Ingot Tree

Why its time to invest in Singapore Real Estate!

2006-11-20T23:03:00.000+08:00

The property market is bullish, esp the city area.
The article says so, my lecturer - a property hedge fund manager says so, the market research reports so.. so what do you think?

Summary of reasons
- Integrated Resort
- Singapore’s government opened up real estate ownership on 99-year lease properties to foreigners
- Rich PRCs and PRC government laws (may 2006) to allow each and every Chinese citizen to exchange annually the equivalent of $20,000 U.S. dollars and take this capital out of China for any legitimate purpose
- China/Hong kong too expensive
- US economy slow down -> out flow of funds

Its time to leverage in, pay downpayment (10-20%) and sell before TOP/the market bubble burst.
Its risky for sure, but potentially high payoff..

Go find out more :)

Other Resources:
Frank Knight
Jones Lang Lasalle

Fortune Small Business' business plans contest

2006-10-25T17:39:00.000+08:00

Who's got the best idea for a startup? Students from university programs around the country face off in FSB's annual contest. Check the ideas out here.

Categories: business, idea, contest, fortune, small, business

Buy property from struggling companies, and then lease it back to them at a premium.

2006-10-25T17:30:00.000+08:00

Business 2.0 Magazine --

"Jeff Hayden preys on smallish companies on the brink. Not because he's a vulture investor seeking to turn around a struggling business. He just wants its real estate. And he wants it cheap, so he can then rent it back to the company for a juicy profit.
His strategy is a new twist on what's known as a buy-to-leaseback - a deal that's long been used by big companies such as Walgreens that want to get real estate off their books and raise cash.Plenty of investors are glad to have healthy, household-name companies like Walgreens as tenants, so they purchase their properties and then lease them back.
But Hayden is striking deals with companies that big real estate investors ignore, and his approach could mark the emergence of a wide-open multibillion-dollar opportunity."

Read more at Be a landlord of last resort.

Categories: landlord, lease, premium, business, idea, buy-to-lease-back

Red Hat Shares - Worth a look?

2006-10-23T11:08:00.000+08:00

Red Hat shares have plummeted to about 18.20 of late, hitting a 52 week low in the process. This in spite of the general upswing in tech stocks.

The drop has largely been attributed to rumours that Oracle may soon be throwing its own hat in the linux ring. For details read Oracle Rumors Surface Once More, Spooking Red Hat Shareholders, By Rick Smith, LocalTechWire. Excerpts:

"On May 8, Red Hat shares hit a 52-week high of $32.48. The surge in stock price came after Red Hat announced the acquisition of Atlanta-based JBoss, an open source software developer for servers. The move struck a positive chord at the time as Red Hat seemed to be broadening its product capabilities.

But the JBoss deal caused heartburn in a number of different quarters, apparently including in the executive suite at server giant Oracle. Ever since the JBoss deal, Oracle’s Larry Ellison has taken potshots at Red Hat, including in the pages of the prestigious Financial Times. Maybe Oracle, which has worked with Red Hat in the past, needed its own Linux version, Ellison said.

Red Hat chief Matthew Szulik responded in those same pages, writing that Red Hat really wasn’t challenging Oracle. And IBM, another Red Hat partner that relies heavily on server business, issued warm and fuzzy words about the JBoss deal.

But the Oracle-Linux rumors persist. Egbert’s report only exacerbated them,

"(O)ur independent checks in the past two weeks indicate that Oracle seems to be close to introducing its own software 'stack.’,” she wrote. Egbert proceeded to cut her target price on Red Hat to $21 from $24.

Not everyone concurs that Oracle will go the Linux route. But Ellison could choose to partner with another Linux developer, wrote Tim Beyers for The Motley Fool.

“My problem isn't with analyst Katherine Egbert's sources, or her conclusion that Oracle is talking with the makers of Ubuntu Linux about working more closely together. My problem is that she believes the collaboration could result in an Oracle-branded Linux appliance. Frankly, I think that's crazy,” Beyers said.

Not so, others say. On Slashdot.org, the website bible for all things Linux, a poster picked up on the Oracle theme on Tuesday:

"There have been rumors floating around of Oracle working on their own distribution of Linux. If this is true, it is widely believed that this enterprise edition of Linux would be in direct competition with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. What is spurring the rumors? Well, Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison said, 'I'd like to have a complete stack. We're missing an operating system. You could argue that it makes a lot of sense for us to look at distributing and supporting Linux.' I know that Oracle has been doing a lot more than databases recently, will they go the extra mile and create their own stripped down Linux kernel? If they do, will companies switch to database solutions that are running Oracle only software for the benefits of support and (hopefully) stability?"

Meanwhile, some people continue to doubt the wisdom of the JBoss buy.

Peter Goldmacher, writing in the Wall Street Transcript’s “Enterprise Application Software” issue, blasted Red Hat.

“Open source is very interesting, because the poster child for open source has been Red Hat (RHAT), and it seems like Red Hat is losing their grip on their market because they have branched out into incremental functionality that they only needed some of their larger partners for. So if their larger partners feel like they want to get back into the business that they had previously allowed Red Hat to do for them, I think Red Hat could be in trouble.”

The Oracle rumors and recent sell-off have ruined a rebound for Red Hat. Shares dropped a whopping $6.11 on Sept. 27 after a third quarter earnings report that was regarded in many quarters as “weak”. The news sent RHAT to $20.12 as 62.7 million shares - 10 times the daily trade average – changed hands."

If the Oracle rumours are, simply, rumours, this lowpoint in Red Hat prices may be worth exploiting.

Categories: red, hat, oracle, stocks, shares, tech

How to be great

2006-10-19T10:23:00.000+08:00

2 related articles by Fortune Magazine are worth a read, reminding us that talent isn't the formula for greatness, hard work is.

1. What it takes to be great

2. How one CEO learned to fly

del.icio.us tags: greatness, practice, hardwork, talent, success

Sun Microsystem's New Black Box

2006-10-18T11:42:00.000+08:00

In an attempt to bounce back into the tech limelight, Sun Microsystems has come up with something that may actually work.

Computing Data Centres in a box that can fit into a parking lot. Saving corporations time spent building their IT systems and, more importantly, saving rent on prime real estate, these black boxes are a simple yet innovative way to use existing contraptions to solve a problem worth solving.

For more on these black boxes, check out these articles in the New York Times and Physorg.com.

Categories: sun, microsystem, data, centre, problem, solution, business, idea, innovation, IT, tech, space, rent, real, estate

Money on the Internet

2006-10-17T19:24:00.000+08:00

This guy has loads well, 40 over, ways to make money on the net. I've yet to look through all of 'em but the blog is worth looking at.

Categories: money, internet, ideas, blog

Technology that help startups compete with the big boys

2006-10-16T15:18:00.000+08:00

"Once upon a time it was easy to tell the difference between a small business and a large competitor: Big firms had access to more capital, diverse markets, better technology, and economies of scale; small companies had to make do with whatever they could afford. But as technology has advanced, that distinction has blurred. Just as mainframe computers gave way to cheap PCs on every desk, Yellow Pages ads are being replaced by low-cost websites, and regional sales forces by search terms purchased from Google and Yahoo. Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen cites overnight shipping as another of history's great leveler, giving smaller manufacturers the ability to send parts across the globe in less than a day and robbing big firms of a competitive advantage.

The past couple of years have ushered in a new wave of tools for entrepreneurs who want to play big, as software and service providers have begun to adapt their offerings-previously available only to large firms-for small businesses. "The attitude used to be, 'We're going to take this product we have for enterprise, strip out a lot of functionality, and small business is going to have to use it,'" says Chris Hazelton, senior analyst at IDC, an IT market-research firm based in Framingham, Mass. "Now companies are either building products specifically for small business or making the products modular so they're lower-priced and scalable."
The result: startup multinationals. Small firms with bigtime online security. Low-profile companies using high-powered software to perfect their websites. No-name startups with big-name shipping partners. Over the next several pages you'll meet entrepreneurs who are taking advantage of new technologies and strategies and learning a powerful lesson: It's never been easier to play big."
- From this interesting article on some interesting examples of big corporation efficiencies now available to startups.

