April | 2012 | Technology Bloggers

5 ideas that have become online money makers

21st April 2012 5 Replies Farshad

Hobbies have always been an inspiration for many successful people. While most of us attempt to pursue “safe careers” by going for occupations that may bring us monetary benefits, pretty often we lose sight of our hobbies in our busy lives.

However, with the internet boom many people can now change that. There are many success stories, from the likes of Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates who ruthlessly pursued their goals and didn’t follow the bandwagon. But in this article I am going to explore a few more down to earth examples.

What is to follow is a list of five e-businesses that started as a hobby or a small idea that brought immense success to their owners. While the below examples might not contain websites as famous as YouTube, Twitter or Facebook, they are examples that we can all relate to, and maybe borrow a few ideas from!

The Million Dollar Homepage

I still remember watching a report about the guy who set up The Million Dollar Homepage on the news (can’t remember if it was BBC or CNN). The founder of The Million Dollar Homepage (Alex Tew) sold pixels of his website for $1, to raise money for his University expense. The site was such a success that it turned out to become a website that is nothing more than several pixels of small ads. I hope by now you would understand what I meant when I said, “examples that we can all relate to”.

FindAGrave.Com

When it comes to novel ideas that made people money, this website takes the cake. It provides a service that I wouldn’t have comprehended, had I not learned about this website.

Find A Grave is a website that helps people locate the graves of a famous people. It turns out that Jim Tipton liked to visit the graves of famous personalities and used this idea to create a kind of search engine that helps people locate graves of famous people.

So if you have a hobby of visiting famous places or areas that can help, say vacationers, then you might be the next big success story.

PickyDomains

PickyDomains is another idea that got me scratching my head. The founder of the site was good at coming up with interesting names, so he started a crowdsourcing service that allowed people to seek help in finding interesting domain names and slogans.

The idea was to let a community of people provide novel names and not to rely on bots, which arguably lack imagination. If you have been looking for vacant domain names in a domain search engine, then you will know what I mean.

So if your friends, family and bots have failed you, then it might be time to seek advice from a community of people, who just like coming up with cool names and slogans.

Gawker Media

While the Gawker Media website itself is successful enough, it is worth pointing out that this media groups is perhaps the world’s most famous blogging network.

The reason I have included the Gawker example is because one thing that most of us can do easily is blogging (something I’m doing right now).

Gawker Media has the world’s most successful blogs ranging from Lifehacker, Gizmodo to many others. The Gawker network was started by Nick Denton who is a journalist and an entrepreneur. While he claims that blogging isn’t that profitable, he has still made millions from his successful line of blogs.

Amazon

I know I said there will be down to earth examples in this post, but I have to add this one. I have been following Amazon since I was a child and have seen the company grow beyond belief.

What started as an online book store was soon to become one of the first e-stores in the world. But it was not just a good idea that made Jeff Bezos the world most successful e-retailer, but the fact that he took risks when it mattered.

It is said that the company did not expect any profit for five years, which also made shareholders a bit edgy. Nonetheless, the internet gold rush paid off and Amazon, which diversified, became one of the most successful companies in the world.

The above mentioned examples are just a few of many success stories that made people successful because they dared to use their ideas to materialize them into something successful (even if someone enjoyed visiting graves).

The point is that it might not be too late for any of you try out something that may allow you to turn your abilities into something successful, and to let you in on a secret, I’m already trying out something myself, guess I don’t want to regret not trying my hands at the internet gold rush either.

Buddycon Plus! Android App Review

20th April 2012 3 Replies RonF

Its been some time since I have written an app review, and this time its for the Android fan boys. In this post, I review a simple background and avatar customization app called BuddyCon Plus! Available to download from Google Play for free.

If you are on the lookout for an app to customize your Android mobile handset with avatars, wallpapers etc. there are plethora of them available on Google Play to help you do so. But if you are looking for customization as well as an entertaining live avatars & wallpapers, then try Buddycon Plus. Its free and its fun!

