Up Market |
- Encyclopedia Britannica Moves to Digital-Only Format
- Trust in Creativity
- Where to Find Sales Reps for Your Products
- Are You Building a Business That Can Stay in Business?
| Encyclopedia Britannica Moves to Digital-Only Format Posted: 25 Mar 2012 09:00 AM PDT
"Everyone will want to call this the end of an era, and I understand that," Britannica president Jorge Cauz said in an interview with CNN Money. "But there's no sad moment for us. I think outsiders are more nostalgic about the books than I am." The announcement comes as sad news for people who stand by the printed word, but Cauz said the decision was a long-time coming. Today, the printed encyclopedias account for less than one percent of the company's total sales. The online version, first available in 1994, brings in 15 percent, while educational materials such as curriculums make up the remaining 85 percent. A few decades ago, however, Britannicas sitting on a shelf served as a status symbol. And although the majority of Americans today have access to the Internet at work or home, one-third—some 100 million people—do not, according to the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project. “The print set is an icon, but it’s an icon that doesn’t do justice to how much we’ve changed over the years,” Cauz said. "The younger generation consumes data differently now, and we want to be there.” The company has competition in Google, Wikipedia, and an online database of information that grows by the minute. It offers a digital subscription for $70 per year and an app version for $1.99 a month. “Google’s algorithm doesn’t know what’s fact or what’s fiction. So Wikipedia is often the No. 1 or No. 2 result on search. But I’d bet a lot of money that most people would rather use Britannica than Wikipedia," Cauz said. However, he added that he doesn't expect the digital Britannica to overtake Wikipedia. “Wikipedia is a wonderful technology for collecting everything from great insights to lies and innuendos. It’s not all bad or all good, just uneven. It’s the murmur of society, a million voices rather than a single informed one.” Britannica was first published in Scotland in 1768. It printed an updated set of books every two years. This latest announcement makes the 2010 set its final. To date, only 8,000 copies have been sold. Photo Credit: Todd Mecklem  |
| Posted: 25 Mar 2012 06:00 AM PDT
Providers, on the other hand, should be careful when choosing a buyer that doesn't seem to have a realistic view on when and how much they are expecting returns on their investment, that is, investment in your work. Too often, especially in mobile app development, it seems to be the case that the buyer expects rapid returns which most of the time results in disappointment. The craftsman-type provider must adopt a style that fits both the worldview of his potential clients and his own worldview. This is when trust becomes a foundation that supports the project. When there is trust, the specifics do not matter that much. In a multimedia production, for example, professionals acknowledge the margin of error in the hope that the product, video, game, interactive book or web site, will deliver the desired effect and yield a response. Trust allows for inaccurate communication, strange behavior and irrational reasoning during a project. It allows the qualitative and the quantitative to mix and match. It allows all which is humane and it creates a firm basis for creativity and productivity. Trust is not disposable nor instant. It cannot be demonstrated in a week. The challenge for the online service provider is to find out a way to not really package trust, but to frame it in a way that attracts the buyer seeking your services. Photo Credit: See-ming Lee 李思明 SML  |
| Where to Find Sales Reps for Your Products Posted: 24 Mar 2012 03:00 PM PDT If you plan to grow your business into the wholesale arena and offer your products to numerous retail outlets, you may want to hire a sales representative.  |
| Are You Building a Business That Can Stay in Business? Posted: 24 Mar 2012 12:00 PM PDT
In today's world one of the unquestionable benefits we are currently enjoying is the plethora of tools that allow a business to start-up, augment, research, or just plain operate for absolutely free. It's a time in history that has never been so rich with options and yet that list seems to be getting larger with even better tools, but there is a side that most pay no attention to. "What would happen to your business if tomorrow what was now free ended and you needed to now pay for it? Or worse, was no longer available." Not some distance in the future but let's say next week or month. What would you do? Many believe things like this would never happen and brush it off as crazy talk, but I contend if you're brushing it off you could find yourself at the edge of a very scary black hole when you least expect it. Just ask any Amazon® affiliate caught in the tax debacle that happened in California. In the blink of an eye thousands found that they were basically out of business with no recourse. What would happen if Google® decided tomorrow to charge for their mail service, or their doc's platform? What would you do? Don't say it would never happen. Google has a history of deleting or changing them. The latest example of this can be found if you don't like their new privacy policy that affects all of their widgets. Do you stay as your customers leave or vice versa? Would you pour more of your resources and energy in Twitter® if next month you had to pay per word but could use as many as you like rather than limited to how many your allowed for free? Would you even use it at all if that were the case? There have been some recent cases where Apple® has arbitrarily pulled some very popular podcasts from their service for what they deemed "unauthorized" Apple logos or pictures. Even a picture of a real apple was questioned. Pleading your case and trying to get reinstated is an arduous process and still may not be enough to resume. These courts answer to themselves not to anyone else. Rightly or wrongly, "It is what it is." But just how would you continue if you no longer had access to the service is my point? Would you continue? Could you? You need to think about these scenarios if you want to be a business. Just because you may not operate in the old world of bricks and mortar does not mean you can escape a fundamental principle of business. People scoffed at similar notions when I expressed and wrote about what businesses in the brick and mortar realm should contemplate when Greece first showed signs of unrest, months before anyone even heard of the Occupy movement or the mayhem that followed. (So much so I re-posted it when OWS troubles first appeared.) Businesses suddenly found themselves closed, unreachable, or worse. So I ask you to contemplate the most fundamental business principle. What's your plan to stay in business? Because anything can happen, and usually does! © 2012 Mark St.Cyr Photo Credit: Ѕolo  |
After 244 years of producing reference books, Encyclopedia Britannica's publishers announced recently that they will no longer print the 32-volume, 129-pound sets of encyclopedias. Instead, the material will exist in an exclusively digital format.
Getting picky on specifics in the beginning might kill a project that was bound to be successful. Buyers often want security and if they don't hear the right signals, or if they hear wrong signals, they often won't have the courage or the patience to pursue and work through the project.
What's becoming apparent across the business landscape is many new entrepreneurs are building businesses for the purpose of not being beholden to any so-called boss. They see that the old model of a "job" is either dead or dying and rightly so are venturing out looking to take control of their own destiny. However what many are not realizing is they may be just changing one taskmaster for another without being aware.| You are subscribed to email updates from Upmarket To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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