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Tammie does people’s Christmas decorating for them, because they no longer want to do it themselves. She charges by the hour. It’s not that she needs the money. It’s that Christmas needs her.
Ad.ly, is a brand new Twitter advertising network that can make you money, even if you don’t have thousands of followers.
The new World Trade Center under construction in New York City got it’s first franchise restaurant this week. The Subway restaurant was assembled from nine yellow shipping containers and is perched on top of the under construction Freedom Tower.
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It’s one thing to have resolutions for the new year. I, for example, plan to lose weight, learn Python and design the perfect web app.
But since nothing satisfies like the quick achievement of a short-term goal, Jolie O’Dell over at ReadWriteWeb has put together eight things every good web user needs to do before the ball drops later this week.
1. Edit your privacy settings and friendships.
2. Change your passwords.
3. Own your name.
4. Prune your feeds.
5. Find a better mobile.
6. Update copyright notices on your website.
7. Revisit your blog.
8. Back up your data.
Photo by abcnews/photofunia.
Inc. com has put together their choices for entrepreneurs of the decade.
Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook
We don’t have much more to say than this: When the decade started, he was 15. Today, he is CEO of Facebook, a company that has become an indispensable part of the lives of 350 million users worldwide. And just wait for that IPO.Jack Ma of Alibaba.com
If the great story of the decade is the rise of Chinese capitalism–and the opportunities and perils that China’s economic power presents for American businesses–then Jack Ma is a protagonist for our age. Alibaba.com, the company he started in China in 1999, helps to connect thousands of businesses at every point in the global supply chain with one another. In all of these small transactions, Ma seems something quite huge. “I want to create one million jobs, change China’s social and economic environment, and make it the largest Internet market in the world,” he told Inc. in 2008Evan Williams and Biz Stone of Twitter
Like Cher or Prince (but with flashy punctuation), @Ev and @Biz have become household names by creating Twitter, the addictive microblogging platform that is already changing the way we communicate. Besides fostering a collective penchant for brevity, the site has become an amazing resource for everyone from marketers in Silicon Valley to democratic activists in Tehran. If you’re not keeping an eye on the day’s trending topics, you’re hopelessly misinformed.Peter Theil of PayPal
He is best known now for the many businesses he’s invested in, including Facebook, Yelp, and LinkedIn. But we haven’t forgotten that, early in this decade, Theil along with Max Levchin and Elon Musk developed and sold PayPal. The simple, secure online payment system (which is taken for granted today) was not only a great business in its own right; it made e-commerce feasible for hundreds of thousands of start-ups and solo entrepreneurs.Your choice not listed? Tell us about your entrepreneur in the comments.
Photo by Inc..
With the news industry struggling to find new revenue streams that can reshape their broken business model, 2010 will be defined by experiments in news media monetization.
This will also include content that is guided more than ever by the audience and ad revenue, reports Mashable.com.
1. Social Media Monetization
2. Revenue Beyond Advertising
3. As Publications Fold, Others Become Lean and Mean
4. Growth in Hyperlocal and Community Models
5. Local Advertising Grows
6. Local Advertising Models Emerge
7. To Charge or Not To Charge?
8. The Freemium Model
Photo by hotcakejoy.
In a nationwide effort to help support the growth of small businesses, Intuit is hosting the “Love a Local Business” sweepstakes.
Fans of local small businesses can nominate their favorite hometown haunt, which will make them eligible for a drawing to win a $1,000 Intuit Growth Grant, which includes a $500 Visa gift card and $500 in Intuit business services, such as Intuit Websites and Web Listings.
One of those five winning local businesses will receive a grand prize of $5,000!
In addition, each business that is nominated will appear on a custom Google Map displaying favorite businesses from across the country.
The more nominations a business has, the more chances they have to win a grant. Intuit has already awarded $55,000 in small business grants, now it’s time to show support for your favorite neighborhood shop!
Go to Love a Local Business for more information. Enter by March 3, 2010.
Photo by Intuit.
On Monday, we started a biz poll asking readers to guess how much time is spent online surfing the web.
Of those responding, 46 percent chose 16.5 hours per week, 27 percent guessed 13 hours per week, 13 percent chose 8 hours per week and 15 percent guessed 5.5 hours per week.
According to a report from Harris Interactive, the average person now spends about 13 hours online each week.
Online times differed greatly depending on who you talk to. Of the 2,029 adults polled by Harris, about 20 percent of adults are only online for two hours or less a week, while 14 percent are on for 24 or more hours a week.
The reported times exclude e-mail — only time spent surfing the Web.
The results are down slightly from last year, when users were online about 14 hours per week. But usage is up from 11 hours per week in 2007.
