They first emailed to ask if the phone was still available. I replied yes and this was the response.

Thanks for your reply and am glad to know that it is still available for sale.However i have few questions on the product you are selling.
1,I would like to know the reason you are selling it..?
2,What is the current condition of the item..?
3,What is your firm price, though am okay with the listing price..?
4,Do you have the original box and the receipt for it ..?
5,Do you mind if i pay through paypal even though i will add an extra dollars to cover the shipping because am currently not local at the moment,Am out of town participating in a research project and i would like to purchase it from you on behalf of my friend and i think this is the best thing i could buy her because she has been a good firend to me.

If you do not have a PayPal account, you can do so by going to www.PayPal.com and set up your account it is free,easy and guarantees transaction safety.Once you send me your paypal email account, I will send you the payment for your item as well as $60 USD to cover shipping via USPS EXPRESS MAIL INTL.
I would be glad if my request is favorably considered.
Thanks

Seller beware of naturalearth9200@gmail.com

We can use this as an opportunity to re-evaluate things we’ve taken for granted and consider other paradigms. It’s human nature to want to use resources (money) now instead of saving for the future. Many even borrow on their future to pay for more stuff today. Debt is like getting on a carousel. It’s fun for a little while and you get an immediate rush, but you want to get off pretty quickly. If it keeps going, you’d get dizzy, tired, lose focus, and have a hard time finding your way. Carousels usually stop – unfortunately debt has the bad habit of continuing and even growing over time.

Maybe this isn’t the best way to live. Maybe there’s a better way.

If one regularly saved more money than earned, and invested it wisely, there may be a point where they no longer need to work. Wouldn’t this be better? Not that quitting working entirely is a desirable goal (maybe for some). When one has the option not to work and continues anyway it’s because they really want to contribute and not stuck because they have bills to pay (like a rat on a wheel with no exit).

It’s easy to be the rat. Live on credit cards, borrow money to buy a new car, buy a house, and hope your job doesn’t go away. It takes prudence to avoid these traps. I’m going to suggest a simple formula for finding your way off the wheel and into a life filled with more options -a life where you can choose how you spend your time. Time is our most precious commodity. We don’t know how much we have, but it is limited and when it’s gone – it’s gone.

The first step in getting on the right track is to see where you are. Take some time and calculate your annual cost of living. Be honest with yourself and really count everything you spend. To get off the carousel you must have assets which produce an annual return of at least this amount. For the sake of simplicity, let’s say your assets return a rate of 10%. Multiply your annual cost of living by 10 and this is the amount you must have in assets.

Example: If you spend $50,000 per year, you would need $500,000 ($50,000 x 10) in assets to cover your lifestyle.

The next step is to compute how long it will take you to accumulate a sufficient amount of assets. A financial calculator or Excel would be useful for this step since compound interest is involved.

Example: If you saved $10,000 per year, it would take 19 years to accumulate enough assets to cover your lifestyle.

A 25 year old could follow this plan and be financially independent by age 44. If you want to shorten the required time to achieve financial independence then you have two basic options:

1. Save more
2. Consume less

Example 1: If you saved $15,000 per year, it would take 16 years to accumulate enough assets to cover your lifestyle.

Example 2: If you spent $40,000 per year, it would take 17 years to accumulate enough assets to cover your lifestyle.

As long as your assets earn more per year than you spend, your wealth will continue to grow. Now you know how to get rich – go forth and prosper!

1. Find your passion

Is the business you intend to start a passion or are you just trying to make a quick buck? Starting a business requires long hours, financial investment, and sometimes ridicule from family or friends who think you should just work 9-5 and watch TV all evening. Once the initial rush of starting your own business wears off, passion will keep you going when everyone else is asleep.

If you’re in it just for the money, you will find your attention diverting elsewhere when there is no big payday in sight.

2. Research the industry

Just because you are good at something doesn’t mean you should start a business around it. Market research will allow you to determine if there is any demand for what you plan to offer. You may find an established company that is offering the same service you plan to offer with more benefits, a better reputation and a lower price.

The research may reveal underserved customers, though. If the market is dominated by large incumbent companies, you may be able to compete in a niche which would make you a fortune but would not be viable for larger firms.

3. Start Small

Rome wasn’t built in a day, so they say. Don’t succumb to the temptation to immediately expand your business. Start small and work out the inevitable problems. You’ll learn a lot along the way and have a better product to offer your customers. You may even discover a very profitable niche you didn’t know existed and change the focus of your business entirely. Think about expanding only after your core business is running smoothly.

