Two self-described Disney "fanatics" have purchased a house in Utah modeled after the colorful home featured in the animated movie "Up."

Discovering the house in the Salt Lake City suburb of Herriman, Utah, was a dream come true for Clinton and Lynette Hamblin of Petaluma, Calif. The couple had been looking for a house with some of the same flourishes as the one in the movie, such as a multi-colored exterior or a blue kitchen with retro appliances.

They initially looked in California until they saw news reports about the house in Utah that included every possible detail from the movie and was even officially recognized as the "Up" house by Disney. Even more surprising was the $400,000 price tag, which was less than homes they looked at in California.

For them, however, the real attraction to the house was it underscored the overriding theme of the movie.

"We just love the message of the movie — adventure is out there," Lynette Hamblin told The Salt Lake Tribune.

The house is modeled on its appearance early in the movie, when Carl and Ellie Frederickson are flush with the optimism of newlyweds. That was before infertility undid their hopes for a family and Ellie’s death left Carl a curmudgeonly recluse who refuses to succumb to developers and sell his house.

Homebuilder Adam Bangerter told The Associated Press earlier this year that he and his brothers — who collectively own Bangerter Homes — wanted to replicate the house because it’s iconic and plays an important role in the movie.

"It illustrates what homeownership really is, and it’s not an investment. It’s part of the American dream to have a house to care for, to improve and to make part of your family," Bangerter said during a tour of the house.

Herriman City spokeswoman Nicole Martin said about 45,000 people have visited the home for tours, and will continue to do so through the month of December. City leaders even recently passed a resolution honoring the house for its economic impact.

The Hamblins plan to move into the home after closing Jan. 4, which happens to be Lynette Hamblin’s birthday.

[Via - Boston Herald]

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Cool sites - PickyDomains.com, world's first risk free naming agency

Domain Name Ideas

Running out of domain name ideas? Have you tried all the usual online naming venues, like domain name generators and expired domain lists with no success? Time to consider PickyDomains.com – world’s first risk-free online naming agency.

Unlike domain name generators or expired domain lists, our domain suggestions are generated by real human beings, not some obscure computer algorithm. And risk-free means that you pay us ONLY if you decide to register one of submitted suggestions. If you don’t like any suggestions and decide to register none – you don’t pay anything.

Our service is very affordable - $50 for names and domains, and $75 for slogans. We’ve already come up with over 1500+ cool domains, like Geomium.com, GetMapped.com or Architexa.com, and have been featured in major publications, like The San Francisco Chronicle. Over 40000 people have signed up to become PickyDomains.com contributors with several hundred being active on any given time.

So if you are tired of trying to come up with domain name on your own, give us a try. To place an order, simply register as client, create an order and activate it.

Business Name Ideas

Looking for business name ideas? Pickydomains.com is world’s first risk-free naming agency that opened its doors in 2007 and has come up with thousands of cool business and domain names, like GymGenius.com, Xutta.com, Geomium, Eyes On Fries Diets or GetMapped.Com since then.

The idea behind Pickydomains.com is brilliantly simple. If you need a business name that perfectly describes what you do and immediately stands out, you simply place your order. Right away you start getting dozens of suggestions from our contributors. If you find the name that fits you perfectly, you pay $50. If you don’t like any suggestions, you don’t pay anything. Hence, risk free naming service.

Currently, there are over 40,000 registered contributors, with several hundred being active on any given day. The system automatically tracks performance of each copywriter, by measuring how many submitted suggestions were liked or disliked by other clients. Based on that performance, each contributor is ranked 1 though 5. Higher ranked copyrighters receive better pay and can submit more suggestions. This way you don’t have to waste your time on sub par suggestions as the system automatically promotes best namers and pushes out the ones with little skills. We’ve also been told by several clients that they like our work better than that of branding agencies that charge anywhere between $10,000 and $100,000.

So if you are looking of business name ideas on a small budget, Pickydomains.com is the way to go. Hey, some folks even trust us to name their pets. And we named a strip club in Las Vegas too! So we can surely find a business name for you or you'll pay us nothing.

Groupon Horror Story

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A London bakery recently experienced the worst-case scenario of offering a Groupon for a small business, and it cost the owner thousands (yes, it's another groupon horror story).

Need a Cake bakery owner Rachel Brown decided to put up a 75% discount on a dozen cupcakes on the site, which dropped the price down to $10 from $40.

