Posts Tagged ‘blogs’
Written by Will Hawkins on 17 September 2009
Four keys to attracting customers
I wrote some time ago an article called ‘How to Win – Focus and Speed‘ which was about strategy in business. I use it all the time in my business life and it does work. I read an article today by John Sviolka which reminded of that approach in business planning which talks about an online voucher company in the USA which has differentiated itself very clearly from its competition by doing just that.
It has been so successful that it has accumulated 675,000 subscribing customers to its service since November 2008 and it is growing them at a rate of 40% to 50% per month. It has a very clear proposition and it works. The lessons it teaches in this competitive market are clear and can be used by any consumer facing business.
Read the article here. You won’t regret it.
Tags: blogs, business, competition, customer interaction, focus, groupon, planning, strategy, vouchers
Posted in business, marketing, sales | No Comments »
Written by Will Hawkins on 27 August 2009
Hull Digital Live
Jon Moss from Hull Digital is a man who has found a seam of digital excellence in an area of the country which is often overshadowed by the larger cities in the UK where it is incorrectly believed that the majority of the country’s digital talent is held. Hull and the surrounding area is seen as a deprived trouble spot.
But, the reality could not be more different. Far from being a backwater or a black hole for digital talent, Hull is a vibrant place with a collection of companies and individuals with a rich range of skills and experience in the world of digital technology.
Jon started a networking group where, each month, he invites the local people from the digital talent pool to meet, share ideas and create new business opportunities. From its outset, the networking group called ‘Hull Digital’ has had an attendance of 45 to 50 people at each session. Jon invites two speakers to stand up and talk about aspects of the digital industry in which they are involved or passionate.
This has now developed into what one might call a ‘digital movement’ in the city and Jon has launched Hull’s first digital conference on 14th October called ‘Hull Digital Live‘. Jon is a man with connections and he has managed to attract some of the UK’s digital royalty to speak at the event, including Rory Cellan-Jones from the BBC.
Rory Cellan-Jones writes reports and blogs about a wide range of digital news and manages to make complex digital subjects approachable. Rory is the main speaker for the day long conference.
There are still ‘early-bird’ tickets available and if you want to know how you and your business or organisation can benefit from the digital revolution then you should make yourself available for the conference that Jon is organising.
Digital and technology in the UK today See Rory Cellan-Jones speak here http://ow.ly/lx7O
Tags: BBC, blogs, business, digital, hull digital, jon moss, networking, rory cellan-jones, skills, technology
Posted in business | 3 Comments »
Written by Will Hawkins on 11 August 2009
Generation M wants to be great at doing stuff that matters
Before you get upset by my heading, I really do mean this as a personal comment. I know several people, including friends, who have been badly affected by the recession in their businesses. I too have had a couple of tough years, most of which came from starting a business at the beginning of 2008 which is still going but for which I am no longer working on.
Bad timing, perhaps, and the recession did not help. The business strategy was ambitious. We were taking a new product to markets we thought we knew well but the clients were cautious and they did not buy as much as we thought despite the benefits available to them. I have learnt a lot in the last two years of my business life and my home life.
One of the main consequences of the business last year is that I have had to look through my personal finances to adjust my lifestyle according to my funds. And it has been a valuable exercise in highlighting how inefficient my household had been in the last ten years with the way we were spending money.
For example, we had borrowed money to extend our current house in a modest way. It improved the house, for sure, but the house has a limit to what people were prepared to pay for it and the growth in the equity has not improved enough to have made it worthwhile. We are selling our house and moving, hopefully, into a new town house which has energy bills half that of our current house. We will drop our mortgage by £100,000 by moving into the new house and it feels good.
Furthermore, it will save us having to drive our children from our current village house to school in town. The children can now walk to school and we save a lot of money on petrol.
Also, I have downsized my car to a car which does 70 miles per gallon (mpg) and 80 mpg if I drive a little more carefully. What was I doing beforehand in a car which only managed 25 mpg? Also, the tax on it is much lower than the previous car.
