For this month’s 11th edition of the Digital Nomad Blog Carnival, I’m bringing it back home for once. It’s a traveling online carnival that’s hosted at a new blog each month to round up the month’s best posts for readers interested in the live-anywhere, work-anywhere digital nomad lifestyle.

Submissions for this month were a bit sparse, and BlogCarnival.com’s system is unfortunately rather overrun by irrelevant spammers—so I went scouring the web for this month’s best posts (i.e., submit your best stuff for next month’s roundup, and please help spread the word about the carnival). There is a great collection of quality links about the mobile lifestyle here, so please visit the sites and leave your comments, Stumble, Tweet and Digg your favorites to support these helpful, inspiring writers!

Will You Fulfill Your Dreams to Be Location Independent?

Check out this great photo of Ricardo from NuNomad relaxing on his own beach cabana, checking email and getting work done while he gets his base tan on what I assume is Koh Lanta island in the Andaman Sea. If you want the same great lifestyle, read what he has to say about the hard work you’ll need to do first to earn it.

Being A Digital Nomad

My blogger buddy Dragos Rua talks about his experience as a nomad, providing value through writing and mobile consulting. He describes the kinds of places he works wherever he goes, the kind of work he does, and some fascinating tips on overcoming the challenges of the digital nomad life and relationships on the road.

The Entire World Is Knocking At My Door

A lot of my online friends are finally making the transition to a location independent lifestyle, applying lifestyle design tactics to visualize their ideal life, building mobile business, and going traveling around the world right now. Raam Dev writes from Heathrow airport on his way to India about his newfound freedom to roam and the emotional and relationship challenges he had to overcome to get there.

How I Live and Work in Southeast Asia

My new real-life friend Sean Ogle from Location180, who I’ve been spending a lot of time with the last few months, came out to Bangkok to work with Dav and Ian from the Tropical MBA, having no idea what to expect. Here he discusses the skills he’s learned and finds necessary to achieve the work-anywhere lifestyle, and talks about his income and expenses and lifestyle out here in Asia.

Another Day In The Life Of A Travelling Entrepreneur (Costs Included)

Jonny Gibaud of The Life Thing, another traveling entrepreneur and engaging writer who I got to meet while he was out here in Thailand recently, after he left Bangkok went to I spend 3 weeks living in Bangalore, India. Here he shows us his typical day in India, with tons of good photos, and breaks down the cost of living.

17 Reasons Why Living in Developing Areas of Asia Kicks the Crap Out of Living in the West

Dan Andrews at Tropical MBA, who lives in Manila, Philippines, wasn’t the first to say it—but he is one of the loudest voices right now discussing the benefits of geoarbitrage and bootstrapping your business from Asia. Here he and Sean Ogle discuss some of the reasons why they love living in Southeast Asia. (By the way, have I mentioned that Sean Ogle is the man!?)

Chris Guillebeau & Sean Ogle in Bangkok

How to Develop a ‘Virtual Business’ Mentality and Create a Lifestyle Design Strategy of Your Own!

My man Greg Rollett from Rockstar Lifestyle Design delivers an excellent guest video blog for Chris Ducker’s Virtual Business Lifestyle site, all about how you can take control of your life by working backwards from visualizing your ideal situation and what you really want out of life. Chris’ site is rockin’, and has tons of quality vids you should check out.

An In-Depth Guide to Online Business Revenue Models for Lifestyle Entrepreneurs

Corbett Barr at Free Pursuits reviews the four most common online business models—selling services, selling products, affiliate marketing and advertising–and compares them on startup time, how passive the income can be, and other important metrics to help lifestyle designers choose the right business for their digital nomad traveling.

Long Term Family Travel = Homeschool Roadschool World School

Jeanne at soultravelers3 shares all about the details and advantages of educating a digital nomad kid and doing lifestyle design as a family from someone who’s been doing it since 2006.

