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NOTE: THIS POST WAS WRITTEN OCTOBER 10, 2008, WHEN THE GFC WAS ON A VERY STRONG DOWNWARDS SWING. WITH THE BENEFIT OF HINDSIGHT THOSE WHO HEEDED THIS FACEBOOK NOTE AT THE TIME, EXPECIALLY IN THE STOCK MARKET, WOULD BE DOING VERY WELL RIGHT NOW.

I’ve probably spent too much time watching the stock exchange and the forex market over the past few days… What’s happening in the world economy at the moment is pretty much unprecedented over the past 50 years, and there is lots of reasons come from lots of places as to why we should all be very concerned… (Update: In the last 3 months along we’ve since an average 50% recovery in the worlds economy. The world didn’t end.)

But here’s the thing. Google is not my bible, and here’s what my bible says…

Psalm 91
1 He who dwells in the secret place of the Most High
Shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty.
2 I will say of the LORD, “He is my refuge and my fortress;
My God, in Him I will trust.”
5 You shall not be afraid of the terror by night,
Nor of the arrow that flies by day,
6 Nor of the pestilence that walks in darkness,
Nor of the destruction that lays waste at noonday.

I am gladdened by the number of people I’ve spoken to lately who are starting out there own businesses, stepping out into the thing they WANT to do with their life, not sticking, out of fear, tradition, habit or laziness (inertia, basically…), with the thing that they feel THEY MUST do.

Here’s my point, and my encouragement to both myself and anyone else who’ll listen. Christians are afforded a unique position in the marketplace. If we choose to be obedient to God, partner with him at every step, and walk the line between faith and wisdom, God promises to provide our every need, and more than that, promises to give us “every place the sole of our foot treads”.

Wisdom often instructs us not to do things that we normally would… Faith often instructs us to do things we normally wouldn’t.

Somewhere in between those two tools God has given us there is His place of blessing, favor and peace. If we drill into what He has for us in this season in the marketplace, I believe that the volatility and the dominant spirit of fear and doubt that seems to be running the show worldwide at the moment has opened up an amazing opportunity for those who will engage faith and wisdom.

Numbers 14:24
But My servant Caleb, because he has a different spirit in him and has followed Me fully, I will bring into the land where he went, and his descendants shall inherit it.

It’s about having a different spirit, and following God fully. This verse is one of my favorites in the whole bible. Caleb was one of the spies that got sent into the region God had promised the tribe of Israel. Of twelve spies who went in, ten came back and reported on all the issues Israel would have conquering the region (it was inhabited by giants and filled with walled cities… they weren’t just going to walk in there). Only two, Caleb and Joshua, brought back a good report. Only two, Caleb and Joshua, ever made it into the Promised Land.

So if God is telling you to go to your next level in the marketplace, be it in your job you currently have, a new job, starting out for yourself, or growing your business, and you feel yourself tighten up because all the doom and gloom going around, buckle up and go for it! If God is in it and you do it with Him all the way, you will not fail.

Psalm 91
14 “Because he has set his love upon Me, therefore I will deliver him;
I will set him on high, because he has known My name.
15 He shall call upon Me, and I will answer him;
I will be with him in trouble;
I will deliver him and honor him.
16 With long life I will satisfy him,
And show him My salvation.”

Here’s the thing… I would describe myself as someone who is continually pregnant with the plans and dreams and hopes I know God Himself has planted in me, and will bring to pass. The problem is, there is the ever-present mundane-ness of the now…

You know the deal “I’m going to change the world, right after I get out of being stuck doing this report/proposal/quote/coff

I’ve had moments over the past months, just like most other people I know, where I’ve “looked down” (i.e. think of the scene in Shrek where they are crossing the bridge and Shrek instructs donkey not to look down… that kind of “looked down”).

