Up and Running:

No, it’s not crazy; or at least, I should say, I’ve done it. I spent many hours during business travel using my t-Mobile PDA phone as an ebook reader, compatible with the Microsoft Reader format. It worked for me then (several years ago), and might still be convenient now. And that’s even despite the fact that I also own a Kindle.

That comes up because a Canadian company is introducing a digital book application that makes e-book readers out of smart phones. And the iPhone (hooray) is first.

As several providers rush into the e-book reader market, a Canadian company is preparing to take advantage of a huge population of stealth e-book readers — smartphones — and launch its Shortcovers service, which lets consumers read books on their handsets.

The digital book platform has been tested for Apple’s iPhone, according to people who have seen the service. Shortcovers is a division of Indigo Books & Music, which operates a Canadian nationwide chain of bookstores.

I like to post about ebooks and related new things on this blog because I think this is a market that has a lot of future to it. Or maybe it’s just me, that I like this technology.

This is the third of three parts. The first part appeared here a month ago, and the second here two weeks ago. All three were published first on Entrepreneur.com and are based on the book 3 Weeks to Startup, which I co-authored with Sabrina Parsons. That book, published by Entrepreneur Press, came out in the autumn of 2008. It’s built on the idea that most how-to-start books fall back on the older, pre-web ways to get things done; and that today, because of the tools available, three weeks is still credible.

Day 15: Think about your location.

Most people know they’re either going to work out of their home or they know where their office will be. They’re considering the right location, how it should look, where it should be, what else is nearby and so on.

Even if it’s a home office, you’ve probably been thinking about it. Now’s the time to make sure you’re set up. Desk, computer, telephone, internet, quiet if you need it, view or not, the whole nine yards.

For a retail shop, workshop or office space, if you haven’t done so already, start looking. It’s almost time to make a decision.

There are brokers to help, and they won’t charge you because they get their commission from the landlords (which you should keep in mind as you deal with them because it’s always good to remember who’s paying). Find a broker who’ll work with you; one who listens to you about what you want and don’t want.

Today take steps to establish the location, whether it’s simply adding desks and phones in your home office or making calls to revamp a restaurant or manufacturing plant. For some people and businesses, this takes more than three weeks. Sometimes you can’t even lock in the location you want in that time. But start planning the office space in which you want to work, as this can create the most lag time.

Day 16: Set up your accounts.

With some good accounting software, you can keep track of every transaction–every check, each invoice you receive and those you send out. Keep careful track of spending and invoice categories, and before you know it, you’re doing the bookkeeping. The best way to choose your new accounting software is to check with your bank so your system and theirs will be compatible. That will save you endless frustration with inputting records.

Day 17: Create the legal documents.

Way back in Week 1, you got together with the others involved and wrote down your agreements on who is supposed to own how much of the business, who does what and who is putting in how much money. And you started looking at possible names for the business. Today, get it locked in by creating the legal entity online, talking to an attorney, or both.

Do yourself a favor, though, before you start the attorney’s meter running: Make sure you understand the basic tradeoffs, so you can spend the billable attorney time making the right choices, rather than just understanding the options. We don’t recommend setting up your business without an attorney (online or not), but if you get informed first, you’ll reduce the expense.

Day 18: Start hiring.
You’re nearing the end of your three-week startup. Just three days left, so if you’re going to have employees, it’s time to hire them or at least begin hiring. You started the recruiting process last week, so you should have some people in mind.

Don’t do job interviews without first going over a simple review of what you can and can’t say. A lot of what would at first glance seem like common sense is technically illegal. For example, you’re not supposed to ask someone his or her age or marital status because that information can lead to the appearance or suspicion of discrimination.

Day 19: Get funding.

This is another one that depends on the details. It can be as easy as deciding to spend a few thousand dollars you already have or as hard as raising millions of dollars from professional investors.

Your simple startup, involving a home office and a computer, might need nothing more than what you can get at Office Depot in an afternoon.

