Photography: Urban Mixer
It might not feel it. You probably aren’t noticing it in your wallet. And it certainly doesn’t apply to the price of loans, food aid or gas, but the world is getting cheaper. It’s not just that you can now buy a pair of Chinese-made jeans for less than $15 and it’s not only that you can pick up a basic laptop for $500 and one that would have cost four times that a couple of years ago for $1000.
It might be the first goal of many a budding entrepreneur: to find someone with more money than he knows what to do with, explain why your idea can make him richer than Beverly Hills and accept a seven-figure check from him in return for a tiny little stake in your company — one that’s now worth several million dollars. Whether the business ever makes a dime, you’ll always be able to say that you were worth a mint and that you ran a large corporation.
In practice of course, it’s never that easy. While venture capital may well provide the sort of launch pad that’s sent many a business into the stratosphere, finding the money can be as laborious as building the foundations of the business in the first place. Time that could have been spent talking to potential customers, perfecting the product and developing new service ranges will be spent creating business plans, contacting investors and creating Powerpoint presentations to land the capital.
It’s an old ad world wheeze. If you want to target a market, first you identify it, then you characterize it, then you give it a catchy acronym – ideally one that’s easy to remember and, more importantly, is cool enough to make its members proud to own and keen to live up to.
“Yuppie” was probably the most effective. First termed in the 1980s to describe young, upwardly mobile professionals, it’s hung around ever since, even if it has lost the slicked-back hair and the Gordon Gecko greed-fest.
Group blogs have become very popular in the last year or so. After all, they do have many advantages opposed to a single user blog. One I can think of right away is the many varied voices readers can sample while reading through a group blog. Google Docs is an excellent platform to manage, share and publish information to such a group blog. While most of us are familiar with the actual running of Google Docs, many don’t realize this options even exists.
I will go into details on how you can do this quite comfortably. Instead of just listing all the features I’m going to explain in a little more details on possible work flow to help you get started with your own Google Docs group blog administration. You as the administrator will hold ultimate control which assists you with peace of mind I guess.
Photography: Dale Gillard
After reading an article on Film UI Bloopers I really wondered what goes through the minds of a movie screen maker when they design their computer interfaces for movies? I wanted to go behind the scenes to find out what makes these software genies tick and why computers for movies are often designed with unrealistic user interfaces (UI’s), opposed to the real thing.
Photography: orphanjones
In the financial year of 2006-7, Japan broke a record. Around 355 workers fell ill from overwork. Of those, 147 died, usually of heart attacks or strokes. It was Japan’s highest figure ever and an increase of 7.6 percent from the previous year, despite a government campaign to cut work hours.
Photography: Vicki’s Pics
Create a professional website and inevitably, you’ll have to do it. You’ll have to write an About Us page that tells a lead who you are, what you do and how you got there. It’s the story of your company and while that account might not be as important as your product or your services, your business’s narrative is an important part of your image and your branding – especially when you find that it plays the role of the bad guy. Google, after all, would still have a world-beating search engine and advertising system even if it didn’t come with a story of two noble geeks who promise to do no evil. Microsoft, on the other hand, has produced a standard-setting games console but its competition-squashing has made it the computer world’s Lee van Cleef, a characterization that only inspires young virus-writers to call the company out.
Wouldn’t it be great if you could just pop a pill and hey presto!… you’re Bill Gates? Well, maybe not that pill. But how about one that turns you from entrepreneurial dreamer into successful business person, from someone with ideas to someone who takes action, from someone who wants to someone who achieves?
Usually, those sorts of transformations require massive amounts of hard work, long investments of capital and sometimes a complete personality change too. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Popping placebos has long been known to end even the toughest illnesses and it’s possible that there are a few little sugary confidence tricks that can have an equally transformative effect on a business’s growth.
Photography: Martin Kingsley
So you’ve got an incredible idea for a new business, and can’t wait to roll up your sleeves and get to work. However, before you pour dollars and hours into creating your product, it’s a good idea to see if people are actually willing to buy what you have to offer.
Photography: Wallyg
Start freelancing during a boom and it feels that nothing can go wrong. Companies have more work than employees, more money than they know what to do with and more gigs to pass out to freelancers than available contractors. You’ll be picking and choosing your jobs, demanding higher prices each time and wondering where it’s all going to take you.
The Fish bone Diagram is a common name for the Ishikawa diagram, a simple and highly effective problem solving tool devised by a highly respected Japanese quality expert. Also known as a cause and effect diagram, this is a concept every entrepreneur should be familiar with: it provides a visual way of organizing disparate data as to come up with a solution to a problem, or otherwise achieve a desired outcome. The reasoning behind this diagram is breaking down the intertwined factors which either build up as the problem or could possibly could build up as the solution.
A tool for Dissecting Problems in pursuit of Solutions
Bloggers are the new breed of published authors if we take an ever growing array of people who manage to move from being a blogger to becoming published authors. Wanting to look beyond the usual curtain of how a blogger can self publish I did a bit of research online to show you it can be done indeed.
Sometimes the step from blogger to published author is a mere strike of luck and at others it is done at will right from the start.
Photography: vidrio
It’s an old saw popular with business coaches. If you want to be successful, your first step isn’t to write a business plan, spot a niche or create your product. It’s to create a mastermind support group – a team of cheerleaders who’ll buck you up when you fail to land a client, buy you coffee when the VCs turn you down and give you a shoulder to cry on when your business goes belly-up and you’re wondering how to explain the last two years on your resume.
“By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail” – experience notwithstanding.
Such words have been presented to us by one of the founding fathers, and their validity is still remarkable, nowadays. Granted, experience is an extremely important asset, and it’ll take you far along the cyberspace snakes and ladders; however something else is required to ascribe the far shores of being a true master. You should always keep in mind that genuine mastery is a by-product of experience enhanced with strategy.
Experience is what you get through practice: doing something over and over again, thus improving your skill. Strategy, on the other hand, is a mindset which provides for optimization and expansion of the learning processes. You can think of experience and strategy as analogs to practice and theory; while the former is all about doing things, the latter is exclusively concerned with optimizing everything we do. When you learn how to balance theory and practice, strategy and experience, rest assured: you’ll be on the high road to mastery of your craft.
Freelance long enough and at some point someone will tell you that it costs ten times more to find a new client than to keep an old one. Or twenty times more. Or a hundred. Or just more than you can afford.
“Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?” James Chartrand
James from MenwithPens summed Twitter really good. It’s a service that allows users to stay connected with current friends and get connected to more like minded people. As we know, Twitter has picked up the pace in many facets when it comes to our online life. Bloggers have made a gradual move towards microblogging and some people have eliminated their RSS feed readers completely, and embraced Twitter as their new link generator to keep up with current news and posts.
