Sunday, October 16, 2005

 

Bubbling about E-Brochures, and Misinterpreting the Bubble and the non-Print Decision, and Other Stuff

WSJ's OpinionJournal.com identifies the five best books about how the Internet affects business. Most were published in the Internet boom of the late 1990s. It's really important to separate the stock market bubble with what really happened to people's daily lives: an information marketplace where there is far less friction and trouble in securing information; an expectation that everything can be "googled" or you could at least get close to what you need; and young consumers who are immersed in a world of constant connectivity. Internet bubble? People always made stupid decisions about stocks, but look at the infrastructure that bubble left behind. The advice in these books are quite relevant.
http://www.opinionjournal.com/weekend/fivebest/?id=110007408

Speaking of that, the Greater Phoenix Convention and Visitors Bureau is switching to e-brochures. Here are highlights from the article about it (the full article is at http://www.dmnews.com/cgi-bin/artprevbot.cgi?article_id=34357 )


This is why the first step in repositioning the printing business is recognizing the significant benefits of e-publishing. Why couldn't a printer have handled this job for the visitors bureau? Why couldn't it have been the printers idea? Or is someone sitting in the printer's office saying "the economy is bad; they don't order brochures like they used to." Or perhaps they are thinking "those brochures are probably printed offshore because labor in China is so cheap." Or maybe it's "our competitors undercut our prices."
See the e-brochure page http://phoenixcvb.terralever.com/
Their main site is http://www.visitphoenix.com/
As written up by one of the developers http://email.exacttarget.com/clients-case-studies.aspx?casestudyID=49

WSJ has a good article about laptops in classrooms. Some teachers are finding them disruptive as students IM, surf, and do e-mail during class. There's also a change in the way people sit in classrooms. Traditionally, students sit in back (much like Catholics kid ourselves the way we sit at Mass) with active students sitting up front in the form of a "T"; today, the position of electric outlets determines sitting location. These teachers can complain all they want. I still would read Captain America hidden in a textbook in the back of the classroom if I had the chance; on days, of course, when I was not reading my hidden copy of U.S. News & World Report.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB112924976699568321.html?mod=todays_us_marketplace

WSJ also had an interesting article on how the storage business has heated up, mainly from the growing use of digital images, static and moving. It also be that no one ever cleans their hard drives. I do find that keeping everything comes in handy. I just keep a directory where I keep every e-mail attachment I've ever received and then add copies as I use them into appropriate directories. Ah, the days when I felt so emboldened by my purchase of a 100MB drive for $1000 are clearly gone. Now you can get 1GB memory sticks and no one really thinks about it any more.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB112925257994168388.html?mod=todays_us_page_one
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB112924976699568321.html?mod=todays_us_marketplace

Wi-fi "cloud" over rural Oregon: 700 square miles of wi-fi access, free for the taking!
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/16/AR2005101600532_pf.html

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