If you have to raise more money than you have, you need to write a detailed business plan, find potential investors and do a lot more work. If you’re looking for professional investment, you almost certainly won’t get that in three weeks (although there are some rare exceptions). You can still get your business going with the money you can get quickly. That way you look much more attractive to investors.

Day 20: Think about opening day.

This should be fun: Imagine the big party, the searchlights beaming into the sky, a brass band. Well, maybe not all that, but opening day is a good event to start your business marketing right.

Plan your opening day, and make sure everyone knows about it. This is the chance to write a press release, talk to local or trade reporters and generally let people know about your business. You want to build buzz so that when you open, people are aware of you.

Day 21: Start your business.

You’re up and running, and in three weeks, just as we had hoped. That makes today the first day of the rest of your business.

Today you’ll want to take another day to make the sale.

Focus today and see how many customers you can get in the door, figuratively or literally, depending on your business.

On your first day, remember to observe what’s going right, what’s going wrong and to note what could be better.

Your business will quickly become different from what you expected, and that’s OK. The key is to record what’s different and why, and make course corrections. In the real world, your planning should become management. So review your plan vs. actual frequently, and run your business better.

This is the second of three parts. The first part appeared here a month ago. All three were published first on Entrepreneur.com, and are based on the book 3 Weeks to Startup, which I co-authored along with Sabrina Parsons.  That book, published by Entrepreneur Press, came out in the autumn of 2008. It’s built on the idea that most how-to-start books fall back on the older, pre-Web ways to get things done; and that today, because of the tools available, 3 weeks is still credible.

Day 8: Plan your marketing strategy.

Think about your target market. Imagine a hypothetical, ideal customer. Determine his or her age, gender, job, favorite media and family situation. It’s important to know your customer well.

What’s your message? Can you say it in a single sentence? What if you have just one sentence that your customers will listen to? Where would you send that message? How would you reach them?

Think about your marketing strategy and implementation details. Take the time to go through a short but focused marketing plan to make sure you understand what it will take to market your business.

Day 9: Develop your look and feel.

Start developing a sense of the look and feel of your company as your buyers will see it. What will your logo look like? What sense will it convey? Old-fashioned? Trustworthy? Leading edge? Everybody has a brand. What will yours be? How will you get that idea across to customers and potential customers?

Develop your look and feel through logos, signs, letterhead and graphic standards. These are your branding essentials, and you need to have them in place before you get much further.

Day 10: Start building your website.

Have you started your website already? Have you been thinking about it? Today’s the day to get going with that.

If you’re building a Web 2.0 application or any website that’s core to your business, then you might have to settle for simply having begun by the end of the three weeks.

For most businesses, you can have a website built very quickly. Think about the basic elements of your website, and at least get a site up with basic information about you, your business, your products, and your services.

These days there are some good shortcuts available: take a look at TypePad, WordPress, and blogger platforms, for example. These were built for blogging but can apply to many small sites, with little to no  formatting work.

Day 11: Think about how you’re going to get paid.

Think about how your customers will pay you. If you’re going to be selling to consumers, then you probably want to establish a merchant account so you can accept credit cards.

These days, because of the online vendors, there are a lot more options. In the old days you had to go straight to your favorite local bank, which had a detailed and time-consuming process. These days, you have the option of setting yourself up with some Web stores (like Amazon, Yahoo!, and others) that can handle that part of it for you.

If you’re selling to businesses, then think about invoices and credit policies for business customers. There’s no underestimating how important getting paid is.

Day 12: Try making a sale.

Have you been able to make a sale yet? Maybe you should take today to peddle your goods. Even though you’re not fully established yet, lots of businesses (maybe most of them) start selling before they’re fully launched.

This is where you get to make sure that people want to buy what you’re selling.

Even if you can’t make a sale, because things are ready, talk somebody through it. The selling will continue for as long as your business is open, but we wanted to include it here as well because so many businesses are born at the moment the first customer says “yes.”

Day 13: Get an insurance policy.

