Weekly 7
Success/Failure Criteria: Some Surprises
Factors for IT Project Success and Failure
Why marketing should make the user manuals!
How we treat customers before and after they buy our products
The Search For A Domain Name
Some very interesting statistics on the domain industry
Read Between All Those For-Sale Signs
The most amazing graph I’ve seen on the real estate market bust is shown in this article
What is the premium for good customer service?
Shows what great customer service is really worth, and I have to agree, I sometimes find myself willing to pay more to be served quickly and correctly!
And The Best Antivirus Is…
A good comparison of several of the leading anti-virus packages available today. One thing to remember is that it’s not only definitions that count, but also heuristics (the ability to detect viruses not yet defined or even seen)!
Why It Pays To Be Narrow Minded In Business
Each business should be about it’s core. Yes, there is room for expansion, but few Jack’s of all trades succeed.
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Weekly 7
Actual lessons from Kiko
5 great tips on how to build up a company.
A Spec-tacular Failure
Interesting in the sense that this shows how important it is to have proper software specifications
Is it smart to be buying or trading up when you are in a down market?
Very interesting graph that illustrates his argument.
Mr Angry’s rules for recruitment agencies dealing with contractors
Having been a contractor in the past, I can tell you these are some very good rules on how to recruite quality contractors.
The Return Policy – Friend of Foe?
The ups and downs of offering a no hassle money back guarantee.
Top 5 business maxims that need to go
Quick little read that has some good take-aways.
How To Run A Beta Test… Or Not?
The experience of someone who ran a beta test for his own company, the good and the bad.
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Weekly 7
How To Be An Effective Entrepreneur
One of the better pieces I’ve read on this topic, especially the “Focus on Contribution” and “First Things First” sections.
Are housing prices headed for a big fall?
Once-hottest markets at biggest risk for price declines, say analysts
Small-Business Myths Busted
The truth as you know it about starting a business may really be a lie. Let us help you sort the myths from the realities.
State of the Blogosphere, August 2006
Very interesting graphs on what’s happening in the blogging world according to Technorati
Proper Pricing of your home is very important for your sale
The Majority of prospect activity on a new listing occurs in the early period of marketing which is why the initial presentation and selling of your real estate property is important.
Who’s Counting: It’s Mean to Ignore the Median
The same set of numbers can have a mean and a median, which differ significantly.
Rapid Responses Save The Customer Service Experience
How fast do you and your employees react when a customer has a complaint?
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Weekly 7
My house hunt: a look at social computing’s impact on real estate
A first-hand experience with some of the online real estate tools in the marketplace
Mortgage delinquencies seen rising in 2006
High-cost loan owners will struggle with interest rates and debt.
‘Take this house and shove it’
More and more Americans are moving to get away from overheated housing markets.
Support Does Not Scale. Customer Service Does.
Highlights the differences and importances between support and customer service.
Don’t believe BusinessWeek’s bubble-math
I’m a subscriber to BusinessWeek and find many of their articles interesting, but this author does bring an important point about how certain articles can be written with a lot of hype.
Death and Taxes
A visual look at where your tax dollars go.
My Favorite Real Estate Story
The story of why we now have “the Hannah clause” in all Buyer Agency contracts stating that the buyer is aware that the company may have other buyers under contract competing for the same house.
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Weekly 7
A word about metrics, part II
You have to think about the limitations of any measuring methodology
Foreclosure listings are up 26%
North Texas’ real estate forced-sale postings keep multiplying
Learn From Adobe – Don’t Annoy Customers
We all know we shouldn’t annoy our customers, right?
If you want to be rich, first stop being so frightened
Very interesting article. I don’t fully agree with this person, and he is very ego-centric, but he has a few great take-aways.
Why Dell.com Still Feels Like Buying a Used Car
A rant about how Dell has trained its corporate customers to haggle for everything, and why you shouldn’t do this.
How to Sell Your New York Apartment
A 20 minute podcast on how to pick your real estate broker.
The TV Deal the NBA Wishes It Had Not Made
This is more of a purely entertaining article. This is the best passive income deal I’ve ever heard of by far!
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Weekly 7
Why I Love Apple
“But again and again, Apple delights with its focus on the user experience. Its engineers and programmers obviously work through every aspect of how the product will be used, and refine it until they get to the slightest detail”
The High Cost of Being Poor
From food prices to auto insurance, when did poverty get so expensive?
Diseconomies of Scale and Lines of Code
The bigger your software is (LOC – Lines of Code) the longer it takes to add more features. This relationship between project size and productivity is illustrated in the article.
Open Source Reality Check
Comparing free open source software to commercial paid software
How Not to Pay Rent
The lofty ambitions of tenants of illegal apartment buildings
Top 10 Dumbest Online Business Ideas That Made It Big Time.
