Popular posts

What Paypal Won’t Tell You

Posted by Scott on 7th May, 2008 | 40 comments

There is a very well-hidden setting in Paypal that can save you a lot of money in Paypal fees depending upon the volume of Paypal payments that you receive. This is particularly important for merchants selling goods, or big sites that accept subscriptions, but it’s important for ebay sellers and anyone selling more than $3k/mo via Paypal. It’s called Merchant Rate pricing, and it’s something you have to opt-in to, on this page at Paypal (must be logged into Paypal, then visit that link - yes it’s a real Paypal link and no I’m not a phisher).

When I decided to write this post, it took me half an hour to find that page so don’t bother to look for it, they’ve hidden it well. No doubt, their requirement to opt-in to qualify for the discounted tiered pricing is probably buried in some legal agreement, too.

If you earn more than $3,000/mo in Paypal payments, the Merchant Rate switches your transaction fees from 2.9% to 2.5%, and again to 2.2% (>$10k/mo) and 1.9% ($100k/mo) saving you potentially hundreds or even thousands per month. I just assumed that Paypal’s tiered fees adjusted automatically to take my order volume into account but not so, you have to manually choose the lower tier if your sales volume qualifies.

Popularity: 73%

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Danasoft Social App: 3 Million Views Per Day

Posted by Scott on 25th April, 2008 | 25 comments

Danasoft is a site we created years ago but it was really ahead of its time, before all of these social apps became popular. The Danasoft sign is an image that people can put on their profile pages (myspace, facebook), blogs, and sites, with custom quotes. It’s popular because the sign works like a mirror, showing each visitor their IP, host, web browser, and city location, but never showing that information to anyone else except the viewer.

1 Million people have created a custom sign to date, and the Danasoft sign images are viewed between 60 and 90 million times per month in thousands of myspace profile pages, facebook apps, blogs, websites, and especially in forum signatures. Impressive as hell, yes, but until recently very hard to monetize. But now, companies like Slide and RockYou (through their publisher program) have brought cash to social apps, by partnering with big name advertisers to get their brand messages out to the masses as well as tightly targeted demographics. This opens up great possibilities for Danasoft, as well as for any developers looking to create similar apps.

Popularity: 41%

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Triggit: Easy Embedded Ads for Non-Developers

Posted by Scott on 25th April, 2008 | 3 comments

I’m at the Web 2.0 Expo this week in San Francisco. Last year, this conference sucked a bit, because it was just so much hype and no substance. This year, the bigger online players are here, the session talks are more useful, and now the hype has shifted a bit. Now, 90% of the buzz is about social media apps - everyone wants a piece. Since ‘99, the Internet has seen several booms, each of which resembles the gold rush, and this is no exception. Talk of the day is Facebook apps, Twitter (gag me if I hear one more person say “I’m going to go twitter that”, viral this that and the other.

There are some standouts though, some technologies that are really making life better for Internet entrepreneurs. Triggit is in that short list. It was featured in the Launch Pad session yesterday and won the audience vote for the best new business. Here’s what it does: embed one line of javascript in your blog or webpage, and you can then easily highlight text on your page via your web browser and make it a affiliate link, or drag and drop Adsense blocks onto your page (without having to create new ad units or edit code), or drag and drop youtube videos or flickr photos onto your page, all without having to mess with any code whatsoever.

Their marketing angle is ads, but it works well to embed all sorts of content right on the page, without even having to edit the post or go into the source. Their javascript sits on top of pages, and renders the page as it loads, without messing with your local content or database.

Triggit is for the masses, for people who just want to create content. Content creation apps have evolved, but monetization and advertising is lagging and is still difficult for those who don’t have any clue about backend, code, etc, so I think this is a hugely useful app.

Popularity: 34%

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$629,000 Credit Limit Challenge

Posted by Scott on 27th March, 2008 | 28 comments

This came as a big surprise and made me laugh. I logged in to check the balance on one of my company credit cards and saw that my credit limit had increased from something like $40k to this:

I guess they have a lot of faith in my ability to pay off their card (I do pay it off in full every month after all) but I had no idea that my company’s credit was so good. I might disappoint them though, as I won’t come anywhere near that limit any time soon :).

Any other bloggers out there want to challenge this for bragging rights? Shoe? Chow?

