Bright Hub was recently featured in the Albany Business Review.  The following link shows an excerpt of the article:

http://albany.bizjournals.com/albany/stories/2009/04/20/story10.html

Unfortunately you have to be a subscriber to read the full article.

Either way, this article is one of the first official announcements of us closing our latest round of funding, which was a feat given the current state of the economy.

My company is having a money giveaway contest. The only thing you need to enter is your email address to have a shot at winning and this would really help Bright Hub out. So go to www.brighthub.com/win to enter for your chance to win a $200 Visa gift card. We’re giving away a total of $2,000, so there will be 10 winners. You may enter once a day. Our first drawing will end on May 15th. We’ll have a second drawing will end on June 15th. Please pass this along to your contacts too. For each friend you refer, you will receive a bonus entry.

We are doing this to help build up some readership and raise awareness for Bright Hub so you’re help would really mean a lot.

We are finally big enough to where Community Server paid attention to us.  Check out the latest showcase site on their site:

http://communityserver.com/showcases/

For the full write-up, including a quote from yours truly, you can visit the following URL directly:

http://communityserver.com/showcases/media/bright-hub-inc/

For my wedding gift, my wife gave me an Amazon Kindle. It was something that I have been wanting for a while, but after receiving it, was completely shocked at how much I wound up loving it. Recently, my screen stopped working, which given my love for the device, was somewhat devastating.

I called Amazon Kindle support tonight, and within 5 minutes, they have agreed to send me a brand new Kindle priority mail and an easy to use, free UPS shipping label to return the old device. All I apparently have to do when I get the new unit is add it to my Amazon account and I will have everything I did before. It was worried I would be massively disappointed (and pissed) if they told me I was SOL and needed to buy a new device, but they where very good, and I am happy once again, looking forward to my mail coming in the next day or so.

LifeHack.org wrote an an article doing a side by side comparison of Bright Hub and several other similar companies that pay experts to write articles.  Everyone should check it out and then Digg it!

http://www.lifehack.org/articles/money/your-expertise-is-worth-money-5-sites-you-can-write-for.html

Help Bright Hub win the award for best “How-To” site by voting for them in the 2nd Annual Open Web Awards.  To vote, simply click the link below, find the voting widget, select “How-To” for the category, enter “Bright Hub” for the company and enter your email address:

http://mashable.com/openwebawards/home/

Bright Hub exceeded the mark for one million page views last week.  A pretty decent accomplishment considering the fact that we launched the new version of the site only 4 months ago.  Check out the press release at the following URL for more details on this and for a good description of what Bright Hub is all about:

http://www.prweb.com/releases/science/technology/prweb1555164.htm

Bright Hub currently offers writers $10 for each article they write. If you where to write one article a day for a year, that would result in $3,650 (or an average of $304.17 per month). If you were to continue this for 35 years, you would earn a total of $127,750. A decent amount of money for spending what is likely not more than an extra hour a day doing what you love (which is writing if indeed you are a true writer).

While good money, this total is far from the million dollars this article claims you can earn. However, rather than spend that money, if you where to invest the money you earned each month, you could indeed retire a millionaire due to the power of compound interest.

What is Compound Interest?

Interest in general is money that someone pays to someone else as a fee for borrowing money that is in addition to repaying the money actually borrowed. The amount of interest that a borrower pays to the person lending them the money is usually not a fixed amount rather it is a certain percentage (interest rate) of the of the amount of the money currently owed (principal). This interest ‘compounds’ on a periodic basis, which is to say that it the fee you pay for borrowing the money is added to the current amount owed every certain number of days (every month, quarterly, annually, etc.) . It is sort of like renting the use of the money borrowed. If you are occupying the money, no one else can use it, so the fee is charged on a recurring basis as an incentive for you to pay it back.

For example, if you borrow $100 and have a 10% interest rate that compounds annually, that means that after a year of borrowing the money you would own $10 in interest (100 * 0.10). When compounded to your initial principal ($100), you would now owe a total of $110. After year two, you would owe an additional $11 (110 * 0.10), which would bring the total owed to $121. It is important to note here that the interest that accumulated in the second year ($11) is more than what accumulated in the first year ($10). This is due to the fact that the interest owed is based on the current principal, which was higher after the first year due to the first year’s worth of interest that was compounded to it.

Making Your Money Work For You

When you are the one that is borrowing money, compound interest is not your friend, and you are forced to work for your money. If you are the one lending the money however, compound interest can be a wonderful thing, and your money can work for you in a sense. If you where the lender in the above example, after the first 2 years, you would have earned $21 extra dollars for doing nothing other than letting someone else use your money.

