Get Paid for Watching Ads

We watch ads every day. Hundreds and thousands of them. These days, on the Internet, just go to a site and it will beam 10+ ads in your face. Even Google is not spared.

I have worked in Enterprise Content Management space for years and content targeting was a common issue there. How can you target content (or ads) to a user whose only information you have is the few links that the user has clicked. This was a topic that most of the developers never use to understand well. No wonder, you are bombarded with all of the irrelevant ads every day. E.g. I really don't care whether a given dog food is out of this world. I don't have a dog and I am not going to eat it myself. Then why should I bother about seeing the ad. Also, I don't care if my money is not giving me enough returns, or I can get diabetes medicines for free or I can save 500 $ on Insurance. And I really don't care about Viagra.

Swagbucks

The point is that if I am going to watch ads, why not get some benefit out of it. Swagbucks is a site where you search which is powered by Google and AskJeeves. It rewards you by 'randomly' awarding you with Swag Bucks when you search on it. You can accumulate Swagbucks and then trade these in for prizes such as gift cards from Starbucks, Amazon, Subway, etc or save up for big items like an Xbox360 bundle or iPhone.

Sounds too good to be true. Well, it sort of is. I was not sure of the site initially, a bit apprehensive and whether it works or not. I looked around and this does not look like a scam and it has been verified by many sites. You can Google Swagbucks, scam or something to do your research but it looks legit. I have made 15$ out of the site by now that I redeemed in Amazon gift cards in last 20 days or so of usage. All I have done is start using Swagbucks instead of Google. It allows searching of images, video etc and the results are same as that of Google.

450 SB - Amazon.com $5 gift card

500 SB - Starbucks $5 gift card

10-100 SB - chance to play Swagstakes for Ipod, IPads or Amazon Gift Cards.

You can check all the prizes here.

If you are interested,  you can register here and you can get 30 Swagbucks free. Over the last few days of usage, these are the positives and drawbacks that I have seen of this. 

Benefits

1. Pretty safe. If you use only the search, don't give your mail account for the offers that come here. They don't spam you unless you want to.
2. You can always use a junk mail ID to register for offers and get more swagbucks
3. You get 7 - 40 (maybe range is higher but this is what I have seen) swagbucks on random while searching. From what I see of the algorithm, one in 10 searches (if not done one after another) results in Swagbucks
4. You can supplement your earnings by watching videos, playing games, filling surveys and looking for treasure codes. 
5. The collection of gifts is great. You can take Amazon gift cards to paypal cash and electronics of most kind
6. Has a faster payout rate than other competitive sites like iRazoo.
7. Has a lucky draw of all logged in users every hour. 4000 Swagbucks (Approx 45$) are given.
8. Uses Google for search so the results are not different from google.
9. You don't get Google ads.

Drawbacks

1. The withdraw takes about 10 - 14 days for the rewards to get credited to your account. 
2. You can not spam search with swagbucks, there seems to be some sort of time limit to how often you can win. Most of the time it's been more than 1 hour before I win again, but I have won once in a 20 min span. It's just best to incorporate it into your daily internet usage and forget about it.

I have also used iRazoo for the same time. Will post the difference between the two separately.

Tips and Tricks

You can not spam search with Swagbucks, there seems to be some sort of time limit to how often you can win. Most of the time it's been more than 1 hour before I win again, but I have won once in a 20 min span. It's just best to incorporate it into your daily internet usage and forget about it.

That doesn't mean that you can beat it. There are a few ways to improve your chances on a day to day basis.