My beautiful wife brought it all into perspective when she smiled and looked me in the eye and said “All you need to look after is your family and your salvation.” It’s true…

KLO means Keep Lights On. It’s an fairly recent term heard floating around the enterprise, it’s the process of jettisoning absolutely everything non-essential to maintain the survival of the company through extreme circumstances. My family and I aren’t in one of those situations at the moment, far from it, but if we ever where to be, what would my KLO look like?

The answer is not that bad. The answer, probably for you too, is not that bad. Not comfortable, not ideal, but definitely not the end of the world. And not permanent either…

This is my favorite verse for my “look down” moments…

Psalm 91

1 He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High
will rest in the shadow of the Almighty. [a]

2 I will say [b] of the LORD, “He is my refuge and my fortress,
my God, in whom I trust.”

3 Surely he will save you from the fowler’s snare
and from the deadly pestilence.

4 He will cover you with his feathers,
and under his wings you will find refuge;
his faithfulness will be your shield and rampart.

5 You will not fear the terror of night,
nor the arrow that flies by day,

6 nor the pestilence that stalks in the darkness,
nor the plague that destroys at midday.

7 A thousand may fall at your side,
ten thousand at your right hand,
but it will not come near you.

8 You will only observe with your eyes
and see the punishment of the wicked.

9 If you make the Most High your dwelling—
even the LORD, who is my refuge-

10 then no harm will befall you,
no disaster will come near your tent.

11 For he will command his angels concerning you
to guard you in all your ways;

12 they will lift you up in their hands,
so that you will not strike your foot against a stone.

13 You will tread upon the lion and the cobra;
you will trample the great lion and the serpent.

14 “Because he loves me,” says the LORD, “I will rescue him;
I will protect him, for he acknowledges my name.

15 He will call upon me, and I will answer him;
I will be with him in trouble,
I will deliver him and honor him.

16 With long life will I satisfy him
and show him my salvation.”

Knowing that God’s got your back… Knowing your KLO… Enables you to be bold. We are not called to shrink back in the face of adversity, negativity, or threats, we are called to conquer and have dominion.

Quick thought… I’m the kind of person who is very quick to start working out contingency plans if a dream, goal, task or venture or mine doesn’t seem to be panning out.

When bumps in the road come, my mind spawns a whole range of Plan B‘s, way that I can change tack and either recover what I am doing by going down a different route, or finding an alternative that involves abandoning what I was doing altogether and trying to find a way to recapitalize on the effort and expense I’ve already put into Plan A.

Here’s the thing I’ve realized over the past few days in particular… When you allow yourself to focus on Plan B you:

- distract your attention from Plan A, (and remember that Plan A was what you really wanted in the first place wasn’t it…)

- divert resource from Plan A,

- create a ton stress in your your thinking, because all of a sudden you’ve move from the front foot of conquest and new things to the back foot of defense and repair,

- and if you’re anything like me, because Plan B was conceived in a stressed-out defensive frame of mind, you’ll probably start wondering what to do if Plan B starts to go wonky as well and before you know it you’ve got 50 Plan B’s, 500 Plan C’s, et al…

Here’s the most important thing though. When you start to focus on contingencies and the ever comforting Plan B, BY DEFAULT you lose faith in Plan A. It’s impossible not to… The focus of your faith turns from making this really great exciting thing that you’ve decided to do work to recover from a worst-case scenario… It this really what you want?

It’s hard to really pray for what you originally wanted when your faith has shifted towards a lesser thing.

I hope this has made sense. Cutting off Plan B has actually been quite liberating…

NOTE: THIS, AND SOME OF MY RECENT POSTS, ARE REPRINTS FROM MY FACEBOOK NOTES. THEY WILL BE A FEW MORE OF THESE INTERSPERSED WITH NEW STUFF.

I often talk to people that are absolutely chomping at the bit to start their own business, and the number one pre-startup question I hear in conversation is this: What the heck am I going to sell?

Here’s a few ideas and examples of what’s worked for me. To sum it up in one line… The best way to identify a need in the market is to have a look at your own needs.