6 Undeniably Unconventional But Exceptionally Effective Tips For Breaking Free

Another awesome piece from Jonny Gibaud! In a guest post at Untemplater, Jonny quit his “boring ass but stupidly high paid project management job” around 8 months ago, started a company and went off traveling the world and claims that he still hasn’t died yet. This is what worked for him.

Next month, we’ll host the roundup on a new site, so make sure you submit your own best posts to the Digital Nomad Blog Carnival page. Enjoy!

Read the original article on Thrilling Heroics here: Digital Nomad Blog Carnival #11

Jun Loayza is a really cool guy—a young serial entrepreneur in Los Angeles, and a good online buddy I met early on in his blogging adventure! I met up with him and Jonathan Mead, both big players in the next generation of online stars, when I was in LA for the fun Mindshare conference a few weeks ago.

Jun runs several sites, he has an interesting video series that shows the behind-the-scenes of starting up a new web company with some college friends, and he has a new venture, Viralogy, where he does great, interesting video interviews with many bloggers from our community. I finally had the chance to sit down for a talk with Jun, and we had a really fantastic  conversation about social media, travel, Thailand, and the location-independent lifestyle!

I look like crap with poor lighting and low video quality (!), but if you’ve ever wondered how I managed to become a “digital nomad” and live in Thailand, this video interview packs almost all of my philosophy on life and work into about 13-minutes!

• 1:15 – Breaking out of the traditional “template” lifestyle and job path
• 2:45 – How do you create a job that you can do from anywhere?
• 5:00 – How long does it take to make your business location-independent?
• 6:30 – How living in Thailand has helped me grow and develop personally
• 8:30 – Resources & links for learning more about the location independent (LIP) lifestyle
• 11:20 – Can you have relationships while you travel the world?

Jun did a tremendous job, really asking me some great questions and opening it up for queries from Twitter followers. He’s compiled a lot of valuable supplemental info on his blog post, so if you’re an avid blog reader or social media user, I’d appreciate if you click over and vote for Jun’s post on sites like StumbleUpon, Digg, or share the link on Twitter! The Awesome Revolution interview series is really interesting and useful, so let’s help him make it a success!

Read the original article on Thrilling Heroics here: How I Became a Digital Nomad and Moved to Thailand

I’m starting a weekly review of great articles and resources from around the web on how to master everything from your finances to your personal development, run a successful business, go global, and live the life of your dreams. Today I kick it off with a summary of great finds I’ve stumbled across in the month of February, and next week I’ll start sharing with you more regularly!

Social Media Marketing

For those of you who run a small business and are weighing the cost of starting some online marketing, a new article by Sarah Perez at ReadWriteWeb is a must-read: How to Reach Baby Boomers with Social Media. Believe it or not, Forrester Research says that 67% of people ages 43–52, and 62% of people ages 53–63 are active social media users. If you’re not marketing to your consumers online with blogs and social media, you should get on the bandwagon!

Starting a Blog

The best thing to do if you’re not very involved in online marketing is to get your business started blogging regularly, and then you can branch out into other social media. Mark Hayward, owner of a successful Caribbean-based business, has 10 Tips for Blogging Your Way to Small Business Success over at Problogger.net.

If you’re starting a new blog on a tight budget, this is a wonderful place to start: Pavel Ciorici compiled a fantastic list of over 50 beautifully-designed WordPress Themes (all free!)—there are rich, premium-type themes that will be a great application for everything from travel blogs to personal pages to your business blog: 50+ Free WordPress Themes for Personal Blogs of High Quality

To Twitter or Not to Twitter?