I admit that I am now becoming a bit obsessive about what I use day to day and I question even the humblest products and their value. For instance, why the heck do I need a razor which has five blades? How close can a razor get before it starts taking your face off anyway? Two blades are fine and the shaving foam I use now is a supermarket brand which is a third of the price of the branded equivalent and just as good. I don’t seem to be the only one either who is changing their ways either. Caroline Eveleigh at Anatec Software and Systems is doing the same with her lighting.
The main point is that we will soon have a great deal more ‘disposable income’ so that our family can invest in the really valuable things in life such as giving our children the best education we can, investing money for the long term, and actually having some fun.
And this is what we are doing in our business, of which I am now a part, too. We question the value of all of our investments very closely. We are investing in the skills of the team. We are investing in building relationships with our new and existing clients. We are making sure we have some fun as business too.
And as the tough conditions continue for businesses and people alike, it seems like their is change in the atmosphere in how people perceive their environment. Umair Haque wrote a very interesting article where he pointed out a change in society in a group which he calls ‘Generation M‘. Generation M is searching for greater meaning in a world which is “full of big, fat, lazy business” but which is seeking “small, responsive, micro-scale commerce“.
I am part of Generation M. I have moved out of big business and into small business where I can make a difference. I am glad that I am downsizing so I am no longer burdened with an oppressive mortgage. I don’t buy products which purport to make me a better human being because the brand tells me so. I am buying products which do a good job and no more. I am getting my life back and getting some meaning into it so that I can enjoy what I do, spend time with my family and friends and just enjoy a simpler life.
Tags: blogs, business, change, education, Finance, Five, generation m, lazy business, meaning, recession, relationships, skills, small business, strategy
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Written by Will Hawkins on 03 July 2009
Show your boss the evidence and make it real
I realised that I first learned how to sell a few years after I first did it. I was a young British Army Officer and one of my jobs in the Mess was to have all of our dining room chairs restored. The chairs were getting battered by many functions and daily use by thirty blokes and their occasional guests. I took one chair as a sample to a local furniture restorer to be restored and took it back into the Mess to gain the approval of the senior officers before having all of them restored.
But I didn’t just show them the restored chair. Firstly, I showed them a chair which had not been restored and which was probably the worst one of our set. The unrestored chair was rickety and had had much of the varnish chipped off. I showed the group of senior officers how bad things were but how good that they could be by investing in having the chairs restored. Having the chairs restored was a whole lot cheaper than buying a complete new set. Approval was gained.
One of the biggest challenges that some employees or even business directors face is having to convince their boss or fellow directors that they need to invest money into their project. Most people fear the rejection or fail to persuade their boss or bosses on why the investment is an investment and not a gamble.
I met someone recently who is facing this challenge. Their business is a web based news site which focuses on a science and technology. It has grown its unique visitors to the site from 6,500 per month to nearly 15,000 in the last year. It has benefited in the economic downturn, it would seem, as people seek more knowledge and information.
On the outside, it appears that this is a good news story. But, the underlying trends on the site show that people are spending less time on the site. The site is very much a ‘broadcast’ site meaning that it does not have capabilities for viewers to interact with the site by way of leaving comments, sharing articles with friends or colleagues, or even posting other content onto the site such as photographs.
Its competitors are large. One of their competitors has fifty times the number of unique visitors per month to their site. The competitors’ site is more advanced by way of tools which allow visitors to subscribe to the web site through RSS feeds, to read blogs, or to download and listen to podcasts, for example. Not only are their competitors larger, they are competing more effectively for the visitors by providing reasons for them to keep them coming back.
Herein lies the problem with the smaller news site. They have an infrastructure to their site which is bespoke and they are finding it nearly impossible to change. Furthermore, the owners of the web site do not see the problem. They see rising visitor numbers and they have achieved their original aim of setting up a successful web site providing the specialist news. “Why should we change the infrastructure?”
