Writing, marketing and technology
Steve Jobs obsessively tinkered and polished Apple’s products (and his yacht, apparently). Jonathan Ive said that Apple doesn’t do focus groups. As Jobs once remarked, before Henry Ford, if you asked people what they wanted they would have asked for a more efficient horse. Mark Zuckerberg built the first version of Facebook in a few [...]
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Today I spent 45 minutes helping my father-in-law fix a problem that had been caused by a kludgy bit of UI design in Windows 7. It has so many options and buttons and ways to do things that it’s really easy for a naive user to do something that appears logical but actually causes real [...]
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Online applications give me a competitive edge. I want to be a ‘big little company’ with the same (or better) IT capabilities as the biggest of my clients. I try to make the maximum use of online applications because they let me deploy new capabilities quickly without adding to my IT or admin burdens. This [...]
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A month ago, I went to see Jonathan Ive interviewed by Sir Christopher Frayling at the Royal College of Art Innovation Night. As senior vice-president of design at Apple, Ive is responsible for some of the iconic designs of the last decade, including the iMac, iPod and iPhone. Since he rarely gives interviews and Apple [...]
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Thanks to Allister Frost for this link to 40 Useful and Creative Infographics. Sometimes a picture is worth way more than 1,000 words. Writers need to remember this. I worked on an article for Wired and my research ended up at about 30,000 words or something. Their graphic design department shrunk it to a two-page [...]
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Email Etiquette 101. How to use BCC so you don’t send everyone’s email address to everyone else. Great video on YouTube that shows how to do it in different email programs. Internet safety 101. The Get Safe Online blog has some great videos that teach the basics of internet safety – how to avoid rip-offs, [...]
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I’m working to improve my site (more on this later). In the process, I came across a number of online tools that are really helping. They’re all free, so you can’t beat the price. Must-use tools I use these tools every day. Highly recommended. Site24x7. This free online service pings your site hourly and graphs [...]
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Matthew Stibbe is CEO of Articulate Marketing and Turbine, the easy, online way to deal with office paperwork. He edits Golf Hotel Whiskey and writes the Forbes Aviator column.
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