4. Set Goals

As the owner, manager and employee, you will need to set goals to keep you focused. It will seem like there are a million things you should be working on and you can easily feel overwhelmed. By having written goals and intermediate stepping-stone goals along the way, you can keep yourself on track.

5. Develop an Exit Strategy

The final goal for your company should be… your exit. Unless you plan on doing this the rest of your life, you should know where you want the company to go. This will affect the decisions you make and shape your company. You could sell the company, retain ownership and hire management to run the day-to-day, or just close the doors and walk away. Each of these plans will require different actions on your part.

Google’s core competency is search. More broadly, Google excels at presenting data in a meaningful format. They are head and shoulders above any competitor in delivering relevant search results and this has made the company a juggernaut. If I were an investor, I’d be demanding Google keep focused on improving search and extending the competencies of search into new areas.

Google could be doing its own version of Wolfram Alpha which would be impressive, highly-used, and play to their strengths.

The two high profile projects I’m unsure about are Chrome and Android. People are going to use Google services and search regardless of which browser or mobile OS they use, so why get bogged down in an endless process of updates and competition when it’s unnecessary? Neither of these products cost the end user anything so it seems like a big expense for no additional revenue.

The two questions one must answer when evaluating a line of business are:

1. Are the businesses forming the corporate whole worth more than they would be under independent ownership?
2. Are the businesses creating value that equity holders cannot create through portfolio investing

I’m not sure all Google’s businesses would pass these tests.

PS) I love Google services, just making the case that they are not all benefiting shareholders.

Building a successful company requires not only skilled people, but people who work very well together. Getting the right mix of skills is easy compared to getting the right culture that inspires everyone to contribute at their peak performance. I think that’s one of the biggest weaknesses of finding potential teammates at present. You can easily look through someone’s profile and get a list of skills: programming language knowledge, web development skills, etc. What is missing, though, is the ability to easily verify the breadth of knowledge on the subject matter and the personality characteristics of the person.

Does anyone know if there’s a platform similar to Elance for entrepreneurs/startups? Elance is great for established companies to outsource work, but it’s not really geared towards startups. If there was something that had profiles and work samples of entrepreneurs and an ongoing list of budding startups, this would solve the problem of connecting the two. I think the current problem is that information is decentralized and there are probably a lot of redundant projects being worked on due to lack of information.

People who are employed and satisfied with their salary are unlikely to start their own company. It’s too much ‘risk’. For those who’ve unsuccessfully looked for jobs for months, the risk of starting their own company is more manageable because they don’t have to factor a salary into the equation. An employed person would have to justify making X dollars more than their current salary while an unemployed person wants to make more than he is now ($0).

The person is likely to start his own business doing what he knows from his previous job. By starting out of his home or renting an affordable office space, such as Awesome Inc. in Lexington, KY, he will have lower overhead and still provide a high quality service. With lower overhead, he can charge less and still remain profitable.

If you watch The Office, you can think about the Michael Scott Paper Company (MSPC) versus Dunder Mifflin. Dunder Mifflin has massive overhead due to the corporate office and several levels of management. MSPC is lean, efficient, and provides better service for a lower price.

This trend is made possible due to the increasing availability of communication and capital. The internet has facilitated a great portion of this trend with hints of the future market for resources being displayed on sites such as elance.com. Additionally, linked in, facebook, et al allow entrepreneurs to connect with venture capitalists.

In summary, don’t think about rising unemployment as a negative; instead, think of high unemployment as a sign that the economy is adjusting itself to the 21st century. We don’t need massive corporations to leverage economies of scale. We can connect the money with the ideas with the talent much more efficiently these days.

The Innovator’s Solution is the follow up to Christensen’s best seller The Innovator’s Dilemma. In The Innovator’s Dilemma, Christensen explains how industry leaders get blindsided by disruptive innovations because they are focusing too closely on their highest margin customers. The Innovator’s Solution uses academic research and examples to teach companies how to create disruptions and not be destroyed by them. Christensen argues that innovation is a predictable process, regardless of industry, and offers insight to managers on how to identify the right conditions for a disruptive innovation.

The Innovator’s Solution is written from the point of view of senior executives for a large company being able to identify disruptive innovations and move quickly into the new market. The information, however, works equally well for small start-up companies that are looking for opportunities.

The book is broken down into 10 chapters with each chapter dealing with one overall question. These questions are as follows:
1.    Is it possible to innovate without taking unacceptable risk?
2.    How can we beat our most powerful competitors?
3.    What products should we develop?
4.    Which initial customers will constitute the most viable foundation upon which to build a successful business?
5.    Which activities required to design, produce, sell, and distribute our products should our company do internally, and which should we rely upon our partners and suppliers to provide?
6.    How can we be sure that we maintain strong competitive advantages that yield attractive profits? How can we tell when commoditization is going to occur, and what can we do to keep earning attractive returns?
7.    What is the best organizational structure for this venture?
8.    How do we get the details of a winning strategy right? When is flexibility important, and when will flexibility cause us to fail?
9.    Whose investment capital will help us succeed, and whose capital might be the kiss of death?
10.    What role should the CEO play in sustaining the growth of the business?

