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.