Categories: startup, entrepreneur, software, tool, big, multinational, corporation, compete, logistics, VPN, startup, website, efficiency

7 steps to a healthy medical startup

2006-10-16T12:40:00.000+08:00

This one should interest HL.

By Jeanette Borzo, Business 2.0 Magazine

October 11 2006: 2:26 PM EDT

Categories: healthy, medical, startup, doctor, HL

How not to make money from a great invention

2006-10-13T15:16:00.000+08:00

- Not knowing what problem your invention solves
- Poor intellectual property rights protection
- Poor licensing agreements
- Poor marketing

For more tips, check out this poor genius' story at Fortune Small Business.

Categories: intellectual, property, rights, licensing, agreements, marketing, genius, invention, fortune, small, business

DVDs by demand

2006-10-13T10:42:00.000+08:00

For the first time, consumers will be able to download and burn movies onto DVDs legally - that is, with the copyright protection technology that the movie studios demand.

Despite the advent of movie downloads, DVDs are still highly sought after. They pack more information than the typical downloaded movie. Their quality is far superior than streaming movies wirelessly - which are going to look horrible on a regular Wi-Fi connection.

You can lend DVDs to friends and family. They're easy to mail. And you get instant access to all of their features and every scene in a movie, instead of having to wait for the download to end.

This week, software developers Sonic Solutions and Macrovision Corporation made a deal that could save retailers a lot of rent money. Sonic makes software that helps consumers burn discs, while Macrovision sells copyright protection services to the entertainment industry.

Because suddenly it becomes possible for stores - both online and off - to burn DVDs on demand.

A video store offering hundreds of thousands of movies, instead of, say, the thousand that currently fight for space on store shelves. Amazon will be a big winner because it will be able to burn discs as customers order them, thereby reducing inventory costs and boosting margins.

This post was adapted from DVDs: They will survive.

Categories: DVD, copyright, movie, inventory, costs, margins

Lord of the batteries

2006-10-12T12:17:00.000+08:00

A friend of mine has started selling a battery pack that may be used with almost all portable electronic devices, from laptops to mobile phones. One power source to rule them all.

You can select the appropriate voltage to suit the device, and use the the appropriate adapter to connect the battery to the device.

This would save business travellers from carrying numerous duplicitous chargers for their phones, laptops etc.

Brilliant example of someone finding a good problem to solve.

It's going for around S$235, in case anyone's interested.

The Specs, according to the website are:

myPower ALL Tech Specs

• Weighs just 11.8 oz (MP3300) and 15.9 oz (MP3400)

• Size is 3.28” (W) x 6.80” (L) x .92” (D)

• Output current: 4A max

• Rechargeable lithium polymer battery

• 4 hour charging time

• Supports multiple voltages

• Output power 40 Wh (MP3300) / 56Wh (MP3400)

• Includes 8 adapter tips that connect to most devices

• Comes with leather carrying case with belt strap

• Full one year warranty

The sales pitch I received by email is as follows:

Unique Selling Point of the MP3400 in Singapore :

Come next year, the government’s iN2015 plan will include a nationwide wireless internet implementation. By then, we can get connected wirelessly in a lot more places and not only limited to hotspots. More people will be working on their laptops outdoors but the only problem they will always face would be : Power ! There is no power outlets in the outdoors readily available to let you power up your laptop or PDA when your laptop/PDA battery runs out. Your only option now is only to buy a spare laptop battery proprietory to your current laptop brand/model, when you change your laptop, this extra battery will be deemed useless as most likely than not, it is not compatible to your new notebook, even if it is of the same brand.

BUT NOW, you have a choice !!

1) myPowerall MP3400 Universal Rechargeble Battery aims to solve the problem of providing additional battery power, by extending your outdoor laptop power usage by another 3-4hrs. In total, a typical user whose laptop battery lasts 2 hrs can basically get 5-6 hrs of total usable power in the outdoors instead of the usual 2hrs from his current laptop.

2) The MP3400 is not limited to your current laptop model or brand, if you are using a Toshiba now and changing to Compaq later, this battery can still be use, the Universal MP3400 is compatible to over 80% of all the portable electronics (including laptops) in the market.

3) The cost is near or equivalent to most laptop batteries in the market. If you are considering to buy another laptop battery, why not consider this new option that gives you not only more power but also more value.

4) It charges PDAs, MP3, portable DVD/VCD players, mobile phones and digital cameras etc.

5) It is also much safer than the conventional Lithium Ion battery (as in the laptop battery recall incidents recently).

Categories: battery, pack, electronic, devices, adapter, problems, solution, business, ideas

Neville's Financial Blog: Business Ideas - Make Money with No Money

2006-10-11T18:01:00.001+08:00

I've been rather impressed with the ideas this dude has collected and recorded since 2005. His post containing business ideas for the broke is pretty neat. Check it out.

Categories: business, idea, money, broke, blog

Everything tastes like chicken

2006-10-11T14:56:00.000+08:00

WARNING: THIS IS ONE OF THOSE APPETITE DESTROYING POSTS.

Recently I received a forwarded email that alleged that somewhere in China eateries are cheating customers by serving deep friend rats as chicken. The email even serves up the steps in the culinery process. Unbelieveable? Check these pictures out. Personally I don't think the finished dish looks like chicken so it's also likely that the eatery sells it AS Fried Rats...

BURNING THE HAIR OFF THEM

WASHING THEM BEFORE COOKING

CUTTING THEM UP INTO PIECES THAT SIMULATE CHICKEN PARTS

PREPARED FOR DEEP FRYING

WELL SEASONED TO TASTE GREAT!!!!

ALL DONE AND READY TO EAT!!!

CLOSER LOOK

THE OTHER "WHITE MEAT"

Categories: rat, chicken, taste, con, china, restaurant, appetite

How Youtube began

2006-10-11T14:43:00.000+08:00

The Youtube story is another classic fairy tale. Recently acquired by Google, Youtube's simple beginning must be a lesson to learn. Solve a problem, one small step at a time. Here's the Straits Times' account:

ALL Mr Chad Hurley and Mr Steve Chen wanted to do was share some videos from a dinner party with a half a dozen friends in San Francisco.
It was January last year, and they could not figure out how to do it. They tried sending the clips by e-mail but they kept getting rejected because the files were too big. Posting the videos online was a headache, too.
So last February, the two buddies got to work in Mr Hurley's garage, determined to design something simpler.
What they came up with was a website called YouTube - and the rest is Internet history.
BusinessWeek, in its April 10 issue this year, told this story of YouTube's young founders - Mr Hurley is 29 years old and Mr Chen, 28.
They met at an online payment service PayPal where they were among the first 20 hires during the second half of 1999. They became good friends and part of a tight-knit PayPal clique that remains close till today, said the magazine.
In fact, their venture money came in part through their connection to Mr Roelof Botha, a partner at Sequoia Capital, a top venture capital firm and early backer of Google. Mr Botha had been PayPal's chief financial officer.
Mr Hurley, YouTube's chief executive, also had an entrepreneurial streak from the start. He grew up in the Philadelphia suburbs and tried to sell paintings from his front yard at the age of five, said the magazine. He studied design at Indiana University of Pennsylvania and landed at PayPal after reading about it in Wired magazine and asking about a job via e-mail.
During his interview he designed a new logo for PayPal, one that the company still uses today. He left after PayPal was sold to eBay in 2002, working with a few companies as a design consultant.
Mr Chen, YouTube's chief technology officer, has been a maths and science geek since high school, said BusinessWeek.
He threw himself into programming and computers at Illinois Mathematics & Science Academy and went on to study computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
During his last semester, he was recruited by Mr Max Levchin, co-founder of PayPal and a former classmate. Mr Chen remained at PayPal until early last year to help finish launching the company's expansion into China.
By the time of the fateful dinner party last January, the two men were both between jobs and carrying substantial credit card debt.
They founded YouTube in February as a classic Silicon Valley garage start-up with another friend, Mr Jawed Karim. Mr Karim left the company just before it got its first round of funding in November last year to go back to full-time study at Stanford University.
Mr Chen, the programming expert, used Adobe's flash development language to let users stream video clips on their browsers. Mr Hurley, the user interface expert, designed ways to let users easily share the videos they liked and put descriptive remarks or 'tags' on their favourite clips.
They let users paste YouTube clips right on their own Web pages - a trick that led to the exploding popularity of YouTube, especially on another popular website, MySpace.
In an interview yesterday, Mr Hurley told Reuters that he and Mr Chen gave in to Google, after rebuffing other offers, because of its resources and assurances of independence.
They get to keep on running the company and YouTube retains its name and its own corporate offices. The Google stock they will get in a deal worth more than US$1 billion (S$1.6 billion) must have been hard to resist, too.

