Entrepreneurness

Recently I stumbled across a very nice, quick and easy way to get an on-line shop up and running.  Below there is some information and deals to help you do this yourself. First of all, shopify.com  takes just minutes to get up and running and has a very clean design and easy to use interface.  Click here to get a 30 day trial, free! Unfortunately with any online shop you need to pay an additional 2.9% + 30 cents per credit card transaction.  (Pretty hefty fees if you ask me!  This may give some insight to why .)  Luckily, Braintree.com is offering 1000 startups $50,000 worth of transactions for free!  Here are their standard costs  https://www.braintreepayments.com/pricing . Here is the information you'll need to know to get the link set up between Shopify and Braintree .  You will need to change the default credit card gateway to Braintree, those instructions are here . You'll also need to know the credit cards that Braintree can pr...

Add audio, either with a voice over and or background music. To do a voiceover, iMovie has a really great voice over feature where when you click the microphone icon on screen it will allow you to record audio and will overlay the audio on whatever audio may already exist for the clip that you select to voice over on top of.  You can easy drag and move the voice over.  It is added as an additional audio track to your video. To add background music you can search google for "production music" and "royalty free".  This will help you find lyric-less music that might be appropriate for your movie.  Another tip would be to search youtube for keywords that might be relevant to your topic of interest. Using soundflower an extension that allows applications to pass audio to other applications, you can now have quicktime record sound directly from your computer. First, open the System Preferences and select Soundflower (2ch) as the device for sound output inside the So...

Tips for managing ADHD and ADD,   Patrick McKenna  and Rick Green 1.  Acceptance.   You need to understand that you are "built" differently. 2.  Educate yourself. It's NOT about a lack of willpower. It's NOT about laziness. It's NOT about stupidity. It's hereditary/genetic, it's a part of who you are.   Understand your particular "flavor"—ADD is different, very different, in different people. Target the challenges that trip you up. 3. Bend the world to you Do what you are good at, have other people do the things you aren't good at 4. Chunk it up. Put tasks in small chunks that have clear goals and are actionable items. 5. Take action. Take an action and let it lead to inspiration 6. Always move forward. Start doing, stop waiting  7. Use doorways to remind you.   Leave things in front of the doorway.  Tape notices by the light switch. 8. Make an Entrance. Be a positive, supportive, interesting person each ...

Many years ago my aunt was recovering from a breast cancer surgery and a friend came over to help her feel better.  She began by massaging her feet.  This made me curious because after such a major surgery, why would a foot massage make much of a difference?  She showed me this chart and explained all organs have their corresponding projected area on the foot.  The study is called reflexology, and it is a form of alternative medicine. What if this is true.  It would make sense to why walking and an active life creates a healthier lifestyle.  You would stimulate all of your organs as you walk.  Maybe that is why foot massages are one of the biggest delights that we often forget about. What if a simple foot massage was the cure to many ailments and one of the secrets of a healthier lifestyle was to simply pay attention to your feet more? Here's a gentle reminder to take a breath, rub your feet, and smile a bit more.  Because, maybe things are ...

I had some colleagues attend Startup weekend and this is the advice they came back with. When you have an idea that you want to pursue, in the order of importance this is what investors consider before placing their money where your mouth is. 1.  The concept is worth something to somebody 2.  There is a viable business model to accompany the concept 3.  You know how to execute Get the 'MVP' the Minimum viable product out the door and fail and learn quickly to quickly develop a quality product and deliver something that the customer wants.  Learn early and Learn often. It is not as important that you are able to build the prototype right away, but that you believe thant you can build the prototype. Goodluck!

If you are looking for something specific on Craigslist, specifically something as crucial as finding housing, you may spend way too much time refreshing Craigslist and re-reading the same posts over and over again. But, there is a better way! First of all, when doing a housing search, Craigslist usually gives you a couple of different tabs to select from within your area.  These tabs may not limit your search enough for you, especially if you are looking for only particular cities within a tab. Here's a hint.  Inside of the search box... type the cities you are searching for, for example: (mountain view)|(palo alto) The parenthesis will group the search term you are looking for, and the "|" is the symbol for 'or'. Now, after you perform the search, if you scroll all the way to the bottom of your search results you'll see this symbol.  Click the orange RSS and you'll get let to a webpage with a bunch of text. Ignore the scary code and copy the ...

This past weekend was Hack the Future 3 at The Tech Museum in San Jose.  Hack The Future is a self-directed hackathon for young future hackers. Mentors from different companies and backgrounds are there with different stations for the kids to participate in. Willow Garage and the PR2 robot were there for kids to go ahead and hack.  It was an all day event, and parents and kids arrived early, waiting at the entrance for the museum doors to open. I've been working at Willow Garage to help organize their education outreach in the community.  The company had participated in a previous Hack the Future and was eager to increase their educational impact on the community and simplify their material to allow the youngest of minds to be able to try their hand at hacking and robotics.  It's a pretty substantial milestone for a technology when you can finally simplify it enough for novices to be able to use it and gain enough from it to get them interest...