Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) is a great service for anyone doing business on the web that needs a lot of storage or bandwidth.
The problem with most web hosts is that they charge you every month for the maximum bandwidth you might need, whether you actually do need it or not.
Amazon S3, however, only charges you for what you use. That makes it ideal for streaming video (it’s not actually streaming, it’s progressive download, but we won’t get into that here).
You link to the video html page, the video itself from within a web page on your site, or link to it from within your web site video player. The actual video streams from Amazon S3 through your web site, but it doesn’t add to your web host bandwidth usage.
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I came across Wolfram Alpha from a rumor that Microsoft’s search engine Bing would present some of the content that Wolfram Alpha generates. Then, Time magazine had Wolfram Alpha as one of its top 50 websites.
So what, exactly, is Wolfram Alpha? It’s not a search engine per se. It doesn’t provide links to answers. It GIVES you the answer that it calculates or finds in its database.
According to Wolfram Alpha
Our goal is to accept completely free-form input, and to serve as a knowledge engine that generates powerful results and presents them with maximum clarity.
From simple things like converting measurements to plotting out mathematical equations to the weather any place on any given day to geographic data on major cities to the fish production of France. Or even a comparison of the fish production of France to that of Poland.
It’s definitely worth watching the video on the site.
What else? A quick look at companies by their stock symbol, or comparisons of companies. Calculate mortgages. Find nutritional data of foods or add them up for a meal. Everything from mortality data to quantum physics.
I did find an article that says it falls short on baseball statistics, but this tool almost makes me giddy with delight!
Let me explain. The Internet has three basic uses – email, information and shopping – in that order. The information aspect has grown exponentially but finding that information can be a chore.
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A recent study by the Kauffman Foundation shows an uptick in business startups in 2008. It’s what the New York Times calls ‘accidental’ or ‘unintentional’ businesses.
Many unemployed people are turning to small business startups as an alternative to a corporate job, a job they got laid off from and are having little luck finding a new one.
The NYTimes article goes on about startup costs…
…the costs of owning a business add up quickly. There are state and local taxes and fees, insurance, salaries and contract pay, overhead, inventory and the like. And these days, lenders are none too generous when it comes to forking over money to new businesses.
For an online business that’s just nonsense. All that can come later. To start an online business all you need is a bank account and an Internet connection.
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In both Internet marketing and offline marketing, it’s best to limit the number of choices offered at the same time. This applies to both products and services.
In a recent article called Focus Your Marketing Plan the author was helping an entrepreneur who had been in business for 15 years.
…he showed me the company brochure, which listed ten different, unrelated services that his company provided.
He just thought the more services he offered his clients, the more business he would generate. Unfortunately, he just neglected to consider how trying to do too many things for too many different types of clients would dilute his efforts.
I remember an old story about Soviet Russian visitors coming to America and, when going to a grocery store, being flabbergasted at the number of choices offered. They were used to standing in line for one item, like shoes or beets. These people would spend hours shopping because they couldn’t make a decision.
It’s true. Go grocery shopping and you have lo-cal, lo-fat, sugar-free, low sodium, gluten free, fortified, all natural, organic, Fair Trade Certified, and that’s before you get to specific brands. Hell, look at the choices for chewing gum in the checkout lane.
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The answer: Other moms online
A post by Stephanie Azzarone at mediapost.com’s Engage: Moms had some interesting statistics:
- 35 million of the 40 million women in the U.S. with children 18 or under are online
- Over 16.5 million of those moms are blog readers or publishers
- 67% of moms online look for help making a purchasing decision
- 78% of moms who blog review products
And moms looking for advice online usually go to other moms…
Studies show that moms are increasingly losing trust in established “experts” — institutions and the like — while trusting more in what other moms have to say. That trust extends beyond members of their family or immediate community to other moms — strangers — they meet online.
In other words, she says “Bloggers can promote products or services more credibly than companies can on their own.”
So, if you are a Mom you can start a home business as a blogger giving advice and selling products to other moms. Many do product reviews as a lead-in to affiliate sales.
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I try to give solid advice to budding entrepreneurs looking to start an online business. But every so often I am going to drag out the soap box, stand on it and shout, like a bearded radical inciting the citizens in the town square.
First of all, the U.S. Government, especially now, is NOT a friend of small business. It is turning into the most anti-capitalist, anti-profit, anti-business government I’ve ever seen.
I’m not even going to how we got into the current economic crises, but the links below will give you an idea…
2000 – The Trillion-Dollar Bank Shakedown That Bodes Ill for Cities
The Clinton administration has turned the Community Reinvestment Act, a once-obscure and lightly enforced banking regulation law, into one of the most powerful mandates shaping American cities—and, as Senate Banking Committee chairman Phil Gramm memorably put it, a vast extortion scheme against the nation’s banks.
2004 – Ex-SEC Official Blames Agency for Blow-Up
[An SEC] rule change in 2004 led to the failure of Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, and Merrill Lynch.
The SEC allowed five firms — the three that have collapsed plus Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley — to more than double the leverage they were allowed to keep on their balance sheets and remove discounts that had been applied to the assets they had been required to keep to protect them from defaults.
2008 – Barney’s Rubble
Mr. [Congressman Barney] Frank was publicly arguing for an increase in the size of their [Fannie Mae & Freddy Mac's] combined $1.4 trillion portfolios right up to the day they were bailed out. Even now, after he’s been proven wrong about a taxpayer guarantee, he opposes Treasury’s planned reduction in the size of the portfolios starting in 2010…
The resulting economic crises has put the government in control of investment banks, insurance companies, auto companies and over half of the home mortgages in America.
The government strong-armed Bank of America into paying 18 billion dollars too much for Merrill Lynch, told major banks they WOULD participate in TARP whether they wanted to or not, and short-changed Chrysler bondholders in favor of the UAW, then complained the bondholders were being greedy.
Next step – health care. A lot has happened since I wrote about the health care plan last month. An estimated 1.5 trillion dollars over 10 years, perhaps now whittled down to only a trillion, to “fix” something that over 70% of Americans are satisfied with.
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