“At the Tahoe Tech Talk this weekend, someone from the audience introduced themselves as a representative ofWheretheladies.at, a domain whose extreme ridiculousness piqued my interest a) because it is actually real and b) because most events in San Francisco can easily go from a bonestorm to a bronado to a category five hisicane in like a span of 30 minutes.

Founded by Path’s Danny Trinh and Digg’sJeff Hodsdon, Wheretheladies.at is an iPhone-friendly web service which uses Foursquare to gage how many females have checked into venues in your vicinity, stack ranking and featuring the places that have the most women checking in. Seriously.

The service crawls the Foursquare API to track female checkins based on first names which admittedly leaves room for inaccuracies (here’s looking at you dude Courtney). But, as someone who deals with dorky guys desperate for practice consistently, I think this is brilliant and totally gets an “A” for effort and vision.

Says Trinh, “The few chicks that check-in are a decent sample of where more might be.” Using any female checkins as signifiers of an even larger “lady” ratio, it’s like Trinh and Hodson have totally made an app giving nerds some kind of advantage in natural selection.

And while apps like Assisted Serendipity and Kissmobs attempt to do something similar, Wheretheladies.at has the simplest solution UI-wise  for the moment. The service, which started out as a joke between friends at SXSW, is currently experiencing high volume traffic in San Francisco and is branching out to other cities shortly, targeting New York, LA and then Minneapolis. A Wheretheladies.at iPhone app is also in the works, which, get this, is JUST A BIG COMPASS POINTING YOU IN THE DIRECTION OF LADIES (see screencap to the left).

Ladies and gentlemen, but especially ladies, what we are witnessing here is called evolutionary advantage.  On this bent, Trinh and Hodsdon are not looking for funding and are currently just focusing on “helping our fellow dudes around the world find the ladies.”

Selling on eBay is a very common skill, and one some people find worth paying other sellers up to 15% for. Buying on eBay, however, I feel is largely a neglected art.

Multiple strategies have received large amounts of publicity recently about auction sniping, or bidding on an auction with seconds to go in order to not give competing buyers a chance to outbid you. This is a good strategy and a good way to save money, especially when using automated bidding programs, but I consider this the “novice” level of eBay money-saving techniques.

I won’t reveal all of the tricks I use, but here’s one. I call it “overgeneralized auction buying.”

To understand it we have to understand a bit of how eBay works. eBay’s “search engine” is very, very simple – based completely on the “item title.” So when I search eBay for “30GB Apple iPod” the only results that will show are those that have the key terms “30GB” AND “Apple” AND “iPod.” Common knowledge says if you want to find a more exact result you add more terms, thereby specifying what you are looking for. Good eBay sellers’ titles are generally not much more than a list of key terms customers might be using to search for when looking for their item.

Common economic knowledge says that the more views there are on an item the higher the price will be. We won’t take time to explain here how in a market-based bidding economy such as eBay such a law operates, but if it’s not common sense simply accept that as more people see an item more people bid on said item, therefore the price goes up.

So according to that principle, what we are looking for if we want to find a cheap auction are auctions that nobody else has been able to find. Some have suggested searching for misspellings, and even developed programs that search for misspellings, but such occurrences are few and far between in my experience. Now those of you that have earned the right of passage by reading this whole  article up until now will be able to understand what I consider the “holy grail” of eBay shopping, step-by-step.

1. Search for something in vague terms. For this example, we’ll use the term “Iphone.” (although note that trying a term such as “i phone” with a space might be another good option here, since fewer people search for it as two words). When I do this I see 379,002 results. Everything that has the word “Iphone” in the title is showing up. Being used to search engines makes us want to be more specific, but consider this: What if some seller had listed their product as simply “Iphone” with no other descriptive information. How would you find it? You would have to look through all 379,002 auctions to find it. But there’s a better way.
2. Begin minusing out terms that don’t apply to what you’re looking for. There are thousands and thousands of iphone accessories on eBay. eBay’s search allows us to “minus out” search terms, or in other words if I search for “iphone -headphones” (with no space in-between the – and the term “headphones”) all of the auctions that have the word “headphones” in the title will disappear. So instead of narrowing the results by being more specific, we’re going to narrow results by eliminating other terms. Note that we probably want to minus out even “good” terms that would describe our item, since some terms would be too easily found by other buyers. Ideally we’re looking for an auction whose title is simply “iphone” or “i phone.” So here’s a not perfectly done sample search (eBay only allows a certain number of characters for the search, so I get as many as I can and then scroll. This is far from the best search I’ve done, but I’m not giving you all of the best ones)
   “iphone” -3gs -4 -2g -case -headphones -charger -car -fm -adapter -battery -unlocked -broken -speaker -replacement -screen -16gb -3g -cable -cord -ipad -stylus -av -earphone -headphone -scale -headset -pick -tool -stereo -”ear phone” -”head phone” -remote -mic -skin -bobblehead -service -1st -keyboard -8gb -16gb -32gb -1 -sticky -sticker -silicone -earbuds -clock -dock -timer
3. Scroll through remaining auctions (I set settings to view 200 at a time, and usually will just search for 1 days worth each day). You can even buy something and turn around and sell it once it comes. That got me through High School with no job.

Good luck with that one, and happy bidding. I’ll post the results of the auctions I’ve found later

Certainly, we have all had this confidence at one time in our lives, though must of us lose it as we grow older. Perhaps, because of my work, I’ve been lucky enough to retain a shred of this youthful quality. But sometimes, as I look back on how tough things were, I wonder if I’d go through it again. I hope I would.

