I decided to post the source code on GitHub if anyone wants it. Or if you want to just play the game. Here is a link to download it.

So far my money has been invested for 3 months.  I’ve chosen a risky platform (mostly D and E grade in their terms) which means higher returns but with a higher risk of default in their loans.  Here are my impressions.

The Good

• Returns – Lending Club has provided me an annualized return so far of 20.25%.  This is much better than my stock market account which is down about 2% for the year.   Of course this is still early on, so the default rate is likely to go up overtime.
•  Ease of Use – For the most part, their interface is user friendly and easy to use.

The Bad

• Slow Money Transfer – It takes over a week to transfer money into the Lending Club account.  My discount brokerage can do this in less than 3 days.  Not sure why it takes forever to transfer money.
• Risky – There is a wide range of returns in an investment category.  Aslos, Lending club is the holder of the notes, so if the company ever has financial trouble, the notes are worthless.

The Ugly

• Surcharges – Lending Club charges fees to both the lender and the borrower.  This seems a little greedy in my opinion.
• Time Consuming – Sometimes loans do not get funded.  Sometimes they get paid off early.  This means that EVERY time I log into my account I have cash sitting un-allocated.   10% returns are worthless if over half of your cash is sitting in an account unfunded.

Conclusion

LendingClub provides high returns and moderate risk.  However, account management is so time consuming that its probably not worth it.  If they could put in automated reinvesting, I might put more money into it.

Update: Talked to a Lending Club rep.  They actually have a “administered account” option if you have a minimum of $25k in the account.  I might consider this in the future.

Maybe this is just my circle of friends, but no one I know is using Google+ any more.  Out of 50 some odd friends, I see about 1 to 2 posts a week.  Is this just me?

We created a Karaoke app using the TokBox api.  The purpose of the application was to allow opponents to compete against each other in live Karaoke battles.  You could compete on any of the 3000+ karaoke songs on YouTube.  Or if you just want to watch people make fools of themselves, we had a voting system for live performances.  Our idea was this would be a great app for American Idol or X-Factor to put on their websites.

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I think we walked away with $150 a person.  Anyway,  special thanks to my team:

• Kenny Kadar – NightTap
• Vaughn Blake – Vintage Store App
• Ethan Tran – Cal State Northridge

Here is temporary link to our project.  I’m pulling it off my server soon, but you can contact Ethan Tran for future development.

One of the fun thing about Facebook Ads “Targeting Section” is that it gives a unique perspective on  demographic data.

To use this option, just go to Facebook Ads and click on “Create New Ad”.  Don’t worry, you don’t actually have to create and ad here.  Go to the second section, labeled targeting.  When you start playing with the demographic data, you can see on the left the number of people that fit this demographic.

For example:

will yield the result (on the right):

Now, all you have to do is play around with different demographics and it yields some interesting results.  For example:

Education in the United States:

• Poli Sci majors in the US - 389,320 people
• Computer Science majors in the US – 367,680 people
• Communication majors – 131,400 people
• Aerospace Engineering - 28,040 people

Companies:

By using the following function. You can disable FOLLOWLOCATION and just call curl_follow_exec() instead of curl_exec().

	function curl_follow_exec($ch, $times = 0)
	{

		var_dump( $ch );
		$result = curl_exec($ch);

		// Look to see if there's a location header.
		if ( ! empty($result) && $times < 6 )
		{
			  if ( preg_match('/Location: (.+)/i', $result, $matches) )
			  {
				// $matches[1] will contain the URL.
				// Perform another cURL request here to retrieve the content.
			  	curl_follow_exec( $matches[1], $times+1 );

			  }
			  else
			  {
			  	return $result;
			  }
		}

	}
}

Below is a listing of trends from Google Trends comparing the top framework in various web  programming languages:

• Ruby (Rails)
• PHP (Codeigniter)
• Python (Django)

As you can see, Rails has been losing steam, while Codeigniter is the hottest trending.   The point is, just because you see a lot of press on Hacker News doesn’t always translate to real world uses.

First create the css class for the bullet.  The radius show be equal to the size of the bullet (with padding).

.bullets {
	background-color: lightGrey;
	float: left;
	height: 20px;
	-moz-border-radius: 20px;
	-webkit-border-radius: 20px;
	width: 20px;
	margin-right: 10px;
	padding: 8px;
}

Next create the html tag as follows.

<div class="bullets">1.</div><h2>First list item</h2>

And here is your result:

First list item

Second list item

Third list item

Click on the image for more details.