I finally became a twitter or a twit- the significance of the word twit will not be lost if you are from the UK.
I’m playing at the moment and testing the water to see how useful it will be to my business. We shall see.
The future of reading is Ebooks (electronic books) or so we’re told and the Ebook has been with us for years, most commonly used by people who buy information products via the internet. The most common format is PDF which is more or less the de facto for the universe. So if this has been around for years why is it that the future of reading has got to be Ebooks?
Well in the US, Amazon have a product called the Kindle which is a hand held reader and its success has been phenomenal with sales accounting for 10% of Amazons profits which is significant considering it’s one of their more expensive products ranging from $299 – $489. All this and it’s not even available in Europe yet!
There are around 300,00 Kindle books available and some of these sell for $9.99 which frankly is way too expensive and this will inevitably come down as competition hots up. Talking of which the main competition is the Sony Ereader and the mighty Iphone. The Iphone being even more phenomenal than the Kindle is the reason why the future of reading is Ebooks.
Their are free reader apps available for the Iphone which mean you can now read books, magazines and even newspapers. Imagine sat on the tube (London Underground) in the daily rush hour reading your Daily whatever whilst the guy next to you struggles to turn his page without poking someone elses eye out.
Below is a video on the Iphone Ereader app – Stanza (keep the volume low this guy has a really sharp voice!)
All this is still in its infancy as you have a variety of formats which of course are incompatible – it’s VHS and Betamax all over again. But this will of course get resolved and we will have a standard format similar to PDF (which can’t be read on handreaders at present). I should add that the videos do no favours to the quality of resolution you can expect from these readers, particularly the Kindle.
If you have just put up a website and you wonder where you go from here, contact us for some sagely advice. No point in boring you to tears with things like this;-
Yawn – yeh get in touch
Google Adwords is one of the Internet’s big mysteries. There are volumes of books, videos, tutorials available telling how to use, abuse, cheat or avoid it all together.
How Google ranks ads, sets its prices, decides upon the quality of your ad has always been seen as secretive and vague. Well this video from Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist, explains it all. Mind you, you may well have to view it a few times to understand it – I certainly had to – but it is all there in the open for all to see.
If you click the arrow in the bottom right corner you will get access to more adwords videos
Six months ago my PC laptop gave up the ghost and became non repairable. I made the decision to go for a mac an intel based mac so I could use windows. So I bought a shiny new 20″ Imac which resembled your typical flat screen TV, sleek, compact and easy on the eye . No messy wires or separate units to worry about as it was all in the one slim unit.
Loading my windows software proved painless thanks to a brilliant piece of software called VM Fusion. I did not expect this to work as well as it did but I was delightfully suprised – everything worked just like a normal PC only better.
However I soon weaned myself off windows and now uses the mac system for everything. No more faffing around with drivers,or configuring this that and the other. No virus issues either just programs that install easily and work.
So dont be afraid to make the change – get a mac you’ll never go back
STOP PRESS If you live in the UK then go for this below, nothing to pay just fill in the info