The Billion Dollar Quest

exploring my creative potential…while trying to save the world


Here's the deal...

My name is Alex. I have no business experience, little money and few connections. Yet, I believe that in time, I may be able to build a billion-dollar business. How do I plan to make a billion dollars? Read on...

The thing is, whatever I may lack in experience or resources, I believe I can make up for with creativity and determination. I have the ideas to make billions, and the willpower to make it happen. I am not going to be distracted, dissuaded or defeated. Absent a failure of my body or major disruption in the geo-political-environmental-social complex, I think I can do this. Skills can be learned. Connections can be forged. Luck can be made.

Yet this quest is not about money. Personally, I have no need for billions of dollars or even millions; my material needs are few. Instead, this venture is about exploring the potential of my life and my mind, while using my skills to make the world a better place. As such, the vast majority of my profits will be redirected to environmental causes. Our environment - that which gives us everything we know - is crumbling apart and I cannot just stand back and watch it happen.

Oh yeah and this is going to be really hard. Feel free to help... :)

Latest News...

August 25th, 2009

ups and downs

These past two weeks have been rather harrowing, as my sites were completely gone for awhile during a transitions from webhosts and a domain registrar transfer.. and then down again for a day as I tried to diagnosis the cause of the heavy server load… and then in a state of disrepair as I had to rebuild playwithyourmind.com in order to eliminate the problems behind all these server problems.  They were many moments of despair and hopelessness, and my hair is a bit more grey thanks to this whole process…. BUT now everything seems to be working great and playwithyourmind.com is better than ever and ready for a period of growth and promotion.  Just yesterday, in spite of all the recent turmoil, I had my highest-traffic and highest-profit day in the past 4 months, so that’s encouraging.  So far, it looks like today might eclipse those numbers from yesterday, and that’s definitely a pattern I can live with.

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August 6th, 2009

let me try this again

Yeah so apparently I have a little problem keeping up with this blog.  The thing is, I get a little behind and then it becomes even harder to give you the updates as I have fallen so far behind.  So in order to get me back into the swing of this, I’m just going to forego that duty and pretend like I have been doing this regularly all along.  So, you’re going to be missing out on a few details at the moment but hopefully I can shed some light on them in time, piece by piece.

For now, let’s just talk about where I’m at now and where I am going instead of where I have been.  I am currently in the midst of a highly productive and motivated phase of things; it’s high-tide in my mind.  My focus and determination have ebbed and flowed over the past two years and that has certainly hindered me in my quest but nonetheless I am feeling really good and excited about things right now and once again feel like I can make anything happen if I only put my mind to it.

My primary focus at the moment is social networking (me and everyone else it seems).  While I was away (well, not away, but not paying enough attention) Facebook , Twitter and the like have emerged as these extremely powerful and highly-used networking and marketing channels.  Had I been on this from the beginning, who knows where I might be now, but alas no point in dwelling on that.  The point is I am ready for them now, hopefully I’m not too late.

This is part of the larger goal of getting more traffic and exposure for playwithyourmind.com and other projects.  I have a lot of interesting ideas of how to use these massive networks of people, but the success of these ideas is contigent on having a large following of people to work with, so I am setting out to find them.  So in addition to developing a presence in the world of social media I am also writing articles, distributing press releases, and actively looking to network with other websites.  I’ll give you more details on these things in future posts, but for now I’ll just share my two articles and then leave you be for the time-being.

An interview with Dr Breznitz of CogniFit

Build a Better Brain: Brain Fitness Tips

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February 23rd, 2009

the start of a new week

Yesterday was a very productive day as I pretty much worked nonstop from 9 a.m. to just a little past midnight.  I spent the first half of the day developing a framework for the HighQ game, and then moved back to BrainBall.  Things are coming along well… I have 10 games working within the system, I have the supporting files working, and much of the interface built.  I expect to have BrainBall squared away sometime later today and then hopefully will begin a short trial season come tomorrow.  If things go well with BrainBall today, my goal is to have all three daily games back online on next Monday.  While this may seem like a lot, most of the framework and supporting files are the same in the three games so I have already done the bulk of the work required.  I’m not exactly going to bet the farm that I can get this all done in the next week, but I think is a really good chance, and it would make me ever so happy to have the three of them back online and humming along again.  Then I can go about integrating them into Facebook…

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February 22nd, 2009

a brief distraction

things are coming along well.  I got mostly everything done with playwithyourmind.com that I’ve wanted to accomplish this time through, all that’s left now are just some little tweak and adding in links.  I also have the new BrainBall nearly squared away, and ready to integrate with Facebook.  at this point, I mostly waiting on the graphic design work my friend Scott is helping with… so when the new BrainBall does emerge, it’s going to look all snazzy.  Really, I have all sorts of things I could be doing to that end, but since it’s a Sunday I’m going to succumb to a little distraction…

So this morning, lying in bed, half awake and half asleep, I came up with my next project and I’m going to spend a little time today working on it to solidify the concept in my mind and get myself motivated to do it in the future.  It’s called HighQ, and as you can guess it’s another sort of IQ like project.  I’m not going to get into all the details of how it will work at this moment, except to say it’s going to follow a new model for distribution.  Rather than keeping it exclusively on my site, or even just offering it on other sites like Facebook, this game is going to be free for anybody to put on their website.  Of course, it’s still going to load files from my domain so I will have control over what is in there, and when the time comes, what advertising I might be able to do within the game.  presumably, if I get enough people playing it I should be able to sell some ad space… and if by some miracle I’m able to get 500,000 people playing per day, I can enroll in the Google adsense for games program.  anyway I’m going to tinker with that little today and see where it goes, but no matter happens, I’m going to get back on track come tomorrow morning.

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February 19th, 2009

Back at it again

okay, it’s a little past three in the morning and I just woke up to start a new session of work.  I went to bed with the intention of sleeping the night through, but as it turns out I was a little too excited about things to ever really fall into a restful sleep, so here I am.  Although it may not be the healthiest pattern, it’s a really good sign for my quest and I’m so excited about my work that I can’t sleep.  Besides, the middle of the night is one of my favorite times to work as I find it a very productive space, as long as I’m not tired.  So I’m going to return to my work of the day, which was adding links to play with your mind and searching out potential websites to network with or link with.  I already got the few links out there today, and send out a number of e-mails promoting my site so hopefully those efforts will bear fruit.  my new search engines standing report or play with your mind is due out in a couple days so I’m excited to see how much upward progress there has been as a result of my new site design and the added love it’s been getting recently.  Much of my SEO work for the site was undone by the neglect of the past year so it’s going to take some time and effort to get back up there.

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