1. What interests you? There is little point deciding go into business selling something that bores you to tears…

2. What hobbies do you have? This is a key one… Most fledgling entrepreneurs sow the bulk of their time pre-startup into trying to conjure “the” idea that will generate the most profit for them in the shortest amount of time. Here’s the thing, if find that you’ll need invest a bunch of time and effort learning a whole new field in order to effectively target, market and sell the product you’re considering, consider this: you have hobbies, things that you love to do and know lots about. Wouldn’t it make more sense to leverage that knowledge instead? It would certainly save time…

e.g. I love audio engineering and music, and I set out about a year ago to build a home studio. I discovered that because of the strong Aussie dollar (R.I.P.) and and undervalued US retail market I could get audio equipment from the USA over eBay considerably cheaper than I could from local Australian merchants.

3. What opportunities exist in the field of your hobby? There is always a need to be found in any area… The key here is to avoid trying to create a “solution looking for a problem”.

e.g. After a while I realized I had too much gear and decided to sell some off. I eBayed a few pieces, and quickly noticed that what Australians and Europeans were paying for the goods was almost twice what I had bought them for…

4. Do your interests and hobbies make you a member of your potential target market? Ask yourself this… “Would what I am selling be something that I’d buy?” If you can answer yes to this, by being a member of your target you’ve automatically saved yourself from the tedium of initial market research. You’ll know what captures your interest when it comes to products and service in the field of your hobby, and chances are that you’ll already have amassed a fair bit of information about your competition and their offerings.

5. What market trends have you noticed in the field of your hobby? There will always be consistent cries for something… “I don’t know how to do x”, or “where the heck do I find a y”, or “does anything exist that would allow me to do z?” Internet forums are a GOLDMINE for market research like this, they paint a very good picture of what the general consensus is.

e.g. I noticed that different brands were very highly regarded and would fetch a disproportionate amount if imported and sold locally… Every second bulletin board or forum post was about either Neve, API, or Apogee. So that’s what I focused on.

6. What needs or gaps in the market have you identified in the field of your hobby? This is an extension of the above. e.g. Even though their economies were strong at the time and the people who ended up buying from me could have saved by buying overseas themselves, for some reason Aussies and Europeans seemed very timid about international purchases from the US…

7. How can you do it cheaper, and make it better than anyone else? This is assuming that you haven’t come up with something brand new… I minimized my import costs by never having a single shipment exceed $1000AUD in value (and therefore avoiding any customs duty fees), importing via USPS (by far the cheapest carrier out of the USA), looking for bundle deals and selling the contents separately locally (huge savings on shipping to be had here), and maintained a high-level of communication with my buyers which has got me to the point where today I have just under 500 eBay feedback comments and a rating of 99.7%.

TIP: If you are selling on eBay, your feedback sets you apart!

Obviously the global financial rollercoaster we are all on has made importing less attractive at the moment (although if you can find a good local product to sell exporting out of Oz is a VERY good idea right now), but what I wanted to try to illustrate here is this:

Don’t spend your time racking your brain trying to conjure up “the” product that’ll make you squillions… Go back to what you already know, and what you already love, already spend all of your spare time thinking about, and start there. You will find that “the” opportunity you have been looking for has been staring you in the face the whole time.

Cheers!
Casey

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Matthew 17: 24 After Jesus and his disciples arrived in Capernaum, the collectors of the two-drachma tax came to Peter and asked, “Doesn’t your teacher pay the temple tax?”
25 “Yes, he does,” he replied. When Peter came into the house, Jesus was the first to speak. “What do you think, Simon?” he asked. “From whom do the kings of the earth collect duty and taxes—from their own sons or from others?”
26 “From others,” Peter answered. “Then the sons are exempt,” Jesus said to him.
27 “But so that we may not offend them, go to the lake and throw out your line. Take the first fish you catch; open its mouth and you will find a four-drachma coin. Take it and give it to them for my tax and yours.”

God is really bugging me with this verse at the moment… I feel it relates so powerfully to how life should look as a Christian who believes in the provision of God.

Couple of things…
1. Jesus knew Peter’s concern about paying the tax before Peter had said a word about it… (v25 – “Jesus was the first to speak”) – How nice is it to know that the same thing applies to us today?

2. Peter was a fisherman by trade… Fisherman normally make their money by selling their catch, and the return is in proportion to the effort they put in and how successful they’ve been. In this instance though, Jesus alerted Peter to an opportunity to multiply his return out of proportion of the effort Peter had put in.

3. The outcome of the story isn’t actually written down, but one can assume that Peter was obedient to pursue the opportunity that Jesus put in front of him.

4. Jesus didn’t say to Peter “go and dig for gold“, or “go and play the stock market“, or “go fill this high paying role for a day”, or even “go ask this rich guy for the money”… He got Peter to take the skills he already had, and multiplied their value for a specific purpose.

5. The money Peter got from the mouth of the fish was enough to pay for both Jesus’ needs and his. (v27 – “for my tax and yours”)

I am still working through the full story of what God is trying to say to me personally through this passage, but my encouragement I’ve taken from it so far is this: God’s provision is not something we need to rack our brains for, to strive and stress and struggle to find “that one good idea” that will set us up for life and provide provision for the Kingdom.

I thoroughly believe that God’s agenda in all things is to draw His kids into deeper relationship with Him. If I just set the sail of my heart towards God’s purpose, walk with Him, listen, and obey, He will provide the rest.

And what He provides will be enough for both of us.

It turns out that a large percentage of recent fraud is being traced back to a single type of PIN pad: the Ingenico PX328. Here’s a piccy for you all…

It probably looks very familiar – that’s because its been around for a LONG time and lots of retailers use it. Last year there was a $5 million breach involving 20 or more McDonald’s in Western Australia. You can read about it here. That was in October, and if you were paying attention you’d have noticed that McDonalds now have bike chains on all there PIN pads.

What is happening out these in fraud-land is the bad guys have methods to “trojan” these devices and turn them into skimmers. This particular model is currently being targeted around Australia, which means that simple and effective trojan method exists in the fraud community (i.e. it’s easy to do and undetectable), and that there are a number of these devices are floating around in the black market.

The typical way fraudsters install these deives is for them to walk into a retailer, walk straight up the the cashier and say “Hi, I’m Joe Blogs from the bank, we’ve found a fault with your PIN pad and need to replace it”. The cashier says yes, the trojan’d device gets installed, and card number collection starts.

The trojan’d PIN pad, particularly for this model, will continue to work as normal, so it can stay there until it gets discovered (usually as a result of bank investiagations on the merchant once enough people have been compromised to join the dots together and figure out where it happened).The bad guys are now at the point where they are holding up retailers just so they can steal the PIN pad.

Here’s what you can do to avoid getting stung by hand held PIN pads:

1. Don’t use your card with this model of PIN pad. It seems obvious, but it’s not. The bad guys obviously have developed a reliable and simple method for stealing data from these things, so the best bet is just to not use them. (It’s a bit like using Internet Explorer as a web browser – the bad guys are good at finding new ways to hack it. The solution: Don’t use it.)

2. Don’t use your card when the hand held isn’t chained to the desk of the base station. This applies for all hand held PIN pads, not just the PX328. If you see a PIN pad that doesn’t have a chain, have a quick look and see for yourself just how easy it is to steal the things. It’s a bit scary.

3. Sign, not PIN. I’ve said this before, if you are using a credit card then sign, don’t use your PIN.

4. Switch to cash, even just for a little while. I know it sucks, and it probably encourages you to spend more, but if you can discipline yourself go back to using cash while the current spate of fraud settles down.

5. Reward good behavior. I noticed recently that a Coles cashier checked my credit card to make sure that it was actually embossed. An unembossed card is a sure sign that it is fraudulent. I respect and admire the initative that Coles have taken to train their employees to do this to reduce fraud. I will shop their more now because of that.

