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A million-dollar girl in cyberspace

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The Internet is indeed a gold mine and we, Netizens, just have to know how to grab those gemstones to become millionaires, even billionaires!

Indeed, sky’s the limit in cyberspace.


Ashley Qualls barefoot at her desk at the office-basement of her new 4-bedroom home.

Take the case of Ashley Qualls, a 17-year-old Internet user who’s now the big boss of a million-dollar business in the US.

Using her wits and imagination – and of course her computer – Ashley began making background designs in 2004 for the online social networking website MySpace and turned her hobby into a multi-million dollar enterprise!

Ashley is now the head of whateverlife.com, a website she started when she was just 14 — with eight dollars borrowed from her mother. Fast-forward to 2007: Her website now grosses more than $1 million a year.

What’s really fascinating is that Ashley didn’t set out to start a business. The Internet practically did it for her. Web design was a hobby, something she’d been learning online since she was 9.

As a high-school sophomore, she figured out how to create layouts for MySpace pages, and her friends at Lincoln Park High School were keen to customize theirs, much like school lockers.

As word spread throughout the MySpace universe, the 15-year-old couldn’t afford the servers to support her exploding online audience. A friend suggested using Google AdSense, which generates ad revenue based on a site’s traffic.

She started making cheery, colorful and whimsical designs with lots of hearts, her favorite. Then she bought a website and called it whateverlife.com, using the $8 she borrowed from her mom. She then put all her creations in the site.

Next, she took quotes from popular songs and built backgrounds around those quotes. “Teenage girls love quotes,” Ashley says.

Ashley has created nearly 3,000 layouts, her monthly audience is around 7 million, and revenue has grown from a couple of thousand bucks a month to as much as $70,000 — more than $1 million in less than two years!

Ashley used to live in a one-bedroom apartment with her mom and sister in a working-class neighborhood in America. But with her earnings, she has built a four-bedroom house with her very own office in the basement.

When her success story began in 2004, Ashley’s parents were divorced. She and her little sister, Shelby, were all crammed into her mother’s one-bedroom apartment.

When the first check arrived, her mother was doubtful, wondering if her daughter could really make money off a website. But Ashley was confident, telling her mother: “No, I really trust this. I think it’s really gonna happen.”

Ashley was right. The checks kept coming and the business kept growing — to the point where she could afford to buy a brand new four-bedroom house for them to live in. Ashley also hired her mother, Linda LaBrecque, to help manage the company.

Ashley has created background designs for songs by popular artists like Britney Spears. This MySpace background design includes lyrics from the new Spears song “Gimme More.”

In addition to her mom, Ashley hired three friends to help with the business, teaching them design and then requiring them to make a minimum of 25 designs a week.

Has the price of Ashley’s business success been the loss of a part of her childhood? She doesn’t think so.

“You know, when I’m with my friends, I’m still 17,” she says.

Ashley has even turned down a deal for her own reality television program. “I’m really stubborn, like my mom,” she says, “So I know what I want from business. And I don’t want that. I like my privacy. I like to hang out with my friends. I don’t want cameras following me around.”

Unlike many adults, Ashley has not succumbed to the temptations that new wealth can bring. She pays herself a modest salary of $3,000 a month. Aside from the house, she hasn’t made any other major purchases.

“I don’t even know how to put this,” says Ashley, “But it’s just kind of like the shiny feeling that when you have this money, it kind of goes away after a while. It gets old, you know. Yeah, I can go out and buy you know something really cool. But at the same time I mean I don’t really need too much. I like to invest it back into the business.”

Ashley, whose divorced parents didn’t attend college and knew little about the Web themselves, didn’t have the resources and connections that Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, My Start-Up Life’s Ben Casnocha, and myYearbook’s Catherine Cook have drawn on so effectively. But Ashley did have a bright idea and the technology to share it.

In the Internet world, having a bright idea and the knowledge of how to spread it is often enough to start making money big-time!

I hope Ashley’s story would spur budding Internet geniuses and millionaires to start piling in those greenbucks!

Facebook: It’s smiling like a billion-dollar baby

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An Internet baby is rocking the world!

Launched globally only on Sept. 11, 2006, Facebook is zooming to the top of the social networking world, leaving MySpace, Friendster and the other oldies gasping for breath.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg

As a testament of its growing popularity, Microsoft Corp. beat out rival Google Inc. yesterday (Oct. 24) in a battle to invest in Facebook, agreeing to pay $240 million for a roughly 1.6 percent stake in the Web phenomenon and expand a deal to sell advertising.

Microsoft and Facebook said the $240 million investment valued Facebook at $15 billion, which analysts said was a steep price and a bet the young company would be able to transform itself into a hub for all sorts of Web activity.

As of July 2007, Facebook had the largest number of registered users among college-focused sites with over 34 million active members worldwide (also from non-collegiate networks).

