You can order it! Apple – iPad – See the web, email, and photos like never before. http://ow.ly/1ip6T ipad
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Seven ways to get traffic to your site before you need it
The first iPad advertisement
If you didn’t already know the features of the Apple iPad, here’s the first advertisemnt from them showing a whistle-stop tour of the device.
Big and beautiful companies?
Are all big companies bad for business and consumers?
It would appear that most people know about the indiscretions of Tiger Woods, recently. It was splashed all over the news, both online and offline. The story about his extra-marital affairs became the most searched for articles on the web for a time. Some news organisations saw large numbers of new visitors to their websites looking for the latest gossip and insights into why the most famous golfer in the world had crashed his car just outside his own house. Woods’ troubles were good for business for news sites, helping them to reinforce why advertisers should continue to pay them their fees.
The image of Tiger Woods had been one of sportsmanship, achievement, dedication and integrity. But, some sponsors have started to drop him because they believe it was negatively affecting their own brands to be associated with him. Tiger Woods was, and probably still is, the biggest thing in golf, helping to boost TV ratings which no other golfers achieve.
But, like all things which become big, they often creak at the seams or they become unaware of their surroundings so much so that they damage others. You can see this with the BBC, which has announced that it is planning to pare down its organisation by dropping some stations and web pages. Google has now become so big that organisations feel that it is too dominant and they want to shackle the search organisation so that others can compete with it.
The challenge for other companies competing with them is that Google is just so good at what it does. It is competing with other massive companies, like Microsoft, by providing many free services (e.g. Google Docs) for which their competitors charge. Its competitors feel stifled in their search rankings when Google has a competitive product.
But, people do have a choice when it comes to search. Microsoft’s Bing search engine will soon be joining with Yahoo!’s search engine. Bing is pretty good. But, people choose not to use Bing and Yahoo! as much because they are not yet quite as good as Google yet.
Google will soon be bringing out its own operating system to rival Microsoft Windows. I, personally, can’t wait because if it is as good as their web browsing software, Google Chrome, then I am all for Google being big so that they can invest in technology which will actually give a real choice in which operating system we use in our computers.
So, it seems counter-intuitive for the European Union (EU) to being trying to legislate against Google when it is actually this organisation which is providing choice to consumers. After all, Microsoft has been the target of the EU’s wrath for the last decade for not providing choice. Now that a competitor to Microsoft is providing choice in the market, the EU is attempting to stifle them.
Really good iPad demo
Here’s an excellent demonstration of the iPad in action.
Are you an entrepreneur?
Be honest with yourself
Today, I read a good, fun article on Harvard Business Review by Daniel Isenberg which is test about whether you should be an entrepreneur or not. It consists of twenty questions (like all good tests should!) and based upon my answers to those question, I should be an entrepreneur.
However, Daniel makes some very good points which you should consider in addition to his test. He asks about whether you have schools fees to pay, debts to pay off, alimony to cover and so on. If you answer yes to any of these questions, then you should hold off starting your own business until you are in a position to be able to support yourself while you get your business up and running. You need to be able to focus your time and attention onto running your business and not how you are going to keep your household going.
But also, Isenberg states that you should answer the questions honestly. That seems a strange thing to say but it is very easy to answer the questions in a subjective because you might be in a position where you hate your employed status and just want to get out of it no matter what the price you. This is foolish. You have to be completely objective with your answers and be truthful with yourself.
If you are not truthful with yourself at this stage then you run the risk of running your whole business on a judgments and decisions which are too subjective or unrealistic. And, in business, you need to be tough and realistic. Yes, of course, you need to be full of energy, enthusiasm and drive for setting up your own business. But you need to be true to yourself.
For instance, if you leave your employment to start a business, you might be setting it up around what you hope the market wants rather than what they actually want. It sounds stupid but if you start to fit your business around what you think the market wants rather than what they do want, you will find that your business is whole lot harder to run and is more likely to fail.
Isenberg’s advice is sound. I know. I didn’t follow it when I started my own business and it cost me.
How do you know it works?
Do you believe in anything?
I have been trying to persuade a deeply skeptical businessman that his business will benefit from providing useful content on his website for prospective customers to download. His business is very technical and provides technical services to the publishing industry, a global outsourcing company and a number of other marketing agencies who don’t have the technical know-how themselves to build web solutions for their clients.
Their technical know-how is impressive not only from the software solutions they develop but also the commercial knowledge they possess and the consultancy they provide to help people plan for the solutions they are hoping to achieve. Their main market is the educational and trade publishing sectors where, to be frank, the clients are generally conscious of what they want to do but don’t often have the competencies to implement the solutions themselves. This is where they help them.
As a consequence, the clients need a lot of help in framing what they want to do so that is commercially viable and practically possible. It’s almost a process of educating the clients to help them be successful. It sounds potentially patronising but that’s the reality of how they help their clients. They help their clients by providing pragmatic and impartial advice of what to do.
