Thousands of years worth of history have proven gold and silver to be the longest running form of money. Gold and silver meet three specific requirements of real money: It acts as a unit of measurement, as a medium of exchange and as a store of value. John Tomlinson from Honest Money explains, “The commodity used most successfully for money to date has been gold. By its very nature it is almost ideal. It is scarce. To produce a small amount of it requires a large expenditure of human energy. It is homogeneous and therefore can be divided into small amounts of identical size, quality and exchange value. It is inert: it does not physically deteriorate, so it does not inherently lose value.”

Read the full article at Wall Street Cheat Sheet.

Answer: Gold has never been zero for sure.

Here’s another definition: Gold is money and has always been money. Paper money came into the picture because it became impractical to carry gold (coins) in various situations. It was the Chinese who invented paper money. Merchants and wholesalers wanted to avoid hauling large wagons of metal around from their transactions.

The promise of the king’s treasurer is good enough in the form of “legal tender”—a paper “contract” of a promise that will surely be made good at the point of exchange in any city.

And then there’s the current argument that gold has value but cannot be used as a proper medium of exchange because in people’s minds it cannot be used to purchase groceries.

It will take a real financial collapse to bring us back to a time when trading and commerce can be viewed in a most elementary manner again. That will be when gold hoarders are happiest.

The More You Do This, The More You Will Make.
You can start easy. You can start slow.
The more you do this. The more it will grow.
It’s not complicated. It’s not hard.
But the income you make, can pay for your car.

The More You Do This, The More You Will Make.
You can live in a city. You can live in a small town.
You can live on an island, with no one around.
Set it up once, then leave it alone.
With the results you get, you could pay off your home.

The More You Do This, The More You Will Make.
You don’t need a product. You don’t need much time.
If you can send an e-mail, you’ll be just fine.
Do it once. And then do it again.
Before you know it, the banker’s your friend.

My silly rhyme has come to an end.
So this is my advise, I give to you friend:
The More You Do This, The More You Will Make.
Thanks for reading to the end
Now go make some moolah, my friend.

- M.C. Moolah Maker

I hope you got a kick out of that. Sure, it might be childish, but that’s the point. Making an income online is child’s play. So many people make it more difficult than it needs to be. Let’s have some fun, change our own lives and then be in a position to effect change in the world.

Popups, slide-ins, peelaways, corner stay ads…you heard them all.

How about Instant SlideUp?

Former engineers from Google rolled out a new search engine Monday that they claim can, and I quote, “index faster a far larger portion of the Web than Google.” (Google claims to have indexed 1 trillion—as in 1,000,000,000,000—unique URLs.)

Instead of focusing on Web link and audience traffic patterns, www.cuil.com (pronounced “cool”) analyzes the context of each page and the concepts behind each user search request.

“Our significant breakthroughs in search technology have enabled us to index much more of the Internet, placing nearly the entire Web at the fingertips of every user,” Tom Costello, Cuil co-founder and chief executive claims.

Google ranks search results by popularity and number of links going to the site. Cuil.com promises to be more democratic and give lesser-known sites a fighting chance for an audience.

There’s really a lot more you can do with Skype than just phoning someone since its SDK has been released a long time ago. Watch the presentation to find out how you can setup Skype for conferencing, podcasting, interviews and much more. Get creative!

BRAD and Jennifer Fallon got more than they bargained for when they walked down the aisle in 2003.

Their nuptials spawned a multi-million-dollar e-commerce site that 4 years later morphed into a veritable Internet empire consisting of more than half a dozen sites. But that is what happens when a bride who is determined to find something different for her wedding marries a groom who is an expert in search engine optimisation.

When Jennifer was planning her wedding, she turned to the Internet to find favours for her guests. Specifically, she was looking for place-card holders for the reception tables.

Finding examples online was not the problem. In fact, Jennifer was overwhelmed by just how many different online merchants were selling wedding favours. But she was underwhelmed by the quality and variety.

