July 2007 - NevilleHobson.com

Sun Microsystems lowers the bar on financial communication

Yesterday, Sun Microsystems reported their financial results for 2007. A routine communication activity for a publicly-listed company, with a press release, earnings call and presentation for the financial community, employee communication, interviews with journalists, conversations with shareholders, etc. Most definitely not routine was the way they did it by making their public announcements on their website and via RSS feeds before any other public communication – before the press release, before the earnings call, before anything else. The financial results…

Cuts from FIR #262

Overflows from today’s FIR #262: Top global brands ranked according to BusinessWeek/Interbrand survey Google updates Google Earth Enterprise If you want to automatically receive FIR Cuts as they’re published, subscribe to the RSS feed. (What are FIR Cuts?)

The Hobson & Holtz Report – Podcast #262: July 30, 2007

Content summary: You can contribute to the show notes wiki; vote for FIR in the Podcast Awards 2007; what listeners think of FIR Cuts; the Media Monitoring Minute with CustomScoop; Lee Hopkins reports on The Age of the Vanishing Context, and the Annual Pig and Pussy Hunt; RSS has highest business value among Web 2.0 apps; B2B marketers’ Web 2.0 preferences; Sun Microsystems announces financial results first on the web and via RSS; what UK educators are doing in Second…

You are the presentation

PowerPoints are not your presentation, says Bert Decker in a post that gets across a point that anyone who ever needs to communicate with a group of people should bear in mind – you are the presentation and the PowerPoint deck or other media is purely your visual aid. Decker uses Steve Jobs as a great example of an engaging communicator where, no matter the wow! factors of the Apple products he’s talking about and the cool audio-visual aids he…

Do I get a Dell, a Sony or something else?

I’ve held out but I now have to face the inevitable – my venerable IBM T30 Thinkpad laptop just doesn’t deliver the goods any more and I have to replace it. It’s been a terrific computer during the past four years. For the past couple of years, it’s been the machine I take with me on my travels, not the primary PC I use daily (that’s a Dell XPS Gen 5 desktop). But with only 16 megs of video memory…