Sometimes it is  a bit hard to be an early adopter. But I like testing new things and I have a good track record for spotting successes and failures very early based on my first tests.

I am using my bicycle every day, all year round in Stockholm and love it. So I was naturally intrigued when I read about the upcoming ”invisible bike helmet” Hövding a year ago. It is an airbag contained in a collar around your neck. It is activated by motion control sensors when you are falling off your bike and inflates all around your head, offering radically better head protection than traditional bike helmets, this of course appealed to me.

I also admired the way this Swedish startup handled their PR. They hired professional photographers and models to produce spectacular product photos and seeded them to media all over the world, gaining a lot of publicity. So I immediately pre-ordered a Hövding, for delivery in spring 2011.

Production was delayed, so the first batch was not delivered until November. I eagerly unboxed my Hövding and immediately began to feel that this was perhaps not an ideal product for me. The next day, after having tried it on during 3 bike rides in the city I decided to return it.

Why? Well, here is my personal impression of Hövding.

1. It is definitely not invisible, it looks like a bulky big medical neck support and it weighs 0,7 kg, which is a lot heavier than a bike helmet.
2. It is quite difficult to put on, as you have to pull a small zipper under your chin, and then turn it on by fastening a small button. Both are hard to locate and feel that they are in the right positions since you cannot see them. After two days of frustration it still took me minutes to get the helmet fastened and activated, compared to around 4 secs with my old helmet. There must be ways to do this much easier and faster!
3. It gave me a suffocating feeling, wrapped around my neck, and limiting my ability to turn my head sideways. In this cold winter weather, I did manage to put a thin scarf under it, but then it felt very tight and I was still cold around my throat. I also suspect that it will be way to warm to wear in the summer, when I definitely want my neck to be cooled by the air.
4. Since it is quite heavy and bulky, it is a drag to carry around when not in use. And it costs €400 so I am worried about theft and forgetting it in places I visit. My old bike helmet I simply put inside my bike lock, so I never have to carry it around. Since Hövding  has a serial number and can be synced to my computer, I suggest that Hövding looks at the Find my iPhone function or something similar that might deter theft and help me locate it.

So I am back to my old bike helmet. I still love the concept of having a head airbag, but think that Hövding will not sell volumes until they have improved the design to make it much more convenient to use. And lowered the price.

I still have not seen any real independent tests of Hövding, will be interesting to see if others react like me.

The big discussion around ebooks is usually:
Should ebooks be cheaper than printed books?
This is the wrong question!

The pricing of printed books and ebooks:
two fundamentally different ways to charge for content

Buying an e-book cannot be compared to buying a printed book:

You buy a paper book. Then you own it, it’s yours. You can give it away or sell it as you like.

But you don’t buy  an ebook, you license it. You don’t own the file that you paid for and downloaded. You cannot give it away and you can certainly not sell it. However, Kindle and Nook allows you to loan your ebooks to friends for 14 days.

This means that the price of a printed book cannot easily be compared to the price of an ebook.

The gut reaction of many is that this difference is negative for ebooks: “If I pay for an ebook I want to own it, to be able to control it…” But in my view the licensing model of ebooks is actually better for us book lovers in several ways.

Frédéric Filloux expresses this difference and its benefits elegantly in the blog Monday Notes: “Buying a right of use instead of an actual file will profoundly change the landscape and the role of the different players.” He also writes about other consequences of this, so read his post!

Also, when you think of it, we are in fact used to this licensing model for other types of media, more on this further down here.

First about the price itself:

Why on earth is the discussion of ebook pricing still based on production and distribution costs?

People seem to think that since the cost to distribute ebooks is very low, they should be very cheap. This is just as silly as the old argument “Why are movie DVDs so expensive when a recordable DVD only costs $0.50?”

There are more problems with this reasoning:
The biggest part of the production cost is the authoring and the editing, not the physical printing.

The price of any product has never been set based on production costs only. We pay for the status of the brand, the design, the usability, the convenience of the delivery and packaging, for being first with a new product, for additional features etc. Why should digital media be any different?

For example: the price difference between a hard cover book and the same book as paperback is only slightly based on reduced printing costs, it is about access time and status, even though the content is identical.

It could actually be argued that ebooks should cost more than printed books, since the ebook can have enhanced functionalities that offers increased reader value compared to a printed book, (see my post “Where’s the e in ebooks?“).

Move from ownership to accessibility

I have a feeling that we will let go of this urge to own and possess many types of books (but not coffee table books etc) just like we have already stopped buying CDs with music.