The infrastructure they have is bespoke and there very few people who can develop their system to customise it and add new features. They are stuck with a single supplier who charges them a lot of money to maintain but not develop and expand the capabilities of the site.
The owners are not seeing that their web site will become soon see the number of visitors declining because they receive better services and news elsewhere. The people in charge of marketing and running the site don’t have the support of the owners to make changes because the owners don’t think there is a problem. So, the status quo prevails and when the number of visitors and subscribers decline, they won’t be able to react. This is a classic case of people not worrying about what a rising tide covers up until the tide turns.
How do you deal with this inertia? How do you show that something is wrong when all seems to be rosy when your boss doesn’t believe it? Think back to the chairs earlier. Everyone in the mess was uses to the chairs being a bit battered or wobbly. Nobody was really complaining about them. But, by showing them how good they could be and how much more presentable and professional our Mess would appear, the senior officers approved the investment. They did not care how the chairs were restored as long as they were done professionally.
This is similar to the situation with the contact I met who was struggling with their bosses to see that their web site was not competitive. You have to show them evidence and keep showing them and not just accept the status quo and the inevitable pain they would go through again if they did not change their infrastructure. You need to show them what their competitors are doing. You need to show them what real people want and then how that will help their business survive. It’s tough but evidence and outcomes are very persuasive. You need to be bold, strong and persistent.
Tags: blogs, british army, british army officer, broadcast, business, change, content, focus, marketing, meaning, photographs, rejection, relationships, sales, sell to your boss, strategy, technology
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Written by Will Hawkins on 11 May 2009
News on your desktop
Reading a newspaper is an immersive experience. Getting the Saturday newspaper is one of the weekend’s great pleasures. The number of topics covered is large but interesting. I may not read all of it but I will read most of the newspaper. There are usually one or two articles which stick out which are particularly memorable and thought provoking.
However, during the week reading a newspaper is a different matter. I read a newspaper in a different manner which means fitting in reading an article or two when I am on a train, having a sandwich at my desk at work or briefly in the evening after getting the children to bed.
As a result, I buy a newspaper less frequently but I do read their digital versions for catching up on the rugby team I support, business news or technology news. I read the news through my mobile phone or on my laptop. All for free, of course. I also follow a number of blogs which are all ‘aggregated’ through an application called ‘ShareFire’ which presents them all in one place for me to read when I can. ShareFire is a simple, free and easy to use tool which saves me having to log into each blog on the web.
And that is the newspaper publishing industry’s problem in a nutshell. I am a contributor to their current demise. I admit it. I read far more than I ever used to than when I just read a newspaper.
But something caught my collective eye at work today. As a technology company, we are always looking at new trends, technologies and applications. This morning, our ‘Chief Geek’ spotted an blog article by Serge Jespers about an application built in Adobe Air and Flex by The New York Times for their readers.
It’s a free download which provides non-subscribers with a limited amount of news at no charge. To get the full version, you need to pay a subscription of $3.45 a week. You can search the newspaper, watch videos of the news, see the news in pictures all for free too, and all from your desktop (which means that the application loads pages in the background so you can move between them quickly).
Another article today on the BBC technology blog site by Rory Cellan-Jones highlighted an interesting comparison to how the newspaper publishing industry could learn a lot from the English Premiership which is very successful at making sure that people pay for their content through subscriptions. Commentators were saying that the football league example was not good because people are happy to pay for live football games to be streamed onto their TV’s but not so keen on watching highlights or replays. However, news is even more short-lived than a football game and few people want to read yesterday’s newspaper, unless you buy ‘The Week‘ of course.
There is great talk about devices designed specifically to enable people to read eBooks and electronic versions of newspapers and magazines, such as Amazon’s Kindle 2 or Sony’s eReader. But, these are expensive and most people won’t want to fork out a load of money when they already have a decent laptop, web-book or PC from which they can easily read.