When you’re ready for the next stage of social media interaction, a ton of folks are getting involved on Twitter.com and raving about it. A lot of you probably still don’t know what Twitter really is or how to get any value out of it, so here we have a Twitter triumvirate for you:

• Twitter: The how to get started guide for businesspeople from Computerworld
• Kristi Colvin shares 7 Habits of Highly Effective Twitterers at the Blog of Mr. Tweet (follow her @kriscolvin)
• Timothy Ferriss gives you 5 tips on How to Use Twitter Without Twitter Owning You. (Follow Tim @tferriss)

Other great stuff from around the web this month:

• Seth Godin’s 7 Tips for Startups in a Down Market (an interview by Andrew Warner)
• 10 Things to do After Installing WordPress at Pro Blog Design
• Beyond TweetBacks: Introducing TweetSuite by Dan Zarrella
• Blog Post Ideas That Always Generate Buzz at TheFutureBuzz
• 15 Things I Wish I Had Known When I Started My First Blog by Neil Patel
• Five Best Cities to Live in 2009 if the Economy Keeps Tanking from Matador Abroad

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One of the most important parts of my job is keeping up with industry news and headlines, and cutting through the static for my clients to find what’s current and what’s important. If you’d like to receive good recommendations from me on a more regular basis, please feel free to connect with me on your network of choice:

• Follow me on Twitter
• Subscribe to my Google Shared Items
• Subscribe to my reviews on StumbleUpon
• Subscribe to my bookmarks on del.icio.us
• Connect with me on Digg

Read the original article on Thrilling Heroics here: Best of the Web: February Edition

Jun Loayza is a young CMO to keep your eye on! I met Jun through the Brazen Careerist Gen-Y blog network, and we’ve exchanged thoughts a few times as we both worked through some late nights! As co-founder and Chief Marketing Officer of Future Delivery, he’s certainly an interesting guy to follow if you want to learn about startups and entrepreneurship. Future Delivery has just recently launched their new project: a roleplaying game (RPG) that awards students and young professionals for things like joining new organizations, taking internships, scoring well at college, and attaining their career goals! I think this is a great idea, because it takes a form of entertainment that our generation loves—games, that is—and puts a really productive spin on it. Jun is also an exceptionally friendly, hilarious, and approachable guy who loves to share his insight and experience, so he volunteered to answer a few questions about his new venture and lessons on entrepreneurship for the Thrilling Heroics audience.

Hey Jun, so give us a little professional background on how you got to be where you are and what your role is with Future Delivery.

As an undergraduate at UCLA, I got a taste for entrepreneurship by founding Bruin Consulting, the UCLA Undergraduate Case Competition, and the Veridical Group. Each experience taught me something new about myself and really amplified my abilities as a leader and consultant, and my business sense.

After I graduated from UCLA, I worked at an international consulting firm for about three months. At the three month mark, I realized that the corporate life was just not for me. I mean, the pay was good, the job was steady, it was around 55 hours a week (not bad for consulting), and we even had an amazing Flavia machine in the kitchen! What drove me to step aside from the corporate world was that I felt unchallenged, and that I was in cruise control. You go to work, come back home, eat dinner, you might have time for the gym, and then you sleep. It became an endless routine!! From my experiences as an entrepreneur, I knew that my passion was in having my own baby (company).

I stepped aside from my corporate job and teamed up with Yu-kai Chou, my Delta Sig pledge brother who co-founded Bruin Consulting and the Veridical Group with me. Together, we founded Future Delivery. This is a startup company; therefore, I wear at least twenty different hats. My main responsibility is that of Chief Marketing Officer. I am in charge of everything having to do with our branding, advertising, lead generation, conversion, and client fulfillment. I am the face of Future Delivery, so I must always make sure I look my best!

What is the new FDCareer roleplaying game all about? Give our readers a run-down of the community and why it’s such a great benefit.

Many of you play video games and watch TV all day. Many undergraduates go to class, play and party all night, and ignore their careers until right before they graduate—which in many cases, may be too late. We created the FD RPG so that undergraduates and young professionals can have fun while developing themselves professionally.

In the FD RPG, every time you gain an internship, get a high GPA, or become a leader of an organization, you gain experience points and level-up on the site. As you level-up, you gain prestige, new abilities, access to new areas of the site, and will be able to recruit with more prestigious firms. We’ve also implemented Quests that help you develop career-wise. For example, a Quest for a Consultant could be a business analysis case. You will have to solve a company’s problem—could be profitability or an acquisition—and you will submit your solutions online to be reviewed by our expert panel. A Marketing Quest could be to gain social influence on Twitter by gaining more followers.

