Believe it or not, the virtual economy of Second Life, a popular online computer game that lets users create a new reality for themselves, doubled in size last year. Users spent more than a billion dollars on virtual goods over the last year, compared to $360 million for the year before. Second Life’s economy is now larger than the economies of nations such as East Timor, Samoa and Dijibouti.

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To install the gadget on your site or blog, Google outlines just three easy steps,

1. Sign up for a Google Checkout seller account.
   Checkout will process your orders and help you attract new leads, convert more sales, and enjoy advanced fraud protection.
2. List the products you want to sell in a Google Docs spreadsheet.
   You’ll just need to create a copy of our template spreadsheet, and then replace the sample inventory with your own.
3. Place the Google Checkout store gadget on your website.
   You can embed your online store anywhere you’d like — on Google Sites, Blogger, or your personal website.

Start selling online with the Google Checkout store gadget

Given the state of the economy, it is important to recognize the declining value of the United States dollar. Without getting deep into this topic, note the 97% drop in dollar value over the past century. With numerous causes for inflation transpiring, including bailouts, government “stimulus”, and foreign spending, one can only expect a greater loss of purchasing power in the near future. So what specific steps can a web designer take to plan for continuous currency devaluation? The three strategies below can help cut costs in the long-term without sacrificing the level of work and service delivered to clients.

Top 3 Cost-Cutting Strategies for Web Designers

(Thanks for mentioning CurdBee as an option!)

Never let your schooling interfere with your education, someone clever once said. Being willing to sacrifice at the edges is one of the most important skills you’ll ever learn.

I’ve received plenty of Bs and even Cs for classes that I was incredibly proud of because they came from hardly no time spent at all. Time that I could then spend on reading my own curriculum, starting my own projects, and running my own businesses.

Can’t agree more with David Heinemeier Hansson on this. There’s enough time for everything in life, only just you are ignorant.

For the small guys, the Internet was a real shot in the arm. Indeed, Vesess would not be here today if not for the mother of networks. The advent of online communication heralded what one can easily call The SME era. With the ability to drastically reduce communication costs, SMEs were able to operate at a fraction of the cost it would normally take them. During the earlier years of Vesess (the proverbial garage era), the team operated out of Asantha’s house, cutting out all overhead, and allowing the company to grow exponentially over the next few years. Today, over half a decade later, we do have offices, and conference rooms. However, our core thinking has remained the same.

Think small. Think efficient. Share the returns.

As a South East Asian company, we have always been able to compete with American and European players for one simple reason – low overhead. We maintain a small team, and hire infrequently. All Vesess employees are multi-talented, and every Vesess project, bar none, is a team effort. We don’t have dinky job titles (ok, we do, but they say very little about our individual roles in the company), and we certainly dont have project leaders and supervisors. When we have a problem, we throw it to the (super secret, internal) mailing list, or just ping the people we need online.

Apart from the invention of the Internet, no other global event has contributed as much to the rise of the SME as the present economic crisis. Of course, this is just a prediction, but we’re sure that posterity will prove us right. How is that possible, you ask?

Cost cutting, that’s how. Small businesses generally run very efficiently. No multiple printers or photocopiers to finance, no thousands of wasted feet of floorspace to pay for, and generally, no jobs that can be axed. SMEs also aren’t usually badly in debt, and are able to run from month to month, even if it does come down to a hand to mouth situation. Thus, our contention is that the businesses that are going to survive this depression are going to be the small ones, and especially the small smart ones.

When Hotelotravel, our latest venture, went into development, we all began wondering how we’d sell yet another travel site. There were hundreds out there, and we needed ours to be different.

The difference, it turns out, came with the downturn. As economies weakened and pictures of worried stock brokers started flooding the wire services, we realised that we could give people exactly what they wanted this year.

Money. It’s 2009, the year of financial doom for the world, and what any traveler would want is money back. HOT’s cash back feature was designed with exactly that in mind.

Think small. Think efficient. Share the returns.

By keeping running costs low, and using FOSS tools and frameworks for development, we are able to give a percentage of our commission back as cash on every booking. To learn more about cash back, check out our features page.

The point we’re trying to make, however, is that in an economic climate like this, only a SME could afford to offer such discounts, and that it is precisely this ability that will enable such businesses to flourish despite the problems we face. For the first time in years, small businesses have the ability to truly shine, and we’d love to hear how some of our fellow players are using small and efficient business practices to attract customers and grow, despite everything going on around them.

Before you can stop fraud, you need to know how to define it in order to properly identify it. Fraud is defined as the use of deception to obtain money or something else of value. Although typically carried out online, some fraudsters pursue the riskier physical fraud in which they interact with people face-to-face.

Telltale Signs of E-Commerce Fraud

According to a new survey, opt-in email makes travel consumers more likely to do business with a travel company, in addition to generating a more favorable opinion of the company and even a stronger sense of loyalty.

Travel emails inspire loyalty, favorable opinion

However for a successful mail campaign it’s vital to track the end result. Usually we could use a service like Campaign Monitor for this, but if you want do it yourself, here is a way to do it.

Tracking email campaigns in Google Analytics is done using a process called link tagging. This process is the manipulation of the links in your emails.

Tracking Email with Google Analytics

All too often they jump from one bolt-on quick-fix to the next. A successful social strategy needs to be built into the DNA of the business. This is hard to do, which is why many travel companies fail.

How user-generated content can help your hotel climb higher in search results

If you use CurdBee you are already achieving most of the tips mentioned there!

You want the best working for you. People who aren’t just good at their job, but people who are also good at your
job. People you can trust to not just do something right but tell you
that the way you suggested doing it was wrong.
People you can rely on
to get things done if you just stay out of their way.
At least, that’s
the ideal. In practice, it’s hard to find people like that and even
when you do, they still need help.

Aaron Swartz shares some great
tips on how to manage startups. A Must read for all the challenge seekers.