BinaryDay

It is our choices…that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.

J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and The Chamber of Secrets, 1999

A good one from dilsecartoons.com

If you are a proud geek with some free time then you are going to love this post. Here is a list of websites that pay you for what you love doing i.e coding.

The best one among the lot is topcoder. It has weekly contests for designing, testing and coding. Go here to see the active contests. The prize money ranges from 500$ to 1400$ for one component. You read that right, you can indeed make 20,000 Rs upto 60,000 rupees writing one complete programme. The only problem is that most of the projects are in .net or java. Topcoder provides a rating to each member depending upon how many times you win in competitions among other criteria. If you can get some really good rank then who knows even google may come searching for you

The other type of sites are freelancing sites. These sites allow companies in need of programmers to post their projects. As a programmer you can select projects that you like and then bid for them. If you are selected then you can get paid for developing the programme. http://www.getacoder.com/  ,  http://www.project4hire.com   and https://www.getafreelancer.com/ are some of the freelancing sites.

disclaimer: I have not used any of the sites except topcoder myelf.

I had previously writeen about the possibility of starting your own business without leaving yout job. (Here) It was based on my assumption that most people know what to do but are not able to do so as they are not ready to leave their jobs. However the comments to the post clearly showed that many of us do not know what we want to do. As Suku says so very clearly no one can tell you what to do but atleast I shall try to guide you.

Look for the problem

I think the problem lies in our education system that needs us to find answers/solutions. The problem is always defined by someone else. But entrepreneurship needs you to find a problem and then go ahead and solve it. Noone told larry and binn to develop a better search engine, they identified it themselves and then solved it. Same is true for any great startup. Unfortunately the same is true for you as well. You shall have to identify the problem to solve.

Fortunately it is not that difficult to identify. Just recall how many times in a day you wish that things were better. You get irritated everytime windows crashes, go and design a operating system that does not crash .

Well jokes apart that is the exact way atleast we go about selecting an idea. Frustrated with having to go through 10 different newspaper to find a walkin in hyderabad we started mywalkin. Mostly Pari does not have anything  to do at office and we started bakarbakar

So here is a 5 step approach to finding an idea to work on

1. Carry a frustration diary. Everytime you feel frustrated note it down.
2. Mention about the situation to your freinds. You will be surprised by how many of them have already faced such a problem.
3. Once you have 2-3 problems that you think 4-5 of your freinds have faced, start thinking about possible solutions.
4. Finally select the one that you feel is interesting. This is definitely important because you will have to work on it for atleast 3-4 months before any result is visible.
5. There is no fifth step Go and start working on the problem.

Hope it helps.

P.S: These are my views. I am sure many of you have much better idea than that. Please feel free to post them as comments.

And you have no right to expect your dream to come true, unless you are ready to pay the price. In my previous post , I had written that it is possible to keep your job and start your own business. Now if we accept that there are many young Indians like us who want to start their own company, why are we not seeing many more startups?

Well the reason lies in the fact that we are not ready to pay the price of our dream. What do I mean by that? Right now I could have gone for the latest release with my freinds. Instead I am writing this post on my laptop all alone in my room. This is the price that I have to pay if I have to make my dream of my own company come true.

Make no mistake. It is a choice that everyone wanting to own a startup has to make. Your dream or a nice time. And you can not have both. Anyone who thinks otherwise is only making a fool of himself.

The question that you need to ask yourself before starting your business is “Am I ready to pay the price?”. If your answer is NO, then stop fooling yourelf and go back to your 10 to 10 job, enjoy your weekends with your freinds and girlfreind. It is perfectly fine and perhaps the most logical choice. Afterall why to leave what you have for a mere dream?

But if you are the illogical type, who believes in listening to the heart, then welcome to the tough world of entrepreneurship. But before you enter this, make sure that you understand what you are getting into. There is no guarantee that we shall be successful. But even if we fail, we have failed while daring greatly, so that our place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

Yesterday I had submitted the sitemap of my site to both Google and Yahoo. I am going to find out if the search engines have visited my blog or not. I first log into my cpanel and look for lit of visiting crawlers. Both Google and Yahoo have visited my blog. Google seems to have beaten yahoo on speed. Here is a snapshot from my webstat for your reference.

* Robots shown here gave hits or traffic “not viewed” by visitors, so they are not included in other charts.

Next I want to figure out if they have added my site to their index or not. So I head to google.com, put my site name (binaryday.com) into the search box and hit enter. Oh no. Bad Google It has not yet added my site to its index. Let us see if Yahoo i any better. Again I head to yahoo, enter binary.com into the search box and hit enter. Yahooooooo…It has indeed added my site to its index.

Verdict of the Day : Yahoo rocks. It has added binaryday.com to its index in less than 24 hours since I submitted the sitemap to it. 

It has been one week since I started thi blog. None of the 3 major earch engines have visited the site yet. A search for binaryday.com did not return any result.

I am going to follow a step by step approach to lure the search engines to this website. While I do that I intend to note down my findings on this post on a regular basis. There will be a time period of 3 days between any 2 steps. That will slow down my march to the top of the search engines. However I think exactly which step worked will be worth the delay.

Day 1: Submitting the Sitemap 

My blog uses wordpress. I used the following plugin to create the sitemap http://www.arnebrachhold.de/projects/wordpress-plugins/google-xml-sitemaps-generator/#P18DL The advantage is that this will continue to update the sitemap as the content on my blog changes.

Next I go to the google webmaster central at https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ and submitted the sitemap. Then I head to yahoo site explorer at https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/ and submitted the sitemap.

If you have a file that is too large for gmail or if you do not have access to gmail then you should try out http://www.mediafire.com. The website lets you upload files upto 100 Mb in size !!!!

This is a really cool site that lets you upload files even without signing up. I just tried it out with a 3mb file and the file was loaded in less than a minute.

It also gives us various options like sharing files with your freinds and embedding the file to your webpage. I am too impressed with it.

There is a lot of similarity between the first kiss of a lover and the first dollar of an entrepreneur. These are the most memorable and difficult parts of a long and wonderful journey ahead. (Hopefully )Due to lack of relevant experience, I am in no position to give you any gyaan on the former. However I have a fair amount of experience in earning dollars on the net and I shall be giving you advice on how to make your first dollar on the net.There are two ways in which I have made money without any investment and both of them use google’s adsense for monetization. There are two ways in which I have made money without any investment and both of them use google’s adsense for monetization. The 2 methods are creating Google’s custom search engine and writing blog on blogger.

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

Even though I have long forgotten where I read this, I just love this speech. Do what I have done. Take a print of this and paste it on the wall of your room. May be in 6 months time it will be able to convince you to take on that risk. I definitely hope so. Because then my place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat