The Mouse, Bird, and Fox

A haughty bird spotted a mouse crawling through the field. 

The bird landed next to the mouse and said: "Oh, poor mouse! A hungry fox prowls this field!  What are you going to do if he sees you?"

The mouse answered: "I have but one option - I will run away."

The bird boasted: "I know several ways to escape the fox!"

Just then, the fox arrived!  The mouse ran away and the fox ate the bird while it tried to figure out which escape method to use.

Moral: It pays to keep things simple and your options limited.

Trump Mortgage Boss Inflated His Resume?

According to a story on CNNMoney.com, the man that Donald Trump hired to run Trump Mortgage inflated his resume.

Well, I think that is being a little bit charitable. If a guy lies about a degree or exagerates one job, that is inflating his resume. This is a joke.

According to the article, the guy's bio said:

1. He was a "a top executive at one of Wall Street's most prestigious investment banks."

2. He was an "established leader" at one of New York's leading mortgage boutiques.

3. He had 15 years of experience in the financial industry.


But the article said that these turned out to be false. Turns out:

1. It looks like he was a broker at Dean Witter Reynolds for 3 months (and a registered broker for a few days).

2. He was a loan originator at GuardHill Financial for 2 years.

3. Besides his job at Dean Witter, he was a daytrader for 2 years.

It looks like his main work experience was running a nutritional suppliments business. This kind of stuff reminds me of someone working a multi-level marketing (MLM) company.

What really surprises me is how someone like this ends up connecting with someone like Donald Trump, and becomes head of something visible, like "Trump Mortgage".

I don't think he will be the head for too much longer ;-)

It seems like, with the success of "The Apprentice", Donald Trump is actively trying to reach middle-class individuals, through things like books, Trump University, and now Trump Mortgage. But he is getting hooked up with the get-rich-quick crowd.

Marketing By Providing Free Useful Information

One of the ways to market your business on the internet is to give away free information. The interesting thing is that this aspect of marketing can become viral.

For example, Geico.com - the car insurance company - created the GEICO teen safe driving Web site, which is located at http://www.geico.com/auto/safety.

This site contains a whole library of safe teen driving information, tips, and brochures. GEICO provides the materials at no cost to families, driving classes, law enforcement officials and state agencies.

Now, the viral marketing aspect comes into this because sites that resale Geico insurance, such as CarInsurance.com, can publish a link to this free library and offer the information of its existence as their free information.

This way, people can use their site to link to the Geico information and, while at their site, hopefully request a car insurance rate quote from them and, maybe, buy car insurance through their site.

Stony Field Farms

Yahoo has a story on Gary Hirschberg and his Stony Field Farms.

Back in the early '80's, he and his partner were running a farm school in New Hampshire. They were struggling for money, and then decided to sell the organic yogurt that they were producing.

They intially got funding from an order of nuns, who saw that ther business would give a boost to the local dairy farmers.

Today, they are the world's leading organic yogurt maker, and now are 2.5 times the size (in sales) of Kraft's yogurt business.

Innovative Marketing Though DVDs

The new DVD formats - Blu Ray and HD DVD - are being promoted for high definition video and enhanced audio.

However, they also allow studios to cram in more interactive features - including games, picture-in-picture commentaries and Web links. The studios are hoping that, by branding some of these features, they can tap additional sources of revenue.

In one of the first experiments, Progressive Direct (which sells car insurance via free car insurance quotes on the web) teamed up with Universal to create a "crash calculator" for the HD DVD version of "The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift."

When the calculator (labeled "Progressive Direct: Insurance Damage Estimates.") is activated, it displays a running total of the damage done to vehicles as they crash on screen - i.e. Roof repair: $209, taillights: $451, fender: $618, etc.

Some analysts doubt that these things will be big sources of revenue, at least for now: HD and blur-ray disk releases are limited, and these features have to be searched for a turned on by the user.

In the case of the "Fast and Furious", no money changed hands. In return for Universal including the feature, Progressive created a website and contests to promote the movie and Disk.

"Horizontal Double Dummy" Tax Loophole

Forbes magazine has an interesting article on how Tom Siebel avoided $58 million in taxes when he sold his company, Siebel Systems, to Oracle.

Normally, the way to avoid taxes in a merger is if the buyout consists of at least 40% stock. But Oracle did not want to issue that many shares.

