The CCPIT sponsored “Made in China 2007” seminar on Saturday featured two very impressive speakers – Dr. Shi Zhengrong, founder of Suntech Power (and one of China’s richest entrepreneurs), and Professor Lin Yifu, leading economist (and advisor to the Chinese State Council).

Professor Lin started off by putting China’s economy into a global context. He noted China’s position in the following areas:

• 4th in GDP

• 3rd in Trade

Read the rest of this entry »

Speaking of Transporation: Prop 1

I think I’m going to end up voting for Prop 1. The sales tax increase kills me. I hate it. Loathe it. But I really believe increasing mass transit options has got to be Priority 1.

Whatever the cost, I know that building it now will be cheaper than building it later. If there are any facts about Prop 1 I know for sure it’s that one. The property will be more expensive to buy … the labor more expensive to hire … and the need will be greater.

I think one analogy that is useful for thinking about light rail and mass transit is that of e-mail. The first person who had e-mail didn’t have much use for it. But it was more useful after the second person had it, and much more useful after 100 people were on e-mail.

Transit is much the same. The investment of billions of dollars in light rail is one thing. But each and every dollar spent after that is more and more useful because it keeps adding segments and stations and makes the system more and more useful for everyone.

Read the rest of this entry »

Burn them all

Hot on the heels of my recent digest of Climate Skeptic’s post pointing that there probably isn’t any significant warming happening, let alone any human activity causing catastrophic climate change, there is a BBC Poll showing, once again, that people in general are ignorant sheep.

Most people say they are ready to make personal sacrifices to address climate change, according to a BBC poll of 22,000 people in 21 countries.

Four out of five people say they are prepared to change their lifestyle, even in the US and China, the world’s two biggest emitters of carbon dioxide.

Three quarters would back energy taxes if the cash was used to find new sources of energy, or boost efficiency.

Yeah, and what are the chances of that happening? The government takes more taxes to piss them up the wall—fucking great! Y’know, governments have such a wonderful track record in efficiency and innovation, don’t they? For fuck’s sake…

Look, people, there are new forms of energy coming but we have price and engineering problems to overcome first. In fact, Timmy highlights the progress that is being made in solar power at present.

I love this piece, I really do.

Take the member of the renewables/efficiency/conservation family, that I know best: solar. The manufacturing costs of solar photovoltaic cells are coming down at nearly 20% every time the global industry doubles in capacity, and that is happening every two years at present. Solar PV manufacturing costs are, in fact, cheaper today than retail electricity in some markets, and by 2010 will be cheaper than today’s electricity in most developed country markets even if the price of retail electricity grows only slightly.

OK, great. Solar is getting cheaper quickly. An excellent thing too. So we should all wait until 2011 or so and then we’ll all switch quite happily as it’ll be cheaper. Great.
…

Read the rest of this entry »

Training is typically a large investment b/c it's time intensive and trainers usually don't work cheap. This weekend, out company hired Dunn Training and Sahil Malik to get us up to speed on Sharepoint.  I can say that dealing with Dunn and Sahil was like buying a Lexus except not nearly as expensive.

Mark Dunn attended the training and was there  the whole time to help out. Sahil arrived right on time and from start to finish, he covered virtually every aspect of Sharepoint that one could care about.  I consider both Mark and Sahil good friends of mine but if I wasn't impressed with the training, I just wouldn't mention it. A good portion of our office showed up and Mark was kind enough to let me bring Kim.

The first few hours showed you how to use Sharepoint to do most of the common activities using the UI. Later in the afternoon, we started getting into coding tasks.  If you read Sahil's ADO.NET 2.0 book , you can tell the same guy that wrote that book built this courseware.  His stuff is thorough and fun and he keeps thing moving by keeping the laughs  rolling.

Read the rest of this entry »

BA sees possibility of achieving 10 percent operating margin by March 2008

A social networking site for the over-50s

Sticking to `KISS principle’

US carriers raise fares to offset fuel costs

Read the rest of this entry »

Pity, please, the poor folks who run the New Alternatives mutual fund.

We learn this from Kiplinger:

Ethanol, biofuels, and solar, wind and ocean power. With oil prices in the stratosphere, everyone, it seems, is suddenly interested in alternative energy. But Maurice Schoenwald and his son, David, have been exploring the best investment opportunities in this rapidly growing industry for more than a quarter-century…. The Schoenwalds are passionate liberals who employ social screens to pick stocks. Several years ago, they sold their position in Chesapeake Energy after learning that its chief executive was involved in Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, a group that opposed Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry in 2004. Chesapeake’s stock subsequently turned out to be a big winner.

