This evening I spoke to 50 Officers of Silicon Valley Toastmasters clubs about the value of the National Speakers Association (NSA). My talk covered the history of the NSA; its focus on the business aspects of being a professional speaker and why NSA conventions are such valuable sources of information.

I shared with the Toastmasters the source for recordings of past conventions and encouraged them to consider purchasing relevant material for download.

I encouraged them to subscribe to the free weekly newsletter SpeakerNet News for information on a wide variety of topics of interest to speakers.

I listed the upcoming meetings of the Northern California chapter and invited them to attend. We finished the talk by raffling three free copies of our magazine Professionally Speaking. Those who did not win a copy but would like to read this excellent magazine can order one from the print-on-demand MagCloud website for $4.50 plus postage. Such a deal!

To hear my presentation in full click on the podcast icon below. Since this is 44 minute talk you might prefer to use the Download option and save the .mp3 file to your iPod for later listening.

 

 The Value of the NSA for Toastmasters [44:16m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

How I became a magazine publisher

I never thought that a chance meeting on a Boston bus would lead to me having anything in common with Steve Forbes, Oprah Winfrey and Jann Wenner. But, like the publishers of FORBES, O and Rolling Stone, I’m now a magazine publisher.

It all began the day I met Udi Chatow, part of the MagCloud project team at Hewlett-Packard. We were attending the annual HP TechCon symposium. Udi told me how MagCloud enables anyone to publish a magazine. The team were looking for non-profit associations to test the service. As the President of the non-profit Northern California National Speakers Association I knew our association needed a showcase for members’ articles about public speaking. Within a few short weeks we had selected five articles, sourced some illustrations from a stock photo website and, with design help from Meghan Kennedy in HP Labs, created the inaugural edition. Professionally Speaking is a 20-page color magazine that’s available for purchase from magcloud.com. Best of all, there was none of the up-front cost associated with printing.

We announced the Summer 2008 edition of Professionally Speaking on June 13, 2008. Our Fall 2008 edition will be published in September.

MagCloud: the future of magazine publishing

MagCloud is a new business incubation resulting from collaboration between HP Labs and HP’s Corporate Ventures team. It’s where the world wide web meets the world of printing. MagCloud offers publishers the ability to take digitized magazines and economically promote, sell, print and fulfill them on demand.

It costs you nothing to publish a magazine on MagCloud.com. The service lets you upload a high-resolution PDF and MagCloud takes care of the rest: printing, mailing, subscription management and more. The MagCloud website functions as a virtual newsstand, where readers can browse and, using PayPal or a credit card, order publications. The publisher specifies a markup on each copy sold, which MagCloud collects and pays the publisher at the end of each month.

MagCloud uses HP Indigo digital press technology to custom-print each issue when it’s ordered. Printing on demand means no big print runs, which means no pre-publication expense. The resulting magazines are in gorgeous full color on 80lb paper.

This is a breakthrough for niche publications – the small ‘zines’ which form the long tail of the magazine publishing world. It’s also an interesting opportunity for large publishers. They are now free to experiment and create riskier products and see if they can find an audience.

The New Economics of Magazines

The MagCloud development team is looking at much more than printing technology. They are researching the fundamental economics of magazine publishing. Team member and economist Kay-Yut Chen states:

“MagCloud is enabling a completely new kind of print economics. It is reducing the distance between the publisher, the subscriber and the advertiser compared to traditional magazines. In the traditional model, someone who wants to run an advertisement in, say TIME Magazine, has to engage in a labor-intensive negotiation with high transaction costs. The automation we’re building into the MagCloud system means even a very small publisher and small advertiser can do business cost-effectively.”

By simplifying all aspects of the publishing process MagCloud benefits publishers, subscribers and advertisers – making a whole Print 2.0 ecosystem much more efficient than the existing model.

MagCloud’s Guiding Principle

The guiding principle of the project is that anyone can be a publisher. What they will do as publishers remains to be seen. “MagCloud is an enabling platform,” states Udi Chatow. “People are finding new opportunities that did not exist before. We don’t want to second guess what they will be.”

MagCloud Today

The project is still in early Beta stage. What this means in practice is that anyone can register on the site and browse and purchase magazines. Publisher capability is by invitation only, though rumor has it that invitations are distributed liberally. The reason is the development team is seeding a new market. They are looking for publishers who serve specific niches.

