Get A Free Domain Name With CO.cc

July 23, 2009 by 4 Comments

Co.cc gives away free domains such as example.co.cc. The vast majority of domain names are free, though some more popular ones must be paid for. You can use your co.cc domain to either re-direct to your main website, or a domain itself. You’ll need somewhere to host your website, however.

Search for the domain you want – if it’s available, register it today for FREE! Free for life. I registered www.likechapaa.co.cc yesterday (and configured it to redirect to this website). The only catch is that if you don’t “set up” your free domain within 48hrs, you lose it.

If you are still insure of this online thing, why not try it with a free domain?

Filed Under: Cool Sites, Tips Hacking and Reviews Tagged With: ,

How To Build A Successful Blog (Interview)

July 23, 2009 by 1 Comment

Meet Alborz Fallah, the owner of the famed owner of Car Advice. In 2008, Alborz’s blog was independently valued at $5.9 MILLION dollars. He now has a team of full time writers producing content and he gets to drive expensive cars, which he then writes about in his blog. And giess what? It all started with a computer in his bedroom.

Alborz was recently interviewed over at Yaro’s blog. Here’s some of the most important points to take away from the interview (in Yaro’s words):

  • You can start a blog and choose top level categories in very competitive markets, if you niche it down based on geographical location. In other words, you can start a car blog and target just your country to differentiate it. There’s big bucks to be made as the leading blog in just one country for mainstream subjects.
  • When you don’t know what topic to blog about, pick what you think might work and just put something out there and see what happens.
  • You can build a significant blog based only on part time labor, if you are dedicated and get things done during the time you have available to work on the project.
  • Sometimes, being controversial can do wonderful things for your traffic. Strong opinions will always stick out and grab attention.
  • Search engine traffic is very powerful if you just do a few things right, like blog post titles in Alborz’s case.
  • Think BIG with your blog, it doesn’t have to be just a small publication – consider taking things to the next level with the help of financial investors.

Download an mp3 of the whole interview, or get the text as PDF.

Filed Under: Case Study Tagged With:

Candy.com

July 23, 2009 by Leave a Comment

This past June (last month), www.candy.com was sold for a cool USD 3,000,000/-. That is around 240,000,000 Kenyan shillings. Sweet eh? Guess what he bought it for…

The seller is an individual domainer named Rick bought it in the 90s probably for a few hundred US dollars. Then he sells it from 3M. Sijui if you can get such margins anywhere but on the internet! Rick is a domain name speculator…he buys them cheap and sells them very high. (He is the same guy who sold www.ireport.com to CNN for USD 750,000/-)

The question is, can you make money this way in Kenya? Just think about it, some day .co.ke domain names will be very valuable. The good thing is that you can still get very interesting domain names in the .co.ke range of domains. I wanted to buy www.drink.co.ke and sell it to Coca Cola, but it seems someone beat me to it. I’ll keep on looking though (got a few I’m holding on to till they become valuable enough).

Can you (yes, you) make money this way? Why not? Learn how.

Filed Under: Make Money Tagged With: ,

Safaricom

July 21, 2009 by Leave a Comment

There’s no doubt that Safaricom is one of the very best companies in Kenya. I’m proud that such an innovative and, simply amazing company is Kenyan! God bless all that is good in Safaricom.

Sometimes they make me wonder, though. Actually, they make me wonder a lot. Their customer care is not the worst but it is worse than most. I’m sure many of you are familiar with the term “Sufferingcom” – there’s even a Facebook group! Not to mention that many of my friends and family have “sworn” that they will vuka to another mobile phone service the minute we get mobile number portability in Kenya. (Mobile number portability allows you to move to Orange, for example, but keep your Safaricom number.) What if you could move to Zain, YU, or Orange and keep your Safaricom number, would you vuka too?

I recently won a prize (imagine that) in the ongoing Safaricom “Activate your drive” competition/promotion. I have never won any prize ever before so I was thrilled! Alas, I no longer am thrilled. Collecting the prize has turned out to be harder than I thought it should be. If I won it, why not just give it to me? It’s gone as far as someone from “marketing” being shockingly rude about this. Considering that the “Activate your drive” promotion is supposed to be marketing Safaricom, I find how Safaricom have handled me quite shocking. I suppose sometimes you get too big to care about the little guy.

Marketing is not just the adverts and other promotional gimmicks. It is how ‘customer care’ answer the phone; it is the way you speak to customers; it is the quality of your products or services; it is being honest and genuine. Marketing isn’t what you do when you want to make a sale. It is an ongoing process that starts even before you create your products.

Safaricom, you disappoint me.

Filed Under: Miscellaneous Tagged With: ,

Don’t Let This Be You – How Twitter Was Violated

July 20, 2009 by 2 Comments

Twitter is probably the world’s hottest technology company in the world at this time. If you follow the world technology industry, you’ll no doubt see Twitter in the news at least once a week, every week. Well, this past week, Twitter was in the news again – for all the wrong reasons. A cracker from France (named “Hacker Croll”) managed to single-handedly break down Twitter’s security system and gain access to confidential company information, employee records, calendars, phone logs, credit card numbers and other information.