Popularity: 38%

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Blogging Challenge Linkbacks Part 2

Posted by Scott on 22nd March, 2008 | 10 comments

Thanks to all those who participated in the blogging challenge, including:

Now to those of you lazy asses (you know who you are!) who saw the # of pingbacks on my original longevity blogging challenge post and thought “why bother making a post, he’s already got 100 blog posts” - shame on you. I actually received 86 total posts, and every one of those got $20 (I have yet to Paypal only two). But for those of you who said “why try, he’s already got over 100″, you missed out on my 14 remaining spots as the call for blog challenge entries is now closed. I refer you to my Guaranteed to Fail post for further reading!

Popularity: 31%

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Never Say Never

Posted by Scott on 8th March, 2008 | 19 comments

We’ve all heard that advice, right? Most people, if they’ve been around long enough, know that anyone who has a closed mind and therefore says that something is definitively impossible, often gets their ego handed to them on a platter when they are eventually proven wrong. Still, there are naysayers out there in droves, who like nothing more than to dismiss new ideas as crazy, impossible, fantasy, pipe dreams, etc.

When someone tells you that something can’t be done, refer them to these quotes - they’ll think twice about questioning the capability and drive of the human spirit:

“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.” – Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943

“Heavier than air flying machines are impossible.” – Lord Kelvin, President, Royal Society, 1895

“There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.” – Ken Olson, President, Chairman and Founder of Digital Equipment Corporation, 1977

“Everything that can be invented has been invented.” – Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, U.S. Patent Office, 1899

“This ‘telephone’ has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us.” – Western Union, internal memo, 1876

“Television won’t last because people will soon get tired of staring at plywood box every night.” — Darryl Zanuck, movie producer, 20th Century Fox, 1946

The funny thing is, as an entrepreneur, this kind of mentality is motivating for me. When someone says I can’t do something, it just pisses me off and makes me go out and get it done. Some relatives said I should never leave college to pursue my business 9 years ago - but I believed in myself, I knew what I had already accomplished before leaving college, and the naysayers fueled my drive.

This ties in with my living indefinitely post, too. If you think living indefinitely is impossible and that it sounds like science fiction, check back in with me in 20 to 50 years when stem cells and gene therapy are routinely used to cure most disease.

People tend to be short sided and base their opinions on the now, rather than on the future of what’s possible, but as we accomplish more and more amazing things in this world, I’d hope that the naysayers would step aside and let the visionaries of the world just get it done, whether “it” is a big new idea for your business or a way to prevent death or extend life indefinitely.

Popularity: 35%

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Blogging Challenge Linkbacks Part 1

Posted by Scott on 8th March, 2008 | 18 comments

Thanks to everyone who supported yesterday’s blogging challenge about living indefinitely. About 60 bloggers have answered the $20 blogging challenge so far, so if you haven’t done so yet, there is still time. There were a lot of insightful posts about the topic, and I was happy to receive such overwhelmingly positive feedback. Everyone I heard from does indeed want to live indefinitely, and the call for science to address this issue with all available resources is loud and clear. The problem won’t be solved overnight, and will take a combined effort from many scientific disciplines. But with enough public support, and enough people keeping an eye out and priasing each day’s new breakthroughs to slow or stop the biological aging process, we will get there.

Thanks to these bloggers:

Popularity: 35%

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Living Well, Indefinitely

Posted by Scott on 6th March, 2008 | 166 comments

I’m in San Diego this week for the Emerging Technology Conference. ETech offers a great opportunity to hear about the latest tech breakthroughs and to talk with some of today’s best minds in science, engineering, and online media.

There are a lot of sessions at the conference that focus on genetics, neurobiology, and other health/biological science. One area that I have become particularly passionate about is longevity research — not just the idea of living longer, but the idea of biologically living as a 20-something indefinitely without experiencing age related disease or decay. Despite many advances in research over the past decade, this important concept has not yet been widely embraced by the public, and after talking with some of the best minds here, I’ve come to the following conclusions:

6 Reasons People Don’t Support Longevity Research:

1) They are highly religious, and believe that living is standing in the way of reaching their creator. This doesn’t make sense because any creator would have given us life and wants us to live, not to die. Christianity says that Jesus’ death was a sacrifice, something undesirable, not something to be welcomed and revered.

2) They use history (the death of all living things before us) as an excuse for why preventing aging, disease, and death, are ultimately impossible despite the vast number of “first time” accomplishments and breakthroughs that our species has had in the past 100 years alone.

3) They don’t like their lives and would therefore choose not to prolong them. Ultimately this is a solvable problem, given resources and time.

4) They are old and are decrepit, aging has already deteriorated their mind and body, and life isn’t worth living.