From September 2006 to September 2007, it increased its ranking from 60th to 7th most visited Web site, and was the number one site for photos in the United States, ahead of public sites such as Flickr, with over 8.5 million photos uploaded daily.

What’s the secret to Facebook’s skyrocketing success?

Well, it’s got all the best of almost anything and everything you want in a socializing Web site. It’s packed with fascinating features that the other sites don’t have, like the Applications where you can pick up any socializing applications available at the site and from others as well and put them in your own Facebook. Sky’s the limit as to the number of applications you can add.

I personally like best the “Superpoke” application where I could send funny, endearing, sweet messages to my friends even without speaking a word.

The interesting features in Facebook are:

* The Wall — a space on each user’s profile page that allows friends to post messages for the user to see. One user’s wall is visible to anyone with the ability to see their full profile, and different users’ wall posts show up in an individual’s News Feed. Many users use their friend’s walls for leaving short notes. More private discourse is saved for Messages, which are sent to a person’s Inbox, and are visible only to the sender and recipient(s) of the Message, much like email.

* Gifts — Friends could send “gifts” — small icons of novelty items designed by former Apple designer Susan Kare — to each other by selecting one from Facebook’s virtual gift shop and adding a message. Gifts given to a user appear on the recipient’s wall with the giver’s message, unless the giver decided to give the gift privately, in which case the giver’s name and message is not displayed to other users. Facebook users are given one free gift to give upon account signup. Each additional gift given by a user costs $1.00.

* Pokes — Facebook includes a “poke” feature which allows one user to send a “poke” to another. According to Facebook’s FAQ section on the Poke Feature, “a poke is a way to interact with your friends on Facebook. When we created the poke, we thought it would be cool to have a feature without any specific purpose. People interpret the poke in many different ways, and we encourage you to come up with your own meanings.”

In principle this is intended to serve as a “nudge” to attract the attention of the other user. However while many Facebook users, as intended, use the feature to attract attention or say hello, some users construe it as a sexual advance. This interpretation of the feature inspired a popular Facebook group titled “Enough with the Poking, Lets Just Have Sex,” which, as of September 2007, has more than 250,000 members.

Friends often engage in what is known as a “poke war,” where the poke is exchanged back and forth continuously between two users by using the “poke back” feature.

There are several new applications such as “X Me” and “SuperPoke!”, that allow users to put any action in place of the word “poke.”

* Applications – This feature provides a framework for developers to create applications that interact with core Facebook features.

Among the most popular applications are Top Friends, which allows users to select and display their favorite friends; Graffiti, which gives users a visual version of Facebook’s wall; and iLike, a social music discovery service that features concert information and a music trivia game, similar to the one featured on the iPod. Third-party websites such as Adonomics, which provides application metrics, and blogs such as AppRate, Inside Facebook and Face Reviews have sprung up in response to the clamor for Facebook applications. Even games such as chess and Scrabble are available.

* Facebook Video — Users can add their videos with the service by uploading video, adding video through Facebook Mobile, and using a webcam recording feature. Additionally, users can “tag” their friends in videos they add much like the way users can tag their friends in photos. This feature was expected to increase competition with MySpace.

However, the Facebook Video Application does not allow sharing videos outside of Facebook. Users will not be able to export or download videos from Facebook.

Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg, a former member of the Harvard Class of 2006. Initially the membership was restricted to students of Harvard College. It was subsequently expanded to other Boston area schools (Boston College, Boston University, Harvard, Northeastern University, Tufts University), Rochester, Stanford, NYU, Northwestern, and all Ivy League schools within two months.

Many individual universities were added in rapid succession over the next year. Eventually, people with a university (e.g .edu, .ac.uk, etc.) email address from institutions across the globe were eligible to join. Networks were then initiated for high schools and some large companies.

Since Sept. 11, 2006, it has been made available to any email address user who inputs a certain age range. Users can select to join one or more participating networks, such as a high school, place of employment, or geographic region.

Facebook is free to users and generates revenue from advertising including banner ads and sponsored groups (in April 2006, revenue was rumored to be over $1.5 million per week).

Users create profiles that often contain photos and lists of personal interests, exchange private or public messages, and join groups of friends. The viewing of detailed profile data is restricted to users from the same network or confirmed friends.

According to Chris Hughes, spokesman for Facebook, “People spend an average of 19 minutes a day on Facebook.”

In a 2006 study conducted by Student Monitor, a New Jersey-based limited liability company specializing in research concerning the college student market, Facebook was named as the second most “in” thing among undergraduates, tied with beer and sex and losing only to the iPod.

Tied with sex? Does it mean Facebook could be an alternative to sex? Hmm … that’s certainly an interesting idea. Well, come to think of it, having a Facebook page is also like sex, but instead of impregnating someone, you impregnate all your friends there with endearing thoughts of how much they mean to you.

