the curse of invention

There is nothing as rewarding as inventing something new. The feeling is unparalleled. However, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. A lot of innovators do not reap the rewards of their invention and it usually happens that it goes to some oaf with no clue what it takes to dream.

Whenever I get a eureka moment it is always followed by a sad feeling knowing the hurdles that bedevil fruition of an idea. If the bug of invention bites you there is no turning back. You are infected with a disease characterized constant thinking about solving problems or doing things differently.

Dying poor is a road well-traveled. You can read up on people like Michelangelo, Charles Goodyear or Thomas Edison; the list is endless. Often, it is the person who has the money to commercialize the invention, who becomes rich. The point of this conversation? If you consider yourself anywhere near creating new things then you must bear the burden of knowing you are holding the cow by the horns whilst someone else milks her. That you will dream and create but it is someone else who will laugh all the way to the bank.

Yet you must not stop because that is the way the cookie crumbles. Best you can do is look for a worthwhile outlet like write and tell the whole world your bright ideas before you actually implement them. It’s the means of putting your name on a product regardless of who pockets the money and also to keep you sane.

Laptops that run forever

Most laptops are limited as to how long they can keep charge. This makes them pretty much useless on planes, train or long bus rides or in areas with no electricity. Some tech companies such as Samsung have gone forward to harness solar. Unfortunately this is limited only to netbooks and they can't run all night long.

Having seen people using bicycle dynamos to charge phones, I have always wondered whether the same concept can be applied to laptops. The idea is this: All laptops have at least one fan for cooling the CPU. If this fan is used to turn a dynamo of sorts it can result in generation of a current. Given the fan moves a very high speed compared to a bicycle wheel, we assume that a reasonable current will be generated.

The generated current can then be channeled to recharge the battery. This will mean that the laptop battery will start charging as soon as the fan starts rotating which is immediately the power button is pressed. The assumption is that the amount generated somehow surpasses or equals the amount being drained from the battery to run the laptop.

If the above is possible this could mean walking around without chargers since there is no need for charging and consequently lower or no power bills due to laptop usage. Extending this model to other machines with fans such as desktops which have as many as four or more fans could mean having desktops that have a battery and that don't need external power to run. What about server machines with more fans and consume tons of power. Maybe even the UPS could be part of this setup.

The only time one would need charging is if the dynamo circuit becomes damaged or the battery itself deteriorates badly. Another downside is how the dynamo will fit in such a constrained space especially for laptops. Or maybe I just like dreaming..

Fail and Unlearn

The first time you meet an investor or hear them speak you might just be shocked to hear them say that your startup needs to fail, and fail fast. The cliché that 90% of all startups will not see the end of two years cannot be over emphasized. Failure is not necessarily a bad thing as long we learn from our mistakes (and others’) and move on swiftly.

Of all the ideas you think of and implement most will fail but will add some knowledge so that future ideas will stand a better chance. Here is where unlearning what you think or assume is true (when its not) comes in. Assumption is the mother of all blunders including yours. When a few facts are overlooked then you will keep failing until you realize what it is you don’t understand and either fix it or throw in the towel.

For example the first apple imac computers looked terrible and were a complete failure. Nobody hardly remembers that when they are fiddling with a macbook or ipad. The inventor kept on failing, quitting and going back. I personally remember once seeing three imacs (like the one in pic 2) one red, one blue and another yellow and thinking how stupid those things looked to me then. It’s now a fact that apple goods sell like hot cakes and Mr. failure is gloating from somewhere beyond the grave.

1984                                                                         1998                                                               2009

So the idea here is that when you fail you need to unlearn what you think is true and get some new education. Actually when I think about being an entrepreneur I see myself as a restless monkey with a loaded gun waiting to blast off opportunities. It’s time to fail, unlearn and relearn (and write shorter blog posts..).

Investment 101

In a previous article 7 cures for a lean purse was a map to wealth. Cure 3 says to multiply thy gold. But how? The answer is invest, invest, invest. So said the Chinese: if you have two loaves of bread sell one and with the monies buy hyacinths for your soul.

Most saving people go to work and have little or no room for side business. A nice way to save and accrue interests at the same time is the money market fund. A money market fund is generally a savings account that earns a much higher interest than a conventional bank account.

With Kenyan Banks offering savings accounts with 2% interest growing your money shall remain a pipe dream. Money market funds on the other side fetch interests as high as 21% believe or not. I even fantasized of getting a humongous loan at 16% from the idiotic banks and saving it in a money market fund at 21%. The logic for that fantasy is this. Assuming banks will nowadays beat a path to your door to offer you a loan on the slightest indication that you have a stable job, show up at a bank and order them to give you a loan.

