Building a credit card killer from Iowa ?

Posted November 21, 2011 at 1:42 am

by Alyson Shontell

There’s a tiny 12-person startup churning out of Des Moines, Iowa.

Dwolla was founded by 28-year-old Ben Milne; it’s an innovative online payment system that sidesteps credit cards completely.

Milne has no finance background, yet his little operation is moving between $30 and $50 million per month; it’s on track to move more than $350 million in the next year.

Unlike PayPal, Dwolla doesn’t take a percentage of the transaction. It only asks for $0.25  whether it’s moving $1 or $1,000.

We interviewed Milne about how he is building a credit card killer and Square rival from the middle of the nation where VCs and press are scarce.

BI: We hear you’re making credit card companies angry. How are you doing that?

Ben Milne: Ultimately we’re trying to build the next Visa, not the next PayPal.  We’re building a human network based on how we think the future of payments will work. The current model needs to be blown up.

Dwolla started out of my old company.  I owned a speaker manufacturing company and we sold everything directly through a website.  I got really obsessed with interchange fees and [continue]…

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Homeless man turns his life around by selling soap

Posted November 17, 2011 at 3:55 am

by Steven Greenberg

Dennis Anderson never thought that he would be unemployed and then homeless after college. But that’s exactly what happened to him after he graduated in 2005 from Massasoit Community College in Massachusetts.

The only jobs he could find were meager-paying retail ones. And it didn’t look like his employment options were going to get any better. So on a whim, he took his last savings, packed up his car and drove cross country to the West Coast.

When he arrived, he had no job, home, family or friends. He did have ambition, which helped him launch and build Oregon-based Anderson Soap Company, which manufactures whipped soaps, and lip balms and other cosmetics.

He now has a home, a family, and dreams for an even better future. Anderson recently spoke about his change of fortune — including how Pabst Blue Ribbon beer and different kinds of foods figure into his success — with Steven Greenberg, CBS radio expert for jobs and host of the nationally syndicated radio program, “Your Next Job.”

Just a few years ago, you hit bottom — you had no job, and you were homeless. How did you turn things around?

I was completely tapped out just five years ago. I didn’t have a place to live or a job, so I filled up my car with my few belongings, emptied my bank account of the $300 I had to my name and used that for gas to drive across country to California. Things were very tough, but I tried to view my situation as an opportunity to do something new, not as a dead end.

Did you think you would remain homeless for long? [continue]…

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10 U.S. companies that are hiring like crazy

Posted November 14, 2011 at 1:45 am

by Christina Settimi

With unemployment hovering above 9 percent and the whiff of recession in the air, many companies are keeping their expansion plans on hold. A select few, however, are expanding like mad.

A close look at the Forbes annual ranking of 100 best small public companies offers some hope on the dreary jobs front. During the previous three fiscal years, 84 of the 100 companies boosted payroll — by an average 48 percent — adding a total of 56,885 heads.

A vast majority came aboard during the natural course of business, not via acquisition.

We drilled down further and found the 10 most powerful job creators of the bunch [continue]…

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Steve Jobs biography in 3,000 words

Posted November 10, 2011 at 2:17 am

In the current New Yorker, Malcom Gladwell boils it down to this: Jobs was a “tweaker”

by Philip Elmer-DeWitt

I’m only 46% of the way through Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs, according to the Kindle app on my iPad, but I’ve read enough to recognize that Malcom Gladwell has captured the essence of the book — and the man — in his 3,000-word review in the current New Yorker.

Gladwell’s thesis is that Jobs, at heart, was an information-age version of those 18th and early 19th century engineers who put Britain in the forefront of the industrial revolution by creating and perfecting the automatic mule for spinning cotton.

Such men, according to a recent article by economists Ralf Meisenzahl and Joel Mokyr, provided the “micro inventions necessary to make macro inventions highly productive and remunerative.”

It’s a strong thesis — one that Isaacson doesn’t offer his readers — but what brings it to life in Gladwell’s piece are the [continue]…

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More trash than treasure at storage auctions

Posted November 4, 2011 at 1:13 am

By Jonathan Berr

Attention Storage Wars fans: The odds of you striking it rich at a storage auction are as remote as those of mortal enemies Darrell Sheets and Dave Hester dancing the cha-cha cheek-to-cheek, or fashion maven Barry Weiss wearing beige.

Though the hit cable-TV show does give viewers an idea of what goes on at the auctions, it doesn’t give the entire picture. Buying and selling merchandise based on a cursory inspection of an abandoned storage locker is not an easy way to make a living.

Indeed, what gets viewers hooked on Storage Wars is that the cast members don’t always make a profit.

Anyone tempted to take a stab at being a “storage warrior” should be advised that lots of people are getting the same idea. Attendance at storage auctions has soared thanks to the cable show, and prices for lockers have followed suit.

“Yes, they are [up] big time,” said Sheets, who calls himself “The Gambler,” in an email. “A locker that would normally sell for $300 a few years ago now costs $1,000 and up.”

Storage Wars has worked the growing crowds at auctions into its plotlines. Weiss, a self-styled collector who buys auctions in the hopes of [continue]…

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Build your home-based dream business

Posted November 1, 2011 at 11:34 pm

Tear up that office lease. Starting a business from home isn’t just about the money you save, it’s about the lifestyle it creates.

by EricMarkowitz  

The age of the virtual company is upon us. Future historians may look back and declare that the concept of offices began their slow but inevitable extinction some time around 2011 A.D.

