If only it could be the good ‘ol days again. At least that’s what I’m sure Cable TV executives are thinking to themselves. In the past couple weeks the Cable Industry has witnessed a wave of new technologies that plan on taking the industry head on. Just over a week ago, the New York Times published an article about a new technology called ‚ÄúVudu‚Äù. What is Vudu?

Vudu, if all goes as planned, hopes to turn America’s televisions into limitless multiplexes, providing instant gratification for movie buffs. It has built a small Internet-ready movie box that connects to the television and allows couch potatoes to rent or buy any of the 5,000 films now in Vudu’s growing collection. The box’s biggest asset is raw speed: the company says the films will begin playing immediately after a customer makes a selection.

Not only are there start-up companies that are trying to completely revamp the landscape but even AT&T is trying to grab a piece of the market. According to a Wall Street Journal article, AT&T is planning to roll out a new TV system called “U-verse”, and they are planning to spend as much as $6.5 billion on the project between 2004 and 2008.

In addition to facing businesses that plan on taking cable television head on, the industry is vulnerable to emerging technologies, specifically IPV6 (or the new internet). IPV6 is the a project that will expand the number of IP addresses available to digital devices. They plan on providing enough IP addresses so that every device can have its own. Additionally, IPV6 could prove to be a much faster network. According to recent reports, a team of researchers were able to transfer packets at 9.08 gigabits per second across 20,500 miles of network. While these speeds will not be accessible via commercially available services (Comcast, Verizon, etc), it is a sign of things to come.

As network speeds increase, it will become easier for the common consumer to download full length movies and watch hd quality streaming media. Bottom line: tough times ahead for the cable television industry.

Last week the New York Post suddenly became popular with tech enthusiasts. On Tuesday, they published an article covering Microsoft’s potential buyout of 24/7 Real Media. Personally, I didn’t see many follow-ups to this story and am not sure if this ever materialized. Then on Friday they published an article stating Microsoft’s intention to buy out Yahoo for $50 billion dollars. This rumor pushed Yahoo’s stock up over 30 percent. By the end of Friday the rumors were squashed. Brian Dudley sums up my initial reaction perfectly:

You can’t just drop a bombshell that jerks around 80,000 Microsoft and Yahoo! employees, rocks Wall Street and then fizzles before the day is over.

By posting the story on Friday, the New York Post has instantly lost all credibility with me. Honestly, I never viewed the New York Post as a viable news source anyways, and then last week they “broke” two tech related stories. Not a bad week, except that they were primarily lies! I definitely won’t be turning to the New York Post as a primary news source any time soon.

Over the past couple days I have been facing an increasingly problematic issue. I have had too many ideas about businesses to launch. In one week I have come up with four ideas that I think are feasible business ideas. Each one has its ups and downs but I think they all have the potential for future cash-flow. I’ll share the ideas with you to see what you think. Maybe you can shed some light. Initially I figured that I would keep these to myself, but now that I have so many ideas, there is no point in keeping all of them a secret any longer.

1. Confrenzy – Confrenzy is a blog that covers all issues related to conferences. The target market is people that enjoy attending conferences, as well as those that want to become organizers. I would attend conferences to do live blogging at the events as do interviews with conference organizers to learn about the challenges they have faced and the most rewarding aspects of the job. Revenue would be generated via advertising from conferences as well as companies that promote to the event industry. My personal goal with this one was to get paid to meet people.
2. E-book Package РI mentioned this one in a post a couple of days ago. I have yet to reveal all of the details. The main concept here is to produce an in formative e-book/video package and successfully market it to the target niche. I came up with the idea while reading “The 4-hour workweek”. My personal goal with this one is to generate some extra cash flow on the side. Setting up an effective e-book marketing program takes a little time but is highly automated.
3. Clothing Store for Lean/Slender People – If you have met me then you know that I am not the largest person around. Thanks to the gym I have grown in size, but I still wouldn’t consider myself to have a threatening presence. Often times I go to the store looking for smaller jean sizes only to find that they are sold out. I have talked to many sales people who say that the smaller sizes sell out quickest. As a result I figured that I could create an e-commerce site that stocked all the brand-name clothing in smaller sizes. This idea was to simply fulfill an unfulfilled niche. I’m not sure how large this market is (especially considering that most people are getting fat in this country), but I’m sure there are other people out there like me.
4. Easy Contact Forms – I’ve been thinking about this one for years, but after seeing the post on Techcrunch about Contactify, I figured now in just as good a time as it ever was to launch this one. The main idea is to offer a slick alternative to MailerMailer and Constant Contact. I have set up way too many MailerMailer and Constant Contact campaigns for clients. Both their solutions have horrible solutions, although they do get the job done. I figured that I could create an easy system where users sign up, create a quick form and include a little piece of javascript to add it to their site. This would automatically add an Ajax contact me form, or mailing list registration form that would work from the comfort of the user’s website. There would be no redirection to contact website. This could be created in one weekend, and I’ve been thinking that now is a good time to make it.

