The granson of Ansle Adams is helping us enjoy Ansel Adams print reproductions

Scoble has a video about the grandson of Ansel Adams, Matthew Adams, making nearly indistinguishable copies of Ansel Adams prints from the original prints, not from the negatives. I'm a big fan of Ansel Adams, so this is pretty exciting news to me considering the fact that there are a finite number of original prints and they are very much outside my price range.

Check out the video and listen to how they do it: Link

This guy build a 747 flight simulator in his warehouse for under $200K

The real ones cost $40mil and apparently his is pretty close.

Now this simulator took 10 years to build and a lot of the parts were donated to the builder in exchange for work, but it's still pretty impressive.



Certainly makes you think about what is possible given the time and effort.

Link

After the standard 15-20 month wait, GrandCentral is becoming Google Voice

After a 20+ month wait since the acquisition of GrandCentral by Google, the "phone number for life" service is relaunching as Google Voice. As an early user of GrandCentral, I am very glad to see that Google Voice is adding in many of the features that have been missing from the GrandCentral service, namely:

• Text message forwarding. The Google Voice number will now forward text messages to your mobile device and it appears that you can respond to the messages via the Google Voice number or direct from your mobile phone.
• Phone calls via the web or your mobile/landline. Some of these features have been a part of GrandCentral for a while, so it will be interesting to see if there is an additional feature set.
• Free transcriptions using the GOOG-411 engine. Due to the fact that I currently pay for PhoneTag, I will be very interested in the accuracy of this service. You can read a reaction to this announcement made by James Simnoff of PhoneTage this morning -- in short he says that he looks forward to being able to say that his product is better than Google's; I wonder if Google's will simply be good enough to cause people like me to stop paying for transcription through third parties.
• Easy conference calling. Simply have the people you want to conference with call your GrandCentral number, and add up to 5 of them to the call using the keypad interface.
• Free calls to the US and aggressive international rates. I don't have the international rate chart, but assuming that you can easily make web-based calls using the service, this could be useful.

Current GrandCentral users have to wait for the upgrade notice to show up in their Inbox (mine currently tells me that I am ineligible for an upgrade). There are some things that I'm hoping for that have not yet been confirmed:

• Google Voice shares my Contacts from Gmail to resolve callerID and provide a single contact database.
• Google Voice messages automatically show up in my Gmail account. Lifehacker reports that the "voicemail" label is now reserved by the system in Gmail, so it seems there's a pretty good chance that this will happen.
• Ability to initiate web-based calls directly from the Gmail interface.

Google Voice is currently only available to existing Grand Central users and to people upon whom Google bestows invitations -- if I get some invites, I will certainly let you know.

Link

The Obama watches are in

Shameless plug because I'm the one selling them:

ObamaWatchShop

AT&T nastygram: no iPhone for you on a non-iPhone data plan

Posted yesterday about moving my SIM into my iPhone and having no problem with with data service, right?

Here's the nastygram I got via e-mail from AT&T today:



Oh well, worth a try I suppose.

I guess I'm more apt to want to sell my iPhone now, so anyone want an unbricked iPhone?

The switch from iPhone to Bold

I've really tried to like the iPhone and for the most part, it's lived up to many of my expectations. However, there are a few things that make it hard to use for business:

• Battery life. On a normal-use day for me (probably a heavy-use day for most people), I wind up recharging the battery at least once during the day and have to charge it overnight.
• Signal. There still seem to be some signal issues with 3G service; I can stand right next to a co-worker using an original model Samsung BlackJack and he has full bars on 3G while I'm on a couple of bars with EDGE.
• Keyboard. I've gotten pretty good at using the iPhone keyboard, but it still is limiting when compared to a real QWERTY keyboard (yes, I've tried the Storm with the haptic and although it's marginally faster, it's not really as good either).

I picked up a Bold last week and immediately took it with me on a business trip. Things that I like:

• Contacts & calendars. I simply set up Google Sync and all of the information from my contacts and calendars downloaded to the phone and everything syncs in real-time. While I had configured this on the iPhone, Google Sync on the Bold automagically happens by simply downloading the app and entering in your account information.
• QWERTY keyboard. I can fire off e-mails about 3 times faster than I could with the iPhone.
• River of messages. Having everything -- e-mails, MMS, and SMS -- come into a unified inbox greatly improves my workflow. I've gone from being a minimal texter to a heavy texter as I use texting as a filter for importance.
• Battery life. I'm only recharging it every other day under my normal use conditions.
• Signal. Unbelievably good in areas where the iPhone wouldn't even have coverage. There's no option to shut off 3G, but the only reason I ever considered doing that on the iPhone was to conserve battery, which doesn't seem to be an issue with the Bold.
• Call quality. People on the receiving end have commented on the voice quality, so it must be noticeably different (I didn't call myself from my iPhone and I haven't called myself from the Bold, so I really would know).

What I don't like about the Bold:

• User interface. Apple and the iPhone blow everyone out of the water with this on every Apple device that I've used; nobody even comes close.
• Applications. The BlackBerry's handling of applications is kludgy at best and there just aren't that many real applications yet. I miss a lot of the applications that I use to use on a daily basis, including applications as simple as the iPhone Weather application. I'll see what happens when the BlackBerry app store opens.
• Media handling. Totally sucks compared to the iPhone -- I'm not sure anything handles music, pictures, and videos as well as the iPhone (except a Mac, of course). It does such a poor job that I travel with an iPod Touch to take care of these items.
• Screen size. This is a total opportunity cost -- in return for getting a real QWERTY keyboard, I lose half the screen real estate that I had on the iPhone.
• Rich e-mail handling. For the most part, the iPhone rendered e-mails on its screen the same way a desktop e-mail application does; the new BlackBerry OS does an ok job, but not great. Further, since I access my personal Gmail from the Gmail BlackBerry app (I accessed it via a Safari shortcut on the iPhone), there is not support for rich/HTML e-mails, which sucks.

Overall I think I'm happier with the Bold from a getting things done perspective, but there are definitely times when I miss the iPhone. Interestingly, the AT&T folks told me I couldn't move back and forth with my SIM, but I popped it into my iPhone today just to check and had no problems whatsoever (note that I don't use VisualVoicemail, but I'm guessing that would not have worked) -- I was able to make and receive calls, send and receive SMS messages, and access the internet. I'm guessing that my iPhone is completely unbricked, which means that I could probably sell it for a fortune, I'm just not sure that I want to at this point with the knowledge that I can bounce back and forth. I suppose if any of you wanted to make me an offer for it, I would consider it, but I'm not necessarily in active sales mode right now.

Anybody notice how the Amazon Kindle app for the iPhone doesn't include newspapers and magazine subscriptions?

I did.

Interesting stuff considering that Sprint charges Amazon to use their network for "WhisperNet".

Chinese real estate speculation in the US

Lots of news stories about how tours are being organized for cash-flush Chinese citizens to tour America and buy properties that are distressed, in foreclosure, etc. Many of the news stories, especially those on television focus on Americans being interviewed, expressing outrage and concern over the potential of the Chinese owning tracts of property in the United States (I have yet to see any reporter remind anyone being interviewed how much of the US debt is already owned by the Chinese).

Reminds me of the 80's and the concerns about the Japanese being large tracts of US property, which, in turn, reminds me of this quote from Akio Morita, founder of the Sony Corporation:

"If you don't want Japan to buy it, don't sell it."

There you go -- feel free to update accordingly with the country of your choice.

Picture from b2tse

The accelerating death of newspapers

I returned home to Colorado last night to hear that the Rocky Mountain News was publishing their final edition today -- some of the employees were absorbed into the Denver Post and most others were simply laid off. In watching some of the television coverage there seemed to be varying degrees of shock among employees and older subscribers; there did not seem to be any shock among younger people interviewed.

Early this morning I saw a story about how the San Francisco Chronicle may have to shut down because it is hemorrhaging money. In San Francisco, unlike in Denver, there is only the Chronicle, so a closure of the Chronicle means that the daily newspaper goes away.

This morning I saw an announcement Hearst Corporation is going to launch its own e-reader for the distribution of magazines and newspapers. Interesting timing to be sure, although probably fairly coincidental as it relates to the Rocky Mountain News, though Hearst is the parent corporation of the San Francisco Chronicle, so perhaps not so coincidental at all.

I attended a conference last week at which there was a panel of persons representing various media outlets, including newspapers. The newspaper representatives at the conference said that they were exploring strategies including a more heavily scaled focus on their website, the ability for citizens to post blogs and/or articles on the main newspaper site, and printing micro, tightly regionalized papers that included articles written by people living within those regional areas (i.e., non-professional writers).

A few weeks ago I was explaining to a good friend that I consume my news via the reading of blogs and that although I saw most of the same news that he did, I reached the news outlets by different ways (if I ever even reached them at all). Generally by consuming news through blogs, I get 2 or more opinions of a news story and don't necessarily need to see the (supposedly) unbiased reporting from a news outlet.

It's my opinion that news companies are confusing their vector (print vs. e-reader) with an underlying issue of a fundamental shift in the way that their content is consumed. Hearst is trying to create a device that allows for dynamic advertising while still providing the same content -- could you imagine the amount of ads in a Cosmopolitan magazine (Hearst owns it and I'm secure enough to admit I've looked through one) on a single page e-book reader with no color? Just the thought of that is extraordinarily painful. However, I suppose that if you are one of those consumers that is used to holding the newspaper artifact in your hand as part of the ritual of reading and newspapers are severely cutting or eliminating printing, then perhaps Hearst has exactly what you need.

What do you think?

Picture from Jon B. Swerens

Kindle 2

This is going to piss some people off, but I ordered my Amazon Kindle 2 this past Saturday night (2 days ago) around 11PM and got the shipping notification early this morning, which means that I should receive it on the 25th (unless they upgrade to overnight like they did with my original Kindle).

Stay tuned for reviews.

Click here if you want to buy one.

Google Sync just got really useful

Google Sync now offers calendar and contact sync using the Microsoft ActiveSync protocol. Although the Google Sync application for BlackBerry has been around for a while, Google Sync over ActiveSync opens up 2-way syncing for other phones supporting that protocol, namely Windows Mobile devices and Apple iPhones. Previously if you wanted some amount of sync on your iPhone with Google, you had to use a product like NuevaSync, which only provided one-way calendar sync and gave a third party access to your Google account.

A few notes of caution:

• Contacts from OS X Address Book and Outlook don't always import into Google perfectly -- I have experienced problems with imports of names, companies, titles, and phone numbers.
• Read the list of known issues here.
• Follow the instructions to back up your data.

Just cross your fingers that Google will enable PushIMAP for its mail services -- we know they support it on the phone for Yahoo. If you combined PushIMAP with the sync services described above, you'd have a free platform that would challenge BlackBerry core functionality. Take it a step further and imagine administrative controls for all this in Google Apps.

Link (this links to the iPhone page because that's what I use)

The Four Agreements

One of my good friends and someone I respect very much professionally recommended that I read The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz. What was amazing to me is that my friend was able to recite the four actual agreements in the book from memory and to explain each of them to me while we were sitting at lunch. Although it almost felt as if I did not need to read the book after his explanations, I decided to purchase a copy and read it for myself (unfortunately it is not available on the Kindle).

I now find myself in the same position to be able to recite the four agreements from memory and to provide explanation, so here it goes:

Always be impeccable with your word. Ruiz defines "impeccable" through its Latin roots, meaning "without sin." With that definition, it's easy to see how Ruiz suggests not to gossip or tell lies; most importantly he encourages you not to lie to yourself. The idea is to use your words for truth and to say only what you mean.

Don't take anything personally. What other people do and say to you have nothing to do with you, rather it has to do with issues that other people have. If you don't take words or actions from other people personally, then you make yourself immune to those words and actions.

Don't make assumptions. Instead of assuming things, simply ask questions to make sure that you fully understand; make yourself as clear as possible in all situations so that others do not have to make assumptions about what you really want. Removing assumptions removes drama, mistrust, and misunderstandings.

Always do your best. Even though circumstances may vary at any given time, simply do your best every time.

Typically I only recommend business-focused books and, while the information in this book is applicable to business, this book is much more of a book focused on life change. Note that you may be turned off by the first chapter of the book, which attempts to give some background on the Toltec religion and set the premise -- you can skip the first chapter, but some of the Toltec words used throughout the rest of the book will not make sense to you. Further note that you can completely skip the chapters following the fourth agreement as they deal completely with the spiritual and even include lengthy prayers. The meat and potatoes of the book are the four actual agreement chapters and you can likely finish reading them in less than 20 minutes.

Thanks to Dolf Berle for the recommendation.

Link -- Amazon

Google Latitude

Google Latitude lets you share your location information with people in your Gmail contacts -- you can leverage the power of the GPS chip in your phone along with Google Maps to see where your friends are.

Before I get too far into this: I always used to use the example of Asia being so far ahead of us in cellular technology with the example of location-based buddy proximity because I had seen an example of it 3 years ago on the internet. My starting point was to tell people to imagine that they had a lunch appointment and they had received permission from the person that they were having lunch with to see that person's location. If you know exactly where that person is, then you don't need a call or text if they are running late, if they are right outside, if they are circling looking for a parking place, etc. because you can see what's happening. Inevitably they would ask we we don't have the phones and I would explain that it's a network problem: Asia has a single network standard, which makes it easy to upgrade and even easier to adopt higher speed protocols. The uniform network standard enables the phone manufacturers to focus on development of the device functionality as opposed to network operation. Then that functionality allows the software developers to develop cool uses for the functionality.
Ok, so now I have to get a new example of how Asian networks are insanely ahead of us, but back to Latitude.