Time to talk to an insurance broker, and get your business insurance started. These days, you can do a lot of research or even do the whole thing online. And if not, remember the old-fashioned telephone tree-style of finding the right people. Talk to any insurance broker you can think of, ask some questions, and if he or she isn’t the right one, ask who else you should talk to. Find the right person by asking the wrong person who else you should talk to.

In the doing, you’ll find out what kinds of insurance are appropriate for the type of business you’re starting.

Day 14: Build your dream team.

Have you been thinking about how to build your team? Do you know the people you want to bring on? It’s time to start ironing down the team and the employees, and start the recruiting process. Depending on your specifics, you’ll likely need job descriptions, and you’ll need to place ads on the right websites.

Start thinking about your employee list. Who will you need to help you out when you actually open for business? Will it be just you and your business partner? Do you need to hire service people? Drivers? Designers?

To get started, take another look at the financial planning you did in Week 1. See who you can afford to hire and start looking.

I’m happy to see that week 1 of our book 3 Weeks to Startup was featured yesterday on msnbc.com. I’m co-author of this one, along with Sabrina Parsons.

Here’s what we’re saying about the idea portion of it:

Day 1: Start with a viable idea.
Start thinking about whether your core idea makes a viable business.
How do you know? Well, honestly, you don’t always. It does help to take a step back from the idea, try to be honest and objective with yourself, and ask these questions:

1. Does anybody need (or want) what we’re going to be selling? How great is the need, or how much do they want it? Think about it in commonsense terms. Vigorous market research will come later.
2. Will they pay for it? While they say people will beat a path to your door for a better mousetrap, that’s not always true. Think about it in your case.
3. Are they already paying for something else? Can you go from that to honestly believing they’ll switch and pay for what you’re going to offer?
4. How will you focus? Do you have a strategy, or are you planning to do everything for everybody?

The answers to these questions may seem obvious, but the point of this exercise is to give yourself a reality check. Essentially, you’re asking whether there’s a market for your product or service. If you’re laying out a lot of money, and especially if that’s somebody else’s money (investors), it’s worth it to do the background research.

3 Weeks to Startup: Week 1 – Entrepreneur.com- msnbc.com

Myths about angels. No, I don’t mean the ones from heaven, just the ones who supposedly invest in your business. I’m talking about a new book by Scott Shane, Fool’s Gold?, about the myths of angel investment. And in this case, myths matter.

Kelly Spors interviewed Shane in The Wall Street Journal last week, and came up with an interesting summary:

Myth #1: Angel investors are like VCs, they just invest less. Prof. Shane finds angel investors are far more varied in their investments than venture capitalists. While VCs tend to focus almost exclusively on high-growth industries like technology, angels will invest in everything from the local dry cleaners to a restaurant. They tend to stick with industries they are familiar with. Plus, they are far more hands-off than VCs. Most angels spend less than an hour a week with the companies they invest in. And fewer than 5 percent of businesses that receive angel money go on to get VC money.

Several interesting points in this one. I’ve always thought of angels as a lot like VCs. I’m also surprised by that last point, the 5 percent one. I would have guessed that figure to be a lot higher.

Myth #2: Most angel investing is done by organized groups. Groups only account for 500 to 600 each year, he says, and only 2 percent of all angel investment dollars come from organized groups or networks of angels.

Myth #3: Angels are wealthy and savvy investors. Prof. Shane notes that only 21 percent of angels meet the Securities and Exchange Commission’s requirements for being an “accredited investor”–or an individual making $250,000 annually or more, or a couple making $350,000 or more (or net worth of more than $1 million). What’s more, the majority of angels don’t end up making money on their investments, and only 2 percent of businesses they invest in eventually become IPOs. And only 15 percent of angels do “extensive” research on the sectors of the businesses they fund.

This one is hard for me because I thought it was illegal to take an investment from somebody who doesn’t qualify as an accredited investor, according to the SEC.

