The followup to the original film by: Peter Joseph w/ focus on money, corruption, scandals.

In the beginning, all Brent Gensler was trying to do was find a bargain-priced sofa set.

He ended up with an online furniture retailing business, Minneapolis-based DefySupply.com, which grossed $720,000 in its first 12 months and is on track to approach $1.5 million revenue in 2009, its first full year.

The attraction: deep discounts on sofas, dining sets, patio sets and other furnishings manufactured in China, one order at a time, and shipped directly to the customer.

cont’d

WebProNews Videos

Ben Huh, CEO of the Cheezburger network
Huh stresses how important the community has been to the success of the Cheezburger network.

“There was no reason for us to reinvent the wheel, so we decided that we wanted to concentrate on what was really truly unique to us, which was the great community that was actually creating all this content.”

“For us, we felt that we didn’t want to break new ground. We didn’t have the resources to do so. We weren’t a giant corporation with a lot of R&D dollars, so we wanted to focus on something simple, and I think a lot of smaller businesses forget that,” he adds. “If you’re focused on what your users want from you, you can continue to grow, which then gives you the ability to do things that are more challenging.”

By Dave Ramsey

Myth: Debt is a tool and should be used to help create prosperity.
Truth: Debt isn’t used by wealthy people nearly as much as we are led to believe.

Debt is dumb. Most normal people are just plain broke because they are in debt up to their eyeballs with no hope of help. If you’re in debt, then you’re a slave because you do not have the freedom to use your money to help change your family tree.

Consider the Risk
My contention is that debt brings on enough risk to offset any advantage that could be gained through leverage of debt. Given time—a lifetime—risk will destroy the perceived returns purported by the myth-sayers. I once was a myth-sayer myself and could repeat the myths very convincingly. I was especially good with the “debt is a tool” myth.
cont’d

1. Fire the committee. No great website in history has been conceived of by more than three people. Not one. This is a dealbreaker.

2. Change the interaction. What makes great websites great is that they are simultaneously effortless and new at the same time. That means that the site teaches you a new thing or new interaction or new connection, but you know how to use it right away. (Hey, if doing this were easy, everyone would do it.)

3. Less. Fewer words, fewer pages, less fine print.

4. What works, works. Theory is irrelevant.

5. Patience. Some sites test great and work great from the start. (Great if you can find one). Others need people to use them and adjust to them. At some point, your gut tells you to launch. Then stick with it, despite the critics, as you gain traction.

6. Measure. If you’re not improving, if the yield is negative… kill it.

7. Insight is good, clever is bad. Many websites say, “look at me.” Your goal ought to be to say, “here’s what you were looking for.”

8. If you hire a professional: hire a great one. The best one. Let her do her job. 10 mediocre website consultants working in perfect harmony can’t do the work of one rock star.

9. One voice, one vision.

10. Don’t settle.

• No non-sense follow your passion.
• Giving a shit about your readers.
• Stop crying.  Keep Hustling.
• Legacy is greater than currency.
• The nature of the game is changing. [still is]

Cisco made headlines today announcing a next generation router that will revolutionize the internet by increasing downloads to unheard of speeds.  The Cisco press release makes the following claims about the CRS-3 router:

It enables the entire printed collection of the Library of Congress to be downloaded in just over one second; every man, woman and child in China to make a video call, simultaneously; and every motion picture ever created to be streamed in less than four minutes.

cont’d

Start each day listening to the customer.

The Internet is the world’s greatest market research platform; so we immerse ourselves in the billions of signals of consumer demand that it provides each day. While more traditional media companies focus on supplying experiences they believe consumers might like, we’re unapologetically dedicated to delivering the ones they already demand. This core trait guides the content we create, the social applications we develop, and the communities that we nurture. It’s incredibly liberating to operate this way, knowing that everything we do satisfies the real world interests of over a 100 million consumers each month.

Make content that is unequivocally useful.