Yeessshh.  Remind me not to entrust my family’s financial security with those earnest folks.  Heck, why not just let it all ride on Ben & Jerry’s stock?

Read the rest of this entry »

Silicon Valley has been working for nearly two years to roll out an ambitious Wi-Fi plan covering the entire area under one system. They recently faced additional delays due to the complexity of the rollout but predicted that they would have a model for the system in place before the end of the year. The end of the year is coming up quickly and it looks like they re no closer to making this a reality than they have been in the past. The problem, of course, is money. Investors aren t willing to foot the $500,000 bill for pilot testing. The system just has so many flaws that it s considered too risky of an investment.
Wireless Silicon Valley has no clear leader and a fuzzy long-term business model. Azulstar has a spotty track record as a network operator. Local public safety agencies - the cash cow for municipal networks - are skeptical. And no one has ever attempted to build a WiFi network on such a vast scale, covering more than 40 municipalities.

Cisco is the only company willing to contribute money to the project at this time. Without additional support, it s unlikely that it s going to be able to move forward. Will the Bay Area find that it is sufficiently covered by independently-offered free Wi-Fi (such as that offered by Metro-Fi and Google Wi-Fi)? Or will a push come for Silicon Valley to work out its original plan?
4 comment(s)

Popularity: 1%

Read the rest of this entry »

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports on a new study showing that Missouri ranks near the bottom for many measures high tech startups and entrepreneurship.  Lots of good research is going in Missouri universities, but little of that is translating into new businesses and new jobs. Our neigbhoring states are way ahead on this one.  Here in KC it is obvious to most any technology worker who has to deal with commuting to Johnson County, KS to find work in their chosen field.

The culprit is almost no government investment, so a group of business leaders is pushing for $17 million a year in state money to jump start the whole thing.   The study was done by UMKC for a new group calling itself Grow Me State.  So far it doesn’t look like any KC media outlets have picked up on the story.

Post-Dispatch: Business Leaders push for high tech funds

Grow Me State Initiative

Read the rest of this entry »

Nimbus Communications, the company which shot to fame after winning the global TV rights for cricket from BCCI, is reportedly put up for sale by some of its investors. The Economic Times reports that certain strategic investors such as private equity fund 3i may look at exiting.

Apparently, the Nimbus board is set to consider three offers —one from a UK-based media major for a majority stake in the company, and two others from international distress fund Ashmore and a media investment company from Singapore for a significant minority stake, says ET.

However, Nimbus chairman Harish Thawani told the paper: “While there may be proposals before us expressing interest to take a controlling stake, it is highly unlikely that the board will recommend them. We believe the best years are clearly ahead of us.”

Nimbus got into trouble recently as an Indian court allowed state-owned Doordarshan (it has access to all corners of the country) to telecast cricket matches in India with a little time lag. This decision has affected the fortunes of the Mumbai based media company, which won the rights for cricket matches for $612 million last year. Nimbus has also not been able to expand the reach of its sports channel Neo. Following this move, Nimbus’ earning potential from the cricket telecast business have come under cloud.

Read the rest of this entry »

Technology for Small Churches - Software

As a small new church in a rural community, we have a unique perspective on technology. We know that it can help us and we know it is important, but we have to make sure that we spend wisely in making our technology purchases. We don’t have an unlimited budget, so price does play an important factor in our choices. So with that in mind, I want to share what equipment and software we are using. First let’s talk about software.

Worship Presentation Software - Easyworship
We have used easyworship for over two years now. It has been true to it’s name. It is incredibly easy to use. I typically setup the songs and backgrounds and Bible verses in a schedule for Sunday morning, and then have one of our teenagers actually run it. You can literally train someone to use the program in under 10 minutes. Many times, we just put Bible verses up on the fly as they are mentioned by whoever is preaching. Whatever you do, DON’T USE POWERPOINT. When we have software like this available, it really enhances the worship experience on Sunday morning. It has all our worship songs built in, and it has multiple Bible versions so we can quickly put up on the screen the verses being talked about. It is worth every penny of the $399 cost. The only drawback to easyworship is that you can’t create slides, but they do allow you to import powerpoint sermon notes. By doing that, you can seamlessly switch between sermon notes, song lyrics, video sermon illustrations, dvd clips, and Bible verses. I have also used Mediashout before, but it has a steeper learning curve and we needed something that could be used my multiple different people. I am also intrigued by propresenter on the mac, and I am watching it pretty closely for the future.

