At any rate, I found The New Elite last year but hadn’t had a chance to read it until now. It’s an easy read that can be done in a weekend or so, but it explores with some really interesting topics. The authors are consultants from the marketing and branding industries who decided to mount a comprehensive effort to study the truly wealthy. They conducted several studies and used two different definitions of wealthy for the book: $5 million in liquid assets (not including primary residence, collections, or any nonliquid business ownership interests), and/or $500k in disposable income. These criteria put these households in the top 0.5% of those in the US, and there are 750,000 such households.

These were my favorite observations from the book:

Start your own company

If you want to build wealth in America, you pretty much have to start a company. Start it on the side in your living room or garage, but start something. The vast majority of the wealthy families covered in this book made their money initially through entrepreneurship.

Money attracts more money

The amount of time that a person has been wealthy is a strong predictor of how wealthy they are. The authors split the respondents into three groups: apprentices (wealthy for 5 years or less), journeymen (wealthy for 6 – 14 years), and masters (wealthy for 15 years or more). The three groups exhibit different psychological and behavioral patterns, which is to be expected, but what’s interesting to me is that you can see the effects of the “gravitational pull” of money. The apprentices had an average net worth of less than $10 million, while the masters average net worth was more than $75 million. Income also more than tripled from apprentices to masters, going from $1 million annually to $3.3 million annually. The implications are clear: the hardest part of getting super-rich is cracking into the bottom tier of the wealthy and then waiting.

Difficulty of studying the wealthy

Probably the most interesting thing in the book was something I had never stopped to think about: it’s really hard to study the wealthy. The rich and famous we see on TV aren’t representative of the wealthy households of this country. The vast majority of wealthy households fly under the radar, are private, and aren’t motivated by the small stipends that market research companies give out for filling out surveys and participating in studies. The authors detail how they went about overcoming this hurdle, but they pointed out that because of the difficulty of reaching the wealthy, very few studies cover households with income in excess of $250k / yr, which is considered affluent, but not wealthy. Coupled with the images the media shows of celebrities misbehaving, we end up with a very skewed perception of the wealthy and how they live. This inability to properly survey the wealthy has other consequences as well. For example, researchers have conducted numerous studies that show that once your basic needs are met, having more money does not make you happier. However, the majority of these studies had essentially no participants above $250k / yr. The authors of the book asked their wealthy participants this question and more than 95% responded that they were very happy in life, a statistically-significant amount above the national average. Now, the issue of cause or effect can wait for another day, but it’s interesting to think about other areas in which our inability to even connect with this demographic limits our understanding of wealth.

If you enjoy reading about wealth or you work in an industry that caters to the wealthy, I recommend this book.

Related posts:

1. Book Review: “Crush It” by Gary Vaynerchuk
2. Review: Motorola S305 Bluetooth Stereo Headset
3. LibraryThing.com Review

1. Magento is much better than most of the alternatives.

The popular PHP open-source competitors are OSCommerce, ZenCart, QuickCart, and X-Cart. There are others, but these are the ones I see most often. I haven’t used QuickCart and X-Cart much, but I’ve worked on multiple sites with the first two, and they’re all universally terrible. It’s hard for me to imagine a piece of software more poorly designed than OSCommerce is. There are no “modules”: plugins are “installed” by following directions in a text file to hack the application core. Stuff like: “open cart.php, find line 37, which should look something like this, and paste this in after it.” This means that after you install a few plugins, you can never upgrade the core, and you’ll have more and more issues installing future plugins, because the core code won’t look like those text instructions expect it to. Truly awful. If you designed OSCommerce, you should be ashamed of yourself.

By contrast, Magento is pretty clean, follows a standard, uses object-oriented design patterns, and is completely modular.

2. Magento still is pretty terrible.

The main issue I have with Magento is the documentation. Specifically, that there isn’t any. It’s an incredibly powerful ecommerce platform, built around an extensible architecture that developers can extend, and the docs would all fit on a few sheets of paper. It’s very, very frustrating, and even more so because the business model of the company who produced Magento apparently is to sell subscriptions to the “Enterprise Edition” at $12,000 a year, so they have little incentive to create good docs to help developers avoid the need for their expensive services.

