Entrepreneur, innovation consultant and former high-level operational executive in several IT companies, Christine Comaford, wrote a book last year called "Rules for Renegades - how to make money, rock your career and revel in your individuality".
On the web site she has had the first chapter available for free ever since it was launched, but now - in a mixture of a fantastic marketing stunt and, I choose to believe, a real desire to help kick-start the economy again, she is giving away 5,000 copies for FREE. That's right, all you have to do is pay the postage & packaging costs of $7.95 if in the US (with sales tax to be added for CA residents).
I think this is a great initiative, and it looks like a very interesting book - as well as one of the better marketing tactics I have seen in a very long time. It all goes back to my previous post about "moving the free line" and is a very strong way of creating evangelism for your product. If it can also help entrepreneurs develop new products and services for which there will be a great demand, and thereby putting more people into jobs, even better.
Read the first chapter online.
Get your FREE copy of the book now.
Thursday, November 13, 2008
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
Bring On the Subs!
... sub-editors that is.
Am I the only one to bemoan the sad state of journalism these days? Every single major news site seems to be full of factually wrong content, badly written content and broken links. I don't know if the advent of Internet publishing meant the end of the art of sub-editing, but it really does seem like it. Yesterday I was looking at a picture on the Danish financial newspaper Borsen's lifestyle site and saw a chef carving up a duck. The caption had two spelling errors in it and stated that the picture was of the duck AND a fillet of beef. I could see many interesting things about the picture, but it would have been truly weird if there had been a steak in the picture as well - and sure enough there wasn't. Makes you wonder if somebody just hits the "publish" button without pausing for just a second to see what they have written. Simple errors like this really ought to be simple to catch and weed out, but I guess the pressure is now on the journalists to focus on quantity and speed in publishing - and now they are doing their own sub-editing (yeah, right) they really don't seem to care whether what they have written is wrong or right. It is all about getting it out there as quickly as possible. I just wish that somebody would start to introduce some measures of quality control again or it might be the slow and painful end of well written content and we'll soon find entire articles written in text speak.
What do you think? Are you also annoyed/concerned about the dropping standards of online (and off-line for that matter) journalism?
Am I the only one to bemoan the sad state of journalism these days? Every single major news site seems to be full of factually wrong content, badly written content and broken links. I don't know if the advent of Internet publishing meant the end of the art of sub-editing, but it really does seem like it. Yesterday I was looking at a picture on the Danish financial newspaper Borsen's lifestyle site and saw a chef carving up a duck. The caption had two spelling errors in it and stated that the picture was of the duck AND a fillet of beef. I could see many interesting things about the picture, but it would have been truly weird if there had been a steak in the picture as well - and sure enough there wasn't. Makes you wonder if somebody just hits the "publish" button without pausing for just a second to see what they have written. Simple errors like this really ought to be simple to catch and weed out, but I guess the pressure is now on the journalists to focus on quantity and speed in publishing - and now they are doing their own sub-editing (yeah, right) they really don't seem to care whether what they have written is wrong or right. It is all about getting it out there as quickly as possible. I just wish that somebody would start to introduce some measures of quality control again or it might be the slow and painful end of well written content and we'll soon find entire articles written in text speak.
What do you think? Are you also annoyed/concerned about the dropping standards of online (and off-line for that matter) journalism?
Royal Copenhagen Keep On Firing Cannonballs Downwards...
Recently (October 2008), Royal Copenhagen won the top award in design awarded in Denmark, the annual Bo Bedre "Design of the Year" prize. Unfortunately, they haven't decided to capitalise on this fact yet, and even though they've, finally, decided to open up an online shop, they aren't selling the first completely brand new set of tableware for the 21st century.
It just makes you wonder why somebody at the top of the Xmas tree hasn't figured out the point that the most likely buyers of the new and cool tableware are also the ones who are most likely to be buying online... I hope I can get a really hardcore investor to go in and salvage this company before they go down the drain - and employ me as the Chief Marketing Officer :-). In many ways, as a Dane by birth, this would really be the dream job.