Kids Check-In Software - Kidzpro
We just started a check-in for our children’s ministry about 4 weeks ago. We got to the point where the teachers didn’t know all the kids and they didn’t know which parents went with each child. We needed a system to provide better security, but we also needed a better system in case of emergency. Now we gather allergy information and special instructions. We can also notify the parent if they are needed by displaying their security code on our video screen. We can now track attendance and capture the name and address of our visitors with children. We went with a simple system, one that does not require internet access since we don’t have that where we are meeting. We also went with a system that does not require a touchscreen. We can run it on any computer(although it won’t run on older OS’s like ME or 98) and we can add more licenses as we go. We print out name tags on a Dymo label printer and it also prints a security label for the parents that matches the child’s. Kidzpro is much cheaper than most other check-in systems out there. I recommend using a computerized check-in system once you have more than 50 children in your children’s ministry. If you want to do it manually, then check out this company. They provide customizable labels with security numbers. This is also a good way to handle all your visitors until you get them in your computer system.

Read the rest of this entry »

Extracts from our September 2007 assessment…

Scenario 2 - Musharraf ruling under martial law. Musharraf would impose martial law after running out of options to remain both president and army chief. The higher judiciary would be required to re-take their oaths of allegiance, and those refusing to do so would dropped from the Bench. The federal parliament and the provincial assemblies would be suspended and Musharraf would seek to govern through the nazims, or local government officials elected on non-party basis. The Army would be further entrenched in power, occupying key positions in Musharraf’s cabinet as well as in the bureaucracy. Neither Bhutto nor Sharif would be allowed to return to Pakistan, and a crackdown would put political and civil society leaders under arrest.

Imposition of martial law will precipitate an immediate political crisis: popular opposition to Musharraf is likely to take the shape of general strikes and street protests, causing martial law administrators to employ strong repressive measures. Criminal and violent elements – from political party activists to sectarian groups – are likely to use the breakdown of law & order to engage in acts of violence and criminality. While the Army could possibly employ even greater force against insurgents in Balochistan, there is an even chance that the BLA might be able to retaliate by carrying out terrorist attacks in Pakistani cities. The Army will find it even harder to trade off having to carry out operations in the tribal areas and retaining US support.

The imposition of martial law will plunge Pakistan into its deepest political crisis since 1971, when the civil war led to the secession of its eastern wing. The Army itself is likely to come under attack from various quarters leading to large numbers of desertions and mutinies by units sent to tribal areas. While there the chances of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons falling into unauthorised hands is remote, it is possible that nuclear material and technology may be stolen. It is almost certain that Pakistan will witness large scale capital flight, drying of foreign investment and disruptions to the economy. Moreover, the turmoil in Pakistan is likely to spill over into the region in the form of terrorist attacks in India, strengthening of the Taleban in Afghanistan and could even extend to the China’s Xinjiang province.

Read the rest of this entry »

California, USA is one of those states where you will find all kinds of properties and real estates. California is where the climatic surroundings vary hugely from place to place. There are places with moderate temperatures and also there are places which experience all four seasons in their full glory. The first thing to consider for investing or purchasing in California real estate is to select the place or area.

The city San Jose lays further inland and protected on three sides by mountains. San Jose is made up of dozens of microclimates and downtown San Jose experiences the lightest rainfall in the city, while south San Jose, at only 10 miles distant, experiences more rainfall and slightly more extreme temperatures. A little about San Jose economics is that its location within the thriving local technology industry earned the city the nickname Capital of Silicon Valley.

In San Jose, housing development has been increase largely and the city has become the largest city in northern California. My dream is to have a property in San Jose for investment plan. San Jose homes were built such a way with beautiful landscape in a great neighborhood. At SJforSale.com, you can search for not only properties listings at San Jose but also other cities in California. This may be a good resource and guide and also giving you ideas before making decision on purchasing homes in California. Prices are at range of as low as $25k and above. Type of properties includes commercial properties, condo, cottage, farm, land, mobile home, townhouses and others.

So, to find out more about real estates, homes or properties in San Jose or other cities in California, check out this aforementioned site. Meet properties sellers at your fingertips!