Categories: youtube, beginning, google, choosing, problem, startup, entrepreneur, chad, hurley, steve, chen, video, sharing, solution, paypal

Choosing the problem

2006-10-11T12:47:00.000+08:00

I chanced upon an (almost) interesting paper on the result of an experiment, to test the business ideas of undergrads, sort of.

One of the issues raised is that smart people are trained to solve problems but not spot the right problem s to solve ("right" being defined as a start up idea).

The article is rather long but here's the beginning and the end:

This summer, as an experiment, some friends and I are giving seed funding to a bunch of new startups. It's an experiment because we're prepared to fund younger founders than most investors would. That's why we're doing it during the summer-- so even college students can participate.

We know from Google and Yahoo that grad students can start successful startups. And we know from experience that some undergrads are as capable as most grad students. The accepted age for startup founders has been creeping downward. We're trying to find the lower bound.

The deadline has now passed, and we're sifting through 227 applications. We expected to divide them into two categories, promising and unpromising. But we soon saw we needed a third: promising people with unpromising ideas.

...

The good news is, choosing problems is something that can be learned. I know that from experience. Hackers can learn to make things customers want. [6]

This is a controversial view. One expert on "entrepreneurship" told me that any startup had to include business people, because only they could focus on what customers wanted. I'll probably alienate this guy forever by quoting him, but I have to risk it, because his email was such a perfect example of this view:
80% of MIT spinoffs succeed provided they have at least one management person in the team at the start. The business person represents the "voice of the customer" and that's what keeps the engineers and product development on track.
This is, in my opinion, a crock. Hackers are perfectly capable of hearing the voice of the customer without a business person to amplify the signal for them. Larry Page and Sergey Brin were grad students in computer science, which presumably makes them "engineers." Do you suppose Google is only good because they had some business guy whispering in their ears what customers wanted? It seems to me the business guys who did the most for Google were the ones who obligingly flew Altavista into a hillside just as Google was getting started.

The hard part about figuring out what customers want is figuring out that you need to figure it out. But that's something you can learn quickly. It's like seeing the other interpretation of an ambiguous picture. As soon as someone tells you there's a rabbit as well as a duck, it's hard not to see it.

And compared to the sort of problems hackers are used to solving, giving customers what they want is easy. Anyone who can write an optimizing compiler can design a UI that doesn't confuse users, once they choose to focus on that problem. And once you apply that kind of brain power to petty but profitable questions, you can create wealth very rapidly.

That's the essence of a startup: having brilliant people do work that's beneath them. Big companies try to hire the right person for the job. Startups win because they don't-- because they take people so smart that they would in a big company be doing "research," and set them to work instead on problems of the most immediate and mundane sort. Think Einstein designing refrigerators. [7]

If you want to learn what people want, read Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People. [8] When a friend recommended this book, I couldn't believe he was serious. But he insisted it was good, so I read it, and he was right. It deals with the most difficult problem in human experience: how to see things from other people's point of view, instead of thinking only of yourself.

Most smart people don't do that very well. But adding this ability to raw brainpower is like adding tin to copper. The result is bronze, which is so much harder that it seems a different metal.

A hacker who has learned what to make, and not just how to make, is extraordinarily powerful. And not just at making money: look what a small group of volunteers has achieved with Firefox.

Doing an Artix teaches you to make something people want in the same way that not drinking anything would teach you how much you depend on water. But it would be more convenient for all involved if the Summer Founders didn't learn this on our dime-- if they could skip the Artix phase and go right on to make something customers wanted. That, I think, is going to be the real experiment this summer. How long will it take them to grasp this?

We decided we ought to have T-Shirts for the SFP, and we'd been thinking about what to print on the back. Till now we'd been planning to use
If you can read this, I should be working.
but now we've decided it's going to be
Make something people want.

Categories: choosing, problem, smart, people, train, experiment, paper, business, idea, management, customers, startup, entrepreneur

Virtual worlds

2006-10-08T01:10:00.000+08:00

Guys, check out this article... I'm excited by the potential of virtual worlds (and making money through it is one of them!)
http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=7963538

Second Life is a 3-D virtual world entirely built and owned by its residents. Since opening to the public in 2003, it has grown explosively and today is inhabited by 358,009 people from around the globe.

From the moment you enter the World you'll discover a vast digital continent, teeming with people, entertainment, experiences and opportunity. Once you've explored a bit, perhaps you'll find a perfect parcel of land to build your house or business.
You'll also be surrounded by the Creations of your fellow residents. Because residents retain the rights to their digital creations, they can buy, sell and trade with other residents.
The Marketplace currently supports millions of US dollars in monthly transactions. This commerce is handled with the in-world currency, the Linden dollar, which can be converted to US dollars at several thriving online currency exchanges.

Categories: virtual, world, second, life, business, potential, creation, marketplace, online, exchange, currency

Apple Bytes

2006-10-06T12:11:00.000+08:00

Just when my Apple shares were back in the black, Apple decides to get caught up in an options backdating scandal. The Financial Times:

"Shareholders in Apple Computer on Thursday took a wait-and-see approach in the first day of trading after the company said an internal investigation had cleared Steve Jobs, co-founder and chief executive, of any wrongdoing in options backdating at the computer maker.
Shares in the company fell 0.7 per cent on Thursday to $74.83, a day after Apple said a group of independent directors found Mr Jobs was aware of "a few instances" of improper options backdating between 1997 and 2002. The company's investigation had concluded that Mr Jobs was unaware of the accounting implications of backdating and had not benefited personally from it.
The independent directors behind the investigation are understood to include Al Gore, the former US vice-president, and Jerry York, former chief financial officer of IBM and Chrysler. Eric Schmidt, the chief executive of Google, joined the probe after he became a member of the Apple board in August, according to a person familiar with the matter. Apple declined to comment.
Analysts on Thursday expressed cautious optimism that Mr Jobs might emerge unscathed by backdating, a practice in which the grant dates of stock options are manipulated to coincide with low points in the value of a company's shares."

Steve Jobs nicely acknowledges that he was aware of these naughty deeds but claims to be unware of the "accounting implications". Sounds like a set up for the defence of bona fides which is rather lame if you ask me... or anybody else. See Can Ignorance Put Apple's Jobs in Clear? By MAY WONG and Apple: Rotten at the Core by the Motley Fool.

Think I shall dump my shares. Fast.

Categories: apple, shares, options, backdating, scandal, steve, jobs, accounting, implications, legal, defence

12 ideas from Business 2.0

2006-10-05T10:23:00.000+08:00

Check out Business 2.0 Magazine's list of 12 startup ideas.

Some of 'em are pretty interesting.

1. Build cheap Wi-Fi networks for Brazilian resorts.

2. Become a biodiesel producer in Argentina.

3. Create an ad network for India's mobile content developers.

4. Launch an exclusive social network for Russian millionaires.

5. Open an American-style restaurant in one of China's fast-growing cities.

6. Remodel homes for China's burgeoning middle class.

7 Flip mining claims in Bolivia.

8. Export the planet's next great wines - from Greece.

9. Import fine wines to upscale restaurants - in India.

10. Export gourmet coffee from Rwanda.

11. Become a social entrepreneur in South Africa.

12. Be among the first to invest in the new Libya.

Categories: cheap, Wi-Fi, networks, Brazilian, resort, biodiesel, producer, Argentina, mobile, content, developers, Russian, millionaires, restaurant, China, India, Flip, mining, claims, Bolivia, wine, Greece, upscale, gourmet, coffee, Rwanda, social, entrepreneur, South, Africa, Libya

Forum Forrays

2006-10-02T12:04:00.000+08:00

There has been quite some hype about bloggers making loads of money from advertisements. See Blogging for big bucks. The formula is simple. Write enough interesting stuff, people will read your blog. Enough people read your blog, advertisers will pay you for some advertising space.