It just makes you wonder why somebody at the top of the Xmas tree hasn't figured out the point that the most likely buyers of the new and cool tableware are also the ones who are most likely to be buying online... I hope I can get a really hardcore investor to go in and salvage this company before they go down the drain - and employ me as the Chief Marketing Officer :-). In many ways, as a Dane by birth, this would really be the dream job.
Government Conspiracy?
No, this post is not about a conspiracy theory, but rather the realisation (which happened about 7 - 8 years ago) that BT were responsible for hampering UK competitiveness when it came to delivering broadband to both companies and consumers.
At the same time (or more specifically 6 - 12 months later) that other European telecoms companies introduced broadband to their customers, BT introduced lines at a quarter of the speed (even though the speed available across the copper wires at the time was more than capable of handling the higher speeds). This was down to a combination of pure greed by BT and opportunism by the Labour government at the time, but unfortunately it meant the death of some of the most interesting content companies in Europe such as Tripledash and Sportal, and bombed the UK internet industry back to the Stone Age. We are only just now starting to catch up with from this government induced setback, but we are still massively behind our counterparts in e.g. Scandinavia, where a 20Mbit line is now becoming the norm, rather than the exception. Over here, my 8Mbit line seldom delivers more than 2.5 Mbit performance. This would actually be fine, though, to deliver a standard broadcast signal live on a full screen terminal (e.g. a TV, but there are just too many "drops" in the connection to make it feasible" - something I have found when I have tried to purchase live TV broadcasts from abroad).
However, the blame does not lie solely with the government and BT. Broadcasters selling live content online have also got to share part of the blame, e.g. Viasat in Scandinavia and TV2 in Denmark, who have previously sold an inferior experience by offering a maximum of 600Kbit streams to customers paying £5 or more to watch a live football match online - and with MASSIVE service outages. With the bandwith available to them, and the prics charged, they should be able to offer a 2 Mbit stream for customers with fast enough connections as a minimum, but this, as always, is one of the areas where traditional TV channels will always try to save money - right until the economic and customer behavioural realities force them to change tack.
If the purely online TV players such as Joost, WiTV, Kangaroo, etc. are pushed out of the running for the (not very lucrative) online TV rights, this move will be delayed even further. It might be that the UK is leading the way in terms of fantastic content for viewing (particularly within the sphere of comedy), but we could still find ourselves left behind by government policies and programme pricing for digital usage.
At the same time (or more specifically 6 - 12 months later) that other European telecoms companies introduced broadband to their customers, BT introduced lines at a quarter of the speed (even though the speed available across the copper wires at the time was more than capable of handling the higher speeds). This was down to a combination of pure greed by BT and opportunism by the Labour government at the time, but unfortunately it meant the death of some of the most interesting content companies in Europe such as Tripledash and Sportal, and bombed the UK internet industry back to the Stone Age. We are only just now starting to catch up with from this government induced setback, but we are still massively behind our counterparts in e.g. Scandinavia, where a 20Mbit line is now becoming the norm, rather than the exception. Over here, my 8Mbit line seldom delivers more than 2.5 Mbit performance. This would actually be fine, though, to deliver a standard broadcast signal live on a full screen terminal (e.g. a TV, but there are just too many "drops" in the connection to make it feasible" - something I have found when I have tried to purchase live TV broadcasts from abroad).
However, the blame does not lie solely with the government and BT. Broadcasters selling live content online have also got to share part of the blame, e.g. Viasat in Scandinavia and TV2 in Denmark, who have previously sold an inferior experience by offering a maximum of 600Kbit streams to customers paying £5 or more to watch a live football match online - and with MASSIVE service outages. With the bandwith available to them, and the prics charged, they should be able to offer a 2 Mbit stream for customers with fast enough connections as a minimum, but this, as always, is one of the areas where traditional TV channels will always try to save money - right until the economic and customer behavioural realities force them to change tack.
