Programmer Brings in $1 Million a month from Facebook
David Maestri created Facebook’s most successful widget, Mob Wars, but now he’s in legal trouble because he developed and launched the app while working for the company that would become the Social Gaming Network.
Sources tell VentureBeat that Maestri’s Mob Wars, a role-playing game for the Facebook platform, earns its creator $1 million a month off its 2,505,698 monthly active users, mostly by selling in-game player upgrades for real world cash. On top of that income, research firm DeveloperAnalytics says Mob Wars could make another $22,000 month selling ads because its users load the app’s pages around 60 times a day.
Trouble is, Maestri developed and launched Mob Wars in January, before quit software developer Freewebs in February. After watching Maestri rake in the cash for months, Freewebs — now called Social Games Network — finally sued Maestri on August 11, alleging breach of contract, breach of duty, misappropriation of trade secrets and interference with business relations. Maestri told VentureBeat that “Mob Wars is my creation and the legal process is moving forward.”
Billionaires: The Next Generation
When Michael Birch met an American brunette named Xochi at a college bar in London, he wasn’t just meeting his future wife. It was also the beginning of a beautiful business.
Earlier this year the couple sold their social-networking site, Bebo, to AOL for $850 million. Their cut: about $600 million. An impressive haul for anybody, but especially for Michael and Xochi, who are just 38 and 36.
In Pictures: Next-Gen Billionaires
The world’s current crop of billionaires has plenty of money but not much youth. The average age of the 1,125 people on Forbes’ list of the world’s wealthiest is 61. It’s impossible to predict exactly who will replace them, but don’t bet against people like the Birches.
Or 32-year-old Tiger Woods. When the golf champion returns to the links from a knee injury, he’ll continue a financial rise that could crown him the first billionaire to make his money through sports. We predict it could happen as soon as 2011 because of Tiger’s lucrative endorsement deals. (See “Tiger’s Next Trophy: Billionaire.”)
Deal maker Roelof Botha is another to keep an eye on. The 34-year-old venture capitalist at Sequoia Capital hit a grand slam with an early investment in YouTube. The deal yielded a 65-fold return for Sequoia, a storied firm that also employs current billionaire Michael Moritz.
Hedge fund manager Chase Coleman’s age, 33, belies his exceptional ability to manage money. His Tiger Global fund reportedly returned over 70% after fees last year, a performance over six times better than the hedge fund average. One estimate pegged Coleman’s earnings from his banner year as high as $400 million.
See Complete story
15 Year Old sells message board
SANTA ANA, Calif. – Young entrepreneur Hansup Yoon, 15, recently sold his creation ZuneBoards, an Internet forum devoted to Microsoft’s Zune media player, for $62,000.
The teenager, who lives in Fullerton, Calif., created the site months before Microsoft introduced its answer to Apple’s iPod in 2006.
“It was the most perfect time to start a Web site about Zune, and I was one of the first few to create a Zune-related site,” he said
Yoon built the site using the free MyBBoard software, later shifting to vBulletin and Joomla. In less than two years, it grew to 60,000 members with more than 270,000 posts, all about Zune. It has been making about $1,000 a month from Google Adsense and TribalFusion, both with tools that place ads that are relevant to a Web site’s visitors.
When he decided to sell, he posted it on SitePoint.com and other sales Web sites for a minimum of $30,000 or “Buy It Now” for $60,000. Two bidders chose the latter option, and crowdgather, a Woodland Hills, Calif., company that has bought more than 70 message boards and forums as a foundation for Internet advertising, upped its bid to $62,000.
See Full Story
http://www.bostonherald.com/business/technology/general/view.bg?&articleid=1115208&format=&page=1&listingType=tec#articleFull
Profiling Startups around the U.S
http://images.businessweek.com/ss/08/06/0627_fresh_entrepreneurs/index.htm
9 deadly startup diseases
Building a startup is hard. There are many problems that can hurt a startup—perhaps even kill it. This article examines some of the more common diseases that plague startups, and proposes some cures. All of these issues can be remedied if detected early enough, so it’s really worth being aware of them. That way, you can operate before they become fatal.
Startup Disease 1: The Imaginary User Syndrome
A product that’s not geared towards a specific user is unlikely to benefit anyone in particular; hence, there’s no such thing as a generic user. No matter how great your initial vision might seem, if you don’t have a target audience in mind, your startup will lack direction and flounder. In addition, it’s difficult to market to everyone, so not only will your product suffer, it’ll be hard to sell too.
http://www.sitepoint.com/article/nine-deadly-startup-diseases
Website Flippping
Dave Hermansen did not own a bird or a cage when he bought bird-cage.com, an online store, for $1,800 three years ago. He simply saw a Web site that was “very, very poorly done,” and begged the owners to sell it to him. He then redesigned the site, added advertising and drove up traffic. Last December, he sold it for $173,000.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/29/technology/29flip.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss
Entrepreneur brings in $10 Million in 1st year
Murray set up the company in September last year after spending five years in R&D to get the technology up to scratch. She invested £200,000 of her own cash into the start-up, but it was tough going from the off. “I could have given up a thousand times,” says Murray. “There were so many complexities involved in designing the actual device. Radio is a black art, you can’t theorise a working system. It’s all about trial and error.”
