I have had a few interesting experiments here in the past year.
Experiment 0: I bought a hotel affiliate site off of flippa. It did pretty well initially, but I didn't do enough investigation into how the previous owner had been generating traffic. In short, there was a lot of untoward stuff going on. As I was getting all of that straightened out, the site got (deservedly) banned from Google's index for a few key terms. I made my money back and learned a valuable lesson: don't buy sites off of flippa.
Experiment 1: I created a few different sites around a big product launch, and monetized via product reviews and the Amazon Affiliate program. This worked very well for a period of time; the site was grossing $100 a day for several weeks with essentially 0 work. Slowly, my site dipped in the rankings for the key terms as much bigger players got their act together. From this, I learned that one-off sites can be valuable, but probably not in the long term. I should've sold the sites at their peak.
Experiment 2: I wrote some algorithms to find underpriced stocks and then examinate a few strategies around that security's options. This was actually a lot of fun. Based on my program, I ended up buying out-of-the-money puts on 5 or 6 different stocks. I'm sitting on a small profit right now. The next step is to exit my positions, finetune the algorithms based on a few key things I learned, and put more money into action.
One note here: Experiment 2 isn't exactly passive income, not until I get a lot more comfortable with the code. That's the goal, though, and I think it's the likely choice for the greatest amount of income (and least amount of work) in the long run.
Are you willing to tell more about Experiment 2? What kind of strategy are you using? What development platform (e.g. what language and libraries and what OS)? What trading platform (e.g. what brokerage / API)? Where did you get your test market data from / how much did you pay? What other strategies did you try first that didn't work? What blogs or sites do you read on the subject? What is your background in? Finance/Econ? Or programming? What other details would you like to offer? Some of us are very interested in this field. :)
I am interested as well. I've studied something similar, the idea is to find the underpriced option in a group. The premise is that the inefficiency in the market will work its way out in hours/days. But it's pretty hard to find a substantial price inefficiency based on my research. Needed a large amount of money to trade.
In defense of Flippa: I bought a site there recently. Checked it out, the owner was a stand-up guy, I even released the escrow early to help him out (he didn't ask for it). He continued helping with the site transition even after he received the money.
So buyer beware but there are some gems in there...
Thanks for the shout out, it's always great to hear from a happy user!
You are correct on the business model; right now, it's promotional fees from developers plus device manufacturer licensing fees.
You are also correct that we focus on a different use case than Kyte. It seems to me they're more focused on location and telephony (very worthwhile, btw!), whereas we are all about making it for kids to find and play great apps.
I was looking for family safety software for Android, so thanks for the recommendation above. I liked your password entering setup :) What is it called?
This looks like an excellent implementation of a great idea. It's actually somewhat similar to what we do at Famigo (see http://www.famigo.com/sandbox/), though we're much more about content management and recommendations than GPS and telephony features.
With respect to the location feature, AT&T actually offers a somewhat similar service called AT&T Family Map for a monthly fee of $10-15. I believe that's a white-labeled version of an existing app (it might be Life360, not sure) with some integration into their back office APIs. I really encourage the Kyte folks to do some investigation here; other carriers might be looking to solve similar problems with respect to family location. That is, after all, the carriers' most lucrative market segment.
On the fiction side, I absolutely loved Shogun by Clavell. I didn't know what to expect, and I found an epic that was captivating in many ways. I also started Neil Gaiman's Sandman series. I realize I'm about 10 years behind everyone else, and I've found it most deserving of all of the hubbub.
With respect to nonfiction, I enjoyed Schroeder's recent biography of Warren Buffett, entitled the Snowball. It was much less of a hagiography than much of what you read on him. He's a fascinating, complex man.
Not sure if you will see this but have you read any of Clavell's followups to Shogun yet? I recently read Shogun as well and really loved it, but haven't had the courage to tackle the other books in the series - as they sound so different (and take place hundreds of years later).
Ha, this is actually pretty funny in retrospect. There I was, giving a talk on all of this great stuff we do with our data, having no idea that a good portion of that data had just vanished. The universe has many potent mechanisms for keeping us humble.
