Ebates is a unique online service that provides consumers with an interesting method of reaping additional rebates.  In the online world many websites receive part of their funding by referring visitors to a shopping site.  The visitor that is referred may purchase something from that site and upon the purchase if the retail site can identify the referring source through cookies, they may pay an affiliate commission to the website.

With this well established business process in mind, Ebates has established a system where they provide coupons to their members.  When those members shop, they login to the Ebates portal and they make their purchases through Ebates’ affiliate links.

Ebates then provides a portion of the commission that they receive on the sale to the consumer in the form of an after the fact payment like a Rebate.  Consumers can obtain sizable discounts in this manner from many well known and recognized retailers across the internet.  Membership in Ebates does require the establishment of an account and the installation of software which works to track you purchase through the Ebate system such that the commission can be verified and paid to you accurately.

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The Wall Street Journal covered an interesting topic today.  It was the concept of interviewees going into situations with prospective employers and providing a great idea or even drafting some sample work or projects, which the company later uses without hiring the interviewee or paying them for their efforts.

In the modern information age, this is a growing problem and one that is readily solved. 

About a half dozen years ago, I sat down in job interview with BankOne(at the time) and outlined a strategy to merge and Acquire Wachovia’s Credit Card Division.  BankOne made me a job offer, but the offer was extremely low and I literally couldn’t afford to remain financially solvent (even with my BankOne debt) if I accepted the job offer.

BankOne later went on to acquire Wachovia’s Credit Card Division and I took a job for a different company.  I of course received nothing for my strategy and did not even receive the opportunity to follow up on the idea and be a part of the team that put the deal together.

I would not have to worry about that same problem today if I properly harness the power of the internet.  In today’s world it is easy enough to provide your information and offer your services or knowledge to the highest bidder online.  Anyone foolish enough to give away their services or knowledge in an interview will be rewarded with the compensation of not receiving the position. 

Many companies act and move from a position of strength during interviews taking information, ideas and concepts and freely applying them long after the interviewee has left the building and often times without a follow up email or phone call.  Interviewees need to wise up and take some simple steps to benefit from what they know.

1. Copyright your plan
2. Don’t give away the crucial elements until you have a contract
3. If examples are required, give historical examples
4. Draft up concepts and publish them online without providing the crucial components and then await contract offers to get the final goods.
5. Sell the information to a companies competitors.  If a company is not bright enough to seize a valuable asset up front, there’s a good chance that their competitor might!

Bottom Line

The job market is highly fluid these days.  Unemployment is still extremely low by historical standards and knowledge can be provided for a premium as long as you don’t short change yourself and give it away for free.  Protect the brand and product that is you and the services you can provide, don’t let a company wheedle down your value by providing a free sample.  You are not a food product to be tasted and passed around in a Sam’s Club!

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Identify Improvements in Progress

• Testing the benefits of Message Boards to Help Cancer Patients get Medical advice from Nurses

Why is the owner making the changes

• University of Pittsburgh is studying the benefits of 24/7 access for patients of fighting cancer.

What is the expected impact of the Change

• Patients get 24/7 access for questions
• Patients can ask questions that don’t come up during Chemotherapy sessions when they aren’t physically up to having conversations.
• Wealth of Knowledge can be made available and the community can benefit from the questions asked by other patients

Is the improvement on Target or a mis-direction

• The Improvement is an excellent use of technology and helps connect patients with medical support and a community focused on fighting the same problem, Cancer.

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I am astounded by the perception of a real estate glut.  I suspect that the true glut is a mortgage glut and not a true real estate glut.

Consider

The US population is rapidly on the rise.  The population just hit 300 million people and will hit 400 million in another 15-25 years.  That’s not much time at all to find a place for an additional 100 million people, especially in terms of the Real Estate market.

Now is an excellent time to invest in real estate.  The price for real estate is dropping and the demand  is going up.  Those are excellent conditions to make money!

A recent trip to my home town of Peoria Illinois helped bring home the fact that Chicago is spreading and before you know it cities like St Louis and Chicago, Atlanta and Charlotte and many others will start to merge, just like LA and San Diego and so many others already have.

Investing in Chicago Real Estate is a great option to consider bar none.  Chicago unlike many large cities has an uncanny ability to adapt and improve with the times.  The city continues to revitalize itself and avoid the malady of many large cities in the Midwest and Northeast. 

Chicago has embraced new technology, new industries and continues to find new way to recycle its land and real estate to remain relevant and connected to the rest of the world.

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Since early 2005 I’ve been using a Canon Digital Elph.  My current camera is a 3.0 mega pixel variety.  It takes great pictures and even does very good with short movies complete with full sound. 

Over the last couple years I have put this camera through its paces and its done great.  In fact the damn thing refuses to die.  I am ready for an upgrade but I still have this great 3.0 mega pixel camera.  So this year, I have finally had enough.  I will upgrade but I do not want to get something that will die fast or put me through warranty service hell.

So I am going to stick with my Digital Elph and upgrade to the Canon Digital Elph SD700 in the 6 Megapixel variety!

CANON Powershot Digital ELPH SD700 IS 6 Megapixel Digital Camera Kit - $289.88

A couple years back, I had a SD card with 128 megabytes of flash and purchased a second card with 512mb.

This time, I will buy a half dozen cards with 1GB each. I could buy just one big card, but I find it very handy to have extras for my Treo and other gadgets and at $14.99 each its just too cheap to pass up.

