• run for 45 minutes every day
• no caffeine for 30 days
• blog 1 article every day for 30 days
• no sweet or processed / industrial food for 30 days
• read 15 books in 30 days
• burn 10 pounds in 30 days
• no meat for 30 days
• take 1 picture every day for 30 days
• go without tv for 30 days

This is recommended reading for any executive who thinks SEO is strategic for his/her company. The guide does not  contain actionable items as much as they are about the approach and guidelines you need to mange  your SEO team. At 25 pages or so, it will not take much of your time (I read it while doing my laundry).

I have only recently started learning about SEO and after spending some time on blogs, forums and some books, my view is that there is lot of fluff out there. About 90% of what you will hear from “SEO experts” is useless and perhaps another 9% is illegal.

However, Google, surprisingly provides a lot of information on SEO that works. This guide is a good place to start with that.

1. CardSnap ($14.99 for pro or $0.99 for base version) – Great way to scan visiting cards into your addressbook. Take a picture from the iPhone (works only with 3GS) and the app does the rest.
2. Yahoo Messenger (Free) (or Beejive at $9.99) – Both of these apps have built-in push notifications. Great way to stay in touch with your team when you are out of office. Beejive works for MSN, AIM, ICQ, gtalk etc besides Yahoo IM.
3. Evernote (Free) -  the best notes taking app there is. I do not know if there is a better way to capture notes. Use it to capture notes during the meeting, take pictures of the whiteboard after the meeting and to digitally capture all the odds and ends that life throws your way. Works from your iPhone and your desktop.
4. ScannerPro ($6.99)- This applications can scan any paper document (multiple pages) and save it as PDF. The PDF can then be emailed, send to evernote or send to dropbox. It also mounting of iphone as a network drive to allow quick transfer of documents from a Mac or PC.
5. Google Analytics ($2.99 for Pro or Free for base version) : You need this if you are a web startup. You need to know all the time how visitors are doing on your website.

Other apps that I have on iPhone but I realize I do not use as much as I thought:

• LinkedIn – I do not do enough contact research on iPhone I guess
• TripIt – Might useful if you do many trips but not otherwise
• Skype – great app. good voice quality. but very slow for voice. I think I would use it a lot more if it has push notifications.
• JiraMate – I need an app for my Jira. Unfortuately, this is not a good choice today. I have blogged about lack of a good Jira app on iPhone.
• Snatch – Great way to control your slides and presentation from iPhone. Unfortunately, its a little clunky and immediately brands you as a dork in a new group.

When I noticed Thanasis over at NAV fund talking about what VC want from your Series A business plan, I thought I should  try to provide a template  that we used when presenting to them and other VCs.

First of all, the plan should be created in excel and then distilled into a small 6-slide deck. Secondly, you should always try to present it in person rather than just sending it and hoping they will make sense of it themselves. If you have to send it, send the deck but ask permission to present it in person (or at least over phone)

Your 6 slides should be:

1. Overall business model. (how you get customers and how you make money)
2. Final revenue and goals (things like when you break even, how much you burn till then, whats your end goal)
3. Base Assumptions  (built bottoms up) and their justification
4. Bread Crumbs (how your assumptions lead to final numbers).
5. Key Drivers (and how they compare with the rest of the industry)
6. How much  money you need now and where will it get you

Thats it !! The six slides should be straightforward and simple to follow and should be backed by a model in excel that you can use to answer any questions that might come up.

Features I need in my Jira Studio iPhone app (in the order of priority) are:

1. Works with hosted Jira Studio
2. Shows me what has changes since my last access
3. Allow editing of jira issues and their workflow transitions
4. Ability to add comments to issues

Features that are desirable:

1. Allows creation of issues (directly in greenhopper views)
2. Shows me Greenhopper boards (Planning Board and Task Board) for my projects.
3. Allows saving of favorite filters and projects
4. Integrates confluence activities in the same screen
5. Text based search of issues (and possibly confluence data)
6. Caching for offline access
7. Allows fisheye view of SVN (read only)
8. Supports custom workflow transitions and custom fields.