But (good) blogging is hard work. Fail to accomplish Step One and there's no gold at the end of the rainbow. Enter the forum. What's more clever (and interesting) is having a website which content feeds itself or is fed by its readers. The money-making formula for online forums is similar to blogs' save for Step One. Instead of writing interesting stuff, you choose an interesting topic that begs discussion and market your website as THE place to have these discussions. Once established, the readers provide the content, the traffic snowballs and advertisement money floods in.

Two examples that come to mind are www.sgcarmart.com and www.singaporebrides.com. Both have established themselves as virtually THE place to go to check out the latest information.

SG Carmarts is now synonymous with online used car classifieds in Singapore. SingaporeBrides is where frenzied brides-to-be go to discuss where better to splurge on (some would say unnecessary) frills for that Big day. The beauty is that the public provide the content while the site owners rake in the dough.

Another key example is www.hardwarezone.com. I think just about anyone in Singapore (and possibly Asia) wanting to build his own pc or check up the latest prices and reviews of techno gizmos goes there to read fellow consumers' reviews on the product discussion forum. I just read today that its owner Hardware Zone Pte Ltd has been bought over by Singapore Press Holdings for a whopping S$7.1m.

How do I install a forum feature on this blog?

Categories: internet, forum, blog, money, advertisement, content, provider, member, sg, carmart, singaporebrides, hardwarezone

Vending Machines

2006-09-26T17:28:00.000+08:00

Check out this guy's idea for a Drycleaning ATM, which some of his readers claim is already available in Japan.

I tried to find pictures of these dry cleaning ATMs on the net but failed. Maybe it's not actually been done yet.

The vending machine industry in Japan is so innovative and huge that they have a "Japan Vending Machine Manufacturers Association" (JVMA). See some vending machine pics here.

Here's a thought. Why don't we start the rage in Singapore? Buy a couple of the weirdest vending machines from Japan and plonk them around town...

Categories: Drycleaning, ATM, vending, machines, japan, jvma

Latest IPO - Energy Stocks

2006-09-26T17:10:00.000+08:00

Got this off Dow Jones Newswire:

SINGAPORE (Dow Jones)--Chemoil Energy Ltd., a U.S. marine fuel supplier, expects to raise up to US$374 million from an initial public offering in Singapore, according to a prospectus filed Tuesday.

The company is offering about 439.5 million shares at a maximum price of US$0.85 each, according to the prospectus posted on the Monetary Authority of Singapore''s Web site.
The offer comprises 366,240,000 new shares and 73,248,000 existing shares.

So... Anyone interested? I think this will be a good one - if you can afford it. Will post something on the energy sector if I can find the article online.

Categories: Chemoil, Energy, marine, fuel, supplier, offering, ipo

Not enough money? Start an Investment Club!

2006-09-26T17:05:00.000+08:00

Was at the National Library yesterday when I stumbled across the Idiot's Guide to Investment Clubs. That got me wondering - what the hell is an investment club anyway??

Here's a Fool.com description of Investment Clubs:

Investment clubs have been around for decades, and tens of thousands exist in America today. They've been growing in popularity in recent years, partly due to the best-selling books by the Beardstown Ladies.

Members of investment clubs, often groups of friends or co-workers, typically meet once a month to discuss companies and make decisions about which stocks to buy and sell. At meetings they each contribute a small sum of money that is deposited in a joint account. Members take turns researching and reporting on promising companies in which they might invest or companies in which the club is already invested.

The National Association of Investors Corp. (NAIC), established in 1951, has set forth guidelines for running successful investment clubs. It urges members to:
Invest money regularly, regardless of market conditions

Reinvest all dividends and capital gains
Buy stock in companies that are growing faster than most of their peers
Diversify investments, not putting all the communal eggs into one basket

These guidelines are fully Foolish and quite sensible. (Of course, hang around Fooldom online and you'll glean much more guidance. We run a bunch of real-money portfolios, modeling a variety of investing strategies for you.)

Successful investment clubs focus on learning as well as doing. There's often an education officer elected and guest speakers invited. Club members seek to explore new ideas and discuss investing issues. One month a member might present her findings on the value of screening for low P/E stocks. Another month, a member might report on a book he read about a great investor like Warren Buffett or Ben Graham. In the early sessions of a club's life, education components might be very introductory, covering how to read a balance sheet or an earnings report. A year or two later, the club might be learning new ways to value stocks or discussing an interview published with a successful equities analyst.

Investment clubs today hold a total of more than $175 billion worth of equities in their portfolios -- rivaling the largest mutual funds. Each month investment clubs add more than $50 million. This is big business -- and exceedingly Foolish, too.

Categories: investment, club, capital, gains, members, money, mutual, funds

The Penis Restaurant

2006-09-25T11:49:00.000+08:00

If you are a dude and you are planning to have breakfast, lunch or dinner in the next half hour, come back and read this post after your meal. Make that half an hour after your meal.

Someone is lopping off the totem poles of dogs, donkeys and tigers and making a fortune by serving them as gourmet delicacies.

"We are in a cosy restaurant in a dark street in Beijing but my appetite seems to have gone for a stroll outside.
Nancy has brought out a whole selection of delicacies.
They are draped awkwardly across a huge platter, with a crocodile carved out of a carrot as the centrepiece.
Nestling beside the dog's penis are its clammy testicles, and beside that a giant salami-shaped object.
"Donkey," says Nancy. "Good for the skin..."
She guides me round the penis platter."

Given that "Organ Soup" (broth containing goats' penises) hit Singapore hawker centres years back, I guess I shouldn't be making a big deal out of this. But Organ Soup never sat well with me either.

It must be that at some primal level I find something objectionable about chewing on some other creature's manhood / beasthood. Afterall, I have no bone to pick with eating a chicken's rear leg...

Anyway, read more here if you have the stomach for it.

Some quotable quotes:

"It is cold and bland and rubbery."

"Not long ago, a particularly rich real estate mogul came in with four friends. All men. Women don't come here so often, and they shouldn't eat testicles,"

"What better way to secure a contract than over a steaming penis fondue."

Categories: Penis, Restaurant, dogs, donkeys, tigers, fortune, gourmet, delicacies, beijing, appetite, tesicles, organ, soup

Own a Sports Team

2006-09-22T11:39:00.000+08:00

If you thought only the Abramovichs or the Glazers among us could own sports teams, check this out. Suddenly the dream doesn't look so impossible.

A league of your own

It's every fan's fantasy: Your office is a baseball diamond and the perks include hot dogs. One CEO shows how to make it big in the minors.