The obvious pricing model then becomes subscriptions. “Subscribe to books? What a silly idea!” you might react. But consider the giant book club industry? And an ever bigger subscription based media business that has been around for 50 years:

The Cable-TV model

We are used to paying for cable-TV packages, such as bundles of channels for sports, feature films, child programs, documentaries etc. And the ownership of these programs are similar to ebooks: you can record them for personal use, but you do not own them and you cannot resell them. We have never seen this as a problem, so why not implement the same model for ebooks?

The subscription model is already growing fast in digital music, with services like Spotify, Grooveshark and Rdio

iPad magazines are moving from selling individual magazine apps towards subscriptions, such as Popular Science,  Wired Magazine and The New Yorker.

And there are a growing number of ebook publishers that are now starting to go this way, for example 24symbols.

Ebbok subscriptions will soon become a very important part of the ebook business, once the publishers learn how to reach out and demonstrate the advantages. But there are several other interesting pricing models that will also be important in the digital transition of the book industry.

I will dive deeper into the subscription model and other ways to monetize ebooks in my upcoming post: “New business models for ebooks”, so stay tuned!

1. Basic e-features that enhance the reading experience
2. How to expand the life span of books
3. How to help the readers to drive your sales
4. Powerful sorting and searching
5. How to encourage book reading with tracking and reminders
6. Five reasons why ebooks aren’t here yet – or are they?
   

Ebook lovers usually have these basic reasons for liking ebooks:

1. You can bring your ebooks along easily on commutes and travels
2. You save shelf space

They usually don’t mention the core of ebooks, that the they are digital and therefore have more functionalities than printed books. As I pointed out in my previous post, “Early ebooks and why they failed“, already at the beginning of ebooks 20 years ago the main selling point was the enhanced digital functionality. So why are ebooks today still not using much of all these digital features?

One main reason for this is fragmentation. There are numerous user interface designs and no common standard for how these e-features look or work. And conservative book publishers still don’t see the value of user communication, social media communities etc. So most ebooks are just converted print books with no e-functionalities.

What  e-features, you say?

Well, there are a number of smart e-features already in avying degrees in different ebook applications.
For example, see these exemplary video clip examples from the UK publisher Enhanced Editions (scroll down and watch the short videos of each feature).

These are basic functions that should be integrated in all kinds of ebooks:

1. Notes, being able to write my own notes into the ebook and decide if I want to share them with others, see other’s public notes
2. Highlighting text
3. Bookmarks
4. User-selectable fonts, font sizes, background colours (for example light text on dark background for reading in dark rooms)
5. Online sharing: being able to easily recommend the book to my friends by email, Facebook, Twitter etc
6. Rate the book online and read both professional and user reviews
7. Copy quotes from the text
8. Search for text in the book
9. Multiple-device support: being able to read it on my laptop, mobile, tablet, and auto-sync where I am in the book
10. Integrated audio book: Listen to a voice reading the book, for example when you are driving is a feature that is now becoming more common, supported for example in Apple’s iBooks and in applications like these:

A demo of the integrated audiobook function from Enhanced Editions of their ebook novel “The Death of Bunny Munro” as read by the author himself,  Nick Cave (highly recommended ebook!)

Then there is the whole spectrum of more advanced things that enhance certain types of ebook, blurring the distinctions between books, games, learning etc:

1. Video inserted into the ebook, either illustrating the content or a short talk by the author.
2. Animations that explain and visualize the content
3. Interactivity such as game functions, move around in photo panoramas, play sound effects or music, quizzes etc.

But the above is just the first step, there are many more e’s that should be utilized now that we have the online possibilities to improve the reading experience and business of ebooks!

E as in Extended life time

One of the biggest problems in the printed book business is not discussed much, but it is solved by ebooks. Or it could be solved, with a bit of forward thinking!

It’s about shelf life, the short longevity of printed books.

All publications, including books, can be divided in two types

1. Short life-span, needs to be updated often: non-fiction, user manuals, school books, most management books, travel guides etc
2. Long life-span: Novels, cook books, some types of reference books etc

E as in Enlighten your friends

Help the readers to drive your sales! Make it very easy to spread the word about an ebook they like. And make it equally easy to receive such a recommendation and act on it by buying the book directly, on the spot, even if you are on a bus.

More on this in my previous post Stories of spreading ebooks

E as in Evolution of storage order

Imagine that you have a number of book shelves in different rooms at home, but you could only put books from one specific publishing house in each book shelf. So to find a book you first have to know the name of the publisher, then in what room and book shelf the book is in. Not very reader-friendly, eh? Well that’s the way it is with ebooks now!

