Posts from — September 2007

Google Inc is offering a US$30mil (RM105mil) contest that could significantly boost the commercial space industry and spur the first non-governmental flight to the moon. They call it Moon 2.0 and the bulk of the prize will go to the first private company that can land a robotic rover on the moon and beam back a gigabyte of images and video to Earth.

For this challenge Google partnered with the X Prize Foundation, which is open to companies all around the world. The Santa Monica-based nonprofit prize institute is best known for hosting the Ansari X Prize contest, which led to the first manned private spaceflight in 2004. The Google Lunar X Prize joins another prize already dangling in front of potential competitors: US$50mil (RM175mil) that hotel magnate Robert Bigelow is offering the first private American team to rocket a manned craft into orbit by 2010.

Any spacecraft participate must be tough enough to survive a landing and be equipped with high-definition video and still cameras and also it must be smart enough to trek at least 400m on the moon and send self-portraits, panoramic views and near-real-time videos back to Earth that will be streamed on Google’s website.

Participants must secure a launch vehicle for the probe, either by building it themselves or contracting with an existing private rocket company. Private rocket company Space X said it will subsidise use of its launch vehicle to interested competitors. The company, headed by PayPal co-founder Elon Musk, has not had a fully successful launch in two tries.

“I hope that a very ambitious team of people will allow us all to virtually go back to the moon very soon. I couldn’t be more excited about that,” said teh Google co-founder Larry Page at WIRED magazine’s technology show in Los Angeles. If there is no winner, the purse will drop to US$15mil (RM52.5mil) until the end of 2014, when the contest expires. There is also a US$5mil (RM17.5mil) second-place prize and US$5mil in bonus money to teams that go beyond the minimum requirements.

Enlist your website. Look for the hottest Internet directories and enlist your site there. This is the easiest and most effective free website promotion tactic.

Join forums. One reason why forums are created is for free website promotion for everyone. Log in, post actively, let them know about your site in every post and you attract instant visitors right there.

Write a press release. Release your writing prowess and start up a press release that advertises your site! This is a free website promotion tactic that you can do anytime.

Be nice a guy on the net. Free website promotion means you need to be friendly to other webmasters. So they can link you immediately! Establish contacts and never tire of link requests and exchanges.

Write an article. Write an article about your niche. On the concluding paragraph, mention your website in passing. This article works as an advertorial and doubles as a free website promotion approach.

Take up a free website promotion course online. There are free website promotion tutorials. Part of the free website promotion program is signing up for newsletters.

To start a business then all you need is a great product or service. Many people want to start a business but they lack with a great idea for a product. If you are looking for a good business opportunity, here are some tips.

Check out Ebay. Ebay has a great site that showcases thousands upon thousands of products. The great part about Ebay is that all of their sales data is available for everyone to see. If you are looking for a great product to sell, go on Ebay and search for items that are selling. You look around or enter terms of items that you would like to sell.

In only a few minutes you can see how many people are selling a specific item, how many items are selling, at what price do they sell for and what is the highest price and lowest prices that they have sold for. Armed with this information, you can make an informed decision on whether an item is a good choice.

You can also check out small business forums. Lots of people discuss great business ideas in small business forums. People are looking for partners and can make you an attractive offer.

It is almost impossible to start an Internet business without spending some money on basic needs such as web hosting, domain names and so on. Hence, but here is a rough guide on how to build an Internet business starting with $0.

List out all your skills. What skills do you have? You may have picked up these skills through daily life (for example languages), through your job (hands-on knowledge on a specific niche) or from your hobbies (for example fishing). It is most vital to list down skills or knowledge that you have because it might be in demand elsewhere.

If you have no money to start off your online business, is to earn some capital using your already existing skills or knowledge. You can give tuition to students on your dominant subject in college, you can teach stuff about your hobby to people who are interested, you can write guides on knowledge or skills you picked up through experience and cannot be found in theoretical books.

If you just can’t think or imagine of any skills or knowledge that people might be interested in then, it’s most important that you try and locate a workable business model and focus on that alone. You can obtain almost everything you need through bartering, web hosting, domain name or credit card processing, to name a few in exchange for your product or services like copywriting, ghostwriting and website designs. There is always some easy job that people don’t want to do, and of course you can do that for those people in getting some easy money on the net.