Richard Branson, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin are ready to start life on Mars.  They have just announced their new partnership ‘Virgil – The Adventure of Many Lifetimes’

The goal of course is to set up a full time colony on Mars.  If you want to apply, you can take their questionnaire to see if you have what it takes.  It might be wise to have sent them an email yesterday.  Fortunately thanks to another new Google application on the Gmail side of things, you can!

I can’t wait to see what some of the other websites and companies come up with today.

I recently finished reading ‘The Art of Deception – Controlling the Human Element of Security’ which is a book written by Kevin Mitnick. In case you haven’t heard of Mitnick before, he is the most famous social engineer ever.

Social Engineering is basically using the social skills of influence and persuasion to get whatever the the persuader wants. It relies heavily on the reliance and exploitation of basic human trust. It’s quite similar to being a conman, only usually it’s done against a company rather than an individual.

Mitnick talks about various workarounds in security systems that can be bypassed by anyone using the correct lexicon who sounds like they know what they are talking about. He explains different methods of attack and ways to get a hold of information using different scenarios.

A good portion of the book is about shielding your company from attacks from social engineers and possible policies that you might want to employ. This portion of the book is done very well and I would recommend checking it out, espicially if you have never heard of social engineering before.

During the first meeting, I learned that I was talking to a sort of affiliate marketer.  I also learned that there was a startup fee, as well as a monthly fee for the program.  Once you are in the system, you can make money in two ways.

First, by selling stuff and collecting an affiliate fee.  Secondly, you can recruit others to sell the junk and collect a referral fee.  And it’s only going to cost you a set up fee of $126 and a monthly fee of $50 to keep your website running.  I don’t know about you, but this has bad idea written all over it.  Especially when I got to the second meeting.

This time there were two people involved in selling me this system.  The same person from the previous meeting, and someone higher up the food chain came to talk to me.

They began talking, and half an hour later they were repeating themselves profusely; however, their circumlocutory speech was not the real issue.  They mentioned that setting up your business, and getting sales would pay for itself in the first month.  “Okay,” I asked, “So how do you get sales on your site?”

The two looked at each other, then at me before saying, “Well, how would YOU get sales?”

I mentioned I would find some relevant keywords and bid on them in Google Adwords to direct people to my targeted pages.

The two looked at each other, then at me.  They had no idea what I was talking about.  So I asked again what they did.

The way they get products sold from their site is to buy it themselves.  Now at 10% to 50% commission that means they are buying somewhere between $100 and $500 on their sites each month.  All this was to gain some sort of PV (or Point Value in their strange little world) witch somehow gets transformed into cash back.

The money with this is made of course once you get enough noobs under you to buy their own products.  Then you will get a small chunk of change from their sales.

I asked to see the backend of one of their sites.  I wanted to take a look at how much control the pupetmasters gave them.  But of course this must lead up to another meeting!  So I’ll let you know what happens if this meeting ever does.

I feel bad for all of the people who drink the koolaid without knowing what they are getting themselves into.  Which sounds like a lot of people are doing with their ‘pie in the sky’ wishful thinking.

Not very long ago, I listened to an audio-lecture on NPR about shopping and investing locally. This was from a man named Michael Shuman, he is the author of the book ‘ The Small-Mart Revolution.’ In this book he talks about the benefits of a locally owned and operated businesses. During his lecture he talked about these issues as well as some of the problems involved in attracting local investors in a fiscally responsible way.

Each community needs to develop its own self reliance and maximize the opportunities presented. This will help them to grow in a sustainable and reliable way.

Michael currently runs the site Smallmart.org and I found this article. About halfway down he has a list of things that will help you appear attractive to local shoppers.   This list includes…

1. Being locally owned – The most needed part of the equation!
2. Develop a local identity – Let people know that you are local and be proud of it.
3. Behave Responsibly – Respect the workforce and the environment if you want anyone to respect you.
4. Give back to the community – Let them know your business cares.
5. Maximize ‘Local value added’ – Do more than locate your headquarters here, put your factory or do your business here as well.
6. Cater to local markets – You can still sell to the rest of the world, but make sure you sell to those around you first.
7. Develop local partners – This could be contacting other businesses for one time events, or perhaps shopping in local stores for any supplies you need.
8. Grow deep – Expand your offerings to the local crowd.
9. Avoid predatory behavior – Just because you offer some of the same goods or services doesn’t mean that the other company is your enemy, just your competition.  Perhaps possibly even a local partner in the future.
10. Exit locally – When you close up shop, who will take over your business?

I really enjoyed the lecture that he gave, but I think I’ll need to pick up the book in order to extract as much of his ideas as possible.