Question by : Is a website that lets people list their unwanted gift cards for sale a good idea?
I want to know if this idea could make me a lot of money. To make money on the site, I would charge the seller a small fee once the card was sold on the site. I would also put advertisements up on the site and a subscriber newsletter that could promote affiliate products. If you don’t think this online marketplace for gift cards idea is any good, please tell me how to make A LOT of money online and some of the best online business ideas to try out that could be profitable.

Best answer:

Answer by joe.attaboy
Actually, it’s not really a bad idea. You could also add an exchange option, in case two people wanted to swap cards.

As for online business ideas to make A LOT of money, you just thought of one. There’s no pile of ideas just sitting there waiting. Most inline web businesses are come-ons and scams.

Add your own answer in the comments!

Question by AJ: What is the best & easiest way to set up a blog to share cooking recipies & invite others to enter their own?
I want to set up a blog for my mom so she can enter her recipies that can be shared by our family members. I also want to make the blog flexible enough such that other family members can also enter their own favorite recipes, rather than just comment on her entries.

Ideally, I’d like to be able to create some top-level categories, and then for each new blog entry, have some sort of a template.

Any help would be much appreciated.

Best answer:

Answer by fh4life92
you could set up a xanga account…i’ve never used it…but it is for blogging…and then send the acct name and password out to everyone so they can all use it. actually you could do that with any blog site…just search for a blog site on google…or ask some friends what sites they use and like.

Know better? Leave your own answer in the comments!

by denharsh

Question by brndbradsh: How do people make money from their websites?
I was wondering how that is if you dont have a business to promote. For example if I had a site where people can go to vent and gossip how would I make money. I have heard of such sites, no one I know personally nor do I know if they get paid to do it, but its just like a My Space or Yahoo, they are free to use and join so how do they make their money?

Best answer:

Answer by Zentheman
Great question..you’d think they go broke
doing it for nothing..

in the end very few people do anything that costs money
for nothing.

ADVERTISING….

How much do you think My Space made from Google advertising in a month?

What do you think? Answer below!

by liewcf

Question by rodger c: Is their anybody making money off their blog using Google ad words?
I’m in the process of getting my blog started and i need to know if i could make a living using Google ad words with it.

Best answer:

Answer by Shae S
It depends. To get the amount of traffic however that would generate enough money to “make a living” you would have to produce quality content for 3-4 years.

What do you think? Answer below!

by Ken Lund

Question by : Hi is anyone out there making good money with adsense ads on their page or affiliate marketing if so how much?
Are you selling someone else’s product through affiliate marketing? Are you making good money through the adsense ads on your page if so I’d like to see proof. Thanks.

Best answer:

Answer by Thats_me
This may sound rude to you but why would i or anyone want to proove you that they have made money… Listen boy google is not a baby so obviously their adsense program makes you money. I made $ 300 a month for around a year on my blogs and sites before i started my business… Yes, you can make good money with affiliate marketing depending upon how many hits (clicks) you get. Advetisers will pay you only when they get a click or lead generated on from your blog… They can pay you anywhere from 1 cent to $ 10,000 per sale depending upon what you are selling or promoting…

www.DebtCareUSA.com
We are looking for affiliates to join our network… We are currently paying $ 5 per Lead generated (Per form filed on our home page)

This website helps people to get out of debts and in US everyone is in debts so you can get alot of leads generated

Know better? Leave your own answer in the comments!

“He makes his way down the field, finds his target, aims—can he make it before time runs out?”

Nope, we’re not at a sports game, but rather watching a robot, made of Legos, and built and programmed by a team of young students, compete at the FIRST® LEGO® League (FLL) robotics tournament. Last Saturday, November 19, marked our sixth year hosting a qualifying tournament at Google headquarters. This year, 16 Bay Area teams made up of 9-14 year olds participated, energizing our campus with their enthusiasm and even a spontaneous conga line or two.

I’m a software engineer with a longtime personal interest in LEGO robotics and, even more, in getting kids excited about doing science and technology. When fellow Google engineer Albert Bodenhamar and I heard about the tournament awhile back, we put together a team of volunteers at Google, got in touch with the FLL regional coordinators—the nonprofit group Playing at Learning—and held our first tournament. Now we host the event every year, with a cadre of 25-30 Googlers, spouses and friends who spend the day volunteering as judges and referees and help with all of the set-up and logistics.

The center of the action during tournament day was the two ping pong-sized tables where these homegrown robots raced against the clock to complete various physical tasks, all related to the tournament theme of food safety. The tables were covered with small “props” the robots would need. For example, at one point, the robots had to scoop up, carry and then empty dispensers of little plastic “bacteria” into a miniature plastic sink at the opposite end of the table. Referees in black-and-white striped shirts started and stopped the clock and kept their eyes out for penalties while the MC gave play-by-plays of the action. Meanwhile, parents and coaches crowded around, cheering and taking photographs, and the action was broadcast on a jumbo screen for all to see.

