Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Take a look at these shots of a bog ship in a storm in the North Atlantic. Stunning:

Nice story in BusinessWeek on doing great presentations. I like this one on PowerPoint…

2. Stick to One Theme Per Slide

A brilliant designer once told me that effective presentation slides only have one message per slide. One slide, one key point. When Jobs introduced the “three revolutionary products” in the description above, he didn’t show one slide with three devices. When he spoke about each feature (a widescreen iPod, a mobile phone, and an Internet communicator), a slide would appear with an image of each feature.

Jobs also makes the slides highly visual. At no place in his presentation does the audience see slides with bullet points or mind-numbing data. An image is all he needs. The simplicity of the slides keeps the audience’s attention on the speaker, where it should be. Images are memorable, and more important, can complement the speaker. Too much text on a slide distracts from the speaker’s words. Prepare slides that are visually stimulating and focused on one key point.

Brilliant idea!

But hard to believe though it may be, T-Mobile did make an announcement last week. And even harder to believe, its new product may be as game-changing as Apple’s.

It’s called T-Mobile HotSpot @Home, and it’s absolutely ingenious. It could save you hundreds or thousands of dollars a year, and yet enrich T-Mobile at the same time. In the cellphone world, win-win plays like that are extremely rare.

Here’s the basic idea. If you’re willing to pay $10 a month on top of a regular T-Mobile voice plan, you get a special cellphone. When you’re out and about, it works like any other phone; calls eat up your monthly minutes as usual.

But when it’s in a Wi-Fi wireless Internet hot spot, this phone offers a huge bargain: all your calls are free. You use it and dial it the same as always — you still get call hold, caller ID, three-way calling and all the other features — but now your voice is carried by the Internet rather than the cellular airwaves.

I buy lots of wine from Porthos. They’ve now launched a wine concierge service which looks very cool. I’ve been frustrated plenty of times in Hawaii and Mexico with the lousy and expensive selection of wine. 

Porthos | Andrew Harper

Big feature in BusinessWeek on social networking… Interesting piece on Execs using Social Networks. I know many are ambivalent on LinkedIn but I really like it – it’s been great for recruiting and also networking. Good little tip sheet.