So, the development by The New York Times of a branded reader application for their news which enables the publisher to get paid for their content and which helps customers get up to date news in a well presented way is a move which could start to pave the way for the publishing industry to secure its future. I will be watching with interest.
Tags: adobe, Adobe AIR, Adobe Flex, amazon, BBC, blogs, books, business, content, design, devices, digital, ebooks, ereader, Flex, kindle, marketing, mobile, Newspapers, publisher, publishing, rory cellan-jones, technology, TV, video
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Written by Will Hawkins on 18 April 2009
Tools are very useful but not interesting at dinner parties
Last weekend I saw my wife sawing off a branch of a plum tree she was pruning back with a saw designed to cut metal. She was managing to get through the branch but it was slow work. I handed her our bow saw and she finished the job more easily.
Furthermore, under my staircase is a big black box which contains most of my tools. There is a mix of spanners, pliers, screwdrivers, hammers and saws. One of these tools has a largish, orange handle and looks like a screwdriver for small screws.
In fact, the tool is a bradawl and it is used for making small holes in wood into which you drive a screw. The bradawl is not very good as a screwdriver because it was not designed for that even though it looks like one.
Now, before you switch off, this is not a post about the contents of my toolbox or a rant about women and tools. Far from it.
Yesterday, there was an article on the a BBC blog which was talking about Oprah Winfrey signing up to Twitter and there was a big battle between her and some other media chap I had never heard of until yesterday for who was going to be the top celebrity with the number of ‘followers’ to their tweets.
What was interesting were the comments (of which I was one commentator) from readers. The first commentator stated that ‘TWITTER IS STUPID’. A later comment talked about lazy journalists using it and businesses using it for cheap research. Another comment said the discussion about Twitter was not adding to the sum of human knowledge. Fair point.
I used to be a cynical about Twitter. But, being cynical about Twitter is a bit like being cynical about bradawls. Imagine this statement- “BRADAWLS ARE STUPID!” It sounds odd, doesn’t it? Bradawls are extremely good for making holes in wood but they are not very good screwdrivers.
Talk about Twitter is dull, just as talking about screwdrivers or hammers is dull. But seeking how to use a tool is very useful, just as learning that a bow saw is better for chopping off branches from a tree than a saw designed to cut metal.
And talk of Twitter being used by lazy journalists is like saying that farmers who use tractors for ploughing fields should be ashamed of themselves for not doing it by hand. And what is the difference between a business using Twitter for cheap research and a business not using it and buying expensive research? It might be your job.
Twitter is a very good tool but I can’t say I am going to be talking about it at dinner parties. I will be helping clients find more customers with it. I will be using it to find work for myself. But, as with anything, a better version may well come along. And until that comes along, I will continue to use Twitter as a tool, as I will continue to use my bradawl to make small holes in wood.
Tags: BBC, blogs, business, content, design, lists, marketing, media, social networks, technology, Tweet, Twitter
Posted in Social Media, marketing | 6 Comments »
Written by Will Hawkins on 08 April 2009
It's not the way you say. It's how you listen.
You may know someone like this. They appear to be exceptionally confident. They dominate conversations and walk into a room or a meeting and take command of it. You might feel a little intimidated by them. They say things at you and you wonder why you had not thought of that idea yourself and it is so much better than any idea you could possibly have ever conjured up. This person might tell you to do something and so you go and do what they tell you without thinking about it too much.
That’s the way it has been since you were at school. People say things to you and you listen and act upon what you are told. That confident person might have been your teacher, your boss, or a colleague who was always louder than you. But, as you grew older and more experienced, you started to think for yourself. The people who were the loudest often were the ones who took your idea and labeled it as their own. You started to see that actually the loud people, or the exceptionally confident ones were quite often very good at saying things but not so good at thinking about things. They did not have the monopoly on ideas that you thought they had and they needed you more than they would have cared to accept.