The service currently boasts 4,000 customers. Murray predicts this figure will hit 10,000 by 2009 and pull in a turnover of £4m
Make Money While You Wait for people .
Waiting around for the cable guy tops the list of customer grievances about cable service, according to a recent survey by TeleNav, a company that makes GPS tracking devices. But one entrepreneur, Herve Aimable, sees opportunity in frustration. He runs a service in New York called Wait For Me. It’s exactly what it sounds like: He has hired and bonded five people who do nothing but wait in people’s homes for the cable guy. Each four-hour block costs $250. Since 2006, Aimable has brought in $60,000 from cable-sitting. “This is a valuable service, but it’s sort of a paradox, because you are getting paid for waiting,” Aimable says. Well, not just waiting—these are mostly actors. Says Aimable: “They sit around, they think, and they vocalize.”
Back to BWSmallBiz April/May 2008 Table of Contents
Quittner is a staff writer for BusinessWeek in New York
How to make money on the internet .
This is a video from the inventor or founder of Ruby on Rails .
pimpmysearch.com – Viral Marketing Genius
I dont know anything about this site but I keeo getting invitation mails from people I know . The site is about 1 month old and they already have an Alexa Ranking of about 2000
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/pimpmysearch.com
I dont know if they are making any money but this is a product that encourages viral marketing .
Tips for creating a successful new online product
There is much talk these days about building a product for a niche and making a lifestyle business out of it. Much of the online literature about starting up is focused on how to create some fantastic product which will gather millions of visitors and make you a billionaire, and the “new wave”, so to speak, proposes that rather than taking a 1 in 10’000 bet that you can make billions, it is better to take a 1 in 10 bet that you can make millions.
Since I have started two such businesses already, here are thirteen tips from my own experience.
What to build
1. Build for someone specific
It’s very tempting to create a product for the widest audience. “Everyone can use our product, therefore if even a tiny proportion use it, we’ll be rich!” Beware the generalised product. If your product is not built for anyone in particular, it will not be good for anyone in particular. The worst possible market for a product is “small businesses on the web”.
On the other hand, if you build something that is directly useful for even just one real human being, chances are there will be others like that user and your product will have some success.
2. Don’t be afraid of targeting a narrow niche
Niches have numerous advantages. There’s less competition in niches, which means that your marketing dollars will go further to get you new customers. It’ll be easier to target likely buyers since there are probably already channels (blogs, magazines, trade shows) targeting that niche, that you can make use of.
Niches also tend to be very badly served in today’s world. If you look into almost any niche you will find a plethora of awful products that are just begging to be replaced by something better suited. Being able to build great products cheaply is a fairly recent development, and most pre-existing businesses have had to make do with duct-taped, poorly conceived solutions that are begging to be replaced. The smaller the niche, the lower the bar to success.
3. Solve a real problem that costs money
As DHH pointed out, the way to realistic profitability is not through gathering an outrageous number of eyeballs, but through creating a product that people are willing to pay for. The easiest way to get someone to loosen their purse strings is to convince them that using your product will pay for itself
Full Story Here http://www.inter-sections.net/2008/05/07/13-tips-for-creating-a-successful-new-online-product/
MyFreeImplants.com – Another weired biz model .
ATLANTA — Hundreds of young Atlanta women are signed up on a Web site that some critics are calling total exploitation. The founders call it free enterprise. And just about everyone Channel 2 showed it to called it shocking. It’s called MyFreeImplants.com and it’s a donation site for young women who want free breast implants. But it’s what they do to get the big money that’s troubling for some.
“Everyone uses sex to sell. That’s what this really is. It’s marketing and this is America,” said MyFreeImplants.com founder Jay Moore.
MyFreeImplants.com is a business venture hatched at a bachelor party in Las Vegas to help young women raise thousands of dollars for breast augmentation surgery through online donors.
The Web site has taken off. Five-thousand women are now signed up. One woman took her bid for new breasts to YouTube.
The surgery isn’t cheap. It’s usually $4,000 for silicon implants and $5,000 for saline. The money is held in an account until the goal is reached and then sent directly to the surgeon selected.
But it’s how the women get the donations that is raising some people’s eyebrows.
Read Whole Article http://www.wsbtv.com/news/16061686/detail.html
Sold for $10 Million now worth $7 Billion
Today turns out to be the twenty year anniversary of when George Lucas sold Pixar to Steve Jobs. In the post, ”February 3, 1986: Divorce, Mogul Style,” Chris Seibold tells how Lucas decided to “see a smallish piece of his Lucas Film empire” to raise cash to settle his divorce. Given Lucas’ predicament, Steve Jobs was able to bring Lucas’ initial asking price of 30 million dollars to 10 million.
For years, the company Steve Jobs called a hobby was little but a serious money pit. Unexpectedly, Pixar became the source of the majority of Steve Jobs’ immense wealth after an extremely successful initial public offering. It was this month in 1986 that Steve first acquired the hobby that eventually paid off big.