We love the Internet because it allows us to improve people’s lives in large and small ways–every single day. So we create content that solves problems, answers questions, saves money, saves time and makes people laugh. Consumers become attached to us because we have helped them manage their diabetes, find a rewarding job, plan the perfect family hike, fix a cranky garage door or shave the last five strokes off their golf game. We aren’t here to break news, lay out editorial opinion, or investigate the latest controversy. Our target audience tells us they want incredibly specific information and we deliver exactly that–in a style that the average consumer appreciates and understands.
Cont’d

Keynote from the Le Web in Paris, which focused on how to catalyze a global phenomenon on a very limited budget:
Ferriss – Le Web 2

We get better design when we understand our medium. Yet even at this late cultural hour, many people don’t understand web design. Among them can be found some of our most distinguished business and cultural leaders, including a few who possess a profound grasp of design—except as it relates to the web.

If we want better sites, better work, and better-informed clients, the need to educate begins with us.

Web design is the creation of digital environments that facilitate and encourage human activity; reflect or adapt to individual voices and content; and change gracefully….

cont’d

First, Fundamentals and Hypotheses

I run experiments for one of two reasons: 1) to produce results I feel comfortable predicting, or 2) to gather data and findings I can then (hopefully) incorporate into follow-up experiments. Let’s call the latter an “investigative campaign.”

It is important to begin with a hypothesis or hypotheses (predictions) that you will test. Why? Because backwards correlation is bad science.

Read

This is a question I have fought with a lot over the years.

Spending time with the upwardly mobile in places like NYC and LA, one can’t help but believe the consensus: It is better to wait until you have made a lot of money before trying to change the world. The idea (excuse?) is that you can then have a greater impact. But is it really true?

I no longer think so. There are a few reasons I have decided to commit at least $100,000 of my own money to education in the next 12 months:

1. Giving back is like investing with compound interest

cont’d…

Earth Class Mail can shred, recycle or digitally archive your mail.

For a frequent traveler like David Recordon, sorting through piles of mail after he returned from trips was always a hassle, not to mention an environmental challenge. So, the blogger and entrepreneur signed up with Earth Class Mail six months ago and now receives his mail electronically. “Now I am connected to my mail no matter where I am,” Recordon says.

Seattle-based Earth Class Mail scans all the envelopes you receive and sends the images to your online account. You view the images and then tell Earth Class Mail which envelopes to shred, recycle, archive or send to you. The cost: $10 to $60 per month. “Seventy-five percent of our mail never leaves the premises, except as fiber going to be recycled or shredded,” says founder and Chief Executive Ron Wiener.

Wiener started the company in 2004 with a team of talented experts–including software engineers from Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT – news – people ) and the former U.S. Postal Service assistant postmaster general of logistics–and an old mail sorter he bought on eBay (nasdaq: EBAY – news – people ) for $18,000.

cont’d

Markus Frind works one hour a day and brings in $10 million a year. How does he do it? He keeps things simple.
By Max Chafkin | Jan 1, 2009

At 10 o’clock in the morning, Markus Frind leaves his apartment and heads to work.

It’s a short walk through downtown Vancouver, British Columbia, but somehow the trek feels arduous. This is not because Frind is lazy. Well, Frind is a bit lazy, but that’s another matter. The problem is that he is still getting used to the idea of a commute that involves traveling farther than the distance between the living room and the bedroom.

Frind’s online dating company, Plenty of Fish, is newly located on the 26th floor of a downtown skyscraper with a revolving restaurant on the roof. The gleaming space could easily house 30 employees, but as Frind strides in, it is eerily quiet — just a room with new carpets, freshly painted walls, and eight flat-screen computer monitors. Frind drops his bag and plops himself down in front of one of them.

He looks down at his desk. There’s a $180,000 order waiting for his signature. It’s from VideoEgg, a San Francisco company that is paying Frind to run a series of Budweiser commercials in Canada. Like most of his advertising deals, this one found Frind. He hadn’t even heard of VideoEgg until a week ago. But then, you tend to attract advertisers’ attention when you are serving up 1.6 billion webpages each month.

cont’d