I have looked at JiraMate and iJira. The developer for both the applications are apparently slow to respond and both the applications are not being frequently updated (neither of them is compatible with OS 3.0)

JiraMate seems to be richer in features with ability to save favorite filters and projects and ability to comment. However, it does not support any editing of issues or any workflow transition.

iJira, apparently, does not work with hosted Jira and crashes when a project has large (>1000) number of issues. It allows editing of issues and sorting on many fields.

Neither app provides any integration with confluence or fisheye. There seem to be some confluence apps available and mini confluence actually seem nice but I think an integrated jira+confluence+svn app can be very useful for many developers and small teams.

I am just surprised that there are no good apps here. Is there no market for an iPhone version of Jira Studio?

Mark Suster – as part of his startup series – talks about how bigger companies roll out the red carpet when a good employee resign to keep him/her from leaving.

This is an all too familiar phenomenon. Companies do not do enough for their A-players (due to the fear of antagonizing others – most likely, B-players) till the person resigns and then suddenly everybody from CEO down wants to meet in person and convince him/her to stay promising big raises and perks.

At hCentive – my current startup – we have seen it from the other side of the table. When we make an offer to an excellent engineering or business person from a bigger organization – they are usually given royal treatment from their current company as soon as they tell them about it. Meetings with CEOs are arranged, salaries are raised and sometimes offers to fire their immediate boss are given in hushed voices.

What should be your role as a small entrepreneur who has been able to attract this hotshot engineer or business guy but now his current company is making him an offer he cannot refuse?

Here is my list of things we all should be aware of:

1. It ain’t over, till its over. The selling does not stop just because somebody has accepted the offer. Be prepared for the fact that if he is any good, his current organization will try to do everything they can to win him back. You have to continue to woo him and keep the selling hat on – at least till he officially starts working for you (and may be a little later). Peter Harrison – CEO of my last startup – knew this game very well. He would invite potential hires to our office and his home continuously – making sure they are engaged and excited about their work, their boss and the team. He would continue to be close to them (directly and thru common friends) trying to see if there is anything at all that can derail the deal.
2. Negotiate a win-win deal. This is a lesson I learnt the hard way. Just because somebody is excited to join you is not a good reason to offer him less than what he or she is worth. It is true that you are a small startup and you should be careful about where you spend the money. However, the best way to spend money in a startup is to spend it on your A++ players. Offer them good money – always more than they are making now (or at least a time-bound promise of reaching that level). People get used to the money they are making and adjust their living standards to it. It is very hard for them to cut back even when they are excited about their work. They might say they can live on less but as time passes and when a sweet counter offer comes in (and, trust me, it will come in), that excitement may not be enough for them to stop from reconsidering. You got to pre-empt that. Yes, I know, YOU are willing to live on Ramen noodles and on cheapest health insurance for your dreams. But, there is a reason why you are an entrepreneur and the person you are hiring is a salaried employee.

To be fair, I think most hires will have a lot more maturity and will not consider going back regardless of the sweetness of the counter-offer. Afterall, the love is already lost and they will be forever tainted and remembered as someone who was willing to leave, but could be bribed to come back. But, this is something you do not want to bet upon.

Bottomline: it never hurts to be too careful and offering a little extra when hiring the people you know will make a difference to your company.

You really should read his whole article but two things stand out for me.

• FOCUS ON USP: You should be able to say in one tweet why anyone should buy your product
• SMART AND GET THINGS DONE: You company is full of smart people but you know when to say “no” to them.

The first is strategic and the second is tactical.

Strategically, you need a razor-sharp focus on why you are different and you should be spending enough time thinking about why anybody will buy your product. Then, you should be able to express that differentiation in one sentence. (Robert gives the example of Prius: “It gets better mileage than your car”)

Tactically, we all know the importance of hiring smart team (Joel Spolsky even wrote a book about it). Its getting-things-done part that gets sidelined. One needs to be careful about over-engineering any part of the organization.