Read the rest of this entry »

I need to roll-over my 401k in an IRA(Individual Retirement Account) from my last company soon and I need to learn about investing in the stock market. It’s a good thing that I found Wikinvest.com. It’s a new investing research portal, they also call it Wikipedia for investing. It’s a very helpful tool for investing for beginners like me to learn from the pro-investors.

If you want to research on any of the publicly traded companies, you should check out this Wikinvest.com and learn. It’s so easy to find and read about the different companies. Know what is hot and what is not in the stock market. “Buy low, sell high take a piece of the pie at Wall Street” just like what the cartoon School House Rock that my daughter watches.

Like for example: Research on Nintendo , from the graphs alone you can tell that the stocks are doing well at $76.75 per share with the graph on an incline. You can read up the text on the company and find out more.

It’s such an awesome idea, investing simplified! They were smart in not naming it “Investing for Dummies.” This site rocks! Very easy on the eyes and it has so much meat on it. I would strongly recommend it to anyone who wants to have a piece of the investment pie.

Read the rest of this entry »

the site is LiveLoaded.com - The Easiest Way to Make Money on the Internet and it basically works like a simple random draw from a database. Each time ” />

Home Based Business Secrets

Home

Register

Rules

FAQ

Search

Today’s Posts

Mark Forums Read

 
Online Money Making Forum
> Online Money Making Forum

> GPT Programs

found glitch at online random reward site easy $12.50/day

Display a rating image on your site

Users can rate this program at MoneyFanClub if you display this image on your website.

Select the code below and insert them within <body></body>.

Rating image 1

<br /> Online Money Making

Rating image 2

Read the rest of this entry »

Exclusive Analysis Finds Lawyers Still Bggest Givers But Retired Contributors Have Edged Out Wall Street Democrat Have The Edge In Nearly Every Major Industry

A Nov 3 Report From the Center For Responsive Politics (www.opensecrets.org)

WASHINGTON—As the first Baby Boomers start collecting Social Security checks, retirees’ campaign contributions are making an impact in the 2008 presidential race as well. According to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics’s exclusive analysis of the candidates’ 3rd Quarter fundraising, retired individuals contributed at least $9.2 million during the period. Their contributions exceeded money from lawyers and the securities and investment industry, which had led throughout the first six months of campaign fundraising.

Unlike the legal and investment industries, which are favoring Democrats along with nearly every other big-giving industry, retirees are relatively bipartisan in their contributions. About 51 percent of the money they’ve contributed since the election cycle began has gone to Democratic candidates, while Republicans have received 49 percent. Barack Obama is the top recipient of retirees’ money, with at least $5.1 million, followed by his Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton, who has collected about $4.4 million since the start of fundraising, and Republican Mitt Romney with roughly $3.8 million. In the 3rd Quarter alone, however, Clinton led all candidates among retired contributors, followed by Obama and Republican John McCain.

Read the rest of this entry »

Foreclosure Explosion: 1379 Revere Avenue, Bayview

Friday, November 2, 2007, by Jay Nisen

One man’s pleasure is another man’s pain: Hudson & Marshall, a Texas-based firm that auctions off foreclosed real estate, is bringing the fun here to NoCal shortly. The firm gleefully announced that, as “foreclosures are exploding in California,” it will auction off approx. 600 foreclosed, empty homes throughout Northern California Nov. 12-18—more than 200 of which are in the Bay Area. One single, lonely property in the whole lot is in San Francisco: 1379 Revere Avenue, a 1,575 sq. ft. property in Bayview.

Read the rest of this entry »

