As you may know, I’ve been pretty busy on a few new designs (This blog, Carbon Fiber Gear, and dpitMedia). All of these designs were custom created from the ground up by yours truly. Many many hours of work is spent on these designs, so it’s always nice to get any sort of recognition for the work. All three sites were just featured on a couple of design showcases:

We Love WP

We Love WP is a showcase site that features the best Wordpress powered sites on the net. They recently featured both this blog and Carbon Fiber Gear!

One Page Love

One Page Love is another showcase site, but specifically features sites that are only one page. dpitMedia was a perfect site to fit that need.

A buddy of mine owns FullSingle, which is the same idea other than the fact that they only feature one site at a time (although you can see the archive of sites)…except he hasn’t added yet

I was watching TV when I happened to see a commercial for limited edition mint crisp M&M’s. It’s apparently a promotion in conjunction with the new Indiana Jones movie. I have to admit, I have a bit of a sweet tooth, and I’m a HUGE fan of mint-flavored candy. The commercial worked on me, and I immediately had a craving. I had to go to the store anyway, so I ended up going to Target, Wal Mart, Exxon, and Bloom (grocery store) which were all in the same shopping center…none of them had it there.

That was about three weeks ago, and every time I’m at a store that would carry M&M’s, I look to see if they have them. No dice. So finally I went over to M&M’s website, and contacted them asking where I could possibly buy these. I get this canned response back:

In response to your email regarding M&M’S MINT CRISP LIMITED EDITION.

Thanks for contacting us about M&M’S MINT CRISP LIMITED EDITION.

Because we are reviewing our marketing strategy, this product is unavailable at this time. Your comments will be shared with our Marketing Staff.

The product cannot be purchased via the Internet nor directly from us.

Have a great day!

Your Friends at Mars Snackfood US

First of all, what kind of response is this? Does Mars have robots working for them?

Second of all, it’s surprising to see such money being wasted. Thousands of dollars spent showing and producing commercials (on top of whatever other marketing was used that I haven’t seen), just to pull the product right at the time when the Indiana Jones movie comes out? While I trust that the marketing dollars backing these billion dollar companies can make better decisions than I can, I’m curious to know the real reasoning (or at least a more detailed explanation) behind why I can’t find these on shelves. Mint crisp M&Ms are still on the website (but then again, I’ve never seen Wildly Cherry either). Next time they should just send me a check for 50% of what they spent on the commercials, and I won’t complain

For now I guess I’ll just have to trust the review of one lucky person that was able to get a pack:

I however, Ms. No Like Mint, really enjoyed them.

It was kinda like, eat one, eat another, how about a few at a time, trust me they are quite addictive.

I hope they will be kept on the market after the movie is done. I think they would make a great after dinner candy or just because.

I guess for now my only option is to buy them on eBay, they seem to be going anywhere from $4-$20/bag. Unless Mars is reading this and wants to send me one

If you’re a mint fan, and tried them, what did you think? If you happen to see them in a store, post a comment and give the details!

Update: A friend of mine has since found a bag of the good stuff at her local Giant grocery store. She luckily read my post and got me one as well. After trying them, I’m not as impressed as I thought I’d be, but they are pretty good. I’d love to have a non crisp version though.

As I went last year, I’ll be going to Ocean City, MD Thursday-Sunday. A bunch of us always go the first weekend of June, which happens to be when the OC Car Show is. Since it’s a car show weekend, there are always pretty nice cars driving around everywhere you look. Which is perfect since Jason and I will be taking the Vipers down. In fact, as you read this right now, I’m currently in my Viper driving to Ocean City.

I may or may not have access to the internet while down there. If I do, I may update the blog with a couple fun posts, if not…well…we’ll have to wait until next week

I’ve been wanting to create some sort of umbrella/holding company for a while. The idea is to essentially have one company that is the main company for all of the sites that I do. This is beneficial for tax purposes, and just ease when launching new sites that are making money in similar ways.