I got a Facebook account. If you want to see more of me there, we’ll just get in touch through here.

3 Tips for Befriending Your Co-workers

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One study posits that the average person will spend 90,000 hours at work – to put that into perspective, that’s 10 years. So yes, if you don’t work alone, it’s a good idea to befriend the people you’ll be seeing for all these hours for the sake of both your personal and professional life. It means not just a positive work environment and reduced work stress but also job security and opportunities for career advancement whether you work at a memory care facility or a law firm.

How do you toe the line between professional and appropriate to befriend your coworkers? Here are some tips.

Look for Common Ground

One of the easiest ways to befriend anyone, including a co-worker, is by finding common ground – something to bond over and build a friendship on. Keep in mind that this requires effort and genuine interest, as it’s pretty difficult to fake interest for a long period of time. Imagine having to remember white lies years down the line.

Here’s how to really find common ground:

  • Ask questions about interests you’ve observed over time – such as a kind of book they often read
  • Share your own interests – talk about your favorite tv show or your knitting
  • Participate in team building like work retreats, team lunches, or even happy hour outings
  • Join work-related clubs or committees and volunteer for group projects

Avoid Gossip

Few things can damage any chances of being friendly with a co-worker as fast as engaging in workplace gossip. And not only does it facilitate an unfriendly work environment, but you could also get sued for defamation.

So, how do you handle gossip at work to avoid alienating potential friends? Try:

  • Redirecting the conversation to things like a work assignment, a new tv show, or even food
  • Offering a different perspective or alternative explanation as a way to dispel the rumors, especially if you have the facts
  • Keeping any such information confidential instead of sharing and further spreading it
  • Looping in a superior or HR if things escalate

Be Patient

Befriending anyone takes time, but perhaps even more so when it comes to coworkers. The workplace is not the most conducive place for friendships after all because of things like work stress, competition, and professional boundaries.

So, here are some tips for being patient when trying to befriend your co-workers:

  • Don’t knock small gestures. Saying hello and thank you or passing helpful notes are important steps to a deeper friendship
  • Be consistently friendly and approachable
  • Always be mindful of boundaries and the fact that many people are introverts or simply uninterested in being friends with a co-worker
  • Don’t take things personally. A cold co-worker may be dealing with personal or even work-related problems

Having a friendly relationship with your co-workers is often ideal so try to find common ground, avoid workplace gossip, and be patient in an effort to make this happen.

Small businesses to be hit hardest by new compulsory pension

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Small businesses seem to be taking a lot of unnecessary hits of late, and they are already feeling the effects of this “injustice.”

It seems the government is not yet content with just hitting businesses with an endless list of legislation and then tying them up with red tape. Now it looks like small business employers will be forced to make contributions to a new National Pensions Savings Scheme or NPSS.

An employee can decide not to participate in the NPSS but with the sheer apathy of most employees it is believed that most will choose to remain in the scheme.

A white paper regarding the issue has already been given to the press and it indicates that employers will be forced to contribute an additional 3 per cent of an employee’s salary into the NPSS. The employee, in turn, will contribute 4 per cent while the government will give one per cent in the form of tax relief.

The white paper also revealed that this new policy will cost UK businesses an additional £2.6 billion every year. It also said that the Government knows that forcing employers to pay into their employees’ pensions will have an especially strong effect on small businesses and that is not yet counting the cost of administering the new pension scheme.

The white paper presented a solution to the dilemma but the solutions – higher prices or lower future wage increases – are considered as highly simplistic and ignores the intricacies of running a business.

52 million pounds funding for business-focused universities

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This piece of news will be welcomed by students all over the country. The DTI has recently awarded �52 million to a number of universities under the third round of the Higher Education Innovation Fund or HEIF. The goal of the awards is to aid in building closer ties between business and institutions that offer higher education.

One of the projects that will share in the 52 million pounds funding handout are initiatives whose goal is to boost the number of entrepreneurs, establish a UK creative industry in China and to target the early signs of disease.

The DTI has awarded to a range of universities under the third round of the Higher Education Innovation Fund (HEIF). The aim of the awards is to help build closer ties between business and higher education institutions.

After announcing the said funding, Secretary of State for Trade and Industry Alistair Darling said, “Innovation and science are the keys to UK economic growth. Figures show that university spinouts floated on the stock market over the last two years were valued at more than �1 billion. Exploiting the wealth of knowledge in higher education and translating that into real business opportunities is, therefore, vitally important for the UK economy.

Darling added that the Higher Education Innovation Fund will bring together university research along with private sector investment and also stimulate an environment of entrepreneurship within higher education institutions. Darling acknowledges that innovation will be an important factor in the country�s economic prosperity and he said that seeing universities working closely with businesses in order to bring new ideas and technology and then transform that into improved productivity and job opportunities.