Her fruitless Internet shopping experience did not ruin her wedding—rather, it gave her and her fiance, Brad, a great business idea. They decided to start their own online wedding favours site and to distinguish theirs from the competition with broader merchandise offerings, better design and more targeted online marketing.

Via their website, My Wedding Favors, the Fallons carry about 600 different wedding favours, as well as bridesmaids’ gifts, groomsmen’s gifts and other wedding accessories. They ship 800 orders a day from their warehouse in Norcross, Georgia, near Atlanta.

They also have several other e-commerce sites, such as Elegant Wedding Bands and Quality Bridal Shoes.com, that they cross-promote to couples planning to marry. The Fallons are also behind many other non-related Web stores like Electric Scooters Galore, The Corner Stock and Instant Poker Chips.

Just a few months after getting hitched, Brad and Jennifer launched their website, My Wedding Favors, with an initial investment of less than US$1,000 (S$1,504) including US$50 spent on a Yahoo store. They chose Yahoo specifically because it was a quick, easy and affordable way to build a Web store.

With the rest of their initial US$1,000 investment, the Fallons bought merchandise at the Atlanta Gift Mart and funded an online advertising and search engine optimisation campaign.

Their Yahoo store launched with just 40 products, but within the first month, sales reached US$11,000. By the third month—on the strength of Web advertising and marketing—monthly sales rose to US$80,000. Within 6 months, the Fallons’ sales totalled US$150,000 a month, or US$1.8 million on an annualised basis.

Now, just 3 years into their venture, the Fallons are at the helm of a US$15 million company, with one-third of its revenues coming from their wedding favours site. They have both left full-time jobs to run their entrepreneurial venture.

The true reason for the Fallons’ success is that they drive a huge volume of traffic to their Yahoo store and convert a significant percentage of that traffic into sales. The Fallons went into business knowing there was a huge demand for wedding favours, decor and related items.

Excerpted from Amy Joyner’s The Online Millionaire, published by John Wiley & Sons. This article is printed in The Sunday Times, dated September 23rd, 2007.

Ebay introduces new online classified advertising service called Kijiji in US; new service pits eBay against company it partly owns: Craigslist, company that manages classified ad sites for 300 cities, which attract 12 million new ad listings each month; Ebay bought 25% stake in Craigslist in 2004.

EBay, the Internet auction leader, has quietly introduced a new online classified advertising service in the United States.

The new service, called Kijiji, pits eBay, based in San Jose, Calif., against a company it partly owns: Craigslist, the San Francisco-based company that manages classified ad sites for 300 cities, which attract 12 million new ad listings each month. EBay bought a 25 percent stake in Craigslist in 2004.

Kijiji, which means "village" in Swahili, is one of eBay's several classified advertising efforts outside the United States. It is the market leader in Canada, Germany, Italy and Taiwan.

EBay introduced the Kijiji site in the United States without fanfare last Friday, a move that was reported yesterday on the Web site of The Wall Street Journal. The new site has separate classified ad pages for 220 cities and allows users to buy and sell items in a variety of categories like antiques, cars, motorcycles and pets.

"This is going to be our classified ad play in the United States," said an eBay spokesman, Hani Durzy. "We look at it as competition to Craigslist and other platforms. But we think there is room for competition." Mr. Durzy said eBay was planning to keep its stake in Craigslist.

EBay plans to attract users to its new site by buying advertisements on search engines and by ensuring that listings appear in unpaid, or natural, search engine results. There are no plans to direct eBay traffic to the site, Mr. Durzy said.

Craigslist's chief executive, Jim Buckmaster, said, "One of the beauties of viewing our world through public service goggles is that there is no need to worry about what other companies are doing.

"Many companies offer classifieds, but since we don't concern ourselves with considerations such as market share or revenue maximization, we don't think of them as competition, or as a challenge to Craigslist."