Finally, with inspiration from Derek Semmler launching his own similar company (Red Staple Media), I decided to just do it. Low and behold, dpitMedia was launched. I did a pretty simple one-page design for the business that highlights some of the public projects that I have (this blog included). Although the site looks pretty simple, it was a huge pain getting it to look the way I wanted. A huge thanks goes out to these three guys for helping me figure out how to get the code looking the right way in order to work:

• Mubs from Suffolk Software. Mubs has a ton of really cool web projects. Most recently sites like ShouldRedesign.com which is like a hot or not for websites and MyTimeZoneIs.com which is a cool application that allows you to share what time zone you are in.
• Tom Lauck from Deseloper.org. I found Tom when he started following me on Twitter. Tom is a designer and developer, and his Deseloper blog has some really great posts if you dig through it.
• David Blanchet from ClimaxDesigns. You may know David’s work through sites of his such as LogoPond and StandardsReboot. ClimaxDesigns is his web design/development company, and they do some really great work. Check out his site for some examples.

In the near future I’ll be registering dpitMedia as an LLC, and will be doing all of my online business under that name. In the meantime, I’m just glad that I put the effort to create the dpitMedia brand.

The economy may be in a fairly bad place right now, but the right people still have money to spend. How about on joining a car club where membership starts around $38,000/year and goes all the way up to $100,000+? Oh, I forgot to mention the $15,000 initiation fee. Today we’ll be profiling Luxautica, the ultimate car club.

What Is It And How Does It Work?

Luxautica is a high-end car club that allows the elite to have access to an arsenal of vehicles from a $184000 Aston Martin DB9, to a $1.7 million Bugatti Veyron. They even have one of seven Maserati MC-12’s ($1.4m) in their fleet.

For a yearly fee, members get access to points, which can be redeemed for a car. Let’s take a look at a sample scenario. Let’s say you get the Silver membership ($38,400), you are given 1,200 points. You could go for a Lamborghini Gallardo, which is 20 points for a weekday, 30 points for a weekend, or 140 points for a week. The cars in this price range should expect to be around this many points. So you could rent a Gallardo for about 2.5 months out of the year. On the other hand, their most expensive car, the Bugatti Veyron, will run you 1,000 points/day.

On top of having access to the cars, you also get a few extras:

• Access to the private member lounge
• Private VIP events
• Concierge services
• Access to premium tickets to local sporting events
• Chauffeur services for the Maybach and Rolls Royce cars
• Exclusive golf excursions
• Sales and acquisition services for exotic cars

The concept of why somebody would pay such high prices for just renting these sort of cars comes behind the high cost of ownership and the little amount of time these cars are actually driven. Between the cost of maintenance, and depreciation, these cars are very expensive to own. Luxautica lets you get access at potentially a much cheaper per mile cost when you look at the big picture…on top of more selection.

The Fleet Of Cars

Luxautica has a fleet of 20 cars worth over $11 million, but plans on growing it further. They said if they have 100 memberships, they will double the fleet. Here’s what you can currently expect:

Aston Martin DB9 Volante | $183,250

Bentley Flying Spur | $170,990

Porsche GT3 RS | $124,900

Spyker Laviolette | $278,000

Ferrari F430 | $173,079

Ferrari F430 Spider | $201,123

Lamborghini Murcielago LP640 | $313,600

Mercedes SLR | $495,000

Ferrari 599 GTB Fiorano | $264,034

Ford GT | $139,995

Lamborghini Gallardo | $180,050

Bentley GTC | $193,990

Lamborghini Gallardo Spyder | $206,000

Rolls Royce Phantom | $340,000

Mercedes Maybach 62 | $386,500

Porsche Carrera GT | $484,000

Saleen S7 | $555,000

Ferrari Enzo | $1.1m

Maserati MC-12 | $1.4m

Bugatti Veyron | $1.7m

Who’s Behind The Company?

Luxautica was started by Raju Mantena, some of the cars even came from his personal collection. Raju founded a privately held specialty pharmaceutical management firm in 2003, which he sold in 2006. He sold it for almost $200 million, more than enough to start Luxautica.

The Facility

Luxautica is located in a 12,005 square-foot bulding that used to be the Millennia art gallery. Part of that space is a private lounge for members only.