3. If you can, use Shopify.

Ecommerce is a fairly complicated area and the software generally reflects that. So if you can avoid reinventing the wheel, you should. You can do this via using open source platforms like Magento, but you’ll still spend a pretty penny on design and development talent. Another way to go if you need something a little less flexible are hosted ecommerce offerings like Yahoo Stores or Shopify. From what I’ve seen of Shopify, they offer an incredible value for people just getting started in ecommerce (and even some pretty big stores) for a very reasonable price. And you still have the option of customizing things to a great degree. However, there will be those times when you just need more control than hosted solutions offer. And when those times come, I can honestly say that Magento is a great solution. Just be prepared to pull your hair out for a few weeks (or months) while you learn your way around.

Related posts:

1. CakePHP vs. CodeIgniter
2. Book Review: “Crush It” by Gary Vaynerchuk
3. If you’re sick of Trac, check out Redmine

I don’t have kids, but after playing with the app, I think it would be something that most children would enjoy playing with. It’s got fun music and sound effects, colorful pictures, and interactive animations on every letter. They really did a great job on the app, and all the work they’ve put into it over the last few months really shows. At $2.99, it’s a huge bargain compared with what you’d pay for a non-interactive book about the ABCs, and your kids are sure to spend a lot more time playing with this and exploring the alphabet.

Check it out on iTunes!

Related posts:

1. Book Review: “Crush It” by Gary Vaynerchuk

I know everyone in the tech community is drooling over this, but I’d give it 50/50 odds at best. The real advantage it has going for it is that Google can throw a lot of weight behind it and maybe push it through with sheer force of will. Here’s the problem with Wave: what is it? Every blog post I’ve read about it struggled with how to explain it. I read this entire post and I’m still not sure of how I’m supposed to use this thing or what pressing problem it solves. Even the videos I’ve seen are super long, presumably because you can’t really show it off in 60 seconds. “Well, it’s kind of a mix between email and IM, but also with wiki functionality and social networking…oh, and it’s got these crazy widgets and media sharing and stuff. Hmmm…you really have to play with it to understand.” 97% of the people I know wouldn’t get that, and don’t have the patience to figure it out. It seems like it’s just too flexible, that it can be used for a million different things, which makes it hard to know how to use at first. Think about almost every successful web site out there and how easy they are to explain, especially when they first launched. You would have zero trouble explaining Google, Youtube, Facebook, Flickr, Delicious, Twitter, etc. in a 60 second video.

Wave is like FriendFeed on crack, and FF is already dangerously close to being too much for most normal people to grok. I just don’t see it catching on.

I’m not often great about predictions (I thought Twitter was doomed when I first heard about it), but it’s nice to occasionally get something right

My rule of thumb for consumer internet products is that I need to be able to explain it to my grandparents in 60 seconds, and it needs to be easy enough to use that I can figure it out while I’m drunk [1]. Anything else is going to probably be too complicated for normal (read: non-masochistic) people to hassle with figuring out.

1. Not that I ever have been, of course

Related posts:

1. Book Review: “Crush It” by Gary Vaynerchuk
2. If you’re sick of Trac, check out Redmine
3. Yammer’s Business Model: Infiltration of Value

Style

CodeIgniter is a pretty loose MVC framework. It’s not quite just a collection of libraries, but it doesn’t have the strict adherence to the MVC pattern that CakePHP does. In general, CI will let you break the rules pretty easily, while CakePHP makes it harder. The end result in my experience is that I see a lot more poorly architected code written in CI than in CakePHP. CI just makes it too tempting to be sloppy and cut corners, but ends up costing you more in the long run. On the other hand, learning and using CakePHP won’t automatically make you a good developer, just like using CI won’t make you a bad developer. In fact, if you’re a great developer, CI might be a good choice because you have the experience to know what rules to break. However, if you’re reading this comparison right now, you might not quite be there yet.

Winner: CakePHP

Ease of Use

CodeIgniter doesn’t do as much of the magic for you behind the scenes like CakePHP does. For those new to MVC or even new to programming, this can be comforting, because you know what to expect. However, once you learn the CakePHP way of doing things, you can fly through projects. And when the automagic way of doing things isn’t working, you can always override it and do it your own way. This is what makes rapid development so fun in CakePHP: you can build your prototype or version 1 using the built-in automagic dust that CakePHP provides, and then swap out what you need to later as your project matures.

Winner: CakePHP

Performance

CakePHP is slow. Not super-dog-slow, but it’s quite a bit slower than CI. This is a big concern for some folks, and if you’re one of them, then you should weigh this more heavily. I almost never worry about this, for several reasons. First, a lot of that slowness won’t be the bottleneck in your application. Your database is far more likely to be the bottleneck than your application is. And you can do a lot with some simple caching and scaling methods to speed up your app.