Apparently, people really love getting cupcakes cheap, because she was rushed by throngs of customers in a cupcake frenzy. 8,500 people signed up, and her crew of eight had to make 102,000 cupcakes to meet the orders.

Brown lost $3 per batch because she had to hire 25 extra workers to help, and she ended up losing $20,000 because of it, which is a ton for a small biz. It wiped out her profits for the year, reports the Daily Mail.

"Without doubt, it was my worst ever business decision," she told the BBC. "We had thousands of orders pouring in that really we hadn't expected to have. A much larger company would have difficulty coping."

This is just the latest in Groupon small business horror stories. A story popped up in September about a Portland cafe losing $8,000 because of a Groupon, which prompted a personal letter from founder and CEO Andrew Mason.

It brings up the always-present question about the daily deals site: does Groupon suck for small businesses?

Well, it looks like most small businesses think so. An overwhelming majority of 70% hate Groupon, if the latest survey from iContact is to be believed.

As for Brown and her bakery, the experience may have cost her 20 grand, but what about all the exposure she's getting for her store? Great, right? It doesn't hurt, but it probably wasn't worth the cost.

Small businesses like this bakery thrive on relationships with their local customers, not crowds of outsiders coming in to snatch up a free lunch.

Getting new customers is great, but in this case, the bakery rewarded the wrong customers. Those 8,500 people that rushed for the Groupon probably won't be coming back to pay for the same cupcakes at quadruple the price.

Only those the store has nurtured relationships with for a long time (in Brown's case, 25 years), should be the ones rewarded. They're the ones that keep coming back for more.

[Via - NicheGeek.com]

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Need business name ideas? PickyDomains.com, world's first risk free naming agency

Startup Naming Tips

So your startup needs a name. Welcome to PickyDomains.com, a crowdsourcing naming platform that has named over 1500 startups, services, blogs, online shops and news sites. Here are just a few examples of our work -DePrice.Com (discounted software retailer), SoftwareJudge.com (software review site), MadConomist.com (odd news), BatesExpress.com (bates numbering software for lawyers), BenePark.com (innovative domain parking system with above market payouts) and many, many others.

We understand that most startups don’t have any cash to burn, so our services cost only 50 US Dollars. Moreover, our service is risk-free, which means that if you decide that you don’t like any names (domains) we suggest for your startup, you get your $50 deposit back. You pay us only if you like our work.

We are very different from naming agencies and brand consultants. This is how the process work. First, you register as client. Then, you create your order and specify what you want - how long your domain should be, which extensions are desirable, does it have to have certain keywords or not, etc. The order goes active as soon as you make the deposit (we accept credit cards, paypal, bank transfers, invoices, and all other conventional payment methods). Within minutes (yes, minutes) you start receving suggestions from our contributors (we’ve got over fourty thousand registered copywriters and several hundred are active at any given time). You mark incoming suggestions as liked or disliked to steer our contributors in the right direction. When you see a domain that’s perfect for your startup, you register it first and then mark it as picked. Contributor who made that suggestion will get half of your deposit. Once again, if you aren’t happy with our work - the money is returned, no questions asked. You aren’t risking anything when hiring us.

We also do names and slogans, and our projects aren’t limited to startup names. We’ve been hired to name software, restaurants, product lines, adult websites, strip clubs, even dogs. So if your project needs a name, we’ll happily assist you.

Source - Startup names

Your Cable Guy Owes You!

Link Of The Day - Coupons For Godaddy

People often joke about how much waiting for the cable guy and other service people is costing them — in time and billable hours. Well, now someone has actually done the math.

t costs a whopping $37.7 billion a year for the time customers spent waiting on someone to come fix, install or deliver something, according to a new “Cost of Waiting” study from TOA Technologies. The company makes software that helps businesses better track their service people and narrow down the window of time customers have to wait.

Americans waited 4.3 hours on average — more than double of what the individuals had expected. On an individual basis, that works out to about $250 a year, or two full working days, that we waste waiting for everything from the cable, phone, Internet or utility guy to a retail home delivery.

“It’s clear from this year’s survey that customer service needs to be a top priority for businesses in the current climate, not only because it can negatively affect a company’s performance but because poor service around wait times has financial penalties for a company’s own customers,” said Yuval Brisker, co-founder and CEO of TOA Technologies.

And, if you’ve had it with waiting, you’re not alone: The survey found 58 percent of Americans suffered fist-pounding frustration, waiting on somebody for something, in the past year.

