Amazon Kindle – Gabriel Catalano®

The Jeff Bezos School of Long-Term Thinking

Vía 99u.com

Why focus 10,000 years into the future? The answer lies in Bezos’ letter to Amazon shareholders from 1997 when the company went public, a manifesto of sorts about the benefits and approaches to long term thinking.

The 1997 letter’s main point: we can’t realize our potential as people or as companies unless we plan for the long term. Every subsequent year Bezos has ended shareholder letters by attaching the original 1997 essay with a reminder of the importance of thinking long term. And every year, he is proven right.

The company that started out as a few guys in a garage has now revolutionized the way we buy everything from books to toys to clothes. Amazon is now one of the 100-largest companies in America, mostly thanks to bold long term plays like the Amazon Kindle.

“If everything you do needs to work on a three-year time horizon, then you’re competing against a lot of people,” Bezos told Wired in 2011. “But if you’re willing to invest on a seven-year time horizon, you’re now competing against a fraction of those people, because very few companies are willing to do that.”

We can’t realize our potential as people or as companies unless we plan for the long term. Leer más

3 Ways Goofing Off at Work Can Make Your Company More Innovative

entrepreneur.com
3 Ways Goofing Off at Work Can Make Your Company More Innovative

image credit: Windows

If you still think the best way to move your business forward is to be chained to your desk or smartphone, it’s time to loosen up. Innovative companies like Google have proven that you can let yourself and your employees have a good time at work and still be productive.

Ryan Tate, author of The 20% Doctrine: How Tinkering, Goofing Off and Breaking the Rules at Work Drive Success in Business (Harper Collins, 2012) and Matt Weinstein, author of Managing to Have Fun: How Fun at Work Can Motivate Your Employees, Inspire Your Coworkers and Boost Your Bottom Line (Simon & Schuster, 1997) have found that injecting fun into your office can result in not only a more innovative environment, but a more productive one.

Here are their tips for how incorporate more play your workday:

http://www.labnol.org

The Wikipedia website now includes tools to help you create formatted ebooks using content from one or more Wikipedia pages – here’s a sample ebook in the EPUB format.

Wikipedia eBook

Wikipedia has offered the PDF export functionality on their website for some time but with the recent change, you can export a selection of Wikipedia pages as EPUBs which is a much better format for reading articles offline on mobile phones, ebook readers and tablets. PDF is still a more suitable format for creating print-ready ebooks.

How to Create eBooks inside Wikipedia Leer más “Create an eBook from Wikipedia Articles | via labnol.org”

5 Signs of a Great User Experience

If you’ve used the mobile social network Path recently, it’s likely that you enjoyed the experience. Path has a sophisticated design, yet it’s easy to use. It sports an attractive red color scheme and the navigation is smooth as silk. It’s a social app and finding friends is easy thanks to Path’s suggestions and its connection to Facebook.

In short, Path has a great user experience. That isn’t the deciding factor on whether a tech product takes off. Ultimately it comes down to how many people use it and that’s particularly important for a social app like Path. Indeed it’s where Path may yet fail, but the point is they have given themselves a chance by creating a great user experience. In this post, we outline 5 signs that the tech product or app you’re using has a great UX – and therefore has a shot at being the Next Big Thing.

By Richard MacManus
http://www.readwriteweb.com

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Why You Ought to Throw Away Your Vanity Metrics for These 5 Customer Metrics

Have you ever logged into your analytics account and noticed how your traffic and pageviews are up? And when you notice that your pageviews have gone up, you probably get excited and try to figure out what caused it to go up, right?

But when you dig a bit deeper and start to analyze the impact of those increased pageviews, you probably notice that your revenue hasn’t really gone up at all.

http://blog.kissmetrics.com/throw-away-vanity-metrics/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+KISSmetrics+%28KISSmetrics+Marketing+Blog%29

But when you dig a bit deeper and start to analyze the impact of those increased pageviews, you probably notice that your revenue hasn’t really gone up at all. Leer más “Why You Ought to Throw Away Your Vanity Metrics for These 5 Customer Metrics”

Its about people not devices

We live in exciting times. Times of innovation, invention, and rapid change. Technologies that were unthinkable years ago are now commonplace. Close to 1.5 billion people worldwide use a computer, but that figure pales in comparison to the 4.2 billion (75% of the planet) who use or have access to a mobile phone.