But more importantly, hardware is pretty cheap. Developers, on the other hand, are not. In my opinion, if you’re building something that you’re not 100% sure will experience heavy load, don’t pre-optimize. Get it out there ASAP and let people start pounding on it. You can always throw more hardware at the problem if it’s a success. That’s not to say you should ignore scalability completely or ignore best practices in performance, but I wouldn’t make it your primary focus.

Winner: CodeIgniter

Documentation and Community

Eighteen months ago, I would have easily given the edge here to CI, but the CakePHP community has matured a lot over the last year or two, and the documentation situation has improved drastically. Today, my assessment is that both communities are very strong, with lots of good folks in both camps writing documentation, plugins, modules, and other enhancements to their frameworks. You’ll find great people no matter which path you choose.

Winner: Tie

Conclusion

As I admitted at the beginning of this comparison, I’m biased in favor of CakePHP. It’s true that you do give up some advantages in speed, and you’re also forced to adhere more to the MVC pattern than you might be comfortable with, but in my experience, CakePHP lets developers write cleaner code and do it faster than they would if they were using CodeIgniter. You might pay a small hit in performance, but hardware is usually cheaper than developers. Regardless of which you choose, just pick one and build something awesome.

Related posts:

1. Magento Ecommerce: Impressions
2. Book Review: “Crush It” by Gary Vaynerchuk
3. If you’re sick of Trac, check out Redmine

Finally fed up with replacing my crappy iPhone headphones, I recently decided to explore other alternatives. But I really do like the design of the iPhone headphones, with the integrated microphone, playback, and volume controls, so I didn’t want to just get normal headphones. And I wanted something that would be useful for both phone calls and listening to music. I’ve always gotten a little frustrated with the cord from my headphones, so I decided to see what wireless Bluetooth options existed, and the Motorola S305 headset caught my eye on Amazon, so I ordered them. I’ve had them for almost a week now, so I’ve gotten a chance to really get a feel for their strengths and weaknesses, so I thought I’d write a review and share my impressions.

Spoiler: I would recommend them, but with several caveats. Read on to find out more.

The Good

The headphones are light, comfortable, and sound great. They’re relatively slim so I don’t feel like a huge dork walking around with them. Pairing with devices is pretty painless, and they have all the controls on the headphones you would expect, so you can pretty much leave your phone in your pocket and control (almost) everything from there. The battery life seems really good, and they charge with mini-USB, so I think you can just charge them from your computer and avoid lugging yet another charger around (though one is included). Overall, they seem pretty solid, and they’re only $40 from Amazon right now.

The Bad

I’ve had several issues with them, but I suspect that none of them are the fault of the headphones. First, I use them with three different devices: my phone, my iPad, and my Macbook Pro. They work great with each one, but I often have to shuffle around the bluetooth settings on my devices to get it to connect to the desired device. The headset apparently connects to the first device it finds when you turn it on, so if you have your bluetooth turned for all three devices and you turn the headphones on, it’s a little random as to which it will connect with. This is frustrating, but I’m not sure how you’d solve it, except maybe a button to have the headset jump to the next device it knows about and can find? You can have it connect to your phone as a headset and your computer as headphones, which works great, until you want to listen to music on your phone, and then it won’t work. You have to disconnect from the phone and reconnect for them to be in “headphones” mode. This may just be how bluetooth works.

Also, the “headset” bluetooth profile on OS X is genuinely terrible. Snap, crackle and pop. Listening to music is fine, but if you have to enable the headset profile so you can use the microphone, watch out. I have no idea what the problem is, but it works fine on my iPhone and iPad in headset mode, so I think the problem must be OS X and not the headset. Speaking of Apple dropping the ball, they didn’t implement the protocol in the iPhone bluetooth stack that allows controlling the track, so you can’t skip forward or back, but interestingly you can play, pause, and stop. Go figure.

Finally, a bunch of reviews on Amazon said they stop working from sweat but I’ve worked out with them and no issues so far. Perhaps I’m not sweaty enough.

Final Verdict

If you’re looking for a decent bluetooth headset that’s good primarily for music but also for calls, I recommend them, but you’ll have a smoother experience if you just use them with one device. And maybe wear a sweatband when you work out

Motorola S305 Bluetooth Stereo Headset (Black)

Related posts:

1. Book Review: “Crush It” by Gary Vaynerchuk
2. LibraryThing.com Review
3. Book review – The New Elite: Inside the Minds of the Truly Wealthy

I recently read Crush It!: Why NOW Is the Time to Cash In on Your Passion by Gary Vaynerchuk and I enjoyed it enough that I thought I’d post a short review.