PNY 1GB SD Secure Digital Memory Card P-SD1G-RF3 - $14.99

It seems like just yesterday I was paying the same amount for a 3.0 Megapixel and I was paying $100 for 512mb of flash.  Don’t you just love it when the prices on your favorite stuff comes down that much, sure makes me glad I don’t sell cameras.

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I have been sticking to a bit of a Christmas Gift Theme this afternoon, and as I attempt to stick to this theme I thought I would elucidate on the concept that its much better to give a unique gift than something that will quickly replace last weeks garbage.

To stick my point home, I found this great gift at Creative And Unique Gift Ideas.   They have a lot of great ideas for unique gifts. 

This one can be found in their article A Unique And Inexpensive Kitchen Gift Idea.  Creative and Unique Gift Ideas is not a shopping cart website, but instead features articles and ideas about gifts.  This just happens to be one of those and at under $70 it will not stick it to your wallet.

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A great amount of energy was utilized by the press to cover the trend known as CyberMonday.  The first work day after the Thanksgiving Holiday and Black Friday.  The day when everyone that was or was not crazy enough to get up at 5 am on Friday to line up at Wal-Mart to get that fantastic deal, now goes to work with shopping on their mind and laziness in their heart, logs on to their work computer and goes CyberShopping.

Me Thinks the press dost Report too much on this pseudo would be trend.  More and more people are gaining internet access and even broadband access all over and the need to go shopping at work out of necessity is decreasing, and at the same time the need to go shopping on Monday following Thanksgiving is decreasing too.

The truth is that many people are benefiting from the same trend that helped large corporations save a fortune in logistics, warehousing, and inventory costs in the 90’s.  Its called the theory of Just In Time Inventory.  Companies have been stocking their warehouses with just enough product to supply the demand and ordering just as much as they need for replenishment.

Consumers with large houses funded by interest only mortgages full up with affluenziatic junk are starting to catch on to the JIT process in their personal lives as well.  Why order all that junk for Christmas at Thanksgiving, only to have it clutter up your hidy holes and closets and secret places when you could order it on 12-11 and have it delivered on 12-15 or order on 12-15 and have it by 12-23 or pick your perfect niche of a date. 

People are finding it more and more important to reduce the junk and clutter in their homes and this means buying less junk early and only as much junk as you really need.  I have three young kids under the age of 10, and I’ve have taken to recycling Christmas season teddy bears by stuffing them into Glad Garbage Bags and filling the attic with this new and great form of additional insulation.  It keeps my kids rooms clear so that they could actually escape in an emergency and it helps reduce the cost of heating and cooling my home.  The last thing I need is to log on to my work computer on Monday and order some more teddy bears!

The trend of CyberMonday is quickly fading as the online shoppers diffuse their holiday spending across the entire year and learn to order things at the last minute when they really need them.  Christmas was brought back to life by retailers working to provide consumers with a reason to end the year with a purchasing bang.  After a hundred years of inflated holiday sales, we’ve grown several generations of consumers that suffer from affluenza and are now starting to realize that there just isn’t enough space even in a 6,000 sq foot house for all the junk, wrapping paper, boxes, packing materials and more that can come from a holiday shopping blitz.  Oh and by the way, they’re supposed to be working and putting on a good show for the year end Review!

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For many years now web based business solutions are growing in popularity.  They offer the benefit of zero to little up front costs to start.  They are typically easy to launch and do not require months of planning and preparation or training.  Most of the heavy lifting from an IT perspective is done by the company providing the service so your own IT team will not be required to learn, manage and grow with yet another technology.

Relenta provides just such a web based tool in the form of Customer Relationship Management.  Relenta provides this CRM tool in a way that can work for organizations of many sizes from the very small to the very large.  They offer a free version of their program that can progress into several pricing levels that are based on the number of contacts and the amount of space required. 

Where’s the Value?

 The value lies in Relenta’s ability to help you manage email newsletters, email response management, single and double opt-in email subscriptions so that your domain will not be tagged as a spam domain and blocked around the world.  They allow you to create rules for filtering email, and establishing auto response or canned response to basic email inquiries even to generic addresses like support@yourcompanyname .  You can even customize canned responses and manage attachments received on emails.

What’s the Pricing?

Their free email marketing program does not require a credit card, allows one user to main email mailing programs for up to 50 contacts receiving and sending up to 1,000 emails.  Their monthly program starts out at $50 per month and allows 1k contacts and 10k in emails with many customizable options like paying an additional $10 per 10,000 emails.  They also offer larger accounts at they yearly level and a Server license option (hosted on the server).

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Baseball season is over but that’s not stopping Universal from hoping to smack a line drive off of a MySpace pitch.

Universal has filed suit against MySpace for not establishing a tighter policy to protect its copyrighted material.  Universal accuses MySpace of not doing enough and of encouraging its members to swap files and broadcast copyrighted materials.

MySpace has notoriously attracted User’s attention as their agreement requires users to grant MySpace license to the content that they publish.  The idea is supposedly to allow a new musician to get their music spread across the internet via MySpace.  This has always raised concerns that MySpace might take advantage of new artists.

The old artists however say that users are signing the agreement and providing license to the old artist songs and videos of which they do not have the authority to grant that license.  As such, it gives the user the feeling or impression that their activities are acceptable and the failure of MySpace to police copyrighted content re-enforces this misconception.

Universal is only going after $150k per video or song, and given the very small numbers of MySpace users That number probably won’t add up to more than a few hundred million dollars or better . . .

Good thing MySpace like YouTube now has deep pockets!

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