While looking for things to post on ThinkCE I found this really cool article on an underwater hotel. Well before I get into it I guess I should tell you that ThinkCE is going good again. This time I am focusing more on just cool tech/gadget news so if you are interested in that check out the site. Also if you know of a better RSS feed addon for Joomla than the one that it comes with please let me know!
Ok so anyways I was looking for news for ThinkCE and I came across this really cool article on Popular Science’s website that was talking about an underwater hotel that is scheduled to open in 2008 off the coast of Fiji. It immediately reminded me of the movies of all the underwater hotels/places where things went wrong! But if they actually pull this off it will be amazing, to bad I don’t have the 15K it will cost for a 1 week reservation.
From the article…
The $500-million Hydropolis Undersea Resort is said to be the world’s first underwater hotel. A sprawling 1.1-million-square-foot complex—with lavish suites, a ballroom, a shopping mall and a missile-defense system to ward off terrorists—Hydropolis is an ambitious vision of luxury at 60 feet underwater. As of press time, though, the project had stalled in the preconstruction phase. According to Mansoor Ijaz, deputy chairman of the board for Crescent Hydropolis Resorts, LLC, Hydropolis is on hold pending “land acquisition” and probably won’t be finished before the current opening date, set for 2008.
Money, naturally, is the first hurdle facing any large-scale endeavor. In the case of Poseidon, private investors and an American merchant bank have anted up nearly all of the $105 million that Jones needs to complete the resort. Clearly, they are optimistic that Poseidon can lure enough celebrity guests and high rollers to be a financial success. Meanwhile, Jones has inked a deal with the owners of a privately held South Pacific island. If all goes well with construction, the Poseidon Mystery Island will soon be submerged in 40 feet of water in a 5,000-acre coral lagoon near the coast of a narrow, 225-acre isle located in northeastern Fiji.
A while ago I received my press pass for CES. The past week I have been setting appointments and sending RSVP’s for all of the events. Last year CES was a shamble because it was my first time going and I had no clue what to expect. This year I am organized and know what I’m doing. We have so many meetings this year it’s crazy! We probably won’t even hit the show floor until Wednesday because all of our meetings Monday and Tuesday are off the show floor in surrounding hotel suites. This is nice because the show floor is such a zoo. There are so many people and it is so busy that it’s hard to get real work done. It is also nice because the companies usually provide food and drinks when you come to their suite, and even sometimes some nice swag! After looking at the press pass I noticed there were meal tickets. Which means during the press lunch’s you are only able to get 1 serving, when last year you could go up as many times as you wanted. Oh well not a huge deal to me, anyways I’m really looking forward to CES and hopefully this year we can make more contacts and promote ThinkComputers even more!
Myspace is probably the biggest online community out there. Myspace has made many people rich, not just its owners. Jon makes a good amount of his money off Myspace. It is crazy the amount of traffic you can push to a website because of Myspace. The 15K challenge used Myspace to make $14,185.37 in 1 month! Most of my websites are tech related, but I have ventured into Myspace related sites because of the ability to push a lot of traffic to them easily and I don’t have to update them everyday to have constant traffic.
What I wanted to talk about today is in-direct marketing. You basically want to advertise a product, or website in our case without “really” advertising it. I actually got this idea from the 15K challenge. Basically this is how it works; you create a Myspace profile that you want to look real. Some things when wanting to make the profile look real you want to use more than 1 picture of the person. I’ve seen a ton of fake Myspace profiles that use the same picture over and over again. If you want people to think you are real then find more than 1 picture of someone. Next fill out the profile completely, people will be able to spot a fake profile if it isn’t filled out at all. The last thing that you want to do is make sure the person you have created is from a major city. This will get more people to add you as a friend. It also helps if the person you create is good looking.
Ok now for the marketing part. My Myspace resource site is MyProfileResource, which has layouts, graphics, etc. So basically on this fake profile will be comprised of a layout from MPR, graphics from MPR, and maybe a blog entry about how “I found all of these cool layouts at MPR”. This will draw some traffic to your site, but we want more! Here are some more things that you can do. Well first you want to get some friends, you can easily add people from your area and they usually won’t wonder why you have added them. If you want to accumulate a lot of friends fast you can use a program like Badder Adder. The next in-direct thing you can do is leave comments to people with comment images from your site. Those images will link back to your site. So if you have 100 friends and leave comments on all 100 of them and say 10 people view each one of their profiles that’s 1000 people that you would be advertising to. Some other things you can do is send bulletins or messages to people talking about your site or things like that.
So does it work? YES! On MPR I was averaging around 700 unique visitors a day. After creating 3 profiles like this and doing some work on each a month later I am averaging 1300-1500 unique visitors a day. A lot of the traffic is coming directly from Myspace too. Now imagine if I had made 100 profiles?
Well today we had our first real snow of the year! Honestly I’m not a real fan of snow. It’s fun for the first couple of week then you just want it to be warm again. Not to mention all of the roads are crap and it’s pointless to wash your car. We got about an inch of snow, which is not that bad, hopefully it will all just melt! Here are a few pictures from the balcony of my apartment.
In other news I have been extremely busy trying to get reviews done and trying to get some holiday shopping done! This month is crazy for me! I will have some more interesting stuff tonight or early tomorrow, sorry for all these personal posts!
While doing my daily web browsing the other day I cam upon a really cool pixel object poster called “Web 2.0”, which basically highlights all of the big “Web 2.0” companies.
Looking at it I can see a lot of the services I use today, Google (who doesn’t use google!), Feedburner, WordPress, Skype, Myspace, Digg, YouTube. I did see a Google talk logo, but not a Gmail logo, unless I haven’t found it yet. Some other cool things to notice are the Bluetooth logos, all the hidden RSS logos, and both black and white iPod’s. If you really like this poster you can actually order it. I really thinking about getting it, maybe get it for when I actually have a real office!
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