For those of you who don’t know, Gary is a very successful entrepreneur who has really pushed the limits of social media and proven that you can build a powerful brand in a short period of time with nothing more than hustle and imagination. Gary started his social media empire with Wine Library TV, an online video show about wine that helped grow his family’s retail wine and liquor store into the beginnings of an empire that does tens of millions per year in revenue. Nearly 100,000 people watch the show. He later expanded into blogging and videos on social media and personal branding. He has hundreds of thousands of fans on Facebook and nearly a million followers on Twitter. Impressive, to say the least.

Crush It! is the first book of a 10-book deal that Gary signed with HarperStudio and covers how to get started with social media and personal branding, no matter what your interests are. It’s a short read, maybe an evening or two, and it’s more motivational and strategic than tactical, though there’s definitely some practical advice. The three primary points of the book are:

• Find your passion and talk about it, relentlessly
• Build an audience, which may take time
• Be yourself

Gary’s primary point in the book is that social media has broken down the traditional barriers to building an audience so that now anyone can make an income off their passion, no matter what it is. This claim seems dubious, but he illustrates it with the example of worms. Say you love worms more than anything…you could do a blog and podcast about worms, and you could do so from several angles: fishing, the study of worms, worm farms, whatever. His point is that you by being passionate and authentic and creating an audience of other worm-lovers out there (and they are out there), you can make a good living off of it.

I tend to agree with him, partly because I’ve seen an awful lot of bloggers making a lot of money over the last few years writing about tiny niche topics, and partly because there are more than a billion people online and more joining everyday, and it just stands to reason that for almost anything you can possibly be passionate about, there’s a market-size group of people out there who care about it too.

Gary talks about how Wine Library TV only had five viewers when he started, but he just kept creating good content and engaging whatever fans he had, and today you can see the results. Another of his big points is that you may have to spend years working at it to really build the audience you’ll need to live off your passion. This might sound like a long time, but if you’re doing it because you love it and you’re having fun, does it matter?

One of the points he comes back to most often is the idea of just being yourself. Users can smell people being fake from a mile away, so the only way to build a valuable audience is to be honest and authentic. The only real question I had that the book didn’t answer was: what if you’re not the type of person who a) has a passion, or b) enjoys developing an online personal brand. However, I don’t fall under either of those categories, so I enjoyed the book. However, if you’re not really into Twitter or Facebook or blogging or online video or whatever, then maybe the book won’t appeal to you like it did to me.

The book has inspired me in several ways: first, I’ve renewed my efforts to stay engaged in the current communities that I participate in. Second, I’m going to be revamping my personal brand and making this site simpler and more expressive this year. Finally, I’m going to relaunch Bounteo.com, a site I started almost three years ago to talk about personal finance, investing, career development, and entrepreneurship, all from the perspective of young adults in the 20-35 age bracket. Unfortunately, I let the site languish and haven’t done anything with it for the last 18 months or so, which I really regret. I wonder what it could be right now if I had really focused on it. Maybe more like this. However, there’s no time like the present to turn things around, so stay tuned.

And buy this book.

Related posts:

1. Book review – The New Elite: Inside the Minds of the Truly Wealthy
2. Twenty-five tomatoes: experiments in micro-startups
3. If you’re sick of Trac, check out Redmine

Related posts:

1. Book Review: “Crush It” by Gary Vaynerchuk
2. Yammer’s Business Model: Infiltration of Value
3. Why Google Wave failed

1. Budgeting feels like an afterthought

Budgeting and planning are pretty important parts of personal finance, but they feel like an afterthought in Mint.com. From what I understand, it launched without them, and then they were added later. It shows. Budgeting should probably have its own tab, but it’s just a box on the overview tab. Adding budget line items feels clunky and the list isn’t organized in any meaningful fashion that I can discern, so it’s hard to check a specific category without scanning all of them.

2. No way to enter manual transactions

Here’s another reason that budgeting isn’t terribly useful: transactions lag several days before they show up in Mint.com. This isn’t their fault, it’s just how the financial institutions work. But if I could enter a manual transaction and then clear it when it posts from my bank, I could keep my budget up-to-date. If Mint.com doesn’t know that I just dropped $300 on a new iPhone, it might think that I still have plenty of money left in my spending category, when it’s actually over budget.

Plus, I do occasionally spend cash and it would be nice to enter manual transactions for that. You can split ATM transactions into different categories, so perhaps that accomplishes the same thing for most people.