The title says it all.
Top 5 projects to boost home’s value for resale
The title says it all.
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Weekly 7
Beginner’s Guide to SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
The best and most comprehensive introduction and how-to to Search Engine Optimzation (SEO) I’ve seen online!
Top 10 mistakes of Do It Yourself Home Fixer Uppers
What more can I say than the title?
10 tricks for a low-cost, high-impact home upgrade
The title says it all again.
Do Quit Your Day Job
Ian argues against another blogger that you should quit your day job if you’ve properly planned for your business and have a reasonable chance at success. I have to admit I agree with him, but then again I’m biased.
Living in a hidden-fee economy Things seem cheap until you tack on all the extra costs
How many people realize, when they walk out of CompUSA, a nice $99 inkjet model tucked under their arm, that it’s likely they’ve just committed themselves to spending nearly $1,500 on ink cartridges over the next four years?
Why 81% Don’t Read Newsletters
Interesting article with metrics on how people read newsletters.
Yes, I love technology – The key to developer productivity
Describes the importance of making sure your developers have fast machines. This is the same as making sure that your car mechanic uses the right wrench, not the one for the car model 20 years ago!
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Weekly 7
Reading Blogs is Useless
Very poingnant statement that made me think: If you never use the information you receive from the blogs you read, then they are useless.
The Realtor Bubble
Compares how many realtors there are in the current real estate market over the last 45 years.
Fairfax County Buyer Intensity Index
Although I’m not located in Fairfax County, this is an interesting graph comparing the number of properties sold to the number of active properties. According to the graph, since about August 2005 it’s been a buyers market in Fairfax County. It would be great to have these kinds of metrics for every city!
Real Estate isn’t the Stock Market
According to the article the real estate market is not an efficient market because the statistics used to describe it leave much to be desired and take a long time to trickle down. This has implications of why the real estate housing bust is taking time.
How Does Your House Look to Buyers, Lenders, Appraisers, etc?
Not so much an article as the lighter side of the view of your house from different perspectives.
Misconception: Renting is for Suckers
The classic argument of which is better, renting or owning?
From paper-clip to house in 14 trades
This is not so much 1 article as the full story of how one person managed to trade his way up from one paper-clip to a house in just 14 trades, including the lists of items he traded along the way.
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Weekly 7
Elements Of Simplicity: Make Up Your Mind
Not making a decision is also a decision. But it isn’t like other decisions. In most cases it’s the worst decision you can make.
Who Gets Hammered in the 2007 Housing Bust: the Lower Middle Class
A very good article with many detailed graphs explaining and supporting the authors claim on who will be the most likely people to get hurt in the real estate bust.
Rates No Longer an Excuse
If rates are the same now as they were four years ago, why should home prices have risen so much more than rents during that time?
The Importance of Using the Digital Darkroom…
A great explanation of how big a difference some simple image editing such as adjusting the brigthness can greatly affect an image and its capability of delivering interest in the property for sale.
So we were asked to sell the business
This is someone’s internal debate on whether or not to sell their small business, and if so for how much.
How to Buy a $450K Home for $750K
A satire on how to make a real estate market over-inflated
521 reduced prices on craigslist in San Francisco Bay Area Alone
Real estate prices are dropping. Here’s a quick query on Craigslist.com of the listed “real estate” items with the word “reduced” for the SF bay area alone.
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Weekly 7
Starting this week I’ve decided to to post links to the top 7 articles (in no particular order) I find each week, hence the “Weekly 7”. Why 7? So that you can have at least one article to look at each day. So without further ado:
Confessions of a Car Salesman
A journalist goes undercover as a car salesman and tells us about his day to day experiences. Very informative and detailed. He really conveys the car salesman culture so that it’s more understandable to outsiders.
Implementation is more important than idea
Ideas are a dime a dozen, it’s the 99% perspiration (implementation) that will get you there.
10 Stupid Mistakes Made by the Newly Self-Employed
Some very common mistakes made by those who are self-employed. I personally believe that it also applies to pretty much every business.
Warren Buffett gives away his fortune
Warren Buffett stated to the world this week that he was going to give away 85% of his wealth (which is a tremendous amount considering he’s the second richest man in the world). 5/6th of it will go to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Perception A Reality In The Customer Service Experience
Bottom Line: Consider how your customers perceive you, your business, and your employees. Then do something about it.
How much Traffic does Being Ranked 1 on Google Bring?
The 80/20 rule applies to SEO (Search Engine Optimzation). Someone has a 60% difference in traffic between position 1 and 2 in the Google search results.
What’s a buyer to do?
This article shows the importance of creating an common connection with the seller of a property. Sometimes this connection can result in getting a property without being the highest bid.
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