Business and Sucess BlogAs the guitarist in Spinal Tap taught us all, “11 is better than 10″. This year with the economy down and the music industry surviving on iTunes coat tails, NAMM is pulling out all the stops.
Instead of cutting back NAMM is promising the show in Anaheim for 2011 to be the beat ever. We have the exclusive video of the new LED guitar in hand, and we’ll let you know how it goes.
Scott
As we move into the final stretch of the 2010 holiday shopping season, everybody’s asking me what are the Kuhltoys to get? There are some obvious choices, like the iPad and iPhone which are still flying off the shelves. Then there are some not so obvious choices.
This year’s giftgiving is probably taking on a new meaning for your family as it is for most families across the country. Instead of gadget gizmo he things that really don’t serve any purpose, people are looking for things that are slightly more practical. I can’t say for sure if any of these things are more practical but they are things we use everyday.
Yes, Really. Ok, not quite yet but we are getting there.
When the iPhone first came out, Steve Jobs told us that it changed everything. I didn’t believe him and stuck with my BlackBerry. At First it turned out to be the right decision. The first iPhones were very limited in what they could do. Now that I have an iPhone 4G, it changed a few things, but not quite everything. The high resolution retina display quite amazing. The camera isn’t quite a replacement for my pocket digital, but is pretty good. The thing I like best, I didn’t discover until I had the phone over a month. Voice control. That did change every thing I did with the phone. The voice that talks back sounds just like the BlackBerry Voice only she is a much better listener and can do more than just “call home”.
The voice control functionality on the iPhone is significantly more robust than the voice Control on my BlackBerry. I can’t speak for the Torch because I got the iPhone 4G first. Admittedly there were some growing pains with the iPhone 4G. Still my biggest complaint is the lack of ability to invite people to meeting. It just blows my mind this simple feature is still missing. Who in the world can have a business meeting with only themselves. What I do is email a second account on my laptop, and then create the appointment on my laptop. Hey I guess Mr. Jobs was right there too, it did change how I make appointments. He didn’t say “it made everything better”, he just said “it changes everything.” The other function I missed from the BlackBerry was the “to do list” that synced with MS Outlook or Google. Everything I want to do goes on to the to do list. Each night I sort out my list deciding what really is going to be done and what was just a fun idea at the time. There is a company called Appigo that makes a pretty decent to do list that will sync with Microsoft Outlook. It isn’t quite as clean as the BlackBerry sync but good enough. Read the rest of this entry »
In keeping with my philosophy of focus, my inputs to the kuhltoys store and blog will be related to creating a better business and a better life through focus. I know it sounds odd to talk about business and toys especially kuhltoys in the same sentence. Sometime ago when my stepdad visited my office, he laughed and said “now I get it.” What he was referring to was my desk.
I have two large screens with what I call the supercomputer (An HP Quadcore with 8GB Ram), Blue Snowball and Logitech THX speakers. I’ve had it for so long I don’t think anything of it. With this setup does it let me get all the information I need to make a better decision in front of me at the same time. I realized some time ago a lot of business owners can use this. By having enough screen space in front of me I can have a Skype file open with a video conference to a customer, a log me in remote session and the customer’s accounting all on the screen at the same time.
When I entered the Information Resource Management program of the Business School at San Jose State University, I heard a prediction of the future. A professor who was also a research fellow for IBM just down the road talked about the future of the world of information and how Judge Green destroyed it.
Judge Green is the man who single handedly broke up the largest telephone company in the world, AT&T. In doing so, Judge Green created several Regional Bell Operating Companies or RBOC’s (pronounced reboks). The professor claimed this was then end of the dream for AT&T and IBM. He also said the consumer was going to lose out. Read the rest of this entry »
kuhltoys