Reezhal Blog

Obama Tunjuk SBY Lead Speaker :: Headline - Riaupos.com

2009-09-25T10:25:00.001-07:00

Obama Tunjuk SBY Lead Speaker :: Headline - Riaupos.com

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IBM Dapat Penghargaan dari Obama - techno.okezone.com

2009-09-18T23:44:00.001-07:00

IBM Dapat Penghargaan dari Obama - techno.okezone.com

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KPK Optimis Tetap Berantas Korupsi :: Headline - Riaupos.com

2009-09-17T12:07:00.001-07:00

KPK Optimis Tetap Berantas Korupsi :: Headline - Riaupos.com

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Wanita 107 Tahun Siap Nikah Untuk yang Ke-23 :: Headline - Riaupos.com

2009-09-17T11:20:00.001-07:00

Wanita 107 Tahun Siap Nikah Untuk yang Ke-23 :: Headline - Riaupos.com

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Dua Pekan, Mesin Pencari 'Halal' Diklaim Sukses - techno.okezone.com

2009-09-17T11:16:00.001-07:00

Dua Pekan, Mesin Pencari 'Halal' Diklaim Sukses - techno.okezone.com

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Informasi Libur Idul Fitri 1430 H

2009-09-16T03:59:00.000-07:00

Sehubungan dengan adanya libur nasional lebaran dalam rangka Hari Raya Idul Fitri 1430 H, kami informasikan kepada seluruh pelanggan AdsenseCamp mengenai jadwal jam kerja AdsenseCamp selama masa lebaran.

20-22 September 2009 : libur
23-26 September 2009 : pelayanan online (07.00 - 23.00)

AdsenseCamp akan kembali melayani Anda secara normal mulai 28 September 2009 (support online 24 jam).

Demikian informasi dari kami. Segenap manajemen dan staf AdsenseCamp mengucapkan :

Selamat Hari Raya Idul Fitri 1430 H
Minal Aidin wal Faidzin
Mohon Maaf Lahir dan Batin

Informasi | | Sep 16

message from adsensecamp.com

AdsenseCamp (adsense indonesia)

2009-09-15T23:48:00.000-07:00

AdsenseCamp adalah website Adsense Indonesia yang merupakan salah satu divisi usaha dari perusahaan CV JogjaCamp yang berada di Yogyakarta. AdsenseCamp menitikberatkan pada pelayanan dengan menempatkan 3 customer support yang melayani secara online (YM, email, sms, dan telpon) ataupun offline dengan datang langsung ke kantor kami.

AdsenseCamp merupakan website yang memberikan kesempatan bagi Anda untuk memperoleh penghasilan tambahan dengan menyediakan ruang pada website Anda sebagai tempat pemasangan iklan bagi advertiser.

AdsenseCamp juga memberikan kesempatan kepada para Advertiser yang berkeinginan mempromosikan iklannya yang bakal disebarkan kepada pemilik website yang memiliki jaringan di AdsenseCamp.

Sebagai salah satu pelopor layanan Adsense Indonesia, kami berupaya untuk lebih memaksimalkan pelayanan terhadap client agar terjadi sinergi yang kuat. Kehadiran AdsenseCamp mendapat tanggapan cukup positif dari para pelaku bisnis online sehingga mampu tumbuh dan berkembang pesat hingga saat ini.

Tadinya saya mengira adsense indonesia tidak ada. Tapi setelah browsing-browsing saya menemukan adsensecamp dan untuk saat ini saya mencoba untuk bergabung di adsense ini. Bagi semuanya yang ingin mencoba silahkan aja Daftar di link ini : http://adsensecamp.com/

Free Google AdSense Online Webinar

2009-09-12T14:20:00.000-07:00

Event: What's New with AdSense Webinar.
Description: AdSense support specialists will provide an overview of the latest features in AdSense as well as a refresher on the top support issues every publisher should know.
Date and Time: Wednesday, September 19, 2007 11:30 pm India Standard Time (Bombay, India) or Wednesday, September 19, 2007 11:00 am Pacific Daylight Time (San Francisco)

I would definitely recommend it for pro-bloggers.