If the purely online TV players such as Joost, WiTV, Kangaroo, etc. are pushed out of the running for the (not very lucrative) online TV rights, this move will be delayed even further. It might be that the UK is leading the way in terms of fantastic content for viewing (particularly within the sphere of comedy), but we could still find ourselves left behind by government policies and programme pricing for digital usage.
Flickr Service Outage
It is interesting to see that just a few days after the announcement that Yahoo! has lost one of its principal strategic options, we are starting to see service blips on Flickr. Is this the beginning of the end of Yahoo! or is it just an ISP service blip?
Wednesday, November 05, 2008
What Now For Yahoo!?
This is the big questions of the day after Google announced its intention to walk away from the advertising partnership. With Yahoo! rebuffing MSN's advances and failing to secure a deal with Google, it is starting to run out of options for a long-term growth strategy and could very well end up failing in the next few years as it struggles to find a clear and beneficial value proposition to present to consumers and advertisers alike.
Back in February, I wrote about how I thought that Jerry Yang had lost the plot and with this recent development he and the board have got very few options left. It will be interesting to see what happens next...
Back in February, I wrote about how I thought that Jerry Yang had lost the plot and with this recent development he and the board have got very few options left. It will be interesting to see what happens next...
Experience Flying With Cathay Pacific
I just saw Cathay Pacific's new online advertising campaign, which leads you to an interactive experience where you can see what it is like to fly with Cathay in first class, their new business class and economy. It is one of the better presentations of this sort I have seen recently and it just goes to show what can be done in the newer versions of Flash.
Experience flying with Cathay.
Experience flying with Cathay.
Barack Obama Looks Like a Likely Next President
Having sat up until 2:26 a.m. GMT to follow the US election, it now looks very likely that Barack Obama will become the next President of the United States of America.
I just wish that Jesse Jackson would shut up about this being a racial issue and the idea that every country in the world should now elect a black candidate. Finally, the US has entered the modern age and no longer looks at race as an issue (like the rest of the first world has done for years). It is about electing the BEST candidate for the job.
Now the question becomes what Barack Obama will do in order to solve the following issues:
- The economy (will he be an isolationist/protectionist?)
- Foreign policy
- The wars in Iraq & Afghanistan
- Healthcare (lest we all forget the ill-fated Clinton attempt at solving this)
- Ecology/climate change
There are still outstanding questions about Obama's complete lack of executive experience so the importance of assembling a very strong team around him becomes even more apparent, particularly on issues such as the economy, environment, armed forces, foreign policy and healthcare. I wish the new administration the best of luck and hope that they succeed in helping the global economy and promote the idea of a more stable global political system, but really am worried about the potential isolationism which might be displayed by Obama once he is in office. For the last 65 years, the United States have seen themselves as playing the role of global police officer and if they suddenly start reverting to the Monroe Doctrine of isolationism, I wonder how the rest of the G8 countries as well as the developing world would look on that.
I just wish that Jesse Jackson would shut up about this being a racial issue and the idea that every country in the world should now elect a black candidate. Finally, the US has entered the modern age and no longer looks at race as an issue (like the rest of the first world has done for years). It is about electing the BEST candidate for the job.
Now the question becomes what Barack Obama will do in order to solve the following issues:
- The economy (will he be an isolationist/protectionist?)
- Foreign policy
- The wars in Iraq & Afghanistan
- Healthcare (lest we all forget the ill-fated Clinton attempt at solving this)
- Ecology/climate change
There are still outstanding questions about Obama's complete lack of executive experience so the importance of assembling a very strong team around him becomes even more apparent, particularly on issues such as the economy, environment, armed forces, foreign policy and healthcare. I wish the new administration the best of luck and hope that they succeed in helping the global economy and promote the idea of a more stable global political system, but really am worried about the potential isolationism which might be displayed by Obama once he is in office. For the last 65 years, the United States have seen themselves as playing the role of global police officer and if they suddenly start reverting to the Monroe Doctrine of isolationism, I wonder how the rest of the G8 countries as well as the developing world would look on that.
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