The Convenience of Listening

19156424.jpgImagine if you could sell all of your seminars, CDs and books on one little iPod for, say, $4997. Then you charge a subscription fee for people to receive new material as you create it. Think about it.Who wouldn’t want all that shelf space back?Who wouldn’t want the ease and simplicity of one little unit you can carry anywhere to get the information you want anytime?Who wouldn’t love to walk the dog, work out, or go for a drive an have instant access rather than being tied to a computer or bulky CD or cassette player?It’s genius! Imagine if you had the Tony Robbins iPod, the Robert Allen iPod, the Mark Victor Hansen iPod….And it doesn’t stop there. You could have spiritual books, classics, language tutorials and more. You could have “Men are From Mars Women are From Venus” by John Gray on an iPod, works by Deepak Chopra, Henry David Thoreau, and just about anyone you can think of. You could then categorize your iPods according to topic, “Classics”, “Spiritual”, “Business”, “Leadership”, and so on.

Face it, music is fleeting. For most people, they’re fed up with the same song after hearing it just a few times. But how many times do you reread classics like, “Think and Grow Rich” by Napoleon Hill or “How to Win Friends and Influence People” by Dale Carnegie? Over and over again. Podcasting is here to stay.

 

 

“Top Grading”

Brad Smart
Brad Smart

Listen to Virtual Book Tour…

   
Brad Smart is a world renowned industrial psychologist and consultant with nearly 30 years in practice. His clients include several Fortune 500 companies including General Electric and Allied Signal. He is the author of two previous books and has been featured in The Wall Street Journal.

During this 1 hour Virtual Book Tour, Brad reveals the story behind his latest book, Top Grading. The book’s promise is: “How Leading Companies Win by Hiring, Coaching and Keeping the Best People”.

Click here to add this book to your library.

HAPPY HOLIDAYS!

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Better Communication

30399593.jpgBecause of technology, the world is at a turning point in the way people communicate and in the way people monetize their content. With the advent of podcasting and small, affordable media player, communicating content to other people has never been easier, faster, or more convenient.

A song can be downloaded almost instantly over the internet to go with you wherever you go. Instead of carrying a CD player that holds one CD with about a dozen songs, we can carry one small media player in a shirt pocket that holds hundreds of songs or hours of instructional audio.

We don’t have to drive to the store to buy the music or wait for it to arrive at our house in the mail. It doesn’t get any more convenient than that.

Take Portable Media Expo for example – I see this expo growing as fast as Comdex has.

Will You Use it if You Don’t Understand It?

32169674.jpgConsumer Usability 

When going to http://podcasts.yahoo.com/ I see something that I’m very familiar with; audio button, listen, subscribe. 

These are going to be icons – a meme. This is the beginning of a meme, very exciting! I go there right now. I’m looking at it. There’s a podcast that says ‘Unicef′. I click listen and what happens? There’s a little box that pops up. There’s fast forward, fast rewind, play, speed, and volume. This is brilliant. Why is it brilliant? Usability

I can do this from anywhere in the world.Consumption usability. We talked about the power of directories. iTunes owns that. Now the power of usability; Yahoo owns it. All I have to do is click the “Listen” button and boom, we′re there.

If I subscribe to it, how easy is that? All of a sudden, I go into Yahoo ID and password and boom, they have me that way. I think Yahoo has a different intention behind what they′re doing here than Apple. It may not be about monetization. It may be about building their Yahoo database, whereas Apple′s intention is appeasing entertainment. 

The fact is I don′t think that I’m alone when it comes to understanding new technology. I didn′t realize in the beginning that iTunes was on-line. Well http://Podcast.Yahoo.com is online and it has a subdirectory. Usability. 

Paul Colligan recently had his biggest day of podcast downloads ever after sending out an e-mail letting people know they could go to a Web site and click to listen. Is this a coincidence? No, I don′t think so. It all has to do with usability. 

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