Let’s pretend they have handed you Kshs. 2 milli at 16% interest p.a. At the end of the repayment period you should pretend to hand back Ksh. 2,320,000. If you immediately throw this cash into a money market fund that accrues interest at 21% p.a you will get an interest of 100k + each year assuming the interest is compund. The only backlash is if you must start repaying the loan back immediately.

Disclaimer: If you follow advice from this post and you end up in jail or loose property, it shall be at your own peril and I shall not accept liability for any damage caused. However if it works out share the knowledge and also feel to invite me to the after party.

The next question at this point might be where to get money market funds in Kenya and which is the best. When I first stumbled on money market funds I only knew one, and it was offering an interest of 6.5% p.a. then. At the moment of writing this post I had discovered over 20 and they all offer different products so it’s up to you to launch an inquiry into the most suitable. Below is a list from a respectable local newspaper dated Wednesday February 1, 2012.Given today is Friday February 3,2012 the information is up to date so it’s a good point to begin. You can also download the complete pdf file.

UNIT TRUSTS                                      DAILY YIELD                    EFFECTIVE ANNUAL RATE

Africa Alliance Kenya Shilling Fund                       11.85%                                             12.5%

Old Mutual Money Market Fund                            12.17%                                            12.87%

British-American Money Market fund                   12.45%                                             13.26%
 
Stanbic Money market Fund                                 12.75%                                            13.52%

CBA Market Fund                                                   11.69%                                             12.40%

CIC Money Market Fund                                        15.83%                                             17.03%

Amana Money Market Fund                                    21.09%                                              22.5%

Suntra Money market Fund                                  11.48%                                            12.17%

Zimele Money Market Fund                                    9.0%                                                9.31%

ICEA Money Market Fund                                     10.96%                                             11.58%


A few advantages of this investment vehicle are that you can always withdraw your money, keep up with progress online and generate e-statements. It also has a guarantee unlike the stock markets where stocks fluctuate wildly.

Stocks are also affected by non-issues and may plummet to hell just because a board member of the company was allegedly spotted breezing into Motel Kabu Kabu with a string of kele keles in his wake.

Driving traffic to your blog

Most people nowadays have a blog where they simply express themselves, bitch about daily issues or offer w4r3z for download. However, it’s pointless if nobody knows how to get to your blog.

After struggling to get my blog in the results, I thought why not point the N00B's in the right direction without having them know all the technical stuff. We’ll start with the easy tasks and then gradually move on to more involving ones.

Set your blog as homepage

Attempt to set your blog as the home page on as many computers that have access to the Internet as possible. For instance each time you visit a cyber café, make sure you make your blog the home page so that each next person that uses the computer gets to see your blog first before they embark on their business. Just don’t get caught by the cyber café assistant.

I also found telling people by word of mouth is also effective in getting people to visit your site. In addition people that you tell also have other networks they are connected to. This means that you can access very many people by just telling a single person.

Spamming

Send all your email contacts the URL to your blog and hope they will follow and hear what you have to say. You may also join mailing lists that connect you to thousands of people without the need to know their emails. A good place to start is to spam back all those people who fill up the spam folder in your email.

In addition create an email signature with your website along telephone number, title and/or disclaimer.

Leverage social media

After each post to your blog you can announce it on your LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook status and get more people to follow the links and land on your blog. If they like what you blog about, they will explore and comment. This has a big impact since links from the highly ranked sites to yours will improve your page rank resulting in your site moving a little bit higher in results.

Furthermore, update your profile to show your blog address so that people who view your profile and want to know more about you can also see you have a blog and visit it in order to pique your mind. Still on social media, Follow buttons and options to subscribe by email or feed can help retain followers who want to follow your posts.

Commenting on websites with your signature

Often you may read articles on the web and leave you comments. You may append your blog URL after your comment and maybe even your twitter handle to get new people to check out your blog. If the sites rank higher than your blog, it might improve your page rank if people follow the links.

For example if your blog is about Technology, frequent comments (with a backlink to your site) on articles in Technology sites such as TechCrunch may lead a considerable number of visitors to your humble website.

Submit your URL to all major Search Engines

Don’t wait for search engines to discover your site. If your site is getting a lot of visitors already you need not lift a finger. However if that’s not the case you need to manually submit the URL to your blog. Just type “submitting a website to search engines” in the Google search box and explore.

Webmaster tools

Sign up for webmaster tools. They are free and help you discover interesting statistics about your site. The point is to know where the most traffic from your site comes from and optimize for these visitors. Both Google and Bing offer these tools. You just sign in with your Google or Windows Live ID and follow instructions.

If you find you enjoy using webmaster tools especially from Google, you can go on and try Google Analytics and Google Adsense. If you can get the crowds to visit your blog then you can also get them to earn you revenue every time someone clicks on advertisements on the blog.