6. Discourage bad behavior. Think about it – all this could have been prevented if the PIN pads were chained down. The banks could mandate that, and supply a chain with the PIN pad. Yes, there is a cost involved, but what about the cost of fraud? What about those who go personally bankrupt because they are $10,000 in the hole for 6 weeks while the bank does its investigations? If someone you shop with is not doing what they should to minimize the risk to their customers, they are putting profit before people and treating you poorly. Vote with your feet.

7. Silo your cash. I can’t stress this one enough. The best approach to fraud and skimming is to just assume that it will happen to you at some point. So get yourself a low limit card, and/or a bank account that you only put money in when you are about to spend it.

8. Enable daily spend limits on your bank accounts and credit cards. Same as above, just assume that you will get hit at some point and work think in terms of minimizing the impact that would have on you.

9. Sell everything, give it to the poor or your local church, move to Pennsylvania and completely shun technology and money… (HINT: I’m being sarcastic here… although it would work.) One of my favorite sayings is “The best way to secure a computer is to unplug it.” The same goes for this stuff… The lifestyle we enjoy carries with it an inherent risk – so the focus should be on minimizing that risk. Obviously completely disconnecting is not possible, or even reasonable for most people. Even switching back to cash is risky…

The important thing is to make sure that you minimize your risk – ask yourself “If I got scammed out of $YOUR-CREDIT-LIMIT, how bad would it be? What can I do to change this?”

I’m very interested to hear from people who’ve been skimmed recently, please share your story via the Comments section below.

Best of luck out there!

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This is a repost from http://www.strategyeye.com/articles/digitalmedia/id/24649416.

Interesting to watch this progress – the take-up of anti-monopoly solutions like Skype since the Global Financial Crisis has been incredible (until, of course, Skype becomes a monopoly itself and people move on to the next thing).

Voice-over-IP (VoIP) service Skype has cemented its position as the biggest carrier of international calls, finishing 2009 with a 12% share of all international call minutes – a huge 50% increase on 2008 figures. The results come from a report by TeleGeography, which says Skype handled more than 54bn minutes of calls last year, an increase of 64% on 2008.

Skype’s growth is accelerating despite a slowdown in the market overall. International call volume has grown at an annual rate of 15% over the past 25 years, but in the last two years it has slowed to just 8%, growing from 376bn minutes in 2009 to 406bn a year later.

“Demand for international voice has been remarkably robust, but it’s clearly not recession-proof,” says TeleGeography analyst Stephan Beckert. “However the volume of traffic routed via Skype is tremendous. Skype is now the largest provider of cross border communications in the world, by far.”

Skype has experienced record growth in the past year, hitting more than 520m users in October. It is expected to have reached an even bigger user total when owner eBay reports its Q4 earnings later this week. The service also recently broke its record for the most concurrent users logged on when almost 22.3m people signed into Skype at the same time.

“Skype remains the sole VoIP juggernaut, and it has clearly hit a tipping point,” says Beckert. “I know because my grandmother has started using it.”

eBay must be kicking themselves after selling Skype last year for $1.9 billion after buying it September 2005 for $2.6 billion. That’s a $700 million write-down, and it may be that they pulled stumps at exactly the wrong time.

And as an aisde, my Grandma user Facebook AND Skype… Go Grammy!

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One of the things serial entrepreneurs are consistent challenged with, and often waste a lot of time on, is a name. It makes sense, for me personally I always find it easier to work on a project once it has an identity… It sort of defines it. It’s a bit like when you have a child, binding with your child really kicks to the next level once you’ve decided on their name – even before they’ve been born.

Unless you’re a born marketer (which, if you are, is awesome) a lot of time can be sunk into thinking up a name and finding an available domain for a business venture. When you think about it the investment of this time never really gets recovered, especially if the naming bit happens before the idea is mature.