Panelist(s) Info: Laura Chen, Sunil Subhedar
Duration: 1 hour
How to join: Click here to enroll.

I am thinking of attending. If I do you will get the details on this blog.

Jakarta warns against Timor probe

2009-09-11T06:56:00.000-07:00

Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono says ties with Australia may be harmed by a war crimes inquiry into five journalists' deaths in East Timor.

Australian police earlier announced the inquiry into the deaths of the "Balibo Five" which happened during Indonesia's invasion of East Timor in 1975.

President Susilo said to reopen the case was not in the spirit of the relationship the two countries shared.

Indonesia maintains the journalists were killed accidentally in cross-fire.

This version of events has been accepted by successive Australian governments.

But in 2007 an Australian coroner found that the the two Australians, two Britons and a New Zealander were executed by Indonesian special forces in the border town of Balibo to stop them revealing details of an impending Indonesian invasion.

'Past mistakes'

Mr Yudhoyono implied that Australian history showed it was not free from its own mistakes in the past.

"Frankly if we were to focus on the past, then we can look at the era of slavery, crimes against humanity, colonialism. All gross human rights violations," he said.

"But a smart and wise nation looks forward. I am urging Australia's foreign minister to manage this problem wisely so that it won't disrupt our good relations with Australia."

Indonesian foreign ministry spokesman Teuku Faizasyah told the BBC that Jakarta considered the matter closed and had no intention of reopening it.

He said an investigation would be difficult as many witnesses may no longer be alive.

The announcement of the Australian inquiry comes weeks after the release of a hard-hitting film, Balibo, which shows the five being murdered by Indonesian troops.

Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said Indonesia had been "surprised" by the police decision but played down talk of a rift.

"I believe we can manage these challenges," he told Australian broadcaster ABC.

"There are bumps in the road with most relationships around the world and I think we'll have to manage this one as well."

Indonesia invaded East Timor after the territory descended into civil war following the end of Portuguese colonial rule.

At least 100,000 people are believed to have died as a result of Indonesia's 25-year occupation. East Timor achieved formal independence in 2002.

source : http://news.bbc.co.uk/

Comment Guard Lite - Lightweight, Super-Fast Comment Spam Protection for WordPress Blog

2009-09-11T06:54:00.000-07:00

We are about to release a new blog (WordPress) comment spam protection software. It has been extensively tested for over two months. We will deploy it first across our network of highly popular blogs. The new software named Comment Guard Lite was developed after gaining extensive experience with the leading Comment spam protection software - Comment Guard Pro. Comment Guard Lite provides super-fast (no database access required to identify spam) comment spam protection with zero false positives (no valid comment will be discarded as spam).

Why comment spam protection by Comment Guard Lite is faster?

Most comment spam software (like Akismet or Bad Behaviour or even Comment Guard Pro which however tries to minimize database access for performance) uses the database and executes one or more queries and DML's (Insert, Update, Delete statements).While this may not matter much in a tiny blog, it can consume significant CPU cycles and memory in professional blogs serving millions of viewers per month and getting bombarded with comment spam as a result of its popularity.Why waste your CPU & RAM for nasty spammers when the same can be used to serve more vieweres and provide a faster experience?

Additionally many like Akismet also relies on connecting to Akismet server (for every single comment), sending your full comment details (lots of data) and getting the result (spam or ham) from the server, thereby consuming your bandwidth and slowing down the response.

Even moderately popular blogs can get millions of hits per month because of continuous access by search engine crawlers and myriad other crawlers on the web. While serving pages can be cached to some extent (search our blog for more articles on this topic), processing the comments cannot be cached and consumes your resources for thousands of spams you may be getting every day. Not only that but you also have to spend your valuable time looking over many comments daily, which are obviously spam.

Comment Guard Lite excels in differentiating humans from spam-bots

Comment Guard Lite uses a novel and innovative technology to verify the human-ness of the comment poster without imposing any load on the server. The simplicity of the approach allows us to process several thousands of comments per second without consuming significant processor cycles.