Excerpts:

"I was always a sports nut," says Stickney, who played hooky from school to watch the Indians win the 1948 World Series. "I never realized that the business side of it was just as interesting."
He made his first foray into the minors in 1986. He had just sold his medical specialty company and joined a group of investors led by actor Mark Harmon, paying $90,000 for a 30% stake in a team that became the San Bernadino Spirit.
Four years later the Spirit had become a farm team for Seattle and saw its first star, Ken Griffey Jr., pass through on his way to the Show.
But it was still bleeding money. Stickney had his own ideas about how to turn a profit, so in 1990 he spent roughly $500,000 to raise his stake to 60% and named himself GM.
First he ditched San Bernandino (the Spirit played on an ex-Little League field) and struck a deal with the city of Rancho Cucamonga, which was building an $11.5 million ballpark, one of the first in a wave of major league-grade, single-A stadiums.
He also had a revelation. "It's very simple: You can't depend on the baseball to sell your tickets," he says. He nixed ticket giveaways and instead began to draw fans with carnival rides, half-inning skits, promotions, and fireworks. Tremor the mascot was hatched out of an egg at the first game.
Stickney's timing was perfect. The 1994 strike drove disgruntled fans to the farm teams, pushing minor league attendance from 33 million in 1994 to 41 million in 2005. With an average of 3,950 fans per game last year, the Quakes have topped California League attendance every season for the past decade.
Meanwhile, Stickney teamed up with his son Ken and several other investors to found Mandalay Sports, which bought five other minor league franchises across the country. The teams - notably the Dayton Dragons and Texas's Frisco RoughRiders - have thrived following the lessons Stickney learned at the Epicenter.
One caveat for aspiring owners: In the minors, all on-field talent are provided and managed by the major league parent club, a lack of control that can be tough (the Quakes are now affiliated with the Angels). On the upside, the majors pick up salaries, workers' comp, and health insurance bills.
Minor league baseball teams are "great properties to have," says sports investment banker John Moag of Moag & Co. "They're almost like utilities: Most provide an annual dividend, they're established, they're fairly conservative, and they appraise well in value."
Last year, Stickney says, 40% of the Quakes' $3 million in revenue came from ticket sales, 40% from advertising, and 20% from sales at the park. Profit margins hover between 5% and 10%, and the team Stickney and his partners bought 20 years ago for $250,000 would sell for upwards of $7 million today.
"If you're looking for a quick buck, this isn't it," laughs Stickney. But, as Yankee slugger Phil Linz once said of baseball, it sure beats working for a living.

Categories: Abramovich, Glazer, baseball, sports, team, own, world, series, franchise, Yankee, slugger, Phil, Linz

Last Laughs

2006-09-22T11:09:00.000+08:00

I was just saying to Zen42 yesterday how being the first to provide new products / services doesn't mean much, Google being the prime example of a latercomer who overtook the incumbent (Yahoo!).

Today I read that Google isn't all that prime. See Google gets a new ad-versary by Erick Schonfeld and Jeanette Borzo, Business 2.0:

... It's not often that you find a startup CEO openly mocking Google (Charts). But Gurbaksh Chahal, founder of BlueLithium, thinks Google is a one-trick pony when it comes to Web ads. "They've miserably failed in the last year with display ads," he notes, "because they look at the world through text advertising." It's big talk -- and you'd be tempted to dismiss Chahal entirely were it not for his claim that BlueLithium has been profitable since its third month of operation and is on track to hit $100 million in revenue by the end of next year...

Categories: google, yahoo, latecomer, incumbent, startup, BlueLithium, overtake, first, newcomer

Sounds Right

2006-09-22T01:09:00.000+08:00

And I thought Bose only made good vibrations.

Amar Bose: Bose
From the Sep. 2004 Issue of FSB
By Brian Dumaine

Bose is known for high-end audio equipment and dedication to research. Founder Amar Bose, who still owns most of the $1.7 billion company, reinvests all its earnings into R&D. That approach has created cultlike fans and innovative products—its wildly successful Wave radio took 14 years to create. Now Bose has a new product that could shake up the car industry. (Hint: It's not stereo equipment.)

When I was 12 years old, in 1943, I bought a radio kit, and in building it I learned how to read schematic diagrams and repair radios. My father, an immigrant from India who used to sell imported mats and rugs, would go around to the hardware stores where he used to sell them and talk them into letting me repair the radios that their customers would bring in. It was a good business—no one was making new radios because of the war effort, and many of the radio repairmen had been drafted. As the business grew, I was working nights and all day Saturday and Sunday. I even hired a couple of employees.

In 1956, when I was at MIT finishing my doctorate, I bought my first hi-fi system based on the best specifications. I brought it home and played some violin records, and I couldn't believe it. The sound wasn't right (I had played violin growing up), but it should have been right based on everything I had been taught about engineering. So either the manufacturer was cheating on the specs, or the specs were not meaningful. It turned out it was both, by the way. So I started working in the MIT acoustics lab to find a solution.

My first product didn't come out until 1965. It was a speaker in the shape of an eighth of a sphere, which fit in a corner and reflected sound all around the room instead of in a direct beam as with conventional speakers. I was a professor and didn't know anything about business. I projected we'd sell $1 million worth of speakers our first year. We ended up making 60 units and sold 40. That sphere-shaped speaker eventually evolved into our 901 system, which we launched in 1968 and which was the product that really built the company. It was much different from anything that existed—I was able to patent it—but it was a hard sell at first. The 901 had no woofers and no tweeters, which every speaker was supposed to have. It was very small compared with the steamer trunk-sized things that were on the market at the time. When you hear live music, very little of it comes to you directly; most of it bounces off walls and ceilings first. A traditional speaker just blasts the sound directly at you. Like a live performance, the 901 blended both direct and reflected sound.

When we first launched the 901, it was a total disaster. None of the retailers had any idea how to demonstrate the product. One dealer in Santa Barbara loved the sound and put the 901 out in the middle of his showroom floor. One time, however, I was out visiting him and couldn't find the Bose speaker, so I asked him about it. He pointed up to a high shelf, and there it was in a corner, practically out of sight and not even connected. He said, "Look, I love your speaker but I cannot sell it because it makes me lose all my credibility as a salesman. I can't explain to anyone why the 901 doesn't have any woofers or tweeters. A man came in and saw the small size, and he started looking in the drawers for the speaker cabinets. I walked over to him, and he said, 'Where are you hiding the woofer?' I said to him, 'There is no woofer'. So he said, 'You're a goddamn liar,' and he walked out."

When I got back to Bose, I created a seven-minute audio demonstration to help dealers explain to customers how the 901 worked, and that really helped spur sales. [Editor's note: Bose doesn't release any figures, but the NPD Group, a market information firm in Port Washington, N.Y., says that Bose today is No. 1 in home speakers, with a 12.6% market share; its 901 speakers are still sold.]

The biggest crisis I ever faced at Bose hit in the early 1980s, when interest rates rose to 22% or so. Technology companies everywhere were going down, and banks were panicked, putting all sorts of restrictions on their loans. We were in the thick of developing our new car audio system for GM. The situation was pretty scary because it could have forced us to go public to raise capital, something I vowed I would never do. Going public for me would have been the equivalent of losing the company. My real interest is research—that's the excitement—and I wouldn't have been able to do long-term projects with Wall Street breathing down my neck.

How did we hang on? I told GM how our bank—it had given us a $14 million loan—was trying to constrain us. A couple of weeks later I got a call from Ed Czapor, who was head of GM's Delco Electronics. He asked me to fly out to Detroit. When I met him, all he said was, "I'd like to introduce you to our CFO." He walked me up to the 14th floor of the GM headquarters, introduced me to the CFO, and walked out. The finance fellow had heard our new audio system and loved it. He said, "I understand you have a financial problem." I told him about how our bank wanted to make us cut costs that would force us to wind down our R&D spending. The next day the CFO called up a bank he dealt with in Boston and told it to assume the loan from our bank with no constraints—just like that. That's what saved us. People just would not believe that a company as large as GM would do such a thing.

Around the same time, GM delivered $700,000 worth of production equipment to our factory in Massachusetts. I called Ed and said, "Seven hundred thousand dollars of equipment just arrived at our factory, and I didn't order it and I can't pay for it." Ed said, "Look, everyone comes to us with a widget in his hand and says, 'Here's my widget, and here's how much money I want.' You've been working with us for almost a year now, and you've never asked for a cent. You've gone your mile a long time ago; it's time we go our mile." Can you imagine this? Without GM's help, we might not be here at all.

Our latest product is a new car suspension system, which has been in development for nearly a quarter of a century. I first got interested in suspensions as a young man. In Paris in the 1950s I saw a sleek Citroen DS-19 C and immediately thought, "Oh, my God, I've got to buy one." Which I did when I returned to the States. The Citroen had a novel hydropneumatic suspension system that made you feel you were floating along the highway. Over the years I remained intrigued by it. In fact, I used to give my MIT students quizzes on it. In 1980 I started looking into the subject and realized that conventional suspensions, made with springs and shocks, acted differently for luxury and sports cars. Make the damper and springs stiffer, and you've got a sports car. Make them softer, and you've got a luxury car. But the slow roll of a luxury car can make you seasick, and the stiff ride of the sports car makes you want a chiropractor.

