A Great Podcast is Essential for the Entrepreneurial Soul

I don't know about you, but I listen to quite a few podcasts. Leo Laporte's This Week in Tech and MacBreak Weekly, Andrew Warner's Mixergy, Russ Roberts' Econtalk ... and countless more. Regardless of my listening frequency, I recently realized something. As an business aficionado, I experience what many of my fellow entrepreneurs face as well: the sometimes arduous effort of maintaining the focus, drive and motivation to keep the entrepreneurial engine running all the time.

I won't lie to you. Some days I just feel like throwing in the towel. On such days, I reach out for my iPod, find the right kind of podcast that I know will provide me with the entrepreneurial blood transfusion I so badly need, click play ... and voilà, I begin feeling better almost instantly.

It is so easy to think that I am the only person feeling what I am feeling, but one listen to ... let's see ... absolutely ANY episode of Andrew Warner's Mixergy podcast, and I immediately feel a sense of relief knowing that Andrew's countless entrepreneurial guests all feel and felt the same way on a fairly regular basis. I am not alone and Andrew's podcast makes me very aware of it.

I leave you with this. Everyone is overcome with wanting to quit and move onto something else at fairly regular intervals, but I must point out that podcasts are an amazing tool to keep us in sync with our entrepreneurial selves. When I'm feeling down, a great podcast is essential for the entrepreneurial soul. I can state with certainty that I could not live without my daily podcast dose. I thank the Andrews of the podcast world and encourage them to keep up the good work. You can't possibly measure the real value of what you offer the world of people just like me. Thank you!

Your thoughts?.

The Economic Effects of Using Evernote. Staples loses $100 million dollars in revenue?

I have been using Evernote for quite some time, but just recently have I mastered its use by forcing myself to save EVERYTHING to it.  Yes, EVERYTHING! I am not sure why, but I got into the horrible habit of emailing myself 'stuff' knowing that it was innefficient and that considering the load on my inbox, that important item worth 'saving' would surely get lost among the countless emails I barely have time to look at.

Yesterday, I was organizing my files and found my trusty shoebox full of everything digital/password/technical in my life and said to myself ... "Wow!  This box weighs a ton, full of paper and file folders.  This is how I 'used to' do things!"  I quickly thought to myself, "Evernote, replaces the need for all of this paper and stuff."  

I also began thinking of the economic effects related to anyone who adopts Evernote as part of their everday 'filing' system. I barely print anything anymore.  A ream of paper lasts forever. My exciting trips to Staples to keep my paper, paper clips, file folders, highlighters, file boxes, etc at optimal levels are a thing of the past.  I miss those trips getting lost in the latest highlighter technology!  :(

I no longer spend money on that stuff.  Furthemore,  Staples does not see me in their store anymore.  Their ability to sell me other things while I looked for the latest highlighter design is ... 'POOF' gone!

Evernote (among other digital habits) has easily cut hundreds of dollars off office supply expenses yearly.  If you take my situation and multiply that across ... say 500,000 small business owners/individuals/entrepreneurs who are passionate about their file keeping, that is an average of $200 savings a year per individual.  I think that is a conservative number.  Chime in if you disagree.  

Do you understand what this means?  That reduces spending ... and revenue for the office supply giants ... by $100,000,000!  I find that amazing.  Evernote, a free application, has single-handedly shaved $100,000,000 off the yearly revenue off giants like Staples!  

I am certain I can find a dozen other similar situations, and the relative economic effect on the 'old world' businesses that are affected.  What do you think?

Nuance's Dragon Dictate for Mac. Simply Amazing.

Dragon Dictate for Mac is simply phenomenal.   For those of you who are not familiar with the software, it is  a speech recognition application developed by Nuance, the company who spearheaded speech recognition and dictation for Windows PCs.   I have been a long time user (the software was previously known as MacSpeech Dictate), and it has without a doubt been the application I have used most consistently to save time, or should I say to “add time”… to my day.

 I vividly remember making fun of my fellow classmates who decided “typing” was a worthwhile elective in high school.   At the time, I felt as though “basket weaving”  was just as useful as learning how to bang on a keyboard ‘correctly’.  I thought I would conquer the world with my two finger power-typing, but little did I realize that a good keyboard foundation could have saved me thousands of hours over my lifetime … personally, academically and professionally!

Enter Dragon Dictate for Mac.  Not only has it made my writing experience easy, fun and effective, but most importantly my rear end need not be glued to a chair any longer!  As I write this post, I am looking out my living room window, with bluetooth headset on … speaking as naturally as I can.  What blows my mind each and ever time I use this program is that the software almost never misinterprets my words.  When you first start using Dragon Dictate, you will be asked to train the software to understand your voice and accent. If I remember correctly, it does not take much more than 5 minutes. 

 I  also try to have fun with the software.   Being a native Bostonian, I can morph in and out of a local accent quite easily.   I should train the software to recognize a “Joey Bumbazz” speech profile. I am certain that in five minutes, I could have Dragon Dictate recognizing “Pahkin ma caa” as “Parking my car”!  There is another great advantage to using this software.   For those of us whose professional life requires  giving presentations,  speaking in public,  recording podcasts, and whatever other vocation involves the use of speaking, Dragon Dictate forces you to enunciate correctly, enhancing the clarity of your words.   I also try talking into the microphone as quickly as I am able to see if the software fails me, but once again, no chance … it gets every darn word right!  