When not competing at the tables, teams met with three different sets of judges. One panel of judges asked students about their robot (how they designed it, how it worked), while another set asked about core values (how they worked together as a team, the learning process, camaraderie). In front of the third set of judges, the teams presented their research projects and answered questions. The research project, while unrelated to robotics, aims to incorporate research and problem-solving—keys to the success of any real-world engineering team—into the competition.

At the end of the day, we announced awards. The team Nibbles & Bytes took home the Core Values award, Decon Droids won the award for best Research Project, Xtreme Creators won for Robot Design and the Flying Cougar Cyborgs won for Robot Performance. The LegoNauts took home the Champion’s award. Seven teams advanced to the district championship, which will take place in Redwood City, Calif. in January. Eventually, the tournament reaches the national, and then international, level.

It’s important, not to mention fun, to support creative outlets for young people to get involved in computer science and technology. Competitions like FLL introduce a whole new generation to the world of technology and engineering, and it’s always a blast to support the students who are participating—even if I am a bit exhausted after that conga line.

If you want to get involved with FLL, you can check the website to find out if a team exists in your area, or register a new one.

Posted by Glenn Trewitt, software engineer and FLL tournament director

The Official Google Blog

Last week in our Zurich office, we held a celebratory event for the 20 winners of the second annual European Google Trailblazer Awards, intended to recognize students that exhibit great potential in science and engineering. The eight girls and 12 boys aged 16-19 were selected for their work in national science, informatics and engineering competitions that took place in Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Romania, Switzerland and the U.K. over the past year. Partnering with each of these competitions, Google engineers awarded “Trailblazer” status to the participants who demonstrated an outstanding use of computing technology in their projects. The aim of the distinction is to reward and encourage these students’ achievements, bring talented students to experience life at Google and show them what a career in computer science can look like, with a special emphasis on how computer science touches every discipline.

Every Trailblazer winner this year was truly worthy of the title. Ciara, Ruth and Kate, three of the winners of the the BT Young Scientist competition in Ireland, taught themselves to code in order to develop a mobile app for teens to measure their carbon footprints, looking at their use of typical teenage appliances like MP3 players, hair straighteners and computer games. Joszef, one of the winners of the Scientific and Innovation Contest for Youth in Hungary, developed a portable heart monitor combined with GPS that would alert medical services instantly if you were having a heart attack, and include your location so they could respond quickly. Tom and Yannick, winners of the Junior Web Awards in Switzerland, learned HTML and CSS in order to build an interactive health website—and made it available in French, German and English. These are just a few examples.

While at Google Zurich, the Trailblazers covered a wide swath of material, learning about data centers, security and testing, hearing from the Street View team on managing operations in multiple countries and from recruiters on how to write a strong resume. Google engineers chatted about careers in computer science and then tasked the group to solve problems like a software engineer: imitating how a software program might work, the participants lined up in groups of six and had to create an algorithm to reorder themselves without speaking to each other during the re-arranging. For their most in-depth challenge, the students developed and pitched their own award-winning product with guidance from product managers. In just 20 minutes, each student had to come up with product ideas and a pitch—delivered to the product managers—that would convince even Larry Page that their tech product would be the next big thing.

The students left Zurich buzzing about the pathways a career in tech can lead them down, and we can’t wait to see how these young entrepreneurs develop over the next few years.

If you’d like a shot at becoming a Google Trailblazer in 2012, enter one of our partner competitions in Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Romania, Switzerland or the U.K. (you need to be at high school in one of these countries to be eligible for entry). More countries and partner competitions will be added each year, so keep an eye on google.com/edu for further details.

If you’re the organizer of an pre-existing national science and engineering competition in Europe, the Middle East or Africa (EMEA) and would like your competition to be considered for a Trailblazer prize from Google, please complete this form.

Posted by Alison Daniel-Cutler, Pre-University Education Outreach, EMEA

The Official Google Blog

What do a celebrity blog, a video interview on a newspaper site and a cable channel’s smartphone app have in common? They’re all supported by advertising…and they’re all examples of how the lines between media formats are blurring.

These increasingly blurry lines are not only resulting in highly engaging forms of content for users, but many new revenue opportunities for publishers. A wave of innovation and investment over the past several years has also created better performing ads, a larger pool of online advertisers, and new technologies to sell and manage ad space. Together, these trends are helping to spur increased investment in online advertising. We’ve seen this in our own Google Display Network: our publisher partners have seen spending across the Google Display Network from our largest 1,000 advertisers more than double in the last 12 months.

With all these new opportunities in mind, we’re introducing new tools for our publisher partners—in our ad serving technology (DoubleClick for Publishers) and in our ad exchange (DoubleClick Ad Exchange).

