Swiss Army knife – Gabriel Catalano®

Facebook: A Swiss Army Knife is good but a Tool Set is better – thnxz @martinvars

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While in Smartphones themselves the battle may be only between iPhone 5 vs Samsung IV, when it gets to apps people are much more picky. Facebook is losing dominance by the week to focused niche players.

Full article 🙂

For most people Facebook Swiss Knife approach is good, but given a choice, a tool set is better. What is Facebook to do? They are lucky enough to be seating on a cash pile and it is a public company worth over $50bn. They have to do what Google has been doing for years. Buy, buy and buy. Instagram was a good start. Buy first and figure how to monetize later, learn from Google’s acquisition of Youtube which for years was as struggle and now is a star.

12 Must-Do Tasks for the New WordPress Site Owner

copyblogger.com

You know you’re sitting on a gold mine, don’t you?

That freshly-installed WordPress site of yours is poised to be a source of income, prospects and possibilities for your business. It has the potential to be a powerhouse resource, but there are a few things you’ll need to get in order first.

This post shares the top 12 power sources you can plug into with your brand-new WordPress site.

It may seem like a lot to do, but they’re listed in order of importance. Work on the top of the list first. Once you’ve got those things set up, move on to the rest of it.

Before you know it, you’ll have a WordPress website that’s fully charged and ready to power your business.

1. Make a decision: homepage or blog page?

One of the first decisions you’ll need to make is about how to structure your site.

When visitors type in your domain name, will they see a home page, or a blog page? With a WordPress site, either one is easy to create. The question is, what are the advantages of each?

Homepages with some general information about your site and an opt-in form are a great way to welcome new visitors.

But suppose you have a blog — won’t it get lost if it’s not on your home page?

Not necessarily. When you talk about your blog posts — either on social media, in an email or on another site — you’ll share a link that goes directly to them.

People can find your blog using your navigation menu, too.

On the other hand, if your blog is the star of the show, you may want it to be the first thing people engage with.

There’s no right or wrong answer here. It’s a strategic decision that should be part of your overall site planning. And it’s easy enough to change later, so don’t over think it: just choose one and test it out.

2. Build connection with an email list

To build a genuine, ongoing connection with your readers, nothing beats email.

The email inbox is an intimate space, and a privileged place to inhabit. You’re there by invitation only, and because of that, you’re apt to get the attention you want.

Not sure what to include in your emails? There’s good information here on Copyblogger aboutcreating emails people will look forward to and why you should treat your readers like dogs (really). Start with the ideas in these posts, and build from there.

3. Give us a reason to share our email address

That intimate, privileged inbox space is also pretty cluttered for most of us. We don’t want any more email than we already have, so you’ve got to give us a compelling reason to invite you into our inbox.

Unless your site is already well-known and an established authority, it’s not enough to promise “updates.” Give us something we can hold in our hands, listen to, watch, or look forward to.

Create an ebook that solves a sticky problem, and give it away in exchange for an email address.
Record a downloadable audio interview, conversation or presentation.
Make a video or tutorial that shows us a technique you’ve learned.
Create a short course you deliver by autoresponder, like Internet Marketing for Smart People.

Whatever you decide to create, make sure it’s so desirable that your visitors will be willing to share their email address to get their hands on it.

4. Track your progress Continuar leyendo «12 Must-Do Tasks for the New WordPress Site Owner»

This Swiss Army Knife Comes With a 1 TB USB Flash Drive

Data transfer speeds are 220 MB/s for reading and 150 MB/s for writing data, and the availabile capacities range from 64 GB to a whopping 1 TB.

Of course, the knife also has a blade, scissors, nail file with a screwdriver tip and a LED/laser pointer. All you frequent travelers needn’t worry – the drive can be interchanged between the fully-equipped body and the flight-friendly body, which comes without the pointy stuff.

by Stan Schroeder 6
http://mashable.com/2012/01/11/swiss-army-knife-usb-terabyte/#view_as_one_page-gallery_box3755

Victorinox has unveiled a Swiss Army knife with a USB flash drive that holds 1 terabyte of data.

The company has had a USB knife in its line of products for a while, but the Victorinox SSD comes with several new features: it connects to eSATA II/III as well as USB 2.0/3.0 with a single connector, it has a monochrome graphic display showing what’s on the drive and it supports 256 AES encryption. Continuar leyendo «This Swiss Army Knife Comes With a 1 TB USB Flash Drive»

Switzerland blazes innovation trail

A nearby flight instrument company, Flytec, approached Victorinox with a suggestion for a gadget geared to mountain climbers. Flytec now supplies the knife maker with electronics for an altimeter, barometer, thermometer and clock.

