Outselling Angry Birds – the future of publishing

The world of publishing is changing rapidly and the iPad in my humble opinion may do more to speed this up than the Kindle )altho, I may be proved wrong in the end, but on the evidence so far, the iPad is winning).

The latest piece of evidence is called The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr Morris and appears to be much more than just a book. Thanks to the iPad it is part open world game, part movie, part educational tool and probably many more things beside. And it has apparently outsold Angry Birds, which is something of an achievement.

An article in The Times (which I won’t link to due to Rupurt’s paywall) says that in the future it is possible this book “will be regarded as one of the most influental titles of the early 21st century.” High praise indeed (altho taken with a pinch of salt as Rupurt isn’t great when it comes to the internet – remember MySpace?)

One of the key points of interest here is that the book was not written by a single person, nor a collaboration of a pair or small group of people, no this was created using a studio method – I can only compare this to the gaming world where once games were produced by single coders in their back bedrooms whereas now they are produced by huge studios.

Perhaps the historic lone writer who works in a room cut off from the world to produce his masterpiece will disappear as books are produced in studios with huge development budgets…

Battling PowerPoint-lessness moves to a new level

My brother introduced me to the term PowerPoint-lessness a few years ago – explaining about how awful some of his lectures at uni could be.

(He went to uni several years after I did, he was a mature student, and now has a great job thanks to his hard work in a vocational degree).

I have often advocated the need to use PowerPoint as an effective tool – which it can be if done properly.

I am an advocate of the six slide rule – ie if you need more than six slides to give a presentation, you are doing it wrong. The important rule here is that the slides support your presentation rather than, for example, you reading out every word on the 54 slides you are presenting.

I once presented the entire plot of Lost in a six slide presentation Lost Presentation_2upload

(in fact I did it in five and the sixth slide was used as a trailer for the new series of V).

(This was a challenge from a friend of mine – you know who you are!)

As someone who understands that badly used PowerPoint can drive you nuts (and well used is a great tool), I was intrigued to read about the  Swiss Anti PowerPoint Party.

Taking the issue to extremes in my humble opinion.

Mobile technology changing lives

In our western household we recently made the decision to get rid of our landline phone and the broadband which went with it.

We swapped the landline (£12 ish pcm line rental plus call charges) and internet (£14.99 pcm ) for a dongle from 3 (£15.99 pcm and a much higher download limit, 10gb more than the fixed line broadband contract we were on.

Which has seen the 100+ year old house I live in without a connected phone line for the first time I suspect in several decades.

Some people seem to think we are crazy getting rid of the landline – but each of the adults in our household has a mobile phone they take wherever they go so why have a land line? And why use this 19th century technology to provide your internet?

I was interested to read an article in the Observer the other day which talked about the change is society mobile technology has given to Africa.

Bringing landline phones and internet to all the world was just too expensive, which is why no one ever did it before.

The much lower cost of mobile phone technology has opened up a wprld of possibilities and it is changing lives.

Having recently got shot of my landline and started to rely on mobile only technology for my net connection and phone, I am pleased to read about how this is happening across our planet.