What does knowing people are making mone...

I was first exposed to some really simple logic when reading the book “Becoming Your Own Bank” by R. Nelson Nash.  The logic is almost so obvious as to be invisible yet so many people fail to see it.  The premise in this case was applied to figuring out the cost of leasing a vehicle as opposed to financing it.  The logic basically goes like this, someone is selling the car and they are in business, which requires making profit so you know they are making money.  If the car is financed to you then you know someone else has to be making money by lending out...

Useful credit score tool

You can get a copy of your credit report by mail for free from Equifax and TransUnion, and you can get your actual score for about $15/mo. along with credit monitoring (I find that adds up so tend not to advise it), but here’s a useful free tool for once you’ve got information about your account to help you estimate your credit score:   http://www.bankrate.com/calculators/credit-score-fico-calculator.aspx   Supposedly people who have tested it have found it to be pretty accurate.  My advice is get copies of the written reports, for free by mail,...

What I’ve Learned about Credit

I’ve become a huge believer that credit is a subject we should teach in school.  We should teach people how it will affect them, how to manage it, etc.  It is simply too large a portion of a person’s financial life to ignore. Having made some mistakes in the past with credit and having worked to correct many of those mistakes I figured it would be worthwhile to share some information. To start off with there’s a lot of very generic and non-useful information on credit on the internet.  Lots of stuff about how it’s not possible to fix, only to...

Why the End of Scarcity Will Change the ...

http://on.mash.to/iwfGpV As with many similar articles, the title is of course overstated…there will always be scarcity, scarcity is fundamental to physical materials, products, energy, abundance or as he calls it “economies of plenty” are the domain of the information age, and yes, that’s a huge shift.  There also seems to be a balance struck.  For example, contrast Wikipedia, which has been relatively successful (though not economically) at leveraging abundance, to Linux, which wasn’t nearly so successful, what’s the difference?  Why did one succeed where...

Comparative Tablet Teardowns Reveal iPad...

  And again this is the 3rd part of me and my friends’ conversation about this issue and the following was his reply: The fact is that no one can make a product as good and as cheap as Apple today. I think Microsoft has the best chance to dethrone Apple in the future if they would get their heads out their a**es and get the cloud stuff working for the masses without requiring a computing science degree to operate. I think the Google phones will always be the hack, popular but never really great except for hacks and hackers. Yet to answer his conclusions again: That...

Comparative Tablet Teardowns Reveal iPad...

On my recent review with this topic I was asked by one of my friend about some questions and then he concluded that: 1) By most reports Apple still owns the mobile market. Droids might sell more from time to time but they still don’t have close to as many users. 2) Almost all apple laptops are cheaper by all estimations. You get more and better for cheaper. No one can touch apple prices on laptops considering the caliber of the product. Once again, you can get an etch-I-sketch for less but nothing comparable. So as to answer his conclusions: 3)      No,...

Comparative Tablet Teardowns Reveal iPad...

http://press.ihs.com/press-release/design-supply-chain-media/comparative-tablet-teardowns-reveal-ipad-design-advantages   I read this article a couple days ago, very interesting and certainly cool how they’ve done that.  I have a few questions: 1.       Will they be able to maintain these advantages as competition increases?  Realistically speaking, they haven’t faced real competition yet, it’s a new market (less than 2 years old) and if we look at the track record of the Mac where they also controlled everything, they eventually stopped doing so and...

Online Business Directory

I was thinking yesterday about functionality of websites. I’m a big believer that if something isn’t useful immediately it won’t grow, hence the need to start simple and build from there in many cases, this is especially true of social technology. I was thinking of the B2B space and noticing a gap, I’m not sure why the gap exists, but I think it’s an opportunity. There is no really good online directory of local businesses. Google lists businesses in one form or fashion via Google local and Google places, but it’s not really great for the B2B space. Try...