1. Toolbar: The Swagbucks toolbar is a good tool to have. Now, I personally hate toolbar. They occupy very important screen real estate. I use Chrome just for this reason over IE. The key thing is that the toolbar gives you 1 Swagbuck each day it connects. So I installed it on IE and I run it once a day to get my point. 
2. Bookmark: If you go to a site regularly, e.g. "Amazon", you can create a bookmark as http://www.swagbucks.com/?t=w&p=1&q=amazon. This way your bookmark is only one click away from your desired site and this increases your chances of earning Swag Bucks without much of a hassle
3. Controlled Spam Search: Remember, if you do too much of spam search, swagbucks will throw a Captcha to check whether it is a person of a human. This means that you cannot do an uncontrolled spam search and run the tool overnight. It took me 20 minutes to write an AutoIT script that looks a config file and searches one of the terms randomly. you can add up to a 1000 odd terms there to ensure that the searches are different and not in same pattern. You will have to monitor in case Captcha comes on. Let me know and I will send the script to you.
4. Surveys: The trick with surveys is to fail them. Swagbucks have survey that if you don't qualify give you 1 point. The best way is to find responses that will get you disqualified in the first 3-4 questions. Generally, the questionnaire takes 15 minutes to fill in. getting rejected in 30 seconds allows you to fill in 5 surveys in 5 minutes. You will anyways not qualify for too many so better to fail upfront.
5. Offers: Now, generally the offers are useless but there are a few offers that are a few one-off ones that are quite good. e.g. you get 400 from TurboTax for registering with them. That's it, no cards asked or other information entered and you get equal to 4.5$ in a shot.

Finally, the key is that you should try to integrate swagbucks in your regular search habits and you will start accumulating bucks to encash. you will realize that in a month, you are able to get about 10 $ or so just by switching the search (or escaping google ads to see some other ads). 

Oracle and Content Management

Five years ago, when Oracle acquired Stellent with the aim that it will fit in the middleware tier, the first thing that came to my mind was that this is a good cross subsidy chip for Oracle to give out its Content Management free to everyone and entice them in buying more of Oracle Databases and Application Servers.

A lot of water has flown under the bridges since then but Oracle has never shown any interest in cross selling or subsidizing its UCM offering except for any specific RFP sent out to them. In-fact Microsoft was able to do the same quite successfully with SharePoint. Finally, when a couple of weeks ago when Oracle announced that it will give Oracle WebCenter (aka UCM, aka Stellent) free for all Documentum users as a trade-in, my  reaction was “too little too late”.

Documentum has been losing market share over the years. EMC doesn’t release sales figures individually for Documentum that makes it difficult to guess how much but the fact is that Documentum has lost from the leader in ECM space to number four. On Oracle’s part, it is safe to ask customers to move away from Documentum as there is sufficient negative publicity to Documentum and it is not in a position to retaliate well but I would have liked to see Oracle target more aggressively to other leaders like OpenText or even Microsoft. Microsoft and IBM are in position to retaliate strongly against oracle and I can understand the fear in Oracle to take them heads-on but taking up half of market share from OpenText and three fourths of non Life Sciences customers would be sufficient to propel Oracle to the leader in ECM space.

If I were in Oracle’s place, I would have asked the whole R&D to quickly prepare for a server that would come with Oracle Linux as the Operating System, Oracle as the database, WebLogic as the App Server and all of the Fusion Middleware installed on it with just an ability to put in a license code and enable to functionality. The benefit would have been that as a customer, I would not have to install any software, worry about compatibility or skills needed to deploy it or to size. Just build in relevant sizing logic in the system that can tell you that server A is good to run a CMS for 100 concurrent users. Server B is good for doing it for 500 users and so on. This would allow Oracle to provide its customer with one software, enable trials for them to evaluate products and most importantly, it will allow Business Units of a company to take charge of the servers without having to depend on IT department and that itself would have been a big advantage for many customers.

Oracle has done a very good strategic investment in Sun. It took them five years to do something good with the Stellent acquisition, I really hope they do something better with Sun than to just fight with Google over Java patents. Getting royalty money is easy money but that will not take Oracle very far. I can deposit all my money in bonds and earn yield on top of it but that is a non-ideal way to exploit it. Come on Oracle, there is a world out there, waiting for the next wave in ECM.