There are numerous methods for organizing the books in your physical book shelf, as described in this funny article in the Guardian, or with this innovative book shelf tree branch. In these book shelves you have a good overview of your books.

Compare this with your collection of ebooks: You cannot search for book titles, authors or content,  and you cannot sort them with tags for different categories.

Your ebook collection is just a database, sitting inside a powerful computer. So technically they should be possible to sort in any way you want!

With a physical book shelf you have to choose between sorting the books alphabetically, by the title or the autor, or sort them per category. With a data base you should be able to sort your books in all these ways and more!

Here are my current ebook apps in my iPad:

Some of these apps, like Kindle and iBooks,  contain multiple books of many kinds that I have purchased from these ebook stores. Others are independent publishers of niche types of ebooks or services for ebook lovers. And some are for individual ebooks. Can you tell the difference?

Looking at this collection of icons, how do I find a certain book that I have on my iPad? I can certainly not search for an author’s name or a specific word of phrase that I know is inside one of my ebooks, like I can in every other type of document I have on my computer.

So I want a view where I can see and search for all my ebooks, independent of its type or publisher.

E as in Enhanced tracking and reminders

I usually read several books simultaneously, and sometimes forget what book I was reading. With printed books it is somewhat easier: I see it lying on my bedside table. With ebooks, it is very easy to lose track of what books I have started reading. In my screen shot above from my iPad there is no way I can see what books I have started or finished reading.

So how about a clock-type little visual indicator on top of all book icons, showing how much I have read? It would also be nice to have automatic reminders: “Henrik, this is Sunday afternoon and you have 11 unread ebooks and 4 that you have started reading”.

And a function (like Runkeeper) where I can automatically post the reading status of my books in my Facebook and Twitter feeds.

Wired Magazine had an interesting article in June 2011: 5 Reasons Why E-Books Aren’t There Yet.  In the article, the author argues:
“There are some aspects to print book culture that e-books can’t replicate (at least not easily) — yet.”

I agree with some of these reasons, but find others can be fixed now or are already here:

1) An unfinished e-book isn’t a constant reminder to finish reading it.

I also have this problem. But as I say here, it is possible to create smart reminder systems and social media functions that inspire me to finish my books. I have not seen these functions anywhere yet, here is room for innovation!

2) You can’t keep your books all in one place

Yes, indeed, see above!

3) Notes in the margins help you think.

How come the author has missed that this feature has been in ereaders since 1992? Perhaps because it is sometimes not so easy to understand how to use it, we need more intuitive interface designs.

4) E-books are positioned as disposable, but aren’t priced that way.

5) E-books can’t be used for interior design.

This is not a problem really, just old-fashioned thinking. Like “kerosene lamps are so beautiful that they will never disappear”. We will continue to buy beautiful coffee-table books to decorate our homes. The ebooks we will use to decorate our social media profiles.

Amazon started the recent ebook growth in late 2007 with the Kindle e-reader. And Apple put another big booster into ebooks in 2010 with the iPad. In February 2011 another milestone was passed, when ebooks became the biggest format of all kinds of books in the US.

But nothing is new under the sun, ebooks have been around for a long time, with different names and formats and readers. So why are ebooks taking off now?

I see many similarities between today’s disruptive book market and the multimedia business that I worked in during the 90s when my company Ahead Multimedia produced numerous interactive presentations and learning programs on CD-ROM. They had chapters, headlines, body text and illustrations, just like ebooks. we called it “interactive multimedia”. They looked like many of the ebooks you see now, but they also had more interactivity, animations and video than most ebooks have today.

Another similarity was the problems of competing and incompatible hardware and software platforms and varying screen sizes. My company thrived because we produced B2B communication for corporate clients so we could control the delivery platforms.

Here is the first ebook that I bought:

The novel Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton, an ebook on a 1,4 MB floppy disc, introduced in 1992!

This was the first title in the Expanded Books series produced by the famous Voyager Company, these ebooks were designed for the brand new Apple Powerbook computers. I attended the launch at the MacWorld expo in San Francisco in January 1992.

Note that they called it Expanded books, their pitch was that it offered extended functionality compared to printed books. “Electronic text is a dynamic medium that enables you to become a more active reader”

Notice the features such as being able to dog-ear a page or put a paper clip on it, and type in margin notes, search for any words in the book etc.

Notice also the absence of all communication tools, remember this was before internet and email so there was no social media or online communities to share your book experiences with!

