Archive for October, 2009

PayPal Is Finally Fully Operational in Malaysia

by Ades on October 31, 2009 in News, paypal with 35 Comments

After just recently adding (allowing) transactions in Malaysian Currency (RM), PayPal has now rolled out full services to Malaysian residents. For those who are not aware of PayPal’s integration with local banks internationally, it was kind of big deal to withdraw funds from PayPal in Malaysia until now. But that’s history now! It now supports over 20+ Malaysian Banks…

What’s more, if you withdraw more than RM400 there won’t be any service fees. Previously you had to pay $5 or RM20 for every withdrawal to your Debit Card. Continue reading →

Balsamiq Mockups Winner 1

by Ades on October 31, 2009 in Contests with 12 Comments

First Winner of Balsamiq Mockups Contest is Aaron Hall! You can follow him @AttorneyMN. Congratulations Aaron, you should be getting an email from Peldi Guilizzoni the creator of this great tool shortly.

Want to win too? Two more copies of this mockup creator program will be given away next week. If you want the software, enter this simple contest here.

Make Money With Non-Latin Domain Names

by Ades on October 31, 2009 in Make Money with 20 Comments

ICANN organization responsible for managing the assignment of domain names and IP addresses has approved a new plan to allow non-Latin characters in Web extensions. That means there will be a rush for domain name registrations for valuable keywords in Russian, Korean, Chinese, Arabic, Greek and other languages soon.

According to some sources ICANN could start allowing registrations as early as next month. So, watch out for the day, you could make serious money if you can get hold of nice domain names.

LogoMyWay – Another Great Business Model

by Ades on October 27, 2009 in Links with 22 Comments

LogoMyWay – is another great business model that just works. It’s a marketplace where logo designers and businesses meet. Looking at the site, I was amazed by the number of submissions and the quality of works that were submitted for each logo design contest. (Each contest gets easily 100-200 entries) And they are really good, see the winner logos.

Basically this is how it works. If you are looking to get your logo designed, you come to LogoMyWay and create a contest. Your prize can be anywhere between $200 to $1000. And the most important feature is – and I think this is why LogoMyWay is successful – all the funds are prepaid and the designers are guaranteed to be paid. That’s right, the winning designer is guaranteed to get paid for his/her work. I believe this is why there are many quality works and tons of submissions for each contest.

It’s in the Business Model

For example 99Designs does the same thing with the same concept, but they do not guarantee a payment to the designers, prepayment is just an option at 99Designs that contest organizers can choose to do. Instead 99Designs concentrates on “100% Money Back Guarantee” business model. For this reason you can see that the submissions for each contest at 99Designs are much lower than that of LogoMyWay.

Important Lesson

Being a logo design marketplace, LogoMyWay could have a better logo. Their current logo looks not so professional, and the website could be greatly improved, especially to make it more web2.0 like.

But that’s the lesson we should all learn when launching an internet business. And that is, you shouldn’t be perfectionist when launching a project. Don’t hinder the project from being launched just because the logo looks certain way, or the website design is not what you expected. Rather launch the project and test the waters. If you see that the response is good and people really like what you are offering, then and only then do whatever necessary to improve your project i.e revamp the whole website, get a new logo etc.

There is a time when you need to be perfectionist, and it is not during launching new internet projects. For web projects, as long as it is bug-free and all the features are in place and properly working – you are ready to go!

Website: http://www.logomyway.com

lu.ly

by Ades on October 24, 2009 in miniblog with 11 Comments

lu.ly is an interesting firefox add-on, with it you can see twitter and facebook updates in the toolbar. you can also update your status and shorten urls right in the toolbar too. http://lu.ly

How Much Top8 CEOs in US Made in 2008

by Ades on October 22, 2009 in General with 33 Comments

The above graphic, by Dee Adams, shows the eight CEOs with the highest compensations in the US for the year 2008. It also shows the number of minimum wage earners that each respective CEO’s compensation could have supported (see the image of a man below ceo’s feet). Bruce Wasserstein of Lazard ltd. was the top earner at $133 million, or the annual salary of 8,866 minimum wage earners.