So after spilling the beans on most of my ideas, what are your thoughts? I would love to get your input on what ideas are good, which ones suck, and how I can make some of them better. Also, I am currently looking to interview individuals from small businesses that have experienced growth thanks to their website and/or blog. If you or know anyone that has, please get in contact with me.

The buzz around the tech blogosphere the past few days has been related to the blow-up on Digg. If you haven’t heard about it, then you have been living under a rock. For those that like to seek shelter under various stones I will provide you with a quick overview. Chester Millisock, an avid Digg user, dugg an article that published the HD-DVD processing key that you can use to decrypt and play most HD-DVD movies in Linux. Soon after it was published, Digg received a cease and desist notice from the owners of the intellectual property and they complied. What ensued was a chaotic response by the Digg community. Suddenly Digg was swamped with more articles that posted the HD-DVD processing key then they could bury. There was no way to stop it. The result? Digg caved in and Kevin Rose posted the following statement:

But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.

If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.

At least we died trying? That sounds a little ridiculous to me. The real problem is that beyond a certain point, social networks become controlled by the users rather than the moderators. Without a highly automated moderating system, there is no chance that a site can effectively monitor everything being posted with its community.

I’ve witnessed the problem first hand at the first startup that I worked for. After coming into work one day, I learned about a community participant that was harassing others. A few members of the community felt threatened and communicated their problem to us. The member did cross the line, and he was effectively banned. At the time, that community contained under 10,000 users. I can’t imagine trying to control a community of millions. Think of the troubles that MySpace faces, especially when it comes to pedophilia. The future of social networks is effective automated monitoring programs that don’t limit people’s freedom of speech.

In this case, I don’t think Digg should have buried the article. There’s no point. If Digg is at risk of being sued, then Google should be at risk also. Try googling ‚Äúhd-dvd processing key‚Äù. Hundreds of thousands of pages show up, many of which include the key in the title or body of the page. The bottom line is that there will always be hackers and crackers that try to break protections, and they will also post their results on the web. This is a fact of life. Let alone, how many people really know what to do with the HD-DVD processing key anyways? There will be a continuing struggle between industry and the social web, this is just another case study in the relationship between the two.

As I wrote in yesterday’s post on ‚ÄúThe Losing Business of CPC Arbitrage‚Äù, I am beginning a monetization experiment on this blog. My hope is that this does not turn away any of my existing readers. I am going to be as least invasive as possible with the arrangement of my advertising. If you have any feedback on this please feel free to comment. I am trying to see if it is possible to create a balance between advertising and valuable content. I will continue to provide insight on social media, entrepreneurship, and technology but will additionally document my experience in monetizing this blog. Hopefully this can be a learning experience for both of us.

Now to the core matter. What was the first step in monetizing this blog? Applying to various internet advertising programs. The ones that I have selected to participate in so far are:

• Text-Link-Ads – I will be using Text-Link-Ads to provide ads in my RSS feed as well as testing their site based ads. At the end of each post there will be a single text ad that is a sentence long. Text-Link-Ads provides a variety monetization methods. This includes site based text ads, post level ads, and feedvertising.
• ReviewMe – ReviewMe gives advertisers the flexibility to create review offers for their blogger marketplace and/or order reviews direct from specific top blogs. I plan on occasionally posting reviewme posts, but not too frequently as I want to maintain a high level of informative postings.
• Google AdSense – If you don’t know what Google AdSense is then you’ve probably been hiding under a rock for the past couple years. Google AdSense is one of their primary sources of revenue. Google places targeted ads on your page based on the subject you are discussing. If approved for this program, I will be placing the ads on the sidebar.

My only concern in the whole process is maintaining my integrity. As a reader, do you think that I lose integrity by accepting ads on this blog? I’d love to hear your feedback. So let me know!

With all these ‚ÄúHow to make money on the internet sites‚Äù around you would guess that it is a pretty easy thing to do. While it is still possible to monetize a site effectively, the old game of CPC (cost-per-click) arbitrage is coming to an end. While reading the article ‚ÄúTurning Dimes Into Dollars: The Basics of Low-Bid PPC‚Äù I began to wonder about some of the practices discussed. Todd Mintz describes Jeremy Schoemaker’s method of making money on the internet.

