I wrote earlier about how I was underwhelmed by my Apple iPad after the first few weeks of use.  With my iPhone and my laptop always handy, I just never had a real need to use it.   Now I need to (slightly) revise that opinion.
I just came back from a 2 week vacation with my kids, my wife, and her parents, and the iPad was in constant use by all 6 of us.  The USA Today app is fantastic (while its free) and we all used it to get …

I wanted to use my iPad for at least a few weeks before writing about my experience, first with the setup and then with my usage, and what I think the future holds for the device.
Wi-Fi reliability. During the first few days after the iPad’s release, the most common media topic was the iPad’s poor Wi-Fi reception.  I was so concerned about it that I actually logged onto Apple to cancel my order, figuring I would wait to see what ultimately came of the issue.  Even though my unit hadn’t …

What a coincidence that on the day I finished listening to the audio version of The Big Short by Michael Lewis, the SEC announced charges against Goldman Sachs for improprieties from the subprime mortgage mess.  A lot has been written about Goldman’s central role in the subprime industry since the meltdown, so it is not a surprise that they were the first investment bank to be targeted.  Will they be the last?  Only time will tell.

The “Book Smarts” series of articles provide a summary of the key themes from a recent business book.
How The Mighty Fall (by Jim Collins) is a must-read for anyone studying innovation. The author analyzed a number of companies to try and determine why some of the greatest companies in history had fallen. His conclusion:
“I’ve come to see institutional decline like a staged disease: harder to detect but easier to cure in the early stages, easier to detect but harder to curer in the later stages. An institution …

There have been several dozen very popular business books published in the last decade, and the best way to retain and utilize the key points of any books are to write them down in a synopsis like this.
The Tipping Point was written by Malcolm Gladwell and published in the early part of the decade.  He defines the “Tipping Point” as “that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire.”  This concept is a critical one for business people to understand, as …

If the success of a book was based on the number of pages that I underlined or wrote notes on, then Free: The Future of a Radical Price by Chris Anderson might become the most successful book of all time.  Obviously that probably won’t happen, but by the time I finished my pen was out of ink.
What struck me first were the incredible number of examples – not just the known examples like Google and Facebook, but many companies and products that I had never heard of before.  Did you …

Until recently, if you asked me “what is the most important business book you’ve read in the last decade”, I would have instantly answered The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton Christensen.  Almost daily you see this book played out in real life – upstarts that are innovating , challenging, disrupting and even destroying industries and established companies.
But ask me that question now, and I have the more difficult choice between The Innovator’s Dilemma and Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business by Jeff Howe.   It …

I was in desperate need of a productivity “pick me up” – a personal database to house those websites, notes, articles, pictures, and anything else digital or scannable that I came across and wanted to save and reference later. I use Microsoft’s OneNote 2007 as an online binder for taking notes with my tablet, but it just didn’t seem to be the best solution for a broad personal database.
I had heard a lot of positive buzz about Evernote (www.evernote.com) so I decided to try it out. (With their tagline …

Add video recorders to the list of industries being disrupted by “good enough” products that, with less features than the established players, become both easier to use and less expensive.
Have you seen the Flip Mino? It’s the size of a small cell phone with this little, tiny screen that can’t be bigger than 1 inch across (you can barely tell what it is recording), and is so light I forget when it’s in my pocket.