Comment Guard Pro uses over 20 pluglets to idenitfy spams, one of which is a pluglet named "Are you human?" which does the same thing. Comment Guard Lite simplifies this check and eliminates the need to maintain sessions.

Simple and Focused approach to comment spam prevention

The strength of Comment Guard Lite is its focussed approach to comment spam protection. It primarily does one thing and does it very well - verify the human-ness of the commenter.

Comment Guard Lite doesn't expect bloggers to know nothing more than how to activate a plugin (and even that will be clearly explained). Beyond that all he can do (aside from blogging) is to watch in disbelief as his spams reduce dramatically and his server breathes a sigh of relief from the reduced load.

Note: Comment Guard Lite also protects your from pingback and trackback spam (to give comprehensive comment spam protection) but those implementations are simplistic and can be achieved by other plugins too.

Comment spam protection can be layered

Our goal is to enable you and make you more efficient and not to box you into any paradigm or software. As a result Comment Guard Lite can be used with almost any other comment spam protection software like Akismet or Bad Behaviour or Comment Guard Pro (needs Are you human pluglet to be disabled as this job is done by Comment Guard Lite).

Comment Guard Lite or Comment Guard Pro?

Unlike Comment Guard Pro (features), Comment Guard Lite will not provide the ability to write customizable rules in pluglets or provide an Open API (Developer Guide).

Comment Guard Pro is a comprehensive comment spam prevention software with over 20 rules covering all the different types or spam and will provide more comprehensive coverage against comment spam. Comment Guard Pro is inherently customizable and allows you to customize the business rules and parameters used to identify spam.

Unfortunately many bloggers may not have the time, inclination or expertise to leverage the full power of Comment Guard Pro.

Comment Guard Lite takes a critical piece of Comment Guard Pro functionality (human-ness identification with certainity), improves upon it, simplifies it, makes it faster by a simpler but accurate algorithm and eliminates database access or sessions.

Comment Guard Lite doesn't replace Comment Guard Pro and both can be in a complementary fashion on the same blog to leverage the low resource usage and fast performance of Comment Guard Lite to handle most of your spammers (over 90-95%) while using the comprehensive comment check provided by Comment Guard Pro, which can even identify human spammers, for the rest and provide more control over your comments. Comment Guard Lite with Comment Guard Pro is like two brothers who will look over your blog day and night, fight spammers while approving genuine commenters without requiring your intervention, however appreciating it and using it when you can provide some input. Read here for more details on Comment Guard Pro software.

When will Comment Guard Lite be available?

Comment Guard Lite will be available from July, 2009. It will be priced at 30$. However we will provide a limited time discounted price of 20$ only for the month of July.

Comment Guard Lite - A simple, pluggable comment spam protection software that respects your readers

Comment Guard Lite can be used as a standalone product or integrated with your existing comment spam protection system, a simple light-weight plugin which allows you to focus on doing what you do best - blogging.

It ensures that no valid comments from your readers are lost. It treats your readers with respect and it will never give snarky messages to your valuable readers (like Bad Behavior). Comment Guard Lite will never ask your readers to fill any demeaning and often hard-to-read CAPTCHA's and waste their time.

AdSense Success Formula From AdSense

2009-09-10T22:34:00.000-07:00

Here is the AdSense success formula from AdSense team.

1. A content-rich page = Highly-targeted ads
2. Highly-targeted ads + Interested users = Healthy clickthrough & conversion rates
3. Healthy clickthrough & conversion rates = Success!
Source: Mike Gutner - AdSense Optimization Team

So to conclude:
A content-rich page + Interested users = Success!

It is surprising how many people cannot grok this super simple equation.

Blogging + Adsense Success Story (from $200 to $3000 per day) - Weblogs Inc. Profiled by Google

2009-09-10T22:33:00.000-07:00

Weblogs Inc. is now profiled by Google as one of AdSense success stories along with Camcorderinfo.com and Askthebuilder.com.

I guess PVRBlog.com, the first AdSense darling, is now old news and probably comes nowhere near the leaders mentioned above.