In the armed forces, there are lots of people who are loud and confident. You are trained to lead and to project an air of confidence. But this was quite often a veneer of confidence and you spent a lot of time telling people what to do if you were a platoon commander. But, if you stepped back from the noise, you started to notice something. More often than not, the people who were very influential were the quiet ones who observed and listened before saying anything. All their words were used carefully and minimally. Their confidence was not projected through a one way barrage of information and orders. Their confidence was projected through their quietness and their ability to inspire others and to use the strengths of the team that surrounded them.
In the business world, advertising agencies have been great at saying things to their client’s customers for years. They have been very effective at sending messages to people and telling them to do things. Buy this washing powder, eat this food, rub this cream in or buy this car to become this sort of person. Some of the world’s most talented people went into advertising and they still do. They are brilliant at saying things.
Over the last few years, we, as individuals, have realised that we have a voice too. We can write our views up on a blog, comment on other people blogs or views, and we can do things which were once the private domain of the corporations which controlled what we saw, read or consumed.
This has meant that advertisers are changing their ways. We are not prepared to listen to the message of one advertiser on their product or service. We will check what everyone else thinks about their product or service before we buy it. The loud, confident broadcasts are becoming less and less impressive. Now, the quiet noise of the people tells us whether the advertiser is right about the product they are pushing or not.
An example of this is a recent story of two developers I know who have built a simple to use tool called ‘ImageSizer.’ These two bright and self-effacing individuals have spent their spare time building ‘ImageSizer’ to help people quickly re-size batches of digital photos and made it available for people to download for free. Quite quickly, it started to appear on lists on the web recommending top tools to download. Downloads went from one hundred in a month to almost a thousand in a week. It kept appearing on lists and the number of downloads increased. Soon, a computer magazine picked it up and asked if it could include ‘ImageSizer‘ in the free CD on the front of its publication which went out to 20,000 subscribers.
Although the product is free, it is a good lesson in the fact that today people find out about products and services by hearing about them less through the loud noise of traditional advertising and increasingly through a network of people on the web recommending things. Further to the ‘ImageSizer’ story, the developers receive suggestions and requests for improvement to the tool from their users regularly which helps them to keep ImageSizer relevant and useful to what people want from it.
So, now think back to those people who exude confidence, start to question their substance and find out whether what they are saying is correct from the network. We are in a far more democratic society than we were ten years ago and it is a far better world for it.
Tags: blogs, broadcast, business, creativity, developer, digital, ImageSizer, lists, marketing, social networks, technology
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Written by Will Hawkins on 16 March 2009
Being creative takes practice
“WE’RE GOING LEFT FLANKING!!” The enemy had opened up on my lead section and I had rushed up next the section commander to see what was going on. We were on a rise looking down into a wooded area where the enemy had opened up on my platoon. The lead section was returing fire rapidly to keep their heads down. The adrenaline was coursing through my body as I rapidly thought about how we were going to take out enemy.There was a lot of noise and smoke, people shouting at me for orders.
The ‘book’ says leave leave one section of your platoon and take the other two sections to flank the enemy. But I decided that I had the advantage over them in a big way, both physically and mentally. I was going to smash them. To the enemy’s rear and to our right I could see they had left their transport exposed. It was likely that they were going to withdraw to it and try to escape when I launched the main attack. But I was not going to let that happen.
“JONES! TAKE YOUR FIRE TEAM TO THE RIGHT. GET UP CLOSE TO THEIR WAGON USING THAT DITCH! WHEN I GIVE YOU THE SIGNAL, I WANT YOU TO DESTROY THEIR TRANSPORT WITH GRENADES. AND IF THEY TRY TO WITHDRAW YOU WILL ACT AS CUT OFF AND TAKE THEM OUT. WE’LL START THE MAIN ATTACK FROM YOUR LEFT SO KEEP YOUR HEADS DOWN WHEN YOU HAVE DESTROYED THEIR WAGON!”