I would love to tell you that I've already used Latitude and that it is awesome and great and is already changing my life, but unfortunately it's not available for the iPhone. Presumably it will be available only when Apple releases the next iPhone firmware update as I further presume that there needs to be an upgrade to the core Google Maps application on the iPhone.

For those of you that can use it (Nokia, BlackBerry, WinMo), Latitude seems like the must-download application of the day.

Link

My rant on luxury hotels

I've got a few problems with luxury hotels. You know, the ones that are in that $200+ per night range? I feel like they're missing a few things in their business model, so here are my open suggestions to hotel operators:

• Valet parking should not be $20-$40 per night. I understand that you likely have to outsource your valet operation for liability reasons, but you've got to figure out how to get that into the price of the room. One of the worst first impressions is to drive up to a hotel and have the valet remind you that it's $30 per night to park; before I've even walked in your door and checked in, I've already been dinged with a pretty hefty charge. Believe me, if it were between a room at $220 per night with no valet or $250 per night that included valet, I would choose the latter because the experience would feel better. (P.S. -- if I'm paying $20+ per night for valet, the valet should not change my radio station or move the position of my seat)
  
• High-speed internet should not cost anything. After the initial infrastructure investment in some wired and/or wireless equipment, there really isn't too much of a recurring cost as you probably are going to have a high-speed connection at a monthly cost coming into the hotel regardless of whether or not any of your guests use it. If you have to recoup some sort of cost per room night, build it into the cost so that I don't sit down after I've checked in and feel like I'm getting dinged again: remember that at this point I've gotten hit by the valet for $30 per night for my car, I've signed off on the room rate with all of the additional taxes, and now I'm getting hit for another $10 per day for internet. Again, if I were choosing between the $220 per night and the $260 per night, but the $260 now includes internet and valet, I'm not going to quibble. (P.S. -- some of you provide bandwidth-throttled connections for free and higher speed connection at a premium; this strategy is good provided that you aren't throttling the bandwidth to below dial up speeds)
  
• Workout facilities should be free. I've not stayed anywhere, including the very high-end chains, that have workout facilities that are worthy of a $10 charge -- it costs $8-$10 to go work out for a day at Spectrum, 24 Hour Fitness, or Bally's and none of you have those sorts of facilities at your hotel properties. In fact, your equipment is usually out of date and there is usually not enough of it. Unless you have an absolutely huge, state-of-the-art workout facility, it needs to be part of the base rate and even if you have a great facility, it should be part of the base rate. Some of the mid-tier hotel chains have figured out how to put in great facilities in small spaces, have state-of-the-art equipment, and not charge anything to use the facilities, so you need to as well. (P.S. -- lemon water and refrigerated towels are great, but please make sure you have regular towels and plain water available as well)
  
• Small amenities make a big difference. Why don't you provide me with mouthwash and q-tips? The Holiday Inn Express that I recently stayed in provided me with mouthwash, q-tips, and cotton balls -- if they can figure it out, you can too. Also, if you spend a gazillion dollars making a really nice, marble-covered bathroom, do not give me small bath towels that I can barely get around my waist. Again, if Holiday Inn Express can figure out how to get me a soft, over-sized bath towel, you can too. (P.S. -- if the maid moves all my stuff on the counter of the bathroom to clean the counter, putting it all back on top of a washcloth instead of pushing it all into a corner is a nice touch)
  
• Water conservation should not be a joke. You put the signs out about water conservation and I see the signs; I follow the instructions, and I still get all of my towels replaced. Unfortunately the water conservation ideas are at odds with the overwhelming luxury service that you want to provide -- you have to figure out how to balance it and get your staff on board with supporting the program. If the whole program is a joke, then maybe you should just get rid of the signs and support the environment by not printing them.
• Be careful with your ancillary F&B revenue streams. I do expect to pay more for a beer at your hotel bar than Joe's Bar down the street -- $8 for a bottle of Coors Light is pretty expensive and $14 for a vodka and soda with well vodka that's measured in a shot pourer is really expensive. Yes, I also expect to pay more for food than at Joe's Bar down the street -- $18 for a cheeseburger is pretty expensive; there's only one place that I've ever been that has a cheeseburger worth the $18 price tag they slap on it. There's a certain amount of tolerance that we as your guests have for slightly elevated prices, but if you push too far, it forces me to leave your property to either spend less money elsewhere or to find a store and bring some items back with me. (P.S. -- I love Fiji water, it's my favorite bottled water, but $9 for a large bottle of it makes it worth my time to go buy 6 bottles of it for $9 at the gas station down the street)

Maybe I'm overthinking all of this, but as people look hard these days at what they're spending their money on, they want to feel like they are getting a good value, even at a luxury hotel. A hotel guy might look at everything I wrote and tell me that I don't understand, that there's competition, that there's Hotels.com; that they need to have the lowest possible room rate and that they really have to make all of their money from the ancillary streams. They would be wrong with regard to my understanding, I was in performance venue management for years and get the whole idea of ancillary-based economics. Here's the thing: we would put a facility fee in the ticket price of a concert and people rarely had an issue with it, but if we had tried to charge everyone entering the facility those few dollars at the door, no one ever would have paid it.

It's worth thinking about.

Image from dbking

And the SuperBowl ads already start leaking

Transformers

Link (visit YouTube and watch it in HD)

GI Joe

Link (visit YouTube and watch it in HD)

At this rate, you'll be able to skip the game entirely if football isn't your thing.

Conference week -- light blogging

I've been an at conference in LA since last Tuesday and role into a conference in Palm Springs that goes into next Thursday.  Sorry for the light blogging, but I promise I've got some good stuff stored up.

Failure

“Go ahead and fail. But fail with wit, fail with grace, fail with style. A mediocre failure is as insufferable as a mediocre success. Embrace failure. Seek it out. Learn to love it.”

-- author Tom Robbins (from: Tom Peters, The Tom Peters Seminar)

Watch this video for further inspiration:




Link

Someone heard my rant about review copies

I haven't had a chance to review it, but Catherine Wilson read my rant about review copies of books not be distributed in e-book (i.e., Kindle-compatible) format and e-mailed me a copy of her book, When Women Were Warriors. Not only did she send me the e-book, but she actually encouraged me to e-mail it around to other people. Further, the book she sent is listed for only $0.99 in the Kindle Store, which is a pretty cool marketing technique considering it's the first of a trilogy.