The world first heard about MagCloud when a couple of blogs broke the news in mid-June. Since then literally thousands of requests to publish have been received. They come from an astounding variety of organizations - from juggling associations to Stanford University athletics; from cartoonists to photographers.

SFentrepreneur visits HP Labs

Following a June 24th visit by 20 members of the Northern California Chapter of the National Speakers Association to HP Labs, SFentrepreneur founder Edith Yeung organized a visit by 40 members of her organization on August 21st.

The evening visit took in a talk by Udi and a tour of the Indigo printing press and a panel session where magazine publishers shared insights. I spoke about the experience of creating Professionally Speaking. Edith gave every member of the audience a complimentary copy of SFentrepreneur.

There was an incredible level of interest by these entrepreneurs. Many saw how a magazine could serve their niche.

The highlight of the evening was when the MagCloud team surprised us with a special 8-page souvenir magazine of photographs of the event they’d taken during the reception and tour. This is a great example of how MagCloud extends the boundaries of publishing. Training program managers and conference organizers can create just-in-time magazines for events.

What’s unique about MagCloud

Publishers can repurpose and monetize online and user-generated content. Printing costs are lower for small magazine and promotional runs of a few dozen, a few hundred or even a few thousand copies. There are automated web based ordering and print management services to take the headaches out of production. Financial transactions between buyers and the publishers are handled automatically to ease the flow of money to the bottom line. The site also offers a unique demand creation vehicle that publishers can showcase. It all adds up to the pleasure and prestige of seeing yourself in print at very low cost. It’s the people’s printing press.

Finally, it solves the back-issue problem for publishers. Virtual magazines never go out of print and readers can order any copy at any time from any where as long as it remains posted to magcloud.com.

Readers are free to enjoy a virtual magazine newsstand in the cloud. They can access a wide array of specialized and unique content in a printed magazine format that is not readily available elsewhere. If they find something they would like to order, it’s printed on demand and delivered directly to their mailbox.

Green Magazine Publishing

By taking advantage of print on demand, magazines are only printed by people who actually intend to read them.. This is much more environmentally friendly than the current magazine industry where an incredible 60% of the 3.8 billion magazines delivered to news-stands in the USA are never sold (or read). That’s over 2.3 billion wasted magazines that end up in recycling.

Variable print technology and future of MagCloud

This online marketplace of digital magazines holds the same promise as iTunes for music lovers. It allows readers the opportunity to sample content and purchase only what they need to read. iTunes means you no longer buy a whole album to just listen to a song or two. MagCloud means publishers have the opportunity to offer readers the option to just purchase the one or two articles they are interested in from any issue.

Imagine a future magazine marketplace where readers are free to create ‘mash-ups’ of content from a wide variety of sources. Magazines will be tailored from news articles, blog postings, book excerpts, event schedules, even friends’ recommendations for music, movies, books and more. The magazine is personal again.

No amount of marketing analysis can predict where MagCloud will go. Expect the unexpected. Variable print technology allows the freedom to experiment. “Every page can be different,” says MagCloud engineer Wei Koh. “A publisher is no longer limited to designing only one magazine. They have the option to personalize copies for each subscriber. This has exciting possibilities. We’ve only just scratched the surface.”

Consider a few options:

• Targeted advertising by zip code give national publications the option to insert low cost ads from regional companies.
• Editorial pages geared to certain consumers. A restaurant review for your town inserted in a national food publication.
• Photographs of subscribers on a one-off cover (Congratulations! You are Person of the Year.)

Your call

If you’ve read this far you are obviously interested in MagCloud. You probably have interests, hobbies, association colleagues or an attic filled with grandfather’s photographs which could be digitized and published. Perhaps your kids soccer team needs an end of season souvenir with articles and photographs. Or you could thrill your relatives at this summer’s family reunion with a magazine of the clan. Or perhaps you want to launch a magazine to support your neighborhood or other political campaign. What are you waiting for? Simply go to www.magcloud.com, and complete the request for a publisher invitation.

There’s a publishers guide that walks you through the process.

It’s available as a free download from the site, or for purchase as a printed magazine. What else did you expect?

Professional speakers are used to being introduced at large events by the disembodied announcer “Ladies and Gentlemen, please welcome…” known in the business as the VOG or Voice of God.

The idea that God speaks in an amplified, authoritarian, disembodied baritone is central to the Judeo-Christian tradition. It goes with the misogyny and long white beard.

