10 New Ways to Make Money Online

So you want to ditch your corporate cubicle and join the ranks of web workers? But you have a mortgage, maybe a dependent or two, and a taste for Venti Mochas from Starbucks? You can make money in the new economy, though it might not be as easy or cushy as keeping your old economy job.

I’m not talking about advertising or affiliate marketing or selling your junk on eBay. Those are so last millennium! I’m talking about the new new economy.

1. Offer your professional expertise in an online marketplace.These days, you can do more than just sell your old books via Amazon and your old Coach handbags via eBay—now you can sell your professional capabilities in a marketplace. No longer are you limited to looking for a permanent or contract job on Web 1.0 style job sites like Monster or CareerBuilder. The new breed of freelancing and project-oriented sites let companies needing help describe their projects. Then freelancers and small businesses offer bids or ideas or proposals from which those buyers can choose.

Elance covers everything from programming and writing to consulting and design, while RentACoder focuses on software, natch. If you’re a graphic designer, check out options like Design Outpost or LogoWorks–you don’t have to find the customers, they’ll come to you. Wannabe industry analysts might sign up for TechDirt’s Insight Community, a marketplace for ideas about technology marketing.

2. Sell photos on stock photography sites. If people regularly oooo and aaaaah over your Flickr pics, maybe you’re destined for photographic greatness or maybe just for a few extra dollars. It’s easier than ever to get your photos out in front of the public, which of course means a tremendous amount of competition, but also means it might be an convenient way for you to build up a secondary income stream. Where can you upload and market your photos? Try Fotolia, Dreamstime, Shutterstock, and Big Stock Photo.

3. Blog for pay. Despite the explosion of blogs, it’s hard to find good writers who can turn around a solidly-written post on an interesting topic quickly. GigaOM is always looking for bloggers with great content ideas and solid writing skills. How do you get noticed? Comment and link to blogging network sites. Write blog posts that are polished and not overly personal (although showing some personality is a plus).

4. Or start your own blog network. If you like the business side of things–selling advertising, hiring and managing employees, attracting investors–and have the stomach to go up against the likes of Weblogs, Inc., GigaOmniMedia, b5media, maybe you should make an entire business out of blogs. Don’t make the mistake of thinking you’ll get a lot of time to write yourself though.

5. Provide service and support for open source software. Just because the software is free doesn’t mean you can’t make money on it–just ask Red Hat, a well-known distributor of Linux that sports a market cap of more than four billion dollars. As a solo web worker, you might not want to jump in and compete with big companies offering Linux support, but how about offering support for web content management systems like WordPress or Drupal? After getting comfortable with your own installation, you can pretty easily jump into helping other people set them up and configure them.

6. Online life coaching. Who has time to go meet a personal coach at an office? And don’t the new generation of web workers need to be met by their coaches in the same way that they work: via email, IM, and VoIP? You could, of course, go through some life coaching certification program, but on the web, reputation is more important than credentials. I bet Tony Robbins isn’t certified as a life coach–and no one can argue with his success. For an example of someone building up their profile and business online as a coach, check out Pamela Slim of Ganas Consulting and the Escape from Cubicle Nation blog.

7. Virtually assist other web workers. Freelancers and small businesses desperately need help running their businesses, but they’re not about to hire a secretary to come sit in the family room and answer phone calls. As a virtual assistant, you might do anything from making travel reservations to handling expense reimbursements to paying bills to arranging for a dog sitter. And you do it all from your own home office, interacting with your clients online and by phone. You can make $20 and up an hour doing this sort of work, depending on your expertise.

8. Build services atop Amazon Web Services. Elastic computing on AWS is so cool… and so incredibly primitive right now. Did you know that you can’t even count on your virtual hard drive on EC2 to store your data permanently? That’s why people are making money right now by offering services on top of AWS. Make it easier for people to use Amazon’s scalability web infrastructure like Enomaly has with elasticlive, a scalable web hosting platform built on AWS.

9. Write reviews for pay or perks. If you blog for any length of time on a particular topic–parenting, mobile phones, or PCs, for example–you will likely be approached to do book or product reviews. You can get free stuff this way, but are you selling your soul? Is there any such thing as a free laptop? These are decisions you’ll have to make for yourself, because no one agrees upon what ethical rules apply to bloggers. Even less do people agree on services like PayPerPost that pay you to write reviews on your blog. Check out disclosure rules closely and see whether such a gig would meet your own personal standards or not.

10. Become a virtual gold farmer. A half million Chinese now earn income by acquiring and selling World of Warcraft gold to gamers in other countries. If you’re not a young person living in China, this probably isn’t a viable option for you. But what’s intriguing about it is the opportunity to make real money working in a virtual economy. People are making real-world money in Second Life too.

Emergency Phone Charger for Real Optimists

Murphy's Law is an adage in Western culture that broadly states that things will go wrong in any given situation, if you give them a chance. The book " Murphy's law " issued in 1977 had stunning success. I think that the reason for that is that the world is full of such pessimistic people, as the man, whose name this gloomy law inherited. Serving at Air Force Base, the captain Edward Murphy, investigated the reasons why the planes crash. He came to pessimistic conclusion that if there was only one way to do something wrong, the technologists would find it.