Also note that they used real- life metaphors like adding a paper clip or dog ear a page, something that we still have not broken free from, compare with the wooden book shelves in Apple’s latest iBooks application:

I think it is time to move to user interfaces that build on today’s digital possibilities and get rid of these old real-life metaphors! I am glad to see that others are also realizing this, such as Swedish startup Readmill in this post:
When we founded Readmill there were a few things we were fed up with. One was imitations of wooden bookshelves, the other that everyone was building closed ecosystems where no innovation could thrive. We decided to go the other way.

So why did those early ebooks fail?

1. They only worked on Macs and there were few Macs back then
2. They were difficult to install, the users had to manually install fonts and manage the application memory etc. (This to some degree remains a problem, just try to buy an ebook in the epub file format online and install it on your computer today…)
3. Cumbersome distribution on floppies (then CD-ROMs came, but they were just as cumbersome)

But of course the main factors were:

1. People where not used to consuming media on a computer, and there were no mobiles or tablet computers.
2. People were not ready to pay for digital media (that problem still persists to some degree, 20 years later…)
3. There has been a djungle of platforms and formats for ebooks and ereaders introduced in the 90s and 00s, see these enormous charts.

2011 – the breakthrough year for ebooks

Right now it seems that in the US, the Kindle and Nook dedicated ebook readers are leading the pack, while the iPad is totally ruling among the more general-purpose tablet computers. Note that the Kindle ebooks can be read on Kindle ereaders as well as on PCs, Macs, iPads, iPhones, Android mobiles etc, according to Amazon’s vision “buy once, read anywhere”.

So the ebook took a long time coming, but it finally looks like the time is ripe now and the ebook market is booming, especially in the US and other English-speaking markets. The ebook market is growing everywhere, but in much varying degrees in different countries, here is a report from spring 2011 on the global market in 2010.

What’s next?

So I have been accumulating a lot of analysis and ideas on how to organise conferences and gathered a part of it in my post “Conferences Do’s and Don’ts“.

I have now updated and revised this post based on my latest experiences.
It is soon getting too long for a blog post, maybe I should write a book?

So please enjoy my new edition of  ”Conferences Do’s and Don’ts“, all comments are welcome!

I started reading some ebooks in the 90s, but it was not until I bought my first iPad a year ago that I started buying ebooks instead of paper books whenever they are available.

I really enjoy the comfort of having my ebooks available and synchronized  for reading on my iPad, mobile and computer.

But I also discovered that I have started to buy many more ebooks now, and in new ways, as illustrated in this story:

Recently I took a trip to my vacation home in the Stockholm archipelago with this ferry:

During the 25 minute ferry ride I read some blogs on my iPad. My eye caught a story about a new ebook publisher called Atavist, publishing original non-fiction journalism laced with video, audio and layers of information.

That of course appealed to my multimedia production experience, so my finger touched the link to Atavist and this appeared in seconds on my iPad:

I played the video and immediately realized that this is my kind of ebooks; short, non-fiction journalism with multimedia features, love it!

Then I browsed the titles and found the story Lifted,  about the big helicopter robbery in Stockholm 2010, a drama familiar to all Swedes. Seconds later I had spent $2.99 buying it in the App Store.

A new faster way to discover and buy books!

So, most important, only minutes after first discovering Atavist in the blog post, I had bought and started reading the ebook Lifted, while still riding the ferry!

This is a fundamental change in how we discover and buy books. Before, when we read or heard about an interesting book, we hade to make a note of it and then either go buy it at the book store or order it online at Amazon etc. Now this threshold is lowered with two improtant factors, in this order:

1. We can buy a recommended ebook in seconds and download it wirelessly by just tapping links on our e-readers like the iPad.
2. It is very easy to pay for ebooks (mostly, at least with the Apple App Store and Kindle book store) and the prices are now often very affordable.

This changes our consumer behaviours, opening great possibilities for new publishers like Atavist.

Easy recommendations turns ebooks into social objects

A week later I am having lunch at our coworking office space The Hub. I tell a guy sitting next to me about Atavist and how I bought the ebook Lifted on the ferry. Turns out he also enjoys this kind of books, so he flips open his iPad and visits Atavist.net on his web browser.

Seconds later, he also has bought the Lifted ebook for $2.99, thanking me for the tip! All this while we are eating our pastas.

Ebooks are transforming both our reading and buying habits!

There were all the usual stats, like 85% of all Swedes having access to internet at home. 97% of the internet users have broadband and 81% of them use internet daily. Mobile internet is increasing rapidly.

