Thought Leadership as Marketing

Interesting story from Rajesh Setty about becoming a thought leader prior to selling your product. Not sure it’s for everyone and their products, but it’s worth listening to his story at the beginning of the video.

Rajesh Setty at The Founder Institute on Thought Leadership

Note: I seem to be having issues embedding Vimeo videos into WordPress. If anyone has solved this issue, please let me know. And yes, I’ve tried using the WP Shortcodes.

nciku: Not for Minors?

I’ve been in China for over five years and my Chinese is still only at a conversational level. I’m nowhere near fluent. So since I’m not a natural language learner, I need to spend a little time each day either attempting to improve my language skills or just trying to prevent losing them.

I’ve been using nciku for about a year or so now. I find their site to have such a confusing layout that for the most part it’s completely unusable to me. For looking up vocabulary words though, it’s my #1 destination. The ability to input English, pinyin, or hanzi is incredibly useful, so decided to check out their iPhone Chinese-English dictionary application.

The first thing that struck me was the price. Considering their website and MSN bot is for free, $4.99 seemed a little too pricey; especially since I have a free dictionary from another vendor already. But as I was leaving the page, I noticed this:

Rated 12+ for the following:

  • Infrequent/Mild Profanity or Crude Humor
  • Infrequent/Mild Alcohol, Tobacco, or Drug Use or References

So I have to ask, who is making these classifications? Is it self-imposed by nciku or just a general disclaimer put on to every dictionary by Apple? Other English-only dictionaries in the iTunes store don’t have a rating or are rated at ages 9 or above.

Since I don’t know the full story, I wont say this is political-correctness or legal protection gone awry. I’m just going to leave it as the quirky item it seems to be and be glad that I’m old enough to increase my vocabulary with my iPhone. Watch your kids folks, Merriam-Webster might soon get classified as a gateway drug.

Partnership

Teamwork

Original @ www.torakamikaze.com / Click Image for T-Shirt

I could stare at this all day and never stop laughing.

But what I really love about it is the message it conveys:

If you’re having a problem overcoming walls in your life or business, find a partner who specializes in knocking down your particular kind of wall.

Many times, people don’t even need to have the same goals as you, they just have a strange desire to help knock down walls. It’s a good reminder for me to sometimes just relax, with Kool-Aid in hand, and let others step in where I stumble.

The Sandbox

PocketGod Screenshot

I can’t even count how many times I’ve been in a meeting discussing a product’s concept where someone would say, “I just don’t get it” or “I wouldn’t buy that.” Many times, someone would pop-up and reply, “That’s because it’s not made for you.” I tried playing Pocket God, but I was one of those who didn’t get it and haven’t touched it since. The game has been a huge hit, so apparently it wasn’t made for me. However, it seems to be resonating with others…

So thank you CNN for interviewing the creators and enlightening me on why this game is attractive to so many :

In some sense, it’s just really an offshoot of sandbox play, when you were lining up toy soldiers and castles, then knocking them all down and building them up again.

What a great statement from one of their users. I suspect he’s hit the mark for why this game appeals to so many. It’s still not the game for me, but I will admit to getting a cheap thrill out of watching pygmies get eaten by sharks.