Gerhard Rasocha - Unplugged

I must admit, I am into simplicity. Just in time for the UEFA EURO 2008, a great video showing the difference.

Have you ever suffered from “Death by Powerpoint” ? Too much information, little interaction, presenters reading bullet-points of slides with little enthusiasm … does this sound familar ? Garr Reynolds, creator of the most popular Web site on presentation design and delivery — presentationzen.com — shares his experience at a Google-Meeting in a provocative mix of inspiration and guidance that will change the way you think about making presentations with PowerPoint or Keynote. Watching this will take around 70 minutes of your time, but believe me its more engaging than most 15 minute presentations I have ever seen.

Lets work together to reduce the number of “template-based and bullet-point-driven” group-reading meetings. We may even free up some time along the way to get serious work done.

When the iPhone was announced a year ago, I wrote why mobile phones will never be the same again. Now, six months forward after its initial introduction in the US with 4 million units (this makes it the fastest selling smartphone ever) sold and data traffic to Google surpassing all other phones, it proves to be a big success.

Stephen P. Anderson put together this wonderful presentation explaining what sets the iPhone apart from all the other phones. There is a lot to learn from Apple.

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I guess you may by now that I am bit of a “presentation freak”. Every time you are doing a presentation, you have an objective. Right ? Well, I hope so, why else would you do the presentation in the first place ? Therefore, it is very important to put a lot of thought into the visuals and the words that come with it. Just watch this great example: Stephen Colbert explains on Comedy Central the rebranding of Cingular to AT&T!

The same could have been presented with tons of slides and bullet points. So, do you think this would have the same effect ?

Apple just posted a record revenue of $7.1 billion and record net quarterly profit of $1.0 billion for the last quarter of calendar year 2006. The company showed 28 percent sales growth in Macs and 50 percent growth in iPods over the year-ago quarter. Do you now of any other consumer electronics/computer vendor enjoying such growth rates these days ?

So what’s their special secret ? Apple are not really inventing new product categories or at least they haven’t in a while. They rather take an existing market segment where something needs to be fixed. Then they design a stylish product with an emphasis on usability/simplicity for it that integrates well with other components (computers, the internet, …). So using these products is easy and fun. They are selling something that makes people feel good (=cool, sexy, happy, …). Something to be proud of and to make them recommend it to others.

Want an example ? So tell me, when was the last time you made an attractive young woman sing a love song about one of your products ? Watch this video and you will know what I mean.

Apple develop products from top down. Design, usability and target price are first, then the engineers have to find ways to built the product around those requirements. That’s not how tech companies usually work. They often go the other way around - engineers go in with things they have done or things that would be worth doing. When marketing comes in with requirements, there are already many things set in stone. Everybody compromises somewhere in the middle. The result - feature rich products with bad design and high levels of complexity. Basically, not so cool products !

Now compare this to Apple: sexy, easy to use, great experience, something thats fun to use and to be proud of - no matter if its iPod Shuffle, iPhone, Apple TV, iMacs or MacBooks. That’s all there is to it. (though I guess having Steve Jobs on board won’t hurt either)

Apple finally announced their long awaited entry into the mobile phone market at MacWorldExpo 2007 in San Francisco. Steve Jobs started his keynote with the words: “Every once in a while a new revolutionary product comes along that changes everything … let me introduce the iPhone“. And I think he is right. The iPhone will change the mobile phone market the same way the iPod changed the market for MP3 players a couple of years ago.

Some of the features of the iPhone include: Continue Reading »

I think this quote by Mark Twain sets a good stage as we approach the end of the year:

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So through off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.

Follow your passions, feel the emotions and enjoy your life. I wish everyone a happy and successful New Year!

There is a big hype around personal productivity these days. New websites are appearing almost daily, promising to help in the search for the perfect solution.
I am not surprised by this trend. The stress-level of the average business person has become almost unbearable. There is big demand for personal productivity systems to help us cope with our daily workload and all those things entering our lives. Just look at 43folders, DIY Planner, Getting-Things-Done (GTD), Franklyn Covey and Total-Workday-Control (TWC). They are all really worth a look - you will definitely find some great input to increase your efficiency.

But, beware! The search for the perfect system is a dangerous one, because:

1) there is a risk to get over-organized - this is something I experienced myself: you implement a sophisticated system that becomes either very complicated to maintain or which simply is incompatible with your personality
2) you are easily traped by the temptation to keep on trying new systems - as a result you will wind up less productive, because “searching for the system” or “improving it” becomes more time/energy consuming than the productivity gains you get through using the system.

So, my advice on this is very simple (and I admit I am sometimes guilty of not following it through myself): Continue Reading »

Do you know this feeling ? Sometimes you are really struggling to get things done effectively, while at other times you are highly productive and everything seems so easy. Well, at those times when everything goes so easy you are in the state of “flow”.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, author of “Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience”; researched this topic and describes flow as “being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost.”.

Wouldn’t it be great to get yourself into this state, whenever you want ? Nick Smith shares this vision and wrote The little book of flow on his Life 2.0 blog.

The premise of this essay is that those exquisite but all too rare moments when we experience ‘flow’, when we are truly creative, happy and intuitively know exactly what is needed, are simply those instances when we glimpse our original and true nature. It sets out to show how, instead of trying to fathom the conditions for flow, we can realise this ‘true nature’ and make ‘flow’ our normal way of being, wherever we are and in whatever we do.

Nick has some excellent points on how to get yourself into the state of “flow”. A word of warning though: this is not easy to digest. The printed version of this article weighs in at over 30 pages, but its well worth the time and effort.