Something like this happened to me several years back... I accidentally deleted a table full of emails out of a spam appliance when I thought I was in my development window. Thanking my stars it happened at 5pm on a Friday afternoon, took me the entire weekend to reconstruct the database. Ever since then I set my production terminal backgrounds to bright red so I can't miss what window I'm in :)
For a lighter side of both Steve Russell and Alan Kotok, you absolutely must read Steven Levy's Hackers.
A large chunk of this book deals with the very early computer scene of MIT in the late 1950s and 1960s. Both of those guys played a big role, especially Russell. He developed a game, Spacewar, that just enraptured the whole PDP crowd and led to this mania of gameplay and hacking, gameplay and hacking, etc.
It is really a delightful book. It's great to see these gentlemen recognized for their more formal contributions.
Unrelated: one thing we've really learned with this launch is the value of a great video. People seem to be responding really well to that as compared to a wall of text, probably because it's much more effective in telling the story behind the product. These videos actually aren't all that expensive, either.
I agree with the author that Chef is an incredibly powerful tool and that it has numerous benefits over plain old bash. However, I'm reluctant to actually use it because of its dependencies. Chef relies on CouchDB, RabbitMQ, and Solr, and all of those have non-trivial dependencies as well. Then, with a stack like that, I worry about the overheard involved.
FWIW, Puppet's dependencies are much simpler. I don't know much about Chef vs Puppet, but I can say that from an installation and dependency maintenance POV, Puppet wins.
To be clear, those dependencies are required for running your own open source chef server.
You can use chef without the server, as chef-solo, or let Opscode run it for you in the form of Opscode Hosted Chef. We do make it easy to install Chef Server through Chef Solo itself, or with our Ubuntu/Debian apt repository.
I never understood what kind of person/company would trust a hosted chef.
The chef databags/cookbooks tend to contain rather sensitive information (ssh-keys, passwords). Handing all that stuff over to a third-party borders on criminal negligence to me.
If you've already decided on Chef then the Opscode platform provides great value. You get the best and most knowledgable Chef admins handling your Chef server for a few bucks per hour.
Just to be clear, this has always been a core goal with Puppet - very low dependencies to make it easy to adopt.
There are some real downsides - we have to do a lot more coding, and it can be tough to get all of the hot newness - but we think the users benefit from a much simpler solution that's much easier to support.
You really should check out CFEngine 3. Very few dependencies (pcre,berkeleydb,openssl), and they also provide free packages with all the dependencies included: http://cfengine.com/download
The memory footprint is about 10 MB, install size maybe 30 MB.
Speaking of dependencies, CFEngine 3 is written in C and has 3 dependencies:
berkeley db,
libcrypo,
and PCRE.
It compiles into small binaries and is usable anywhere - in the cloud, on supercompute clusters, on the desktop or laptop, on a smartphone, in embedded devices.
Thanks for pointing this out. We JUST pushed a change this week where we removed a huge banner saying "We help families find and manage blahblahblah" and replaced it with a few other things. Maybe we need to revert that!
Experiment 0: I bought a hotel affiliate site off of flippa. It did pretty well initially, but I didn't do enough investigation into how the previous owner had been generating traffic. In short, there was a lot of untoward stuff going on. As I was getting all of that straightened out, the site got (deservedly) banned from Google's index for a few key terms. I made my money back and learned a valuable lesson: don't buy sites off of flippa.
Experiment 1: I created a few different sites around a big product launch, and monetized via product reviews and the Amazon Affiliate program. This worked very well for a period of time; the site was grossing $100 a day for several weeks with essentially 0 work. Slowly, my site dipped in the rankings for the key terms as much bigger players got their act together. From this, I learned that one-off sites can be valuable, but probably not in the long term. I should've sold the sites at their peak.
Experiment 2: I wrote some algorithms to find underpriced stocks and then examinate a few strategies around that security's options. This was actually a lot of fun. Based on my program, I ended up buying out-of-the-money puts on 5 or 6 different stocks. I'm sitting on a small profit right now. The next step is to exit my positions, finetune the algorithms based on a few key things I learned, and put more money into action.