Charles Lau

I have just started a new blog project with this domain name GadgetBox.info. It is using the new WordPress 2.5 with a thought of creating a niche website with the focus of reviewing the useful software, hardware and peripherals around the world. Charles, a Website Reviewer, is hereby going to become a technology reviewer as well. It is both exciting, and I may not know how far I can bring this website into, this is definitely a hobby of mine to present to the Internet visitors.

To continue expanding my reviewing skills, I am going into reviewing useful software which I have either personally used myself, or they are new product launches, or just a new product to me which I found it might be useful for all of you. They might be from open-source, commercial, or of any kind of licence so long as they are useful to the visitors.

The focus of this site is to allow a computer user to install interesting hardware and software for his new computer which he has bought to enhance his experience with the computer. They may be new and old applications. But who cares? So long as it does the work, that’s the most important. Right?

I am just wondering how far I can bring this new blog into since I have my dedications. Most importantly, all my websites are able to keep me alive in the Internet arena while I am working hard into my Internet business development.

While many blogs are trying very hard to create a very nice interface, I focus on creating contents first since that’s what Google and internet visitors wanted. Nice interface can come later when the time is coming. So, you will see a very nice default WordPress theme in this blog. As an Internet reviewer for almost a year myself, I am arriving a conclusion myself that I have to keep the contents coming in to attract the right crowd first before I focus on beautifying the whole blog.

Please do me a favor by subscribing to the feed, and keep reading the gadget box info blog and give me comments on how to improve better through editor@gadgetbox.info.

Check out Gadget Box Info.

I was reading about a man being arrested for his money having the smell of marijuana. In that news, the whole focus is on the man and his marijuana found. The whole operation is too smooth to be true. The bank teller is able to identify the smell! Right from the start, who on earth can identify such a smell except for the one who consumed it or to do business with it?

The few possible ideas might be:

1. The arrested man is just being unlucky to be arrested.
2. Or the bank teller was trained in banks to identify such smell.
3. Or the bank teller did business or consumed before.
4. Or the bank teller was previously a police or some investigator.
5. Or the bank teller was being instructed by someone else to frame the arrested man.

The whole idea is that the one who is more suspicious is the bank teller instead of the arrested man. The whole story was done in such a way that the whole operation looks so smooth… Is it really true?

I was checking my gmail for work just now when Forbes caught my eye with their special report about The World’s Billionaires. As per normal, I get to see Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Lee Ka-shing, and some familiar names. Also, I don’t really see Donald Trump inside the list even though he’s very well-known to be part of the Billionaire Club. As I was looking through the huge list of billionaires showing off their money at me, it comes to my thought of looking for the youngest billionaire since most of the billionaires I know are already around 50 and above.

And I was shocked to find out how young Mark Zuckerberg is for his famous facebook online application. He is only 23 years old! Even Google founders are above 30s. Mark is a Harvard dropout student. And it seems to me that being able to attain such an achievement doesn’t require you a degree after all. And if I am not wrong, Michael Dell and Bill Gates are also dropouts.

Being rich in his money as well as his time, Mark is probably able to spend all his time and money everywhere he can. But again, even if you own huge amount of money today, it doesn’t mean you will get to own them tomorrow. Money is always an ongoing process of achievement. Just look at how a poor person uses his money after he won a lottery, the next minute you will find out that he’s poor again…

Do you still remember I was mentioning about hostmonster and bluehost with the price difference of $1 per month and yet they are from the same owner? Finally the price has reached $6.95 per month. As a bluehost subscriber myself, I am very much supportive of bluehost more than hostmonster even though they are from the same owner. It is very much towards the branding that they portray, and not so much about the technical issue over here. I like the name “bluehost” more than “hostmonster”.

Bluehost has been quite reliable along the past 1 year. And most of my web applications have been running well under their hosting. Previously, I was complaining about the usage of my previous host which seems to have problem with the slash. Now, bluehost seems to be getting better. Anyway, I had encountered the instability of the server only twice so far. Provided that a server needs quite a lot of maintenance, this kind of temporary instability is nothing!

I have been very supportive of their web hosting plan since they are providing a plan which is so attractive. And only when my business is stabilized, I would probably get a server to support the incoming customers since I had been an administrator myself before in the past. It would be fun to play with my own server, serving my own customers. Don’t you think so?