Over-engineering not just happens in engineering but can happen anywhere where very smart people exist. In my last company, we had a manager incentive plan so complex, that, famously, only two people in the entire organization understood it when it came out !! (those were the two people who designed it)

The reason plan was so complex was not because creators of the plan were evil or stupid but exactly the reverse. They wanted to be fair to everyone in every situation and they were some of the smartest people I have known in my life. However, the end goal was lost. An incentive plan is no good if you cannot even understand how you are being incentivized !!

At my current company – hCentive – we constantly worry about if there is anything at all on our web application that is extraneous. Something that will get in the way of a visitor’s experience of buying a health insurance plan – the tool time – needs to be removed.

Avinash – our UX designer – constantly comes up with yet another feature that we can add and I have to say no to many of his beautiful mockups. Not because they are bad ideas but because we want to leave it simple and truly make hCentive the easiest way to buy health insurance.

Scoble gives the example of Evan Williams (founder of Blogger and Twitter) here who prides himself on NOT doing things.

To summarize, if you know your goal (why customer will buy your product) and you have hired a smart team – the job of an entrepreneur is limited to just two things: saying no and moving the furniture out of the way.

David makes the point that we are using insurance for the wrong things in this country by mostly using it for “regular” and “predictable” health expenses rather than those that are truly catastrophic or unseen. While the viewpoint is not new, David does take it to its logical conclusion with a plan based on it. The last page of his article summarizes his proposal:

• A  low-cost, true catastrophic (> $50k deductible) insurance that everybody needs to buy. This comes with no medical underwriting and a national shared risk pool. This policy should cost about $200/month for a family of 4 as per today’s premiums.
• A new type of HSA account which everyone is required to contribute to fund for under-50k expenses. People can take loans from this account (if bigger expenses happen earlier in life) and they can also withdraw from this account for non-medical purposes (after a certain minimum indexed to age is met).
• Govt contributes to this new HSA for lower-income Americans. Medicare is replaced by this new type of govt-assisted HSA

David believes that this will force people to save for health insurance while at the same time letting them use that money for other things if they use it efficiently. Such an approach will lead to:

• Removal of obfuscated prices for health care as people will demand to know prices when they are paying for it themselves
• Providers will spend dramatically less time on paperwork as very little of expenses will pass thru insurance
• Patients will see “integrated” pricing for the whole service (like they see today for elective surgery like LASIK) rather than multiple bills from each provider that was part of the service leading to better efficiencies at the backend.
• Technological innovation— which often takes the form of slightly improved treatments for much higher prices—would begin to concern itself with value, not just quality. Many innovations might drive prices down, not up.

I think this is an excellent proposal however I will add two more things to it:

• We  also need to deregulate insurance sector allowing carriers to operate beyond state boundaries and letting hospitals and providers form tighter, efficient groups
• We need to limit legal liability and at the same time protect consumers against unscrupulous providers perhaps by giving FDA or similar authority some kind of jurisdiction over providers for safety of procedures.

There is only one problem: the implementation of such a process requires tremendous political leadership as all of the health-care interest groups—hospitals, insurance companies, professional groups, pharmaceuticals, device manufacturers, even advocates for the poor—have a major stake in the current system.

Unless, we as American public, wake up and realize who much are we paying for our health care (an average of $1.8M per person over our lifetime) and how little say we have in how it is spent, such a proposal does not even stand a chance.

They say, a nation gets the government it deserves. I think its true for health systems as well.

It is time we rise above our narrow interests and do what is Right.

This is an excellent presentation about how amazon designs their website. You need about 60 minutes to go thru the whole thing but I suggest you give it a try nonetheless.

This is not about “design” in the sense of which font to use or “design” in the sense of how many tiers in my web stack but “design” in the sense of what are the most important principles you need to follow.

Good reading for anybody building a website (consumer or otherwise) or almost any software or community.

As you can see, most designs actually decrease the functionality of Craigslist under the pretense of “making it beautiful” or “making it a webapp”.

