Read a very interesting article today at the gaurdian, I had no idea that facebook now has more than 350 million users. I was also quite surprised to read the information about about profits (or lack thereof) with facebook and twitter. It seems that very few people click banner ads, and that is a way that many online social networks intended to make money.
facebook
Personally I think the little branded apps like the games on facebook and taking them to mobile phones with embedded adverting, like the farmville game using purity milk or the cafe game having decorations with pepsi or coke may be a much better way to monetize these networks.
Well I have been thinking about moving, but the economy and everything has been so shaky, its a nerve racking experience to think about moving only to end up in a place that has worse job opportunities. If I can keep the cost of living down and make sure that crime is not crazy, I am still thinking about moving, just to get the cost of living down. Today I read an article at Forbes that describes some of the best bang for your buck cities to consider.
I surprised to see some places I had never heard of, soI did some google image searches to get a glimpse, but geeze – there are a lot of images to search through in the image results – and I was really not sure if what I was seeing actually was from the various places I was looking for. So off to find another travel search – perhaps flikr geo tagging would be better?
There have been stories in the news lately of computers being stolen with lots of sensitive information including social security numbers. I have seen at least three stories in the past couple of weeks where thousands of people’s personal information was accessed or stolen, and there has been a lot of buzz about identity theft. During these times of increased personal information security breaches, lifelock is one company that has been on TV and in the news as well.
When Aron was looking into adding identity theft protection with his insurance company online, a commercial for lifelock came on TV that showed the founder of this company putting his social security number on a large bus and running it around a big city. Advertising your social security number in front of thousands of people would seem quite absurd to those of us who are familiar with the various ways it can be used to steal identity, get false credit, and otherwise use someone else’s information to do bad things.
The lifelock company has several experts in from various working working to keep people from becoming a victim of identity theft. They keep up with the major credit bureaus and keep on eye on your credit and have a million dollar guarantee. This is a pretty amazing guarantee, so you know they are working hard with lots of technology to make sure that people do not have ill effects from a personal information breach. After researching the lifelock company more I was impressed to find out they go the extra mile with a wallet lock service that will replace your important documents contained in your wallet should it become lost or stolen.
Lifelock is doing big things, and as a very new company that just started in 2005 they are already gaining the attention big investment firms, as Goldman Sachs Group recently funded them with 25 million dollars. It seems that this s a company that will be around for a while and should keep the trust of everyone who uses them.
When someone told me about a .info site that offered office supply discounts, I jotted it down, budgets are tight these days, and I need to make sure to squeeze every dollar out of our monthly budget. So I preceded to check out the site, office products which gives you the opportunity to sign up for discounts and coupons from several of the major office supply and office furniture retailers nationwide.
They have a section for officemax discounts, and a few other retailers, and even vistaprints including online discounts. The vistaprint discount would have saved me $40 two weeks ago if I had seen it then, but I did pass the info along to Bob and Sherry, as they have yet to order new business cards for 2008.
At first glance I had thought that there would be a long sign up process to take advantage of the discounts, but vista print process was simply a click! Right over to their web site, with the 75% off opportunity set. Simple, effective and I wish I had known about this site earlier in the year!
Special thanks to Jacqueline for suggesting it! Usually I am the one telling people about the good sites online, at least with this one I can share it now.
At party this weekend someone was telling me how they were making money by trading money in various foreign currencies. They said that they had foreseen the value of the dollar going down, so they bought a bunch of Euros and waited, and now have bought more dollars than they had used to buy the Euros. I of course asked how she got into this and she described a web site that made it fun with cool graphics.
Being the geek girl that I am I decided to check it out, and I was quite impressed with the graphics, or GUI that was available. You can find it at Etoro.com foreign currency trading .They have a cool part of the program that lets you play with virtual money to see how it works in the real world of “forex trading”.
Now if I could only use a crystal ball to know which currencies will be going and down over the next few months, I may have a chance to multiple these dollars using Euros or yen. 
Some people will undoubtedly appreciate the available live chat. I think it is something that makes me feel more comfortable doing business somewhere, and shows that the web company in question is not just some random static html page. I wish all financial sites took more of a graphic approach like this.
Financial | Alice Pretchet | 
December 7, 2009 9:10 pm | 
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