And even more important than that, however, is that angels don’t make money on their investments, and don’t research their investments, either. Wow. I’m surprised.

Myth #4: Angels frequently invest $50,000 or $100,000 in businesses, sometimes up to $500,000 or $1 million. The median angel investment is around $10,000, Prof. Shane finds.

This is another surprise to me. I generally go with the idea that investing a little bit takes as much legal red tape as investing a lot.

Myth #5: Many people invest in businesses of people they barely knew beforehand. Of all informal business investments, 92 percent are made by friends and family. Few are made by an angel who isn’t one of those.

In this area I like being surprised, so I pass this on to you, and I’m looking forward to getting the book. Shane, a professor of entrepreneurship at Case Western, has done several other important books for entrepreneurs. This new book, intriguingly titled Fool’s Gold?, is due out next month. I very much liked and recommend Shane’s last book (Illusions of Entrepreneurship), too.

Independent Street : Five Common Myths of Angel Investing

I’ve used this blog on occasion to remind you and me that life is about life, not startups. Business is what we do, not who we are.

That’s important. Life is short. I really like to recommend Guy Kawasaki’s “Being a Mensch” chapter in The Art of the Start. And I like what I read earlier today on Lifehack:

“Reading fiction is a waste of time.”

Have you ever heard someone spout this line of complete and utter bollocks? I’ve rarely heard anything so ridiculous said in my life.

That’s Joel Falconer on Lifehack last weekend, in How to Fuel Your Idea Machine. Here’s more of his reasoning (or belief):

Reading books, fiction and nonfiction, fuels your idea machine. It gives you fodder to think with. The brain is essentially nothing more than a computer (albeit much more complicated); it takes an input, processes it and produces an output. In other words, you can’t create ideas without inputs. Life experiences and memories are your starter inputs; books allow you to branch out into the experiences of others, in the nonfiction section, and fiction allows you to reach the realm of fantasy–experiences nobody has really had. Fantasy breaks all the normal rules, and so do the best ideas and solutions, so what better place to start?

Then again, maybe I just want to do you and me a favor, and remind us both that building a business is something you do to improve your life, and not vice-versa.

Confusing? Yes, quite often. I just got another confused and confusing e-mail on this topic. Maybe it will help to clear it up. If nothing else, it will make me feel better. People use these different terms loosely, in some cases interchangeably. These are good things to think about, particularly when you’re thinking about your core identity, what makes your business you and things like that. Of course you don’t have to write them out, not all of them ever, not even some of them until you’re doing that formal plan for outsiders. But they can all help you settle your business identity.

Mantra

My favorite these days is the mantra. A single sentence that describes what your business does for people. I really like the way Guy Kawasaki deals with the mantra in Mantra vs. Mission on his blog, and in his Art of the Start book.

A mantra is three or four words long. Tops. Its purpose is to help employees truly understand why the organization exists.

He gives some good examples. Wendy’s should be “healthy fast food.” Nike: “Authentic athletic performance.” Target: “Democratize design.” Those are all his, however, not the various companies’. In Palo Alto Software we reviewed our planning and focused on “helping people to succeed in business.”

The Art of the Start by Guy KawasakiRead more about this book…

Mission

A mission statement should be a simple statement of how you’re going to help three groups: your customers, your employees and your owners. If you can’t tell your mission statement from any other, if nobody could guess that it’s you, then you have work to do. Do one only if you’re going to use it. Don’t do just hype, like the Dilbert Mission Statement Generator. Guy’s Mantra vs. Mission post is good on missions also.

How do you use it? Use it to define your company by its long-term goals. What business are you really in? Use it to remind everybody what the business wants to do, and make sure it covers all three groups. Not just customers. Employees and owners too.

The Vision

It’s confusing. I confused vision with mission for years. It finally made sense to me when somebody suggested a vision was a matter of projecting a dream forward in time, like a dream view of something three, five, maybe even 10 years hence, your vision of the future related to your business.

For example, a hotel development, auto repair shop or a web business might easily have a vision for how things will look a few years hence.

