Ribbit - A New money making avenue

I wonder with the growing number of companies opening up their APIs for public use. Ribbit is one such nice avenue where you can sign up for a developer account, start creating some nice applications and make some money

How do I make money using the Ribbit API in my application?

There are several ways to monetize your application using Ribbit. One way is to integrate advertising around your application and offer free dialing or text SMS. Another is to build applications with voice for your clients.

They say it all.

All you have to do is 1. Signup for a Developer Account 2. Understand their API 3. Develop an Application and Publish it.

Guys I shall update this post with greater details after I get to explore some more on this.

Innocentive - Big Money for Innovators

If you are one of the exceptional lot who loves challenges then here is chance to go with. Innocentive is a zone where there are some good challenges. You can choose to solve a problem and what you get in return ? A very huge sum of money.

You can submit a winning solution and you can earn earn cash awards from $5,000 to $1,000,000. Thats really a huge money !

You can click on this image, go to Innocentive , register yourself and start solving a problem.


The best part I like about the program is that it doesn't restrict you to a specific field. There are some good programs similar to these but they are very restrictive. Like astronomy, some linear *** coherence *** something (I don't even recollect the name :P). There are many of us with diverse backgrounds and we generally tend to look at challenges in our fields.

This is one such site where people with diverse interests can pay an attention to.

Most of the people solving the problems here are Phds. No matter what, attempting it far better than not giving a try.

The fields for which they have open challenges are

Business and Entrepreneurship

Chemistry

Computer Science and IT

Engineering and Design

Food Science

Life Sciences

Mathematics and Statistics

Physical Sciences

Requests for Partners/Suppliers

That obviously appears to be a very huge list. From what I see, they have at least covered many major areas. If they still expand it further, it would be one of the best places on the internet for challenge lovers.

TATA Nano - The much awaited Rupees 1 Lakh Car

The long awaited TATA Nano is soon to hit the roads. What a great effort from TATA ! Finally the dream of Ratan Tata of providing the common man with a car worth Rupees 1 Lakh (approx less than $2,000) will be realized.

Im eagerly waiting for this small car. I was waiting for this since the last year. Spending a Lakh and owning a car would be worthy when you don't want to spend much during recession. Yes, I am not inclined to spending any money during the recession time.



I registered myself at the TATA Nano website so they have sent me a mail detailing this information


Hi All,
We have announced the domestic launch of our much-awaited car, Tata . Tata will be launched at a function in Mumbai on March 23, 2009. The cars will be on display at Tata Motors dealerships from the first week of April 2009. Bookings will commence from the second week of April 2009.

We are making arrangements for the widest possible network to book the car, so that prospective customers can conveniently avail of booking facilities at their locations, across India. The booking process and other details will be announced on March 23, 2009.

You can log on to our website www.tatanano.com for all the updates, to air your views in forums and participate in contests. We hope to see you and your friends and family there.

Bye for now,

Tata Team

I am glad that they are finally hitting the market. For those of you who are not aware, the Nano project came across many hitches. First it was with the allocation of land at Singur, followed by impact of recession and decrease in sales. At a point I was skeptic whether they would will be capable of selling it for 1 Lakh.

They did a clever thing by reducing the marketing costs. I don't think for a car which had become very popular more than two years before its release, a car which gained huge attention throughout the world more than a year before its public launch - does it need any more marketing ? Not at all.

Even though the economy is bad and the future for the at least next few months appears to be dark, Im confident that TATA Nano would still have huge demand. Whether TATA Motors will be able to meet the huge demand is the question. I think they may not be... obviously, when the price is in the reach why would someone postpone the thoughts of buying it ?

Good Luck TATA Nano!

$1,000,000 Home Page

I always get astonished when some of the best ideas fails whereas dumb ideas gets wide public acceptance. Anyway that is the hard and harsh fact one has to accept in business. When these dumb ideas become popular, they are no more dumb and I would call them as a new trend.

I was going through some articles on business on internet on problogger, I came across an old post on Milliondollarhomepage, which I already read a year ago in local news paper. As I read this again, I got curious about this concept and went to http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/.

As the home page was getting loaded, it appeared to be a very simple website that one could create by a couple of days work. The first thought that struck me - Every one and Anyone can create such a site so whats so special that he made million dollars out of it ? I knew that the founder made million dollars by selling pixes on the website to the advertisers so it was not something new to me.

After the web page got loaded, I see a lot of advertisements on this site. Initially it appeared to me that small and medium sized companies bought the pixels on this page but after watching Yahoo and Timesonline, I realized there were a few big firms too. Though the idea was very simple, hats off to the founder Alex Tew for the right marketing techniques.