This article appeared in The New York Times, July 4, 2007.

Homer trys his hands at setting up a home-based business, registered CompuGlobalHyperMegaNet.com and gets Bill Gates’ attention to “buy him out”…the Mafia way. Doh!

But new multimedia search engine Theseus may end up another doomed EU project.

LONDON – THE European Union (EU) has authorised Germany to start developing a new Internet search engine designed to challenge the US giant Google, which currently dominates online searches.

The proposed German search engine—named Theseus, after a Greek mythological character who used a rope to trace his way through a maze—claims to be a true “killer application” for Google.

Almost everyone knows Google for what it is—a search engine originally conceived as BackRub by its developers, which hit the market in 1998 with backing from rival search engine Yahoo.

Now the world’s most popular online search tool, it gets funding of about S$1.5 billion a year.

In contrast, few details have been released about Theseus as yet.

What is known is that a consortium of more than 30 different German research companies will develop the product which, supposedly, not only classifies online content—something all search engines do—but will also be able to “draw logical conclusions”, creating new links between text, sound and pictures.

The project sounds impressive, but Europe’s recent history has been littered with many technological efforts which consumed a lot of cash, only to end in total failure.

Dr Hartmut Raffler, one of the bosses of the Siemens technology company—which is part of the consortium developing Theseus—said the project “will make it possible to generate new knowledge from what is already available”.

Theseus will become the “world’s most advanced multimedia search for the next-generation Internet”, said another member of the development consortium.

However, if the promise is so great, why are companies not financing it out of their own coffers?

Short answer: This is Europe, where it is always easier to persuade politicians to spend taxpayers’ money on any idea which promises to confront America’s technological prowess.

Back in 1982, for example, Britain and France developed the Minitel, an online service accessible through telephone lines. It was revolutionary then because the French were able to check stock prices, buy train tickets and chat more than a decade before Americans discovered the joys of the Internet.

But the Minitel was state-funded, and bureaucrats knew little about the need for constant innovation. So, far from retaining its lead, France was actually held back from the early adoption of computers due to Minitel terminals which were useful only as museum displays.

Other disasters followed: European computer companies which were meant to take on the likes of IBM or Dell but invariably ended in bankruptcy, and the Galileo system that aimed to provide an alternative to the US Global Positioning System, but had to be rescued last month with the injection of more government money.

The Airbus commercial airliner project is often trumpeted by the Europeans as their success story; it did break Boeing’s monopoly. But it remains the exception rather than the rule.

Given this poor track record, one would have assumed that Europe’s governments would be weary of similar adventures.

But not a bit of it.

The Theseus search engine idea started as a joint project between France and Germany called Quaero (Latin for “I search”).

Quaero was started not so much in response to a serious commercial need as it was to a political desire to catch up with the US.

The two governments had pledged to contribute S$1.1 billion to ‘kick-start’ funding for ‘ice-breaker’ companies.

Now, however, the German government has decided to forge ahead on its own, promising to pay S$250 million.

The French are set to proceed separately with Quaero, and have allocated about S$170 million to that end.

Already, it bears the hallmarks of another potential European flop. And it has already encountered political difficulties.

Theseus’ claim to be able to search inside video and audio clips sounds truly innovative.

However, similar technologies are already being developed by others, and the amount of money the Germans are putting into their effort is paltry compared to Google’s capital spending of around S$1.5 billion a year.

Also, it will take the Germans another five years to complete their effort. Yet neither Google nor other competitors are likely to stand still in the meantime.

So, Theseus may end up as a commercial failure.

Europe’s dream of leapfrogging America’s technological edge can be realised only by improving its entrepreneurial spirit and liberating small companies from reliance on state funding.

What Europe needs is a radical change, not a vain rush for “killer applications” bearing Greek or Latin names from ancient history.

This news article by Jonathan Eyal is extracted from The Straits Times dated July 31st, 2007.