The private lounge is a 4,800 square-foot clubhouse that features high-tech audio/video with 16 plasma screens, a game room that converts into boardroom, a cigar room, a private bar with world-class wine list and cigar collection, and a 1,600 square-foot patio.

If you don’t want to go for the cars, you can have access to the members lounge for $15,000/year. Gerry Mattia, an Orlando chiropracter who has a nondriving membership was interviewed in this article.

??I??ll take them over there, and they see $1.6 million Bugattis, and the club is done so extremely well, it??s very impressive to them. It??s great for me in business circles,?? Mattia said.

The social aspects are a plus, he said.

??It??s similar to a country club, but instead of it being golf and tennis, it??s cars,?? Mattia said. ??You get to meet a lot of other people. Most of these people, obviously, if you join this, are fairly successful. If you want to advance sometimes, that??s the place to be.?

No detail was overlooked, the lighting in the facility, done by Electronic Systems Design, was a $500,000 project on its own. In fact $2 million was spent in renovating the facility for Luxautica.

For us regular people that could only dream about driving these sort of cars, you can at least go look at them for $20/adults and $10/children. Here’s all of the contact info:

Luxautica
4190 Millenia Boulevard
Orlando, Florida 32839
1.877.666.6878
info@luxautica.com

I’m just going to post the press release for ease of use about this latest announcement…see some of my comments below:

Pepperjam proud to announce that their affiliate network has officially partnered with the eBay Partner Network to bring eBay??s links and graphics to Pepperjam??s affiliates!

Stay tuned for access to eBay??s large selection of advanced links, widgets, and more. If you have any specific requests for the eBay Affiliate Program on Pepperjam Network please contact ebay@pepperjammanagement.com.

HIGHLIGHTS: Make up to 75% of all the transactions and up to an additional $35 for every new active user you send to eBay. Pepperjam has in place a dedicated eBay affiliate management team to work with you in real-time to maximize your eBay revenue. Learn more about our aggressive commission structure by logging-in to your Pepperjam Network account.

About the eBay Partner Network and Pepperjam Partnership:

It will come as no surprise that eBay is The World??s Online Marketplace?, enabling trade on a local, national and international basis. With a diverse and passionate community of individuals and small businesses, eBay offers an online platform where millions of items are traded each day. Founded in 1995, eBay Inc. connects hundreds of millions of people around the world every day, empowering them to explore new opportunities and innovate together. eBay Inc. does this by providing the Internet platforms of choice for global commerce, payments and communications. Since its inception, eBay Inc. has expanded to include some of the strongest brands in the world, including eBay, PayPal, Skype, Shopping.com, and others.

Coupling access to the unparalleled scope of eBay??s global marketplace with industry-leading tools and a dedicated support staff, the eBay Affiliate Program on Pepperjam Network offers success to all types of publishers, from the casual blogger to the experienced Internet entrepreneur. The eBay Partner Network is one of the most profitable affiliate programs in existence today, paying affiliates up to $35 per active new user, and 75% of its revenue on hundreds of categories of products.

I’ll have more information in the future, but I’m very curious about this. For one, I hope it fixes some of the problems I’ve been having with revenue. I don’t really understand the reasoning behind this as I thought eBay moved off of Commission Junction to their in-house network…not just to allow another third party network. There are two major benefit potentials that I see:

1. Pepperjam will have a dedicated ebay contact that affiliates can go to. Since eBay has been extremely uncommunicative to its affiliates, this could have some real potential.
2. Pepperjam was able to increase the minimum revenue by a few % points and $1 on new sign ups from eBay’s own program.

I’m an affiliate through Pepperjam Network, but I haven’t really used it yet. I’ve heard great things about them, so we’ll see how things go. The only problem now is that affiliate links will have to be re-coded again, and we’ll have to wait for BANS to update their code to allow the Pepperjam codes to be integrated.

We all dread that check engine light flashing on the dash, don’t we? It usually means to get ready and drop some cash and get something fixed. A buddy of mine with a Ford Escape had a check engine light pop up, so he took it to the dealership to see what was wrong. He paid something like $80 just to check it out…not even fixing anything.