According to the profile Weblogs Inc. went from 200 USD per day to 3000 USD per day on AdSense alone!

Just so you know Weblogs, Inc. is "a publishing consortium of 100 independent bloggers who produce more than 1,000 blog posts a week across over 75 industry-leading blogs". So before you leave your job for blogging, chew on that number for a while

PS. Not to mention their recent 40 million dollar acquisition by AOL.

Making Money from Your Website with Google AdSense

2009-09-10T21:22:00.000-07:00

Google AdSense is the Google program where you can host pay-per-click ads on your Website. When someone clicks an ad, you earn money. Simple as that.

Is it really as easy to make money with Google AdSense as many would lead you to believe? Now that I've become heavily involved with managing Google AdSense programs for my clients, I can see it's not all play and no work.

Unfortunately, a lot of people bought into the idea that there was a lot of easy money to be made and they are now finding out they aren't making nearly as much as they thought they would. Additionally, Google has a lot of prohibited practices when it comes to AdSense, and too many Webmasters are finding out they violated Google's policies after the fact - often because they never bothered to read the AdSense policies in the first place.

Webmasters must not only comply with AdSense policies, but their Websites must also comply with Google's webmaster policies.

Prerequisites for Making Money with AdSense

To make money with Google AdSense you need plenty of traffic coming in to your site or there won't be anyone to click the ads. Website promotion techniques, especially search engine optimization and article marketing will bring more traffic to your site. You also need to have content that will attract the ads with the highest Pay Per Click (PPC) rate that are relevant to that content. Then, you need to lay out your web pages so the ads blend in with your site. Studies have revealed that people who visit sites that contain ads that use colors that are not in harmony with the actual Web site tend to develop "ad blindness". Meaning no matter how much traffic comes into your site, chances are no one will click the ads because they'll be ignoring them. If no one clicks, you make nothing.

Dealing with Competitors' Advertisements

If you offer products or services on your Website, the first thing you'll notice when you begin hosting PPC ads is that many of the ads are coming from your competitors. Therefore, you'll want to put ads on pages that aren't earning you any money, or do like I did and not put ads on your site until you're so busy anyway you'd rather make a few dollars off of your competitors than to continue turning business away with nothing to show for it.

Google AdSense allows you to specify up to 200 URLs for sites you want to bar from placing ads on your pages. The problem is that most times you won't know the competitors are out there until their ads appear.

Google Money Making Ad Options

Google offers three ways to make money from them:

Google AdSense for Content - A variety of size and shape ads for placing in your content are available. These can be text or image ads or both - you specify what you'll allow. Ad units are full ads. Link units are simply a strip of text links that your visitors might want to click. Google allows you to put up to 3 Ad Units and 1 Link unit on each page of your Web site, provided you follow its policies - both for AdSense and for Webmasters.
Google AdSense for Search - This places a search box on your Web site. When a user enters a term and conducts a search, a search results page opens, that hosts more pay-per-click ads. You can customize the color scheme of the search results page to harmonize with your web site.
Google Referrals - Here you make money by referring visitors to use a Google product, like AdSense, AdWords, the Google Toolbar and other Google software. Just like Google AdSense for Content and AdSense for Search, Google generates the code that you paste into the desired location on your web page. You can choose from a wide variety of buttons and text links of different colors. As an example of how Google Referrals works, if someone goes to your site and clicks the link and signs up for an AdSense account, when that person earns a $100 from Google AdSense and receives a payout from Google, you'll also receive $100 for referring them. This is a great idea to me, because you can be the world's worst Google AdSense advertiser, but if an ad dynamo happens to visit your site and uses your referral link, you can make money anyway!

Google AdSense Payments

Google will not issue an AdSense payment until your earnings exceed $100. Unfortunately, there are loads of Google AdSense Forum entries about website operators who accumulated $90 or more in click through earnings only to get banned from Google and not get paid anything at all before they ever reached $100. This may be because Google doesn't take a close look to see if you're complying with their guidelines until it comes time to pay you. So yes, there's a lot more to the story than meets the eye.

