Category Archives: Geo-Europe

Motivation for Starting Your Home Based Business

Did you know that increasing number of professionals working from home — even if they are employed with large companies? The advances in Internet and communications have made this possible.

And with such experience (or taste), some people are finally able to make a decision to start working on their own from their home office.

Most home based businesses can outsource 100% of non-key business functions. It’s a definite trend if you see the increase in project volume of sites like Elance.

We are seeing every possible work – from easy digital products to high-end investment banking work — being done from a home based business. Starting your home business is easier today than ever before, but most people don’t realize it, or don’t want to act on it!

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Here’s a thoughtful article written by Lazz Laszlo.

Has the idea of starting a home based business of your own been rolling around in your head for days, weeks, months, or sadly… even years?

You almost started a couple of times, but for some reason something came up that resulted in you deciding to delay the very first step.

The first step is truly the hardest, but there’s no denying that the first step is STARTING.

A man by the name of James Cash Penney who died at the age of 96 in the year of 1971 said something that perhaps will help you to understand that you are not the only one to have been timid about beginning a new business, in particular, your new home based business.

James Cash Penney said, “It is always the start that requires the greatest effort.”

He knew, and I’m sure you know, he’s the man behind the retailer J.C. Penney. You have to just love his middle name as it relates to his last name and capsulizes his life so to speak. He’s got a great story to tell if you take the time to find it and read it. Just to imagine that he lived through two world wars is amazing in itself.

There are lots of excuses used by people as to why they haven’t started their new home based business. Some of them include, but not limited to; just don’t have the time; just not ready yet; not sure which type of home based business to start; no money; looking for a partner; haven’t found the right product; or have to learn more.

If you’re in this zone of not being able to start, investigating the lives of others may just be the catalyst to kick you in the behind, knock you off the fence, and get you started. Benjamin Franklin said, “An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.”

The money you spend on a new pair of shoes is gone forever once it is spent and after weeks, months, and even perhaps years, those shoes will be discarded. The knowledge you gain from the article you read, the book you buy, the course you take, or the mentor you befriend will be with you for a lifetime.

You are not the first to have the desire to start a business. You certainly won’t be the last, but if you don’t start, you’ll be among the thousands who wished they had. It’s your choice to either get started or just forget it.

Some of my favorite people to read about have been, but certainly not limited to just these people;

Jeno Paulucci, the creator of Chung King Foods brought Chinese food to the kitchen tables of America. One of my favorite parts of his story was when he made a split-second decision and ate a grasshopper rather than… well, you’ll have to read his story.

Walt Disney began his dream, essentially in a garage. There are a lot of companies that begin in a garage, apparently because the kitchen table wasn’t available. Bill Hewlett and David Packard began the company that bares their name in a garage and as a footnote, they wound up burning down the garage. Oops! Apple Computer is another garage beginning business.

William Wrigley Jr., essentially stumbled on his fortune with chewing gum when this item he used as an incentive became more popular than the item he was selling.

Reading one or two of what I like to call, “How’d they do it” stories can shed a lot of light on what it really takes to get a business off the ground. It would be smart to make this an ongoing practice of reading about how others built their businesses, but don’t use the excuse of having to read just one more, and another, and another, and another… delaying your own start indefinitely.

The message here is that you have to focus and disregard what the naysayers think and say, this includes that little naysayer voice in your own head. Do you really want to do what other people want you to do, or do you want to put your efforts, energy, and brain power into doing what you really would like to do?

If you’re embarrassed as to what people will think of you while you are climbing and stumbling on the ladder of success, you might as well quit now. Success is a bumpy road with lots of hazards and stress, which is another couple of reasons why people seek the safety of a job rather than beginning a home based business in their off hours.

Dean Martin, the entertainer said, “Successful people make mistakes.” Some people make more mistakes than others, but I have never met anyone who has only made one mistake in their life. I was taught that there is a lesson in every mistake, but more to the point, you can learn from the mistakes made by others. Read a biography or two of people behind some of the greatest achievements in history and you’ll see that it wasn’t always smooth sailing.