Harris said the increase is likely due to increased access to the Web, as well as the recession. “It probably reflects a growing ability to use the Internet, an increase in sites and applications, increased TV watching online and increased purchasing online,” the company said in a statement. “Also, hours online may have increased because of the recession. Going online is free; going out usually costs money.”
Photo by jazza.
Jennifer Clark, 28, of Berry, was an administrative assistant before she gave birth to her daughter, Olivia, nearly three years ago. She decided to stay home with her child. And so she began to sew.
‘I didn’t intend to start a business,’ said Clark. ‘It just kind of happened. I would make clothes for Olivia and we would get so many compliments on them and so much interest and requests.’
That’s how Livi Stitches came to be. It is now a bona fide business with a 3-week waiting list.
‘It’s my creative outlet,’ said Clark. ‘It’s a way for me to feel good about myself and feel like I’m contributing to my family.’
Photo by Livi Stitches
@pdxWebDr: Business idea: MeWithaMustache.com, where people can upload photos and it layers a mustache on their lip. I slept about 3hrs last night.
@djenningspr: RT @heavensgame: You know what Twitter needs, an auto translate function 4 foreign lang tweets. A nice business 4 someone there
@chipmunc56: Business idea: Heated handlebars?RT @srobbin: Had my first winter bike ride today. Cold, but good…
@jasonmorio: seeing the movie 2012 spawned an awesome business idea….Doomsday Pods…personal gyroscopically-stabilized graphene escape orbs…w00t
@morecyn: @junnofaria Happy New Year! I think U will like this info. A g8t list of 26 New Business Ideas 4 2010 http://bit.ly/EntrepreneurIdeas
@plish: Ten ‘BreakOut!’ Business Ideas Of 2009 http://post.ly/GZsN
Solar panels aren’t even ubiquitous yet and already solar panel theft is a big problem. In the past year, over 400 panels, worth at least a thousand dollars each, have been stolen from the vineyards of Napa County, California. As more homes and businesses install solar panels, the problem will grow. Ground-mounted panels are the current target, but rooftop models are also in danger.
The KQED report interviewed a Santa Rosa, Calif.-based startup called Gridlock Solar Security, which is a little over a year old and sells a $1,000 alarm system solar security device. The system will make eight phone calls in 10 seconds to warn of a potential theft, and blare a 120 decibel alarm system. Seems like they’re doing well, telling KQED that they’ve been generating 36 orders a month from a national distributor, and working with school districts and wineries.
Newsweek put together a list of business predictions for 2010.
10. The New York Times Charges for Web Content
9. Comcast Will Fire Jeff Zucker
8. Boeing Will Soar
7. Unemployment Drops Below 9 Percent
6. Derivatives Remain Largely Opaque
5. Cap and Trade Won’t Pass (But It Won’t Matter)
4. AIG Will Be Downsized
3. The Fed Raises Rates
2. The Dow Sees 12,000
1. The Auto Industry Revives
Photo by shlomaster.
Trendwatching.com has put together a list of 10 consumer trends for the new year.
Business As Usual
Forget the recession: the societal changes that will dominate 2010 were set in motion way before we temporarily stared into the abyss.Urbany
Urban culture is the culture. Extreme urbanization, in 2010, 2011, 2012 and far beyond will lead to more sophisticated and de-manding consumers around the world.Real-Time Reviews
Whatever it is you’re selling or launching in 2010, it will be re-viewed ‘en masse’, live, 24/7.(F)Luxury
Closely tied to what constitutes status (which is becoming more fragmented), luxury will be whatever consumers want it to be over the next 12 months.Mass Mingling
Online lifestyles are fueling and encouraging ‘real world’ meet ups like there’s no tomorrow, shattering all cliches and predictions about a desk-bound, virtual, isolated future.Eco-Easy
To really reach some meaningful sustainability goals in 2010, corporations and governments will have to forcefully make it ‘easy for consumers to be more green, by restricting the alternatives.Tracking & Alerting
Tracking and alerting are the new search, and 2010 will see countless new INFOLUST services that will help consumers ex-pand their web of control.Embedded Generosity
Next year, generosity as a trend will adapt to the zeitgeist, leading to more pragmatic and collaborative donation services for con-sumers.Profile Myning
With hundreds of millions of consumers now nurturing some sort of online pro?le, 2010 will be a good year to introduce some services to help them make the most of it (financially), from intention-based models to digital afterlife services.Materialism
2010 will be even more opinionated, risqué, outspoken, if not ‘raw’ than 2009; you can thank the anything-goes online world for that. Will your brand be as daring?Photo by vygnyo.
Since it’s the season of giving, AdAge figured they’d drop a little knowledge on you. While you’ve been running yourself ragged going to conferences, socializing in social media and just trying to hang on, you may have missed these titles.