5) They are morally opposed to a longer life, citing social problems or population issues. Again, this is a problem that can be addressed – requiring the deaths of billions after some agreed upon period of time in order to make room for a fresh batch should not be a requirement to living.

6) They believe that aging is a given – that it is caused by time, not by cellular processes. In reality, it is known that aging is programmed into our cells as an evolutionary process.

…And yet, nearly every living human contradicts all 6 of the above by:

1) Accepting the latest medical advances in drugs (for high blood pressure, vaccines, cholesterol, diabetes, etc), diagnostics, surgical procedures, which have extended our life expectancy from 30 in 1800 to over 75 today.

2) The innate fear of death is a natural protective emotion that we all experience, and we therefore wear seat belts, we go to the emergency room to get “fixed” when we are very ill, we skip French fries and steaks at times, most choose not to smoke, and we look both ways when crossing the street. We do these things to keep living because we choose life!

Why the contradiction?

Why are we happy to continue pushing the envelope of age by relying on technological advancements in one breath, and in the next breath failing to become adamant supporters of anti-aging research?

1) People view living too long as undesirable because they think it means reaching a decrepit state like that of today’s 120 year olds, and maintaining that indefinitely. That would be unpleasant. However, the aim of longevity research is to stop aging and to maintain a physical biological age of 20 something, indefinitely. If you could live as a 25 year old for 500 years, or more importantly, indefinitely (with no certain well defined end) wouldn’t you?

2) People ignore their mortality until they’re dead or dying. The thought of dying, not-existing, losing everything one has and all of one’s memories for billions of years to come, is scary and no one likes to think about it. Therefore, if the only people who care about aging and death are 80, then who is going to fix the problem? We need 18 year olds to study science and become researchers to fix the problem and 20 something science geniuses to dedicate their lives to the problem, but they don’t care because 18 year olds think that they’re immortal. By the time a person starts thinking about death, in their 30’s or 40’s, it’s probably too late for them (even if they are in a scientific field) to specialize in the area of research that could stop it from happening to us.

3) Society views death as a certainty, like “death and taxes” as the saying goes, and aging and its associated diseases is directly responsible for that timeless belief. It’s that ingrained belief that leads to apathy and acceptance. If everyone is apathetic and accepting of death and aging, then no one will try to change it.

4) People view aging as the last frontier, and won’t care to tackle it until all other threats (disease) have been eliminated first. The trouble with this mentality is that most disease including cancer and heart disease is age related - if we stopped our cells from aging at age 20, we could significantly delay most diseases like cancer and heart disease although aging isn’t 100% responsible for those diseases and they will need to be addressed in their own right.

There won’t be any such thing as immortality in our foreseeable future, because asteroids, nuclear attacks, cosmic events, and even car crashes and other accidents, remain threats. But the goal of wiping out cancer and heart disease (the two biggest killers) and either genetically tricking our cells into not decaying or using technologies to repair and replace aged cells (stem cells, nanotechnology devices) will go a long way towards making the tragedy of death an infrequent occurance. We shouldn’t have to live with a life expectancy cap, knowing that we will degenerate and eventually perish for eternity. We should be able to live every day in full vibrant health, fully expecting to wake up the next morning, until an asteroid hits us every 65 Million years or so or until an 18 wheeler runs a red light and smacks us.

But if a death at age 25 is tragic (or 35% of our current life expectancy), why isn’t a death at 70 tragic? If we gradually increased our life expectancy to 200 (the oldest living human was 122 so far), wouldn’t death at 70 then be tragic too (70 is 35% of 200)? Isn’t death at any age, therefore, tragic, given that our life expectancy will likely continue to increase as our scientific knowledge increases?

Aging is a disease, like any other. Our cells are programmed by nature to decay and to divide only a finite number of times. This doesn’t have to be a certainty – we are advanced biological machines, and this is an engineering and science problem that can and will eventually be overcome. The question is: 2007 became the year of “green” thanks to a shift in public perception due to the media’s influence, leading to huge investment dollars going into alternative energy research and global warming awareness, but how long must we wait until we declare the year of “I choose to live”? When will people stand up for themselves and their right to live and to be, and demand that our society make the elimination of cancer (not just the treatment of cancer to the benefit of drug companies), heart disease and all other disease, and the elimination of biological aging, the #1 priority of our species?

Never before in human history have we had the technological means to even begin to address this difficult problem. Our ancestors (around 60 billion people by some estimates) died in order to make this world a better place and so that we could learn and build on their accomplishments. Surely there is nothing more important than the massive reduction in human suffering (losing loved ones, or experiencing chronic disease), aging, and death, if it is within our technological capability to do so. We have an obligation to pursue such a challenge with all available means (not just a handful of well-intentioned researchers) to honor those who came before us and to prevent the unnecessary deaths of most people living today.

