November 2011
2 posts
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Fred Lebow and the NYC Marathon: Thinking Big and...
Today, on Thirteen (TV, not online), I saw Run for Your Life, the documentary on Fred Lebow, the runner who dreamed big, lived what he loved to do, and created one of the most successful start-ups the City has ever seen: The New York City Marathon.
Most years, we head down to 4th Avenue, in Brooklyn, to watch the marathon, but I had never known its history or thought about what a huge task it...
October 2011
2 posts
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WatchMusic break: From a 2011 release by Des Ark, an intriguingly lush, raw, dissonant, harmonious, humorous, ferocious band from North Carolina. http://lovitt.bandcamp.com/album/dont-rock-the-boat-sink-the-f-cker
5 tags
On ComputerShopper.com: My Review of the Kobo... →
At $129, the Kobo eReader Touch Edition is $10 cheaper than the Nook Simple Touch and $30 more expensive than the Kindle Touch coming in November. With powerful font controls, a slim/light form factor, and ePub compatibility (allowing it to read the most universal ebook format, available through public libraries), the Kobo remains a compelling alternative (even though it may become less prevalent...
August 2011
1 post
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On Entrepreneur.com: My Roundup of Four Gas Price... →
On Entrepreneur.com, I wrote a roundup of four apps that help you save money on gas, based on your location. Here’s the grain of salt: “Unfortunately, these apps won’t point you to free gas or truly cheap gas — only gas fairies can do that.” Let me know if you’ve had luck with these (GasBuddy, TripTik, Mapquest, Poynt) or other apps.
June 2011
2 posts
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Women Over 40 - This Book's for You: Get DARE From...
My MBA classmate Liz DiMarco Weinmann just released her first book, Get DARE From Here! ($23.95, 330 pp.: https://www.createspace.com/3626200).
Soon after we started our MBA program at NYU, in 2007, Liz told me she was thinking of writing a book someday. She knew I’d been in book publishing/marketing for 15+ years at that point - and I knew she really would write that book (unlike most...
3 tags
New experiment: Wearing my special occasion shoes...
In 1996 or so, my newly wed bride and I were invited to my boss’s husband’s 50th birthday party.
We were excited. It was our first grown up party since our wedding, to be held in Ponte’s, a nice restaurant on Desbrosses, in Tribeca.
I got a haircut, a new shirt, and a pair of Florsheim oxfords. The memory stands out because those are things I rarely do. Two years earlier, I was in a post-punk...
May 2011
2 posts
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My Entrepreneur.com Article Is Up: Four Sales Lead... →
If you use e-mail marketing, telemarketing, or direct mail, check out my roundup of four services (Jigsaw, InfoUSA, Hoover’s, and Sales Genie), “When You’re Hungry for Sales, Consider These Lead-Gen Tools.”
Here’s a snippet:
Using a mix of advanced online searching and old-fashioned elbow grease, sales-lead generators gather, cross-reference, clean, and deliver...
March 2011
1 post
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Here Comes the Sun - It's Taking Initiative
Three friends just had babies, two nieces and an honorary nephew had birthdays, two friends dodged an earthquake, and a friend with a wife and two kids just landed a finance job after a long post-meltdown stretch. Let’s keep that sun coming.
Let’s keep it going. One friend just opened a new office for her practice, and one friend left a giant company to co-found his own...
January 2011
2 posts
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Remembering the Real Mick
My Grandpa passed away on January 12th. He would have been 96 yesterday. One summer, he played this song for me (Stevie Wonder’s I Just Called), in between some Tennessee Ernie Ford and country classics, while he drove me through my family’s hometown of Monticello, Indiana. Always up for hard candy, a snort of brandy, some KFC, and a laugh, Papa John - or Mick, as they called him at work - had a...
October 2010
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My Review on ComputerShopper.com: Your New York...
I just wrote my first review for ComputerShopper.com: Amazon Kindle (Third Generation, 2010 Version). Take a look!
Toward the end, I look to newspaper subscriptions as a good way to rationalize the purchase (in addition to an estimated overall savings of 30 percent on e-book purchases versus paper books).
For example, the savings from subscribing toThe New York Times on the Kindle is large...
May 2010
1 post
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Got Trash? Reframing with Price and Packaging
As this Rocketboom story explains, nycgarbage.com sells cubes of NYC trash — artfully arranged — at $50 a box. What’s interesting is that what started as a proof of the power of packaging turned into a proof of the power of pricing — increasing from $10 per cube to $50. Ultimately, the success of the product and the pricing seems to have improved its quality, too —...
February 2010
1 post
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Comments on the iPad Launch
I do some editing and copywriting for a computer-book publisher, Pragmatic Bookshelf, but I was pleasantly surprised when its magazine editor, Michael Swaine, asked me to comment on the iPad for PragPub magazine, just a day after Steve Jobs’ announcement.
Click here to visit the PragPub Website.
“This is an Age-of-Aquarius moment for publishing,” I say. “Authors will have more...
December 2009
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Web 2.0 Summary Video
Professor Michael Wesch created the following video - it’s “Web 2.0 in five minutes” - using “CamStudio for the screen captures and Sony Vegas for the panning/cropping/zooming animations.”
Beyond the content itself—remarkably current for a March 2007 release—we should study this use of media. It represents an emerging (if not “new”) way for businesses...
October 2009
1 post
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Book Promotion, the Gary Vaynerchuk Way
From my perspective, Gary Vaynerchuk—the boy from Belarus who grew his family’s liquor store in New Jersey into a multimillion-dollar business, and who is now teaching others to use customer service (especially via social media) to grow their businesses—has set a new standard for all authors supporting their books.
I’m piecing together a write-up of his efforts—and maybe a college...