1. Twitterville by Shel Israel
2. The Next Evolution of Marketing by Bob Gilbreath
3. Googled by Ken Auletta
4. Ignore Everybody by Hugh MacLeod
5. Emotionomics by Dan Hill
6. ‘I Love You More Than My Dog’ by Jeanne Bliss
7. And Then There’s This by Bill Wasik
8. How Markets Fail by John Cassidy
9. Trust Agents by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith
10. Reset by Kurt Andersen
As we’re coming to the end of this year, everyone starts to look towards the next one and there will no doubt be an upsurge of articles predicting the web trends of 2010 in the next days to come.
However, in this article, Six Revisions will be talking about what’s actually driving these trends now, and what they mean for the future of the internet.
1. CSS3, HTML5 And Fonts As A Service
CSS3, HTML5, and Fonts as a Service such as Typekit that cater to web browsers that already support the @font-face rule, are giving web designers the creative freedom that they have been coveting for a long time.2. Ways We Browse The Web
The browser landscape is alive and well, with better and faster web browsers such as Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Opera. Web users today are provided with many choices that will surely drive competition and one-upping from these companies – stressful for their developers, but great for consumers.3. Social Media
No one can deny that 2009 has been a big year for social media: Twitter, for example, has become the buzzword in many a boardroom and office. It’s obvious that it will continue to a big part of the web in the future.In many ways, the growth of platforms such as Twitter and Facebook has led the web to be much more community-oriented. Big changes could happen within social media and, no doubt, will be led by monetization of the media.
4. JavaScript
Whilst CSS3/HTML5 has started to step on the toes of JavaScript, JavaScript itself has started to inch into the territory of Flash. The growth of frameworks such as jQuery and has made rich client-side interaction and asynchronous/seamless user experiences a reality. This leads to easier deployments of web applications, which in turn, increases competition, which in turn, leads to innovation.JavaScript is already stepping into what, in the past, we would associate as being Flash’s territory, such as interactive games (which can be used for training and distance-learning applications) and complex and interactive data visualization. It should also enable us to replicate rich interfaces and flash type experiences in a much more accessible way.
5. Software As A Service (SaaS)
Software as a Service business models have been knocking around for years. Top-notch SaaS such as 37 Signals products and Google Enterprise are more commonplace now than ever before.
The competition is fierce; the technologies are becoming affordable and requiring little upfront costs, which gives the little guys a chance to compete with the bigger guys. In the next year, we’ll see this competition increase, and hopefully, the outcome is innovation in web apps.
Photo by ilco.
Every year at ReadWriteWeb, we look at hundreds of new web apps aimed at everyday users.
Here is our list of the top 10 consumer web apps of 2009. These are apps and services that helped consumers use the web in new ways this year; and brought technologies that were previously only geared towards advanced users to a mainstream audience.
1. Bing
2. Wolfram Alpha
3. Google Chrome
4. Posterous
5. Hulu
6. TweetDeck
7. Twitter
8. Aardvark
9. Google Voice
10. Facebook
Photo by Various.
It had to happen eventually, and it’s not really a surprise, considering people don’t tend to shop online for books on Christmas Day but… it will be marked down in history, that’s for sure — Christmas Day 2009: the day digital books outsold their physical, paper counterparts,(At Amazon anyway), reports DownloadSquad.com.
It’s a misleading statistic, as I said: no one buys paper books online on Christmas Day — people do, however, log in with their new Kindles and buy some ebooks.The actual number worth paying heed to is the sheer volume of Kindles that were sold or gifted this year — a number that Amazon seems unwilling to divulge.
Estimates put their 2009 sales figures at over 500,00 units. Couple that with 390,000 books now available in the Kindle Store and you can see that this might be the beginning of the end for physical books. At the very least we may see a cut in the wholesale price of books.
Photo by Amazon.
Christy Jordan is a busy work-at-home mom, wife and blogger who has built a business she began as a hobby.
Her blog, SouthernPlate.com, led to her selection as a “kitchenista” by Kraft Foods.
The “Velveeta it! Kitchenistas” shared daily tips and advice on VelveetaKitchenistas.com “to help make dinnertime a success,” Jordan said.
“Not only does Christy have strong cooking skills and a passion for food, she is a valued resource for readers on all aspects of home and family life – making her a natural fit for the kitchenistas,” Angela Wiggins with Kraft said.
The promotion’s goal is “to arm people with ideas, tips and inspiration in the kitchen to mix up their weekly meal lineup with new recipes,” Wiggins said. “Velveeta is an ingredient that can easily work with many recipes.
“Velveeta asked five top ‘mom’ bloggers to team with them to bring even more mealtime ideas and helpful tips to their readers during their ‘Velveeta It!’ campaign,” Jordan said. “I was incredibly honored to be chosen.” Each kitchenista had a designated weekday theme. Jordan’s time was “Tasty Traditions Thursdays.” “I shared tips on preserving family mealtime traditions, something close to my heart,” she said.
