Chavvon Smith’s Blog

A couple of days ago, my 3 yr old son decided it would be a good idea to put a popcorn kernel in his ear. When you think about it, extracting sounds easy. Tilt his head to the side, flush it with water, try a little vacuum, etc….nope. A 3 yr old has a very small ear canal, so when it’s pushed in with a very little 3 yr old finger, it tends to go quite deep. We could barely see it when we turned him on his side and tilted his head just right.

We tried flushing it with water, turning him on his side and flushing with water, we tried using a bulb to suck it out….and still no luck. After about 4 hrs, we finally gave up and went to the kids urgent care clinic. They tried the same things. Flushing with water, this special syringe full of water, and a bulb full of water. No luck. They told us we need to go see an ENT (ear, nose & throat) Dr. to get it removed.

We wake up the next day, it was midnight by the time we got home, and schedule a visit with the ENT. He looks in ear and says “oh, it’s in a good spot”. He then turns him on his side and while three people are holding him down, he goes in with this special tool and “pop”, out comes the seed.

A nice chunk of money and two days later, he’s now popcorn kernel free. It will be a while before we have popcorn in my house again

Chavvon Smith

The hype around online virtual worlds has been peaking lately with the recent acquisition of Club Penguin by Disney for $700 million. Club Penguin is a safe environment where kids can join and play games in what we hope is a safe environment. No worrying about pop-ups or surfing to other sites where they can communicate with potential predators. Disney obviously thought this was a nice addition to it’s current portfolio of characters and another avenue to bring visitors to it’s online site.

While site’s like Club Penguin are great, I have completely different thoughts towards other sites like Second Life. While the concept is amazing, the nature of man I think will eventually ruin the site. It’s already full of gambling, sex, and other adult themes. The FBI has had numerous investigations into the activities going on in the virtual world.

If you’re interested in getting a piece of a virtual company, take a look at Whuddle World. This site was forced to shutdown due to financial problems, but I think with the right partners it creates a nice opportunity. Contact them directly for investment opportunities.

Chavvon Smith

I’ve been reading about GrandCentral.com and I want in. GrandCentral is a new service that’s still in beta mode that Google purchased for $50 million a month or so back. The service allows you to control your phone numbers with the same control as you control your email. The service claims to let you keep a phone number for life, but they’ve already ruined that claim because they forced all beta users to change phone numbers. They’re still in beta, and with the Google acquisition, change is to be expected. I would think phone numbers will stay put for the forseeable future.

The service allows you to setup access list and route incoming phone calls accordingly. You setup a directory with all your known contacts and define rules for them. Friends and family can first ring your home, then your cell phone, and then go to a voice mail you have setup just for friends and family. Business associates can be automatically routed to your cell phone, but only between the hours of 9am to 5pm. They would then get a business oriented voice mail. Unknown callers can go directly to voice mail. The features go on and on. The service sounds really slick, but it’s in beta and it’s only available via invitation. I’m on the waiting list, but there’s no telling how long it will be before the service is opened up to the public.

One phone number for all of your communication needs. Never have to update friends, family or clients when you move or get a new cell phone number. If/when I get into the service, I’ll write about my actual experience.

Chavvon Smith

I’m 30 years old, and since I’ve been in business, there seems to be a market correction/crash every 5 years or so. I can only really say I’ve been in business since 1995, so that gives you my frame of reference. The Internet and technology is what I know.

Each market correction shows a shift in investor interest from debt to equity markets or vice versa. Pensions funds and other money management groups move large amounts of money between these two investment tools depending on what’s going to yield it’s investors/members the most return with the least risk. In the past five years, the markets have been focused on debt markets. This is evident through the large number of leverage buyouts through firms like KKR and all the new mortgage types that have come to market in the last few years. Companies are making the most money using these debt instruments. When you have one billion dollars in the bank that has to generate a return, people tend to get creative. The more money that’s available, the more risk that has to be inherited to put the money to use. There are just so many low risk, high return opportunities on the market.

With the debt market crashing in the last few weeks which includes the hedge fund crashes, mortgage company bankruptcies, and significant reduction in subprime markets, we’re about to see a substantial shift in money allocation. (more…)

I’ve been driving lately and with every mile, I hear a cha-ching sound go off in my head. With gas prices as high as they are, I hate driving to the store to buy milk because the price doubles by the time I get there and back. I’ve looked at hybrids, electric cars, you name it. Nothing has interested me until I saw this one. Take a look at www.TeslaMotors.com.