That gives us a new (I think I should say old) lesson to learn, A simple idea with great marketing is always better than a great idea with no marketing.

The guy has already sold all the pixels on his blog so now it shows the message "You're too late. There are no more pixels available :( " when I tried to buy a few pixels.

While googling I have come across a lot of sites which are replicas of this but they haven't made much revenue. Is that because the advertisers don't want to advertise any more on such million pixels pages ? I don't think so. If Alex adds one more million pixels to his site, I am confident that he can sell those new pixels in short amount of time. So what I meant here is, the market hasn't dried up and it is still open. Then why did the other websites fail ? I think the others lagged on the marketing. They haven't gained any popularity.

What all happened is history but that set a new trend in the internet business. It emphasized that the market is always open for any kind of ideas. All you have to do is target it at right market. How you do that is the challenge.

Freelancing is it really worthy ? (Part 2)

Im back with the continuation. I have answered a few question in the previous post. Now let me answer a few more.

What all I can do ?
Anything. Yes, I mean it. It could be programming, tutoring, data entry, blogging for someone else, writing articles, photography... the possibilities are endless. Try google search and you will see a lot of such things. There are a lot of internet scams so you have to be slightly careful in figuring out the right freelancing projects.

Advantages and Disadvantages
Let me start with Advantages so that you feel comfortable.

1. The biggest advantage as I already pointed out is the flexibility. Whether you work from 9 AM to 5 PM or 5 PM to 9 AM is your wish ;-)

2. No one would ever question you for going late to office, no one would call you for team meetings, you don't need to work under someone who doesn't know what the problem is but keeps suggesting solutions , keep on bugging you about the status for every half an hour(often a manager).

Let me emphasize that Im not quoting my situation here.

3. You decide what you do. If dislike some work, you need not do that. Often, in freelancing work, you bid for the projects that you are interested in so there is no one who forces you to do the work you hate.

Now coming to the disadvantages

1. Its often hard to predict the revenue you generate so sometimes it could frustrate you in the initial stages. In the initial stages you may feel that the 9 to 5 job with lesser but an assured pay is better than a fluctuating revenue.

2. You have to be a Jack of all trades. If you restrict yourself to a specific skill set then making a decent life out of freelancing may be difficult unless there are a lot of projects around your skill set.

3. Once you work through a few days and have earned some money, you might feel like taking a break. You have to keep yourself motivated... that obviously is a challenge.

4. Often, people tend to identify you by your company. When you are a freelancer its hard to get the same recognition and sometimes its hard to explain what you do (unless the other person is from a similar background).

As always there are Pros and Cons in this situation too and you are the person who have to decide.

What would I do if I were you ?
I knew you would have this question in mind. As a matter of fact, I am a fan of dual pack (Work on 9 to 5 Job + freelancing in part time) and I would suggest people doing it until they get work enough in freelancing and get projects for the next 1 year.

Though I don't focus much on freelancing, whenever I work on projects I get paid around 15 to 20$ per hour which I think is decent number.

Im willing to pay you $$ can you host my bot ?

Yes, Im looking out for someone who can host a bot that I have written. Its a program written in Java. I wish to get it running 24x7.

For this help, Im ready to pay some money. If you already have an account where you and if you can host java bots, Im fine in hosting it through your account (if your service provider allows it).

Anyone willing to offer me bot hosting service can post a comment here with their mail address. I'll revert back with the details.

Im available on twitter - http://twitter.com/sbblogger

Freelancing is it really worthy ? (Part 1)

This is one of the interesting topics that I wanted to discuss with many of my friends because everyone has his own version of the story. Some people say that it is waste of time and others say it is worthy and a very few are unaware about freelancing.

Let me begin assuming that at least of few of us are very beginners and aren't aware.

What is freelancing ?
First and foremost freelancing is a way by which you earn money by doing some work in your free time. It is not a regular 9 to 5 job so you have the flexibility to work as per your timing and priorities. You choose the work you wish and you dictate the billing. That is how it goes. Doesn't this appear great ? Yes there are a lot of good things about this but you'll have to overcome a few initial hiccups.

What all I need to get started ?
All you need is a computer, internet connection and some basic knowledge on the area you want to work on. If you are a programmer I have a decent information to share with you on the other hand if you are a data entry operator, I know that a lot of work is there on the internet but I haven't tried it out so I may not be able to pinpoint you to the resources.

How do I start ?
There are a plenty of work people are willing to get it done through professional freelancing websites. There are a plenty of such sites over internet. In fact there are greater number of dubious sites than the genuine ones so be careful while choosing your first site.