The keynote speaker Jeff Cole from USC Annenberg School Center for the Digital Future talked about the ongoing disruption in the whole media industry sector.
Here is the video from his excellent speech: “Falling Apart or Coming Together: Media and Consumers in a Digital Era”
Some tidbits:
“Now everything is falling apart.”
“Newspapers have 5 years left in the US, 8 in the UK.”
“People don’t live by schedules anymore. Schedules don’t work!”
“Consumers are beginning to abandon subscriptions to print media and have little interest in paying for digital content, at least for the next five years.”
“Advertising is still preferred method. People who opt out might have to start paying.”
“All media will survive, but most will be smaller players in the digital era.”

Many of the other sessions discussed the disruption in the media industry, everybody seemed to agree on:

1. The digital transformation will continue, faster for some types of media and slower for some.
2. Most print media business (especially newspaper and news magazines) will be badly hit by the digital transition.
3. Media consumption is increasing due to ubiquitous internet access and all the new mobile devices.

Pontus Schultz, head of business development at Swedish publishing giant Bonnier’s R&D department outlined it wisely:
“Everything goes digital. Digital is free.”
“People want to pay, but so far we have packaged stuff that people don’t like paying for.”
“You don’t pay for news, you pay for identity and for being part of a community.”
“The challenge is to stop being a broadcaster and become a part of the conversation.”
“Reader interaction: don’t ask what they think, ask what they know.”
“Tablets like iPads is a chance for media to do it right this time.”
See his talk (in Swedish, starts at 18:20)

Strategies are necessary, but they are worthless without action!

Pontus ended by saying that media is usually quite good at creating new strategies, but lousy at implementing them. This is a key insight for me!

All this means that today’s media conglomerates are like ocean-going super tankers. When they see icebergs they have big difficulties changing course due to their massive inertia based on their 100+ years of traditions. Some of them have smart crew members like Pontus and will be able to change course a little quicker and perhaps launch some smaller experimental vessels that will take off. Other will hit icebergs or continue slowly into oblivion.

The time is now!

So there are now unique conditions for small speedboats to run around the tankers and cruise on top of the waves, adapting to the ever-changing conditions in the digital ocean and building new types of media content and services. These speedboats can of course be launched from existing media companies (and some already are) but I think the biggest part of the expanded digital media business many will be built by a new breed of media companies.

They need to be small, creative and agile, populated with a multi-cultural mix of  techies and communicators combined with experienced, open-minded media savvies and some hybrid thinkers like me.

These new speedboats can now be built by small groups of open-minded people anywhere in the world. The tools needed to build a new media service are now far less expensive, faster and easier to use. Sweden is an ideal location for this due to our crop of talented developers and internet-savvy early adopters.

This tickles my mind, what about yours?

Your ability to present yourself and acquire new contacts is at the core of all business networking. For this you need an “elevator pitch”. Here you will find everything you need to know about creating an efficient, personal elevator pitch that really gives you results.

1. What is an elevator pitch?

The expression is derived from making contact very quickly when you meet an interesting person in an elevator. But an elevator pitch should be used in all circumstances where you get the question “What are you doing”. A good elevator pitch should present the advantages of your offering, and open up to further conversation and contact. That is all!

2. What should an elevator pitch contain?

To work well, an elevator pitch should answer three questions:
1. What do you do? Don’t focus on the products/services that you sell, but on how your customers use what you sell.
2. Whom do you do it for? What types of customers are you aiming at?
3. What benefits does it give your customers? How are your products/services helping your customers to earn money, save time, reduce stress, increase productivity etc?

3. What an elevator pitch is NOT

It should not be a mechanical sales pitch, but a time efficient way for you to start a conversation with the other person that can lead to something of mutual value.
You should NOT present everything you can do or sell! You should NOT try to make the other person buy something from you!
You should NOT ask if they use the kind of products that you sell! You should NOT ask whom they are buying from!
Key message here: An elevator pitch is not foremost about you; it is about how you add value to other people’s business.

4. What is the goal of an elevator pitch?

The goal is to stop the other person from saying: ”We don’t need that”, or “We already have people for that”, or “We don’t do that”. Instead, you want the other person to say: “Oh, how do you do that?”, or “That sounds interesting!”.

Then you have a golden opportunity to make the other person talk more about himself/herself, and then listen to your description of how you can be of help.

5. How long should an elevator pitch be?

The shorter, the better! Many people believe that it should be 30-60 seconds. That is too long; it sounds mechanical and quickly bores people. An elevator pitch should be under 10 seconds!The reason is that you want the other person to talk as much as possible, so that you understand his/her interests and needs. Tip: If you talk mostly about yourself you will be perceived as a bore, but if you encourage the other to talk about himself, he will think you are a brilliant conversationalist! That goes for everybody at all occasions.

6. When should you use your elevator pitch?

An elevator pitch is very useful in many more circumstances than you think. It reinforces your image and makes it easier for people to understand you and your business. 1. At all times when you are presenting yourself to others.