On January 24 of this year, Disney announced paying $7.4 billion in stock to acquire Pixar. Jobs will be on Disney’s board of directors, and two executives from Pixar will head the new Pixar and Disney Animation Studios and lead the creative vision. See ”Disney buys Pixar” at CNET for more.
The takeaway for my Web 2.0 readers? On the one hand, be careful of the decisions you make when you’re in financial need (eg. startups trying to cash-out). On the other, your hobby (eg. your “little web app”) may sometimes become much more than that, but only if you take it seriously.
http://www.emilychang.com/go/weblog/comments/twenty-years-later-no-longer-just-a-hobby/
Making money on the web with videos .
Learning how to turn a flashlight into a laser is not a top priority for most people. Yet Kip Kedersha’s step-by-step instructional video that teaches how to do just that has been seen online by more people (1.88 million) than live in Manhattan (about 1.6 million).
Mr. Kedersha’s online library of 94 videos includes tips on how to chill a Coke in two minutes, simulate a gunshot wound and start up a PC quickly.
Many of the clips have been played hundreds of thousands of times, turning Mr. Kedersha into the top earner on Metacafe, a video-sharing Web site that pays the makers of popular videos. In little more than a year, the site has written him checks totaling $102,000.
That puts Mr. Kedersha, a 50-year-old video producer from St. Petersburg, Fla., near the front of the latest online stampede: the rush to capitalize on the popularity of how-to videos on the Web.
“You never know when something like this is going to go away,” Mr. Kedersha said. “I better ride the wave.
SnagAJob.com Brings in $11 Million a Year
Eight years later, Boyer’s business has grown from just two employees to 110 full-time employees. The company grossed sales of $11 million in 2007.
To read about the runners-up and to follow the events of National Small Business Week, check out the National Small Business Week website.
Domain Name Pizza.com sold for $2.6 Million
When Chris Clark bought Pizza.com for $20 in the mid-1990s, he never expected that almost 15 years later, the seemingly benign domain name would sell for $2.6 million.
In 1994, the earliest days of the Internet’s popularity, the North Potomac resident was working as a Web site developer. He bought Pizza.com, hoping to entice a major pizza company to the new world of the Web.
“We wanted to put the first pizza company on the Internet,” Clark said, referring to his company at the time, Internet Information Services. “At the time, we were explaining what the Internet was to them. . . . It didn’t catch on quickly.”
Although he was unsuccessful in achieving his goal, he maintained the site, which features a pizza restaurant locator and pizza-related polls and games, over the years.
When Vodka.com recently sold for $3 million, Clark decided to check out the interest in Pizza.com. “We put a forum on the Web site that said, if you’re interested in buying the domain name, let us know,” Clark said.
The entrepreneur got so much feedback he decided to turn over the bidding to an online auction house, Sedo.com — the same company that auctioned off Vodka.com — and watched the offers begin to skyrocket.
“The auction went on for a week,” Clark said. “My family was just huddled over the computer watching.”
Clark was vacationing in Disney World with his family, watching the auction on a laptop, when the bidding topped $1 million. Soon after, he sold the site for $2.6 million to an anonymous bidder.
“When we saw the final bid, it was far beyond our expectations,” Clark said.
He said he hopes to use the proceeds to grow his new software company, Minestream Software, which sells Internet protection software to homes and businesses
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/16/AR2008041602014.html
Former Support rep is now Internet Entrepreneur
Sean Stafford was a support representative at Louisville-based Modern Gigabyte when his idea led to the founding of the domain name platform company DNZoom (Domain Name Zoom) in June 2007.
He is now director of product development for DNZoom, which was acquired on Feb. 18 by the Delray Beach Fla.-based online bidding site BIDO.
He is an investor in LouisvilleVP (venture partners), which was founded last month. The company is developing a new music platform, Band.org, which will link bands and musicians with musical enthusiasts.
Stafford’s book, “Domain Graduate: Tapping the Online Mines,” was launched in electronic form on Jan. 15. It sells for $87 at www.domaingraduate.com.
The book has made Stafford something of a cyber-world celebrity in Australia and Europe, and he is a sought-after domain name speaker there.
Web companies Sedo.com and Fabulous.com use Domain Graduate to train their new employees. An expanded version is to be published in book form by early 2009.
http://www.bizjournals.com/louisville/stories/2008/04/07/story13.html?b=1207540800^1615444
Making Appointments for Doctor or Dinner
THE e-commerce bandwagon bypassed millions of carpenters, massage therapists, lawyers and other service providers, mostly because it is impossible to drop an appointment into a shopping cart without unleashing a scheduling nightmare.
Now that a set of Internet start-up companies has emerged to help solve this problem, though, small businesses could start using the Web as more than just an online brochure. And while the category is too new for analysts to handicap with much confidence, there are signs it could gain a significant following.
“This is something that’s been needed for a while, but no one has been able to do it successfully,” said Greg Sterling, of Sterling Marketplace Intelligence, an online consultancy. “With these new services, there are a lot of circumstances where it can work quite well for both the business and the consumer.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/31/technology/31ecom.html?ref=smallbusiness
Online Toy Rental Company
I saw this on MSNBC . It is an interesting business
Startup and Entrepreneur News 