At this time people were looking to hydraulics for solutions, but they weren't getting anywhere. So we decided to start from scratch and throw out the old system entirely. After five years of working out some complex mathematical algorithms, we found we could get huge improvements on paper, but we didn't know what the hardware would be. What we ended up with is an electromagnetic motor installed at each wheel. When power is applied, the motor retracts and extends. One of the key advantages of an electromagnetic system is speed. The motor responds to conditions in the road quickly enough to counter the effects of bumps and potholes, maintaining a comfortable ride. The motor is also strong enough to put out enough force to prevent the car from rolling and pitching during an aggressive maneuver.

We've worked on this system and tested it for 24 years now, and are finally ready to show it to the auto companies. It will probably take several years before they adopt it; they'll want to do some of their own testing, but we've designed it so that it can bolt right onto the chassis of current production cars—they won't have to do expensive retooling to make this technology work. We'll probably first see it as an option in luxury cars—we don't know exactly how much it will cost, but as the suspension gets more widely adopted, the price will come down, and we'll probably see it in all but the most inexpensive cars, which is how ABS brakes developed. Oh, and the potential size of the market? We really have no idea. We just know that we have a technology that's so different and so much better that many people will want it.

Categories: amar, bose, beginning, startup, business, story, audio, equipment, engineering, research, design, immigrant, speaker, repair, crisis, capital, gm, hydropneumatic, suspension, system, technology

Maglite

2006-09-22T01:08:00.000+08:00

This is one of my favourite stories.

Anthony Maglica: Mag Instrument
From the Sep. 2004 Issue of FSB
By Kemp Powers

Maglica's life story would make a great movie. He was born in New York City in 1930, but the Depression forced him and his mother back to their native Croatia. During World War II they suffered such poverty that his mother had to pull her gold tooth to buy food. Returning to the U.S. in 1950, Maglica began making machine parts in a garage in Los Angeles, and in 1979 he simplified his business to a single product: flashlights that would hold up to the rigors of police work, yet be attractive enough that civilians would buy them too. Last year Mag Instrument took in more than $100 million in revenue. At 73, Maglica still works 18-hour days, often defending his intellectual property from competitors.

In the 1950s I got a job at a machine shop in East Los Angeles. It was while I was working there that I learned my foreman had a little side business in his garage making hydraulic fittings. I figured that I could do that, so I went down to Santa Fe Avenue and found a simple Logan metal-turning lathe that would fit in my garage. It cost $1,000, and I didn't have that kind of money. But the guy selling it agreed to take the $125 I had as a down payment and let me pay every month. To hook the machine up, I had to disconnect the stove and run 50 feet of cable to the garage. I worked the night shift at my job, because that shift paid better, and worked on this little lathe in my garage during the day. It was job-shop work, very competitive, and the hardest part was getting paid. I've always had to be economical. Even when my business began to get successful, I didn't have an air-conditioned room and expensive machines. I modified the machines I had.

I knew someone in the 1970s named Don Keller, who later came to work for me, and still does. He had been a policeman, and he knew cops who had problems with their flashlights. The flashlights were flimsy, made of plastic, and if you dropped them, they would break. Keller said that if someone could make these out of metal, they wouldn't break.

He and his friend tried making one out of the metal shaft of a fence post. They packed it with rags and the guts of a regular flashlight. Then they took the design to a tool-and-die shop, but those places don't do high-production. They do ten, 20, 50 pieces at a time. So the flashlights were too expensive. They farmed the work out to me, because I could do higher production, but I couldn't get them to pay me. I also made flashlight parts for another company, but that had problems too. The second company gave me a purchase order for 10,000 lights, so I tooled up, invested all this money, and started making them. They said, stop, slow down, you're making too many. We can't sell these flashlights. They wanted me to make them but only give them to them as they needed, which didn't work for me. I almost got into a lawsuit with them to get them to pay me, but they finally did.

By then I had all this equipment in place. And I thought that I could make a better flashlight than they were making. Better quality. I designed one with a pushbutton switch instead of a slide switch, and an adjustable beam, so you could go from flood to spotlight. And contacts inside that are self-cleaning—when you push the button, the contact revolves and scrubs against the other part. It takes the oxidation off the metal, so you get a better connection. We get letters from customers all the time, with stories about the lights and what they've been through. Like someone losing a light in a lake and finding it the next year, and it still worked.

Since 1979, when we took the first Maglite product on the market, we have never raised our prices. We've increased the quality, but maintained the same price. People say, how do you do it? Maybe you charged too much money to start with. That's not the case. It's the automation and innovations we've created along the way. We've actually added value to the product. We now include batteries and replacement bulbs, things like that.

There are still so many challenges though. It can be hard to compete in this country. First I have to design a product that's better than anything else that's out there. Then I have to find the most efficient way to manufacture it. Then there's protecting your patents, once you actually get them. One patent we applied for took 14 years to get approved. Fourteen years! Ninety percent of the people in this factory don't know what new product I'm working on now. I've spent more than $70 million in litigation to defend my intellectual property rights. Can you imagine what I could have done with that $70 million? More employees, better products, a bigger company. You can't try a patent case in this country for less than $1 million.

I think we've filed more than 200 lawsuits worldwide over the years. Most of the times we settle, and we've never lost a case, but still we have litigation going on all the time. It's pretty easy to find out about products that infringe on our intellectual property. The public often helps us find out. Someone in our warranty department will get an angry letter and a returned product, and it turns out that the flashlight isn't even ours. It's a copycat. Or we see people at the trade shows. I once saw someone with a knockoff at a show, and I explained to him that I spend a lot of money on R&D. He told me, "I spend a lot too. My R&D is my attorney." I sued him and ultimately settled, but it took three years and cost me about $5 million.

We also have sales reps who go to the stores. Infringers aren't shy, and they advertise their products right next to ours. We had one situation where a company in China made a light that was the exact same shape and overall appearance as ours. They were selling it for less than what we paid to buy materials. We couldn't go to China to stop them, but we stopped them here by suing the stores that carried the lights. We've sued virtually all the mass merchandisers, companies like Kmart. They usually become our best customers. They want to sell a competitive product and a good value, and they want to buy American. Usually they get into trouble, and it isn't even their fault. They get talked into selling a product when they don't understand about the patents on mine.

I figure I'm going to have litigation forever. It's not going to stop. But I hope people are smart enough to know that I'm not going to give up, that I'm not going to let them come and take something from me.

Categories: business, startup, story, beginning, maglite, maglica, mag, instrument, new, york, flashlight

Boston Beer Co.

2006-09-22T01:06:00.000+08:00

I love an icy Sam Adams....
Here's how it all began.

Jim Koch: Boston Beer Co.
From the Sep. 2004 Issue of FSB
By Julie Sloane

For five generations, the men in the Koch family became brewmasters. Koch began his career as a consultant, but in 1984 he founded Boston Beer Co., maker of Samuel Adams. It's now the sixth-largest U.S. brewery, and Koch is credited with launching the microbrew craze.

I'll never forget my first sale. I'd never sold anything before. I'd always had this status and prestige of three Harvard degrees and my high-paid consulting job. This meant removing all those buffers and becoming a beer salesman. It was scary. There was no growth in the beer industry, and continuing brutal consolidation. The competitors were 100 times any size I could ever contemplate being. I had told my dad I wanted to leave my job and continue this 150-year-old family tradition, and I'd thought we were going to have a warm father-son moment. He just looked at me and said, "You've done some dumb things in your life, but this is just about the dumbest." In 1948, when he got out of brewmaster school, there were about 1,000 breweries in the U.S. When I started Boston Brewing 36 years later, it was down to maybe 30. Industry consolidation meant that jobs for brewmasters were disappearing. My dad lost his job several times.