When innovations are incremental, the established, leading firms in the industry are likely to maintain their dominance. With breakthrough innovations, however, new entrants can adapt better than established firms. When the challenge is to commercialize a simpler, more convenient product that sells for less money and appeals to a new or unattractive customer set, the new entrants are likely to beat the incumbents. Disruptive innovations don’t attempt to bring better products to established customers in existing markets. They redefine the trajectory by introducing products not as good as currently available products but offer other benefits such as convenience or lower price.

There are two basic types of disruption: low-end disruption and new-market disruption. Low-end disruption addresses over served customers with a lower-cost business model. New-Market disruption competes against nonconsumption.  Although new-market disruption initially competes with nonconsumption, as the performance improves they ultimately pull customers out of the original value network and into the new one. Incumbents feel no pain and worry little about the threat until the disruption is in the final stages. Incumbents are happy to focus on moving up-market and serving higher-margin consumers while the entrant satisfies the lower-margin consumers.

Products should be developed through market segmentation based on a new way of thinking about products. Christensen suggests that customers ‘hire’ products to do specific ‘jobs’. Instead of looking at the features of the products, identify what function the person wants the product to satisfy. An example of this is McDonald’s milkshake. Half of all milkshakes are sold in the morning. The reason for this is that commuters with a long drive wanted something they could consume with one hand, lasted long to make the drive less boring and could get quickly. The milkshake did this job better than any product McDonalds sells. Changing the milkshakes to healthier alternatives seems logical, but did not increase sales. Making the product more convenient by selling them in machines so customers could quickly get the product and go did increase sales.

The most attractive customers are nonconsumers of the current products. Since the customer’s reference point is not having the product, they will be satisfied with simple, crummy products. The entrant can then grow sales significantly without invoking retaliation from the established firms since they don’t feel the impact in their market.

There are two basic problems with products. They are either not good enough or more than good enough. When products are not good enough, the advantage is to develop internally. However, when products more than exceed the expectations, then the function should be outsourced. When companies keep improving on products that exceed the expectations of consumers, they will not accept an increase in price proportional to the improvements made over the previous version. When this happens, a product becomes commoditized. When a product becomes a commodity, it is difficult to earn above average returns.

The process of commoditization is inescapable, but so is the process of de-commoditization. Once a product becomes commoditized there will be the de-commoditization trend somewhere else in the value chain. Suppliers will strive to enable customers to deliver better performance in their end-use product by providing a better subsystem than competitors. The leading provider of subsystems find themselves selling differentiated products with attractive profitability.

The right organizational structure is a function of two factors: 1) fit with organizational processes and 2) fit with organization’s values. An autonomous organization should be spun off the main corporation for disruptive innovations. The mainstream organization will be sufficient with sustaining innovations. Heavyweight teams of executives should be used for disruptions that are a poor fit with the organizational processes while functional organizations should be used if they are a good fit.

The two types of innovation come from different places. Sustained innovations come from the top down while disruptive innovations come from within the organization by observation. For sustained innovation the company should make assumptions about the future using historical data and implement the strategy based on this information. For disruptions, the company should look at patters in the market and test whether the assumptions they have about the trend is correct. Once their assumptions are verified, then the company should implement the strategy.
Typically venture capital is better than corporate capital for creating disruptive products.

Senior executives should interface between disruptive growth businesses and mainstream businesses to determine which of the corporation’s resources and processes should be imposed on the new business and which should not. They should create a process to repeatedly launch successful growth businesses. Executives should also sense when circumstances are changing and teach others to recognize these signals.

On the top 5 issues, Obama is preferred in 4.

Rank Issues Obama McCain

1 Education 59% 14%

2 Health care 65% 20%

3 International trade 26% 51%

4 Energy 61% 22%

5 Encouraging
Technology/innovation 43% 23%

The study was commissioned by the creator of Dilbert, Scott Adams. He’s done an excellent analysis of the results on his blog over at: http://dilbert.com/blog

In other news, the stock market dropped like a rock yesterday and the government is buying all the bad debt they can get their hands on. Greenspan is calling this a “once-in-a-century” financial crisis. Is it time to stockpile food and trade our dollars for gold/silver? I’m hoping not but time will tell.