Other Programs Besides AdSense

Yahoo and MSN have similar programs, although those programs aren't as well-developed as Google AdSense and there aren't as many available advertisers to display ads on your site. The fundamentals for making money are the same: You still need plenty of traffic, you still need high-paying ads, and you still need to design your site to harmonize with the ads to get people to click.

Share Your Google AdSense Experiences and Tips

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Google AdSense Related Links

Sprint to start selling phone with Google software

2009-09-10T13:35:00.000-07:00

NEW YORK — Sprint Nextel Corp. is releasing a phone sporting Google Inc.'s Android software on Oct. 11.

That would make Sprint the second U.S. carrier to get on board with Google's entry in the "smart" phone field, where the online search leader is competing against Apple Inc., Microsoft Corp., Palm Inc. and Research In Motion Ltd., maker of the BlackBerry.

The Sprint phone announced Thursday will be HTC Corp.'s Hero, a touch-screen phone similar to the myTouch 3G, which T-Mobile USA launched in August. It doesn't have a physical keyboard.

The Hero will cost $180 after a $100 mail-in rebate when signing a two-year contract.

Sales of smart phones are growing while the general phone market has contracted, and Android is getting some momentum as the leading "open source" software choice. It's free to use for manufacturers.

Motorola Inc. has said it will have two Android phones on the U.S. market before the holidays, as part of its attempt to turn its business around. Verizon Wireless has confirmed it will sell one of them, but hasn't said when. Samsung Electronics Co. has also said it is making an Android phone.

Sprint is based in Overland Park, Kan., while Google has its headquarters in Mountain View, Calif.

Judge extends deadline to weigh in on Google’s digital book deal until Sept. 8

2009-09-10T13:12:00.000-07:00

Judge extends deadline to debate Google book deal

SAN FRANCISCO — The final assault on a class-action settlement that would expand Google Inc.'s already vast digital library has been delayed until next week.

U.S. District Judge Denny Chin extended the deadline until 10 a.m. EDT Tuesday for protesting or supporting the landmark deal that revolves around Google converting millions of copyrighted books so they can be read on computers and other electronic devices.

Ironically, Chin moved the deadline from Friday — a date set in April — because the computers running his court's electronic filing system went down for maintenance Thursday and will remain unavailable through the Labor Day weekend.

The 11th-hour change gives the settlement's growing number of opponents more time to hone their arguments against a proposal that would empower Google to make digital copies of millions of copyrighted books now gathering dust on library book shelves.

An alliance that includes two of Google's biggest rivals — Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc. — is among the strident critics expected to spell out their objections in Tuesday morning's flurry of filings. Silicon Valley attorney Gary Reback, perhaps best known for helping the U.S. government shape an antitrust case against Microsoft a decade ago, is spearheading the attack on Google on behalf of the group, called the Open Book Alliance.

Microsoft and Yahoo also could lodge their own separate complaints against Google, just as Amazon.com Inc. did earlier this week.

Google's 10-month-old settlement with groups representing U.S. authors and publishers would allow the Internet's search leader to act as its partners' sales agent. The nonexclusive arrangement has raised fears that Google — already the owner of the Internet's most powerful advertising network — could emerge as the ringleader of a literary cartel that wields too much control over the prices of digital books.

Those worries prompted the U.S. Justice Department to open an inquiry over whether Google's book deal would violate U.S. laws set up to prevent predatory pricing and promote competition. The Justice Department already has received a waiver giving the agency until Sept. 18 to file its brief with Chin.

Google's ambitions to run the world's digital library also is raising questions about how much data the company intends to collect about what people are reading and what it intends to do with the information.

In response to inquiries from the Federal Trade Commission, Google has agreed to draw up a new privacy policy covering its digital library. The Mountain View-based company also has agreed to adhere to the FTC's policies governing how Internet companies can use their knowledge of people's online interests to target ads at specific individuals, according to letters and statements released Thursday.

Google posted an initial draft of its privacy policy for books late Thursday at books.google.com/googlebooks/privacy.html.