However, there seems some basis in human development for this belief. Consider the opinion of Robert Lepage:

“the first voice that a child hears when it is in the womb is not the voice of the mother, because the child is part of the mother. The important voice that the child hears is the voice of the father: that’s the voice that changes where the child lives because it excites or stresses the mother. So when we come out we desperately try to put a face on that voice. And that’s intimately connected to the voice of God - or the absence of the voice of God.”

Lepage is the director of Lipsynch, “an epic nine-hour performance which spans 70 years and explores the voice as a compelling metaphor for human expression and interaction” currently playing at the Barbican theater in London. Sounds fascinating.

Since beginning his career in the video business in 1977, Rhys Ludlow has worked in field production, lighting, engineering, editing and producing. With a talent for clear communication with strong technical skills, his work includes national TV spots, specials, documentaries and corporate video.

Rhys’ work has been seen on all major US TV networks, at the Smithsonian and he edited the Academy Award nominated documentary “Last Images of War.”

His work on corporate promotional and educational videos include clients such as Chevron, Wells Fargo, PG&E, Pacific Bell, Hewlett-Packard, Autodesk, Visa, Dewitt Jones’ best selling motivational video, “Celebrate What’s Right With the World”, Jason Jennings’ 10-part series, “Productivity” and numerous demo reels for professional speakers. Examples of his work for speakers can be seen on his website www.media4speakers.com/

Rhys is taking the National Speakers Association Pro-Track class to better understand the business issues faced by speakers.

To hear his discussion on tips for speakers who want a video of their presentations, as well as his thoughts on the investment needed to become a professional speaker, click on the podcast icon below.

 

 Interview: Rhys Ludlow [5:36m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Coverage of the Summer Olympics has included television reports of wonderful varieties Chinese cuisine. As the 2008 Games approached the Chinese government took it upon themselves to provide approved translations of menu options on offer in local restaurants.

This, according to an article by the wonderfully named Fuchsia Dunlop (a name I’ll never tire of!) in the Weekend FT.

She lists the literal translations of many Chinese dishes found on restaurant menus:

“Chicken without sexual life” (a young chicken)
“Iron flooring cremation” (cookies baked on an iron griddle)
“Pock-marked old women’s bean curd” (stir-fried tofu in hot sauce)
and “the fragrance explodes the cowboy bone” (no other translation given - my imagination runs wild…)

Lost in translation

At the root of these amusing lists is not some Chinese inability to grasp the basics of English translation. Rather, the lack of congruence between Chinese characters and roman script impedes clear communication:

You can only go so far in borrowing from Chinese because beyond a certain level you have to know the actual Chinese characters to understand precisely what you are talking about. In Sichuanese cuisine, for example, there are two cooking methods that would both be transliterated as kao, but you can’t tell them apart unless you see the actual characters. The different characters for “salty” and “umami” are both rendered in the Roman alphabet as “xian “

The inability of one civilization to render the finer points of its culture into words that would be clearly understood by another is not limited to cuisines. Many social and cultural nuances are lost in translation - business arrangements; educational systems; humor, love, marriage and death. It’s made apparent when we see the literal English used in these menus. Official attempts to provide a standardized alternative are equally limited. Fuchsia Dunlop explains how these are:

…a pale reflection of one of the world’s most marvellous cuisines. Lyrical descriptive terms - like feicui (jadeite) for greenish foods, and guaiwei (strange-flavour, used for an intriguing combination of tastes) have been lost in the translation, and mapo doufu has severed its connection with the lovable pockmarked old dame of Chengdu. As Raymond Zhou wrote in the China Daily, this standardised translation is “a double-edged sword. It removes the ambiguity and unintended humour . . . But it takes away the fun and the rich connotation too. It turns a menu into the equivalent of plain rice, which has the necessary nutrients but is devoid of flavour”.

As with food, so with business. Corporate communications either lose their flavor or suffer unintended mis-translations in the journey from West to East and back. This is all part of the rich tapestry of human life. Give me an exploding cowboy bone any day over the stark accuracy of the standard translation.

I attended the 2008 NSA Convention in New York City. Unlike my podcasts from the 2007 San Diego Convention and my blog from the 2006 Orlando event, I was not able to spend the time necessary to review the Convention in depth on Professionally Speaking.

Not to worry. There are two excellent resources I’ve added to the NSA Blogroll in the right column.

