Infotrade

Apple has a long relationship with Adobe. In fact, we met Adobe’s founders when they were in their proverbial garage. Apple was their first big customer, adopting their Postscript language for our new Laserwriter printer. Apple invested in Adobe and owned around 20% of the company for many years. The two companies worked closely together to pioneer desktop publishing and there were many good times. Since that golden era, the companies have grown apart. Apple went through its near death experience, and Adobe was drawn to the corporate market with their Acrobat products. Today the two companies still work together to serve their joint creative customers – Mac users buy around half of Adobe’s Creative Suite products – but beyond that there are few joint interests. I wanted to jot down some of our thoughts on Adobe’s Flash products so that customers and critics may better understand why we do not allow Flash on iPhones, iPods and iPads. Adobe has characterized our decision as being pri...

The only 4K TV on the floor at CE Week, Westinghouse's D55QX1, was showing off a Google Maps image instead of a video. This is a problem. TV makers are at a bit of an impasse: for the first time ever,   demand for LCD TVs is down year-over-year . After years of increasing sales and declining prices, the market is finally beginning to become saturated, and the incremental improvements and new features that the television companies have added since LCD TVs became mainstream—things like OLED lighting and 3D TVs—have either been well out of consumers' price ranges or too niche to attract a wide audience. The TV industry is looking for that must-have feature that will get people with existing LCD TVs to upgrade their sets, and one of those features is the 4K resolution standard. While 4K TV sets are slowly making their way to the market, both the discussion panels and vendors at Consumer Electronics Week seem a bit unsure about the standard's prospects in the home A prim...

This is a brilliant interview with Jeff Bezos. Once I started watching it, I couldn’t stop. Jeff in an amazing visionary, leader and communicator. There are several great Jeff Bezos quotes out there, but this one is my favorite: Our profitability is not our customers problem… We’re not going to make our customers pay for any of our inefficiencies. –Jeff Bezos At Rumspeed, this is a philosophy we believe in, and it’s built into our business model. There are always learning points when building great products or delivering great service. However, you can’t make your customers pay for that process. Charge for what it’s worth and build trust along the way. You will come out ahead, and, most importantly, your customers will believe in you because you took care of them first. The quote is around 22:45 but the entire video is worth watching. Watch it and tell us what you think. What is your favorite Jeff Bezos quote? I originally watched the video on Amazon:  Founde...

If you are like me, then you are constantly using your iPad all the time. I like to run my iPad at full brightness and I am almost always connected to the Internet. And that means frequent visits to the electrical outlet — at least twice a day. And as result I often fret about how much energy I am using on my iPad and other devices, and how they are impacting my carbon footprint. Some new research from   Palo Alto, Calif.-based Electric Power Research Institute  ( EPRI ) breaks down how much an iPad costs in terms of electricity and how much energy all the world’s iPads consume. EPRI calculations show that  the annual cost of charging an iPad every other day is about $1.36 a year . The analysis shows that   each model of the iPad consumes less than 12 kWh of elelctricity over the course of a year, based on a full charge every other day . By comparison, a plasma 42” television consumes 358 kWh of electricity a year. EPRI conducted the analysis in Knoxvil...

Have you reached that all-important — and often frightening — moment when you realize that your business needs more money to get to the next level? Whether you’re attempting to borrow a few thousand bucks from Mom and Dad or you want to ask total strangers to pony up several million, you’d better have your ducks in a row before you ask. In other words, you’d better have a business plan. People have differing views about the import of business plans. I’ve even heard some venture capitalists say they’re not worth the paper they’re written on. Instead, they prefer just an executive summary. Nonetheless, being able to describe your business, the industry you operate in and the potential market for your company is downright vital. And you won’t generally address all of those aspects until you actually sit down and write up a plan. Here’s a checklist of the minimum information you should have in the plan, along with some nice-to-haves that will increase your chances of getting a “yes”...

I receive a lot of emails from people who ask whether, with all of the competition online, it’s still possible to enter a niche right now and make money. I won’t deny that it’s getting much, much harder in the affiliate marketing space (how I make money) but persistence, determination and creativity can take you anywhere. Did you know that 20-25% of Google searches every single day are brand new? 1 in 4 search queries have never been typed in the history of the search engine – every single day. I knew of this statistic a few years ago but only recently did I try and leverage it. The result?   In the third month after the site launched it received almost 1,000,000 unique visitors from Google . I’m guessing the first thing you want to know is whether I’m just writing a sensational headline and have nothing of real value to share that you can apply to your own endeavours. Or, maybe you’re thinking I just got lucky and couldn’t replicate the same thing again? Sadly for the pe...