2. BONUS!! If I reach more than 8000 followers I will also ship out a Blackberry Storm that I could not figure out how to use! Follow the rules below to get started and retweet

3. Current contestants: http://krutal.com/contest.php

And on top of that … I will also follow you back!

Money is a very interesting object. It refers to the system we have in place that regulates trade throughout the world-wide economy. People do foolish things for money, therefore the phrase “Money can’t buy happiness” came into existence. This statement has been spoken to me numerous times in my life, by many different people. I have asked each and everyone of these people to prove or explain in detail what the statement really means. Not one of these people have had a solid explanation or reasoning behind their statement. This has compelled me to explore the relationship between money and happiness.

How do we determine what Happiness is?

Psychologically, it is up to ones self to determine what makes them happy. This is not something that can be controlled, it is usually a result of ones environment, experience, and knowledge.

• The way in which we interact with the people around us has a direct impact on our happiness.
• The experience we gain throughout our lives and the obstacles it throws us affects our happiness.
• Knowledge is probably one of the most important factors that affects our happiness. If we see others with “happier” lives it will drive us to be increasingly unhappy about ours.

Happiness is basically a result of the equation that involves the things we can get minus the things we want.

Why does money matter?

More often than not the things we want usually outnumber the things we can get. Additionally, in American culture, due to consumerism, the things we want are typically material things. A child is not “cool” at school if he does not have the newest toy-fad. A man is not respected by his associates unless he has that fancy watch and expensive car. This highlights the idea that more money equals more happiness, which is generally true. The closer we are in range of our desires – the happier we will be.

But there is an interesting twist to this equation that brings you right back to first part of the equation, money. Your haters! They are those very people that didn’t think you were cool without the newest toy in school, or that you weren’t worth listening to because of the car you showed up in. As soon as you have achieved your desires, you spark a light for haters – those are the guys that are jealous of what you have so they don’t let you fully enjoy your successes, ultimately driving you to be unhappy.

But as Katt Williams describes: (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxxPLDZnqwA)

“You need haters, they let you know you are doing something right.”

I’m not sure how to perfect this equation but I’d love to explore further, what do you think?

The Visa Black Card has managed to secure the Trademark for “Black Card,” and are already using the phrase: “World’s Most Prestigious Card” in their marketing efforts. This has to be one of the biggest heists in credit card history for Visa has managed to steal the brand and reputation that AMEX has built up. When me and my buddy go around and use the AMEX Centurion card – we never hear the response “Oh is that an American Express Centurion card?” Rather, we get the “OMG, what is this? The black card?” I wonder what kind of confusion and deterioration this may cause to the brand that American Express has built up. We will soon see. AMEX has yet to release a reaction to the new Visa Black.

	Visa Black Card	American Express
Annual Fee	$495	($5000 Initial) + $2500
Material	Carbon Graphite	Titanium
Standard APR	0% for 6 months, 13.99%	12.99%
Concierge	24 Hrs	24 Hrs

]]> http://krutal.com/the-black-card-largest-heist-in-credit-card-history/feed/ http://krutal.com/the-black-card-largest-heist-in-credit-card-history/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/krutal/~3/MlxSxonWRwo/ http://krutal.com/apple-and-its-shady-ness-with-the-iphone-3g-sales/#comments Sat, 12 Jul 2008 11:25:43 +0000 Krutal Desai http://krutal.com/apple-and-its-shady-ness-with-the-iphone-3g-sales/

Apple is definitely limiting the number of iPhones being sold today. Many of the moves they are making seem quite shady to me and are most likely planned to take advantage of many of us first movers. Why are they doing this?

It was no “mistake” that they priced the iPhone at $499 and $599 last year on June 29th, 2007. Me and my buddy were sucked into going and buying the 8 gigs to find out 2 months later they have dropped the price to $399/299. Seems logical at first, a nice apology from Steve jobs suggesting they messed up the price points and they wanted more users to be able to buy the iPhone and so they dropped the price and will now award a 100 dollar rebate. — But then what happens? I take my rebate and can’t get cash? — A real man would give me my $200 dollars back in cash that we all work so hard to earn. But thats fine we all overlooked that. (I actually ended up buying a $300 dollar ipod, thus spending more money with Apple.) Why is he abusing the early adopters?

Now they drop the new iPhone 3G that we have all been waiting for (not sure why it wasn’t 3G in the first place). I login to my AT&T wireless account this morning to see that for me the new iPhone will cost $400 + new 2 year contract on a more expensive plan, becuase I already have a contract with AT&T for 2 years and therefore cannot get an upgrade, but I can pay 400 + upgrade fee and extend my contract for an additional 2 years. — This makes no sense as many have already pointed out — you can cancel your plan for 175 buy the new iPhone under a new contract for 200 and you’d still save about $55 dollars.