So without further ado – here are my 5 favorite sites for domain/business name generation – ranging from the wacky and hands free to quite sophisticated and tailorable.

1. Dotomator

Dotomator is a very neat approach – basically you input the word or words you want and select from a range of categories. The system generates options for you, and from their you can automatically check for domain availability, and even register if you like.

2. Bust-A-Name

Bust A Name, possibly named using its own system, is very cool if you already have a feel for what you want your business or domain name to be. You create a list of words that are candidates for inclusion into your name, and Bust A Name automatically creates combination’s and variations, and test their domain availability on the fly for whatever suffixes (.com, .net, .org, etc…). Their are options like name variations (e.g. Flicker becomes Flickr), pluraliztion (e.g. car becomes cars), and a host of other options. Very swish and full of AJAX-y goodness.

3. Nameboy

The old favorite. You put in two words and it generates a list of options, including shortened versions of the words you’ve entered and combinations with additions of common “buzz words”.

4. 1-2-3- Finder

Similar to Nameboy, but with a bunch of dictionaries to choose from. The thing I like about this site is how it provides info and statistics on domains that are currently registered.

5. Dotomator Web 2.0

This one is for if you get lazy or bored, but gee whiz it comes out with some cool ideas. One button – Generate Name! – and this little beauty spits out random “Web 2.0″ sounding names, presumably from a database of combination’s. Some Dotomator Web 2.0 examples from a short play include:

Qualoo
Brainzone
Triyo
Pixonyx
Nblab
Fivepad
Zoolia
Demitri

Another good source for inspiration is the Twitter Trends engine… An occasional glance yields some interesting trains of thought.

I was thinking how cool it would be to create a domain name generator that does a word analysis of news articles, blog posts, or whatever web page you pointed it at based on probabilities… Does anyone know if this exists?

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I’ve noticed a lot of people putting up quizzes on Facebook lately, I did one of my own as well (although I can’t seem to find it now…). I got to thinking the kind of information people put in a quiz…

What is the name of your childhood best friend?
Who is your favorite author?
What is the name of your first pet?

Do these sound like they are from a Facebook quiz? They do don’t they… the kind of semi-interesting semi-obscure mostly-harmless questions that people come up with on quizzes to sort out those who know them from those who don’t. Right?

Wrong.

These are security questions from a major internet transaction gateway which I’d guess about 50% of people reading this already use. Similar questions are asked by popular free internet email providers that probably more than 90% of you currently have.

Think about this from a security point of view… When you put together a quiz of Facebook you are deliberately posting the kind of information that you are probably ALREADY USING to secure some of your more sensitive internet based accounts.

Consider this scenario…

1) EvilHacker trundles through Facebook and sees your profile (because you haven’t made it non-public… oops… or maybe you’ve got a massive friends list…)
2) EvilHacker notices your quiz… EvilHacker works out the answers to your questions.
3) EvilHacker sees your email address in your info.
4) EvilHacker does the old Forgot Your Password? trick on your Hotmail/Gmail/Live account… He gets asked some weird question about your favorite author… Oops. Again.
5) With access to your email address, EvilHacker sees that you use Paymate, Paypal, eBay, etc etc et al.
6) Rinse, lather and repeat until you are utterly pwned.

Sounds a little far fetched and paranoid I am sure (aka That would never happen to little old me…) but consider this. There are entire ECONOMIES that run off the trade of any amount of personal information. The bad guys who buy this stuff up (or get cheap labour in third world countries to go out looking for it) then get it all together, work out who the best targets are (based on the quality of the information gathered) and go to work on breaking into as many of your accounts as they possibly can. These guys do this FOR WORK. It’s speculated that the economies of certain countries would take a serious battering if this activity ceased. It’s a deep rabbit hole.

It’s not just about using anti-virus.

Not convinced? Try these…
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2008/09/palin-e-mail-ha/
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2008/09/group-posts-e-m/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/09/17/palins-email-account-hack_n_127184.html

Selah.

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