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I just read the following and thought that it would be important to share with our readers… Even if things work differently at your place of business, remember that ‘things’ often change.
Before you dive into the details of event planning next year, be prepared to defend your decisions. One of our Clients now require the following input as a bare minimum in the process of event planning. I thought the instructions were worth sharing:
“Dear Business Development Executive,
If you wish to tap the marketing budget for your event in 2010, please answer the following questions and we will review your application in the order in which it was received:
1) which of our solutions can be sold (incremental business) by inviting people to this event?
2) exact cost (number of people and cost per person)?
3) how many leads / business opportunities can be generated with this event?
4) how much revenue do I expect to generate from these leads?
Each event planner needs to follow this procedure for each event in order to be eligible for funding. Should you feel that this process is a waste of time, we wish you the best of luck with your self-funded / sponsored event.”
I often wondered about the practicality of owning and operating an electric vehicle (EV) -- some are really cool and really fast (for about an hour and a half before needing an overnight charge) while others just simply get you where you need to go at a reasonable traffic jam sort of pace.
Well, I think it is absurd that today’s battery technology only allows for a few hours of electricity powered driving before you need to recharge for up to 8 hours just to be able to drive home.
httpv://www.clipsyndicate.com/video/play/1068283
There is some light on the horizon and one of my colleagues is paving the way for a major shift in the way we perceive and use electricity powered cars. He calls his business ‘Better Place’ and his business model is something I mapped out a few years ago on a napkin when a friend told me about the headaches of owning an electric car. I was not able to find funding or support for my napkin idea but Shai Agassi has succeeded from his base in Palo Alto and I am thrilled to report that he is rolling forward with a very ambitious plan to make the world a better place.
Since starting up the company, Shai has put together a strong leadership team supported by experienced engineers on the execution side. Better Place is working with governments, businesses and energy companies to accelerate the transition to sustainable transportation and has partnered with companies such as
A123 Systems
Acorns to Oaks II
AGL
Automotive Energy Supply Corporation
DONG Energy
Esarbee Investments Canada
GC Investments LLC
Hawaiian Electric Company
Israel Cleantech Ventures
Israel Corp.
Macquarie Capital
Maniv Energy Capital
Morgan Stanley
Musea Ventures
Ofer Group
Renault-Nissan Alliance
VantagePoint Venture Partners
Vayikra Partners
Wolfensohn & Co.
Better Place was named one of the 2009 International Design Excellence Award (IDEA) winners for its electric vehicle charge spot. The IDEA award is a celebration of the year’s most innovative and exciting product concept designs and one of the world’s most prestigious and recognizable design competitions, with a focus this year on sustainability. I am proud to know Shai and support his efforts in reducing our dependencies on fossil fuels. I think I’ll dig up that napkin now and have it framed it for him.
By now you must be wondering what this is all about… Let’s go to the video tape
Yes, I’ve seen the future and it is a wave!
All you need is an hour and a half and you too will be able to peer into the crystal ball and see what’s coming down the pipes later this year and how this new technology from Google will impact our online lives in new and wonderful ways. Enjoy…
Why do we have to live with incompatible and inherently different types of communication — email versus chat, or conversations versus documents?
Could a single communications model span all or most of the systems in use on the web today, in one smooth continuum?
How simple could we make it?
What if we tried designing a communications system that took advantage of computers’ current abilities, rather than imitating non-electronic forms?
Google WAVE is the answer and if you’ve got an hour +++ and some refreshments, watch the video, give it some thought and then let us know what you might do with the wave… We’ve already started planning our collaborative extensions!
For those of you with less than an hour of available time and a bit of ADD, here is the 30′000 foot view:
A “wave” is equal parts conversation and document, where people can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.
