Linden Labs Makes A Move
A few days back I suggested that if There Inc decides to wind down the consumer game division, some money could be found striking a deal with Maxis or Linden Labs. It could be a Win Win Win. There Inc would win by making a little unexpected revenue, Linden wins with a new client, players win with a new place to go and a super deal at one of those sites. The window of opportunity for this has already closed! :) Linden has taken the ball into their own hands and said "come here Thereians and we will cut you a phat deal." Kyau was the first to send me to the Second Life There page. I played second life in beta and it's a cool game. It's closer to There than it is Sims. What game you like best is subjective. I personally like the games in this order: There, Sims Online, Second Life. That's just me. Each game is different and has their own cool uniqueness.
Ventrella's Cafe
Ever wonder about Ventrella's cafe? I found Leo's old article on TechTV and it states:
"Six years in the making, There is the brainchild of Will Harvey, a Stanford computer science Ph.D. and game developer, and Jeffrey Ventrella, an expert on artificial life from MIT's Media Lab."
I had heard of Will Harvey but had not heard of mr Ventrella. Michael Wilson was the lad that was a big player at ebay. Here is a scetch.
Shameless Plug For My New Book!
In january I decided I wanted to write a book. It was more about the challenge of writing a book, then the business of selling one and making some coin. I decided to try self publishing with iUniverse. Anywone can publish their onw book their, and costs run between $500 and $1,500 depending on how many optional featured you choose. I've always said "it's easy to make a website; it's hard to get traffic to it" and the same is true for writing, "it's easy to write a book; it's hard to sell it." LOL :) It was a lot of fun and quite a learning experience. I made tons of mistakes along the way. From idea to store shelf in four months! Woo Hooo. My book just hit Amazon. I see that iUniverse even has it at the canadian store.
The book is basically how I trade stocks and invest. If you trade stocks or your thinking about an IRA, you might enjoy it. I use three or four internet sites to screen for stocks. My favorites are MSN Investor, BigCharts, and StockCharts.
If you are new to investing and retirement planning, you might enjoy the Motley Fools book or the Wealthy Barber first.
When you self-publish, everything is on your shoulders in terms of promotion. I'm not going to go too crazy since this is more of a fun hobby for me and I don't think I'll sell 17 copies LOL, but I have a three prong sales approach plan.
1) Press Release
I'm not sure if this will work but I will do a press release to various journalist through some of the internet PR sites like PRweb.
2) Google Ads
I'll most like try a couple hundred dollars in google ads, aimed at amazon. I tend to think these will lose money but I want to find out the conversion rate. Here is why it will be difficult mathematically...google clicks are minimum 5 cents. I aim that to amazon and try to sell a book. The book is $15 and I would be paid 5% from iuniverse. oopsy, nice math error here earlier...correcting. This means I need to get 1 sale in 30 clicks to break even. This is impossible. I can actually improve on this because...if I use the amazon affiliate program, they pay me too...say 5%. Now that is 1:60. (essentially still impossible) Even losing money, I will get a figure of how many clicks I need to make one sale on average. You can buy your own book at iuniverse and sell them yourself you can make more than 5%. I think you can make $5-$10 depending on quantity. I can use the amazon math to determine if it would be worthwhile attempting to sell from home. Even at $10 profit you are looking at 1/200. I think I just talked myself out of buying google ads. hahaha :)
3) Blog
You know I love blogging. I might do a few blog posts to get the book and stock terms into the search engine. I have a generic site laid out and will finish it off this week. If you use MT and want my clean default templates, here they are.
It took me a lot of years to develop my trading strategy. I've read close to 100 books on the subject. Here is an old list I used to post to usenet 100 years ago. I need to update it sometime. LOL I made huge coin in the dot com boob, and I lost huge coin in the dot com bust. Ahh the lessons of life eh. :) In the last three years, I am up over 20% per year on average. This year I am up 16.4% and beating all four indexes. I do not day trade, I trade long term. I usually make less than 15 trades in a year. I generally hold 8-12 stocks at one time.
If you are curious and want to read more, check out me new book! hee hee
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