Video and mobile in DoubleClick for Publishers
Given the changes in the media landscape, it’s not surprising that we’ve seen incredible growth for both mobile and video ad formats over the past year: the number of video ads on the Google Display Network has increased 350 percent in the past 12 months, while AdMob, our mobile network, has grown by more than 200 percent.

Before now, it’s been difficult for publishers to manage all their video and mobile ad space from a single ad server—the platform publishers use to schedule, measure and run the ads they’ve sold on their sites. To solve this challenge, we’re rolling out new tools in our latest version of DoubleClick for Publishers that enable publishers to better manage video and mobile inventory. Publishers will be able to manage all of the ads they’re running—across all of their webpages, videos and mobile devices—from a single dashboard, and see which formats and channels are performing best for them.

A handful of publishers have already begun using the video feature and it appears to be performing well for them: we’ve seen 55 percent month-over-month growth in video ad volume in the last quarter. In other words, publishers are now able not only to produce more video content, but to make more money from it as well.

Direct Deals on the DoubleClick Ad Exchange
Another way publishers make money is to sell their advertising via online exchanges, like the DoubleClick Ad Exchange, where they can offer their ad space to a wide pool of competing ad buyers. This has already proven to generate substantially more revenue for publishers, and as a result we’ve seen significant growth in the number of trades on our exchange (158 percent year over year).

However, publishers have told us that they’d also like the option of making some of their ad space available only to certain buyers at a certain price—similar to how an art dealer might want to offer a painting first to certain clients before giving it to an auction house to sell. So we’re introducing Direct Deals on the Doubleclick Ad Exchange, which gives publishers the ability to make these “first look” offers. For example, using Direct Deals, a news publisher could set aside all of the ad space on their sports page and offer it first to a select group of buyers at a specific price, and then if those buyers pass on the offer, automatically place that inventory into the Ad Exchange’s auction.

Looking back at that blog, news site and app, we’d like them to have one more thing in common—being able to advantage of new opportunities to grow their businesses even further. These new tools, together with the other solutions we’re continuing to develop, are designed to help businesses like them—and all our publisher partners—do just that, and get the most out of today’s advertising landscape.

Posted by Neal Mohan, Vice President of Display Advertising

The Official Google Blog

If you consider an average smartphone user, he primarily uses it for 3 main purposes: Communication such as e-mail, IM and social networking, taking photos and playing games. And if you’re like me, you’re probably taking a lot of photos daily.

While social photo apps like Picplz and Lightbox are cool, no one has thought of going beyond that and looking at ‘the big picture’. When you snap a photo, you’re essentially creating a visual representation of that place and generating location details of that place through geotags, which can be used for mapping purposes.

Teliport.me, an Indian based startup, previously known as Phototour.in, aims to achieve something similar with its crowdsourced street view product.

Although Vineet Devaiah, co-founder of the Teliport.me refused to divulge any further details on the product they are currently working on, he hinted that their Android panorama app, which came out of Alpha last week, is just the tip of the iceberg and they have much larger plans with Teliport.me, which is currently under construction.

Speaking of the Android app, Vineet Devaiah and his team seem to have pulled off some impressive work over the past couple of months, considering how tricky and device-centric, the panorama feature usually is.

Unlike the iPhone, which has a similar hardware configuration throughout its entire device family, Android devices come with wildly different configurations and processing power, thanks to various OEM’s and their ways of product differentiation, to stay ahead in the market.

Hence, it poses a huge challenge for app developers to provide a similar experience across all devices, be it a low-specced model like HTC Wildfire or a top-end model like Samsung Galaxy II, which probably is one of the reason there are no solid panorama apps for Android unlike iOS which has Microsoft’s Photosynth and Occupital’s 360 Panorama.

On the flipside, Android devices enjoy more popularity than iPhones in developing countries like India, thanks to the wide adoption of the OS by domestic manufacturers such as Micromax, Spice and Olive Telecom who are churning out a crazy number of low-cost Android devices in recent months, thereby offering a large growth opportunity and a chance to be a killer app on the Android platform rather than being a “me too” app on iOS.

Vineet and the Teliport.me team, thereby thought of capitalising this opportunity and brought their award-winning photo stitching technology onto Android.

An alpha version was released into the Android Market in mid-May and the company recorded 47,000 downloads within a span of 60 days without any major PR campaign. The app recently moved to public beta and now supports 200+ Android devices, which is quite impressive, considering the highly fragmented nature of the OS. Vineet also added that the app has already stitched 70,000+ panoramas and the number is growing increasingly by the day.

This however is just the first stage in the company’s grand scheme of things. They have a web version of the photo stitching app which is currently barebones in terms of functionality, but they plan to re-launch a new web version at Teliport.me in forthcoming months.

While crowdsourced street view seems to be a lofty dream right now, we can’t wait to get our hands on this product once it publicly launches in few months.

As for Phototour.in, Vineet said they will ultimately shut it down and all the existing features will be ported onto Teliport.me.

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