Here’s how it works: In Google Wave you create a wave and add people to it. Everyone on your wave can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets, and even feeds from other sources on the web. They can insert a reply or edit the wave directly. It’s concurrent rich-text editing, where you see on your screen nearly instantly what your fellow collaborators are typing in your wave. That means Google Wave is just as well suited for quick messages as for persistent content — it allows for both collaboration and communication. You can also use “playback” to rewind the wave and see how it evolved. That means that users of applications such as bug reporting, Customer support services, communication and decision making online just got a boost and companies that deliver collaboration platforms in this space are likely to get the boot.
Could Google Wave Redefine Email and Web Communication? We think so but, let’s hear your thoughts.
On a flight to the US, I sat behind a man who was seated next to a young girl. I usually don’t eavesdrop but after hearing the ice breaking one liner – I simply could not resist. Following is what I remember from the dialog:
The man in front of me turned to the little girl and said ‘I heard that flights go quicker if you have a conversation with fellow passengers.’
The little girl who had just opened her book, closed it slowly and said: ‘What did you want to talk about?’
‘How about nuclear power? asked the man.’
‘Ok, but let me ask you a question first.’
‘A horse, a cow and a deer all eat the same stuff – grass, yet a deer excretes little pellets, while a cow turns out a flat patty, and a horse produces clumps of dried grass. Why do you suppose that is?’
The man, visibly surprised by the girl’s response, thinks about it and says ‘hmmm, I have no idea.’
To which the little girl replied ‘Do you really feel qualified to discuss nuclear power when you don’t know shit?’
I could write pages about my personal experiences but when I came across Jay’s tribute I thought.. you’d really enjoy hearing his song and dance as you reminisce. Then, without warning… he took it offline! Fortunately, there was another tribute to 2008 available, albeit with a bit more potty mouth than I would like but it gets the point across. Happy New Year everyone! May next year be oh so much better for us all…
I decided that NOW is the best time to invest…
and you can quote me on that one.
Hey, it beats the heck out of Clients calling to cancel projects because they decided to act like
blinded deer at night standing in front of a speeding truck full of ‘industrial disease’.
I don’t care what anyone says… now us the time to invest… if not in the markets, then in ourselves.
Get out there and learn something new.
shameless plug: we give exciting courses on how you can dramatically increase your sales even in slow markets – hack, we even back it up with proof from our Clients and a money back guarantee… are you brave enough to challenge yourself?
Friends, this article is serious. Based on a study conducted by Paypal in 2008, Internet users in the UK are much more likely to be victims of identity theft than their peers in both Europe and the USA.
The recent survey by PayPal and Ipsos Research of 6,000 online shoppers in 6 countries revealed that 14% of respondents in the UK admitted that they have had their identities stolen online. This can be compared with only 3% in Germany. More than half of respondents said that they used personal dates and names as passwords, making it relatively easy for hackers to gain access to accounts through manual efforts of trial and error. The French are particularly bold – two-thirds of the respondents claimed to use easily guessed passwords such as birthdays and telephone numbers but the icing on the cake was that over 80% of the French post this sort of personal data on social-networking sites. Unfortunately, the hackers enjoy trolling the very same social media sites too.
The article did not reveal how users could protect themselves so, in an effort to provide some form of public service… here are my recommendations:
1) Do NOT reveal detailed personal information on a public internet site such as myspace, facebook etc
2) If you have already ignored recommendation number one, check all of your passwords and ensure that they are at least 10 digits long and that they contain a combination of uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers and symbols such as # $ % ( ^ ) etc.
3) a strong password is something like RtY7f*e#2U and a weak password is something like 041277. To check the strength of your passwords, try using the Password Meter – you can even download it to increase your security based on what I am about to reveal to you in the next recommendation.
