There is always something to improve on the way how we do our presentations. Steve Jobs is very well known for his extraordinary speeches. On BNET, communication coach Carmine Gallo discusses various techniques Jobs uses to inspire his audience.
Things to remember from Steve Jobs presentations:
Set clear and consistent theme,
…present it as a mantra to help your audience remember it easily (“Today Apple is going to reinvent the phone!”)
Provide the outline
Open and close each section with a clear transition
Show enthusiasm
(Jobs uses words like extraordinary, amazing, cool, awesome, incredible)
Wow your audience
Sell an experience
Make numbers and statistics meaningful (compare them, how much it actually represents)
Be short on bullet points, big on visuals, tell stories
Give them a show
Rehearse
One more thing … ( give your audience a bonus )
Be optimistic. Jobs speaks with opportunity language and encourage others.
This show is featuring three businessmen. Cushion maker, kitchen seller and air conditioning device innovator. Shows obstacles, benefits and adventure of doing business in China. However these guys seem sometimes rude and clueless to me, they are definitely clever. There is something on China, one billion people, huge market potential, cheap labour. But, I think learning chinese is hard. Language is a gate to hearts and minds of people. This way you will always need to count on joint ventures, local business partners who I think will never treat european businessman the same way as the local chinese one.
Professor Patrick Winston from MIT offers tips on how to give effective talk. He shares his insights about starting a lecture, cycling, how to indicate transitions, asking questions… Offers tips about how to use blackboard and overheads. This presentation published by MIT is excellent if you want to improve your speeches. Something what every teacher should embrace.
When do you realized that knowing too much is too much? With broader knowledge you have, it is constantly harder to start even simple single thing fast. You plan, you design, you start. But many times you end up doing nothing because you find your idea to be too complicated to realize. It is all because of this experience and assumptions of how things need to be done that we sometimes don’t do them at all rather than doing them wrong for the first time.
When I was on secondary school I just sit down and start a web site for students to share papers and home exercises online (studentske.sk). Didn’t know anything about search engine optimization, marketing, usability, design… Just came sit down and did it the best way as I could at that time.
It turned out to be very good. I improved the site week by week. I learned so much while building it. I learned about PHP, site navigation, different styles etc… After two years studentske.sk became the most visited student site in Slovakia. It was just great, it was spontaneous.
But now I would not be able to do such a site again. Too much knowledge, too much willing to do things right for the first time… too much wanting it to be perfect. You think that to make site perfect it must be combination of good marketing, perfect design, quality content, usable navigation, SEO, user experience and interaction…
Putting a simple goal ahead and doing the first step, being foolish and having a clear mind is the only way to start something. Forget about all the things that can occur or need to be done. Focus on one thing, make the first step and you can improve the rest - step by step while you will be walking the stairs.
Whatever web based application you will be working with you will almost certainly need to generate image thumbnails on-the-fly. We were dealing with this issue when we start to develop our own content management system few years ago. Users willing to publish pictures on the web will almost always upload their pictures from digital camera. Those are however high-resolution photos not very suitable for web. You need to scale them down to appropriate size. But how?
There are two ways to do it. One is to automatically scale picture when user uploads it or upload original picture and scale it down when the picture is displayed. I like the last option, because it gives you freedom of use. You can link to original high-resolution version or you can scale it down to whatever size you like.
Creating thumbnail is easy as creating link to an image e.g. /thumb/images/photo.jpg?w=150&h=150 . Yes you can specify width and height of image directly in the link and script will give you picture of appropriate size.
The Ruby on Rails version works as good as PHP one in our CMS. It supports JPG, PNG and GIF pictures. It is just single controller with easy three steps install. It has cache build in so all the scaled down pictures are saved for later use which saves future processing time and promptly delivers resized picture.
If you have online gallery, picture library or any other place where you need to scale down pictures feel free to use RoR thumbnail generator.
I will be also happy to hear about any suggestions or improvements.
After a year or two? I start-up another blog. (Here is the old one). Why? Again? The need to share some thoughts and words came to me again. But now I want to write blog more professionally, there will be less from my personal life and more of information which can be valuable to you. I want to write preferably about entrepreneurship, business, web development, marketing and other topics which I find interesting. And moreover I want to promote my blog better. The formula value content + benefits must equal more readers. I very much want to make from this blog central share point of my knowledge which may be helpful to you. Hopefully I will manage to do it.