Monster.com is about helping people apply for a job.

Vault.com is about helping people research companies.

FD Career is about getting students and young professionals prepared for their careers. It helps you discover what you want to be, and how to get there.

You’ve got a great blog where you share your journey with entrepreneurship. Can you share some of your thoughts on the startup life and your opinions on work-life balance?

Hahaha… there is no work life balance. To be a successful entrepreneur (not that I’m successful yet), your work and life have to be one thing. That is the key. My personal relationships, family relationships, and girlfriend relationships have suffered because of the path that I have chosen. But these are the sacrifices that you have to make in order to put yourself in the position to be successful.

For example, I probably have time to hang out with my friends from UCLA or high school once or twice a month. I do see my girlfriend a lot during the week, but this is how we spend time together: her sitting in front of the TV watching a show or movie, me sitting by her side with my laptop and earphones on so that I can concentrate and meet my project deadlines.

This life is NOT for everyone. Cody, I chat with you all the time at 3am because we’re both still up doing work. We don’t even complain about it because we know this is the life that we have chosen, so all we can do is laugh. Though the road is tough, you will love what you do.

I keep pushing because I truly believe in the idea, I love my baby, and I love my team. If we fail, I would gladly start another company will all of them.

I’ve heard some rumblings about a sort of reality show that you guys are putting together to showcase your experience starting up a company?

Glad you brought it up! Our first video will launch this week! Hopefully it’ll launch before this is posted so you can link to the first episode. [See Episode 1, Part 1 here, and Part 2 here, also see below. —Ed.]

The Living the Startup Life video series is for all of those people who have a great idea but don’t know where to start, for everyone stuck in their corporate job afraid to leave their company to pursue their dream career, and for everyone who just wants to watch some guys have a lot of fun while succeeding or failing.

Lastly, would you mind sharing a bit about your education and how your experience has helped you become an avid entrepreneur. I’m interested if you have any good tips for students or twentysomethings that want to start their own businesses and really exercise their entrepreneurial muscles!

Why yes I do. My major at UCLA did NOT prepare me for my entrepreneurial quest. The three main things that prepared me to pursue the entrepreneurial life were:

1. Finding a mentor who guided me on my path to become an entrepreneur
2. Getting a taste of it while starting an orginzation and a company as an undergrad
3. Reading business books in class instead of paying attention to the teacher

• The E-Myth Revisited and E-Myth Mastery by Michael Gerber
• Good to Great by Jim Collins
• Never Eat Alone by Keith Ferrazzi

If you do these three things, then you will be prepared to become an entrepreneur.

Thanks for your willingness to share your wisdom with the Thrilling Heroics community, Jun.

If you have any questions about entrepreneurship, Jun is genuinely interested in helping you guys out and making new friends on this great online web community of ours, so please feel welcome to contact him at Jun.Loayza (at) FDcareer (dot) com or on his blog Living the Startup Life. If you are interested in the FDcareer RPG, I highly recommend it! In my experience on the community site, I’ve already reached level 25 (currently #7 on the leaderboard!) so feel free to connect with me if you have questions about blogging, WordPress, or web development, and keep an eye out, because I will be creating some web design and blogging-related quests for you guys in the next few weeks! (Check out a little more about the FDCareer RPG in this intro video below.)

Read the original article on Thrilling Heroics here: Young Entrepreneur Jun Loayza Reveals the Interactive Web Game That Will Rock Your Career!

I came across an awesome article about innovative partnerships and strategic alliances in Business 2.0 the other day. Melanie Haiken talks about the need for medium-growth companies stuck between buzzing startups and huge corporations to build strong relationships not only with their employees (although very important), but also with their competitors and with the community. This is becoming a necessity!