If you’re new to mobile design (and most people are), you may be looking for guidelines or best practices to inform your work. When you find them, they will most likely sound something like this:

* Mobile is different from traditional (primarily desktop) computing.
* The desktop is about broadband, big displays, full attention, a mouse, keyboard and comfortable seating. Mobile is about poor connections, small screens, one-handed use, glancing, interruptions, and (lately), touch screens.
* You may spend hours seated in front of the same computer, but mobile context is ever-changing. This impacts (amongst other things) the users’ locations, their attention, their access to stable connectivity, and the orientation of their devices.
* Desktop computers are ideal for consumption of lengthy content and completion of complex interactions. Mobile interactions and content should be simple, focused, and should (where possible) take advantage of unique and useful device capabilities.
* Mobile devices are personal, often carrying a wealth of photos, private data, and treasured memories. This creates unique opportunities, but privacy is also a real concern.
* There are many mobile platforms, each with its own patterns and constraints. The more you understand each platform, the better you can design for it.
* And then there are tablets. As you may have noticed, they’re larger than your average mobile device. We’re also told they’re ideal for reading.

Designing for mobile without an understanding of these key differences can lead to all sorts of problems, including clumsy interactions, high latency, poor usability, and more than a few missed opportunities to create that “long wow.” The problem however is that while these unique mobile characteristics are correct, our very concept of what constitutes a mobile device (and therefore mobile behavior) is constantly evolving.

http://www.uxbooth.com/blog/its-about-people-not-devices/

This post is part of a series authored by the speakers of the upcoming UX London conference. As media sponsors, we’re proud to provide exclusive introductions to the topics that will comprise the event!

If you’re new to mobile design (and most people are), you may be looking for guidelines or best practices to inform your work. When you find them, they will most likely sound something like this:

Mobile is different from traditional (primarily desktop) computing.
The desktop is about broadband, big displays, full attention, a mouse, keyboard and comfortable seating. Mobile is about poor connections, small screens, one-handed use, glancing, interruptions, and (lately), touch screens.
You may spend hours seated in front of the same computer, but mobile context is ever-changing. This impacts (amongst other things) the users’ locations, their attention, their access to stable connectivity, and the orientation of their devices.
Desktop computers are ideal for consumption of lengthy content and completion of complex interactions. Mobile interactions and content should be simple, focused, and should (where possible) take advantage of unique and useful device capabilities.
Mobile devices are personal, often carrying a wealth of photos, private data, and treasured memories. This creates unique opportunities, but privacy is also a real concern.
There are many mobile platforms, each with its own patterns and constraints. The more you understand each platform, the better you can design for it.
And then there are tablets. As you may have noticed, they’re larger than your average mobile device. We’re also told they’re ideal for reading.

Name Your Price

What are you trying to get?

A break?
A job?
A book deal?
A feeling of control?
Of power?
Of peace?
More money?
More love?
More fame?
What?

Okay. Another one:

by Tamsen McMahon
http://www.brasstackthinking.com/2011/01/name-your-price/

I have a question for you:

What are you trying to get?

A break?
A job?
A book deal?
A feeling of control?
Of power?
Of peace?
More money?
More love?
More fame?
What?

Okay. Another one: Leer más “Name Your Price”

Influence, Cash, or Hobby: Which Blogging Choice Is Right for You?

When I first started a blog that I took seriously, it was to promote an ebook that I had published on Amazon’s Digital Text platform. Initially, I wanted the blog to be my “author’s headquarters,” but soon after, I realized what I really wanted to do with my blog. It was far from my initial goal, and I wish I’d made the right decision from the beginning, rather than reversing course.
The problems

Changing your blogging type after you start the blog causes problems. Those problems include, but are not limited to:

* losing readers and subscribers that had expectations
* confusing the search engines due to content changes
* wasting time marketing your blog on the wrong sites.

Readers walk

When you change your blog style or niche, it’s common sense that your readers will most likely walk. Think about it. They came to your blog because they came across some content that intrigued them. Now that you’ve decided to change your content, what reason do they have to stick around?

It’s important to choose your blog style ahead of time, and think about it carefully. You can literally waste hours of your time approaching the wrong reader audience. You can also end up being bad-mouthed by another blogger who’s angry with your switch.

This guest post is by Brandon Connell of brandonconnell.com
http://www.problogger.net/archives/2010/12/10/influence-cash-or-hobby-which-blogging-choice-is-right-for-you/

When I first started a blog that I took seriously, it was to promote an ebook that I had published on Amazon’s Digital Text platform. Initially, I wanted the blog to be my “author’s headquarters,” but soon after, I realized what I really wanted to do with my blog. It was far from my initial goal, and I wish I’d made the right decision from the beginning, rather than reversing course.