But as I explained it to him, he began to understand I wasn't trying to compete with the big American brewers that had driven all these little breweries out of business. My company didn't need to be that big for me to be happy. So we went up to the attic and got out my great-grandfather's recipe, Louis Koch Lager, and he said, "This is really good beer." I took the recipe home and made it in my kitchen as best I could. When it was finished aging and I tasted it, I knew I had something.

To sell it, I went to all five of the distributors in Boston, and I told them my idea. They thought I was weird. Their vision of a brewery was a huge corporate matrix. Here I was, one guy. Nobody had ever heard of my beer, there was no marketing behind it, and at that time it cost 50% more than Heineken. Every one of them turned me down. So I set up my own distributorship.

The day I started selling, I walked to the first bar I saw, a place called the Dock Side. I started talking to the guy behind the bar. He was just nodding, no matter what I said. It turned out that he spoke only Spanish and didn't understand anything I was saying. Luckily the manager saw me, rescued his bar back, and listened to my story. After he tasted my beer, he said, "Kid, I like your idea, but I didn't think the beer would be this good. I'll take it." I was so excited, I forgot to ask for the order. I had to go back the next day and say, "How many cases would that be?"

Categories: Samuel, Adams, Boston, Beer, Jim, Koch, beginning, business, startup, story

Making your money work for you

2006-09-21T22:49:00.000+08:00

Ok, not really a real money making idea but some info on how to make your money work harder for you...

For those who want to earn more interest on their spare cash without losing liquidity, fundsupermart has a cash account that gives interest tagged to the interbank lending rate - 0.5%. Now it is about 2.6%. Not bad considering the typical DBS/UOB/POSB savings account give 0.x% interest.
http://www.fundsupermart.com/main/home/fsmCashAcct.svdo

Can also try Maybank's isavvy account... interest 2.38%

MJ

Categories: endorphinatic, money, work, harder, interest, interbank, lending, rate, fundsupermart

Why The Rich Go Broke

2006-09-21T02:19:00.000+08:00

This is an interesting read.

Fortune's fools: Why the rich go broke

Excerpts:

Mark Twain, who had a lifelong penchant for dodgy investments and gimmicky inventions, lost about $4 million in today's dollars betting on a newfangled but unwanted typesetting machine in the 1890's. He subsequently had to take to the lecture circuit to stave off bankruptcy.

Michael Jackson, who began churning out Top 10 songs and albums as the lead singer of the Jackson 5 before reaching puberty, found it necessary to pledge a stake in his lucrative songbook of Beatles hits to secure a $270 million bank loan to forestall a slide into bankruptcy.

Mike Tyson, like Jackson a gifted man-child, is entangled in his own financial woes despite once having the marquee power to draw $30 million purses for a single fight. When Tyson filed for bankruptcy in 2004, he listed debts of $27 million, including about $13 million in unpaid federal taxes and about $174,000 for a diamond-studded gold chain. He had maintained a monthly budget of about $400,000 before the filing.

Buffalo Bill, Michael Jackson, Mike Tyson, Wayne Newton, Burt Reynolds, Elton John and other public examples of spending run amok were, or are, all entertainers, and entertainers offer ready fodder for tsk-tsking - largely because gossip columns make it easy for the rest of us homely paupers to take quiet satisfaction in their plight. Entertainers, for the most part, are also peculiarly vulnerable when it comes to personal finance.

"You have people who are struggling for a long time and then overnight, boom, they hit it," says Shelley Finkel, Mike Tyson's manager. "If they don't have someone watching out for them, and some emotional stability, it will be very hard for them to be grounded financially."

...

"The rich are different from you and me: they are more egotistical," says Theodore R. Aronson, managing principal of Aronson Johnson Ortiz, an investment firm in Philadelphia. "Psychologically, I think the rich, because of their egos, think they know everything. Well, they don't, and many of them repeatedly make horrible investments - because they can."

Financial success can breed its own peculiar set of vulnerabilities. "People who are very successful develop elevated sensibilities about their skills, and when things turn on them they won't admit they're wrong because their self-confidence has held them up so long," says Arnold S. Wood, chief executive of Martingale Asset Management in Boston. "In the face of evidence, even subjective evidence, that suggests that something bad is about to happen to someone, a funny thing happens: They reject the evidence.

"These kinds of people just continue spending because they think the money will keep coming in because they're so successful," adds Wood, who says he is fascinated by the possible neurological and social underpinnings of financial delusion and decision-making. He believes that gender plays a strong role in financial ruin because, he says, women tend to be more risk averse than men when it comes to money. Some interesting research backs this up.

...

America's consumer landscape, which prizes spending and encourages people to define themselves by what they own, only makes the financial balancing act trickier for adults, especially if they have fat wallets.

"Someone who goes broke, or someone who goes into debt, is really somebody who isn't comfortable having their money," Gurney says. "Yes, it appears as a lack of discipline. But the lack of discipline comes from an emotional place that causes them to be undisciplined. It's not about the money. It's about our emotional relationship to money.

"The people who are out there just running through money have failed because they haven't come to terms with who they are and what they want the money to do for them," she adds. "I see a lot of baby boomers beginning to panic because they haven't figured this out."

Categories: rich, broke, financial, success, ego, investments, vulnerabilities, discipline, consumerism

Selling the moon

2006-09-20T20:34:00.000+08:00

Courtesy of Calvin (again), here's an idea that's been orbiting around for quite some time.

Claim you own the moon, then start selling it acre by acre. At $1 an acre, you should be able to get some buyers.

This dude wrote a book about selling the moon.

.

Read an excerpt from this book here.

Needless to say, interesting legal issues of ownership and selling something you don't own arises. From wikipedia:

QUOTE

In these early stages of speculation about ownership of extra-terrestrial real estate, the legal issues are still extremely vague. One of the underlying issues is whether private ownership of such property is recognised or not. It is generally accepted that, as stated by the United Nations "Outer Space Treaty", space is the "domain of all mankind", and can no longer be claimed by any governments. It omits mentioning private individuals.

Legal experts agree that private ownership of the Moon is not explicitly forbidden in the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 which states that only governments are not allowed to own lunar or celestial property. The Outer Space Treaty has been ratified by 157 countries as well as all space faring nations.

Because private ownership was not included in the Outer Space Treaty, a new treaty, the Moon Treaty of 1982 attempted to explicitly fix this omission by forbidding private ownership of the Moon and the celestial bodies. However the Moon Treaty has not been signed after 3 attempts in the UN, nor has it been signed or ratified by the United States or any other major or space faring nation for fear that private exploitation of the Moon and its resources would be hampered by the treaty.

The legal issues partly depend on which is being discussed:

Land ownership on planets and moons
Ownership of vacant space

Aware of the need for a stricter approach, the Board of Directors of the International Institute of Space Law (the learned society of space lawyers) issued a Statement in 2004 where it deplored the augmentation in the extraterrestrial real estate business “raising the opportunity for individuals to be misled”.

The statement reads, inter alia – “The prohibition of national appropriation [of outer space and celestial bodies] … precludes the application of any national legislation on a territorial basis to validate a ‘private claim’. Hence, it is not sufficient for sellers of lunar deeds to point to national law, or the silence of national authorities, to justify their ostensible claims. The sellers of such deeds are unable to acquire legal title to their claims. Accordingly, the deeds they sell have no legal value or significance, and convey no recognized rights whatsoever.”

The Board of Directors of the IISL calls State Parties to the Outer Space Treaty to – “comply with their obligations under … the Outer Space Treaty …[being] under a duty to ensure that, in their legal systems, transactions regarding claims to property rights to the Moon and other celestial bodies or parts thereof, have no legal significance or recognised legal effect.”

While space lawyers consider the purported sale of extraterrestrial real estate a trivial matter, pertaining to consumer protection law, most of them agree that the subject of real property rights in outer space needs to be clarified. Among the specialists in the field of extraterrestrial property rights are Wayne J. White Jr., Virgiliu Pop, Alan Wasser and Alexander Soucek of ESA.