One of my favorite parts:

One mistake many businesses make is refusing to partner with the competition for fear that it’ll steal secrets or gain an advantage. It’s far better to follow the oft-quoted advice of Michael Corleone: Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer. After all, your competition is your competition because you share the same goals. So why not use that common ambition to your mutual benefit? You might even find that partnering can double your success. “Nowadays,” Rigsbee says, “somebody might be my competitor in the morning, and by the afternoon we might be working together on something.”

She also mentions a few examples of great companies that offer some interesting extras to attract top talent, like subsidized vacations (S.C. Johnson & Son), incentives for buying hybrids (Timberland), sleep breaks, and tuition reimbursement.

I’d love to see more of this trend. In the areas I focus on, I’m seeing companies like Apple, Google, Yahoo, and so on teaming up with each other over and over again. And it’s obviously working very well for them. They are able to bring cooler products to market building on each other’s abilities. It’s also why I like the open-source model for business — where the tools are there for anyone to add value to the product, and no one is afraid of losing their secret upper hand. (There are plenty of other ways to have a competitive advantage.)

-Innovative Partnering [Business 2.0]

Read the original article on Thrilling Heroics here: The Need for Corporate Partnerships

I LOVE this article by Ron Davison! The Bay Area and the Reinvention of Self:

“I don’t know if there is another place on the planet where people are so full of possibility – whether it be the possibility of reinventing themselves by a change in thinking…or body…or starting a business with which they expect to change the world and become rich.”

I think I love Ron’s musings about Silicon Valley and the Bay Area because they reflect my own. I am SO drawn to that region because of the tremendous number of creative people! It is a hotbed for startups, entrepreneurs, and young-at-heart companies–the kind I love, that toss out the traditional rules! There seems to be (at least a bit) more sense of collaboration as opposed to competition. People are less afraid of failure. They are more passionate about their ideas, and doing whatever is necessary to make them become reality! These are not people who give up easily.

And it’s not to say that the region is the only one with determined, creative professionals. I think what actually happens is that those sorts of people are attracted from all over the world to come and work together in this centralized area. Actually, I KNOW this is the case. When I’ve visited Stanford, and interviewed with small companies down there, I meet people from all around the globe. It is a creative center. Take a minute to read Ron’s thoughts as he visits Silicon Valley.

Read the original article on Thrilling Heroics here: Excuse Me While I Slip Into a More Comfortable Paradigm

April 15 through 18 is the Web 2.0 Expo at Moscone Center West, in SF. There are a whole host of expensive learning sessions and workshops, but I just registered for an expo pass today. The normal prices is $100, but if you visit web2expo.com/registration and try using the discount code WEBEX07ECON before the 12th you might just find you can save a hundred bucks on any package!

An expo pass gets you unlimited access to the keynote presentations, exhibit hall, and sponsored sessions (any of the Services & Platforms sessions).

Keynote speakers include Jeff Bezos (Founder & CEO, Amazon), Eric Schmidt (CEO, Google), Jeff Weiner (SVP, Yahoo), Bill Tancer from Hitwise, blogger Kathy Sierra (Creating Passionate Users), and more. The events main sponsors are Etelos, Adobe, AOL, Coghead, Cognizant, webex, Amazon Web Services, Ask.com, Cambrian House, curl, eBay, PayPal, fast, Google, Yahoo!, impetus, Intel capital, Nokia, Sun Microsystems, and many many more. All of these sponsors and more will be featured on the tradeshow floor.

One unique feature of the Web 2.0 Expo is Launch Pad–a venue for new internet startups to debut to the public. Flock, Zvents, Rollyo and Adify are notable alumni companies of the Launch Pad platform.

I’m not sure what’s involved yet, but it also sounds like the expo is working hard to make this a great networking venue for everyone in attendance–and it sounds like they expect a decent show of entrepreneurs and VCs. I know I’m having my name published in their networking book they will be presenting to attendees at the event!

If anyone would like to join me, please let me know!

Read the original article on Thrilling Heroics here: Upcoming Web 2.0 Expo