Note that Catherine is the author of the book; she didn't have to hire anyone to do any marketing for her, she just sent me an e-mail. You can also read the first book in its entirety on her website, just click here.

It's just not that hard folks.

Obama's Chronograph Watch

President Obama was given a Jorg Gray chronograph watch by the Secret Service and has been seen wearing the watch frequently, especially when his sleeves are rolled up. The Secret Service version of the watch is very hard to get and available only in the Secret Service Store, which is not publicly accessible. However, the watch is available as an imprintable item from folks that sell those sorts of things; the catch is that you have to buy at least 12 of them at around $180+ each.

Here's what I've done: I've gone ahead and made the purchase of some of the watches with no logo on them. -- they're the same as you see in the picture, but with no Secret Service Star, just a black face. Further, I've created a little site where you can buy the watch in single quantities from me directly. I'm charging $200.00 per watch plus reasonable shipping and handling charges. This is not really a money-making venture for me, I'm just a watch guy that was trying to figure out how to get one of these watches for myself and decided to help out anyone else that wanted to do the same.

This is a nice looking watch and fairly affordable. There are other sites out there that are charging in excess of $300.00 for these things and are putting in expected delivery horizon of 3-7 weeks (about the amount of time that it takes to get them printed, which means that they are taking your money and using it to fund the purchase prior to shipping the watch to you).

I should have the watches in-hand in a few days, so feel free to use the e-mail address on my site to get on the waiting list -- no deposit required.

If you're interested, please visit my site.

Obama Watch Shop

The sillyness of books for review

I get a fair number of books sent to me to review and post about on my blog -- easily 60% of them never get a review as I only review the ones that I enjoy and that I think that those of you that read my blog may enjoy as well. What's recently cracked me up about the process is that I will always add this line to my acceptance of a review copy: "Kindle-compatible electronic versions to review are always appreciated." Not one publisher or author has ever sent me an electronic copy for review.

There are so many things that are silly about not providing an electronic review copy:

• No shipping cost -- send it to me via e-mail.
• Easy direct quotations -- I can clip a page and copy the text directly on to my blog.
• No production cost -- even the simple review copies printed on bound 8.5x11 paper that I receive have a cost to them.
• Easily transportable for me -- I'm much more likely to review the book more quickly as I hate to carry my Kindle and a book; when I travel, only the Kindle comes with me, so no book reviews when I travel.
• It's green -- electronic versions have little to no real impact on the environment.
• It makes it easy to sell the final version -- if you can figure out how to package it in the review stage to be read on the Kindle, you'll be that much closer to being able to sell the final version on the Kindle store when you release the final version.
  

Why not send electronic review copies? I would guess that the biggest issue might be a concern that the electronic version could show up on bittorrent sites. Sure, that could happen, but you either trust your reviewer or you don't -- have me sign something with a financial penalty if I'm caught (it would be really easy to simply change a paragraph in each digital copy to digitally "watermark" each digital version to the reviewers that it was distributed to). Further, there's not a real market or even a good mechanism for e-book file sharing; market penetration of the e-book devices just isn't here yet. Finally, even if I did decide to share the electronic version, if it's a good book, the people reading it are likely to recommend it and, again, most people don't have e-book readers, so that mechanism is likely to increase overall print sales -- it's not like there's anything keeping a reviewer from photocopying and/or otherwise passing around a printed review copy, even though I typically will not.

Food for thought if you're a publisher or a writer or a marketing company that rep's a publisher. I'd be willing to be that the first marketing company for a publisher that pushes this strategy will have a great story to pitch.

Picture from librarianmer

Mint prevents fraud

I use Mint as my financial account aggregator and got an e-mail from them regarding documented fraud from companies named "Adele" and "GFDL" -- these companies have been hitting customer accounts for relatively small amounts in the $0.10 to $0.25 range. Due to the fact that I give Mint access to aggregate my financial data, they specifically gave me an alert as they noticed that one of these companies had charged one of my accounts.

When I logged into Mint this morning, I searched for "Adele" and got no results, so I searched for "GFDL" and got a result of a $0.11 charge in November. Drilling into the detail, I saw that it had come through as a check card purchase, which means that my check card number had been compromised back in November. I immediately called my bank and they opened a fraud inquiry and canceled my check card with the promise of a new one in 10 days or less. Although it was a relatively small amount of money that was charged against my account, it is entirely possible that it was a test transaction to verify that they had my data correct and that they were potentially looking to steal more and larger funds in the future.

There are privacy advocates that warn against financial aggregator services such as Mint, but I've always been happy with the service and am now even more happy with the service after this experience -- my bank didn't catch it, my financial aggregator did. Furthermore, due to the nature of how Mint imports my data, I can easily search across all of my financial accounts as opposed to having to log into each account individually and attempt to search.

I highly recommend checking your own accounts for charges from these 2 companies (it's easy if you use Mint).

ctrl+option+return

That's the key combo that you need to insert a carriage return within a cell in Excel for OS X. (Excel 2004 & Excel 2008) Similar to the alt+enter function for Windows.

Thoughts for the New Year

I was going to make a whole list, but I think that this quote from Seth Godin sums everything up pretty well:

Your customers and employees and investors will remember how you treated them when times were tough, when they needed a break, when a little support meant everything.

No one in particular will remember how you acted during boom times.

Happy New Year

Picture from nigham

Last minute gift ideas: watch (NOT Amazon Prime)

There's a great watch company in Denver called Serket Watches -- they make awesome automatic watches with mechanisms manufactured for Serket in Switzerland, and they are made in small, serial-numbered batches, so you're probably unlikely to bump into a large number of people that are wearing the same watch as you. As you can see in the picture, they come with a very distinctive leather band and, as cannot be seen in the picture, the back of the watch is transparent, allowing you to see the mechanisms and serial number.

Although the watches are well worth the original price, here's a coupon code that will get you $100 off through December 20: SHOPIFYE7BJ4K7T.

If you have someone that is a huge watch fan and/or collector, this will definitely make an interesting addition to their collection and express shipping for Christmas is an option.

Click to purchase

Last minute gift ideas: electronics

Some ideas for electronics:

iPod Touch 8GB (sure, there's a 16GB available too, but the 8GB keeps it under $250.00). This one also opens up opportunities for other people to just give the recipient iTunes Store gift cards (i.e., uncle Larry needs something at the last minute and he's standing in Safeway).




MacBook Air -- I love this thing and it's perfect for the Mac person in your life, especially if they do a bunch of traveling. Yup, it's expensive.





MacBook White -- spec'd the same as the Air, but under $1,000.00; not as sexy and cool, but still a nice gift.