If you are not just a little bit daring and willing to spit in the face of pessimism, than you’re not living.

Malcolm Forbes said, “Venture nothing, and life is less than it should be.”

It’s time to start your journey into business. You don’t have to go at break-neck speed, but you do have to begin. It’s been said that the best part of the trip is not the destination, but the journey itself. Begin your journey today.

Yes, it sometimes hurts to be entrepreneurial and a visionary. It is full of embarrassment and behind-your-back ridicule, neither of which is lethal. Try something and if it doesn’t work, try something else. The adversities in your life will fertilize the genius within you. I’ll leave you with this Welsh proverb; adversity and loss make a man wise.

About the Author: Lazz Laszlo is a former Investment Executive and Radio & Television Financial Reporter with many entrepreneurial endeavors to his credit. He spends his time as an emcee, public speaker, enjoying life and writing about business, travel, retirement, strategy, and pleasure. To learn more, please visit Lazz’s website; http://www.925-wage-slave-alternatives.com

Low Cost Laptops by 7iDigital

7iDigital — a new venture by 7Avenues Private Equity — has been working to offer very affordable low-cost consumer electronics: Laptops, Mobile Phones, and Digital Cameras — starting with laptops in the very near future. With healthy specifications, and price starting under $250, they can meet the need of a wide range of students, professionals, and businesses.

7iDigital

To learn more about this venture, go here: http://7avenues.com/7iDigital.html

Here’s the key message from 7iDigital:

“We believe the cost of mobile/ notebook computing is way too prohibitive and that today’s market leaders are just not capable of offering low cost laptops, even if they wanted to do it, because of their heavy fixed and operating costs, along with millions of dollars that they must spend on advertising to stay alive — all of which you have to pay for when you buy your laptop!

And on the other side, we are also seeing some innovative models coming up, which are priced under $400, but they often lack something useful/critical – a good hard drive, a dvd player, or a good battery pack. With millions of new Internet users every year, there is no reason why we should not have a low cost laptops that can also do all the basic professional work.

And we have been thinking about this for a while now, and decided to use our collective technology and business expertise to come up with quality laptops that are still very low cost. We plan to do this by having a minimum fixed cost base and will let our satisfied customers advertise for us and pass the savings to them. “

You can sign-up at www.7iDigital.com to receive more info and updates by email.

Based on info that can be shared as of now, the laptops will be first launched in India in the very near future, and then they will also start becoming available for shipment in Europe and North America.

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Just last week, there was a news report of Intel planning to launch sub-$300 laptop, though no timeframe was given.

Intel, the leading chip maker, is right in its market assessment. Over the last two years, the growth rates of notebooks have overtaken that of the desktops.

One of the most frequent questions has been: “What are the specs for your laptops? What all can one do with them?”

Here’s the Team’s Answer: We are committed to bringing good quality laptops at affordable prices, but we will not offer weak specs like some companies are doing. For example, bringing models with prices like Rs 14,500 etc but some of them are not even fully functional with just 128 MB RAM and 2-3GB Hard Drive – you can’t do much with those specs!

When we say low cost laptops, we are not aiming to cut corners on essential capabilities. We want to address the need for a functional laptop at low cost that will support the full range normal home usage – e.g. Internet, email, audio-video playback, office applications, document editing etc.

While our focus is to offer affordable low cost laptops, we also want to offer a couple of high performance models that can be used for computing intensive works like software development, gaming, etc.

Our laptops will support two operating systems: Microsoft Windows and Linux — our customers can choose. We are bound by business agreements not to share details till end-June.

We believe many of our buyers will are located outside India and they would like to buy a laptop for their family members in India. Reputation is important to us and we will not offer you something that we would not buy for our own family members.

Well, that’s all for now. We will share more updates about the planned notebook models soon.