I wouldn’t say it’s not fair because some of the CEOs do deserve large sum of money for leading and managing large corporations successfully. But how much exactly they should get as a compensation for their work is always questionable.

source good magazine via flowing data

Contest: Software Giveaway, Three Balsamiq Licenses

by Ades on October 21, 2009 in Contests with 17 Comments

Sorry this contest has already ended.

In the next two weeks I will be giving away three copies of Balsamiq Mockups to three lucky contestants. read on…

What’s Balsamiq Mockups

Balsamiq Mockups is a popular software for creating mockups without the use of Photoshop and Dreamweaver. It’s especially useful for web-designers and freelancers who are always doing wireframes and mockups for clients. It makes creating wireframes an enjoyable experience!

Balsamiq Mockups costs $79 per copy. You can read more about the product and see samples of mockups created by Balsamiq Mockups at their website http://www.balsamiq.com

Thanks to Peldi Guilizzoni, the creator of Balsamiq Mockups for sponsoring this contest.

How To Enter?

Easy! For each task you complete you get certain number of points. One point will be equivalent for one entry. In other words if you earn 5 points, your name will be entered into the draw 5 times, thus increasing your chances to win. One person can get maximum of 15 points.

Winners will be chosen randomly using the List Randomizer tool at Random.org.

Tasks to complete

You can do either or both of these tasks

Follow me on twitter – twitter.com/ades (5 points)
Tweet about this contest – example: win balsamiq mockups from adesblog.com details here http://su.pr/25U02U (10 points)

Once you are done with the task(s), use the form below to send me the details of your twitter id or tweets.

Good luck!

PayPal Accepts Ringgit Malaysia now

by Ades on October 21, 2009 in paypal with 12 Comments

PayPal has moved one step closer to becoming fully functional in Malaysia by accepting transactions in Ringgit Malaysia (local currency) now. If you are Malaysian you can now send and receive paypal funds with other paypal users in Ringgit Malaysia (RM). see screenshot.

However, withdrawing to local bank accounts is still not possible at the moment. But it’s a positive sign that in the near future PayPal will be fully functional in Malaysia.

Currently Malaysians can only withdraw to Visa based Credit and Debit Cards from local banks.

PayPal has also updated the withdrawal fees accordingly in RM. It now costs RM20.00 for withdrawal to your Credit/Debit Cards. (see screenshot below) Continue reading →

10GUI could be the end for mouse

by Ades on October 19, 2009 in Business Ideas with 21 Comments

What do you think? Could this new concept 10GUI replace the long-lived mouse that we have so much grown accustomed to? But 10GUI proposes some great ideas, especially the ability to use all your fingers on the multi-touch screen. That means you won’t be restricted to one pointer (of the mouse) which can only do one thing at a time. Watch.

What do you think? Could you use something like this in your daily life? What are the disadvantages that you see with this kind of device?

WP Hack: Showing Only Images in Search Results

by Ades on October 14, 2009 in Blogging Tips, WordPress with 25 Comments

If you run a blog that has a lot of pics in it (perhaps photography blog?), you could easily display only images in your blog search results. WordPress by default doesn’t display any images in the search results.

For example, when people look for, let’s say “cars”, they would only see title of the post followed by pictures of cars in the search results. This would make your blog’s search function a lot more user-friendly and usable, because nothing is worse than looking for an image in the photography blog and getting search results in only text format.

Identifying images that lie behind the page through reading texts is a nightmare. Instead, it’s a lot easier to see few cars and decide which one to click right on the search results page.