Sometimes a check engine light can come on for something as minor as the gas cap needing replacement. Do you really want to pay $80 just to find out you need a new $5 gas cap? Wouldn’t it be nice to find out what the problem is for free before deciding on dropping some cash? I found out that you could when my maintenance light came on my Honda Accord.

I was driving, and all of the sudden a yellow maintenance light came on the dash. I later found out that this was not the check engine light, but a “timed” warning to take the car to get serviced…aka, pay the dealership money…but more on that later.

The reason a check engine light comes on in the first place is because the cars computer is throwing an error code. The computer is known as OBD, or on-board diagnostics. On 1996 and newer cars, they use ODB-II. When you take your car in to see why the check engine light came on (or to turn it off), they simply plug a little device in called an OBD-II scanner, which allows them to do a variety of things, including clearing the CEL (check engine light) and seeing what error(s) was causing it to light up in the first place. The plug is normally located around the steering wheel column.

What you may not know is that going to your local auto parts store like Autozone or Advance Autoparts, they have an OBD-II scanner on hand as a courtesy to customers. Simply walk up to the front counter, and tell them your CEL is on, and you want to find out what codes it’s throwing. This way you can at least know what you may possibly need to fix it. Another benefit is if you don’t trust your mechanic, you can ensure exactly what’s wrong with the car.

So back to my maintenance light. Once I saw it on, I went over to my local Advance Auto Parts and asked them to read for any error codes. After checking, we both found it odd that no errors were being shown in the scanner. Luckily the employee had a Honda Civic and realized that the light was not in fact the CEL, but just the service car light. We popped open the owner’s manual (which I should have just done in the first place probably) and found that you can simply reset or turn off the light by following a couple simple steps. 15 seconds later, problem was solved.

My whole point is, you can either pay $80/hour of labor for the dealership to do the same exact thing that a local auto parts store will do for free in seconds. I didn’t know this until a friend told me, so I would assume some of you may not either.

Good luck with all of your car troubles, and I hope you learned something!

[Check engine light photo sources: crazyscientist_11, music for the eyes]

In January of this year I started a little bit of an experiment in affiliate marketing by launching a blog called Carbon Fiber Gear. The blog covers a variety of “cool” products made with or out of carbon fiber. To give you an idea, some examples I’ve written about are:

• Rob Diamond Carbon Fiber Belt Buckle
• Blackbird Rider Carbon Fiber Guitar
• Carbon Fiber & Aluminum Tissue Box
• Carbon Fiber Wallet
• Bell & Ross Carbon Fiber Watches

While the site isn’t making a ton of money, I’ve started to really see some potential in it. I have plans to further expand it out, including a possible direct store, and maybe even our own branded products…but that’s all down the line.

When I initially launched the site, I was using a pretty basic Wordpress template that anybody could use. With the new custom design launched on this blog, I really had the itch to give Carbon Fiber Gear its own unique look. On top of that, I wanted to try and tackle doing everything on my own. When I re-did this blog, I designed it myself, but then worked with Suffolk Software to code it up and integrate it into Wordpress. If anything, re-doing Carbon Fiber Gear would be a learning experience in Wordpress and HTML/CSS…and great practice…both of which are needed.

I managed to do everything from the design in Photoshop to the blog being integrated into Wordpress in about 3 days (Although I did work on it pretty much non-stop). I still have a few things on my to-do list, but the majority of everything is completed. I’m really proud of the work, and feel fairly comfortable integrating a site into Wordpress now.

I have some really interesting articles I plan on writing for this blog in terms of the entire process behind re-doing Carbon Fiber Gear. For those of you interested in what it takes, it will be a must read. In the meantime, I’d like to give a thanks to these two people:

• Mubs from Suffolk Software – Mubs was extremely helpful in answering a few questions here and there when I was stuck on either some stupid CSS quirk or trying to get something to work correctly with Wordpress. I was also able to recycle some code that he had done to create the theme on this blog…which saved me a ton of time/work myself. An example of this is the comments section on a post, that was restyled and rehashed on Carbon Fiber Gear from this blog.
• Collis Ta’eed from Eden.cc – Collis has been on fire lately in the web scene. He owns quite a few sites that you may know of: PSDTuts, NetTuts, FlashDen, AudioJungle, and FreelanceSwitch. While he didn’t directly help me, he (and his work) has been a huge source of inspiration. Enough of it is visible in the site that it definitely deserves some props.