The company has made mistakes – a tool for in-line skaters that came with a separate pouch for different-sized keys wasn’t a success – but Victorinox continues to tinker and add new features to its products. Mr. Elsener’s top goal is to boost the appeal of Swiss Army knives among women, who tend to buy them more for the men in their lives.

In the global scheme of things, Victorinox is a small company. But like other Swiss firms – from online scheduler Doodle to Thermoplan, which supplies coffee machines to Starbucks – it has found its niche. And that’s reason to believe Switzerland’s economy may keep on thriving.

“I strongly believe in the future of Switzerland because of globalization, because open economies can play advantages in innovation even better than protected economies,” Mr. Gassman said. True, it costs more to make stuff there, but that “can be overcompensated by productivity – and even more innovative products and design.”

TAVIA GRANT
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/economy/growth/switzerland-blazes-innovation-trail/article1750626/

IBACH, SWITZERLAND— From Saturday’s Globe and Mail

In a tiny town in central Switzerland surrounded by velvety green mountains and punctuated with whiffs of cow dung, a 126-year-old factory churns out 60,000 Swiss Army knives and other pocket tools each day for a hungry global market.

All the folding blades at Victorinox AG are still made in Ibach, population 3,500. The company is run by the founding Elsener family, now in its fourth generation. Its brand has, over the years, become synonymous with Switzerland itself: quality, precision, reliability.

Innovation keeps Swiss army knife maker sharp

Yet Victorinox is anything but static. Back in 1891, its main product was a heavy, wood-handled knife built for the Swiss army. Now, its knives come equipped with laser pointers and USB drives with biometric sensors. The factory has been upgraded to the latest high-tech gadgetry (machines that look like fingers do the finicky job of assembling the knives), leaving workers free to develop new tools. Sales are roughly $200-million a year, 90 per cent of its products are exported, and it is expanding into new markets such as Brazil, Argentina and China. All this, and employees still get 1½-hour lunch breaks.

Carl Elsener Jr., Victorinox’s approachable chief executive officer, proudly proclaims that his company has never outsourced production or axed jobs due to recession – in fact, it has a history of boosting investment, not cutting it, during economic downturns. He credits its endurance to innovation, which is helping Victorinox face its biggest challenge yet: competition from cheap Asian counterfeits.

“Innovation is in our blood here in Switzerland – since the beginning, we’ve always tried to make things better,” Mr. Elsener said in an interview at his company’s headquarters. “Maybe it’s because we were forced early to be global and to think about exports.”

Innovation seems to seep from Swiss pores. The Alpine nation of 8 million people was named the world’s most competitive economy in a recent ranking by the World Economic Forum, and regularly leads the world when it comes to innovation. The Swiss hold the most patents per capita in Europe – Albert Einstein once worked in the Bern patent office – and the country is a hub for global giants such as Swatch, UBS and Nestlé.

Canada, meanwhile, is still struggling to shed its hewer-of-wood image. The Conference Board of Canada slapped the country with yet another “D” in innovation this year, and it slid to 10th place in the WEC rankings. For Canada to thrive in a global, knowledge-based economy, it must focus on turning good ideas, of which we have plenty, into marketable products, which we’re not so good at. Switzerland offers plenty of lessons on how to do it.

“It’s about desire,” said Roger Martin, dean of the Rotman School of Management. “European countries are more practised in how to compete in sophisticated ways. They can’t chop down trees, dig out rocks, or fish. So they’ve been at it longer to upgrade their products.”

It’s tough to imagine it now, but in the late 1800s, as Victorinox founder Karl Elsener was training as a master cutler, Switzerland was one of the poorest nations in Europe. Its economy was largely based on agriculture, and robbers ruled the roads. It had no coal, steel or iron – no natural resources at all, in fact – and for a time, the industrial revolution bypassed the tiny mountain nation.

Out of necessity, much like Japan, it developed a knack for importing goods and putting them together in smarter ways, or copying other people’s products and making them better.

Over the years, said Oliver Gassmann, chair of innovation management at the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland developed a unique innovation policy.

“It’s bottom-up, science-based and market-oriented,” he said.

Education is key to the country’s position as an innovation hub. Its school system produces world-class scientists who are focused on the pragmatic implementation of new ideas, Mr. Gassmann said. And Swiss universities and technical schools collaborate with multiple partners, including businesses, to bring ideas to market. Continuar leyendo «Switzerland blazes innovation trail»