The $20 Blogging Challenge

So here’s my challenge to you: think about this issue. Read the resource links below (if you desire) and make a post to support this issue on your blog. In exchange, I’ll do follow up posts here at wrevenue.com linking back to you from my PR6 blog and I’ll even do one better: the first 100 bloggers who do a blog post about this issue to voice their demand for serious research to stop the aging process, and who write me to give me a link to their post, will each earn $20 paid via Paypal by yours truly - don’t delay to write your post and claim your easy $20!

Resources:


Popularity: 58%

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Five Months From PR0->PR6

Posted by Scott on 1st March, 2008 | 19 comments

WRevenue reader Jack wrote today to let me know that wrevenue.com had achieved a page rank of 6! From its launch in September 2007 until now, W Revenue’s page rank had been 0, according to the toolbar. Conventional SEO wisdom says that the toolbar rank is meaningless, and that Google assigns its own internal rank to pages. I’m not so sure about that. For months, searching Google for my name would never find a wrevenue.com result until today. Now, wrevenue.com is found in the 4th and 5th positions on the first page in Google when searching for my name.

I was surprised that it took so long to get a page rank >0 but I’m ecstatic that it’s a PR6 :). When I launched Dealighted in late 2006, it had a Page Rank of 6 in under 30 days. Matt Cutts thought that was just a timing issue, saying that I probably launched Dealighted right before a PR update.

In any case, I’m ecstatic about the PR6 and based upon my own test search above, it does appear that a toolbar PR update affects rankings. Checking my other sites, ResellerRatings remained a PR6, TechIMO went up from a PR5 to a PR6, Dealighted remained a PR6, and PhotoPost dropped from the PR7 that it had maintained for years to a PR6. Whether any of that translates into changes in traffic remains to be seen.

Popularity: 36%

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Living Life Without Regrets

Posted by Scott on 18th February, 2008 | 8 comments

I’m an avid cyclist as you may know, and had planned to spend Saturday and Sunday this weekend in Palo Alto cycling and watching the 2008 Tour of California prologue kick off. I had an opportunity to be one of 40 amateur cyclists invited to ride in a charity race on the prologue course with official timings and everything, just minutes ahead of the pros on Sunday afternoon. For those that aren’t familiar, the prologue course of this event is a time trial, where each rider races against the clock one by one. All the big guns were there for the race, Levi Leipheimer, George Hincapie, Paolo Bettini, Fabian Cancellara, etc, those are the guys that could give Lance Armstrong a run for his money.

As luck would have it, I woke up Saturday morning with a sore throat and feeling terrible. I was supposed to do a 45 mile ride Saturday, but decided to forget it in hopes that I’d feel better for Sunday. Well, Sunday morning arrived and I still felt like a ton of bricks landed on me and had spent half the night hacking and having a sore throat. I had to make a decision about whether or not I could get out there and ride in the Tour of California prologue in a couple hours, which meant warming up on my bike for 45 minutes and doing a 2 mile race with a heart rate of 195bpm when I felt like I could barely get out of bed. I decided to bail, and some other cyclist got my spot to ride in the race. I was totally bummed.

Later in the morning, I felt better, and went out to watch the race. As each rider flew by me on the race course, I was reminded of how I voluntarily handed over my once in a lifetime opportunity to someone else because I was sick. I’ve even travelled to Europe a handful of times to watch races like these, and here was one right here in my community that I could actually ride in, and I lost the opportunity.

Granted yes, I felt like crap, and clearly that’s why I bailed. But later, I thought, “why didn’t I force myself to go ride around on the bike a bit to see if I felt better”, or “why didn’t I at least just go do the race at a snail’s pace for the experience”. I hate having regrets like these. I get angry at myself for not predicting those regrets, and taking action beforehand.

And herein lies my tip: before turning down an opportunity, try to visualize yourself in the aftermath of your decision. Picture the story as it would play out. How does it feel? Are you content with your decision? If you have feelings of regret when you do this forward-looking visualization (and that can be regret internally, or feelings of remorse or shame of lettings others down too), then take another look at the situation and figure out how you can get to “yes” and accept the opportunity. For me, that would have meant pushing myself to get on the bike and move around a bit, or riding the course slowly. I might have felt bad doing it, but there was a chance that I could have felt better too, and no matter what, I would have had no regrets.

Popularity: 29%

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