fastcodesign:

A Beautiful Cheat Sheet For Two Dozen Espresso-Based Drinks

Ugh. Just when you kinda sorta started to get a handle on the wide world of wine, along comes another new liquid metric for how cosmopolitan you really are (or aren’t): coffee. 

Must-knows:

Astell&Kern AK100 MQS Portable Player System

- Looking great, 16-hour playback time, weight 122 grams

- One potential path for future of portable music

- Major online music stores need to start supporting the hires formats

- Market is currently lead by HD Tracks, iTunes could even pick them up - their store has rather terrible user experience

- Proper content price point need to be figured out

- Download times and disk space need to be reconsidered, single album might take 400 MB of space

http://shop.iriverinc.com/index.php/astell-kern/astell-kern-32gb-portable-hi-fi-audio-mqs-player.html/

kateoplis:

Today in Ecuador 

Practical marketing tool lessons for entrepreneurs

Lots of written online thought that should be found, is never seen by anyone. Make sure it is not your company.

Blog conversion rates are difficult to manage. One entrepreneur used whitepaper approach with contact detail form. This produced produced 200 fresh leads within weeks, when blogging attracted only few responses.

Format/media fit is the key. As professional, choose the storytelling style that fits your schedule, content production skills, preferred tools and location. Produce inspiring, original thinking, in beautiful format, easy digest and share.

Finnish -speaking language market is challenging. If you split test between Finnish language tweets and english launguage tweets, you get very different response. Sometimes you feel that you lose the main effect.

Re-use and re-cycle you social media presense. Dynamic content, such as events, launches, training should be delivered in your homepage. Map them to your homepage and save time in update cycles.

Mixed media produces better results. Photos, videos and text improve search engine hits.

Use social actions to promote your expertise and brand. Share experiences. Use your mobile, idle time to favorites, retweets, likes and comments.

When it comes to Facebook, don’t be afraid to use the paid advertising tools. They are one of the most modern and cost efficient ways to promote products and events online. Study Edgerank and do trials. Commercially triggered algorithms try to make sure, that your passionate, killer updates will remain lost in flow of paid and unpaid updatest. However, relatively low cost makes advertising an attractive tool for entrepreneur.

In Facebook, keep your updates fresh, add images (but don’t include too much text to the image), write quality content, ask dynamic questions and aim for interactions.

Notes from training session by Dick Lindertz and Riitta Raesmaa.

Skiing on a bright day - lakes, forests and open air

Helsinki loves wintertime.

It’s been the coldest month of March for decades. Rare, clear skies and sun reflecting from the snow.

This shot was taken off the coast of southern Helsinki, Finland. I used my 15 year old dsrl Olympus E-1 with Zuiko Digital 70-300mm lens. No post-edits whatsoever.

What do you think?

Goods to be owned, goods to be sold

Last week I heard a presentation by an entrepreneur, who was not very explicit about the sales figures. Consumer goods, 3 years, 500k invested.

After the presentation, I asked where the cash has gone so far. I was told among other things, that 200k was bound to physical inventory.

I did not go in to details, but I got the impression that the amount was not sold goods, it was pure inventory.

Also, I presented calculation, how many items they would need to sell, to get same size of cash flow as they were seeking investment.

I was a bit shocked about their operational management and inventory turnaround. But, its consumer goods, not software.

People: Discover and manage your work in progress size, inventory, good not sold, waste, depreciation, or whatever you wish to call it

That is, if you’re not in physical storage, bodyshopping, real estate, warehouse, raw material business, cap intensive business.

At least, that is what they teach in business schools around the world, Finance 101 - Operations 101. So, back to basics.

Valuable Meetings, Part 1 …

As I began writing another set of meeting notes that are shared between meeting participants, I started rethinking.

If the meeting proved to be a good one - I had a genuine feeling I could help them, I start a communicative process. As I close the meeting, I make a promise to follow up with my viewpoints, observations, rates and offer direct proposal for short term action points - all this within a timeframe.

For each prospective customer, I spend 30 to 60 minutes thinking about the new information I learned from them in the meeting.

What were their responses to you speculative questions? How did they articulate their current challenges? What was the level of openness? What were the facts presented in the meeting? Did you reiterate and validate the findings live in the meeting? Good work.

I try to scope and stretch my thinking and summarize my findings, make a short analysis and provide diagnosis. I try to scramble and look for online material that supports the thinking. Like I would do as if they already were my clients. I provide a description for solution to their challenge, but in the manner of a teaser. Teaser should be something intriguing and valuable. Something that is definately discussed internally by the prospect.

There are way too many meeting notes in the world, that don’t really respect the time and effort already invested to the relationship by the participants. So, let’s stop wasting each others time. I hate to remind that also saying “No, we cannot help you” is one of the best ways to save time.

True meaning of focusing on prospect communication is to force yourself to really think about the fresh challenge and cases thrown at you in the meeting. If you cannot come up with valuable insights then, can you ever do that?

Also, you can directly move you focus to the next prospects and not worry about forgetting your viewpoints and the actual storyline of the prospect. When they follow-up instead, you pick up your - precious meeting notes!