NSA Meetings is a blog hosted by Cynthia D’Amour and Don Cooper. There are a number of excellent postings on the conference in New York.

No NSA Conference would be complete without the parties Ed Rigsbee organizes for the Cigar PEG. Their new blog will keep you up-to-date on what happened in New York as well as plans for the future.

Finally, if you missed any of the sessions at the conference, don’t forget you can order audio and video of all sessions from SoftConference.

Flying back from an exhausting few days at the National Speakers Convention in New York on Tuesday I was looking forward to catching up on my sleep with a few hours rest in the window seat of JetBlue Flight 95 from JFK to Oakland.

Imagine my surprise when I opened the New York Times that morning to read that the “Happy Jetting” airline had decided to charge customers $7 for pillows and blankets.

Exhausted and intrigued, I decided to hand over my credit card (no cash accepted by the cabin crew) and see what money can buy at 36,000′ these days.

A lot less than I expected.

The pillow and blanket came in a sealed plastic sack which also contained a $5 voucher for Bed, Bath & Beyond. So the net cost is $2 if you remember to cash in the coupon.

The package was branded as a CleanRest by MicronOne and promised “The World’s Cleanest Pillow”. Gary Goldberg the founder of CleanRest tells us on the insert provided with the pillow that “my wife’s vigilance in building the healthiest possible environment for our kids led me to take action … to create a clean, safe, sleep environment for our kids.” Hopefully the Goldberg’s keep their kids off airplanes where recycled air carries far more germs than are ever found in a pillow.

Anyway, the pillow was not worth the money. It’s tiny (10×12) - and does not bridge the gap between the seat-back and the wall which is the main way someone sitting in a window seat can make themselves comfortable.

Obviously, airlines are suffering from high fuel prices. They don’t seem able to raise fares to cover the added cost of flying, so they are reverting to charges for items which they used to provide gratis. One wonders where it will all end. How about a nickel a sheet for loo paper?

Michael writes on the Ragan Communications website about the age disparity between twenty-something political speechwriters and graybeard corporate communications types like me.

Michael and I spoke last week about my experience of the age range in corporate America exec comms departments. He quotes me in the article. One misquote - “I’ve been a corporate communicator for 25, 30 years”. This is simply not the case. I’ve been in the computer business for 25 years. But my early career was spent in technical jobs (database administration and systems engineering). I moved into product training 15 years ago and speechwriting came out of that, but only in the last eight years.

The salary gap seems way overstated. Political speeechwriters might well only get paid $40-50K. But claiming that “A speechwriter for the CEO of even a medium Fortune 500 company might make $250,000″ seems way high. Try changing the leading 2 to a 1 and the number makes more sense. At least in my experience. But wait! Maybe I’ve just been grossly underpaid all these years…

Every summer, the best and brightest science and engineering students from across the country and around the world spend a summer interning at Silicon Valley companies. This select bunch of students are mostly post-graduates with a handful of undergraduates. PARC, SAP Labs, Sun Labs, Microsoft Research, Google and HP Labs host a series of visits and social networking events. These events culminate in a visit to HP Labs and a reception for the students.

I helped organize the visit to HP this year and took the opportunity to ask the students where they were from, which company they were interning at and a little about their research interests. To hear what excites the next generation of Silicon Valley scientists and engineers, click on the podcast icon below.

 

 Sicilon Valley Summer Interns [5:06m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

This month’s Pro-Track profile podcast features an experienced Myers-Briggs expert.

Dan Moirao is an educator of students — from kindergarten through working professionals. He has served as a classroom teacher, site and district administrator in a variety of school settings ranging from rural, to urban and suburban, representing every level of the socio-economic spectrum. His devotion to the importance of the learning and teaching process has been evident throughout his career.

Today, Dan is very much a traveling consultant. While he lives in Danville, with his wife Anita of 29 years, he finds himself traveling to Kentucky, Georgia, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Philadelphia and Minnesota and beyond.

Dan’s passion and work is a style model — the Myers-Briggs. While he started and continues to work with teachers on instructional strategies to increase student achievement, Dan has found his work shift organizational development. He has learned is that professional development for the “workers” isn’t the end — the organization and the systems that propel it are also important.

To hear what he told me about his work with Myers-Briggs and the value he finds in the National Speakers Association Pro-Track program, click on the podcast icon below.

You can contact Dan at TrDan@aol.com

 

 Interview: Dan Moirao [5:32m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download