2. On you business card. Surprisingly many business cards do not have any information about the value that the person is adding to customers, or even what business sector he/she is working in! 3. On your web site.

4. When you introduce yourself on the telephone to people you want to connect with. 5. When you leave a message on a potential contact’s answering service. 6. On your letterheads and printed brochures etc 7. In your email signature.

7. After your pitch

When you have managed to get a persons attention with your elevator pitch, you want to extract more information about the other person’s interests and needs. Then you can discover together what you can offer that the other needs. Describe in more detail how you create value for your customers, and refer to a happy customer in the same type of business as the other person. Depending on the circumstances, you can either continue the discussion directly, or agree on a time for a meeting or lunch.

If you are in a hurry, e.g. in an elevator, just ask: “It would be interesting to have lunch together and get to know more about your business. Can I have your business card so that I can call you and set up a suitable time?”

Your goal is to exchange business cards and get permission to call.

Tip: Immediately make a note on the card about what was interesting and when and where you met the person. Another way, if you cannot write on the card, is to fold the upper left corner = “Hot prospect”, or the upper right corner = “Indirect contact”, or the lower right corner = “No contact”.

Happy pitching!

(See also my checklist for business mingling)

1. Business cards

Bring a stack of business cards and a pen. Far too many people attend events without their business cards! Keep the cards within easy reach. Make sure your business card tells your story, ideally put your picture on it, you want to be remembered.

2. Expectations

Realize that networking is long-term, don’t expect immediate results. You will get the most out of it if you offer your help, your experiences and your contacts without demanding anything back, “Give to Gain”. It is about relations and not about transactions, i.e. you should plant seeds and not be on a hunt!

3. The starting phase

Start directly by approaching the person closest to you, no matter how he or she looks, don’t hesitate! But respect the other person by not standing too close, many people are intimidated by that. Tip: Avoid those that you already know, tell them that you will talk to them later. You are there to make new contacts!

4. The introductory phase

Don’t start by telling all about what you can do, it is not your goal here, (and nobody really cares either). Instead you want to find out as much as possible about the other person, what he or she does, what are the interests etc, and you want to steer the conversation by asking questions.

So start instead by showing your interest in the other person. For example: “Hello, what did you think of the panel discussion?”, or ”Hello, how do you feel about this event?” (Do not ask a question that can be answered with just yes or no!) Listen to the other person, show your full attention, then he or she will soon also be interested in you and ask what you do, which is your goal.

5. Your elevator pitch

As soon as you are asked ”what do you do”, you use your elevator pitch. It should be brief, under 10 seconds, and answer three questions: 1. What do you do? 2. Whom do you do it for? 3. What benefits does it give your customers? (See also my elevator pitch checklist.)

6. The decision phase

When the other person has showed you interest and you have acquired some information, it is time to decide if this is a contact that you want to move further with or not.

7. The comprehensive phase

If you want to proceed, say ”It would be interesting to have lunch with you and get to know more about your business. Can I have your business card to call you and set up a suitable time?” Your goal is to exchange cards and get permission to call. Tip: Immediately make a note on the card about what was interesting and when and where you met the person. Another way, if you cannot write on the card, is to fold the upper left corner = “Hot prospect”, or the upper right corner = “Indirect contact”, or the lower right corner = “No contact”.

8. Termination

If you do not want to proceed with this person, just say ”OK, it was nice to meet you. Here is my card, can I have yours?” Exchange cards and then move to another person in the room.

9. Indirect contacts

Every person knows hundreds of people. The person that you are talking to is perhaps not directly interesting to you, but might have other good contacts. Therefore you should exchange business cards with everybody that you meet, and ask if they know somebody that might be interested in you and your business.

10. Time allocation

Never spend more than 3-4 minutes per person. Even if it is a very interesting contact, you can miss other even more interesting people if you linger with the same person too long. This is a very common mistake! Remember, your goal is to set up a later meeting with your key.

11. The follow up phase

Save and catalogue all the business cards. For those that you want to see again, send within two days some information about you and your business along with a suggested meeting time. You can also send a “nice to meet you”-mail to the other contacts, where you include your elevator pitch and a link to your home page. Don’t sell anything, just ask if there is any way that you can be of help.

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Updated Nov 27, 2011

My name is Henrik, and I’m an Early Adopter.

I don’t see being an early adopter as part of a competition to be first with new stuff. I’m just curious and can’t help that I want to try out and learn new things all the time. And I don’t buy new things until I am convinced that they are useful to me.
It is not an easy life being an early adopter, I don’t recommend it. An old wild west quote: “Pioneers are the ones with arrows in their backs!” And it is usually not the early adopters that make the money.

