Digital Text Books

The future is now. Finally we're starting to get serious about digitizing text books. But don't think you'll save hundreds annually by getting all your college text books free throught Bit Torrents. You know the management teams of printed textbooks don't want to lose their cash cows. You know the thousands of university college bookstores don't want to lose their on campus monopolies'. Yes, you guessed correct...Amazon's Kindle has companies like Sony and Apple scrambling to create a similiar product to sell to you. Early adapters always pay preme prices for the newest must have gadget. These things will be selling for as much as a new mid-level budget PC or high end notebook. How many gadgets can we carry at one time?



On the day after Christmas, Amazon said the Kindle was the most-purchased gift in its history and sales of its electronic books surpassed physical book sales on the holiday itself. Amazon Kindle is a software and hardware platform developed by Amazon.com subsidiary Lab126 for rendering and displaying e-books and other digital media



Now Coursesmart, a joint venture of five textbook publishers, shows how students might use tablet-based textbooks. It is based on their own renderings, not specific applications being developed with Apple.

Can we see people buying two ebook readers? One for Standard Print Books and one for School Text Books? In 2005 the concept of a tablet laptops was gaining momentum -it faded fast. By 2007 the selection, power and price points on laptops under $1,000 was motivating record levels of buyers. In 2009 regardless of the greatest American recession notebooks where flying off the shelf's at $399 price points.

Given there's nothing extremely unique behind any of these technologies, can anyone see one primary light-weight high-powered device that does it all. Assuming we'll always want a very small mobile phone, I referring to the possibility of the Tablet PC/Laptop returning to the lime-light. What do you think?

How's Your Government Accounting & Marketing ?

When your neighbor loses her job, it's a recession. When you lose your job, it's a depression. When federal workers not only keep their jobs but see their pay rise during a recession, it's a sign of the times. And when your home real-estate taxes have risen 18% during the period called the greatest recession and the city tax gets raised I'm ready to ask the federal government to make some layoffs and take some paycuts? How about you? Our state of Ohio employees have taken about a 5% cut but our unionized teachers got raises. let's post a few facts on how painful this great recession has been for the federal government employee vs the private sector employees.

USA Today:

The number of federal workers earning six-figure salaries has exploded during the recession, according to a USA TODAY analysis of federal salary data.

Federal employees making salaries of $100,000 or more jumped from 14% to 19% of civil servants during the recession's first 18 months — and that's before overtime pay and bonuses are counted.

Federal workers are enjoying an extraordinary boom time — in pay and hiring — during a recession that has cost 7.3 million jobs in the private sector.

Since June, the federal government has increased employment by almost 10 percent, while the private sector has cut employment by over 6 percent over the prior two years of decline.

Now you know why I've been advising many students to seek careers in government for over 5 years.

My advice for financial students? Start learning government accounting and tax law. My advice for State and Federal Government? Start hiring those marketing majors. You need someone who could sell Ice to Eskimos' The government worker in this video couldn't sell water in the desert. Start working on those Taxes Are US slogans.

As a young BBA about 40% of our Business School was Accounting majors. When private and public sector recruiters came on campus all us Beta Alpha Phi folks lined-up for the Big 8 CPA firms. Alias, for those of us who were finance majors too, Investment Bankers didn't come to WMU back in 1976. The only government jobs we thought might provide some stability and be cool were for the FBI and CIA. Frankly, we had no required government accounting classes within the core program -there was no need. All of my professors were CPA's and PhD's. I don't recall any of them had worked in government accounting.

It's time to start signing up for any and all government related classes.

After looking at the chart Scott Heintzelman just found(below)the advice I'd give to college business graduates is and old stock traders motto: The Trend Is Your Friend -start working on government internships and interviews. Remember government will not outsource or offshore itself. In 50 years it's never downsized -the trend has only gone up!

Project Management 101.1

Project Management Process is suffering from endless Scope Creep. Project Management Professional (PMP) is a credential offered by the Project Management Institute (PMI). The credential is obtained by documenting 3 or 5 years work experience in project management, completing 35 hours of project management related training, and scoring a certain percentage of questions on a written, multiple choice examination.

In the 3ed edition of the PMBOK Guide (the PMI Bible) it doubled in size over the 2nd edition. Most video's on this topic were either sales pitches to sell training courses or poor quality video's not worth listening too. Here is the best of what I've found todate.







Blue Sky Project Management...The PMBOK is DEAD, well atleast from this mans point of view. He makes an excellent point...Traditional PM has become to complex...to bureaucratic. Blue Sky PM simplifies the process and focuses on first to market.