4) You may have already inadvertently downloaded some sort of spyware that is recording what you type and then transmitting the result to a hacker, a hacking community or an online thief. If you are running Microsoft windows without anti-virus or firewall protection, you might as well raise the white flag and surrender today. Even with both anti-virus software and a leading firewall installed, if you were teased into clicking on some sort of advertisement that downloads a file or more to your computer, chances are reasonable to good that your machine has been infected. One last comment on this topic before we move on – many people have a free version of an anti-virus software installed and they somehow manage to forget to update it regularly thus leaving their machine susceptible to attack. Solution… get a Macintosh and don’t click on links that promise ‘free porn’ or music downloads. For the paranoid among us, add anti-virus software to your Mac and then get back to work
5) Change your password regularly. Do not keep the same password for more than 60 days
6) Create a secure place to store all your passwords and keep them protected with encryption. Put them somewhere safe but easily accessible. My suggestion is to create a secure email account and use their document repository service to give you access from any location. Here is a leading secure email service that offers a free secure email address.
7) Review ALL of your passwords for online banking, email, secure web sites etc and change the password to something stronger today.
enough said, now let’s get back to our regularly scheduled broadcast ;-)
Once upon a time in a jungle village not so far away, a man appeared and announced to the villagers that he would buy live and healthy monkeys for $10 each.
Since the villagers considered the monkeys a real nuisance, many of them went into the jungle and began setting traps to catch them. The man bought thousands of monkeys at $10 and, as supply started to diminish, the villagers reduced their efforts. When this happened, the man announced that he would now buy monkeys at $20 each.
This reinvigorated the villagers efforts and they started trapping monkeys again. Gradually the number of free monkeys diminished even further making hunting efforts much more challenging and time consuming – people started going back to their farms. The offer was increased to $25 each, until it was difficult to find even a single monkey, let alone catch it!
The man then announced that he would buy monkeys at $50 each! However, since he had to go to the city on some business, his assistant would now buy on his behalf. As soon as the man was off on his journey, the assistant let the villagers in on a secret. He invited all the hunters and their relatives to have a look at the monkeys in the big cage that the man had paid for. And then he made them an offer that they simply could not refuse.
“I will sell them to you for $35 and when the man returns from the city, you can sell them to him for $50 each as he promised.”
The word spread like wild fire and before long, most of the villagers gathered their savings and managed to buy every single monkey held captive in the massive cage before releasing them into the jungle so that the hunt could begin anew.
They never saw the man nor his assistant again.
In the above article the names were changed to protect the innocent. The ‘financially sound’ structured products were represented by monkeys in the story but the facts remain the same; this was no accidental occurrence it was simply a version of the now popular Ponzi game. You probably already know this but, a ponzi scheme is a scam where the perpetrator collects money from new investors and uses these new cash inflows to pay high returns to past investors, so that these influencial existing investors believe that their capital is intact and working for them. All the while, the scam artist has been spending the initial capital on himself rather than investing it as advertised. To attract a special breed of greedy investor, such schemes often are promoted as exclusive clubs as in ‘by invitation only’ thus toying with the wealthy and famous have-it-alls psyche to the point where they absolutely must be part of this exclusive ‘winners circle’ in order to maintain their image.
As we sell more and more iPhone Apps, we collect more and more feedback from both our Customers and people who think that everything on the iPhone should be free. At first we were dismayed by the prospect that an entire generation of people (many iPhone users) actually paid for the mobile phone but now expect software developers to design, code, test and launch applications for free given the efforts involved, the costs for the hardware and the coding tools etc. We initially wondered how we could possibly make it happen. Could software be offered for free?
On a bustling corner of São Paulo’s quita district, street vendors pitch the latest “tecnobrega” CDs, including a few by a hot band called Banda Calypso. Like CDs from most street vendors, these did not come from a record label. But neither are they illicit. They came directly from the band. Calypso distributes masters of its CDs and CD liner art to street vendor networks in towns where they plan to tour, with full agreement that the vendors will copy the CDs, sell them, and keep all the money. That’s OK, because selling discs isn’t Calypso’s main source of income. The band is really in the performance business — and business is good. Traveling from town to town this way, preceded by a wave of supercheap CDs, Calypso has filled its shows and paid for a private jet. Not a bad way to offer free software we thought.