This is a new electric car that is scheduled for release in the summer of 2008. Listen to these specs:

0-60 mph: 4 seconds

top speed: 135 mph

miles per charge: 200

Cost to drive: ~2 cents per mile

Those are stats I can live with. It looks good, cheap to drive, and it’s fast! Now if I could just talk them down on that $98,000 intro price.

Chavvon Smith

About a year ago, I had an idea for a website where bloggers could go and get paid to blog. You can see it at www.blogchex.com. I felt like it was a great idea. Bloggers could go and setup a blog and we find the advertisers for the blog. Other sites are making money off bloggers without giving them any revenue split, so I felt like it was a good idea.

Bloggers write, we find advertisers, we all make money. I still like the idea, but I’m not so crazy about the quality of bloggers the site is getting. Rather than getting people that express their true feelings, ideas, hobbies, etc., we tend to get more people that share other ways to make money online. Blogs that tell you how to make money online are traditionally not read by many people.

The only advertising is word of mouth at this point. Online entrepreneurs tell other people so that’s the core of the site. I’m hoping that as the site grows, we’ll get other people with real content and emotions to share. Give it a try, it’s a great site that’s still in development.

Chavvon Smith

I’ve been trying to take Verizon’s 411 service off my speed-dial for a while and haven’t able to until I tried Goog 411. When I heard of 1-800-free-411. I tried the service for about a month. The long ads and slow response got to be just too much. I found myself dialing 411 just for the sake of time and paying the 50 cents or so per call. I then heard about 1-800-Goog-411 (800)466-4411. If you’re know what you’re looking for or just need ideas, it’s a great service. No ads, yet, and the voice recognition is right on. I can call, find my listing and the call is connected via Level 3 automatically. Last time I tried Free-411, I had to hang up and dial the number manually, a big pain.

If you’re interested in trying free 411 services, give 1-800-GOOG-411 a try. It’s worth it.

Chavvon Smith

I’ve been holding off on getting an iphone. Some of the features have been on my wish list for a long time, particularly, the visual voicemail. I have a Treo 700 right now, and other than the daily reboot, it works great. I do wish the browser could run javascript so I could log into certain websites, but o’well. The iphone looks cool, holds music, and plays movie, but for my business it’s not very good.

With the Treo, I can sync with MS exchange and I get emails in real time. It’s also on the Verizon network so I get nice download speed. The iPhone can only check for email in time increments (not real time), and doesn’t support MS Exchange to my knowledge. In addition, it’s on the ATT 3G network.

I hope in the next release it will support Exchange, be on a faster network, oh, and reduce some of the 500+ bugs that have been found in the device.

Christmas Maybe?

Chavvon Smith

I’ve been following the market lately with all these mortgage lenders going bankrupt and laying off thousands of employees. It’s no surprise. I feel like the financial sector is the one industry that lends itself well to following historical trends. You can also make very smart decisions today by looking at the past.

In the last few years, the mortgage industry has been going crazy. 100% financing, jumbo loans, ARMs, you name it. Most of these are new products and to the average finance person, they just don’t make sense. The point of financing 80% of property present value is to minimize risk. The point of doing fixed interest loans is to minimize risk. Everything in the market, until recently, was meant to minimize risk. When the economy is going great, everyone pays bills on time. When there’s a slight hiccup, things fall apart quickly.

With these high yield, 100% financing options offered in the recent past, this market tumble is to be expected. When you finance high risk loans, you assume high risk. In a high risk market, companies fail. With the expected cut in fed rates, I feel like we’re just delaying the inevitable. Let the market self correct and let’s move on.

Chavvon Smith

The last few days has been filled with blogs and news sites covering YouTube.com’s new ad wrapping. There has been a big debate over who invented it first. I personally don’t think anyone can take credit for inventing it first. Traditional TV has been combining ads with shows (commercials) since the TV was invented. As a concept, there’s nothing new about wrapping ads with video content.

YouTube.com has the most traffic for streaming videos so they’ll obviously be able to benefit most from the ad wrapping technology. I think the publicity has nothing to do with the actual ad wrapping, but more with the fact that we can now see the light for Google’s money losing machine. If Google can convert a small fraction of YouTube’s traffic into revenue, it should help Google’s financials significantly. Only time will tell.

Chavvon Smith