Goals

Usually they’re for the mission statement, but it doesn’t matter what form. Make sure you review your goals every so often. What do you want from your business? Think about it. It’s not all that obvious. You might think it’s about growth and profits and success, but then how do you measure success? That’s not a simple question.

• Many businesses are about lifestyle. Having time to spend with children. Independence. Doing what you want to do. Making money from things you’d do for free. Your paintings. Your novel. Coaching people in soccer or backpacking. These things matter.
• Many businesses are about business. You want to make as much money as possible. You want to be the richest person at the next class reunion.

I think of goals as broad and conceptual. Goals are important, but not necessarily measurable in any specific, objective way. Objectives are measurable business goals.

Objectives

Objectives are business goals. Set your market share objectives, sales objectives and profit objectives. Companies need to set objectives and plan to achieve them.

Make sure your objectives are concrete and measurable. Be specific, such as achieving a given level of sales or profits, a percentage of gross margin, a growth rate or a market share. Don’t use generalities like “being the best” or “growing rapidly.”

For example, “being the best” or “maximizing customer satisfaction” are not serious business plan objectives because they cannot really be measured. Much better objectives would set measurable goals, such as holding gross margin to 25 percent as a minimum, selling more than $3 million or achieving 6 percent profit on sales and 10 percent return on equity.

If less tangible goals are critical to a plan, find a way to measure them. For example, if image and awareness are vital, then plan for statistically valid surveys to measure the improvements in image and awareness. You can also set goals for market share and purchase research to measure the actual share. Or if you want to focus on customer satisfaction, plan for a survey to quantify satisfaction or specify numerical objectives regarding returns or complaints.

Lots of people think of themselves as either words (or concepts) people or numbers people. In business planning, however, it’s hard to separate the two. Even the words and concepts people need numbers–the sales forecast, the expense budget, other metrics–to make their planning real. And the numbers people need to move away from the numbers long enough to think through the core strategy, how their business is different, what their customers want from them, and the rest of that heart-of-the-plan center.

The problems come when people get bogged down. Some people fear writing; they think of the empty page, spelling errors, grammar errors and bad days in school. Some people fear math. They think of arithmetic errors, red marks on papers and not being qualified.

And the magic solution is just keeping it simple.

• As for words and concepts, particularly at the beginning, think of the core as that elevator speech, maybe full bullet points, but not a term paper or well-written prose. It doesn’t matter. Nobody but you is reading it. You can dress it up later when you actually need to show it to an outsider.
• For the numbers, keep them simple. Do a sales forecast. Do an expense budget. Be mindful of the cash-flow traps, watch your cash balance, but don’t think you need a full financial forecast from Day One. Just some estimates you can track and review, and use to manage plan vs. actual. If–and only if–you’re a startup, do your starting costs, too.

You may have a business plan event, in which case you’ll probably want to do full explanations with supporting information, covering the bigger market picture, the team background, company history and a complete financial forecast. That would include sales, personnel, profit-loss, balance sheet, cash flow, even the business ratios and probably a break-even analysis as well, plus maybe what you’re going to do with the money you’re seeking, how much of your company you’re trading for investment and so on. But wait until you need it before you get it.

And for the words and concepts people, you already have somebody running the numbers of your company. You have to have that to survive administration and taxes. If you’re just starting, then you can usually find somebody who understands basic business numbers so you can add those skills to your team. Remember it doesn’t have to be just you; you can build a team with co-founders or partners, or contractors or employees, too. Regardless, somebody will have to run the numbers once you get going.

For you numbers people, I think I know you pretty well even though I was a lit major in college and wrote for a living for years. I discovered numbers in business later, when I got the MBA. Most of you are keeping those concepts in your head– things like positioning, differentiation, strategy and focus–because you think about them through the numbers. Don’t sweat the format, the mistakes or the sentence structure: Just tell your story. And start with the numbers; that works just as well.

