According to Bloomberg News, Amazon is testing a service that allows Tablet PC users to purchase goods through mobile applications, this shows that Amazon may enter the market led by Google and Apple.According to Maria Ly, co-founder of the fitness club members card vendor Skimble which involves in the test project in the Amazon. Amazon is testing the in-app purchase service which allows users to subscribe to and purchase of goods in the application. Amazon spokesman Kinley Pearsall declined to comment about this.Developers and companies which are selling applications through online app stores...

Facebook has set up a new team to improve its search products, the team leader is Lars Rasmussen who was a former Google engineer..The team consists of more than 20 engineers which is led by Rasmussen. The main efforts are to achieve easier sorting for contents which are created by users on Facebook . This will help Facebook be a more powerful search engine, which not only allows the user to stay longer on Facebook, but also helps Facebook make more profits by selling keyword ads like what Google does by putting ads next to search results .Facebook is unlikely to compete with Google ...

Most people believe that the first step to starting a new company is to have a great idea. Back in business school, there were countless “idea brainstorming” sessions where groups of students would try to come up with the next billion dollar idea. None of them ever turned into anything.Great businesses are not built on ideas for marginal improvements or incremental features, they solve real problems and require a deep understanding of what those problems are. So the absolute worst thing to do is to come up with an idea for a product while sitting around a table for 30 minutes.So ho...

Why can’t we make more use of the 80/20 rule? I’ll review what the 80/20 rule is, explain how it can be powerful, then give four reasons why we don’t take advantage of it.What is the 80/20 rule?The 80/20 rule is amazing when you first learn about it. It says that efforts and results are often very unevenly distributed. You’ll get 80% of your results from the first 20% of your efforts. For example, maybe your top 20% of customers will provide 80% of your profit. Or when you’re debugging software, often 80% of the bugs will be in 20% of the code. Once you becom...

WHEN I first started as a freelance writer, I was eager to sell myself — but not eager to have to discuss money. So I more or less took whatever was offered. Then I read somewhere that no matter what price a new client states, you always say in a polite but firm tone, “I expected more.” The first time I tried it, I was sweating and I doubt my tone was firm — it probably sounded more like pleading — but to my great surprise, it worked. With that one sentence, I made an extra few hundred dollars. Negotiating a salary when you have a job can be...

Summary: Could and should Bill Gates return to day-to-day responsibilities at Microsoft? Fortune is reporting there’s a rumor to that effect. Fortune reported on December 8 that there’s talk Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates might be mulling a comeback, largely to help boost Microsoft’s stagnant stock price and employee morale.I have to say I am very, very, very skeptical on this one.First, it seems this is a single-sourced report. Fortune says: “One prominent chief executive told Fortune he’d heard from someone close to Gat...

A friendly reminder:The problem isn’t you. The problem is the problem. –Steven PressfieldSome stuff is just hard.We start thinking we messed up. That it’s an issue with us. But it’s not. The work is hard and the problem is hard. You need to solve the problem, not fix yourself.The quote above is from Steven Pressfield’s incredible Do the Work. The audiobook (that’s a store link) is about 90 minutes long, so it fits in a single dreary London commute and costs less than lunch.My problem as of lateMy previous businesses have b...

When I was in business school 25 years ago, I don't recall the term sustainability used. Maybe it was, but it certainly didn't register in my brain. The mantras that I recall were return on investment, shareholder value, revenue growth, and driving efficiencies in the business.But as I look at many of the challenges facing businesses today, it seems to me that the focus on performance and efficiency often comes at the cost of sustainability. This talk by Clay Christensen really drives that point home. The recent history of the steel industry in the US is a case study in managers doing everythi...