Thanks,

7iDigital Team

www.7iDigital.com

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JPMorgan buys Bear Stearns for $2 per Share!

$2 a Share for shares that were trading about $60 last week! Amazing things you can do with $2 per share in a bearish market.

Over the weekend Bear Stearns showed its empty wallet to the Fed and managed to convince US Treasury Secy Henry Paulson for a bailout plan.

And over the weekend, the Federal Reserve cut its discount rate by 25 basis points and offered to lend money to several financial firms, in an effort to prop up the US financial sector. Well, a lot of props have been put already (refer our previous posts on US Banking sector crisis).

With the help of further cut in discount rate, JP Morgan Chase offered to buy rival investment bank Bear Sterns for $2 a share, with a total value of $236 million.  It could have been 99 cents per share as well, but no, that would look too bad! The deal occurred Sunday night, with the US federal government acting as a catalyst to avoid a bankruptcy.

For anyone who’s been looking at Bear Stearns, Cash flow problems have been brewing for the last few months – they had clearly over leveraged themselves – and this weekend did it.

To quote AP news:

JPMorgan Chief Financial Officer Michael Cavanagh did not say what would happen to Bear Stearns’ 14,000 employees worldwide, or whether the 85-year-old Bear Stearns name would live on after surviving the Great Depression and a slew of recessions. He told analysts and investors on a conference call that JPMorgan was most interested in buying Bear Stearns’ prime brokerage business, which completes trades for big investors such as hedge funds.

This CNN report has more info:

http://edition.cnn.com/2008/BUSINESS/03/17/world.markets/index.html

JPMorgan inherits some liabilities as well. For example, about $16.5 million property liability in the form of lease rental agreement that Bear Stearns had signed in London with the Canary Wharf Group (CWG).

This news over the weekend has resulted in hard falls of various stock indices across Asia as well. The Indian Sensex fell 951 points today (6% drop in one day).

EBay Sellers Strike Looks Serious

If you are not actively into online business, you may not have heard about it yet.

A large number of small sellers at EBay are on a strike this week to protest at the treatment they are receiving from the company. Given that EBay generates revenues from the sellers (and not the buyers directly), the sellers are protesting against two things:

(a) The recent increases in fee which is making it very difficult for smaller sellers – who are not ‘power sellers’ (there are various fees that a seller has to pay: listing fee, final value fee, and then PayPal fee).

(b) The fact that EBay has removed the ability of sellers to give negative feedback on troublesome buyers. If you visit the forums, many sellers are especially annoyed this change, because it creates an uneven playing field where the buyer can get away with hurting a seller.

Different reports are quoting different numbers – but the fact is the Ebay listings and sales have gone down as a result of this. The management is sticking to its stand, while the small sellers want to raise us their voice as much as they can in the one week’s time, because many of them can’t afford to not sell for long.

The fee increase mentioned above actually reflects the fact that EBay is struggling with the ongoing damage caused by refunds/returns done by fake sellers and fake buyers – both of them are increasing – and unless EBay uses some new steps to police this aspect (which should involve trusted EBayers in some way to share market intelligence) – this trend will continue to hurt EBay and the majority of genuine EBayers who have been selling / buying on EBay for almost a decade now.

In fact, many trusted smaller sellers have closed down their EBay stores in the last 6-12 months due o the reducing profit margins available to a smaller seller. No doubt, new sellers will take their place because it is a large eco-system.

But this whole episode makes one thing very clear: If we can create a similar system as EBay and get some interested traffic to it, there is a demand for it, and it can take-off.

Here are some news reports on this topic:

CNN: http://money.cnn.com/2008/02/07/smbusiness/ebay_boycott.fsb/

http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abn/y06/m08/i16/s01

And some of the best discussion is happening these blog posts:

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/29/sellers-give-negative-feedback-on-ebay-changes

http://webpronews.com/topnews/2008/02/20/ebay-boycott-having-minimal-effect