ON COMPUTERS

Website connects experts with people who pay for answers

Earn.com lets you make money giving out your email address. You decide how much it's worth. If you're a big shot, or you think you are, you could charge $100 per message.

That's what Ben Horowitz does. As of last January, he'd made over $8,000, which he donated to the charity Black Girls Code. He's one half of the consulting firm Andreessen Horowitz. Marc Andreessen co-founded Netscape, co-wrote the pioneering Web browser Mosaic, and is otherwise a general hotshot. We're not sure what Horowitz does. (Just kidding. Horowitz sold a software company to Hewlett-Packard Co. for $1.6 billion and was a major investor in Skype before it was sold to Microsoft. He consults.)

After signing up at Earn.com, we wondered whether this would be a good way for would-be authors to find publishers without going through an agent. We typed in "Penguin Group" and got an associate editor at Penguin Random House. We contacted him for $1, though he has yet to reply. The contract gives him seven days, then it's kaput. We only have to pay if he responds. He's looking for interesting people to write books about business challenges.

The site makes suggestions on whom to contact, such as Deloitte Corp. or Google. So we contacted Sean Melis, a consultant in Deloitte's Australian office, for $1. He lists himself as knowledgeable about artificial intelligence and the so-called blockchain undergirding the bitcoin cryptocurrency. We asked him about that. We're the first to pay him to answer a question, but he sounds smart. He said the most exciting thing about the blockchain is "the decentralized future it paints."

Earn.com is all done in bitcoin, which can be translated back and forth with dollars. We got 84 cents just for signing up and completing a profile; it's stored in bitcoin. If bitcoin shoots to the moon, it may be worth $8 someday. Wow, party time. We decided not to keep the money we earn, and chose the Folding at Home project as the recipient, one of five choices; they do disease research.

Businesses are using Earn.com to send paid surveys to senior engineers, executives and other presumably smart people who otherwise couldn't be bothered to reply. For example, we could send a mass email to 50 Stanford students and professors for $10 per reply. The recipient gets a note like: "Complete this survey and get $10."

We looked over their lists to get other ideas. A venture capitalist list lets you send a mass email for $50 per reply. It includes more than 20 firms with over $25 billion in investable capital. The "Angel Investor" list lets you get replies from 50 angel investors who have written checks for at least $10,000 within the last two years. There are other lists for startup founders, "blockchain personalities" and others. This could go on and on, and probably will.

PESKY EMAIL

A reader asks: "How do you know if someone has opened your email?" A question that has occurred to all of us.

If you use Microsoft Outlook or the premium version of Gmail, which is part of the $5-a-month G-Suite, you get an option to ask for a receipt. For the rest of us, there's a free extension called Boomerang for Gmail, from BoomerangGmail.com.

With Boomerang, you can have your email sent again automatically if the person hasn't opened it within two days or whatever time period you choose. Even better, you can put off looking at email you know you have to look at eventually.

Suppose a bill comes in. It isn't due now, but you don't want to forget about it. Tap the boomerang icon in your Gmail window, and it won't reappear until the time and date you chose.

VEGAN APPS

Joy hasn't given up her leather jacket, but she's a certified friend to animals and a vegan. Here are some vegan apps we just learned about.

Forks Over Knives is a $5 recipe app for Android and iPhone. The recipes we've tried so far have been great, and they make it easy to add ingredients to a shopping list. The app includes soups, side dishes, salads and decadent desserts.

VeganXPress, $2 for iPhone, tells you what's vegan at chain restaurants and fast-food places.

Bunny Free from PETA.org tells you if a product is cruelty free. In other words, it didn't make some bunny go blind for being used to test cosmetics.

Why go vegan? See NutritionFacts.org and FreeFromHarm.org.

SNEAKY APPS

Joy's friend Frieda commented one day that Joy was getting a lot of text messages. She wasn't. Every half-block or so, her phone would tootle. But it wasn't text messages, the sounds were from dozens of apps that sound off every time something new comes in. Don't let this happen to you!

Go to "settings" on your phone and find the notifications area. There's a setting for each app to allow only silent notifications. In the new Oreo version of Android, there's a setting to allow notification dots. Each app has a dot in the little picture of it on your screen; you see it if there's something new to report.

Bob and Joy Schwabach can be reached by email at bobschwa@gmail.com and joydee@oncomp.com.

Business on 11/18/2017

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