Logitech QuickCam Pro -- small enough to take with you, good quality video. The video conferencing is free through AIM or Google or Skype -- what are you waiting for?



SmartParts Digital Picture Frame -- might as well put all those photos on display, right? This one doesn't have wireless, but it comes in right around $100.00, which you'll probably save in photo printing at Costco over the next year, right?




Shure SE110 Sound Isolating Headphones -- Shure designs in-ear monitors for musicians, so they know what they're doing. These headphones are awesome, great to travel with, and you'll be amazed how low you can keep the volume.

Last-minute gifts, a series

I almost started posting these without making you aware of my assumption: I assume that you have Amazon Prime. If you do not have Amazon Prime, you may consider buying it as a gift for you and your family (5 people in your family in addition to you, to be exact). Prime gives you free 2-day shipping on any item marked with the "Prime" symbol or overnight shipping for $3.99.

Just the thing for last-minute gifts and all the gifts I post in my series will be available via Amazon Prime to make sure that you can get them in time.

AmazonPrime

Last minute gift ideas: business books

First in the series: business books.


Reality Check by Guy Kawasaki







Triibes: We Need you to Lead us by Seth Godin








The 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferris






Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

Slow blogging

I'm blogging from the San Antonio airport, using the free wifi that they provide, which is great. I've been traveling since Thanksgiving and finally conclude my travels on December 15, so I promise some more frequency starting that week.

Expect some last-minute recommendations from me for gift purchases, etc. on the 15th.

Save some money on wrapping this Christmas

Wrapping paper can be expensive; add on the bows and other silly crap, and just the wrapping decorations on a single present can be a few bucks. We went searching for a clean and professional way to inexpensively wrap corporate gifts -- we send out about 150 gifts -- while also creating some branding on the wrapping. Here's what we came up with:

This is basic brown shipping paper that you can purchase in any office supply or paper store. We wound up buying a pretty large roll of it in a 50 weight, but the entire roll was less than $50. The logo is applied with a self-inking rubber stamp that cost us around $25 and was produced in 24 hours by OfficeMax.

In order to wrap the presents, we simply measured paper strips against the boxes we were wrapping and pre-cut them. Prior to actually applying the paper, we randomly hit the paper with the Argus stamp -- it works best on a very hard surface as opposed to stamping after the box is wrapped. To keep a clean look, we wrapped the bottom and corners and held them closed with scotch tape. Then we applied adhesive brown packing tape (it has to be wet with a sponge) so that no seams were visible. We wound up with exactly what you see in the picture and exactly what we wanted: a clean, professional-looking wrapping that displays our brand.

However, you do not have to limit this method to corporate gifts, it works just as well for home applications. A side bonus is that you can tear off a big chunk of paper for your kids any time and let them draw all over it throughout the entire year; wouldn't want do that with wrapping paper. You can also use the paper as an expensive and disposable tablecloth -- if you get the heavyweight stuff, it will absorb some amount of spills and if you have a party with kids, they can draw all over it.

Happy wrapping.

MacBook Air

I'm switching to a MacBook Air, not one of the newer generation, but a brand new older generation -- I couldn't pass up the deal of saving over $800. I'm in the process of migrating everything from my MacBook Pro over to the Air right now, so stay tuned for updates once I get everything up and running.

But because I'm writing about it -- a few quick migration tips:

• Get the USB to ethernet adapter for the Air and plug both it and the Mac you are migrating from into the same switch.
• Make sure that you don't have more data, applications, etc. on the Mac you are migrating from than will fit on the Air. I had to do some pruning and archiving, which actually wound up being a good process.
• Use the Apple Migration Assistant -- it just doesn't get any easier.

Stay tuned.

Reality Check by Guy Kawasaki

Reality Check by Guy Kawasaki could be the most useful business book of the year -- I highly recommend purchasing it even if you do not typically purchase business books.

Guy has put all of his years of knowledge, including information from his blog, into a single volume of reference. One word of warning: this book is huge (think 400+ pages). I actually read the book all the way through and am glad that I did because I can now use it to reference particular topics. Whether you choose to read it using my method or prefer to have it around as a reference on particular topics is up to you, but the writing style is engaging enough to not make it a chore to read all the way through.

Although Guy has a tech and venture background, most of the lessons and information that he provides in the book are applicable to all businesses. For example, designing good PowerPoint for a venture pitch provides excellent guidelines for designing good PowerPoint in general.

I was fortunate enough to participate in a teleseminar with Guy and he explained two reasons for his book: (1) all the information in his book are answers to questions that he gets asked all the time, and; (2) although some of the information is available on his blog, blog posts do not necessarily stay fresh and current and get lost, even with Google's ability to index them.

There is only one bad and inexplicable thing about Guy's book: the Kindle version is only $1.99 less than the hardback version.

Definitely a worthy purchase and a no bull shiitake corporate/employee gift.

A few interesting things I found over the weekend

Monolingual. Free application that allows you to remove a bunch of localization files from OS X, specifically languages, keyboard layouts, and processor support files. Essentially you can delete a bunch of megs of stuff you'll never use; when I ran it, it deleted 65MB worth of files.

Is.gd. Another URL shortening service that seems to super-compress URLs. Seems pretty useful for Twitter and other character-restricted applications.

MailSteward. Archive and search all of your mail from OS X's Mail application. All the mail gets put into a file that can be moved and copied and backed up like any other file.

Audioacrobat

So I wrote that fairly long post about how conferences could create value -- remember that? Ok, so I found a single-source provider that can handle hosting and dealing with all of your audio and video content: AudioAcrobat. AudioAcrobat handles the hosting (and bandwidth needs for doing so) of all of your audio and video files -- not only can you provide download links, but they also are a streaming host.

Pretty cool stuff.

Pricing is around $20 per month with 5gb of bandwidth each month. Again, you're selling a sponsorable vector and potentially have the ability to get sponsor revenue on top of an ancillary revenue stream, so $240 a year is relatively negligible in the face of the potential revenue. Also note the fact that you can record teleconferences . . . imagine doing some teleconferences in between actual conferences with subject matter experts; you could use them as teasers for the conference, as an added value to conference attendees, and/or as an additional revenue stream.

Google search gets social/interactive/addictive/wikish

So, if you have a Google Account (if you use any Google service where you have to login, you have one) and you are logged in when you search, you can now actually play around with search results that you receive on any topic. What do I mean by "play around"? Take a look at these extra icons next to the results:

Now I can remove results that are irrelevant to my search parameters and promote search results above how Google ranks them. Essentially every search becomes an editable wiki for registered users. This makes Google searches exciting again (for now), better than other search engines (until they copy it), and perhaps might even result in more relevant, human-reviewed search results (until it starts to be exploited and becomes irrelevant/useless). But remember that Google makes its revenue from advertising, so if more people search their site and are exposed to ads they can potentially click, Google gets a first-mover advantage (just in time for the end of FY2008 Q4).