I do admit that I was skeptical when I first purchased the program, but you simply have to try it to believe it.   It really works.  This application is worth every penny I paid for it.   I cannot believe I am saying this, but if they charged more I would still buy it.  

Do I ever use a keyboard? Yes I do.  I will return to this post for final proof-reading and editing on my keyboard, but I will also use Dragon Dictate to assist me on word replacements.   The software is also able to do other things, such as allowing you to interact with most of your Mac applications using your voice. I have not delved into this capability that much, but I did test a few commands, and as promised, it works.

If you  click on the software box embedded in this post,  you will be automatically linked to Nuance’s website.   I do want to disclose that if you purchase Dragon Dictate for Mac through this link, as part of their affiliate marketing program, I do make a commission which supports my efforts on MacEntrepreneur.com.   I only advertise products or services that I truly believe in and would never ask you to purchase something I SPECIFICALLY write about without ever having tried it and liked it enough to editorialize on it.

Nuance’s Dragon Dictate for Mac is simply a spectacular application.  I can confidently say that once you begin using it, your Mac keyboard’s  battery life and cleanliness will improve.  Now that I think about it, my friends’ typing classes were a waste of time!  Might as well have taken up basket weaving!

Do You Look at a Book’s Copyright Date? You Should!

As an entrepreneur, there are two types of books that interest me the most:  motivational and how-to.  Motivational books help keep my entrepreneurial sprit well-fed, while the how-to books assist me to understand the technical side of my business interests. 

Let’s focus on technical books for a moment.  As I scan a Barnes and Noble bookshelf, I am initially interested in four things:  the title, the cover, the author and the copyright date.   Is the copyright date something you look at immediately?  You should.  Beyond the effectiveness of the title and cover, and the obvious weight that an author carries,  the copyright date is of most importance to me.   This specifically applies to books that are technical in nature.  

If I pick up a book with a copyright date of 2009, it might as well be 1952!  The intrinsic nature of day-to-day changes in technology make a book that is only one year old generally useless, or at the very least not 100% effective.    There is another aspect of that copyright date that many readers might not realize. By the time the author submits the manuscript to the publishing house, there is a good chance that book will not see a bookshelf for quite some time.  I have read and heard that in some cases it could be a one or two year delay!  One or two years??   In essence, what you get for a book with a copyright date of 2009 is OLD information from 2007 or 2008? Wow! 

Here we are in 2011. Can you imagine reading a how to navigate Facebook guide from three years ago?? Think about it! The major book retailers have countless books that fall into the category of USELESS.  I say ... caveat emptor (that’s latin for Let The Buyer Beware).   

Whose responsibility is it to remove these books from the shelves?  I guess that’s a topic for another day.  To add a little more fuel to the fire, what surprises me even more, is the age of digital publishing,  you can purchase a digital book on Amazon or iBooks within hours of manuscript proofreading and conversion and upload, yet … many of the digital books that could easily and swiftly benefit from a swift update, are left to ...get old.  I surely don't buy them, and I read quite a bit.  What’s up with that?  Chime in, I'd love to hear from you!

New Blog, Three Tweets and 700 Views. I get Twitter now, really, I do!

I need to make a confession.  I never understood Twitter.  I embraced it and signed up for multiple handles, my personal one @joedimeo and multiple handles for various online real estate blogs, but in the end, I just didn’t get what was so special about Twitter.  Quite honestly, it seemed like a grand old waste of time.  Enter my new blog, MacEntrepreneur.com

Getting my newborn blog MacEntrepreneur.com off the ground just this past week offered me a hands-on crash course on the power of Twitter.  I had quite the pleasant surprise.  On Thursday, May 12 I posted an article reviewing Carmine Gallo’s phenomenal book “The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs: How to Be Insanely Great in Front of Any Audience”.  This article was actually posted on my personal blog at joedimeo.com a while back, but considering the nature of my new blog venture, I felt it was appropriate to cut and paste the post for my three Mac-loving entrepreneurial readers.

The very next morning I launch TweetDeck and noticed a tab called ‘mentions’.  I click on it and see three items: two tweets from Carmine Gallo and one from McGraw Hill Business Publishing.  “Wow!” I say to myself.  “Carmine Gallo saw my post, and so did someone at MHB Publishing … pretty cool, this Twitter thing is starting to click!”  One of Carmine Gallo’s tweets simply retweeted my post and another was a simple thanks for the post.  Well, thank you Carmine!  Much appreciated! 

The very next morning I am lying in bed reflecting on the events of the previous day and another aspect of Twitter dawned on me.  “Hmm, Carmine and McGraw Hill have … followers.  I wonder how many?  I fire up my MacBookPro, log into my Twitter page and look at the numbers.  Carmine Gallo, approximately 1,700 followers.  McGraw Hill, approximately 4,900.  Wow!  My blog post had the opportunity to be viewed 6,600 times.  “OK, now I get the power of Twitter!” I said to myself.  I log into my SquareSpace account to look at my traffic stats, and my blog received almost 700 page views. 

That is not much in the grand scheme of things, but for a site that is literally in its infancy … a week old??  Wow!  Thank you Twitter, thank you Carmine and thank you McGraw Hill Publishing!  I get Twitter now, really, I do!