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The iPad is amazing. I think it’s a game-changer. It’s sex.
Not “sexy”. It’s sex.
Here’s what I love…it’s like having a “life panel” in front of you – the entire body of human knowledge and experience on a piece of glass…
Here’s what I’m doing with it…and why I love it so much:
- Watching movies on it. Netflix app lets you watch any of their “on demand” movies in real-time
- The sketch program from Autodesk is incredible
- Email…I really like it
- All my music, movies, podcasts transferred over nicely
- All my AppleTV purchases transferred nicely
- I’m going to use it as my home entertainment control center for all the music
- New York Times app – it looks better than any newspaper
- I’m giving away my Kindle. The Kindle application is much nicer than the Kindle hardware
- USA Today. Beautiful.
- Magazines are dead. The “new” magazine will look like a magazine except they’ll be interactive, include video, you’ll be able to post video reviews, interact with other readers, do community…
- Battery life is very impressive.
- My son is in love with it – he’s already a reader, this really got him excited
- I’m not a gamer (big waste of time), but the games on it are fantastic
- I’d rather hold it or have it on my lap and watch TV on it than watch TV
- Catalogs, brochures, etc. will move over…
- It’s beautiful work of art. Substantive and nice to hold…
I bought the 64gig wifi model and have the mobile cellular ATT version ordered too…
(plus I won two of them in affiliate contests)
So my plan is to have one for personal “carry around” use and the other for at home…
This isn’t about the iPad, it’s about changing the way people will interact with media, companies, brands and people.
I believe this is a new category of the “information experience”…
Harvey Mackay’s new Podcast is Now Available on iTunes
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Harvey Mackay’s new podcast, Use Your Head to Get Your Foot in the Door: Job Search Secrets No One Else Will Tell You is now available on the iTunes Store for free.
The average person will have at least three career changes and ten different jobs by age thirty-eight. In this era of downsizing and outsourcing, you can never be sure your job will still exist in five years- or five weeks. So you’d better think of your career as a perpetual job search. That demands a passion for lifetime learning and the skills for relentless and effective networking.
Mackay shows you how to be at your best when things are at their worst.
His hard-hitting topics include:
- beating rejection before it beats you
- warning signals that you might be losing your job
- acing interviews
- negotiating the job you want not the job they offer
- taking advantage of the way bosses make hiring decisions
- blending the latest contact tools with old-fashioned face-to-face networking
Uplifting, amusing, and jam-packed with proven tips, the Use Your Head to Get Your Foot in the Door podcast will guide you through the toughest job market in decades. It’s also the definitive A-to-Z career resource for the rest of your life.
My sister-in-law, Rose Koenigs interviewed me this summer about entrepreneurship, leadership, building a business, finding a career path and success.
Here were a few concepts I share in this video:
- Leadership: being able to see, think and act with specificity. See a vision, declare a vision and describe that vision.
- Management and leadership: being able to pick the right team, declare the vision and outcomes and allow your team get to the destination without micromanagement.
- Leaders are always trying to find a way to replicate themselves – take action and don’t ask someone to do something they don’t want to do.
Frank Kern interviews Mike Koenigs: What is Traffic Geyser and How Does it Work?
Posted by: | CommentsWatch Frank Kern and Mike Koenigs get a Google Top 10 rating in ELEVEN MINUTES with Traffic Geyser.
Traffic Geyser distributes videos to over 30 video sites, 50 article directories, over 40 social bookmarking sites, makes podcasts, distributes to 12 podcasting directories, social networking sites including Twitter, Facebook and Myspace, captures leads and follows up automatically with subscribers using email, autoresponders, mobile text and direct mail.
It’s a complete, all-in-one-solution to get traffic, leads AND sales.
Free video marketing training is included with your membership.
To learn more and get a 21-day trial, visit Traffic Geyser.
My new “speaker introduction” animation – what do you think?
Posted by: | CommentsI’d love your comments and ideas. Please post what you think!
BTW – you can get a video like this one from Digital Cafe Animation Studios at http://digitalcafe.tv/products/
I just convinced my friend, marketing expert Bob Serling to give you a free copy of a new ebook called ”10-Minute Business Success”.
http://www.10MinuteBusinessSuccess.com
Your pass code to get free access is: 1008
Bob interviewed me for the book and he gave me a pre-release copy. I’ve written on every page – and have dozens of ideas we’re implementing here at Traffic Geyser.
It features 10-minute interviews with leading experts who spell out their single best business strategy or tactic and explain how you can easily implement it.
