Home Business

SFI (Strong Future International) Marketing Group was launched in 1998. Starting with just one product, sold only in the United States, SFI has now grown to more than 71000 products and services (and growing daily) sold in more than 190 countries around the world.
SFI was created to allow anyone with a computer and Internet access the opportunity to tap into the worldwide e-commerce revolution. Anyone of legal age in his or her country can become an SFI affiliate for free by filling out an online registration form. There is no obligation or purchase requirements of any kind.
Once registered, affiliates are provided with professional Websites for marketing SFI's products on the Internet. SFI also provides all necessary sale support services, such as customer service, payment processing, and product shipment – all at no cost to the affiliate. For each sale generated, SFI pays the referring affiliate a commission. Additional commissions can be earned by building and leading affiliate groups.

Stability & Longevity

The mark of a successful company can be seen in its track record. SFI is now in its 14th year, with millions of dollars in annual sales and millions paid in commissions to thousands of affiliates around the world. SFI's parent company, Carson Services, Inc., is now in its 28th year of business, is a Bronze (10+ years), A+ rated Member of the Better Business Bureau and is registered with Dun and Bradstreet. SFI affiliates operate with the peace of mind brought about by associating with a proven, debt-free organization with a long, successful history.

Company Leadership

SFI Founder
Gery Carson

SFI President and CEO, and founder of SFI, is Gery Carson. From 1985 to 1998, Gery was a top marketer and record-breaking distributor for several direct sales companies and a successful business magazine publisher. Known for his innovation, Gery has been a pioneering force in the direct mail and Internet marketing industries for more than two decades. His extraordinary achievements as an entrepreneur have been spotlighted in "Money Maker's Monthly," "Upline," "Opportunity World Magazine," and in numerous books and videos. National recognition has also included being named to 1992's Outstanding Young Men of America list and 1997's Who's Who in the Media and Communications. In 1998, Gery set out to "put a dent in the universe" by creating SFI, a ground-breaking program that would utilize the Internet to empower and enrich the lives of millions of people around the world. Today, with 20059 new affiliates joining in the last week alone, SFI is one of the fastest growing companies of its kind in the world and is well on its way to achieving Gery's vision.

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You can work from anywhere............. its like a home business

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Facebook is testing out a new button

It seems like Facebook is just testing out a whole bunch of new features, and it doesn’t look like it has any intention of stopping anytime soon. Today, it was discovered that Facebook is testing out a new button on the desktop version of its service. The new button appears on the top right of your Facebook page, right next to your profile link. The button pops up the “How are you feeling” post-a-status screen.
The button was first discovered by Mashable’s Alex Fitzpatrick. The button appears to be rolling out to a small test group, and it’s still up in the air about whether or not this button will be rolled out to the rest of Facebook’s users. It allows users to update their status no matter which page they’re on. So if you’re on your friend’s Facebook page, and you just thought of something you want to send to the entirety of your Facebook friends list, you can just click the button to update your status.

Many people are speculating that Facebook is borrowing its features from Twitter. The button looks awfully similar to Twitter’s “Compose a tweet” button, especially with the pop-up button over a faded background. Facebook also renamed its “subscribers” to “followers”, and is planning on implementing a hashtag feature in its service soon, a feature that was popularized by Twitter.

Alongside the upcoming addition of the “post-a-status” button, Facebook has also added an update to Facebook Events. Event planners, as well as event attendees, will now be able to see the weather conditions for their upcoming events. Facebook is also rolling out a new feature to Facebook Pages that organizes comments in more simple, threaded conversations. Facebook has been constantly testing out new features this month, so it’ll be interesting what else will pop out in the next few days.
[via Mashable]

Story Timeline

• Facebook implements conversation threads into Pages
• Facebook brings ads straight to your newsfeed
• Facebook game developers made $2.8B in 2012
• Facebook improves mobile app install ads for developers
• Facebook says paying gamers surge by 24%
• Facebook event to reveal 'real' Android app (not a phone)
• HTC 'Facebook phone' Android software integration tipped
• Facebook gets approval to build a low-key second campus

First boss : Few companies today would have hired Steve Jobs

SAN FRANCISCO: When Steve Jobs adopted "think different" as Apple's mantra in the late 1990s, the company's ads featured Albert Einstein, Bob Dylan, Amelia Earhart and a constellation of other starry-eyed oddballs who reshaped society.

Nolan Bushnell never appeared in those tributes, even though Apple was riffing on an iconoclastic philosophy he embraced while running video game pioneer Atari in the early 1970s. Atari's refusal to be corralled by the status quo was one of the reasons Jobs went to work there in 1974 as an unkempt, contemptuous 19-year-old. Bushnell says Jobs offended some Atari employees so much that Bushnell eventually told Jobs to work nights when one else was around.

Bushnell, though, says he always saw something special in Jobs, who evidently came to appreciate his eccentric boss, too. The two remained in touch until shortly before Jobs died in October 2011 after a long battle with pancreatic cancer.