Remember, with the plan-as-you-go business plan, it’s start anywhere and get going. Build it as you need it.

That having been said, I want to share a words-and-numbers together story. This is from my book Hurdle: the Book on Business Planning:

In 1974, I switched from general journalism, writing for United Press International from Mexico City, to business journalism, writing for Business International and McGraw-Hill World News. With the switch, I found myself covering business and economics instead of general news, writing for (among others) Business Week and Business Latin America. Because I thought it would be nice to have some idea what I was writing about, I went to the local graduate school at night for courses in general economics, accounting, finance, and marketing.

As I learned about macroeconomics, and how to read financial statements, I discovered that the truth in business is almost always a combination of words and numbers, and can’t be explained with either one without the other. For example, when a Central American government announced a new federal budget that it said was going to both develop growth and reduce inflation, the numbers said that was a contradiction. You can’t do both; you can do one or the other. You could only see that by dealing with both words and numbers.

I went on from there, in that book, to plow through the whole numbers thing as if everybody had a full business plan event to worry about and therefore a full, complete formal plan to do. This was too much, in retrospect. You can track and manage most businesses with the core plan numbers in the sales forecast and expense budget.

A business plan is like that, too. You can’t describe a plan without both text and tables, both words and numbers. The single most important analysis in a business plan is a cash flow plan, because cash is the most critical element in business. With the way the numbers work, however, you can’t do a cash flow plan without looking at the income statement and balance sheet as well.

You really can’t do the income statement without looking at sales, cost of sales, personnel expenses and other expenses, so you need those too. And you’d have trouble doing a sales forecast without understanding your market, so a market analysis is recommended.

And then you have the break-even as part of the initial assessment, and tables for business ratios, general assumptions, and other numbers. Step by step, the business plan becomes a collection of tables and charts around the text.

Although cash is critical, people think in terms of profits instead of cash. We all do. When you and your friends imagine a new business, you think of what it would cost to make the product, what you could sell it for, and what the profits per unit might be. We are trained to think of business as sales minus costs and expenses, which results in profits.

Unfortunately, we don’t spend the profits in a business. We spend cash. Profitable companies go broke because they had all their money tied up in assets and couldn’t pay their expenses. Working capital is critical to business health. Unfortunately, we don’t see the cash implications as clearly as we should, which is one of the best reasons for proper business planning. We have to manage cash, as well as profits.

That’s all true, but not for all plans–only when you’re doing the formal plan for outsiders. With the initial plan-as-you-go plan, some of that can wait until later. I am going to explain all of it in my next book, by the way, but some of it waits for the business plan event, so you do it when you really need it, as your business and plan grow.

The plan-as-you-go business plan is the answer to what we need from now on to take planning into the core of business, make it management, use it to help grow and direct the future, proactively.

I have a summary of this in my most recent monthly column on Entrepreneur.com.

This is going to be my next book, published by Entrepreneur, due out in the bookstores and on the web in September of this year.

It’s about planning, not just a plan. Make the plan only as big as you need, not a formal document if you don’t need a formal document. Keep it on the computer.

It starts with setting up review schedules, and it also includes metrics, dates, deadlines, specifics, cash flow and the marketing heart of the plan. But it isn’t a complete formal document until you find yourself needing a complete formal document.

For more detail, it’s on Planning Startups Stories.

I’m not doing a lot of business this week, writing in fact from an Internet cafe in Acapulco, my country-in-law.

As I was catching up on things I found a couple interesting posts. My thanks go to David Miller at Campus Entrepreneurship for a Dec. 24 post listing 20 good quotes on entrepreneurship, from Cheap Revolution. And while I was at that blog, I couldn’t resist clicking on a previous post, which is another good list: Top 12 Books for Entrepreneurs.

And with that, I’m going back to the beach.

(Note: I posted this on Planning Startups Stories earlier this week. I’m crossposting it here because I think the Kindle opens up new opportunities, and it follows my post here on Kindle last month. Tim)

So response to the Kindle is heating up. I ordered one and discovered they’re back-ordered, not promising to deliver before Christmas. I’ve seen a thoughtful post suggesting that Amazon will regret not making it a more open system. And reviews on Amazon are only lukewarm.