3. No way to enter manual assets or liabilities

I like tracking my net worth, and I currently enter all the numbers once a month into networthiq.com, but it would be great if the tool I use to track personal finances could tell me this. And Mint.com does have this feature, but the problem is that you can’t add manual assets or liabilities. This is a bit of a problem if some of your assets or liabilities are in institutions not connected to Mint, or if you’ve got real estate. Ironically, you can add mortgages, but not the underlying real asset that the mortgages are written against, so your net worth will be ridiculously skewed to the negative if you do this.

4. No custom categories

Mint lets you create budget tracking items and categorize your spending, but the categories are all pre-defined and there doesn’t seem to be any way to create your own categories. This is really annoying, because you spend a bunch of time hunting for the best category, and often end up using one that doesn’t fit super well. I’m guessing that one of the reasons they do this is that having every user on the same category taxonomy makes it much easier to automatically tag transactions based on how other users have tagged them. Still, it would be nice to have the option, even if you do give up some benefit.

5. No way to anticipate future spending

This is similar to #2, in that it prevents your budget from being a true picture of what you have available to spend. One of the best things about the envelope method of budgeting is that it allows you to allocate income for *future* expenditures that you anticipate. This is really handy, because if you have $15k in your checking account, it might be because you have a lot of free cash to spend, or it might be because your rent is $1500 and your taxes due are $13k and you’re paying them in two weeks, in which case you’ve only got $500 to spend. To be fair, this one isn’t completely Mint’s fault, as a lot of personal finance and budgeting tools work like this. However, it would be awesome if Mint could find some way to work it in.

6. No way to transfer money between budget categories

If you’re spending way too much in one category, and a lot less in another, it would be nice to adjust your budget temporarily for the month by transferring money from one budget category to another. You can do this with Mvelopes, but the only way to accomplish the same thing with Mint is to edit your budget and then remember to change it back at the end of the month.

So it’s looking like I’ll have to stick with Mvelopes for now, though I plan on checking Mint.com on a regular basis for its analysis tools. Perhaps they’ll get their act together on some of the points above, but for now, it’s just not that useful to me. Too bad, because the design and UI are one of the best I’ve ever seen on a web app.

If anyone from Mvelopes ever reads this, please listen to me: your model is awesome and your features are amazing. But your platform sucks. Ditch the flash, cut your price down, and you’ll have a customer for life.

Related posts:

1. Mint.com vs. Mvelopes.com: which should I use?
2. Book Review: “Crush It” by Gary Vaynerchuk
3. Book review – The New Elite: Inside the Minds of the Truly Wealthy

So why do I keep using it (or trying to)? Because when you get it rolling, it’s amazing. The envelope method of budgeting works like this: for each spending category, you put money in as you get it, based on your budget, and you take it out as you spend it. When it’s gone, it’s gone. If you don’t spend all the money in that envelope for that month, it carries over to the next month. For example, let’s say I make $2000 per month. I put $700 into a rent envelope, $200 into food, $200 into utilities, $200 into spending, $300 into savings, and $400 into gas As I spend money out of each of those categories over the month, I take that money out of the appropriate envelope. At the end of the month, if I have $45 left in the spending envelope and everything else is empty, I’ll have $245 in my spending envelope for the next month. Envelope budgeting is a great way to control spending and save for things over a long period of time, like an annual insurance payment, or Christmas gifts.

Anyway, about a year or so ago, I signed up for Mint.com, which is kind of like Quicken, but online and free. The interface was good, but this was at the height of my enthusiasm for Mvelopes, and since Mint.com was mainly about seeing how you’d already spent your money, I didn’t spend much time on it.

Fast forward twelve months and Mint.com is starting to look a lot better. It’s got more robust budgeting features, some amazing graphing, trend analysis, automatic transaction categorization, and best of all, it’s all free. But at the end of the day, it still feels more geared towards tracking the money you’ve already spent than helping you spend correctly in the future.

So should I switch? I’m not sure. I really like the envelope budgeting method, but if the interface is so horrible and painful to use that I won’t do it, it’s not really giving me much benefit. If Mint.com would just add something close to the envelope method of budgeting, I would be a customer for life. I’d gladly fork over $10 / month to never have to log into Mvelopes.com again.

I’m going to get Mint.com all setup and rocking for the rest of this month. In two weeks, I’ll evaluate where I’m at and post a status update. If it’s working well for me, I’ll stick with it and cancel Mvelopes. If anyone has found any other alternatives, I’d love to hear about them

Related posts:

1. Uh-oh…Mint.com isn’t looking so good
2. My mvelopes experience
3. Book Review: “Crush It” by Gary Vaynerchuk