Quick tutorial below on how to implement such a feature:

Download and install this plugin
Add the code below somewhere in your search results page (usually search.php). Make sure it’s inside the loop. It should be placed after the title tags and before the comments tags

<?php if ( function_exists( ‘get_the_image’ ) ) { get_the_image(‘width=640&height=300&image_scan=true&default_image=http://www.yourdomain.com/default_image.jpg’ ); } ?>

Don’t forget to define the image width and height accordingly. default_image.jpg is the pic that will be used if the post doesn’t have any images in it.

You are done! Your readers are happy now.

Plugin Link: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/get-the-image/

bloggers, note this

by Ades on October 14, 2009 in miniblog with 9 Comments

10 Useful Usability Findings and Guidelines read here

Ad-Networks and Transparency

by Ades on October 7, 2009 in Guest Posts with 26 Comments

This is a guest-post from Olesya Zinovieva, you can follow her on Twitter at @olesya_zinovief

Main advantage of Online Advertising before traditional media is its ability to measure the users’ response and provide transparent reports for both advertisers and publishers. Having technology as the strongest benefit of online media ad networks often fails to deliver accurate reports due to discrepancy issues in ad measuring and tracking.

To solve this problem in 2003 a global consortium of leading bodies within the advertising agency, advertiser, media and research disciplines started the process of development of both the US and Global Guidelines. These guidelines were created to address long-standing marketer and agency concerns about the need for a standardized method of measuring Interactive advertising and a certification of those counts. Headed by IAB, other industry groups like AAAA, the ANA, the ARF, MRC, and others have all played an integral role in creation, adoption and further implementation of these Guidelines, which are constantly being updated along the technology progress and online media growth.

“All of the guidelines offer a detailed definition for counting an online ad impression, the primary currency of the Interactive medium, which is a critical component in establishing consistent and accurate online advertising measurements across publishers and ad serving technologies in the US and around the world. The guidelines address long-standing marketer and agency concerns about the need for a standardized method of measuring Interactive advertising. By simplifying the buying and selling process for advertisers, marketers and publishers, these guidelines are intended to hasten the growth of Internet advertising spending.” (http://www.iab.net).

With the growth of number of ad networks today it has become a necessity be certified compliant with the guidelines in serving and measuring ads. Other essential requirements may also include disaster recovery system, behavioral/activity-based filtering and the reporting of the time at which data is considered final, as well as publisher support system. Standardizing ad serving and ad tracking systems indeed makes it easier for advertisers, agencies and publishers to provide transparency to the performance of their campaigns, which in its turn hastens their selling process as well as the growth of Internet advertising spending as a whole.

Which ad-networks are compliant with IAB guidelines?

Here are some of them: 24/7 Real Media, AOL, Atlas Media Console, Burst Media’s AdConductor, CNET Networks, DoubleClick, Eyeblaster, Forbes.com, Google, Mediaplex, Microsoft, Turner Digital Media Technologies, Walt Disney Internet Group, Yahoo!, OpenX x, etc.

How about Asian Ad-Networks?

Being one of the biggest ad networks in Asia, Innity is preparing for the BPA Worldwide ad server system certification. BPA Worldwide’s ad serving system complies with all Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) guidelines and provides additional systems verification that goes above and beyond the IAB requirements.

Most of ad-networks mentioned above operate worldwide but they do not fully cover Asia, which actually comprises the biggest Internet population of the world and yet has a huge potential as at present it includes only 18.5% of the total Asia population. According to Internet World Stats out of 6.8 billion world population 1.7 billion are already Internet users, which indicates 362.3 % growth from 2000 to 2009.

At the same time out of 3.8 billion of ASIA population 704.2 million people are already Internet users and it shows 516.1 % Internet usage growth over the same period. Though number of ad networks in Asia is still much lower than in the US or Europe it is growing rapidly and there is a strong demand for accuracy and transparency of ad serving and counting mechanisms. Besides promoting credibility of the ad serving and tracking system within the market, third party certification also gives a greater confidence to advertiser and publisher clients in the reporting data provided by ad networks.