Most of this consultative work is carried out for free and they only charge for the development work they do on actually building the solution. The particular individual is convinced that people won’t pay for this advice, which might be true. The clients don’t value their skills and experience until after they benefited from them. By then, it is too late for this company to ask for payment and, therefore this individual sees that there is no value in that knowledge to the business.
But this knowledge is one of the biggest opportunities that they have to market themselves to gain more business, which is exactly what they need. They can use this knowledge to find out who is interested in their services and therefore who, potentially, needs their service.
By distilling their knowledge into case studies, whitepapers or tools and placing them onto their website for people to download for free in return for their contact details is a simple way to demonstrate their core value to customers and that they know how to help people and organisations with specific needs.
Trying to persuade someone to your points of view who completely disagrees with you is a challenge. It’s particularly difficult when they are your boss and they hold the resources you need to do what you believe to be the solution to the challenge. But this individual believes that their type of clients don’t look for their type of skills on the web, which is flying in the face of a large technology industry which provides a huge amount of information, tools and answers to people with challenges.
I am trying to show them that this will work but with no current evidence that it will work. They need facts and figures when I am asking for a leap of faith. So, the question in the title of this post is something which I can show how it has worked for other people in the technology sector. They question this individual needs to ask is ‘Why haven’t we done this before?” But some people don’t want to believe. They want certainty without risk. They don’t actually believe in themselves.
If you don’t believe me, here’s a good article by Valeria Valtoni on her blog ‘Conversation Agent’ which argues that people should stop adding value and that “to build a platform today, you need to be of service“.
The Joy of Conversation
Today, I had a few moments of synchronicity. On old habit from my army days (taking a moment to snooze) was disturbed on my train journey into London when I recognised a voice from my past. Twenty-two years ago from my past, in fact. The voice was that of Adam Renwick who was my first instructor at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. He happened to sit next to me. We caught up, swapped stories and cards, and then went our own ways. It was great to see him.
I went into town for my meeting and then returned to the rail station. Unfortunately, I had some time to kill in the chilly and draughty station amongst the 200 or so other travelers. To keep warm, I was wearing a mac over my suit, a thick woolly scarf and Tweed cap. When not catching up on emails on my Blackberry or being bumped by bustling passengers, I was looking at my temporary companions.
It dawned on me just how few people were wearing a hat in view of the cold weather. Anyone who spends time outside knows that a hat is one of the most important pieces of kit to keep warm. But, it appears that only three of us knew this and were wearing hats.
With my emails done, I fired up the Twitter client on my Blackberry (ÜberTwitter), and sent out a tweet (which also goes to my Facebook profile) highlighting my ‘hat watch’ findings. A few minutes later, I noticed a reply to my tweet from William Wright (@mrwilliam) who presents on BBC Radio saying he had mentioned my tweet on air (You can listen to the clip in the attached Posterous audio post). Shortly afterwards I received a comment from the tweet on Facebook from another old contact from my army days reassuring me that hats were ‘cool’. Another ex-colleague from Microsoft commented on Facebook the fact that she was in her office and wearing a hat too! I reassured her that hats were still ‘cool’.
The train was called and I found a welcome seat in the warm carriage and proceeded to do the crossword on a free newspaper I had picked up. I soon became stuck on a clue and resorted to some help from my friends on Twitter who soon came back with some ideas on the answer. A current work colleague who had replied with a clue also put in the word ‘iPad’ as a joke. Moments later his humourous tweet had been re-tweeted by someone who had picked up that particular keyword but who had not understood the meaning of my colleagues tweet.
By chance, the man who was sitting next to me had a rather nasty personal habit which involved him chewing his fingers persistently from Kings Cross station to St Neots which is about 45 minutes in total. I felt compelled to let people know about the minor amount of suffering I was going through and the replies from my friends were very witty. I also took a surreptitious photo on my Blackberry and sent it out to show the disgusting habit!
So, what does all of this mean? Well, people keep talking about ‘web 2.0′ being about conversations as if a conversation was a new thing. Of course, it is not. But conversation these days can be far more fluid and they are not just with people close by. They can be with people who are miles away from you and you never know what people will be interested in, no matter how trivial.
Rory Cellan-Jones speaking at Hull Digital Live Conference 2009
Hull Digital has started to release the recordings of sessions at the Live Conference in October last year.
This first one is the BBC technology correspondent, Rory Cellan-Jones speaking and starting the line-up for the day.
Rory Cellan-Jones “How Digital is Britain?” from Hull Digital on Vimeo.
Spoof interview with Steve Jobs about iPad
The sheer volume of ‘noise’ about the Apple iPad is quite astonishing. Not all of it is very complimentary, despite the excitement in the publishing industry. This one is a ‘muppet-like’ take-off of the tech industry pundit Walt Mossberg interviewing Steve Jobs about the iPad. If you don’t like bad language, then you this might not be for you!