"We'll work to ensure that the privacy of online readers is fact, not fiction," FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz said.

Google would turn over most of the revenue from its digital book sales to the participating authors and publishers, just one of the many benefits that the company is touting.

More than 10 million books already have been scanned into Google's electronic index since 2004. The settlement would clear the legal hurdles that have been preventing Google from stockpiling millions of copyrighted books that are out-of-print. Because those books are scattered in the different libraries across the nation, they're inaccessible to most people.

The concept of a having library accessible around the clock from anywhere with an Internet has attracted plenty of supporters, especially among librarians and researchers.

After sifting through stacks of conflicting briefs about Google's book settlement, Chin is scheduled to hear oral arguments in an Oct. 7 hearing in New York.

Google AdSense Case Study

2009-09-10T13:05:00.000-07:00

HomeTips.com nails down big revenue with Google AdSense.

Home advice website HomeTips.com started out in a backyard clubhouse. Seeking a quiet, woodsy spot for writing home improvement books, author Don Vandervort converted the bottom floor of his sons' two-story treehouse into a small office. He launched HomeTips.com from that office in 1997, essentially as an online portfolio to promote his books.

In the decade since, HomeTips has grown into a large and popular site, thanks to the authority Vandervort has developed and the volume of content he has collected and posted from his more than two dozen books, scores of magazine articles, and many television appearances on ABC and HGTV.

Challenge

Until about three years ago, HomeTips' main source of revenue came from writing, publishing, and licensing books and content to other companies, such as Sunset Books and Microsoft. This business expanded significantly after Vandervort moved to larger offices in Glendale, California, and assembled a team of editors, writers, and artists.

Though his book and content business was thriving, the website's meager revenue came from online sales of guides and reports. When a visitor requested one of these, Vandervort would email it to them and trust them to send three dollars. "At that time, I couldn't find a good system for these small transactions," he recalls. "It was an interesting way for us to stay in touch with our visitors' needs, but a money-losing proposition. We needed advertising for the web business to be viable." But the small editorial team was far too busy working at their core business of creating content to develop an advertising program.

Results

In 2003, Vandervort heard about the Google AdSense program and thought it might be helpful for creating incremental revenue that could work for HomeTips. As he notes, "It took about 20 minutes to set it up - and that 20 minutes completely changed our business."

He started by testing AdSense on a few pages. During the first week, he remembers that AdSense revenue paid for coffee; the second week, it paid for lunches. The model clearly worked, so he began expanding the program across the entire site. Now AdSense revenue pays for all salaries, overhead, and business development.

"Google's ability to deliver targeted ads is remarkable," says Vandervort. "In fact, because the ads are so relevant to the content on any given page, we believe that they are a very useful resource for our visitors. This is evidenced by the fact that, on many of our pages, more than 10 percent of our visitors click through to the advertisers for more information," he adds.

HomeTips now sees more than 1 million online visitors each month. "Solid content is the secret to developing a following," says Vandervort. "If you write expert content with your visitor's needs in mind, the rest will follow."

As the business has grown up, so have the sons whose backyard clubhouse Vandervort first commandeered for an office. Now they bring media experience to the business: Gabriel as a former writer/producer of shows for The History Channel and Christian as a cinematographer and film editor. HomeTips anticipates online video to be the next area of growth. "Nothing can show you how to do something as clearly and adeptly as a video," says Vandervort. "As we see the migration of advertising dollars from television to the web, we expect video content and advertising to do very well."

The HomeTips team constantly tests site design, navigation, and ad optimization to improve both the user experience and the success of advertising. Vandervort points out the fact that channel reporting and Google Analytics are a big help in this effort. "These analytics help us zero in on where we're doing the best job and where we need to do more. As a result, our performance just keeps going up."

About Google AdSense

Google AdSense is a program enabling online businesses to earn revenue from serving ads precisely targeted to specific web content and search pages. With service levels ranging from online sign-up to dedicated support management, a broad range of sites profit from AdSense. Thousands of Google advertisers also benefit from AdSense by gaining exposure on sites across the Google Network, which includes many of the Top 100 Media Metrix sites such as AOL, About.com, Amazon, Ask.com, and Lycos.

