By Dave Buechel

Dave Buechel, a member of the HOP, was sent in to do some undercover work and see if Amazon Mechanical Turk is the real deal! See what Dave has concluded! If you aren’t familiar with our previous article on Mechanical Turk, check it out here.

If you have the time and devotion, Mechanical Turk is a great way to earn fast, easy money. The tasks, or HIT’s you accomplish in order to make money are simple. Most HIT’s take only a few seconds to complete, however you are given at least an hour to complete them depending on their difficulty and the amount of money they are worth. I have completed HIT’s that are worth anywhere from $.01 to $2.15. When I first started out I wasn’t very careful with my submitted work, which resulted in rejected HIT’s. These rejected HIT’s led to a lower approval rating. Your approval rating is the ratio of approved and rejected HIT’s. Most HIT’s require you to have an approval rate of 80% or higher, and if you have a lower rating than that you will not be allowed to even attempt the HIT. Without being able to attempt most HIT’s, it was extremely hard to complete tasks and  make money. After a month of increasing my rating back to a reasonable ratio, I could then do most tasks and start earning money.

Since starting in September, I have completed 1275 HIT’s and made $40. If I spent the time and gave as much effort as I did for my schoolwork, and didn’t have the approval rating setback, I could have easily made a Benjamin by now.

Looks like Kevin Randall was wrong. If you were a potential homebuyer, you no longer have to worry about missing the December 1st first time home buyer tax credit deadline. Congress has decided to extend the program through April of 2010. Along with the extension through April of 2010 the tax credit has been expanded to move up buyers as well. A move up buyer is someone who has lived in their home for at least 5 years and decide to purchase a new home. These buyers can receive up to $6,500 and first time buyers can still receive up to $8,000. I grabbed my $8K back in June… So why don’t you grab yours!?

Everyone loves cold hard cash, so we have decided to list ten MORE ways to make $100. Our first, second, and third ten ideas can be seen in previous posts. Some ideas you may have heard before, some you might not have. While all of the ideas are relatively easy to conduct, we can’t guarantee that you’ll make $100 every time. You might have to try these ideas more than once, or even figure out how to put your own spin on it. The money is out there, you just have to know how to find it! [Read the rest of this entry...]

Joe decides to try out his new haircut business… Maybe he should stick to something else. If you are good with the clippers though, let people know you are willing to cut their hair for a few bucks! This would be especially popular in a campus dorm building.

Here’s another set of quirky ideas from Halfbakery.com, completing the last post of our Halfbakery series for 2009! With the holidays quickly approaching, I tried to mix in a few appropriate ideas to give you a laugh, along with the usual assortment of random-but-brilliant finds. [Read the rest of this entry...]

When we first wrote about App Bank and online sports betting, I decided to test them for myself to see if they really worked. For App Bank, I created two quizzes, the first being “Which Brad Paisley Tune Are You?” and the other being “How Much Are You Worth To Your Parents?”. The Brad Paisley quiz did not do so well. It was only installed by others 52 times and is viewed a few times per day. My other quiz fared much better. Within 12 hours after making it, the quiz had been viewed and downloaded thousands of times. [Read the rest of this entry...]