The delay is OK with me; it wasn’t a gift. I just want it. I rationalize that I’ll be able to blog about it, but that’s just MBA rationalization. I ordered it because I want it. I did that in June with the iPhone, paid the $600 to get it the first day, and I don’t regret it.

But you realize, of course, that I will have to tell you about it when I finally get it. I’m looking forward to it. In fact, I already decided not to order a hard copy book from Amazon today because I see it’s available on the Kindle, and I want to wait for the Kindle version.

I’ve been an e-book fan since long before the Amazon Kindle. I’m proud of that. I like the idea of an e-book reader. I bought the old Rocket e-book reader five years ago (or so), and I was glad I did. Before that I bought my first PDA–maybe seven years ago–for its e-book capabilities, and I actually read several full-length novels on it before I went on to something else.

In the interest of full disclosure, that Rocket e-book was a gift for a teenage daughter with a reading addiction, at the rate of two or three books a week. It was in part a defense against, “Dad, can we go to Borders?”

“Download it dear, download it.”

The reception of the Rocket e-book reader was underwhelming. I thought my daughter was possibly the only user, so I wasn’t surprised when the content stopped coming. But I just did a web search and found somebody else who owned a Rocket e-book reader, and liked it:

I owned the first Rocket Reader(NuvoMedia) in Grad school and loved it, absolutely loved it. I found it versatile (I could also sink my own documents to it, as well as free e-books I found at Project Gutenberg. I could add notes and bookmarks). I read my first Dan Brown book for under two dollars, Angels and Demons, before he was discovered by the world.

That seems odd because apparently the Rocket was not a success. They stayed away in droves. I thought my daughter was the only user, so I was glad to see Rebecca’s post, but that doesn’t make it mainstream (sorry, Rebecca, but then you do call your blog “the eclectic musings of an oddball“).

And yet, times change, technology marches on, and here comes Amazon with a new thing. The big gimmick is that you’re not tied to the computer. You can download the books from anywhere that has a cell connection.

Meanwhile, David Weinberger suggests the new Amazon Kindle may be “a textbook example of how the strengths of closed platforms can quickly turn into a weakness.”

One thing Amazon has going for it is that Kindle e-books are cheaper than real bound paper books. Just a bit cheaper, unfortunately. They certainly aren’t taking Seth Godin’s recommendation for really disruptive marketing, which he titled You Won’t Find Me on Amazon’s New Book Reader. He makes a good point, but actually, I think I will find him there.

Meanwhile, on the Harvard Business Online site, David Weinberger says Kindle is going to fail because it’s a closed system.

Amazon’s Kindle e-book may turn out to be a textbook. A textbook example, that is, of how the strengths of closed platforms can quickly turn into a weakness. From a product perspective, Kindle addresses every key weakness of its predecessors …

But Kindle operates in a closed universe, and that’s why it probably won’t succeed in the long term as currently constructed.

Interesting coincidence, he finishes that piece by asking “How about iTunes? Where do you see openness encroaching next?” Meanwhile, I’ve just this week switched my music buying patterns from iTunes, which annoys me by controlling how many computers I listen to purchased music on, to Amazon, which doesn’t. That’s right, Amazon is the open-system vendor that switched me from iTunes. So it goes full circle.

Today I was working on another post (coming soon) when I discovered that Guy Kawasaki is hosting a downloadable PDF file with the first chapter and the index of his book Art of the Start, which I recommend highly. This first chapter is very strong. Get going, make meaning, be different, polarize, do something better, do it because you can, and so on. Great ideas about business ideas.

Searching for that, I also came across a Web version that seems to be, word-for-word, that first chapter as well.

So, if you haven’t had time to get the book, or you want a sample, or you simply want to see it right now while you’re browsing, these are some options.