It is possible to do three clicks in the current craigslist design in the time it will take for the home page of these so-called new designs will load. (so much for saving clicks)

Just another data point on why most Web 2.0 products end up making it no money (too much focus on cool design. too little on value for users).

However, I think the sync choices in the application are unnecessarily complex and the concept of keeping things simple for users was lost somewhere.

Omnifocus currently offers 4 different ways to sync data from iphone to mac:

• MobileMe (easy to set up. available everywhere. but not everybody has it.)
• Bonjour over your wireless network (harder to set up. does not work everywhere. most people have it)
• Disk (most esoteric. does not work for mac to iphone sync but is listed right there)
• WebDAV (hardest to setup. can be made to work everywhere. most people dont even know what it is)

As you can see – there are no good choices. There is nothing here that is easy to setup, works everywhere and everybody has it.

I submit that when designing a product a product manager should focus on easy to setup above everything else. If its not easy to setup, it should be made easy to setup or its not a viable option. Period.

In this particular case, Omnifocus should have had really one choice and one backup choice:

• company run webdav server for syncing
• a command line based  option to change the URL of the webdav server

A server run by omnifocus can be made exceedingly simple to set up, will be available everywhere, can be free (given the price of the product), available to all licensed users and should be the default, automatic choice.

Its actual technical implementation could be as a webdav interface (which the product currently supports). The only challenge with it would have been that a minority of people will not be comfortable putting their data in a 3rd company hands.

For that minority privacy-focused group, there should be a way to change the “URL” of the webdav server to a private server (if they want).

This would have been the best compromise to provide ease of use of the users along with giving the control to modify if they want.

And control is second only to ease of use in terms of what you as  a successful product manager need to give to your users.

25 Essential Books About Money: Financial Wisdom from Your Public Library

I cannot do justice to his entire post here so I will urge you to go read his entire post. (And, then, go ahead and read the 25 books he recommends. It is a great list.)

However, if you can only read 1 book on money, I will recommend one of the following based on your current situation

• If you are struggling with cash flow and money and want to break free from debt: The Total Money Makeover by Dave Ramsey
• If you are past the cash flow stage and now interested in building good money habits that will allow you to save your first million and beyond: The Millionaire Next Door by Stanley and Danko
• You have made your first million and feel comfortable about your earning and saving habits but now need a good plan for Investing: The Random Walk Guide to Investing by Burton Malkiel
• You think you are doing okay on debt, making money and investing it but now its time to inculcate some good habits in your young kids then its: What Color is Your Piggy Bank? by Adelia Cellini Linecker

1. Zoho Writer and Zoho Mail
   • Word Processor, Email
   • Not transparent.
   • You can access documents stored inside your Zoho account and edit them offline inside the web browser.
   • You can read and compose mail when offline
2. Gmail :
   • Transparent and automatically detects your are offline.
   • Even has a “flaky connection” mode.
   • Full read-write access to your mail.
   • Even allows access to most gadgets
3. Wordpress
   • Hosted Blogging Service
   • Transparent and full-access to your posts and pages.
4. Google Docs
   • Word Processor, Spreadsheets, PDF documents and Presentations
   • Transparent and automatic offline access
   • Read-write access to word processor (no new docs)  and read-only access to spreadsheets and presentations
5. Remember The Milk
   • Todo List Manager
   • Full read-write access to your tasks. Even allows local search engines to search offline tasks.
6. Some Things
   • Todo List Manager
   • Full read-write access to your tasks
7. Autodesk Labs Project Draw
   • create diagrams online
   • the application can run in the offline mode and synch files later when you reconnect
8. MindMeinster
   • Mind Mapping Tool
   • Need pro account for offline access.
   • Full read-write access
9. Passpack
   • Password Manager for your online stuff
   • Transparent and full-access to your passwords in offline mode
10. Paymo
    • time tracker
    • Google Gears added the “ability to work offline and sync the data with the Paymo server once an internet connection is available”
11. Google Reader
    • Feed Reader
    • Not transparent. You have to tell it in advance that you are going to be offline.
    • Can read and update feeds but not add new feeds
12. Google Calendar:
    • Transparent but read-only access to your events.

http://theappleblog.com/2009/06/05/my-multi-layered-backup-strategy/

Some software worth considering are:

• Time Machine or Superduper! for daily painless backup. this is your first line of defense
• JungleDisk or Mozy for the off-site backup (just in case time machine is corrupted or your house is on fire. This is your reserve backup
• Dropbox or Syncplicity to sync files to other machines on your network (good to have a backup of “critical” files). This is for the worst case

There is also CrashPlan that is a little expensive but can take care of all these three facets.

