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Kevin Kelly provides insight into selling your self-published book, CD or DVD on Amazon.com. He admits though that in many cases it’s not about making, it’s about getting the message out there and hoping to attract customers to the Web site. His simple steps (detailed on his site) are:

1. Get an ISBN (for a book), or a UPC (for a CD or DVD). For one book it costs $125, for one CD, $55, for one DVD, $89.
2. Get a bar code based on the ISBN or UPC. Costs $10, or may be included in UPC.
3. Sign up with Amazon, $30 per year.
4. Duplicate your stuff; include the bar code on the outside.
5. Ship two copies to Amazon
6. Send cover scan
7. Track sales
8. Register it (optional)

Mark Cuban gave a great summarization of why shorters are great for the company:

The more shorts, the more shares shorted, the more pent up demand there is for the stock. For a company that is well run and operationally successful, short shares are like an insurance policy to protect the downside for the price of your stock and more likely push the stock price ever higher. When we had broadcast.com I used to beg people to short our stock. If they didnt like what we were doing I would actively suggest to them that they short the stock. Sure, it might have slowed the rise of the stock in the short term but who cared. I knew we were going to be able to hit our numbers, so why not. If we did our jobs, it just meant they would have to cover the stock and in a down market, that helped keep the price up and in an up market, that could cause the stock to run. Both very good things.

John Heilemann writes the untold story of Google IPO in GQ magazine (out of all tech publications out there). It’s a story about Google founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Google CEO Eric Scmidt and Silicon Valley venture capitalists that guided Google in the startup phase to take it public later. The article answers many questions that readers perhaps had about Google. Why go IPO when your earnings are just fine? How much power do Sergey and Larry have inside the company? What’s the reason for so much secrecy? One interesting episode describes an engineer squatting CEO’s office seeking solutide from the noise surrounding him in the cube area.

San Jose Business Journal talks about Nanochip, a company that’s developing molecular-scale memory:

Nanochip has developed prototype arrays of atomic-force probes, tiny instruments used to read and write information at the molecular level. These arrays can record up to one trillion bits of data — known as a terabit — in a single square inch. That’s the storage density that magnetic hard disk drive makers hope to achieve by 2010. It’s roughly equivalent to putting the contents of 25 DVDs on a chip the size of a postage stamp.

The story also mentions Millipede project from IBM, where scientists are trying to build nano-scale memory that relies on micromechanical components.

Designed for the Windows platforms, BookCAT will help collectors and librarians create and store detailed descriptions of books, download book information from the Internet, generate professional looking reports, keep track of book loans, and more. BookCAT allows creating an unlimited number of book databases either manually or automatically by downloading any selected book data from the Internet. Featuring over 100 data fields, BookCAT allows cataloging a wide range of information such as author, title, ISBN number, editor, type of book, personal rating, comments, reviews, and many other details. By splitting their database into catalogs, adding or modifying data fields, BookCAT users can customize their data to meet their specific needs.

BookCAT also offers an integrated Explorer-style browser that allows users to explore the database easily and view the contents of any book record. With the BookCAT search engine and filters, users can search for book records, containing any specified combination of keywords or/and operators. Furthermore, BookCAT allows for creating professional-quality database reports. Along with over 30 predefined report templates, users can design their own report layouts.

Evan Williams, who created Pyra Labs, who created Blogger and then sold the service to Google, is starting a new venture that deals with podcasting. Looks like it’s both an e-commerce store for audiofiles and ad marketplace for podcasts:

Odeo plans to base its business on the premise that the explosion of digital audio content has created the need for a central place to find relevant material and that there will also be a need for a market to buy and sell “premium” content in much the style of the eBay online marketplace. Odeo, noting that advertising is already an accepted component of conventional radio, also plans to embed automatically generated audio ads within the downloadable files. And because the files are specifically chosen by the consumer, the company is also hoping that consumers and advertisers might find one another as readily as through the keyword Web search advertisements that are at the heart of Google’s and Yahoo’s businesses.

The company is here, there’s a development blog with sneak-peek screenshot and Evan Williams’ blog post on starting Odeo.

Inc. Magazine asks their readers about the best business movies. Their list:

• The Aviator
• It’s a Wonderful Life
• Citizen Kane
• Wall Street
• Tucker: The Man and His Dream
• Glengarry Glen Ross
• What Women Want
• Working Girl
• The Hudsucker Proxy
• The Insider

Criline Search and Replace allows the user to perform a case-sensitive search for a string in multiple files and replace it with another string. It features an ultra-fast search algorithm, HEX and regular expressions support. Criline Search and Replace enables the user to search for a phrase, several words, multiline or regular expressions, using size, date and attributes filters. By analyzing search results, the program may recognize text files and automatically launch predefined external editors to view them. The user can get the program to replace, insert or delete text in found documents - all at a time. All changes can be backed up and an html report may be generated in the end of the search and replacement routine.

Criline Search and Replace can also perform a binary search and replacement in exe files, mp3, etc. After specifying multiple include/exclude file masks and filters, the user can replace all matching results. Each replacement action may be preceded by a replacement prompt and a display of a replacement-to-be. With an easy to learn and use script editor, frequent multi-step search and replacement operations can be prepared quickly and effortlessly.

Everyone kinda knew this would happen, but no one expected it so soon. Virtual girlfriends are here, and so are their mothers-in-law, according to New York Times. They live on the cell phone screen and have some personal characteristics like love for movies and dinners, you can buy virtual clothes and change virtual hairstyles for only $6 a month.

Vivienne, who may soon be joined by a virtual boyfriend for women and, after that, a virtual boyfriend for gay men and a virtual girlfriend for lesbians, is at the leading edge of a wave of services that companies are developing to take advantage of the much faster data transmission rates made possible by 3G technology.

NYT talks about venture capitalists soliciting companies using the Internet. vFinance is one of the companies they talk about in detail. The site helps angel investors and entrepreneurs to find possibilities of investment:

The service is inexpensive - PlantFind.com, which is based in Boynton Beach, Fla., spent about $350 to connect with individual investors who provided a total of about $500,000 - and the process is relatively simple.

AllensBlog also gets mentioned in the article, Allen Morgan is a general partner at Mayfield Partners. According to NYT, the blog “gives entrepreneurs a place to bat around their ideas with Mr. Morgan, and try to entice his company to invest.”