The easiest way you can assume a site to be genuine is whether they asking any money for your registration. Though this isn't applicable in all the cases, still as a beginner you can apply this rule and get started with some sites initially. Once you have decent understanding of the freelancing mechanics, you can try others too.

One of the websites I worked with is livepersons.com. There are others too like guru.com, odesk.com, rentacoder.com and a lot many. Try google search and it would return you a lot of good sites. You can followup about the genuineness by googling further.

How much can I earn ?
Congratulations ! You are not the first person to ask the question. When I tried it out initially, even I had the same question.

It all depends on your caliber, your patience , determination and consistency.

The obvious term I would repeat here is patience. In fact, many of us lose patience just after the first few days in which you may not get any projects.

Yes, I mean it. In the first few days you may not be able to secure any projects. I'll explain the reasons further in my next post about what helps you in getting better projects.

About the ability to earn, I tried it out but the only thing that kept me busy is my office work so I rarely worked for freelancing but I got a chance to understand the dynamics.

About how much you can earn, minimum is $0 (if you drop out after a few days) and maximum is unlimited. Yes, regular job holders have come out of their jobs to take up freelancing as a full time activity. They even started startups and have full time employees in their companies. Hope you now realize the potential of the revenues.

A couple of years ago, I read that the revenues earned by Indian freelancers is $1 billion.

While posting this, I tried google search and I got the url where I read the article

In my next post I would further take you through more details.

Selling and Buying Domains

Some people are seriously into the business of buying and selling domains. Seriously!

My thought on that is its like a share market you cannot anticipate what is the worth of a domain until it gets the demand. You buy something anticipating the you can sell it for a very high price on the other hand it also could be true that no-one would ever be interested in it.

Though I don't have official information on the numbers, I can post the numbers that I came across in a lot of discussion forums.

The following are considered to be the highest paid domain names ever sold. If you have some different numbers, you can post your comments here.

Business.com $7.5 million
Casino.com $5.5 million
AsSeenOnTv.com $5.1 million
Altavista.com $3.3 million
Wine.com $2.9 million
Autos.com $2.2 million
Express.com $1.8 million
Men.com $1.3 million
Wallstreet.com $1m
Rock.com $1m
Websites.com $970,000
Drugs.com $830,000

Its true that the numbers are very high. In fact, companies are willing to pay such huge amount because it increases their business.

Try typing www.x.com - yes its a single character domain name. It is owned by PayPal.

Update

While surfing across www.buydomains.com, I found that the domains IndianRailway.com is priced at $6,064,800 and IndianRailways.org at $346,020. Now I think this is very dumb way of buying and selling domains.

If someone has to buy these domains then it has to be Indian Railways and would they ever think of buying it for a whopping $6,064,800 (Rupees 303,240,000 at $1 =50 Rupees) ? Certainly Not. On the other hand, I think, the following are good domains that may find buyers at least in the long run.

TrafficHotspot.com - $657,200
SwiftTransportation.com- $480,000
USATrucking.com - $345,800

Targeting the domains with a specific company in mind would end you in no-where. The essence is, buy a domain which can attracts wide range of audience, which is easy to remember and preferably short.

Write & Sell Ebooks Online

If you have some good writing skills you can write a book and sell it online. The effort needed in writing might be huge but it is a onetime effort. Once you are done writing it, get it reviewed and create an eBook.

You have plenty of sites that let you sell eBooks. For instance http://www.ebooks.com/

If you have programming skills, you can create and sell your software applications on Share It

If you plan to sell directly from your website then you can choose PayPal's website payment service or Amazon's flexible payment service to get paid directly.

Gmail Crrraaashes

Gmail went down at 2.PM IST yesterday affecting as many as 110 million users worldwide. You can imagine how many people are using their service and how badly they might get affected because of a few hours of disruption.

It is believed that this was the result of several thousands of computers operated by a few people hitting the gmail servers continuously for a few seconds.

It is said that Google has service level agreements with corporates to provide 99.9% gmail availability time in a month and with yesterday's disruption it already was down for 0.44% time in this month. With no other service provider meeting the pace and standards set by Google, I don't think corporates would take this glitch as a serious issue.

Send free SMS from your E-mail

You can send SMS from your yahoo or any other email. Every email provider has a domain name. Within that domain your phone number has unique identity.

If your phone number is 1234567890 and the domain used by the connection provider is abc.com then you can drop a mail to 1234567890@abc.com. The recipient of the phone 1234567890 gets an SMS.

This service is available in India also.

Click here for international service providers.