Some of the chapters include:
- The “inner game” approach Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com uses to keep their billion-dollar brand growing
- Cameron Herold reveals the simple 3-step publicity formula he used as COO at 1-800-Got-Junk? to get over 5,200 stories written about their services
- Brian Tracy, best-selling author of 45 books on sales and marketing, reveals the sales killing mistake nearly every business makes – and how to quickly fix it
- The six words PR expert Arielle Ford relies on to land celebrity clients like Deepok Chopra, Dean Ornish, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Chicken Soup for the Soul and more
- The dead simple technique John Jantsch, whose blog has been chosen as a Forbes favorite for small business and is a Harvard Business School featured marketing site, uses to bring in a never ending flood of referrals
- Plus “fast action” business-building advice from 15 more leading experts including (in alphabetical order): Bob Bly, John Carlton, Michel Fortin, David Garfinkel, Frank Kern, (me) Mike Koenigs, Paul Lemberg, Clayton Makepeace, Perry Marshall, Paul Myers, Joe Polish, Bob Serling, Yanik Silver, Jeff Walker, and Pamela Yellen.
- Special BONUS: As a bonus chapter, you’ll also get a terrific interview Joe Polish recently did with Richard Branson, the billionaire founder of the Virgin Group.
You can get your free copy of this ebook by clicking here:
http://www.10MinuteBusinessSuccess.com
Don’t forget to use the pass code: 1008.
iPod for TV: Amazon Video on Demand (VOD) Goes Straight to Your TV and the Living Room
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With Amazon’s Video on Demand through TV
The music industry got sideswiped first by the free file-sharing platforms like Napster, Kaaza and bittorrents, Apple’s iTunes stepped in and legitimized the business because iTunes offered a one-click, easy to use, fast download and painless integration of music, movies and television content to the iPod and computer.
VIZIO televisions
For us content producers – this is huge. There is now a completely friction-free way to deliver content DIRECT to the consumer into the living room with no extra cost. And with a platform like Mixiv, we’re inches away from direct-delivering our product content anywhere, anytime, any device.
Yahoo’s television widgets are available on Sony, Samsung, VIZIO and LG televisions. Just like the Amazon VOD solution, the technology is built-in to the device you you have direct access to content without going through “old” distribution sources like the networks.
As a consumer we won’t know the difference between broadcast, cable or on-demand. We’ll see high-quality HD content in the comfort of our couch. But like iTunes, we can buy or rent content and watch entertainment, educational material or anything they desire on demand.
One of our major focus areas this year with Traffic Geyser andMixiv is to deliver both free and (your)Â paid content directly to the living room and the new breed of web-enabled televisions.
Gay Hendricks Interviews Mike Koenigs
Posted by: | CommentsI consider Gay Hendricks to be one of my greatest mentors along with Tony Robbins, Brian Tracy and Joe Sugarman.
You’ll meet him here – and I’ll reverse the tables soon with an interview that I make with him. I hope you enjoy this as much as I did!
Kodak Zi8 HD Camera Review
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Dollar-for-dollar, you just can’t beat Kodak’s new “Flip Killer” camera.
Kodak Zi8 camera includes an external microphone input!
The Great:
Kodak Zi8 camera includes an external microphone input!
- Under $175
- External microphone input
- PC and Mac compatible
- True HD high-definition: 1080p, 720p @ 60 frames per second, 720p and WVGA video
- 5 Megapixel Camera
- Nice big LCD display
- Records in QuickTime format with the H.264 compression standard
- SD Card Slot
- Built-in USB connector
- Image Stabilization / “face tracking”
- Removable Lithium-Ion Battery
- Macro function to shoot close-ups
- HDMI cable adapter (and cable is included!)
- External power charger (included)
- External AV cable connection (cables included)
- Battery included!
- Video quality good enough to do “chromakey” – green screen!
- Blows away the competition in terms of quality
- Includes PC editing software (you don’t need it if you have a Mac)
The Not-So-Great:
- Can’t see yourself in the viewfinder
- Built-in USB connector is short
- Slow “boot up” time
- The zoom is “chunky” – not smooth
- Does not include SD card
- Battery life is 1.5 hours per charge
- Terrible audio hum if you plug a microphone into it with the power adapter connected
- Can’t use the camera as a webcam
- No light or flash
Overall Rating
4.5 out of 5
Where to Buy
- Amazon Get it in Black | Get it in Raspberry | Get it in Blue
- The Kodak Store or Any online or offline retailer
The Review
What is the number one thing I look for in a camera?
It rhymes with external microphone input.