Buddycon Plus is an Android app that allows you to personalize your contacts as adorable and fun avatars. You can either choose your contacts’ faces to create avatars or use the template gallery which contains predefined sets like those of super heroes and more. The BuddyCon settings options allows you to create your contact’s avatar and acts basically like the control panel. Images of your friends can be accessed from the device’s gallery and synced with the app. There is a built-in paint brush which allows you to tweak your images. Once you are satisfied with your work of art, you can activate the wall paper. Your avatars will walk around on your Android device’s screen.

Along with adding your art to the images, BuddyCon also allows you to dress them up, create varieties of call-screen backgrounds and make your avatars interact on the home screen. There are options available to make your communication easy too. When you tap on any of the avatars, options like Email, Speed dial, Gtalk, Play a Game appear on the screen in a single touch. These options act as a single point of contact available with all communication modes to interact with your buddies.

To sum it up, Buddycon Plus! offers you an exciting process of personalization. It guarantees an amazing experience and a whole lot of fun which you can share with your friends.

Buddycon Plus! is available for free to download in Google Play and requires an Android version of 2.2 and above.

Holding Back a Rising Sea

19th April 2012 10 Replies Jonny Hankins

Last week I went to a presentation at MIT made by a group of engineers that are half way through building a high technology barrier to protect Venice from rising waters. The project goes under the name MOSE (Moses).

Tourists in a rather damp Venice

Venice is a city built on an island situated in a lagoon that has been artificially shaped by human intervention over the last 500 years. The problem of rising sea levels and storms has meant that the city is regularly flooded, and so the project is to build a barrier spanning the three large openings to the lagoon so that it can be sealed in times of high tide and storms.

The flooding has been exacerbated by works carried out in the 1980’s and 90’s to build an industrial zone that involved the drainage of marshland areas, leading to a softening of the ground that made the city actually sink.

This is a 50 billion Euro project, and one of the biggest of its type ever attempted. A look at the data about the Thames Barrier (the first of its type) shows that the problem of high tides is getting worse. It was closed four times in the 1980s, 35 times in the 1990s, and 80 times since 2000, but why?

Strangely enough the problem is related to global temperature rise as we might imagine but not so much because of the melting of the icecaps. The fact is that water expands when it is heated so warming even by a couple of degrees has the effect of increasing its volume. The International Panel on Climate Change state that 70% of the presumed rise will be due to this factor.

So back to the barrier. The entire project is quite an undertaking as this YouTube video demonstrates. Years of planning followed by years of preparation, reclamation of marsh lands and sea defense construction not to mention the construction of an off shore oil terminal so that the ships no longer have to enter the lagoon. But Criticism is also rife.

An aerial shot of part of the MOSE project

Part of the finished engineering works on the MOSE project in Venice

Some engineers criticize the project on purely technical terms, other groups point to the lack of environmental impact study and others the cost.

This video also on YouTube tells a completely different story to the one above. Critics are arguing (amongst other things) that we do not know all of the variables involved (which seems to be true) and that the entire ecosystem of the lagoon will change.

I am no engineer so I cannot argue about the choices made, but I do have one simple question. With all of the movement of water involved in this project (serious high tides and the passage of thousands of liters of sea water a minute) would it not have been possible to build something that produced electricity instead of consuming it in huge amounts?

Details of how the flood defenses will work

The stakes are high as you might imagine, Venice is one of the most touristed cities in the world, but the high tides are flooding the monuments ever more regularly. We are talking about more than a meter of water, and footage on international TV of tourists walking on raised platforms through St Mark’s Square and fresco covered churches full of water does not go down well.

It is an old problem though, and one that is shared by many cities today. New Orleans is discussing a similar solution, and here in Boston the issue is also under debate.

They are all looking for a high technology solution to an age old problem that is getting steadily worse.

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