That bond inspired Bushnell to write a book about the unorthodox thinking that fosters the kinds of breakthroughs that became Jobs' hallmark as the co-founder and CEO of Apple. Apple built its first personal computers with some of the parts from Atari's early video game machines. After Jobs and Steve Wozniak started Apple in 1976, Apple also adopted parts of an Atari culture that strived to make work seem like play. That included pizza-and-beer parties and company retreats to the beach.

"I have always been pretty proud about that connection," Bushnell said in an interview. "I know Steve was always trying to take ideas and turn them upside down, just like I did."

Bushnell, now 70, could have reaped even more from his relationship with Jobs if he hadn't turned down an offer from his former employee to invest $50,000 in Apple during its formative stages. Had he seized that opportunity, Bushnell would have owned one-third of Apple, which is now worth about $425 billion - more than any other company in the world.

Bushnell's newly released book, 'Finding The Next Steve Jobs: How to Find, Hire, Keep and Nurture Creative Talent', is the latest chapter in a diverse career that spans more than 20 different start-ups that he either launched on his own or groomed at Catalyst Technologies, a business incubator that he once ran.

He has often pursued ideas before the technology needed to support them was advanced enough to create a mass market. Bushnell financed Etak, an automobile mapping system created in 1983 by the navigator of his yacht and later sold to Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. Bushnell also dabbled in electronic commerce during the 1980s by launching ByVideo, which took online orders through kiosks set up in airports and other locations.

In his most costly mistake, Bushnell lost nearly all of a $28 million investment in Androbot, another 1980s-era start-up. It developed three foot tall robots that were supposed to serve the dual role of companion and butler. (Bushnell relied on Apple's computers to control the early models.)

Bushnell's best-known accomplishments came at Atari, which helped launch the modern video game industry with the 1972 release of 'Pong', and at the Chuck E Cheese restaurant chain, which specialises in pizza, arcade entertainment and musical performances by animatronic animals. It's an odyssey that led actor Leonardo DiCaprio to obtain the film rights to Bushnell's life for a possible movie starring DiCaprio in the lead role.

While at Atari, Bushnell began to break the corporate mold, creating a template that is now common through much of Silicon Valley. He allowed employees to turn Atari's lobby into a cross between a video game arcade and the Amazon jungle. He started holding keg parties and hiring live bands to play for his employees after work. He encouraged workers to nap during their shifts, reasoning that a short rest would stimulate more creativity when they were awake. He also promised a summer sabbatical every seven years.

He advertised job openings at Atari with taglines such as, 'Confusing work with play every day' and 'Work harder at having fun than ever before'. When job applicants came in for interviews, he would ask brain-teasing questions such as: "What is a mole?"; "Why do tracks run counter-clockwise?" and "What is the order of these numbers: 8, 5, 4, 9, 1, 7, 6, 3, 2?"

Bushnell hadn't been attracting much attention in recent years until Walter Isaacson's best-selling biography on Jobs came out in 2011, just after Jobs' death. It reminded readers of Bushnell's early ties to the man behind the Macintosh computer, iPod, iPhone and iPad.

Suddenly, everyone was asking Bushnell about what it was like to be Jobs' first boss. Publisher Tim Sanders of Net Minds persuaded him to write a book linked to Jobs, even though Bushnell had already finished writing a science fiction novel about a video game hatched through nanotechnology in 2071.

"The idea is to become a best-selling author first and then the rest of my books will be slam dunks," Bushnell said. To get his literary career rolling, Bushnell relied on veteran ghostwriter Gene Stone, who also has written other books, including 'Forks Over Knives', under his own name.

Bushnell's book doesn't provide intimate details about what Jobs was like after he dropped out of Reed College in Portland, Oregon, and went to work as a technician in 1974 at Atari in Los Gatos, California. He had two stints there, sandwiched around a trip to India. During his second stint at Atari, in 1975, Jobs worked on a 'Pong' knock-off called 'Breakout' with the help of his longtime friend Wozniak, who did most of the engineering work on the video game, even though he wasn't being paid by Atari. Jobs left Atari for good in 1976 when he co-founded Apple with Wozniak, who had been designing engineering calculators at Hewlett-Packard.

Jobs and Bushnell kept in touch. They would periodically meet over tea or during walks to hash out business ideas. After Bushnell moved to Los Angeles with his family 13 years ago, he didn't talk to Jobs as frequently, though he made a final visit about six months before he died.

There are only a few anecdotes about Bushnell's interaction with Jobs at Atari and about those meetings around Silicon Valley.

The book instead serves as a primer on how to ensure a company doesn't turn into a mind-numbing bureaucracy that smothers existing employees and scares off rule-bending innovators such as Jobs.

Bushnell dispenses his advice in vignettes that hammer on a few points. The basics: Make work fun; weed out the naysayers; celebrate failure, and then learn from it; allow employees to take short naps during the day; and don't shy away from hiring talented people just because they look sloppy or lack college credentials.

Many of these principles have become tenets in Silicon Valley's laid-back, risk-taking atmosphere, but Bushnell believes they remain alien concepts in most of corporate America.

"The truth is that very few companies would hire Steve, even today," Bushnell writes in his book. "Why? Because he was an outlier. To most potential employers, he'd just seem like a jerk in bad clothing."

Bushnell says he is worried that Apple is starting to lose the magic touch that Jobs brought to the company. It's a concern shared by many investors, who have been bailing out of Apple's stock amid tougher competition for the iPhone and the iPad and the lack of a new product line since Tim Cook became the company's CEO shortly before Jobs' death. Apple's market value has dropped by 36 percent, or about $235 billion, from its all-time high reached last September.

The incremental steps that Apple has been taking with the iPod, iPhone and iPad have been fine, Bushnell says, but not enough to prove the company is still thinking differently.

"To really maintain the cutting edge that they live on, they will have to do some radical things that resonate," Bushnell said. "They probably have three more years before they really have to do something big. I hope they are working on it right now."

Bushnell is still keeping busy himself. When he isn't writing, he is running his latest start-up, Brainrush, which is trying to turn the process of learning into a game-like experience. He says he hopes to fix an educational system that he believes is "incorrect, inefficient and bureaucratic - all the things you don't want to see in your workforce of the future."

Recipe of Eggplant Parmesan

Ingredients

    1  medium eggplant, peeled and cut into 1/4-inch slices (1 1/2 pounds)
    Cooking spray
    1/3  cup finely shredded Parmesan cheese
    1/4  cup Progresso® dry bread crumbs (any flavor)
    2  teaspoons olive or vegetable oil
    1  cup spaghetti sauce
    1 1/2  cups shredded reduced-fat mozzarella cheese (6 ounces)

Directions

1. Set oven control to broil. Generously spray both sides of each eggplant slice with cooking spray. Place on rack in broiler pan. Broil with tops 4 to 5 inches from heat about 10 minutes, turning once, until tender.
2. While eggplant is broiling, mix Parmesan cheese and bread crumbs; toss with oil.
3. Heat spaghetti sauce in 1-quart saucepan over medium heat about 2 minutes, stirring occasionally, until heated through. Remove from heat; cover to keep warm.
4. Sprinkle 1 cup of the mozzarella cheese over eggplant slices. Spoon bread crumb mixture over cheese. Broil about 1 minute or until cheese is melted and crumbs are brown. Top eggplant with spaghetti sauce and remaining 1/2 cup mozzarella cheese.

Nutrition Info

• 1 Serving

• Calories195
• Total Fat10g
  (Saturated Fat 4g)
• Cholesterol20mg
• Sodium480mg
• Total Carbohydrate18g
  (Dietary Fiber 3g)
• Protein11g

• Percent Daily Value*

• Vitamin A 12%
• Vitamin C 6%
• Calcium28%
• Iron 4%

• Exchanges

• Fat1
• High-Fat Meat1 1/2
• Starch1
• Vegetable1

*Percent Daily Values are based on a 2,000 calorie diet.

Tips & Techniques

• Health Twist

  Eggplant Parmigiana is typically a high-fat dish. But this leaner version broils—instead of fries—the eggplant, for a significant fat and calorie savings.

• Purchasing

  Male eggplants have fewer seeds than the female variety does. Because these seeds are bitter, male eggplants are preferred. You can spot male eggplants because they have a rounder, smoother blossom end or base.

Macaroni and Cheese

 

Ingredients

    2  cups uncooked elbow macaroni (7 ounces)
    1/4  cup butter or margarine
    1/4  cup Gold Medal® all-purpose flour
    1/2  teaspoon salt
    1/4  teaspoon pepper
    1/4  teaspoon ground mustard
    1/4  teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
    2  cups milk
    2  cups shredded or cubed Cheddar cheese (8 ounces)

Directions

1. Heat oven to 350ºF.
2. Cook macaroni as directed on package.
3. While macaroni is cooking, melt butter in 3-quart saucepan over low heat. Stir in flour, salt, pepper, mustard and Worcestershire sauce. Cook over medium low heat, stirring constantly, until mixture is smooth and bubbly; remove from heat. Stir in milk. Heat to boiling, stirring constanly. Boil and stir 1 minute. Stir in cheese. Cook, stirring occasionally, until cheese is melted.
4. Drain macaroni. Gently stir macaroni into cheese sauce. Pour into ungreased 2-quart casserole. Bake uncovered 20 to 25 minutes or until bubbly.

• 1 Serving

• Calories400
• Total Fat22g
  (Saturated Fat 11g)
• Cholesterol45mg
• Sodium560mg
• Total Carbohydrate34g
  (Dietary Fiber 1g)
• Protein17g

• Percent Daily Value*

• Vitamin A 18%
• Calcium30%
• Iron 10%

• Exchanges

• Fat2
• High-Fat Meat1
• Milk1
• Starch1 1/2

*Percent Daily Values are based on a 2,000 calorie diet.

Tips & Techniques

• Time Saver

  Purchase the cheese already shredded in an 8-ounce package.

• Variation

  And this is just the beginning! While stirring the cooked macaroni into the cheese sauce, try adding sliced ripe or green olives or bite-size pieces of cooked vegetables, hot dogs or cooked sausage.

• Variation

  Add a 4-ounce can of chopped green chilies, drained, for a perked-up version of mac and cheese.