NICO+

As amazing as it is this NICO+ is one of the few mobile phone in Japan which can only be used as a phone and in order to send email... and that IT ! Well to be honest with you, most of the people in Japan who purchase these fancy ketai (mobile phones) are only using 10% of their functionality while most of the time their mobile phone will just be used in order to send and receive emails and play games, so why spending so much money when Willcom can offer use the most simple device ever, the NICO+ !!

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Follow what you love and the money will come

The Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) was nothing more than an underground fighting league, and one which was scarcely accepted in the U.S. That was, until Dana White came along. White transformed the UFC into one of the most mainstream and popular sports on the scene today. By cleaning up its image and marketing it as a legitimate sport, White was able to create a successful organization, whose events can now be seen on television in more than 35 countries around the world.

“I’m pretty happy with the way everything has worked out with UFC,” says White. “We’ve come a long way in a couple of years.” From working as a hotel bellhop to managing a multi-million dollar company, White has most certainly come a long way from where he started off. How did this boy who could barely make it through high school, become a millionaire and the envy of men across America?

“It was around 1997 or 1998 that it all turned around for us. We were all boxing guys and I used to think UFC was a joke. I would say, ‘those guys would get their asses kicked by a boxer. It opened our eyes to a whole new world. It literally changed my life. We didn’t buy this to make billions of dollars. We saw something in this sport and in the fighters that we thought was incredible.

It was pretty cool. If you would have asked me ten years ago if this is where I would have been in ten years, I would have laughed in your face.

We’ve been at the tipping point for awhile now. We finally got to the point where we couldn’t be denied anymore. We’ve been kick boxing and wrestling’s asses for the last year and a half. We’re selling out venues; we’re breaking records everywhere we go.

It’s really the last nail in the coffin with the media not giving us the credibility and not looking at us as a real sport. The cover of Sports Illustrated, the talk shows – we’re there. We’ve finally arrived.

A lot of times, kids go to college and take a major because they do what they think they’re supposed to do. I told them I believe 90 percent of America gets up in the morning and drives to a job they hate. That could have happened to me in the hotel industry.

I told them to find what they are passionate about and to go for that regardless of what anyone tells them. They can go to school and major in political science and say they want to be a doctor or a lawyer, but unless they’re passionate about what they do, they’re never really going to be happy or truly successful. That’s what it’s really all about. I’m a guy who did exactly what he wanted to do. When you do that, the money follows.“

What are you following in your life?

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List of Business Podcasts

Here is a few Business podcasts that are interesting to listen to:

Buying a Business: Business Performance Coaching maintains over 90 podcasts on how to buy a business without going bankrupt.

Business Week Podcasts:Regularly scheduled, giving additional analysis and insight to weekly features.

The Cubicle Escape Pod: A how-to guide for those looking to escape the cubicle by starting their own business.

Duct Tape Marketing: A Marketing specific Podcast - John Jantsch interviews prominent figures in the industry.

The Invisible Hand & Invisible Finger Podcasts: Devoted to management thinking but covering other business topics.

Mind Your Own Business: The Entrepreneur's podcast "breaks free from orthodox views and tells it as it is."

The Recognized Expert Marketing Show: Over 100 marketing experts talk about PR, Sales, Marketing, Internet Marketing, Branding, Copywriting and more.

Small Business Pod: The UK's first small business podcast. News, interviews and advice for small, mid, startups and entrepreneurs.

Small Business Trends:Small Business Trends Radio offering 60-minute audio interviews with small business experts.

Venture Voice: Calling entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, their friends and foes, asking what it takes to start a successful business.

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Business Opportunities Marketplace

Click here to enter the web's leading Business Opportunity Marketplace. Here you can search more thousands of business opportunities within the market.

From textile manufacturers in India to Chinese organic food suppliers to property investments in Eastern Europe... there are 1000s of trade opportunities, partnerships and opportunities at www.Ubops.com.

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PC market in Japan decreasing

Following this article, Japan is the first country in the world where the pc market has started to decrease giving way to the dominance of the mobile era. The same way ADSL has stopped its expansion in favour of fibre optics, big companies such as Toshiba, Panasonic, Sony, Fujitsu, NEC have started to bet for the future of mobile aparatus.

Nowadays in Japan, teenagers start to blog through their mobiles instead of using their computers, using a famous service called “Mobage”. Teenagers now don't use MSN-Messenger but they use service such as AU-Docomo-Softbank from their mobiles.