If you don’t have one, your videos will “seem” bad.
And for some rotten reason, very few camera manufacturers except Canon put external mic inputs on cameras that cost less than $600.
This under $175 camera has one. And it works great.
Now the next thing about the Kodak Zi8 is, it is super easy to use, very flexible and it looks like a BlackBerry which is pretty cool! Here’s the great thing. The quality. It blows away the Flip. I’d say, it is easily four times better. What I also love about it, is it stores and saves in QuickTime format.
It’ll record in 1080P, 720P that’s at 60 frames, so you can actually record sports. It has image stabilization built in.
Another super awesome feature it has is an SD card slot, so you can add a 32-gigabyte card in this thing and record about six hours of full high-definition video.
Now the other thing that I love about this camera – it records in QuickTime format!
You just basically pop out the chip, put it in your computer and you record and can do anything you want with it in terms of say, editing it, popping it into any software to edit. You can make a product with this thing and it looks great.
And in the sample video, we actually do a little ChromaKey test!
It’s small, fits in the pocket and it takes 5 megapixel photos as well.
It also has a nice removable battery. Lithium ion lasts about an hour and a half, that’s a little bit of a drawback – I wish it lasted longer and so far, I haven’t found additional batteries at a local store.
The camera actually comes with an HDMI cable. If you don’t know what that is, it is a little port on the side so you can plug it into a high definition scree. And the quality is fantastic! The Kodak Zi8 approaches a $500.00 high definition camera in terms of quality.
There is one other thing that I love. Across the top, it has a macro switch, which means, you can get this super close and it focuses quite nicely. Great when you want to shoot stuff outdoors.
I took this thing to a U2 concert with the Black Eyed Peas. The quality was amazing and I did some split testing with a little portable Casio camera and a Flip Mino HD. The Kodak Zi8 was easily four times better quality. The image stabilization is decent. Exceptional performance and the LCD screen is very nice quality, very big!
I love being able to pop out the CD card, pop it into my computer and be able to immediately start editing.
Drawbacks
There are a few, but I can live with them…
You cannot use it as a webcam. Not that that’s a big thing these days, virtually every portable camera that you get nowadays, you cannot use as a webcam because they compress using the H264 compression standard which isn’t really “real-time”.
Next, the battery only lasts about an hour and a half. It was a real bummer when I was at the U2 concert. I was taking a lot of clips to share with my family and my friends and battery ran out before the end of the concert. Big bummer because there were some cool stuff at the end of the event and the encore was fantastic.
From the time you press the start button, it takes about 10 seconds to boot up. You have to remember that this is basically a little computer. If you think you can just turn it on, point and shoot, you’re going to be sad and lose a few seconds.
Another thing that’s a little bit annoying is when I want to move between capture modes, you move a little joystick to choose your quality and it takes a while. There is a hesitation, so I would suspect that the next generation of this camera is going to be a lot faster.
The digital zoom feature is “chunky” – what I mean is it’s slow and moves in noticeable “pops” instead of being smooth. It’s not nice to look at, but what the heck, at least it zooms in.
The camera has a built-in USB plug. That’s kind of neat and it’s connected to a little flexible cord which isn’t bad. I wish it was just a little bit longer because the camera actually gets in the way when you try to plug in other devices. If you only have two USB ports, it’s kind of hard to just squeeze stuff around on your PC.
The last thing – and my guess is the Kodak people don’t even know this.
I did an interview with a customer one day and I knew it was going to go longer than the batter would last. So I plugged in the external power connector and an external microphone. I decided that day to be smart and double check the audio quality before recording the entire 2 hour meeting.
When I played back the footage, there was a very LOUD hum – my guess is it’s caused by the power adapter not being filtered so there was 60 hz buzzing but ONLY when an external microphone was connected at the same time.
Fortunately I had two cameras with me and I just swapped batteries when it got low. But for now you’re stuck with battery power if you want to use an external microphone.
The Bottom Line
Kodak has REALLY raised the bar for the low-end, under $200 cameras.
I can’t recommend it highly enough – in my opinion nothing comes close in the price range and I love the small size and external microphone input.
I’m even going so far as to buying three of them, getting some tiny mini-tripods and taking it on the road with me to do 3-camera shoots when I do interviews. Combine these with two wireless lavaliere microphones and ambient light and it’ll look and sound as good as most any high-definition consumer camera set up and fit in a shoebox.
Go get one of these cameras NOW – they’re fantastic!
You can get MORE great equipment reviews at www.MikesGadgetGiveaway.com