As we all have pretty much witnessed, real estate has been on a crazy roller coaster over the past 10 years. Prices spiked up, and now they’re dropping. The county I live in, Fairfax County in Northern VA, has been somewhat “recession-proof”, so we haven’t seen as much of a drop as other parts of the country. There is still a drastic difference in pricing over the past 10 years, and some clues as to what to expect in the next few years. Lets take a look at the raw data:

Now lets take a look at the important charts that we take away from the data:

We can see here that from 1999-2006, the housing market skyrocketed up, going from about $195,000 to about $480,000 for the median selling price. That’s almost a 250% gain in prices in just 8 years! Then over the past 2 years, especially the last one, we see it start to come down from $480,000 to around $400,000…about 17%. The decline is happening pretty rapidly, so it doesn’t look like it would just start to flatten out anytime soon. The interesting thing to note in the first chart is the amount of units actually sold. From 1999-2004 there was a slight rise in the units sold (keep in mind this is just the April of each year), but a large decline after that through today. It took a couple years for the prices to start following the lower demand in units.

The even more interesting thing is in the 2nd chart, where it shows how many houses are actively listed for sale. Look at what happened from the middle of 2005 through today. The amount of active listings on MRIS skyrocketed up from about 2,000 units to over 8,000…over 4 times as many listings. With way more listings on the market, and way less demand, I can only predict that the market will continue to rapidly drive prices down much further. Although prices have come down a bit, I still feel like they are drastically inflated. Let’s take a look at the townhouse I live in now:

Using valuation data from Zillow, we can see that the house was purchased for $314,000 in 2003. The price peaked at $543,000 in just 2 years…a 73% gain! Just 2.5 years later, it has dropped down to about $400,000…still giving it an overall gain of about 27% in 5 years. I think it was already overpriced by 2003, but it was newly built, so I can’t look back any further. I’ll bet if the house was built and sold in 1999 or 2000, it would have been under $200,000.

It’s a crazy crazy market right now. Since I’m not a homeowner (I’m renting the above exemplified house), I hope that the prices continue to get driven down so that they are actually affordable to the majority of people. On a $100,000 salary, you realistically can only afford a mortgage for a $300,000-$350,000 house based on the figures I’ve seen. That means you can’t even buy the basic run of the mill townhouse that I live in. That’s pretty pitiful.

How is your local market?

Lamborghini has really outdone itself lately, and the predecessor to the original Gallardo is a great example of that. The newly named Gallardo LP 560-4 outclasses the original car in almost every way, and it looks better too.

The car was officially announced back in March during the Geneva auto show. Some of the notable features are as follows:

• Features a new 5.2 litre V10 engine that pumps out 560hp. The original Gallardo does 520hp.
• It’s 20 kilograms lighter than the original Gallardo
• The power weight ratio is 2.5 kilograms per hp
• It does 0-62mph in 3.7 seconds
• Top speed of 201mph
• Increased fuel efficiency
• 18% less C02 emissions

From the exterior, the most notable updates is the new front end ( which looks a lot more Reventon looking), a new rear (which looks night and day better than its predecessor), and new wheels. The car is surely more refined looking:

One blog that I recently found was that of Samuel Hubinette, who is a professional drifter for Dodge/Mopar. If you read through his blog, you’ll see that he does a lot of promotional stuff like filming and driving in commercials for car makes. Back on March 31st, you’ll see a post he made about a commercial he was working on for the new Lamborghini Gallardio LP 560-4. It’s a pretty cool post with some nice behind the scenes pictures….but we were all dying to see the outcome. Look no further, the video was just released and it is amazing:

I love the film work in the video, and it really makes me want to buy the car….especially with the phone collector feature Too bad that the $200,000 USD price tag is just a bit over my price range. For more pictures of the car, check it out here.