Our grandchildren will watch movies like Office Space with a touch of bewilderment—did people really have to sit in front of a desktop computer for eight hours every day?

Yes, this is all an exaggeration. After all, some offices will need to provide a space for face-to-face meetings. But it’s hard to argue that the growing popularity of the home-based business model isn’t becoming a characteristic of the entrepreneurial mindset.

Now, more than half of all small businesses in the United States are based out of the entrepreneur’s home, according to the Small Business Administration. That’s around 15 million home-based businesses, and represents about $500 billion in revenue every year.

Obviously, the costs of running a business from home is advantageous because it’s cheap.

It’s simple, says Danny Wong, co-founder of Blank Label, a start-up that offers custom men’s shirts. Wong and his co-founders have a completely bootstrapped approach to their business model—and opening an office just didn’t make sense for them.

“We just didn’t want to pay,” Wong says. Blank Label is also a paradigm for the 2011 version of a virtual company. They use video chat and Google Wave when the team isn’t together, and they’ve never even met one of their developers, who lives in Orange County. “We video chat with him, but he’s always kind of in the dark,” Wong says.

Cutting costs early on can be attractive to [continue]…

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10 of the world’s coolest jobs

Posted November 1, 2011 at 1:48 pm

by Brielle Jaekel with Constance Parten

Unless you’re a Powerball winner, or you’ve inherited a large sum of money, chances are you have to wake up every day, go to work and make a living.

For most people, a job is just a job, little more than a way to pay the bills. But what if work were more like play? What if, instead of living for the weekend, you lived for Monday morning?

There are people who feel that way; you just have to find them. We did. For instance, rock climber Steph Davis climbs up the north face of Castleton Tower in Castle Valley, Utah. Yeah, she gets paid to do that.

Here are 10 of the coolest jobs in the world, and the people who do them [continue]…

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$100,000 a year with a YouTube video?

Posted October 31, 2011 at 3:43 am

by Claire Cain Miller

Katie Clem posted a video on YouTube this month of her daughter Lily’s poignant and funny reaction to her sixth birthday present, a trip to Disneyland, for her friends and family. Then it went viral.

In three weeks it has been watched more than five million times, and Lily has become a minor Internet celebrity. Of far more importance, at least to Lily’s parents, the video is poised to make enough money from advertisements to send Lily to college.

Creating a video that attracts millions of viewers and becomes a pop culture phenomenon involves an unpredictable cocktail of luck and timing. A dash of cute babies or people acting like idiots can only help. But once a video goes viral, making some cold cash depends on quick action.

Here is some advice on how to take advantage of your 15 minutes of Internet fame from people who did just that [continue]….

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Earn $2,000 a night as a boomtown stripper

Posted October 27, 2011 at 10:21 pm

by Blake Ellis

WILLISTON, N.D. (CNNMoney) — Forget Vegas. Strippers are discovering they can make ten times as much dancing in the oil boomtown of Williston, N.D.

Thousands of men have come here seeking high-paying jobs working for the oil companies. And, at the end of the day (or four or five days when they’re working on a rig), many of them are looking for some female companionship at one of the town’s two strip club’s, Whispers or Heartbreakers.

Word has gotten out about just how much money can be made dancing in Williston’s strip clubs. The money is phenomenal, but the competition is stiff.

Whispers has received applications from exotic dancers in Hawaii, Alaska, even the Czech Republic and Germany, said Melissa Slapnicka, the co-owner of the club. She’s been bombarded with so many applications that she only gives each dancer a week to try out. If they don’t work out, they don’t come back, she said.

“We used to have to beg people to come, and now we have to turn them away because we don’t have room for all the people who want to dance,” she said. “My best girls would rather dance here than in Vegas, because they make more money here.”

Kit, a 36-year old stripper who has been dancing for 10 years in places like Las Vegas, Texas and California, first started coming to Williston a few years ago in between higher-paying jobs, because she had friends who danced in the town who were able to hook her up with gigs.

At first, the nightly tips were nothing special, but over the past year — thanks to the thousands of men who have flocked here and landed high-paying jobs — she has been making $2,000 to $3,000 a night, about the same amount she would have earned in [continue]…

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Jobs admired zuckerberg for ‘not selling 0ut’

Posted October 25, 2011 at 1:55 am

by Sarah Frier

Steve Jobs, who mentored Silicon Valley technology leaders in the months before he died, said he admired Facebook Inc. co-founder Mark Zuckerberg for “not selling out.”

“We talk about social networks in the plural, but I don’t see anybody other than Facebook out there,” Jobs told biographer Walter Isaacson in excerpts of an interview released online by “60 Minutes,” the CBS television show. “Just Facebook, they’re dominating this.”

“I admire Mark Zuckerberg,” Jobs said of Facebook’s chief executive officer on the recording. “I only know him a little bit, but I admire him for not selling out, for wanting to make a company. I admire that, a lot.”

Jobs, who co-founded Apple Inc. (AAPL) and died Oct. 5, told Isaacson his opinions on competitors, including Google Inc. (GOOG) and Microsoft Corp. (MSFT), and of his struggles with cancer. The biography, which goes on sale today, was based on more than 40 interviews with Jobs and was previewed on last night’s “60 Minutes.”

Google, which competes with Apple in making operating systems for smartphones, had a lot in common with [continue]…

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