When I was about twenty-one, I went broke for the fist time. I slept on chair cushions in my “studio in Kansas City and ate cold beans out of a can. But I took another look at my dream and set out for Hollywood.

Foolish? Not to a youngster. An older person might have had too much “common sense” to do it. Sometimes I wonder if “common sense” isn’t another way of saying “fear.” And “fear” often spells “failure.”

In the lexicon of youth there is no such word as “fail.” Remember the story about the boy who wanted to march in the circus parade? When the show came to town, the bandmaster needed a trombonist, so the boy signed up. He hadn’t marched a block before the fearful noises from his horn caused two old ladies to faint and a horse to run away. The bandmaster demanded, “Why didn’t you tell me you could play the trombone?” And the boy said, “How did I know? I never tried before!”

Many years ago, I might have done just what that boy did. Now I’m a grandfather and have a good many gray hairs and what a lot of people call common sense. But if I’m no longer young in age, I hope I stay young enough in spirit never to fear failure — young enough still to take a chance and march in the parade.”

-Walt Disney

Now we have another chance. Facebook is launching a messaging platform that will compete with Gmail.

And some think this is a serious threat. This could do to Gmail what Gmail already did to Hotmail and Yahoo. Will the platform disappear altogether? No, but with Facebook’s user base already resting at just over half a billion, 50% of which use the site every day, Facebook has one of the largest user bases in the existance of human history. That means that no matter what Facebook decides to meddle in, it becomes a big player.

But when I heard this, I thought, “Why change over? I already have my Gmail account?” This is what keeps Hotmail on the top right now, as convenient as Gmail made it to change over to their better email service, a lot of people didn’t care… Hotmail worked, that’s all they need. So Facebook’s strategy will be to make it so gosh-darn convenient you naturally switch over.

One of Gmail’s big selling points when it was released was its amazing spam filter. Gmail wrote complicated programs designed to determine what you would be interested in reading and what you would not be. But think about it this way: Facebook has been tracking your every move and your communications with friends for years (about which it receives many complaints). Facebook knows and understands who you like to communicate with, who you avoid, and who you don’t know.

So the battle begins. Will a company like Google just sit there and take it? Or is Facebook going to wake up a sleeping giant? Google has been dipping its fingers in the social networking as well, releasing “Buzz” and making pictures and videos publicly visible in Gmail. For example, my little sister, who never got into facebook, says she doesn’t need a page because “[She] communicate[s] with [her] friends through Gmail.”

And Facebook countered by removing the “Add friends from Gmail” option. But this is just starting, and we don’t have all of the information about exactly how Facebook will be building its email system. I, however, think it’s safe to assume that it will have some twists that we won’t be used to, and won’t look like all previous email systems. But if I were a betting man, I would keep my money with Gmail. Why? 1. Because no matter what Facebook does, it won’t be as professional as a Gmail account, and 2. It would be a pain for me to switch over, so I wouldn’t. I’m sure I’m not the only one in that category.

So now we just wait and see. *Grabs lemonade

Google

Alright, so we all know what Google is. At least from the user’s point of view. But a lot of people have asked me across the years, “How does Google make money?” Have you ever given Google any  money? Chances are you haven’t. And Google, in creating a website that was free for the user, took the internet from a place where stores were set up on every page to a place where good ideas win, and millions of little choices decide where the money goes. Thanks go Google, there’s money in being free and liked. And Google makes billions of dollars each year. How do they do it? The idea is called “Adwords.” (Random side note – this month Adwords marks its 10th birthday!)

(Click to Enlarge)

There is an example of a Google search. You see the top results, based on Google’s amazing formula to the left. But then to the right there is another column are sponsored “Pay Per Click” advertisements. Meaning each time you click on one of those Google makes a few cents. Traffic is worth a lot, and people are willing to pay Google for it. Usually the fee paid is between $.10 and $1, but for some phrases (for example “Gambling”) the per-click fee can even get up to a few dollars for click.

But that’s not all. Google knows what you’re thinking about, even when you’re not searching. Look at this screenshot from my Gmail inbox

(Click to enlarge)

Note that the Ad at the top is offering something about Entrepreneurship. That’s because Google’s “Web Crawlers” have looked through my emails and found what I am writing and receiving emails about, then it targets advertisements to me accordingly. I only see the ads that I am likely to click on. But Google isn’t selfish. Now any website that has visitors becomes profitable – it throws a few Google ads off to the side that automatically target themselves to the user based upon the content of the webpage. When you click on those, Google gets a piece, the website gets a piece. Google made free profitable.

Facebook

Mark Zuckerberg, you sly dog, you created something addictive, my friend. Facebook has an interesting story. Originally Mark Zuckerberg hacked into Harvard Business School’s account, took the pictures of each of the students, and put it up on a website for people to rate (somewhat similar to hotornot.com). Harvard figured out what he was doing and shut him down. But you can’t just shut down a good entrepreneur that easily – Mark just offered the option for people to upload their own pictures. Later he had them enter some information about themselves, and then let them connect to each other adding “friends.” Interestingly enough, the website now most well-known for “Social Networking” became a Social Network after it had been around for a long time — actually that was one of the last additions. But now it’s not doing half bad. Check out these stats, courtesy of Facebook itself:

The video has been kept to Silicon Valley VC firms and high-tech upstarts, but it’s pretty intense. The slideshow can be seen here