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Candy Japan April income report

How much money can you make by sending surprise candy to people around the world? I see no reason not to be open about how things are going, since I am approaching this whole venture as a learning experience. Here goes line by line from initial revenue through expenses to the final profit number.

Total revenue for April was $7234 from 312 subscriptions. We don't get to keep most of this money as there some very real expenses too. First thing is PayPal fees, after which we are left with $6895. We are switching from PayPal to accepting credit cards directly through WireCard + Recurly, but that will likely just raise our costs a bit (but will hopefully improve conversions).

Sending packages internationally and buying the items inside of those envelopes are our biggest costs, about $6.40 / month / subscriber for shipping and $5.80 / month for the items. After these, we are left with about $3088. Envelopes and packing materials aren't free (pretty close though). Those are about $0.50 / subscriber, so we are left with $2931.

Sometimes mail isn't delivered properly (usually address was wrong) and we have to send packages again, sometimes also replacing the items. We don't charge the customers for this but just re-send after confirming the address (as it very well might be our fault or just random error in postal delivery), so after accounting for this, we have about $2805 left.

We send things twice a month. 312 subscribers means stuffing 624 envelopes each month, which is time-consuming manual work. Luckily at this point we have managed to outsource this. After paying for that outsourced service, we have about $2450 left. We have an accountant doing the books. They charge $75 / hour and spend a little over an hour on Candy Japan -related things (I have other projects they also handle), costing roughly $100 / month. After that there's $2350 left.

One expense has been marketing experiments, such as buying ads on Facebook and other sites, which so far have been almost complete failures. The costs vary, but last month it was $260. After that there's $2090 left. We have to buy some misc. things like camera equipment, computer stuff, candies for deciding what to pick the next time, pay for website hosting (App Engine) etc. so after all these misc. things I feel safe saying we would have about $2000 left.

Now this sum is finally income. As a Finnish citizen I am paying about 20% taxes and other fees (such as health insurance) on this, so the final sum we get to spend on our rent, food, champagne and overpriced Steam first-person shooter games is about $1600. This is quite good I think, almost matching my living expenses in Japan.

Thanks for reading, and please do give our service a shot if you're not a subscriber yet.

Note: The average subscription fee in this calculation is lower than what is advertised on the website, because in the past subscribers had the option to choose to pay either in USD or EUR. Some people chose EUR and because the value of that currency hasn't been too great lately, they are now paying a bit less for their subscriptions in USD terms.

Thanks to micrypt, blackwhite, davidw and salisbury> on irc.freenode.net #startups for valuable feedback on this post.

Real Shadow: jQuery Plugin that casts photorealistic shadows

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Indamix

jQuery Plugin that casts photorealistic shadows. Perfect for eye-catching demos and landing pages.

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Paralyzed Woman Controls Robotic Arm With Her Mind

Two stroke victims unable to move or speak can now control a robotic arm with their minds.

By thinking about moving her own paralyzed arm, one woman in the experiment used an artificial limb to serve herself coffee for the first time in 15 years. It’s the most complex task yet achieved with a brain-computer interface.

“When the woman with the brain stem stroke reached out for that thermos of coffee and put it to her mouth and then she put it back down, the smile on her face was remarkable,” said Brown University neurologist and engineer Leigh Hochberg, who led the study published May 16 in Nature.

Hochberg directs the BrainGate2 clinical trial, an ongoing test of the BrainGate system. With a 4-millimeter-wide, brain-implanted chip as its centerpiece, the system conducts signals from motion-controlling neurons to a computer that decodes the signals and turns them into software commands.

After years of experiments on monkeys, surgeons implanted the 100-electrode sensor in a human volunteer’s motor cortex in 2004. The volunteer, a 25-year-old man named Matt Nagle, was paralyzed from the neck down. Nobody knew if the part of his brain that once controlled voluntary physical motion could still generate intelligible signals.

But when Nagle moved a computer cursor by thinking, it was apparent his motor neurons still worked. Since then, paralyzed people have used BrainGate to open and close a robotic hand. Other research teams found that monkeys with brain implants can feel with a virtual arm and feed themselves snacks with a real robotic arm.

In an earlier stage of the trial, the same woman used BrainGate to control an iPod, but the latest phase in the research marks the first time a human has used a brain-computer interface system to manipulate a physical object in three-dimensional space.

To map neural activity to the robotic arm’s movement, Hochberg’s team moved the arm while asking the participants to imagine themselves controlling it. After those readings were used to calibrate the system, participants’ thought patterns produced corresponding arm movements.

Both of the participants had paralyzing strokes long before receiving their implants, and Hochberg said it’s encouraging to learn their motor signals were still useful. For the woman who served herself coffee, the implant is still working after five years — the longest anyone has had such an implant.

The feat is “a big step” up from previous demonstrations in monkeys, which were able-bodied and still controlled their arms, said Andrew Jackson, a neuroscientist at Newcastle University who was not involved in the research. “It’s not guaranteed that it would work in a patient, particularly a patient who had a stroke.”

Eventually the researchers hope to make the system smaller, wireless and stable enough that people with brain injuries and physical disorders can use it around the clock to control devices and communicate. Participants currently operate the arm in their homes, but technicians always calibrate it in advance.

Hochberg said his dream, still many years away on the horizon, is not only for paralyzed people to use BrainGate to control devices, but to reroute neural signals back into their limbs, allowing them to again control their bodies.

Hochberg emphasized that the participants deserve credit for “their time, their dedication and their feedback in developing a device we hope will help other people with paralysis or limb loss in the future.”

The research was funded in part by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which hopes the insights can be applied to developing prosthetics for wounded veterans.

Video: Leigh Hochberg & John Donoghue/Brown University

Citation: “Reach and grasp by people with tetraplegia using a neurally controlled robotic arm.” By Leigh R. Hochberg, Daniel Bacher, Beata Jarosiewicz, Nicolas Y. Masse, John D. Simeral, Joern Vogel, Sami Haddadin, Jie Liu, Sydney S. Cash, Patrick van der Smagt & John P. Donoghue. Nature, Vol. 485, No. 7398, 17 May 2012.