And that was it. That was the first time that someone told me that they thought I was in any way creative after that action. I felt nervous because I had not carried out the platoon attack ‘by the book.’ Fortunately, this was not a real enemy and we were just using blank ammunition. I was twenty-two and I was in Wales on an exercise during the British Army’s ‘Platoon Commander’s Battle Course.’ My instructor wrote in his report that he thought that I had “tactical flair.” My commanding officer was impressed.
But I hear the phrase “I’m not very creative” all the time from friends and colleagues, and it is an unfortunate belief which inhibits people from doing fabulous work. I admit that I used to say that about myself. The word ‘creative’ is often misinterpreted. I used to think it meant that I had to be a designer or an architect. But, of course, it does not mean that at all.
Being creative is something which has many levels of meaning. There are artists and musicians, designers, fashion designers and chefs who are creative, as well as sportsmen and women. But that does not mean that creativity is an exclusive club to them. It just means that they have practiced harder than most people and that they have found something they love doing and they become obsessive about it.
These days, I am often told that I have a lot of ideas, energy and enthusiasm for what I do. But there is no secret behind being creative. For me being creative begins with listening to a lot of radio, watching good TV programs on a variety of subjects, reading newspapers and blogs, learning about new trends and working out how they work, as well as trying out ideas, many of which have failed, and talking with lots of people to understand what they do.
Most people are not prepared to put in the time that it needs to do this kind of study and practice. Take blogging, for instance. Many people say they don’t have anything interesting to say. That’s simply not true. Most people have lots of interesting things to say and ideas to share. But they simply don’t practice by trying.
Of course, you can feel a little exposed to criticsm when you first start writing a blog or articles. But, the more you write, the more you understand how to improve your articles and entries by listening to people’s feedback and comments. “Where do you get your ideas?” I get them from everywhere.
For instance, I was standing at a pelican crossing in my local town at the weekend when I saw a sign outside one of the dwindling number of estate agencies which said “We have twelve computer linked offices in the county!” OK, I thought, that’s a feature of your business. Who cares if your offices are computer linked. What does that mean? I felt an article about how local businesses could improve their marketing coming along!
So don’t think that creativity is not for you. It is not an exclusive club. You are creative. If you don’t think you are, then you have not practised enough.
Tags: blogs, british army, business, creative, creativity, design, marketing, meaning, Newspapers, practice, radio, TV
Posted in business, marketing | 5 Comments »
Written by Will Hawkins on 25 February 2009
The publishing industry is a place fascinating to be now. It is a place of extremes when it comes to digital technology. It appears that there are two types of publishers now.
They are either ‘digitally advanced‘ or ‘digitally delayed’, with not much in between.
Publishers can be further divided into those with ‘plain text’ books (trade publishers) and those with ‘complex text’ books (STM & educational publishers). I am sure publishers would be horrified by this description, but it illustrates neatly how they approach digital technology.
‘Plain text’ book publishers are more interested in digital marketing to help sell their books. ‘Complex text’ book publishers are more interested in digital systems to sell their books.
For the unlucky majority, keeping up to speed with all of the technology advancements is an achievement in itself. How to develop a digital strategy and implement it can seem utterly bewildering.
A handful of publishers appear to be so far ahead with embracing digital technology that one fears for those left behind bobbing around in the digital doldrums.
For those that are successful, there appear to be common themes to them. The successful publishers, those that are ‘digitally advanced’, are happy to take an approach of ‘build and burn’ to marketing their books if they are ‘plain text’ publishers. And they ‘mash together’ the best ideas to make better systems if they publish ‘complex text’ books.
Furthermore, the ‘digitally advanced’ publishers have hired technical people into their marketing departments who can sift through the hype.