Anyway, I had a hard disk crash with my laptop recently. It has caused me to lose a lot of data on my computer. Now, I have some difficulty trying to get back some of the digital products…

Singapore government has been encouraging a lot of us in Singapore to produce more babies as our birth rate in Singapore has been quite low for quite a while. This is quite a norm topic in Singapore today. However, when I chanced upon this website talking about Make Love, Not Money, it is not surprised that Singaporeans have been concentrating on working to make more money instead of taking the responsibility to start family planning for their future.

I noticed that many friends of mine, who are above 30, are still eligible bachelors and spinsters. And I was asking them the real reason to remain single, they say that they have no plans to be bonded in marriage. They are all making lots of money, and they don’t find the urge to get married.

If I am not wrong, Singapore government has been encouraging people to go for dating for quite a while already. And it indeed has some effects on my age range of between 20 and 30. Many friends who are around my age are already getting married and having children. I can’t imagine looking at them with their kids when we had lots of fun playing together when we were still kids ourselves. Time has come for us to look at ourselves with our own kids. I had just attended a friend’s 1st month baby at her house yesterday. Here’s the photo of us at her house with her and her baby. Watch how she made her baby sit in front to smile at the camera… Notice the 1-month-old baby sticking out his tongue…

I am the second one from the left, standing behind.

Online dating website has been a real hot topic and it should be a good social website to start as a business for those of you who are interested. You should be looking at it if you are from some event company or wanting to start out an internet business. Ask me out to be your consultant if you are interested.

Now that there is some fundings for the website, there must have some opportunity for us as Internet Marketers. For those of you who had not tried internet business, it might be a good idea not to waste so much money yet because I personally feel that Internet business is all about trial and error, which means it is advisable for you to have some experience with it first. Or you might get into trouble if you are not sure how to go about doing the internet business with money invested in you.

Blogs are slowly taking over the world. We are seeing more blogs giving birth each day. It is so easy to start a blog that it requires almost no effort from the web owner who wishes to let the whole world know about his website. I was reading Darren Rowse mentioning about blogs killing conventional websites. And this has definitely caught my eye about it especially when I was searching for information about how to bump start my vehicle last few days ago.

What happened recently is that I was already sleeping at night, when my sister called at about 3am to inform me that the car battery is dead because she had forgotten to switch off the headlights when she went for movie. I don’t really remember how to get the car started since there isn’t any car to help her jump start the car. I went ahead and search the Internet to find out how to “jump start” the car by itself. Later on after doing a few search, I realize the actual word is “bump start”. And I found how useful the articles online can be and why the search engines really embrace them so much. And it turned out that the blogs are one of the largest number of websites around the world which provide free information for the search engines to index so that the search engine users can benefit from it. In fact, I become one of the beneficiaries instantly.

Conventional websites are really nice to have and yet they could of no use to the internet world except to introduce their products and services. Yes, we are all searching for solutions on the Internet.. And they do come in the form of products and services. But the Internet is something even more than that. Internet is a place where there is NO COMPETITION. Yes, Internet is actually a place of no competition. That’s because we are all sharing the same playground where we do joint-ventures with one another to help one another to promote our products and services. And yet, a lot of people still thought of getting exclusive rights to avoid competition. Having exclusive rights online is a very dangerous move because it only means that your product is not going to be very popular since nobody really sells such product online. It only means that you have to spend even more money to push the marketing effort to the people to understand. Isn’t that silly to have exclusive rights?

Some conventional websites even went to the extend of having their own useful articles in it. They are just hoping these articles will become baits to link them from other websites and search engines. Such link baits are usually ignored because they are not really the main topic of the website. But in blogs, they actually embrace articles to the extend of showing them on the main page and even have their own permanent link to reference.

Darren, that’s a nice thought you had. Thanks for the post.

Ever since the invention of the Internet, a lot of businesses have been affected directly or indirectly. I remember back in those days where we don’t have access to the vast information… The ones who kept the information made the most money because they are the only ones who know where is cheap to buy, and to sell them at high price outside. Now, Internet is making everything clear that almost all your prices are known to the world if they worked hard to do some internet research…

I have been thinking… Internet is such a wonderful communication tool that everyone of us cannot under-utilize it. Google has made almost everything searchable. If you are unsure of certain thing, just key it in and find out what the world knows about this. If you wish to do some trading business, all you need is a computer with Internet access. So you can ask for prices on the fly when your customers are asking you for it! You don’t even need to keep an inventory!

There are way so many products and services that we can do on the Internet. We can choose to do tangible products where we can see and can touch… But we have to arrange for the delivery when it comes. Or if you wish to save the hassle of delivering the items, you can do intangible products where you can see but cannot touch… That’s information. It seems like selling information is getting more and more recognized around the world.