The quote ” “Every really new idea looks crazy at first” is attributed to both Alfred North Whitehead and Abraham Maslow, but regardless of who said it this truism applies to financial services, payments and security managers right now because limits and controls on account usage is shifting from bank to account holder. Banks are still playing the “man behind the curtain” role with accounts, not giving the customer the ability or permission to simply determine, in advance, how “their” deposit, payment, investment and other accounts can be used. At stake is adoption, selection (to use card industry parlance), cross-sell, and loyalty, and the first provider that makes it easy for customers to feel the most control is set to gain big at the expense of competitors. (Yet to digress, even if I were able to predetermine how my bank or card account could be used in advance, all that peace of mind and transaction-shift will remain simply as a drawing board concept because of usability issues. As you board a large commercial aircraft, have you ever momentarily stared to the left, into the cockpit, to witness the jaw-dropping complexity that keeps us mere mortals from flying even a Southwest 727? Even if customers could go online to prohibit unwanted foreign transfers to their card or make sure the card doesn’t get turned off on their next trip to Brazil, our rudimentary usability practices would make the consumer’s control panel look like that set of cockpit controls, thus barring adoption.) Back on point, there’s a market waiting to explode in what we’ve coined as UDLAPs (User Defined Limits and Prohibitions) and IFMs (Interactive Financial Messages, or two-way alerts that update consumers on selected conditions within their accounts). We’ve been calling for changes in these two areas for years, and I invite clients and readers to hold me accountable on the following data-derived belief: by the end of this decade, bank customer activity and industry vendor success will begin to measurably determined by how much is invested in UDLAPs and IFMs. These two areas are the next spending wave, like what we saw in bill payment (or have yet to see in aggregation). Banks can’t afford to build UDLAPs and IFMs on their own, vendor platforms are a natural, and customer profitability will be determined by how well and how fast they are deployed.

Watch for our Banking Safety Scorecard, available Wednesday the 7th to non-subscribers, or 9:00 am PST November 2 to Javelin subscribers. A credit Card issuer’s version of the Safety Scorecard report (both of which compare top institutions based on their availability of UDLAPs, IFMs, and many other vital features) was published a few months ago. Additionally, our report on what IFMs look like has been released and subscribers may access that now.

Get on board with UDLAPs and IFMs, because they will change everything about the profitability of customer relationships, giving account holders the feeling of control they so desperately crave.

When I started working for myself I made a conscious decision to trust my gut. If it was the opposite of what other people were doing but my gut gave approval, then I’d do it.

For the most part that’s worked out great. I love owning a profitable business. All my options are open and that’s because I built it without investors or debt. Around here everyone is taking investment, going into debt, or building products with no revenue. Not all of those people end up happy.

One gut decision that didn’t turn out well was choosing a hosting company for CrowdVine. Everyone told me to go with ServerBeach but I chased some minor cost savings at CalPop and ServerAxis.

CalPop was awful the first month with lots of downtime. Lately they’ve just been a little disorganized but basically functional. I still host RateMyDanceMoves there but couldn’t trust them for professional work. Then I tried ServerAxis because they had a cheap VPS with 4GB of RAM and the underlying server was on RAID giving my data an extra dose of protection. A month later their hard drives crashed and they lost everything (I only lost a little bit of work). It took me five emails to get the complete story. Thankfully I never had a chance to host CrowdVine there.

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been around 5 months since I’ve last checked our investment portfolio. We’re some of those people who really don’t spend that much time checking the details of our investments; we like how things are more or less in auto-pilot. I get some vague idea how we’re doing whenever I receive our account statements. But it’s when I do these reviews around twice or three times a year, that I see our net worth details and our full financial picture. I figure that’s good enough — the less I look at the numbers, the less chance I’ll do something impulsive!

At this time, I have mixed feelings about how things are going. Two reasons why:

The stock market is experiencing a lot of volatility in the last few months, and despite that, it currently maintains a gain of 9% for the year. It seems like it can’t make up its mind where it wants to go even after the last few rate cuts.

We’ve been partially living off our savings this past year which accounted for a decrease of 2% off our overall portfolio totals. This is telling me that it doesn’t seem like an impossibility to “retire early” based solely on the strength of our portfolio growth. Quite a tempting thought.

Read the rest of this entry »

On October 30th we announced Oslo. This is a very positive statement of commitment and direction for companies that have identified SOA and BPM as a critical element of their future.

Oslo is not one product, it is a set of products across a number of releases.  You can think of it as a “quest” to make distributed applications easier to design, develop, deploy, manage, maintain and monitor through a vision of bringing together model driven approaches with service orientation.

Technologies like WF and WCF will be enhanced in a future release of .NET Framework (beyond 3.5) and we hope/expect to see some early drops in CY08 – however we are not yet sharing specifics. The major vehicle for Oslo will be the next release of Biztalk known currently as Biztalk v6 - likely in 2009. This release will run on top of the new versions of WCF and WF.  In addition products such as Visual Studio and System Center will also be enhanced to support the vision of Oslo. If we get this right, we will significantly reduce the engineering cost of building a SOA.

My US colleagues expand on it a little more - and have copied the summary here for simplicity:

Read the rest of this entry »