While the sector has clear deficiencies and is probably ripe for a complete change – there has been some innovations worth mentioning. For example, consumer driven health plans offer a way for providing higher quality care at cheaper prices.

DefinityHealth (a startup that got acquired by UHC for $300M when it had 300K members) offered such products as early as 1998. Essentially, they offered cheaper plans with higher deducitibles.

A typical plan is funded as follows:

• Employers funded most of the cheaper plan (just like other plans) but their costs were less .
• Employees got an attached account (HSA) that they can fund with pre-tax dollars (upto $5950/year/family).
• Many employers choose to pass on some of their savings (say, $500/year/family) to employees to kickstart their HSA fund. This added as an extra incentive for employees to opt for this fund.
• Employees owned their HSA free and clear and are free to invest them as they wish or take it with them when they leave the job but can only use it for medical purposes.

A typical plan paid as follows:

• Preventive checkups were covered at 100%
• Any other expenses (upto about $5000/family) were covered by the HSA – funded by employer (first $500) and then by pre-tax money from employees
• Catastrophes (beyond $5000) were covered 80% by insurance and 20% by employees.
• Any unused HSA will rollover to next year.

The plan has following benefits:

• Extra incentives for preventive checkups (no copay).
• Since consumer pays from “her” money – she has more incentive to search for the right cost.
• Cheaper premiums for employers and employees.
• Incentives for staying healthy as consumer pays some portion of the cost.

The plans has following disadvantages:

• People with chronic diseases (diabetes etc) where annual expense is roughly between $600-$5000 will have to pay most of it from their pocket

One can argue that benefits outweight disadvantages by a huge degree for such plans and people with chronic diseases should carry higher costs than other people in a capitalist society.

Now, if we can combine such plans with pricing transparency (another article) – we will be half way to medical nirvana in USA.

• Tripadvisor Flights is a great site overall
• For International flights starting from US: try Kayak or Trax
• For international flights not starting in US: try Mobissimo or Momondo

[blip.tv ?posts_id=1919896&dest=-1]

The video is also posted at the enterprise 2.0 blog as part of the series they did on how enterprise are becoming open.

Here is what it has going for it:

• claims 9.5 hours of battery life (real life numbers, IMHO, end up being half of claims)
• weighs only 3.2 lbs (just a tiny bit more than 3.0 lbs macbook air)
• a 10 inch widescreen which is great for airplanes and makes this thing fit in a women’s purse
• Screen is LED backlit which makes it easier on the eyes.
• price with RAM upgrade and a nice light-weight bag is $437 shipped !!
• a huge 160GB harddisk
  
• It has a faster processor and bus – compared to most other netbooks out there
• fastest 802.11n wireless networking built-in

Of course, you want to move to upgrade to Windows XP Professional (instead of Home that comes) or Windows 7 beta. (no, you do not want Windows Vista to “spoil” this machine) and you will need an extra 1 GB of RAM

As always, the list is in the order that I use them:

1. Evernote: This is a great note-taking application for your iPhone. Your notes automatically stay synched with the peer application on your Mac (which is a great application in its own right). Besides, its free !!
2. OmniFocus: Perfect companion to your mac version of Omnifocus. Note new action items and complete action items anywhere. Must-have if you are fan of GTD.  Syncs automatically with your desktop.
3. TripIt: Now available for iPhone. forward your trip emails (from airlines, hotels etc) to tripit and have then available as organized trips with offline access on your iPhone. Very useful for people who travel a lot.
4. Kayak: Look up the cheapest fares and hotels or book the next flight home while you are in the cab going towards airport !! Call airlines or hotels at the touch of a button (they have phone numbers for all of them)
5. LinkedIn: Your LinkedIn on the phone !! Learn more about the person you are about to meet or search contacts in your network on the fly !! And yes, its free.
6. RowMote: So okay. Using your iPhone to flip your powerpoint slides for every little meeting gets old soon but its still worth doing it for those big conference rooms or large meetings. Works with both Keynote or Powerpoint (also controls FrontRow, DVD, VLC and lots of other apps)
7. Yelp: In a new area and do not know what will be a good place to grab lunch (or dinner of your favorite cuisine). Why not go where locals go – using Yelp!!
8. Tip: There are dozens of tip applications in the appstore. Some are even free. But i like this 99 cents app. Its has the highest rating of all tip apps and it am
9. Cheap Gas:  Find the cheapest gas prices near you. So okay, company is paying for the gas in your rental but you can still use the app to find the nearest gas station (and if there is one across the street that is 6 cents cheaper, it wont kill you to use that!!).And yes, its free.
10. Bloomberg Mobile: Catch up with the day’s business news. Review your stock portfolio. On the go.

The list is in the order of perceived severity of what you will need. In other words, things at top of this list are required more than things at the bottom. Here goes:

1. Apple MacBook or Apple MacBook Air . Macbook Air is much lighter and more sexy looking but more expensive.
2. I also highly recommend reading thru the short book:- Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual. This book has a nice listing where you can just lookup by Windows action (for example, copy text) and find its mac equivalent. Please do skim thru this book. It will save you many hours later.
3. If you give presentations or use an external monitor,  you will also need a Mini DisplayPort to VGA Adapter. This is required because Apple laptops do not come with a way to connect with standard VGA.
4. If you end communicate with a lot of other people who use Windows, then you will also need Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac. This is also required if you have an Exchange-shared calendar or contact list etc. Built-in apple alternatives (iCal etc) will probably not cut it for you.
5. One big concern for all users is how to move their current mail, addressbook and calendering information from Windows to the new Mac. This little company makes an excellent $10 utility that saved many frustrated hours for me (and, since then, for my friends). [Of course, if all your data is inside Exchange - and not on your local machine - then you may be okay]
6. You should also continue to use your current laptop mouse with your new macbook. Not having a “normal” multi-button mouse is a big source of confusion in many new migrations.
7. If you use Outlook tasks a lot, and you are looking for a powerful Mac alternative, you might consider Things or Omnifocus.
8. You might also need Parallels Desktop, if you want to continue runinng Windows for certain applications.

This is pretty much you should need to get started.

• Microsoft Office for Mac
  • There is really no alternative to Microsoft Entourage (part of Microsoft Office for Mac) if one uses MS Exchange-shared calendars.
  • If the office workflow requires documents formatted in Microsoft Excel, Powerpoint or Word, then its best to buy this to ensure full formatting compatibility
• Evernote for Mac and Evernote for iPhone
  • A very good note taking application for your Mac and iPhone.
  • Data sync automatically between the two over  the air.
  • Can also sync variety of files formats, images taken from camera (capture whiteboards and wine labels ) and web links.
• OmniFocus for Mac and OmniFocus for iPhone
  • A solid task-management tool based on GTD methodology
  • Has a sharp learning curve for a GTD newbie but is very powerful when mastered
  • iPhone and Mac versions sync automatically over the air.
• Parallels Desktop
  • Virtualization Software to run Windows on Mac
  • Not required for most cases unless there is that one windows app that you need to run.

Also see:

• Moving iTunes libarary from PC to Mac

CHORUS:

Aaja aaja jind shamiyaane ke taley (Let us gather under the festive tents of life)

Aaja zari waale neele aasmaane ke taley (Let us gather under the embroidered blue sky)

Jai Ho! Jai Ho! Jai Ho! Jai Ho!