Cold season and Zicam

I think that the original Zicam is a little bit of hocus pocus and some real homeopathic remedy -- quite frankly, the original Zicam zinc nasal spray makes my nose bleed and makes it sore . . . and I really didn't see that much of a decrease in cold symptoms because I was too busy blowing blood out of my nose.

Zicam now (and when I say "now," I mean they came out some time last year) has these quick-dissolve tablets that seem to be the same amount of hocus pocus, but they don't make my mouth bleed like my nose did. Here's the deal: these tablets come in a couple of flavors and give you a pretty concentrated dose of zinc, vitamin C, and echinacea. I tend to believe that zinc and vitamin C can't do anything bad for you when you have a cold, so I can get on board with the dissolving tabs except for the fact that they don't tell you how to use them.

Here's how you use the Zicam dissolving tabs:

• Pop the tab into your mouth
• DO NOT swallow the stuff that immediately dissolves, just hold it in your mouth
• Hold all the dissolved stuff in your mouth until the entire tab dissolves and then swallow it
• Don't drink and orange juice (citric acid) for at least a half hour
  
• Do your best to take these things with a little bit of something in your stomach

If you do not hold all the tablet in your mouth at the same time, the good tasting coating that is designed to mask that totally nasty taste of the zinc goes away and the thing tastes horrible and makes you want to throw up. Hey, there's no reason to get sick to your stomach when you're just trying to prevent/cut short your cold.

Oh, and if you're going to buy into this as a treatment, buy it a Costco -- it's unbelievable what it costs at normal stores.

Two Types of Management

Another one from Meeks:

Two types of management:

1. Strategic management. Use the strategic process to plan and execute against strategy.
2. Shit-slinging management. You show up and shovel shit all day long with a smile on your face and at the end of the year you hope some of the shit stuck because you don't have a plan.

Let me expound on this a little bit more with some of my thoughts:

The strategic process is an important thing. It's hard to run a business without a plan in the long run; it can be easy to have no strategy in the relative short term because you may find yourself in a position where you really are throwing something against the wall to see if it sticks. In an ideal world, you approach even your startup with a good knowledge of goals and objectives and a plan about how you are going to get there with the knowledge that things are likely to change, perhaps significantly change in the very short term.

What you don't want to wind up with is a company that started small with the slinging stuff around principle, what I'll refer to as the "lemonade stand" strategy, that relatively suddenly becomes a big company is just a million dollar lemonade stand . . . throwing cups of lemonade at the wall.

Picture from maubrowncow.

Rainforests: managers and leaders

I was reading through some notes from a strategic management course I took in college and ran across this explanation of management vs. leadership:

If the goal is to cut a 100 mile path through the rain forest, then the managers manage the people by providing sharp machetes, showing the workers how to swing them, and providing water, while the leaders climb the tallest tree to make sure that everyone is going in the right direction. The managers strive to make sure that all the workers are working in the most effective manner, while the leaders are making sure that the work is effective.

As I read more through my notes, I may share some more information like this. Far and away, this strategic management class was the best class I attended and the most impactful class on me in all 4 years of college and it was taught by Michael Meeks -- thanks, Meeks.

Rainforest picture by orvaratli

Provide more value from your conferences

When the economy faces a downturn, one of the easy things to cut is travel and conference attendance. For people that sell services to conference attendees, the smart decision is to actually increase frequency of attendance, but for those that consume services, the bottom-line focus tends to cause fewer attendees.

Here's what I propose you do:

• Equip every speaker with a microphone (yes, even the small sessions), plug a digital recording device into the sound board, and capture everything as a MP3. This can be easily accomplished with very inexpensive hardware that will capture and encode on the fly. Once you have the audio, post it on your site for attendees to download (even better, post it for everyone to download so that they can see the value of content at your conferences -- you are providing fresh and valuable content every time, aren't you?). Total cost of this is whatever the recording devices cost you, some server space, some additional bandwidth, and maybe the rental of a few extra sound boards and microphones during the conference. Of course, this is a sponsorable vector, and you could probably invest in some solid equipment in year one using sponsorship dollars and still have some revenue left over.
• Give people access to the presentations. This doesn't cost anything and you can use a service like SlideShare (I like SlideShare because you can view the presentation on the web and also download it) to do everything for you; you just have to make sure that you get digital copies of everyones' presentation. If you don't use SlideShare or something similar, you can just put the slideshow files right next to the MP3 files on your site. Providing slides costs even less than the MP3s because the presenters are creating the presentations and all you are doing is uploading them somewhere and making them available for download. Again, this is a sponsorable vector (though it's likely that the same sponsor would want to own MP3s and slides under the same sponsorship).
• Do a video recording of the presentations and make the videos available to stream from your site. People are used to YouTube-quality recordings, which can be created with very inexpensive digital video cameras. So you invest in some cheap, moderate quality cameras and get the interns to run them during the presentation. I would think in the first year you just upload them to YouTube and embed them on your own site so that you can wrap them in sponsor branding; sure, they'll be available to the world, but you're proving the value of your conferences, so who cares? Again, this is very low cost proposition: just a few cameras and tripods, some interns to run them, and a computer to upload to a service provider. And again, this is a sponsorable vector, so you should be able to get the first year sponsorship to pay for all the hardware and still have a little profit left over.

Let's say you do some combination of the above options -- you've now made the registration fee for your conference more cost effective and you've created sponsorship opportunities that did not previously exist. You could get more creative by loading up all the MP3s on to a cheap MP3 player (think SanDisk) or thumb drive and sell the audio; you could load up all the videos and sell them in much the same way (I probably don't need to say it again, but I will: distribution on a physical product is another sponsorable vector that is easily argued to be separate and different from the online distribution side). Perhaps you get even more creative and have one registration fee that only gets you into the conference and another more expensive fee that gets you into the conference and also gets you access to all the digital content after the conference: now you've created an incremental revenue stream along with the additional sponsorable items.

Just my $0.02.

PS -- I'm not sure that "sponsorable" is a word (spell check doesn't like it), but it should be as it describes perfectly anything for which a sponsorship can be sold.

Photo from ALA TechSource

The service of trash

Do you think of trash collection as a customer service activity? I think, in general, most folks are just happy to get their stuff hauled away and don't mind much about how it happens. However, if just one company raises the service bar a little bit, then suddenly the consumer takes notice.