For the ‘digitally delayed’, simply building a new web site is not enough. They need to catch up but they must use basic principles first to plan their digital strategy.
Research your market, set your sales and marketing objectives, plan your strategy, and work out your tactics. It is too easy to go straight to tactics.
Also, hire in some specialists in digital in your market if you are ‘digitally delayed.’ Not just digital marketing specialists. Digital specialists in the publishing industry.
This is will help relieve the pressure to ‘go digital’ that many publishers are feeling.
Tags: amazon, blogs, books, business, content, digital, education, google, lists, marketing, media, planning, print, publisher, publishers, publishing, sales, strategy, tactics, technology
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Written by Will Hawkins on 18 February 2009
The recent ‘Tools of Change for Publishers’ conference in New York seemed to sum up the tension in the publishing world on where their industry is heading. “Will printed books survive?” is one question which is being asked but, more importantly, “How do we keep control of our content while embracing the digital potential?” seems to be the main question on publishers minds.
The newspaper and magazine publishers are facing a dilemma. They were quick to adopt technology to reach their customers but they have trained their audience to expect a free online version of their favourite newspaper. Now that their circulations are falling, they appear to have no way to attract subscription paying customers to read their newspapers.
Magazine publishers in certain categories, such as ‘lad mags’ have seen their circulations plummet as the credit crunch hits and the magazines are ditched in favour of more wholesome entertainment like Sky Sports. Other magazine categories have seen the opposite trend in their circulations. For example, the circulation of The Economist has risen and people are happy to £4 for well written content.
Amazon recently launched the ‘Kindle 2’ which their chief, Jeff Bezos, said had been named to illustrate that their eBook reading device had been designed to be the starting point for enabling consumers to read book and newspapers in a digital medium and not an end point. That is a nice analogy although you still need something to light the kindling wood to get the fire going.
Furthermore, the use of mobile phones for reading and viewing content is growing. Personally, I now use my Nokia N96 to watch BBV TV and listen to recent radio shows using the installed iPlayer before I switch off my bed side light at night. That phone combined with improved 3G coverage has enabled me to view content in ways which I simply could not have achieved two or three years ago.
There seems to be inertia as publishers wait for the big product which enable them to provide their content in digital forms which does not see them in the position that the music industry is in where they are fighting a tactical battle of trying to catch up with their customers desires to buy music in ways which does not involve them buying an album on CD of which they only really want to two tracks. As the article in The Economist suggests “An iTunes moment.”
The Amazon Kindle 2 looks like a nice product. It has a 3G connectivity, it is light and slim and it can hold 1,500 books, it “reads like real paper”, it “boasts 16 shades of gray for clear text and even crisper images” and there is a range of 230,000 books as well as newspapers, magazines and blogs to choose from.
Listening to people have used the Kindle 2, one theme stood out for me and that was one person saying that they now read more books as a result of having the device. That is why I like my iPod. I listen to far more music than I ever used to. It’s just easy.
Despite some sceptics in the UK, I think the Kindle 2 will be a success and, like the iPod, it will be improved all the time and the richness of the internet to which we have recently become fans will soon be available. I believe the ‘big thing’ for publishers and their authors will be their ability to have a closer relationship with their audiences in the digital world and they need to provide applications and tools to enable that as well as getting their books ready for Kindle-like products.
To use a Stephen Covey phrase, the Kindle will be a ‘big rock’ around which publishers must create other tools and applications which will enable their audiences to have richer experiences with their volumes of content. For example, cook books which link to short videos on techniques, or Sci-Fi books with links to fantasy games.
Publishers just need to do it. With digital, they can build things quickly, test them and assess the results rapidly. Just stop waiting for the ‘iTunes’ moment’ because it is already here.
Tags: amazon, BBC, blogs, books, change, content, credit crunch, design, digital, google, internet, iplayer, kindle, media, mobile, Newspapers, Nokia, print, publisher, publishers, publishing, radio, technology, TV, video
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