The 2nd most visited web in Japan, Mixi.jp, has been accessed more through mobiles than from computers; and more visits than Google Japan from PCs. Other sites such Facebook and MySpace can all be accessed and updated from handsets, as can the video-sharing site YouTube.

Mobile use is so extreme that there are novels being written using mobile phones. Obviously there are many people on the other side reading them. This is pretty amazing without taking into account that writing on japanese mobiles is easier than you would think.

It is pretty clear why consumers are turning away from PCs. Millions of people now download music directly to their mobile devices, and many more use their handsets for online shopping and to play games. Digital cameras connect directly to printers and high-definition TVs for viewing photos, bypassing PCs altogether. Movies can now be downloaded straight to TVs.

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Curious Japanese products

iFish- product by SEGA which can best described as a fish/robot/speaker. It has been very popular in Japan. Have a look at the video to better understand this curious japanese product.




iDog - is a robot dog by SEGA. It can be considered a cheap imitation of the Aibo envolved in a very obvious iPod design. It will flash lights and dance to the music you expose it to. It retails at about 20 euros compared to the Aibo's 1000 euros.




iCat - pretty much the same but with a cat design (as you may have already imagined). According to the box it loves rock, punk, both rap and hip hop (umm well said??), dance, techno and more.




iPenguin - if you don't know what it is then I can't help you any further.




Personally I think these devices are pretty useless. Kids might be amused by them but if you are an adult, you will probably enjoy this product for about 15 minutes before you get tired of this. By the way I have to say that for me, the Penguin is the coolest of them all.

There is about a Sony product outhere that even though it might be as useless as the ones just explained, it's much more fun to watch. To tell the truth, the amount of actions it can perform is very high and it does them with extreme elegance. It is no other than the Sony Rolly. Here is a very enjoyable video to watch where two of them dance in sync at an opening event:




Other similar products are the iPod Dock Miuro and the KNG iPod DJ Dock.

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Domain name

I have successfully purchased the domain name www.riseofrincon.com and made the switch a couple of days ago. It was nice and easy and everything seemed alright. But then I got onto the blog today and I wasn't able to view the top image on my blog. I played with the settings for a while and tried several things but none worked. The html code seemed completely fine (even though I'm not the biggest expert, I just compared it with an original copy I had from it to verify small mistakes.

Though, everytime time I was in the settings/layout page and then clicked on "View Blog", the blog in the new window would come out perfect. I would then refresh the page to retest it, and again it disspeared. I then imagined the domain swith must have something to do with this and that it somehow doesn't allow the image to get through or be redirected successfully.

I have now sadly switched back to the blogspot.com so the blog stays as attractive as it was until I solve the problem. If anybody has any suggestions I would really appreciate them.

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What is an Entrepreneur?

Here is a video about entrepreneur basics. It covers different areas such as:

• what is an entrepreneur?
• some advantages and disadvantages.
• necessary skills to be one.
• about small businesses

I believe this is to be taken as a preview to the basics on the matter. This video helps clarify the entrepreneur term to people that might think money comes from great ideas. Well it doesn't, it comes from great ideas plus the great amount of work behind them to make them real.

I cannot post the video but here is a link to watch it.

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SEO Blogs to check out

For the last few day I have been trying to immerse myself into the fascinating SEO world. It can be very frustrating to expect something after achieving a time consuming but get nothing (or almost nothing) from it. Many people understimate the inner weavings of the blog world and I am trying to not do the same. So I have started to document myself on this matter. To do so I have visited various blogs that I believe (because other people have said so too) are helpful:

• Inside Adsense
• Seomoz
• Search Engine Watch
• Stuntdubl
• John Chow
• Marketing Pilgrim
• Search Engine Land
• The Link Spiel
• W Revenue
• Johnon
• Jim Boykin
• ProBlogger
• SEO Book
• Matt Cutts
• SEO Fast Start
• Dosh Dosh
• Entrepreneur's Journey
• How to Change the World
• Shoe Money

As you have already noticed, there is an incredible amount of content here, and if you are anything like me and want to keep a life outside the computer, you won't want to read them all. So I am going to try to make a systematic review of each of these sites everyweek in order to find some useful things for both beginners and not so beginners to feed upon, so bear with me.

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