(A)musing++

McDonald’s not in the burger business

Austin Tam — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 01:51:26 +0000

For anybody who’s read Rich Dad Poor Dad, you might have been shocked as I was to learn that McDonald’s was not in the hamburger business but that its business was real estate. How could this be?

It turns out that McDonald’s usually owns the property for each franchise. Franchisees pay monthly base rent or percentage rent that is a percentage of monthly sales, in addition to other fees such as service fees, insurance and taxes. So not only is McDonald’s making money from its hamburger business with well located franchises in some of the most valuable street corners in the world, the value of its holdings is also appreciating.

Today McDonald’s is the largest single owner of real estate in the world, even more than the Catholic Church. With 31,000 locations all over the world I can believe that. Check out these pictures of McDonald’s locations all of the world.

Rypple’s hiring. See how we stack up to the Joel Test

Austin Tam — Sat, 23 May 2009 04:01:30 +0000

I can across a post evaluating the pros and cons of working for Rypple from an outsider’s perspective. Since I actually work for Rypple, I thought it was time to re-evaluate how Rypple is doing on the Joel Test. I had originally blogged about it in January and we stacked up pretty well, rating 11 out of a possible 12. However, it’s been half a year now and while we think we’ve improved, the proof is in the test.

Check out the results here!

Excited for Yoda day, I am. Talking like Yoda today, I will

Austin Tam — Thu, 21 May 2009 05:02:35 +0000

Today is Talk Like Yoda Day! This is perhaps the one day of the year where you can talk like everybody’s favorite Jedi Knight without people snickering at you.

Don’t know how? Try this handy how-to guide or this Yoda-Talk converter. For example, to answer the age old greeting: “How are you?”, why not try: “Excited for Yoda day, I am. Talking like Yoda today, I will”.

Besides talking like Yoda, you can follow @talklikeyoda on Twitter. If you’re a Twitter user already, let everyone know you’re joining in by sending a tweet with the channel tag #talklikeyodaday.

You can also try your hand at asking for feedback on Rypple to become as wise as Master Yoda himself!

Austin enters the fray!

Austin Tam — Mon, 04 May 2009 01:11:30 +0000

Blogs… a common Frontier, these are my thoughts as a web developer. My mission: to learn to write in a clear and entertaining manner, to reflect and to share, to boldly go where many have gone before.

(In celebration of my inaugural post and the release of the new Star Trek movie, of which I am now a fan, I thusly manage to badly mangle Where no man has gone before. My apologies to die hard fans)