ShoeMoney is best known in the SEM community for his ability to hyper-monetize websites through large volume affiliate sales funded by PPC minimum bids.

In other words, target a given niche using CPC advertising and then try to sell them a product since you probably have a good guess about what types of products they would be interested in. While this is a good model, it is only good as long as other people stay away from your market. As more advertisers come in, the margin on each affiliate sale decreases rapidly. Mintz goes on to further explain his experience with advertising on his blog:

I turned off my North American Google, Yahoo & MSN ads since I got little traffic from minimum bids and when I increased the bids high enough to draw traffic, my ROI was only a fraction of what I earned in Europe. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to sell my products into Asia. Asian affiliate programs seem to be the least developed… however, I think it’s just a matter of time before that changes.

At first glance it seems like Todd is already experiencing what would be a rational result in this type of revenue generating model. The hands-off approach of generating revenue only exists under two circumstances:

1. The market has not yet been flooded and there are still opportunities to milk a given niche for cash flow
2. Create your own product and sell it to customers

The second approach is obviously much more secure because you own the actual product that you are selling. Many other bloggers are still using the first approach. While I don’t think that the market for CPC arbitrage has been eliminated (there are always be arbitrage opportunities in any market), there is now fierce competition and blog monetizers have to begin looking elsewhere. The only really effective way of monetizing a blog over the long haul is building a solid readership base that regularly reads your blog. As you build your base you can begin to use advertising tools more effectively to generate revenue. As an experiment, I will try to monetize this blog over the course of the next 6-months while explaining it every step of the way. Let’s see what happens!

Earlier today News Corp. announced a $60 per share buyout offer of Dow Jones. Aside from wishing I had owned stock in Dow Jones, I’m not quite sure that I’m the biggest fan of a buyout by News Corp. Ownership of Dow Jones by News Corp. would extend Fox media’s global dominance. Fox News is know for it’s historically conservative slant and while the Wall Street Journal and other Dow Jones publications are not the most liberal, I’ve always been a fan of their objective journalism.

The Wall Street Journal has speculated that other news companies including the New York Times and the Washington Post could both end up placing competing bids. This wouldn’t come as much of a surprise given both companies existing web presence. Will the Bancroft family (the current majority stakeholders) accept Murdoch’s bid? Perhaps, given that the family has already reduced their stake in the company by over 50 percent over the past 20 years. This will surely be an interesting story as events unfold.

Update: The Bancroft family will vote against the News Corp bid. The employees also issued a statement:

The staff, from top to bottom, opposes a Rupert Murdoch takeover of Dow Jones & Co. The massive premium Mr. Murdoch is offering suggests only one recourse to make the acquisition profitable: gutting the enterprise and slashing the staff that make it the leading financial news organization.

I agree with this move. The only thing I wonder though is will we see their stock tank today? My guess is yes.

I am often a sucker for get-rich-quick schemes. Well, not completely but I used to be. After trying door to door sales, network marketing, and other various sales jobs I’ve grown increasingly skeptical. While many of these jobs provided great cash flow, there was always a ceiling on how much could be made, and every time that ceiling fell well below my dreams. Over the course of the past few years I have faced a continuous internal battle over whether or not it is possible to reach your goals faster by working smarter, rather than harder. Recently, I have increasingly become a follower of the train of thought that says working harder is better. That was until I came upon a great book this past weekend. That book is, ‚ÄúThe 4-hour Workweek‚Äù by Timothy Ferriss.

This book provides a step-by-step guide to finding a product, marketing it, and distributing it. Additionally, Timothy Ferriss explains how to automate 99 percent of the process. Realize that this is not a get rich quick scheme, and that you will actually have to put forth effort to reach your goals. If you are a determined and motivated individual then this is the book for you. Half way through the book, I have already determined the first product that I am going to create and begin marketing via magazines and the web. I will hold off on revealing the product for the next couple weeks while I work on weekends and nights to produce it. Worst case scenario, I will have created a valuable product and tested out marketing it for a few hundred bucks. This is much better than making a serious up front “investment” that can be destroyed not far down the line.

The best part of all of this is that I will have the opportunity to document my entire experience on this blog. I will provide you with detailed descriptions of each of the steps along this conquest. I plan on reaching my goals and hopefully you can also by learning from my successes and failures. So come along and join me on this journey.