But I am proud of having adopted several important trends very early and my gut feelings for applications and functions are often accurate, both for successes and lemons.

Interactive media: I became a pioneer when I started the company Ahead Multimedia in 1988.

Elearning: I created an international award-winning elearning program in 1991, and in 1999 I worked in the US with an online elearning portal about parenting.

PDA’s and smartphones: I switched to digital calendars in 1993 and started enjoying mobile email on my Sony Ericsson P800 in 2002.

The cloud: To me this is probably the most important shift in computing ever, moving from local files and applications that are locally stored in your computer to storing and running them online. I started using online word processing in 2005 and immediately felt that this was the future of easy and collaborative computing.

Some milestones:

1986 My first Mac, a 512K, what a difference! Used it with PageMaker 1.0 to produce course materials about script writing and print them on my Laserwriter Plus. A SEK 100.000 investment that paid off! I had previously worked a lot with computers such as the Swedish Luxor ABC800.

1986 AppleLink This was Apples online service for dealers and developers. I got the user ID SW0101, where SW stood for Sweden and I used it a lot for computer support, to download software updates etc. But it was rather primitive and very expensive.

1988 Email Started using QuickMail on our office Macs. This was long before internet, so we could only email ourselves in our 8-people company. Visitors thought we we crazy: “Why don’t you just walk over and talk to each other?”. But I saw the benefits of asynchronous communication: I could email a text or a file to a colleague anytime and he/she could read it when it was suitable, I dd not have to interrupt people and I knew that they would see my messages. That was a very strange thing in those days! Eventually internet came, and we were all email savvy so we had an edge.

1988 CompuServe was the first major commercial online service in the US. I signed up for an account and liked being able to participate in online forums and downloading software updates etc.

1990 Mobile phone. I bought my first mobile phone, a brick-sized Ericsson Hotline NMT 450, it cost SEK 17.000 and the battery lasted for an hour or two, but it was good to be mobile!

1992 Philips CD-I Since my company Ahead Multimedia was a leading production house for interactive media, Philips approached me and pitched their new CD-I player. It was a proprietary CD format with added interactivity so Philips hoped it would be a success for games and interactive corporate presentations etc. After trying it for a few days I returned it, feeling that it was not going to work: Slow, proprietary and tied to a processor that would become obsolete, expensive and with primitive authoring tools. CD-I turned out to become a disaster för Philips.

1993 I discovered an new type of magazine that attracted me at the London Design Museum. It was called Wired and wrote about technology and society in a new way. I have been a subscriber ever since. Here is the premiere issue from march 1993, still hanging on my kitchen wall.

1993 Newton Messagepad. Bught it on the launch day Aug 2 at MacWorld expo in Boston. But already on the first day I saw its limitations and predicted it would not be a hit.

1994 Apple eWorld Apple’s first consumer online service was not a hit: I did not like the cumbersome user interface with a “town hall metaphor” that you had to navigate in and the childish graphics that required long download times and few people signed up for it.

1994 Flickr I have been a semi-professional stills photographer since my teens, so I immediately fell in love with Flickr when they launched. They made it so easy to share hi-resolution pictures with others, and quickly became a very inspiring place to browse great photography. I also fell for their friendly tongue-in-cheek texts. I am still a loyal Pro user, check out my pics here.

1996 Palm Pilot Professional, a revolutionary PDA at this time. An instant hit with me and it sure became a big success. I bought all the new versions as they came out until they stagnated in 2001.

1996 Pippin from Apple. We produced all our interactive presentations, games and elearning using Apple Macintosh computers, so Apple wanted us to start developing for their new multimedia platform Pippin. But I decided not to use it, since I felt that it was really just a rather primitive video game console with much better competitors. This was in Apple’s dark days when they where totally out of focus….

1997 Joined Six Degrees, the first social media network service. The founder maxed out his credit cards to finance this startup, but unfortunately he was many years to early. I wonder what he thinks of Facebook and LinkedIn now? As I said, it is hard to be a pioneer…

1998 I used Groove Networks for some projects, an early online project management tool that was well executed but way before its time. They were later acquired by Microsoft and turned into Sharepoint workspace.

1999 I was a customer the very first day at Letsbuyit.com. I bought a Palm V PDA, and immediately realized that Letsbuyit would become a big flop, since;
A) It offered a confusing array of unrelated products, very few of them of interest to me
B) At the time of order you did not know the exact price
C) At the time of order you did not know the delivery date
D) I could easily find cheaper online merchants by using price-comparison sites like Pricerunner
But the investors did not think so, so they spent 2 billion SEK before it crashed…
But I loved my Palm V for a long time!