One more of Murphy's laws asserts that if four reasons of possible troubles are eliminated beforehand, there will always be fifth. Certainly, these laws are basically created for pessimists. But I hope you would agree that when you get in a trouble, and you can's find a way out no matter how hard you try, you start to believe that Murphy was somehow right.

I do not offer you to join a special club for pessimists. I just hope it is still possible to avoid such situation, when your telephone with its death breaks your connection with the world right at that moment when you need it the most. Such small portable gadget like Emergency Phone Charger gives you an opportunity to charge the telephone for 2 hours of extra talking time. Thus, if your telephone ran out of charge and interrupted an important conversation when you find yourself far from home, using a single AA battery, you can return it to life and continue the talk.

Different things happen and every day we have to face a lot of difficult situations. After some unpleasant incidents it is difficult to be sure that everything will finally be fine. Still you may use the chance and carry with you Emergency Phone Charger which size is approximately 7cm (H) x 2cm (W) x 2cm (D). It is necessary to be always on the check! It is better to believe in good, and then the laws of Murphy will be left behind!

DigiBank

DigiBank is the intelligent piggy bank from KEIAN. It is capable of recognizing every coin you give it and can indicate on its screen the amount of the money you just inserted and the total amount of your treasure. It is powered by AAA batteries and measures 15 x 12.2 x 13.2cm.

Increasing the performance of Windows Vista

My first impression of Windows Vista was that it was a very shiny operating system with lots of useless stuff (for me) that wasted lots of valuable ram on my system. Things like the sidebar which may be useful for some are absolutely useless to me. Besides that they use ram. I have decided to remove everything that I would not need to increase performance on the system.

This tips might also be useful to those users who use an old computer with Windows Vista. My Vista installation is using about 430 megabytes of Ram in default state with only one instance of Internet Explorer 7 running as well. The following paragraphs contain a list of changes that I made and their effect on the system.

* Disabling the Sidebar
* Changing the Design to Windows Classic
* Changing the Background image to one color
* Disabling the Windows Firewall and Bitdefender

Those changes alone dropped the ram usage by 60 megabytes to 370 with one Internet Explorer window open. There are many settings that can still be tweaked to gain even more performance, for instance removing unnecessary services and indexing. I will take a look at those in the coming days.

The question of course remains why you would like to change to Vista if you disable everything “new” that Vista offers. I personally think that it introduces lots of gimmicks that freeware on XP offered for years. And if it is security that you want you should take a look at Linux instead.

The Blow Table Lamp

Studio Italia Design has designed a rather useless but nice looking gadget. The Blow Table Lamp is unusual with two features. It is situated in a glass globe that protects it from any weather conditions and its magnet system.

You can control the direction of light beam with a magnet placed outside the glass globe. When you place it on the globe, the magnet attached to the lamp will be attracted this is how you can control it. This may be also fun and good because you do not have those banding lamp legs that tend to break.

However, what do you protect it from with a glass globe around it? From getting broken? More questions come when you want to replace the bulb inside it. How do you do that? Just break the glass globe? Maneuvering this gadget is fun but this is it.

The most outrageous thing about blow table lamp is its cost. It retails for $ 1,200 and this is what makes this lamp so unlike all other. Pay 1,200 dollars for this lamp and you won't have to replace the bulb for years; you won't just use the lamp every day, because it is so expensive.

Gadget to Turn Old Vinyls into CDs

Music reflects the essence of human soul. If you pay attention to what kind of music a person listens to, it is possible to understand his way of thinking, and his features of character. Music will tell you much about the person you want to know better.

The taste of a person is reflected in everything - in clothes he wears, in books he reads, in meals he prefers, and certainly, in music. For some people music is an integral part of their life, and their favorite singers are idols and examples for imitation. Specially for the people, who collect all about the favorite singers, including old vinyl's, as the best kind of their creativity, it will be interesting to find out more about the opportunity of getting Ion iTTUSB Turntable with USB Record.

First of all, this gadget can be used to convert your old vinyl collection directly to CD or MP3 without any clumsy adapters or mismatched software when transferring formats.

Requiring no special drivers, the turntable comes with Audacity, a recording application that works with both PCs and Macs, as well as a trial version of Bias Soundsoap 2 to clean and restore vinyl recordings.

As an alternative, the Turntable also works with any other software that supports USB audio input sound cards. Once connected, the Turntable transfers both 33-1/3 rpm albums and 45 rpm singles to digital formats in a few minutes. For increased stereo balancing, the iTTUSB offers a few hardware extras, such as an adjustable anti-skating control. It also includes an adjustable pitch control (+ /- 8 percent), and support for high-speed vinyl recording. Ion iTTUSB Turntable with USB Record is a display of evolution of technologies. It is a link between old times and modernity. It is an unique opportunity to create the bridge between retro music and reliable way of its storage.

* USB 1.1 turntable that makes it a snap to convert vinyl collection to CD or MP3 formats
* Includes Audacity PC/Mac recording software and trial version of Bias Soundsoap 2
* Adjustable anti-skating control for increased stereo balancing
* Support for high-speed vinyl recording; works with both 33-1/3 and 45 rpm speeds
* Line-level outputs for easy stereo connection; 1/8-inch line-level input; weighs 7.7 pounds


In the Box

* Turntable
* tonearm counterweight
* Platter with belt
* Slipmat
* Cartridge premounted on headshell
* RCA cable
* USB cable
* Software CD-ROM
* 45 adapter
* Quick-start guide
* User’s manual