Ratti ratti sachchi maine jaan gawayi hai (ounce by ounce, I have lost this life)

Nach Nach koylon pe raat bitaayi hai (dancing on the hot coalbed, I spent the dark night)

Ankhiyon ki neend maine phoonkon se udaa di (waiting for you, I could not sleep)

Gin gin taarey maine ungli jalayi hai (counted stars till my fingers burned)

CHORUS

Baila! Baila! (Dance! Dance!)

Ahora conmigo, tu baila para hoy (Now with me, you dance for today)

Por nuestro dia de movidas, (For our day of moves,)

los problemas los que sean (whatever problems may be)

Salud! (Cheers!)

Baila! Baila! (Dance! Dance!)

CHORUS

Chakh le, haan chakh le, yeh raat shehed hai (Taste it. Yes, taste it. This night is sweet as honey)

Rakh le, haan rakh le, Dil hai, dil aakhri hadd hai (Keep it. Yes keep it. The heart is the last frontier of the body.)

Kaala kaala kaajal tera Koi kaala jaadu hai na? (for your dark eyeliner is hypnotizing me like dark magic…)

CHORUS

Kab se haan kab se jo lab pe ruki hai (For long, yes for long; its stuck on my lips)

Keh de, keh de, haan keh de Ab aankh jhuki hai (Say it. Yes, I will say it; while your eyes are looking down)

Aisi aisi roshan aankhein Roshan do do heerey hain kya? (for the light in your eyes distract me…)

CHORUS

• Fidelity Retirement Rewards American Express Card:
  • 2% cashback on everything – even on your Costco purchases (2 points for each dollar spent. 2500 points = $50 in your Fidelity account)
  • Automatic Redemption
  • No Annual Fee
  • No Limits on cashback
• Schwab Bank Invest First Visa (signature or platinum) Card:
  • 2% cashback on everything
  • Automatic Redemption
  • No Annual Fee
  • No Limits on cashback
  • No Foreign Transaction Fee
  • Visa Signature benefits (if you qualify for limit of $5000 or more)

• Washington Mutual has the best deal that returns 3% of your purchase amount. The catch is it only pays a maximum of $250/year (or for about $700/month of purchases).
• Paypal Debit card offers 1% cash back for $3000 of spending per day.
  • The good thing is:
    • no need to move your banking to Paypal to use their debit card. You can keep your money in your regular bank and Paypal will pull the money in real-time (if you register this bank account as “backup source” inside paypal)
    • The cash-back amount is available automatically usually by next day.
  • The catch is:
    • The transaction should be “pin-less” (essentially a credit transaction)
    • You need to register in their “preferred” program

• Users of Opera Mini browser worldwide grew 9% month on month and 357% year on year.
• Use per person grew by 11% month on month and 337% year on year
• This implies that total use grew 21% month on month and 20 times year on year !!

If Opera Mini is any indicator of the overall mobile internet usage then we are looking at very healthy trends !!

Source: JuxtConsulting

Random Guy on Phone

• There are 35 M internet users in India (people who use internet more than once a month). 90% of them use internet daily.
• All but 5 M of these are in urban areas.
• This means that 9% of Indian urban population uses internet at least once a month.
• Indian regular urban internet users grew at 19% compared to last year.
• 72 % of internet users have a computer at home.
• Most common activities on the net are email, job search, IM, News, Sports, downloading music or movies, social networking and matrimonial search, in that order.
• 34% of users visit vernacular content regularly (compared to 12% last year).
• YonY growth is linear not exponential, as we hoped.

India Online Market

• India has 8m active online shoppers. (those who have purchased something online in last 6 months)
• About 24% of them have never bought anything besides railway tickets. 49% of them have bought nothing but air or train tickets.
• Books, clothes and CD/DVDs are the other big selling categories.

More at IBEF .

Kyoto Train Station

BTW, it is only the second-largest train station building in Japan (after Nagoya Station) and is one of the country’s largest buildings, incorporating a shopping mall, hotel, movie theater, department store, and several local government facilities under one roof. (from Wikipedia)