There are many different people you can lend your money to. When you deposit your money in a bank, you are essentially lending your money to them. This is why they often pay you a small interest rate on that money. Banks then take that money that they are borrowing from you and re-lend it to others who then pay them interest. A bank only ever keeps enough money physically within it to ensure that it has enough money to give to people that are likely to request to withdraw it at any one time.

Similar to banks, you too can choose to lend your money to others. By others, I don’t mean other people necessarily; I primarily mean other investments such as the stocks or bonds. Your return on such investments is their compensation to you for letting them borrow your money. While the economy is in the slumps now, over time it is quite possible to get an average rate of return of 10% on your investments.

One Million Dollars Realized

If you where to invest the $10 a day that you earn by writing an article into a collection of investments that averaged a return of 10% per year, at the end of 35 years, instead of having a mere $127,750 dollars, you would have a grand total of $1,088,162.84. If you then stopped working and contributing your $10 a day, not only would you have your million dollars, the interest from these investments alone would produce over $100,000 annually for you to live on. Pretty good for writing just one article per day!

Revenue Sharing As An Additional Annuity

The numbers quoted above only take into account the money paid up front for the article.  In addition to that, Bright Hub pays out a percentage of the revenue generated from ads that are displayed when your article is viewed.  The amount of money generated each month from all the articles written would add even more money to your bank account each month.  If that money where invested as well, it is likely that you would reach one million dollars in a fraction of the time noted above.

Yesterday I completed the Mooseman Half Ironman (1.2 mile swim, 56 mile bike and 13.1 mile run = 70.3 miles total) at Newfound Lake, NH. It was my first triathlon so it was definitely a learning experience. Temp was 95 (but hotter on the asphalt) + high humidity, not a cloud in the sky, not a bit of wind. All in all, I finished well under the maximum time limit and met my goal, which was basically just to finish it under the maximum time cut-off. My chip time was 7:45 overall. 6% of the entrants did not finish. Hot day! Here are my detailed results.

Place Bib#  Name                   Age G Rank Swim    Pace  Tran1   Rank Bike    Rate
===== ===== ====================== === = ==== ======= ===== ======= ==== ======= ====
 650    58 Joshua McWilliam        28 M  655   44:11 36:49    4:43  654 3:48:10  14.7

Tran2   Rank Run     Pace  Penalty Final   Div Div     Gen G
======= ==== ======= ===== ======= ======= === ======= === =
7:48  640 3:00:11 13:46         7:45:02  34 M25-29  446 M

Here is a link to all of the official results: http://www.lin-mark.com/MMHALF08.TXT

For the swim, I was physically prepared, however not mentally. Not sure if it was the wet suit or the cold, but I had a real hard time breathing. It was like I only had half my lung capacity, which led me to breathing on the same side after only two strokes, instead of the alternating breathing after 3 I am used to. This lead to me favoring one side, and zig-zagging all over the course. I had to stop a couple times for 10 – 15 seconds to breath as well. Eventually I tried real hard to calm down, go real slow, take deep long breaths each time, and force myself to hold my breath for 3 strokes. That straightened me out and that last half of the swim was much better than the first. All in all though, my time was better than I expected even with that. Not sure if it was the wet suit or the fact that you don’t have to waste time with turns like in the pool.

The bike course I think I was both physically and mentally prepared for. It went well. It was a tough course though. Lots of hills. The toughest thing though was the heat, especially on that back section of the course that is all open. It just bakes you. Definitely need to get better at hills though I think. That and lose weight. I was playing tag with a number of people. They would pass me on the up-hills, and I would then fly by them on the down-hills. If I could get up the hills faster I think it would make a big difference in my time.

My main goal was to finish the swim, and then the bike, under the cut-off time, so I would have 3 hours in which to do the run, and could run/walk if needed. The run is my least favorite part, and I didn’t really train for it. I would have to check the logs, but I don’t think I ran more than 50 miles in the last year. So, I got my goal with the bike, and good thing, because I needed it. I half ran/walked for the first 3 quarters of the run, and then had to walk most of the last quarter as my right calf started locking up. Tami, a friend/co-worker, wound up passing me with about a half mile to go.

Click on the image below to see some of the pics from the event::

2008 Mooseman Half Triathlon (Public)

The next generation of the Bright Hub site is now live.  This is a substantial re-design of the site from the ground up and we are very proud of it.  Lots more work to do, but it is a big step in the right direction.  Check it out at the following URL:

http://www.brighthub.com