Click on link1 or link2 or link3 for details on sending SMS Indian service providers (Airtel,Idea,BSNL and others)

I have already tried it so I can say this works for most of the providers.

AIM Money - New source of Ad Revenue

AOL has launched AIM Money less than a year back. If you are a developer, wish to develop some gadgets using AOL sdk then you can register for their AIM Money program and earn some revenues. All you need to do is develop gadgets and let AOL show their advertisements. Greater the number of downloads of your gadget, larger are the chances that you will earn a lot of money.

As of now, they haven't published any details of Top earners... also developers haven't come forward putting forward their experiences so it appears to take sometime to gain full momentum. Though I doesn't seem to be in a full swing as of now, I think it is right time to give it a try. Competing when there are huge number of gadgets is tougher than making it before others enter in the field.

A whopping $37,000 in a day ! iPhone the new way to go ?

The man behind the popular iPhone game iShoot is Ethan Nicholas 30-year-old computer programmer. He wrote the game by spending about six weeks, holding a bottle in one hand and coding with another. He wanted to make a decent money by selling it for $2.99 per download. Did he expect that it would earn him a fortune ? I don't think so.

This programmer was earlier employed by Sun Microsystems. On January 11th he gave his two weeks notice to Sun Microsystems. He earned a whopping $37,000 before taxes on a day when his best sale in a single day. He said there were more than 17,000 copies of game on that day. That implies he earned $2.17 per copy.

The iPhone games have become a new source for good revenue. Even if you develop a game for $3 per copy and it makes at least 5,000 copies in its lifetime then you should earn no less than $10,000. This opens up a huge scope for new developers to get in and earn some quick money.

Give it a try and let me know if it works for you.

Earn money from Photography

Amateur photographers pull up your socks to earn some money with your hobby. Adography has introduced a market place where you can sell your photographs. The companies that are looking for photographs post ads mentioning the requirements.

The details on how the model works can be found here.

Though it appears to me as a good model to reach out thousands of small and medium businesses (SMBs), in the current state of recession it might take sometime to gain the momentum. Once the market gets to the normal pace, I believe Adography should gain some good momentum.

For novice people like me who like clicking the camera, I think this is a good money earning source. I haven't started using their service yet but down the lane, I think I shall give it a try.

Google's Street View - Invasion on Privacy ?

Google has started Street View on the Google Maps. With the street view, you will be able to roam around any street, view cross roads, trees, houses, even watch vehicles parked in front of the houses.

I did view the clarity and it is awesome. I felt as if I was moving on the roads of Las Vegas!

This technology displays so much details that two people sued Google but they eventually lost the case.

I had always been a lover of Google tools but on this, I have my own apprehensions. A common man can virtually visit any country,state and street directly from his desktop, analyze the geography. Mind you, "No Visa Needed" and "No one keeps an eye on you to study your intentions".

Have to wait and watch whether this proves to be something useful for mankind or it results in more disasters.

Watch CNN and CNBC on Internet

Do you know that you can view Television channels on Internet ?

I know that for some of you this might be very old news but believe me, there are people who don't know about it.

Here we go with a couple of channels that you can view on your computer.

Click on the image to watch the channel.

        

JimKarter - March 2008 Earnings: $61,343.62

I started looking at the various ways of earning money. One good source of earning money online is by advertising.

How it works
Blog publishers and website owners subscribe to advertising programs like Google Adsense, Kontera and display advertisements on their sites. When the visitors click on the ads being displayed, the publisher earns some $$$ (Cost-Per-Click).

How much I can earn
I also had the same question when I started researching on the ad revenue from various sources. After having done some basic analysis, I came to a conclusion that it could range widely. If you publish quality content, are regular and have a lot of visitors then you can estimate good revenues. On the dark side, if you are as lazy as me then don't expect any revenue from this program.

Now comes the talk about numbers. As I said, it ranges widely. I had seen people making <$1 per month to people like JimKarter making a huge money (as good as $60K per month or even more).

Thats true. I came across this guy who made $60K in March 2008 only from advertising revenues. Can you believe it !

He also published his various sources of revenues which appears below.



How do I subscribe to advertising programs
1. All you need to have is a blog or a website
2. Register for an advertising program like Google Adsense or Kontera
3. Copy and paste the JavaScript code they provide you on your blog or web page.

From what I read, Google Adsense isn't open for blogs on blogger.com so you have to have your own domain. Anyway for a beginner, it is worth experimenting with other ad revenue programs before Google Adsense.

What are you waiting for ? Go and start generating revenues ...It may take sometime to see some decent numbers. Don't get frustrated in the first few months when you see no income.