Jordan’s blog receives more than 6 million page views each month. All her recipes are no-hassle meals for cooks of all skill levels.
Screenshot from Southern Plate
The story of Duke Nukem Forever is an important lesson for starting a business. It is more important to start, than to get everything absolutely perfect.
If you try to plan out everything in advance, you’ll never begin. If you look at almost any successful business, it is the exception that looks 100% like it did when it started.
Newsweek has put together a list of 10 predictions for the tech sector in 2010.
10. Google Faces Antitrust Suit
9. Microsoft Pushes Out Steve Ballmer
8. Twitter Use Flatlines
7. Facebook Goes Public
6. Your Phone Replaces Your Wallet
5. Movie Downloads Stall Blu-ray
4. Starbucks Will Stalk You
3. Malware Disrupts Facebook
2. Murdoch Pulls Out of Google
1. Finally, Apple Unveils the TabletPhoto by clix.
ReadWriteWeb are chilled and saddened by the ghosts of the past year – the apps that should have been, the startups that failed to launch, the brilliant ideas that were throttled, the great minds that were fired, the tech heroes that committed tragic gaffes.
But some failures were so monumental that they require specific enumeration and commentary. Here are the 10 worst tech failures of 2009.
1. Google Wave Sucked
2. The TabletPads Went to the Deadpool
3. Powerset Resurfaced as Bing
4. Twitter Failed to Innovate
5. The Great Firewall of China Drama Continued and Worsened
6. Microsoft Dumped Don Dodge
7. Spotify Didn’t Launch in the US… Yet
8. The Web 1.0 Comeback Campaigns Were Embarrassing to Watch
9. Oracle Acquired MySQL
10. LeapFish Made a God-Awful Promotional VideoPhoto by jaylopez.
According to The New York Times, in “Endpaper: Patents”, creations patented in 2009 are sorted and classified by labels like “When Life Isn’t Exciting Enough,” “Reinventing the Wheel,” and “Department of Questionable Judgment.”
Inventions include a bacon comb, an inflatable Christmas tree, water-draining shoes and a retractable chopstick.
Maybe you’ve had an idea for an invention you’d like to patent, or maybe you’ve just identified a need that an enterprising inventor could meet. Tell us about your idea, or describe a need, large or small, that you wish a 2010 invention could address. Put them in the comments.
Photo by NYTimes.
Newsweek has put together a list of ten things that didn’t exist ten years ago, that are indispensable now.
10. Online Airline Check-In
9. Free Credit Reports
8. Red Bull
7. TMZ (celebrity Web site)
6. Chipotle
5. Gardasil (human papillomavirus vaccine)
4. Digital Video Recorder
3. iTunes
2. YouTube
1. Wikipedia
Photo by mai05.
Forbes.com has put together a list of year-end tax tips to help reduce your anxiety and possibly lower your 2009 tax bill.
Spend your FSA balance.
If you set up a flexible spending account (FSA) and had money regularly withdrawn from your paychecks and deposited into the account, make sure you spend the money before Jan. 1 or you risk losing it.Get your paperwork in order.
If your work or personal situation has not changed much since last year, it shouldn’t take too long to get your papers together in one place. Collect your pay stubs or review your automatic paycheck deposits online if you do electronic banking.Calculate your current tax situation.
If your income or expenses have changed significantly this year–for example, if you have lost your job, taken a pay cut, divorced or liquidated investments to start a new business–you may want to estimate your regular income tax using IRS Form 1040. If you think you may be subject to the alternative minimum tax (AMT) use IRS Form 6251 to estimate your tax liability.Continue Reading: “Year-End Tax Tips”
Photo by daveswhiteboard
The answer on Wednesday.
Photo by jazza.
Garcia has the passion to make her dream of owning a photography business a reality. But there is one important ingredient that she doesn’t have.
Money.
With what Garcia makes, it is tough to pay the bills every month, much less save enough to buy the equipment she’d need to pursue her photography dream.
Without the assistance of an Interfaith Housing Service program, that obstacle would be insurmountable.
Through her enrollment in Interfaith Housing Service’s Individual Development Accounts program, Garcia has saved about 75 percent of the money she needs to get her photography business idea off the ground.
The program helps low- to moderate-income individuals establish goal-based savings accounts and then matches clients’ deposits to the savings account two-to-one. The matching funds are made possible through Interfaith Housing’s sale of state tax credits and a federal grant.
Along with the matching funds, IDA clients receive eight hours of financial education classes.
“I’ve let my account sit for over a year without drawing from it,” Garcia said. “It’s been day-by-day. Some months all I could put in was the $20 minimum, and then when I get a little extra here and there I put that in, too.”
Photo by Hamed Saber
Before the Internet, cell phones, Twitter and Google.
If you’re under 40, you’ve probably never seen this.
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