The solution was to use a legal entity called the "horizontal double dummy". This technique was first used by Unilever in 1978. A tax expert said, "Back in 1978, this was the tax equivalent of inventing penicillin".

The way the Oracle-Siebel thing worked is that a holding company called Ozark Holdings was set up. Ozark then created two subsidiaries (the "dummys").

Oracle merged with one of the dummy subsidiaries in a 100% stock deal, so Oracle stock was swapped for Ozark stock. At the same time, Siebel systems merged with the other subsidiary - this deal was 30% stock / 70% cash.

At that point, Ozark owned both companies. Finally, the subsidiaries were dissolved, and Ozark Holdings was renamed Oracle.

Trump's Tampa Tower Project

In the last few years, due to his renewed celebrity with the Apprentice, Donald Trump has been franchising his name (along with some consulting) to other developers for projects around the country.

This is smart on his part because, in this way, he can make good money with less risk than if he did the projects on his own.

However, there have been problems and delays with Trump Tower Tampa.

So, Donald Trump spent months trying to buy out the developer, Tamps-based SimDag LLC.

Now, however, an Orlando-based private equity firm, Mirabilis Ventures, outbid him, and got the 52-story condo tower for $260 million.

As part of the takeover, Mirabilis is aquiring the SimDag personnel, and say that they look forward to working with Trump.

Top 10 Real Estate Books of 2006

Syndicated real estate columnist Robert Bruss recently published his list of the 10 best real estate books of 2006:

1. Trump-Style Negotiation by George Ross

2. The Automatic Millionaire Homeowner by David Bach

3. Buy Even Lower by Scott Frank and Andy Heller

4. Real Estate Debt Can Make You Rich by Steve Dexter

5. Bubbles, Booms and Busts: Make Money in Any Real Estate Market
     by Blanche Evans

6. Success as a Real Estate Agent for Dummies by Dirk Zeller

7. Everything You Need to Know Before Buying a CoOp, Condo,
    or Townhouse by Ken Roth

8. Who Says You Can't Buy a Home! by David Reed

9. Confessions of a Real Estate Entrepreneur by James A. Randel

10. The Reverse Mortgage Advantage by Warren Boroson

0% Interest Gotchas

Car companies had a lot of success with 0% financing deals and, this holiday season, a lot of merchants are using them to attract customers.

I saw an article in the Chicago Tribune that had a couple of warnings about these deals:

1. You need to read the fine print. In a lot of cases, if you don't pay off the loan completely by the end of the 0% financing period, you could get hit with retroactive interest.

For example, you buy $5,000 worth of furniture on Dec.1, and the retailer offers no interest for 12 months. By Nov. 30 of the next year, you have paid off all but $200. You now get hit with backdated interest on the whole $5,000.

2. You may need to open a store credit card to get the 0% deal. This could hurt your credit score in two ways. First, by having too many credit cards. Secondly, the merchant might open your account with a credit limit almost equal to your purchase. Experts say you want to keep your balances at or below 35% of your limit.

The 12 Days of Indian Christmas

Check out this video - its funny:

Speaking of James Bond...

Here is a cool marketing campaign. A Jewish Dating site is using a "James Bond 007 La Femme Nikita Style Video" to create a viral marketing campaign for their site.



This is an example of "thinking outside the box" to differentiate yourself in the over-saturated internet. This kind of creative marketing actually enriches the viewer, even if they don't use your product or service. So, it creates brand-awareness.

Best and Worst James Bond Theme Songs

The readers of the Chicago Tribune recently voted on the best and worst James Bond theme songs. Here are the results (song, artist, % vote):

Best
-----
1. "Live and Let Die", Paul McCartney & Wings, 29.6%

2. "Goldfinger", Shirley Bassey, 24%

3. "Nobody Does It Better (Spy Who Loved Me)", Carley Simon, 20.9%

4. "A View To A Kill", Duran Duran, 8.4%

5. "For Your Eyes Only", Sheena Easton, 6%


Worst
-----
1. "Die Another Day", Madonna, 25,1%

2. "The Living Daylights", A-ha, 16.1%

3. "All-Time High (Octopussy)", Rita Coolidge, 15.1%

4. "The World is Not Enough", Garbage, 8.5%

5. "Thunderball", Tom Jones, 7.7%