The problems

Changing your blogging type after you start the blog causes problems. Those problems include, but are not limited to:

losing readers and subscribers that had expectations
confusing the search engines due to content changes
wasting time marketing your blog on the wrong sites.

Readers walk

Search engines get confused

It is a search engine’s job to make sure it indexes and ranks relevant content. Let’s say you start a blog about your golf hobby, but then you switch course, writing a stock tips business blog. Search engines may have already given you good rankings for golf. If you change your content, you’ll lose those rankings. You may even end up being penalized by the search engines.

When you first publish your blog, unless you’re blog hopping and guest posting, search engines are likely to be the first ones to read your content. Make sure they leave as happy customers. How? Be consistent. Your niche and blogging style should never change once you start.

You waste time

Should you have done your research on blog marketing, you’ll know that blog commenting and article marketing are excellent ways to promote your blog and build backlinks to it. If you change your style or niche, you have to consider the fact that you wasted all that time writing irrelevant articles that don’t match your newly chosen niche. The audiences for those article sites, backlinks, and guest posts will no longer be interested in what your blog has to say. When they click through to your site, they’ll be disappointed.

Another wasted effort would be the fact that you now have to delete your mailing list that you may have built up, since your subscribers didn’t sign up for information on your new topic. They subscribed because they had an interest in your previous topic. Leer más “Influence, Cash, or Hobby: Which Blogging Choice Is Right for You?”

“The Times” cuenta con 105.000 suscriptores online

Por primera vez desde que el pasado mes de julio las versiones online de las cabeceras The Times y The Sunday Times pasaran a ser totalmente de pago, News International ha dado a conocer el número de lectores que se han suscrito a este nuevo modelo.

The Times y The Sunday Times cuentan con alrededor de 105.000 suscriptores para los contenidos web de ambos diarios y para las aplicaciones para el iPad y el Kindle de las dos publicaciones, informa The Guardian.

Aproximadamente la mitad de esos 105.000 abonados son suscriptores mensuales. El resto paga una libra por el acceso a números individuales de The Times y The Sunday Times.

Por primera vez desde que el pasado mes de julio las versiones online de las cabeceras The Times y The Sunday Times pasaran a ser totalmente de pago, News International ha dado a conocer el número de lectores que se han suscrito a este nuevo modelo.

The Times y The Sunday Times cuentan con alrededor de 105.000 suscriptores para los contenidos web de ambos diarios y para las aplicaciones para el iPad y el Kindle de las dos publicaciones, informa The Guardian.

Aproximadamente la mitad de esos 105.000 abonados son suscriptores mensuales. El resto paga una libra por el acceso a números individuales de The Times y The Sunday Times. Leer más ““The Times” cuenta con 105.000 suscriptores online”

Amazon Now Taps Into Facebook For Social Product Recommendations

It appears that Amazon has rolled out a new social feature integrating Facebook into your recommendations. If you go your recommendations, Using Facebook Connect, Amazon will now serve you social recommendations based on information in your Facebook profile. Facebook’s Platform account was just updated with a message that seems to confirm the rollout of this new feature.

So when you activate the feature, you’ll see a dedicated Amazon Facebook page within the recommendations section of your account. For example, you’ll see the most popular books, DVDs, and more that are listed in your Friend’s Facebook profile. So if you like Radiohead, you can see which one of your friends also likes the band. You’ll also see upcoming birthdays and find your Facebook friends’ Amazon Wish Lists more easily. And you’ll get gift suggestions for your friends based on their Facebook profiles.

by Leena Rao

Steve Jobs Hates The New York Times iPad App

Users have jeered the New York Times’ main iPad app, but the newspaper is listening to one in particular: We hear Steve Jobs is among the app’s most vociferous critics and has been shunning it.

Jobs clearly wanted to make access to the electronic Times a big selling point for Apple’s tablet computer; the Apple CEO put the paper’s website at the center of full-page magazine ads for the iPad, and even shared the stage at iPad’s unveiling with a Times executive, who demoed a preliminary version of the paper’s iPad software.

: Image via CrunchBase

Users have jeered the New York Times‘ main iPad app, but the newspaper is listening to one in particular: We hear Steve Jobs is among the app’s most vociferous critics and has been shunning it.

Jobs clearly wanted to make access to the electronic Times a big selling point for Apple‘s tablet computer; the Apple CEO put the paper’s website at the center of full-page magazine ads for the iPad, and even shared the stage at iPad’s unveiling with a Times executive, who demoed a preliminary version of the paper’s iPad software. Leer más “Steve Jobs Hates The New York Times iPad App”