Singapore is kind of lagging behind when it comes to buying information from the internet. They would prefer more towards buying a book to have a feel of the papers and its cover. But when you look at the bigger picture of the whole world, information is so much easily accessed if you are more willing to pay for information which you can touch! And they seem to be making more and more presence on the Internet nowadays.

I am looking forward for even more progression from the Internet again! I start to feel I can’t live without it… Do you?

No, I am not going to talk about the difference between a business and a job. That’s not the topic here. I am going to talk about the supply and demand for businesses and jobs. It is becoming clear that the economy is booming like crazy right now. Everybody seems to be making small fortune out of it. The properties in Singapore are selling like crazy with crazy prices. I also start to see more and more people starting up businesses too.

Back in 2003, many people around me seems to be talking about getting a job. They were saying that properties are at the lowest price and lowest demand when I was working as a real estate agent. Life was really a little tough to get a sale, and it depends a lot on the more experienced agents with better selling skills to close a deal with a little difficulty… Most of the sales were from problematic backgrounds of the buyers or sellers… I remember selling a private apartment for someone who had no choice because of a huge debt incurred… Selling a property which costs almost SGD$500,000 where they bought it at $700,000 in 1997… Who would want to sell a property at that price?

And because of the low period in 2003, the number of jobs were also cut back… It’s so interesting to see how jobs were affected… Many big companies including those “rice-bowl” ones were also cutting down on employment! It is not common to hear friends around who are out of jobs… In fact, it seems that everybody turned to become real estate agents, insurance agents and even network marketers… My idea of becoming real estate agent as my first job is to learn more about real estate so that I can invest wisely in future… And of course to make money and learn more in the working world after seeing both my hands rusting with guns and ammunitions for a long time…

Now in 2007, everything changes so suddenly… I just read from Straits Times about the “rice-bowl” company is going to give more incentives to compete with the private-sectors… Giving five figure bonus… which is actually less than $20,000… Also, last night’s news reporting that the university graduates can expect a starting pay of $2300 where back in 2003, having $1800 is already a good expectation! And the calling is now with the job takers… They can easily move from one job to another without much difficulty because everybody is employing! And because the demand for jobs is increasing, the price for employment increases! The “suppliers” (potential employees) can now take their own sweet time to look for a job of their dream!

In 2007, I can see many people starting up their own businesses… It becomes a common topic nowadays… Anyway, entrepreneurship has been encouraged in Singapore for the past few years, talking in news and heavily marketed by many new-born entrepreneur training schools… Where the business-minded people are born, the demand for jobs is also increasing together… The mindset from the people in business and in job is totally different… Though both focus on making money, business mindset tends to have that adrenalin rush to go for more!

It is interesting to see that PayPal is selling its old logo via eBay (its parent company). With such a gigantic logo at its office to be removed away, PayPal is smart enough to get rid of its old logo the eBay way. And 100% of the sale price shall go to Natural Resources Defense Council. What a good strategy for converting a demolishing item into a sale item and goes into charity! And as a result, PayPal should be getting good brand marketing through its own cause.

SIGN STATS Weight: 500lbs, Width: 15′-4 3/4″, Height: 4′-5 1/4″, Depth: 1′0″

See what PayPal has to say…

I can understand that everybody knows that John Chow no longer ranked for his own name… And it seems like a big news that nobody knows what’s the real reason for that… I just don’t understand why Google is not giving back John Chow his status. Recently, seomoz interviewed Matt Cutts a few questions about links. One of the question asked was about John Chow. Interestingly, Matt Cutts has no answer to that at all even though it is asked in a multiple-choice format. But why is his page rank still so high?

The following is the question

Why was John Chow’s website (johnchow.com) penalized in the Google search results?

A) John engaged in manipulative link acquisition (buying links, affiliate linking, etc)
B) John’s site consistently provided links to paying companies without using nofollow
C) John’s site engaged in other manipulative practices on-page – cloaking, keyword stuffing, etc.
D) He said mean things about Google and we’re soft-shelled here at the ‘plex

No answer provide by Matt

Many people believed John Chow’s site is probably been classified in the bad neighbourhood… That’s probably why in SEOMOZ post, he has only got one nofollow tag which is given to JohnChow.com… The rest were link-loved…

While I still don’t understand why Google don’t wish to reinstate John Chow, I do believe John Chow is really genuine in working very hard for his Make Money Online blog, being a class of his own…