After work around 6PM, I stroll in to the AT&T store where one of my good friends works. As I got in he was selling the last iPhone they had in stock for the day. I started talking to him to get more info on whats going on with this Apple stuff and whats the best way he can help me out. He began to say Apple limited his store to 40 iPhones for the day and later some guy came and dropped off 10 more around 4pm (that way customers who originally went to the AT&T stores will end up going to an Apple store that has stock instead).

I am not sure how reliable my friends information is but it definitely lines up with Techcrunch’s information. If you already have an original iPhone and cannot upgrade for the 200 bucks — PLEASE DON’T GO OUT AND BUY ONE FOR $400. (They’re going to drop the price in 2 months )

Many want-to-be actors end up doing the same thing and flying out to Hollywood in hopes of meeting a celebrity or big producer that will help them make it big in the film business out down by LA. Unfortunately, most of them fail and end up becoming porn-stars in the San Fernando Valley as the popular myth says. I wonder what will end up happening to all the failed entrepreneurs of this 7 year batch.

I would like to encourage new entrepreneurs to introduce themselves and hopefully make a new connection with me here in the Valley.

Today I’m spending my time hanging out at the Web 2.0 Expo and am currently involved in the Startup Metrics panel which is very interesting, it is by two of my good friends Hiten Shah and Dave McClure. You can find more information on this panel which I highly recommend you read the notes for if you are a startup and need to know what kinds of things are most important to track and what are the best tools to use.

You can find notes and tips over at my friend Jeff’s blog: Startup 101 Metrics.

The way I see it children today, on average, know a lot more HTML and CSS than when I was in middle school(8 years ago) or high school(4 years ago). In my middle school days, if the computer lab teacher had asked “Who here knows about HTML?” — I am sure I would have been the only one with my hand up. Today I am almost certain 50% of these middle school classroom students have interacted and edited HTML and CSS code on their MySpace pages.

I think these basic ideas enable the children of today to be a greater pool of knowledge and mass when it comes to interfacing with the computer in the many years to come. Technology is, and always has been, defined by the way society uses it — I wonder how many elementary kids will know about HTML/CSS in the next 8-10 years.

After much pressure from the rest of my team at ACS, I finally switched my full time daily operations to my MacBook Pro. I was dreading that it would be a hard move and that I would not be able to function efficiently using just a Mac. I had my all my tools that I was used to setup and organized on my PC — but everyone still kept saying Mac was the way to go.

I got one and am now absolutely in love. Mac’s make it easy to do everything especially if you make use of the cool applications that are out there. Below I have made a nice list of all the programs that get me through the day.

Firefox - with FireFTP, SEO for firefox, Del.icio.us installed.
Skitch, Snitter, Adium, Pages, Keynote, Growl
And the Macheist Programs that my buddy Phil Ryu throws up every now and than are really great too.

Apart from the cool programs, the Mac also seems to bring me inspiration and I like that — it makes me work harder through the day. Anybody else have similar experiences?

Interesting conversation tonight at dinner:

“If Google didn’t have search results and you can only search through their ad-data — it would still be valuable.”

The amount of targeting that Google has achieved is very interesting and that readers still click on ads knowing they are ads just for the mere fact that the ads are exactly what they are looking for. This can be argued in many ways, but I still feel it holds true on many levels to not be addressed.

With valuations being assessed based on traffic and other metric data — how has this single most important factor played into account while determining value these days? Do users click on Facebook ads because thats exactly what they wanted to see? Most probably not, and therefore is beacon going to be the REAL answer? Do I really want to buy something or do something just because it showed up in my friends feed? Not to just put Facebook on the spot here but every other social network faces this problem.

I’ve been thinking about this for sometime now, not sure how any social network or website for that matter will achieve this level of targeting. Yea sure you can show me ads related to my interests and other information you know about me, but will I really want to click on it unless I’m searching for it? I will definitely keep pondering about this and update when I get a chance — All I know is that the internet marketing world is in its infant stages and will change dramatically in the upcoming years. Anybody have any ideas?

Making the experience familiar across a network increases usability, isn’t that the key point?

For those of you who I’ve talked to about Facebook and its Platform know how much of an aficionado I am of applications that resemble and imitate the Facebook experience. The design team at Facebook has put a lot of time into standardizing their user experience throughout the site. Don’t get me wrong though, I don’t necessarily mean that your app should look and feel exactly like Facebook in order to be successful and have an impact — there are many apps that have proven otherwise. What I mean is that I have noticed many successful applications start to create their own Mini Feeds / News Feeds within their applications as a means to help users engage and navigate through the application.

Facebook users are now almost certainly trained to navigate through profiles via the Feeds, I know I do. Feeds made a big impact on Facebook because users didn’t have to think about what to do or whose profile to look at — that information was put right in front of them. It is a familiar interaction for users and thus should be imitated within Platform applications to increase engagement. I have added links to a few images of feeds within third-party applications which I thought were particularly interesting.

Packrat
Friends for Sale
Flixster - Movies
(fluff)Friends
Facebook Marketplace