For years and years I was with the same trash company in Colorado. During the summer, they left my cans (usually with the lids inside them -- gross) to fester out on the curb or in the street; during the winter they left them usually in the street with the lids wherever the dropped them (slightly less gross, but inconvenient if they were left upright with no lid and filled with snow). I just switched to the company that takes the extra 20 seconds to walk the trashcans with their lids in place and put them in front of my garage door. Not only are they a little less expensive, but they provide the extra customer service and recycling service for that less expensive price.

Most of the folks in my neighborhood are with the company that I just switched to, which means my former company had opportunities every week to show how much better they could be. Had it been me on that green truck, I would have made every effort to do better than the other guys -- every single time I picked up the trash, I would have not only returned the trashcans to the front of the garage, but I would have put them under an overhang when it was snowing.

What's really interesting is that the old green truck company had 2-3 people in the truck while the new company has only one guy -- from a resource perspective, it is much easier for the old company to provide a higher level of service than the new company, so they are consciously making an effort not to.

How much do you think it costs to provide this level of service? Bear in mind that the new company only has one guy working the truck, so if the old company pays their 3 guys $35,000.00 per year, the old company's cost is $105,000 in salaries plus another $26,000 in fringe (using around 25% for fringe). The new company probably pays their guy $50,000 plus another plus another $12,5000 for fringe; he's slower because he's alone and has to carry cans up driveways, but the lower throughput is more than made up for in the extra service and salary savings.

Here's something else that's silly: the old green company had a bunch of churn, had a bunch of guys that did not speak English, and had a set policy that their guys could not accept gifts of any kind, even during the Christmas holiday time. Compare that to the new company that has the same driver every week, that speaks English, that can be talked into taking some extra stuff, and is not restricted from taking gifts in return for special service.

Bottom-line: even if the new guys were a little more expensive, I probably would have changed to them anyway; the lower price is just a free prize.

Remember what Seth Godin said:

"Maybe the reason it seems that price is all you customers care about is . . . that you haven't given them anything else to care about."

Picture by Daniel Spillere Andrade

Publishing errors

Not sure what's been going on, but Blogger hasn't been publishing my blog for the last few days. I think I have everything fixed and please accept my apologies if you've been getting errors.

Ross

The Obama Tribe

This guy has some true tribe leadership, doesn't he? I recently stumbled upon will.i.am's first video that he released on YouTube entitled Yes We Can. Following Obama's win, will.i.am produced another song and video entitled It's a New Day, which debuted on Oprah last week. Perhaps I haven't paid attention in the past, but I don't remember this level of support and endorsement for any Presidents in the past. Sure, celebrities have always picked sides, but I don't recall the amount of passion that Obama seems to receive.

Maybe it's because it has never been easier for videos like the ones produced by will.i.am to be distributed and become viral. Maybe it's because Obama embraced social tools to reach his tribe. Maybe it's because the soon-to-be-previous administration left a vacuum that needed a particular kind of leader. Maybe.

But consider this: powerful people say things like "Obama inspires me to be a better person." Wow, really? Or more personally, my dad, the last person that I would expect to do so, paid his own way -- airplane ticket, lodging, food, laptop, cellphone, opportunity cost of not working -- to spend almost a week in Pennsylvania supporting the campaign. (I would love to share some of his stories, but they are not mine to tell, so I'll see if he wants to write a guest post or 2).

It seems like there is something more fundamental going on here, doesn't it? Like maybe what is expected in a President has fundamentally changed. Maybe the tribe that is America desires something new in the leadership that is the President.

Picture from radiospike photography

No more advertising on this site feed

I've disabled the advertising for all of the site feeds for this blog. Although all of the dollars went to my daughter's college fund, the dollars were negligible and I've come to the realization that the ads simply detract from the content and potentially may even cause people to unsubscribe.

I write this blog because I feel like it, not to monetize it, so enjoy subscribing to read ad free.

PS -- yes, the static ad at the very bottom of the site will stay for now, but I welcome any feedback on that. The primary people that see that are those that happen across a post based on a search result, not anyone that reads via RSS.

Avoiding bad presentations

Although I've posted a number of times about this, there's a concise article in the current issue of Fast Company that's worth a read for anyone the has to create and give presentations.

If you don't feel like reading the whole thing, here's the quick take-away: Use your presentation medium (not necessarily Powerpoint) to illustrate your story, not tell it; create curiosity to keep your audience engaged.

More details via the link below.

Link -- Fast Company

Image from cogdogblog

Drobo

I've changed my home digital storage from a Mac connected to 2 external drives that I striped to RAID 1 using Disk Utility to a Drobo. More specifically, I've changed from a computer that is managing and sharing my storage to a network attached storage (NAS) system. Here's why I did this:

• I'm either getting rid of the Mac desktop or plugging it into a TV, so I don't want all of the external drives attached to it anymore (especially if I get rid of it).
• The primary computers in the house are going to be laptops, so I need a storage solution that allows me to connect to it via the network, but doesn't need to be physically connected to any one machine.
• Drobo allows expandability up to 16TB through the insertion of up to 4 SATA drives -- the price of these drives continues to go down and 16TB as an upper-end single device limit seems reasonable to me.
• Data storage needs to be redundant and fault tolerant and the way that Drobo distributes data across multiple drives and reports on impending drive failures is attractive.
• I could have simply plugged the Drobo into the USB on my Airport Extreme and shared the disk, but the Droboshare device is attractive due to the DroboApps that are being developed to make it act more like a lightweight server than just a traditional NAS.
• I like the fact that the NAS can be easily disconnected and the Drobo simply plugged into the USB port of any computer -- this is not functionality normally found on NAS-capable devices.
  

While certainly not the cheapest NAS solution, I've been very happy with the performance of the Drobo unit thus far. I have initially set up the Drobo with two 1TB drives, which leaves about 1TB free for storage with the other 1TB reserved for data redundancy. My previous set-up was two 250GB drives striped for RAID 1, which left about 250GB for storage, so I've effectively quadrupled my storage capacity and built in expansion. Furthermore, the external drives I was using did not have any external warnings for drive failure or the ability to hot swap drives.

As I mentioned, one of the exciting parts of the Drobo, and specifically Droboshare, is DroboApps. Two apps in particular are very cool: Yoics, which allows me to access the Drobo remotely via the web and Firefly, which is an iTunes Media Server (i.e., you point it to your music files, and they show up as a shared library for iTunes-capable devices connected to the network). Essentially Droboshare is a lightweight Linux server, so there are people writing all kinds of software for it.

My biggest challenge right now is figuring out how to back up everything on the Drobo into the cloud. Ideally Jungledisk or someone similar would write an application for Droboshare that would allow it to back things up by itself without needing a connected computer to do it for you.

Link -- Drobo main page
Link -- Drobo purchase on Amazon
Link -- Droboshare purchase on Amazon

Durant's

Excellent steakhouse in Phoenix -- red velvet and Rat Pack with a great wine list.