Case study : Hometips : www.hometips.com

Site maintenance on Saturday, September 12

2009-09-10T09:38:00.000-07:00

This Saturday, our engineers will be performing routine site maintenance from 10am to 2pm PDT. You'll be unable to log in to your AdSense and Ad Manager accounts during this time, but we'll continue serving ads to your pages and tracking your clicks, impressions, and earnings as usual. In addition, your ad targeting won't be affected.

We've converted the maintenance start time for a few cities around the world:

Ottawa - 1pm Saturday
London - 6pm Saturday
Kolkata - 10:30pm Saturday
Manila - 1am Sunday
Auckland - 5am Sunday

If you'd like to learn more about what goes on during these maintenance periods, check out this Inside AdSense post.

By Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team

Easy money can kill a business

2009-09-10T08:59:00.000-07:00

(Fortune Small Business) -- In 2001, DNA Software won a $1.5 million, three-year grant from the state of Michigan to develop computer programs for genomics researchers. Four years later, the eight-employee Ann Arbor company was on the verge of bankruptcy.

What happened? On paper DNA Software had been living every startup's dream. The government was "very supportive of what we were trying to do," recalls CEO Don Hicks. The grant paid the company in annual installments in exchange for preferred shares with no controlling interest.

But as three years' worth of steady money rolled in, looming problems at DNA went undetected. The cash cushion allowed executives to focus almost entirely on product development, without giving much thought to sales or marketing. Until the grant money dried up, they failed to realize that they had grossly overestimated the potential market for DNA's highly specialized services.

In 2005, with his company on the verge of collapse, Hicks took a 50% pay cut and started targeting potential customers with courtesy calls and demonstrations. DNA was forced to run on cash from its own operations. That required executives to "hunt only what we could kill," says Hicks.

During the next three years he brought DNA Software back to profitability. Since 2005 the company has doubled its staff, and it is on track to bring in $1.5 million in revenue this year.

Despite the current clamor for loans, business owners would do well to remember that money is not the mother of invention. On the contrary, capital constraints often spur innovation. Historically, scarce capital has forced many businesses that were founded during downturns -- such as HP (HPQ, Fortune 500), which debuted in 1939 during the Great Depression, and FedEx (FDX, Fortune 500), launched in the oil crisis of 1973 -- to eschew debt and remain agile.

Small business owners should do as much as they can without relying on other people's money, recommends Jim Anderson, an Orange County, Calif. counselor for SCORE, a national nonprofit organization that teams successful small business owners with entrepreneurs who are seeking advice.

"People who self-finance generally don't become sloppy," he says. "There is a tendency for people who have borrowed a big chunk of money to relax."

Mike Michalowicz, CEO of Obsidian Launch, a Boonton, N.J., consulting firm that invests in small startups, admits that external funding gave him the flexibility to ignore sound business practices -- and reality -- when he founded his first business, Olmec Systems, in 1996. The company, which set up computer networks for financial firms, swung from profitability to losses of as much as $50,000 in a single month after securing a $250,000 SBA-backed loan. Michalowicz blew the dough on office furniture and unnecessary administrative and sales-support staff, not to mention a new BMW Series 7 sedan.

"My explanation to myself was that if I had a lot of employees and a beautiful car, people would know I was successful and want to do business with me," he says. "Once I was out of cash, I had to get back to doing business the right way: servicing clients well and working hard."

Michalowicz ditched the expensive furniture and renegotiated his rent. In three years he had paid back his loan and sold the company for six figures.

Some entrepreneurs can take on loans without losing their innovative edge, particularly if they're armed with specific plans for spending the cash and generating enough revenue to pay it back. For everyone else, the era of lazy borrowing is over.

"In most cases we're telling people, 'You'd better have the capital,'" says Anderson. "It's tough times ahead."

In the end, a loan is a debt, not an excuse to let your hair down and party. Note to Wall Street: That advice isn't just for entrepreneurs.

Source : http://money.cnn.com