In fact, Brisker and his partner Irad Carmi, now the CTO of the company, founded TOA after a particularly frustrating wait for a guy to come and fix Brisker’s video on demand. The window the company gave him came and went without a single ring of the doorbell, so he decided to go out and run an errand. He came home to find a note on the door from the service person that said, “Sorry we missed you.” The company was able to give him a new appointment — for ONE WEEK LATER.

“I thought, there’s got to be a better way!” Brisker said.

Customer frustration with wait times is bad in the best of times, but Brisker said it’s even worse since the recession.

“Our focus in this survey was to understand if waiting pains people more as a result of the downturn in the economy. Do they perceive that pain more acutely than before? Yes,” Brisker said. “There’s a much more acute sense of every dollar lost — especially in middle- and lower-income people.”

Couple that with the fact that people are more inclined to voice their complaints through social media — reaching far more people than just complaining to family and friends — and companies like TOA are seeing huge demand for their software.

[Via - MadConomist.com]

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10 Strangest Canned Foods

Link of the day - I will pay you $25, if you come up with a cool domain name for me.

1. Canned worms (ok, technically, silkworm pupae)




2. Pizza-flavored SPAM (sorry, KAM)




3. A can of croc



4. Canned bacon (should be considered a crime)




5. Corn smut (huitlacoche)



6. Frog Legs. Must be hot in France




7. Canned armadillo meat



8. Canned Cheesburger (Germany). Here is a little video, in case you are wondering, how the f.ck do you can a cheeseburger (yes, buns, meat, cheese and sauce together)



9. Scorpions in a can



10. Canned whole squid (doesn't look too tasty)



Link of the day - I will pay you $25, if you come up with a cool domain name for me.

BenePark - Cool Startup Ideas

http://benepark.com

BenePark.Com is a recently launched Finnish domain parking service where 90% of all accepted sites get at least $5 in ad revenue each and every month. This is 5 to 10 times the industry average. Most parking services (like Sedo.com, for example) simply load the page with ads, which immediately leads to Google downgrading domain to a ‘junk’ status. Which, in turn, leads to domain being omitted in the search engine results. And that means that such companies are capable of monetizing type-in traffic only.

BenePark.Com takes a different approach. First, domains have to be approved, prior to being accepted into the system. Then BenePark turns an empty domain into a regular webpage. This is done by placing relevant content onto the page, which is not limited to text only – videos, for example, are added as well. As a result of this ‘transformation’, domains parked with BenePark turn into regular sites. Because content is updated and new links are been placed for the parked domain, search engines start treating them as regular sites. Which means that type-in traffic isn’t the only type of traffic for BenePark domains, as over time domain’s pagerank and search engine traffic increase.

If you have domains you’ve purchased and don’t plan to develop soon, consider parking them with BenePark.com

Branding, Naming And Other Things

Yeah, I know it's been a while. Here they are

1. Brand Naming

2. Domain Name Ideas

3. Business Name Ideas

4. Company Name Ideas

Doing my best to keep new clients coming.

Off Topic (Help Wanted)

As you may (or may not) know, I own PickyDomains. After recent upgrade, we had a huge surge in orders, getting as many as 8 new orders in a single day. So basically we need your help and right away. What's in it for you? We charge $50 our clients for coming up with a cool domain. The person who suggests picked domain (that could be you, yes YOU) gets half of the fee. So if you are good with domains, names or slogans (you get more for slogans), go we need your suggestions right now. Here is registration link.

Here is a simple trick that will GREATLY increases your chance to get your suggestion picked. Most names are picked within two weeks, with day 2,3,4 most popular. Most new users work on the first three orders only. Because of difference in traffic depending on day of the week and time of the day, a new order may receive 200 suggestion during first few hours or 20. Then, as new orders are listed, old orders are pushed down and volume of suggestions for old orders goes down. So to increase your chances (after working on orders that we just added) go and work on ALL orders that were listed withing last 72-96 hours. These are going to be the first 15 orders on the Available orders list, generally speaking. And when you work on older orders, work BACKWARDS, submitting to order 15 first, then 14, then 13, because the owners of these are ready to make a decision. Do it even if you already made your suggestions to these when they initially appeared, because many clients feel overwhelmed when they receive several hundred suggestions within the first 24 hours. As the volume of suggestions drops down, they have more time too look at each individual suggestion - and if you are smart, these suggestions are going to be yours. This drop in volume is very significant, we've had one client tell us that they like the service, but here were too many suggestions and then the same person asked, why so few suggestions are coming in after the order was active for three days. Take advantage of that.