In a thriller of an article, Techcrunch lays bare the riveting story of how Hacker Croll violated Twitter. Here is a summary of how he did it:

1. HC accessed Gmail for a Twitter employee by using the password recovery feature that sends a reset link to a secondary email. In this case the secondary email was an expired Hotmail account, he simply registered it, clicked the link and reset the password. Gmail was then owned.
2. HC then read emails to guess what the original Gmail password was successfully and reset the password so the Twitter employee would not notice the account had changed.
3. HC then used the same password to access the employee’s Twitter email on Google Apps for your domain, getting access to a gold mine of sensitive company information from emails and, particularly, email attachments.
4. HC then used this information along with additional password guesses and resets to take control of other Twitter employee personal and work emails.
5. HC then used the same username/password combinations and password reset features to access AT&T, MobileMe, Amazon and iTunes, among other services. A security hole in iTunes gave HC access to full credit card information in clear text. HC now also had control of Twitter’s domain names at GoDaddy.
6. Even at this point, Twitter had absolutely no idea they had been compromised.

Read about the whole thrilling account here.

In computer security circles, they say that a computer system can never be 100% secure – there’s always a hole somewhere that can be exploited by someone who is determined to do so. However, most organisations and individuals (probably even you) are very very poor when it comes to security in the computer systems (especially online) that they use.

As seen in the Twitter cracking, a single Gmail account fell and this opened the door for the whole company to be compromised. Could this happen to you? No, really, could it? Rethink your approach to computer security, reset those passwords and do not use a single password for all the services and systems that you use. Change your passwords regularly and do not use passwords that can be easily guessed.

Always be on your guard. Otherwise, You may come to regret it.

Filed Under: Case Study, Internet Culture Tagged With:

Work At Home Today – Jobs!

July 20, 2009 by Leave a Comment

More Freelance Jobs

Rails developer – Agathon Group is in need of an experienced Ruby on Rails Developer to help us finish off a mix of internal and external projects. This is a 100% telecommuting, full-time, three month contract position.

Data entry for online magazine site – Looking for someone to type in information from a printed magazine into an online spreadsheet. The magazine is a listing of businesses. Your job is to enter the business listings into a spreadsheet. The magazine is 65 pages with about 10 listings per page. We need the project done in 7 days. After that we have many more projects just like this one. We’re looking for honest, reliable people who we can work with online and depend upon.

Online copy editors – Demand Studios is recruiting experienced freelance line editors and copy editors to edit our growing library of informative articles. Demand Studios publishes thousands of articles a day and we rely on our community of copy editors to ensure accuracy and quality. We are looking for dedicated editors who can deliver quality work in a timely manner and are comfortable occasionally communicating with writers. Some fact checking is also required. Our articles cover a variety of categories and you can set preferences to edit the topics you are most comfortable with.

Web designer – Keele UX is a close-knit team of creative thinkers with a focus on the design and planning of web apps and community driven sites. We’re looking for full-time freelancers only, who can correspond between the reg. business hours.

Article writer (paid weekly) – We are currently seeking individual writers to write articles/stories about a wide range of topics. Our company is rapidly expanding and we need individuals like your self to become part our team.

Personal technology columnist – Mshale Newspaper, based in Minneapolis, Minnesota is looking for a personal technology columnist to comment and write on latest technology trends of interest to its readers. Mshale caters to the African immigrant in the United States through its print edition as well as its online version at Mshale.com.

Web UI designer – Appfrica Labs (appfrica.org) is looking to hire a part-time Web UI Designer for a number of our forthcoming web apps and a number of data visualizations. The position will pay based on experience and may turn into a full-time offering in a few months.

Freelance writing jobs – At Suite101, our focus is our commitment to supporting freelance writers. Whether your goal is to publish articles, earn more income, hone your writing skills or create new career opportunities, Suite101 is here to assist you every step of the way.

Remote web designer – Are you a passionate, multi-talented designer with a desire to help be involved in an exciting new organization dedicated to entrepreneurial innovation? Are you that rare type of professional who possesses an equal ability to design incredible websites and brand identities? Do you want creative freedom as well as the chance to collaborate? If so, Grasshopper Labs wants you.

Finally, Some Hot Freelance Jobs


Need help?
How to get an online job.
How to avoid online scams.

This post is a weekly feature – we post a list of online, work-from-anywhere, jobs every single week. Be sure not to miss the next list of jobs. Subscribe to Like Chapaa today, or sign up to receive free email updates.

Filed Under: Online Jobs Tagged With: , ,

You’ll Let This Opportunity Go?

July 20, 2009 by Leave a Comment

Starting on the 27th of July 2009, Wambere and I will launch the Biashara30 learning program where we will work with 10 people and teach them what we know about making money online. The program will be 100% free and will end in a project where the group (or everyone individually) launches a structured internet business.

Are you going to sit there and let this opportunity just pass you by? Why?

Apply today!

Filed Under: Miscellaneous Tagged With: