Saturday, December 22, 2007

The Nigerian Letter Scam arrives on Linkedin

Today I received a linkedin from A Marcus Elliker, Owner Import and Export from the Ivory Coast. I've been a big fan of the Nigerian letter scam (Dear Sir, $24021350 Million are waiting for you, just wire $10,000 now to get started) for years, be it in Email or via real letter (my dad has been receiving them for decades).
This is the first time I've gotten one on Linkedin - so congrats to Mr Elliker for being a cutting edge, 2.0 scamster!

Here's the screenshot:

Wednesday, December 19, 2007

US States and their comparable-sized countries


I found this interesting map on the Strange Maps blog today and thought you would enjoy it. Gives you an idea of the scale of the US economy! Now I'd only need to know where North and South Dakota are.....

Tuesday, December 18, 2007

My first experience with Facebook ads

After trying Ad Chap two weeks ago, one of my colleagues and I went straight to Facebook Ads today. We put together a little campaign in the ringtone space, wrote our own copy (the tool is quite simple) and hit the next button. The targeting is very neat, you can target by demos, gender, relationship status, interests and even political inclination (slightly more liberals than republicans, but very few people with political status on there in general). Then we hit the first snag: Facebook does not accept American Express cards! As I would imagine many business users have Amex, this is a real usability issue (no invoicing either). The next issue was, that it wouldn't let me use my card on my colleague's facebook account - but i only figured that one out by trying three times- there isn't any error messaging yet.

Finally we got the campaign live, but alas Facebook shut it down w/o giving a reason after about 20 minutes....

So summing up, nice concept, pretty mediocre execution so far!

Stay tuned for more updates

Sunday, December 16, 2007

Happy Holidays




I really like this greetings app built by Adi and his crew over at Oddcast. It's a nice combination of flash, user-generated photo and voice and an easy interface. Try it for yourself!

Thursday, December 06, 2007

Great internet entrepreneur video - here comes the bubble!

This has been removed from Youtube after a request by photographer Lane Hartwell to have it removed. Here it is again from Metacafe.


Here Comes Another Bubble - Celebrity bloopers here

Wednesday, December 05, 2007

Facebook still won't let me opt out of beacon!

After reading the latest summary about the Facebook beacon on Centernetworks I decided to once and for all opt out of Beacon. I clicked on the link within the blog post, logged in, selected the "don't spam me" option and hit save - bang I got to this:




What's up, Facebook? $15bn valuation, public outcry and you still won't let me opt out?

Tuesday, December 04, 2007

Indispensable source of VC funding information

I just came across this site by PWC - you can lookup all US venture investments by Quarter - down to the level of Investor/ Sector and Region. Great tool to find out what's going on!

PricewaterhouseCoopers: Global: Insights & Solutions: MoneyTree™ Survey Report

Costa Rica 2007 - Pura Vida!

Vanessa and I went to Costa Rica for Thanksgiving this year - great place to visit! We really enjoyed the Tico attitude to life - Pura Vida or "take it easy" - make sure you raft the Pacuare when you go down there!

My Personal DNA

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