2000 Ericsson R320 The first WAP mobile, very slow and clumsy, I immediately realized that WAP was a terrible example of tech hype not based on usability.

2001 I tested online dating and predicted it would become big since I felt it was very time saving and efficient. Most people then thought it was a sign of total failure to use online dating, but only a few years later this became a global success.

2002 Dec I bought Sony Ericsson P800 smartphone on its launch day, immediately liked having mobile email and a calendar that I could sync to my computer.

2003 Skype My immediate reaction when I tested Skype’s first public beta release in August 2003 was “this is going to disrupt the telecom industry”. And it certainly did! Did you know that their original name for Skype was “Sky peer-to-peer”?

2004 Feb I bought a Wayfinder GPS for my P800 and enjoyed having navigation in my pocket.

2005 May, Blogging, I started my blog here on alfabravo.com, first on Blogger, later moving to WordPress. I attended the first little community meeting for Swedish bloggers in 2005, where everybody had read all else’s blogs!

2005 June, discovered YouTube and felt that it was going to become a big hit since it was free and so easy to use.

2005 Aug, I started using the beta version of the online word processor application  Writely. They were acquired by Google in March 2006 and transformed to Google Documents, which I have been using heavily ever since.

2005 Started using LinkedIn as a business networking tool, still use it every day.

2006 Joined Facebook in the summer and realised it would become very big, it felt like a smart and fun way to increase contact with friends and acquaintances.

2007 April, I bought a Nokia N95 on its launch day. Liked the integrated GPS and the camera.

2007 Oct, I bought an iPod Touch, a milestone in mobile web surfing and video play.

2007 Started using Jaiku microblog before they were acquired by Google in Oct 2007. It is still the best microblog service I think, I am sorry that Google has neglected it.

2008 Started using Twitter and Bloggy microblogs. I have a strong feeling that microblogs will evolve quickly the next few years. We will hopefully laugh in 2012 at Twitter of 2010!

2008 Dropbox I was by then already hooked on cloud services, so Dropbox did not have a hard sell to me. I love simplicity, file management cannot be simpler than with Dropbox. Still use it everyday, both for personal backups and for project file sharing with team members.

2008 In the spring I got a beta invite to Spotify and enjoyed their smart and very fast interface. I felt strongly that this kind of streaming on-demand media is the future of music, so I wrote this blog post about why we will not want to own our music files, the headline attracted a lot of readers: “Steve Jobs is wrong”

2009 Google Wave  There was a very big buzz in the online world when Google released Wave, it was labelled as the “next big thing”, “email killer” and lots of other hype. I was interested in the advanced interactive functionality, but foudn it complex to learn. So I organized a workshop with some like-minded early adopters where we tested through all the functions. Already after a few hours we all said to each other “this is going to be a flop”, we did not see much real beenfits and found it much to complex to use. And we were right, Wave flopped.

July 2009 iPhone 3GS Since I had my iPod Touch I waited until the summer of 2009 when the iPhone 3GS was released. What a change from my Nokia N95! My mobile online life grew a lot with all the creative and useful apps.

2009 Started using Foursquare and Gowalla, social online location based services for tracking your friends. I find  it useful, for example by checking in at a café in the city other people in my network can see that I am there and I get spontaneous contacts this way.  After testing for 6 months I skipped Gowalla since I find Foursqaure to be more business-oriented.

2010 April I bought my first iPad from the US, since I already from the news about it before the launch had a gut feeling that this is a very interesting new platform. After the first day with it I was hooked and I have since discovered many new ways to use it. I am now using my iPad 2 everyday, mostly at home but also during meetings, seminars and during travel.
See my blog posts “Paid iPad Content – Why it’s important”
“iPad Media apps – CD-ROM revisited”
“eBooks vs eMagazines”

2011 November I finally exchanged my 3GS to the new iPhone 4S when it was released. Not so much difference on the outside as many had hoped, but certainly a big leap forward in processing power and camera quality. But I find Siri to be the most interesting development. Siri is Apple’s new voice-command function, enabling you to both control your mobile and get information in a new way. I am even more convinced that this is a revolutionary new interface that will change the way we use mobiles when I hear all the skeptics that proclaim: “Siri is useless. I don’t see any benefit of using Siri. Stuff like Siri has been around for years” etc. These reactions always come up when something radical is emerging. Check out Apple’s demo of Siri for yourself.

And I have a strong feeeling that all this is just the beginning.

We ain’t seen nothing yet!