Watching TV becomes an expensive past time if you take the hourly rate of your present job and calculate it by your number of viewing hours.

To put it into perspective, if you watch an average of 31.5 hours of TV each week (which the average person in the US does) and you value your time at minimum wage of $5.85 an hour, you are spending nearly $800 a month ($798.53) to watch TV. That comes to nearly $10,000 ($9582.30) a year. I would imagine that most people reading this value their time well above minimum wage, so the cost is likely several times that number. When you look at it from that perspective, watching TV is an extremely expensive and financial draining habit to have.

While I’m stretching it to make two hours a week, it does put an interesting perspective on the amount of time spent watching TV.

Does working long hours mean you’re a success? I always thought working fewer hours was a way of saying you’ve made it…

It’s been a long time since there was a direct correlation with the number of hours you work and the success you enjoy. It’s an antiquated notion from the days of manual labour that has no bearing on the world today. When you’re building products or services, there’s a nonlinear connection between input and output. You can put in just a little and still get out a spectacular lot.

Startups can save a fortune if the founders decide to setup both their residence and workplace in the same place.

Also in Boston are Dan Haubert, 25, and Tom Davis, 24, who moved in together to launch TicketStumbler.com, which aims to be the Expedia of sports and concert tickets. The “ugly dump,” says Haubert, lets them “live and run a business on a few thousand a month.”

Entrepreneurial types are giving rise to new breed of startup, LILOs, or “a little in, a lot out” (a very, very, new term by the way), which are all about spending the minimum of money but the investing of as much effort and hard work as is possible.

At no other time in recent history has it been easier or cheaper to start a new kind of company. Possibly a very profitable company. Let’s call these start-ups LILOs, for “a little in, a lot out.” These are Web-based businesses that cost almost nothing to get off the ground yet can turn into great moneymakers (if you work hard and are patient).

disassociated PLC may be one such example… watch this space (cheques from VCs more than welcome).

JPG Magazine closes it doors sometime later today. Despite JPG’s well known back story, still a sad day.

We’ve spent the last few months trying to make the business behind JPG sustain itself, and we’ve reached the end of the line. We all deeply believe in everything JPG represents, but just weren’t able to raise the money needed to keep JPG alive in these extraordinary economic times. We sought out buyers, spoke with numerous potential investors, and pitched several last-ditch creative efforts, all without success.

Brad Howarth has recently a put together a list of Australia’s top web 2.0 entrepreneurs:

The ability to throw a company together or tear it apart in a matter of days – with minimal outlay in hardware of software development – is a hallmark of web 2.0 development, which focuses on sharing and re-use rather than building everything from scratch. It also means that entrepreneurs are relatively unfazed by current economic conditions – it is easier to sustain a business when it owns no assets and runs on the smell of an oily rag.

There’s been quite a few Top [insert number] lists appearing across the web recently, at this rate I think we’ll soon need a Top 10 list of such lists. ;)

The Australian Startup index October edition has been posted.

Interesting to see that Compete rankings, which generally gauge the number of US visitors to a website, are being used as one of the metrics to compile this list.

Still it’s good to see some local startups enjoying a high profile in a large market such as the US.

Brad Howarth has recently compiled a list of ten significant influencers of Australian mobile content development and delivery.

Following the launch of the iPhone, the mobile industry has become hot property. But this is not a new sector. A group of industry pioneers have been slowly building Australia’s mobile industry for more than a decade. Building an industry can be a thankless slog, especially when the idea is compelling but the business models elusive. Such is the lot of many of Australia’s innovators in content and applications for mobile phones.

Ian McCallam, founder of text message voting application SMS Poll, talks to Vishal Sharma about the startup climate in Australia.

Starting a venture in Australia (as opposed to your popular international hot beds like Silicon Valley) certainly adds a few preliminary ticks to the “cons” column, but I think anyone will tell you that these days. However, the market is growing, it’s slowly getting stronger and a few more risks are being taken. Resources and networks are becoming more widely available by the active influencers and participators of the market, but right now I believe being an entrepreneur in Australia is all about putting the risk on your own shoulder and building on your own investment with a hope for VC support once your startup begins to show signs of success.

Vishal Sharma’s run down of ten Australian Mobile Startups that are poised to take advantage of the market for mobile web applications, on the back of the iPhone’s arrival.

Mobile is the next platform for consuming services and its the next battle field for technology companies/entrepreneurs. Apple’s iPhone has been embraced similar to standing ovation which Barack Obama is receiving wherever he goes. People are now looking for Google’s response via its Android initiative. This is going to be an interesting battle.