Durant's

Getting items back on to your Kindle

AKA: "Getting purchased items onto another Kindle."

Part of the attraction of the Kindle, outside of other things I've posted about it, is the ability to share purchased books with up to 6 other devices. This isn't entirely perfect yet as the devices all have to be linked to the same purchase account (i.e., someone with a Kindle on my account can place orders using my credit card), but it's still pretty cool if that's not a concern for you.

Perhaps I missed it or just didn't look in the right place for it, but I couldn't figure out how to get access purchased content that was deleted and/or purchased content I wanted to put on another device from the Kindle -- that's because you can't. What you have to do is access yourmedialibrary on Amazon; this is where all of your digital purchases (e-books, music, movies, etc.) is stored. As it relates to the Kindle, from the yourmedialibrary dashboard, you can choose to resend a book to your Kindle via WhisperNet, send a purchased book to another Kindle on your account via WhisperNet, or download the e-book to load it via the USB cable (this must be the solution for purchasing books while traveling outside of the WhisperNet coverage area).

Kindle

Free video-based knowledge featuring Seth Godin & Tom Peters

The delicate balance of leadership
Social networking for small business
No cares about you
The importance of decency

Less than 10 minutes out of your life -- well worth it.

P&L killed the radio tribe

Radio stations used to have tribes; DJs on radio stations definitely used to lead their own tribes Listeners used to listen to radio to find new bands, to interact with artists, and because the DJs lead them. DJs used to be local and talked about local issues and people showed up at remote broadcasts to see them and interact with them, sometimes in acting out insane stunts. It wasn't unremarkable to see people driving around with stickers of their favorite radio station plastered on their bumpers because it was cool to announce that you were part of the tribe.

Once the consolidation of radio stations took place and playlists were programmed nationally and it was cheaper and easier to syndicate national DJs, the radio stations lost their tribes. Initially people continued to listen to the radio stations and the advertising revenue stayed flat or rose with yearly rate increases, so the radio stations had a good model: less costs and the same or more advertising revenue. Then the listeners decided not to listen any more because, after all, the same 12 songs every hour with some DJ based 10 states away didn't really do anything for them; listeners could load the same 12 songs on their iPods for $12 (or steal them). Now not having tribes is killing the advertising revenue for many stations around the country tribes=listeners, so kill the tribe, kill the listener pool, kill the advertising revenue.

The death of the radio tribes has left a pretty enormous vacuum that has not been adequately filled. I would hazard to say that if some stations exited their cranial-rectal inversion and turned the clock back, they could probably resurrect their tribes -- the former listeners still want someone to lead them. Certain stations prove this point overwhelmingly with KROQ in Los Angeles being a great example. In some cases, listeners have turned to satellite radio or internet radio (go try Pandora to find some new music), but that's content without a leader. In other cases listeners are connecting directly with bands, subscribing to the band and allowing the band to fill the role of leader and that's the opportunity.

It's never been easier for bands to connect to their listeners and it's never been easier for people to build platforms to make this happen. Take Hot Spot Radio Network as an example. Instead of providing DJs, they simply play a bunch of music that you've never heard and give you a way to interact directly with the band. The bands get commercial-free airplay, the get a distribution platform for their music (if you like what you hear broadcast, you can buy it), and they get a social network backbone to interact with their fans. Essentially a service like Hot Spot Radio makes it easy for the bands to lead the tribe; the tribe that Hot Spot leads is content and band access driven. Oh, wait, isn't that a big part of the leadership that the DJs used to provide? New content and access to the artists?

Again, it's never been easier to act the role of a DJ -- if you're an artist you can set up the ability to connect your tribe worldwide at almost no cost. You can get distribution at a worldwide scale at almost no cost. You can buy a computer and produce your music on it for about the same price as a couple of hours of studio time. You can achieve worldwide song distribution in seconds. You can shoot a live performance and post it on YouTube and let the whole world see you live. But you have to decide, can you lead your tribe? They want you to.

Picture from seychelles88

Review | Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us by Seth Godin

FULL DISCLOSURE: An advance copy of this book was provided to me by the author.

Those of you that read my blog know that I am a fan of Seth Godin and his newest book, Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us does not disappoint. As with his last book, Tribes is short and to the point -- I easily completed it in a 2 hour workout session at the gym the first time that I read through it. Unlike some of his other books, Tribes is a little bit non-linear, but based on the main concepts of Tribes and leadership, the style works very well.

The underlying concept of the book is that there are many kinds of what Godin refers to as "tribes" -- they exist around specific interests, exist inside and outside of organizations, and that they need leaders. Further, Godin explains how the flattening of the world through the internet and easily accessible social applications provide powerful tools for leading a tribe.

There are some powerful concepts in this book in relation to leadership. Many of you have probably heard Peter Drucker's quote: "Management is about doing things right. Leadership is about doing the right things." Godin provides a more updated version: "Management is about manipulating resources to get a known job done. Managers manage a process they've seen before, and they react to the outside world, striving to make that process as fast and as cheap as possible. Leadership, on the other hand, is about creating change that you believe in." Kind of a much longer version, so try these from Godin:

• "Leaders have followers. Managers have employees."
• "Managers make widgets. Leaders make change."

Throughout the book there are powerful concepts regarding change, elements of leadership, and how to break out of the routine of being sheep ("sheepwalking" as Godin calls it). I frequently use the classic term of people having risen to their own level of incompetence -- Godin updates it with this: " '. . . in every organization everyone rises to the level at which they become paralyzed with fear,' " and continues with saying, "The essence of leadership is being aware of your fear."

Tribes does not disappoint and is well worth the read. The book will be released on October 16, 20008.

Link -- Seth Godin

What's Seth's free prize this time?

If you are like me and pre-purchased Seth Godin's new book, you may have taken the time to follow the instructions and become a member of Triiibes (if you haven't done it yet, don't bother as Triiibes goes public soon and the offer was only good for a limited time). And, if you are like me and completed your Triiibes registration, you may have received an e-mail asking for your home address so that Seth could send you a small gift.

I received my gift yesterday and it turned out to be a pre-release copy of Seth's new book, Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us. Pretty cool. What Seth asks is that in the next couple of weeks when the pre-ordered copy arrives that I give it to someone to read to spread the word. Brilliant.

I'll actually be giving both of my copies away and also purchasing the Kindle edition, so you never know, you might be receiving a copy of Tribes from me to read and share. Believe me when I say, with what I've read so far, once you read it, you're going to want to own your own copy.

PS -- you'll know if you get the pre-production version from me if it has dog-ears all over the pages.

Invest $0.99 for landscape e-mail on your iPhone

Yup, it just works -- enough said.

Link (straight to the Apple Store to buy TouchType)