UNQUOTE

Here's what Virgiliu Pop has to say:

QUOTE

Land on the Moon for sale? Think twice!

For eons, the Moon has been the symbol of supreme desire. Asking for the Moon meant asking for the impossible. Owning the Moon and the stars was both the ultimate want and the ultimate folly. And, proven that a fool and his money are easily parted, there ought to arise people who would readily exploit this weakness. With or without material aims, many people throughout the ages thought they were the first ones to embed the flag of their desire on the alien orbs. As the Moon waxes and wanes above them and their unreal estate businesses, this book chronicles their way from anonymity to fame and back again.

"[Unreal Estate] is both a welcome documentation of the latest step in humankind's long history of land schemes and an entertaining look at our place in space. ... I look forward to first conviction for fraud on Mars -- then we will know humankind is truly expanding into the solar system. " - Louis Friedman, Founder and Executive Director, The Planetary Society.

"Virgiliu has done stellar research on this topic and his book is extremely informative and interesting. You will find the stories he tells to be compelling, the legal arguments as to why one cannot own space real estate to be illuminating, and the entire book to be not only unique but very special." - Dr. David M. Livingston, Founder and Host of The Space Show .

"Who could be cooler than a space lawyer named Pop? ... If Virgil's fascinating stories and characters from the annals of space property claims were the issues, I might never have fallen asleep during property class in law school ... Pour yourself a chilled snake oil cocktail and dig in." - Jesse Londin, Space Law Probe.

UNQUOTE

Categories: selling, moon, real, estate, Outer, Space, Treaty, Land, ownership, planets, Virgiliu, mcardle

Liquid Gold

2006-09-20T12:33:00.000+08:00

Man seeks to overturn conviction for illegal urine sales - News

(article) contributed by Calvin.

Thanks!

Categories: illegal, urine, sales

Don't Panic

2006-09-20T11:45:00.000+08:00

Bad News = Buying Opportunities

Case in point is this morning's coup in Thailand. As expected, after hearing news of the coup, upon (Singapore) market opening, there was general bloodshed... Traders were selling across the board, STI traded 25 points lower... It was ugly.

So, just like any panic-stricken trader, I sold my shares in AsiaPharm, and took a loss of $150 in my stride. All things considered, not a bad loss (or so I thought). It's now 11.45, less than 3 hours after market open. The stock I sold is now up by one tick, was up by 2 ticks at one point, ie. the person who bought the shares from me has made a $100 profit in less than 3 hours.

Here's a thought. If the stock market operates on a willing buyer - willing seller basis, who is buying when everyone else is selling??

Categories: Bad, News, Buying, Opportunities, coup, Thailand, STI, AsiaPharm, stock, market,

Planting Rice is Never Fun?

2006-09-20T10:25:00.000+08:00

Does the farmer working his back in the padi fields of Asia ever understand how top Japanese fund manager Yoshiaki Murakami, recently arrested in Japan for insider trading, become so financially endowed? Suggestive of that Murakami's net worth includes his purchase of a high-end property in Singapore for approximately US$10 million. But does it bother the farmer, whose economic existence serves to support his own family and other economies where rice is a staple food, that such achievements can be attained elsewhere in the world?

From another perspective, Warren Buffett, the world's second richest man, announced plans in June this year to donate 85 percent of his fortune, then estimated at US$44 billion, in the largest single act of U.S. charitable giving ever.

Now now, where do we all stand in this huge income gap of the world? In the circular flow of income, where the dollar you earn gets spent/invested/saved and becomes another dollar earned by somebody else or invested by a financial institution and it goes on.... Money does make the world go round. We all probably fall right in the middle of the farmer-WarrenBuffet spectrum. Planting rice may not be great and while becoming someone of Warren Buffet's proportions is a nice ideal, we need to ask ourselves as a matter of constant self-assessment; how do we meet our personal wealth/life targets and where can we find our resting place on this spectrum?

All said, as a digressive conclusion, most of the money-spinning successes or life successes stem from being able to bring out one's personal strengths in one's undertaking and enjoying the process of that undertaking. Doing that, while the economy sorts out its most efficient allocation of resources, and with full self-awareness of one's progress may just one day help us jump out of our padi fields, skipping past the Murakami-type potholes and into the realms of Buffet.

Categories: farmer, padi, Asia, Yoshiaki, Murakami, endowed, economic, existence, support, family, economies, rice, staple, food, Warren, Buffett, personal, wealth, strengths, undertaking, enjoying, efficient, self-awareness,

Sell Missiles

2006-09-19T20:44:00.000+08:00

Reservist military training never fails to deliver.

Last week I donned once again my army fatigues and served my country, albeit by manning a computer terminal in war games.

Over lunch one day in the mess, idle banter with my buddies turned to the wealthy Chinese in Indonesia. I asked casually, and rather naively, whether anyone knew exactly why the Chinese in Indonesia were far more well to do than the indigenous people.

It turns out they sell missiles, or at least some do. One sergeant told of how he had a (Chinese) relative in Indonesia who farmed shrimp and delivered missiles. Literally. The missiles are stored under the shrimp ponds which are, of course, a front.

Amazing. (if true)

Categories: missiles, arms, indonesian, chinese, shrimp, army, war, wealthy

one red paper clip

2006-09-19T17:41:00.000+08:00

This dude started with

this

and ended up with

Categories: red, paperclip, barter

The Million Dollar Homepage

2006-09-19T17:10:00.000+08:00

This is kinda old but I think it is apt to start the ball rolling with this.

Selling pixels. Who'd have thought of that.

Excerpt from BBC:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4585026.stm

- QUOTE -

By Tom Geoghegan
BBC News Magazine

It took a 21-year-old a few minutes to come up with an idea which has made him more than one million dollars in four months. So what's his secret?

It started with a blank notepad, an overdraft and a shortage of socks.

Now it's a million-dollar business.

Last August, as a three-year degree loomed, Alex Tew lay on his bed in his family home in Cricklade, Wiltshire. It was time for his nightly brainstorming session.

This time, the problem was his finances. He already had an overdraft, which was sure to multiply at university, and he felt his poverty was reflected by his lack of decent, or matching, socks.

The first thing he wrote in his pad was "How can I become a millionaire?" Twenty minutes later, the Million Dollar Homepage idea was born.

It was selling pixels, the dots which make up a computer screen, as advertising space, costing a dollar per dot. The minimum purchase was $100 for a 10x10 pixel square to hold the buyer's logo or design. Clicking on that space takes readers to the buyer's website.

With $999,000 banked so far, Alex recalls his thought process at the time. He says: "I wrote the title to spark the creativity and then wrote down the attributes the idea needed. It had to be simple to set up and understand.

"It had to have a name to capture the imagination and be something that could be set up quickly with no physical delivery required.

"I wrote down some keywords and then the idea came out 20 minutes later - selling pixels. So I snapped up the domain name that very night."

Snowballing

Alex spent £50 on buying the domain name (milliondollarhomepage.com) and a basic web-hosting package. He designed the site himself but it began as a blank page. His friends and family paid the first $1,000 dollars, which he spent on a press release. That small publicity gave his site more traffic, which in turn persuaded more advertisers to have faith.

"It snowballed," he says. "As I made money, more people talked about it and the more people talked about it, the more money I made."

Four months and 2,000 customers later, including The Times and Orange, and the million dollars is almost surpassed. Two million different people have accessed the site, which has a wry blog and FAQs, in the last seven days.

"I've been blown away. These have been the most exciting and hectic months of my life. Things are quite surreal at the moment and because it's been so busy it hasn't really sunk in.

"It seems like Monopoly money. Previously I'd associated money with working at Tesco getting paid £5 an hour."

His first business venture was when, aged eight, he drew comics and sold them at school. He had no intention of going to university because he wanted to try out some of his ideas.

- UNQUOTE -

Categories: million, dollar, homepage, business, college, student, pixels

this is where it begins

2006-09-19T16:18:00.000+08:00

Crazy business ideas, amazing accounts of money from nothing, and the occasional random rant. That's what this space is about.

If YOU have a crazy idea, don't toss it away. Leave it here!