On the 8 Spot

This is a story about how an entrepreneur can build an internet business on the side. The business Sean Percival launched wasn’t meant to be the next Google. He was just trying to make some money and improve his business skills.

Sean built a site that sold customize European license plates, the kind of plates you might see on cars speeding on the Autobahn or cruising down the Champs-Elysées. As you’ll hear in this interview, he spent $12 to buy the domain, customeuropeanplates.com. Then he built the site using a free ecommerce platform. To fill and ship his orders, he partnered up with a company that was already in the business of selling license plates online. And he got customers by teaching himself search engine optimization and developing link partnerships with related sites.

He ended up selling the business — which was profitable — after Tweeting that he was thinking of selling it.

We talked in this interviewed about how he built the business, and how he built up the kind of social capital online that helped him sell his business for about $100,000 via a Tweet.

via The $12 Startup That Was Sold On Twitter For About $100,000 – with Sean Percival | Mixergy – Online Business Tips from Successful Entrepreneurs.

Street View in High Definition, so cool!

At the start of the day I have something of a ritual which involves in almost chronological order:

-Get Coffee

-Check Email, Answer only immediate and important emails, leave the rest for later

-Read RSS Feeds of  Expansion/Thinkers/Coding

-Check Unimportant/Not immediately pertinent emails

-Check Friendfeed

-Check Facebook

-Read RSS feeds from news sources (Inquirer/GMA)

-Breakfast

-Check tasks for today.

-Check production servers applications I am supporting.

-Begin work on tasks.

All in all this takes about 1-2 hours of my workday.

I’ve recently lost internet acces to most sites I go to, thank God for google reader, still can read most posts.

So I was pleasantly surprised with the new “social features” that they have included in google reader.

As far as I can see they have made liking more open, because now people who allow other people to see their likes are showing up at the rss entry.

This is interesting because  now you can follow these people.

Following other people has been an old feature of google reader, what’s new is that it is now far easier to find people who read the same things you do.

Hope they can do this with google reader notes, and that they find a way to convince more people to read posts from rss.

I’ve been just using the new social features for a few minutes but, I can see the possibilities!

Kudos to the google reader team, I don’t know what they plan for the future but I am surely going along for  a ride!

A long conversation about two weeks ago with Chuck and Vince was about finding something to do to earn money in our free time.  Suffice to say one of my lamer ideas that night was to sell something in sites like multiply and ebay. Just realize that that is not what I want for a business, in fact I realize that even if we did something like that I would not really be satisfied with it.

See, I think I try to find my own way on most things. The paths I take may have been walked by other people but I try to be aware whenever I walk a certain path, its not about originality but about walking the path that is for you.

What irked me about my idea is that I was unwittingly selling out. I wanted to create, I wanted to walk a path for me and I’ve had this long irritation with middle men.

Why? It seems that most middle men/women I encounter can be said to bring little to no value the connection.  Let’s take the lot of  computer sellers in a mall floor. To protect myself from litigation lets call this mall SharonMall and the mall floor/part as CyberFloor. Using my totally unscientific and totally biased observations and my talent for overhearing a lot of things.

I observed that:

• The sellers were basically just a little knowledgeable with their products than the people they are selling to.
• The sellers who were really knowledgeable were somewhat aloof, they gave of this vibe that you were stupid trust them.
• The best sellers were basically honest and didn’t talk down to their possible customers. (If you’ve watched 40 year old virgin, I believe).
• A lot of people valued time and in a way this is logical, but it also meant that a lot of sellers survive on being available for the sale when the more efficient sellers are swamped.

Basically people who are not the best sellers tend to be snakes oil salespeople. I don’t want to be a snake’s oil sales men. I would like something that brings value to this world in a real sense not a rearranging the chairs. I want to create more chairs! I almost forgot that. I am glad even if I forgot about it , my friends have a higher standard than what I have. Cheers!

Middlemen add value when they bring taste or judgment or trust to bear on a transaction that isn’t transparent. Literary agents are crucial when publishers believe that their choice of content is essential but have too many choices and too little time. But publishers don’t trust every literary agent. They trust agents they believe in. Key point: anonymous agents are interchangeable and virtually worthless. Agents that don’t do anything but help one side find the other side in a human approximation of Google aren’t so helpful any more.

Think about how anonymous the typical real estate broker is. He will sell almost any house or represent almost any buyer. When selling a house, he has a fiduciary responsibility to represent that house to the best of his ability. Just like every other broker. The great real estate brokers do far more than this.

via Seth’s Blog: Where have all the agents gone?.

Halting Problem in Dr Seuss style! Quite nice! If you are unfamiliar with the halting problem read the thing and then google halting problem and click on the wikipedia link!

SCOOPING THE LOOP SNOOPER

A proof that the Halting Problem is undecidable

Geoffrey K. Pullum

(School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, University of Edinburgh)

No general procedure for bug checks succeeds.

Now, I won’t just assert that, I’ll show where it leads:

I will prove that although you might work till you drop,

you cannot tell if computation will stop.

Scooping the Loop Snooper — Geoffrey K. Pullum.