Back at ground zero, our developers were asking for their paychecks and our freelancers were requiring payment for Apps that had just been accepted for launch. We can’t blame them for wanting money after all, they need to eat too but, this same generation of gotta-haves want to get paid for their time and yet expect most things that they need to be free – someone is going to have to pay for all this free stuff if you read your college ECON 101 textbook it’s likely to define economics as “the social science of choice under scarcity.” The entire field is built on studying trade-offs and how they’re made. Milton Friedman himself reminded us time and time again that “there’s no such thing as a free lunch. But Friedman was wrong in two ways. First, a free lunch doesn’t necessarily mean the food is being given away or that you’ll pay for it later, it could just mean that someone else is picking up the tab. Money is not the only scarcity in the world today… the other items include time and reputation. if you build on reputation, you gain respect especially in the troughs of a given niche market. If you increase attention you can actually build a business as you convert from reputation to traffic and traffic as many of us in this digital age know, can be converted into cash. There is, presumably, a limited supply of reputation and attention in the world at any point in time. These are the new scarcities — and the world of free exists mostly to acquire these valuable assets for the sake of a business model to be identified later. This ‘free mentality’ shifts the economy from a focus on only that which can be quantified in Euros, Dollars and cents to a more realistic accounting of all the things we truly value today.
How a company presents an offer for a product today differs in many ways from the past in that the price of each individual component is often determined by using psychology, not cost. Your mobile phone company may not make money on your monthly minutes — it keeps that fee low because it knows that will be the first thing you will compare when picking a carrier — thus another component, your data volume and your monthly voicemail fee is pure profit to the carrier. So you see ads for free phones but I have yet to encounter free calling plans.
You get the pipes for free but the water passing through those pipes is expensive. So, what are we to do about our dilemma? Many of our target prospects want something for free and yet our developers need to eat. If we were to offer a free ‘lite’ version, then we would encounter higher dev costs and support costs but the idea has crossed our mind.
Wait, there is another way… How about building real value into your offering so that people won’t mind spending some spare change if an App helps them do something that they wanted to do before but were not able. If an App were to focus on leveraging those scarce resources that we listed a few paragraphs above such as helping a user to save time, gain respect or save money – the App would pay for itself and that, in essence, is currently our favorite model of ‘free’.
I have some amazingly good news to share with you (and a small group of others – we’re not advertising this yet so please keep this to yourself for now), but first here’s a little background.
Ever since BoxOnline was launched in 1999 people have been asking us for personal one to one coaching.
I’ve had to say no hundreds of times for several reasons.
First, I did not have a trained staff of coaches.
Sure, I could have hired a professional “coaching company” to take on the task, but frankly most of these programs are pretty sub-par to say the least and I did not want to forward the calls to India.
Heck, their idea of coaching is to get someone on the phone and push play on a tape deck!
That’s not coaching – that’s highway robbery no matter how you slice it.
So, the years passed and we have been unable to service this need.
Some thought I was foolish for “leaving money on the table” and maybe they’re right, but some things are more important than money.
Giving people a high value for their dollar, taking a genuine interest in their success, honest dealing …
Not only are those wise principle to live by – they make great business sense, too.
What a lot of these companies offering coaching don’t get is that they can cut costs by offering shoddy service, but they are losing someone who is a potential lifetime Customer.
I finally found a coaching company that shares this same philosophy.
Not only is what they are teaching completely in line with the core principles we built our business upon (their coaches help you take them to the next level), but they have strict quality control
measures to ensure their coaches are actual *coaches* and not salesmen in disguise or “clock punchers.”
They have an extensive screening process for their staff and if a coach survives that, they are under constant review and provided with excellence training to keep getting better and better at
what they do (coaching you to unleash your hidden potential).
We’re only offering this as a pilot program to a few people now – not everyone will be accepted.
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