The recent passing of Steve Jobs got me wondering what the rest of us mere mortals could learn from such a visionary businessman and creative genius.

Carmine Gallo’s book The innovation secrets of Steve Jobs, distils Jobs’ philosophy down to seven principles. After thinking about how I can apply those ideas to a new venture a friend and I are planning, here’s what I came up with.

1. Do what you love: Think differently about your career

After a recent period of stress, I’m keen for the next phase of my business-life to be all about flow, fun and good vibes. As one of my mentors recently reminded me, “When you’re self-employed there is absolutely no reason to do anything you don’t want to do.” Amen to that.

2. Put a dent in the universe: Think differently about your vision

Steve Jobs was a universe-changer on a grand scale. Can a couple of humble small business owners from Sydney put a dent in the universe too? We’re going to give it a red hot go.

3. Kick-start your brain: Think differently about how you think

I’m so passionate and excited about the new business that I’ve noticed a huge burst in creative energy and I’m now actively looking out for ways to do things differently, just to see what unfolds. Watch this space.

4. Sell dreams, not products: Think differently about your customers

As a marketer and copywriter, I’ve long been familiar with the principle of selling in a way that solves a problem or relieves a pain.

5. Say ‘No’ to 1000 things: Think differently about design

Design applies to more than just the look and feel of a product or page. I’m applying this principle to our marketing plan to ensure we don’t try to be all things to all people with our new products.

6. Create insanely great experiences: Think differently about your brand experience

How awesome would it be for someone to describe their experience of our brand as ‘insanely great’? So far I’ve only got the tiniest inkling about how we’re going to achieve this, but I love the idea, and am going to try to weave it into everything we do.

7. Master the message: Think differently about your story

The way we tell the stories of our products, and the way people respond to those stories is what sets one business apart from another. Hopefully ours will be a page-turner!

Apple presents the new iPhone 4 with FaceTime, permitting video calling. The iPhone 4 features a 5 megapixel camera with LED flash and HD video recording.

The 3.5 inch Retina display has 960 x 640 pixels resulting in sharper, smoother and more realistic text, images and video. The iPhone 4 is only 9.3mm thick, and the new 5 megapixel autofocus camera with a 5x digital zoom, backside illuminated sensor and built-in LED flash allows pictures even in low light environments. iPhone 4 also records and edits HD video and the tap to focus feature now works while recording video. You can use the iPhone 4‘s LED flash for both still photography and video recording. The new iMovie app for iPhone lets you combine movie clips, add dynamic transitions and themes and include photos and music.

iPhone 4 has access to apps on the App Store. Every iPhone 4 has a built-in 3-axis gyro that when combined with the accelerometer provides 6-axis motion sensing such as up and down, side to side, forward and backward and pitch and roll. Developers can access the gyro using the new CoreMotion API to make games and other apps.

iPhone 4 comes with iOS 4, the new version of the mobile operating system with over 100 new features including Multitasking, Folders, enhanced Mail, deeper Enterprise support and Apple’s new iAd mobile advertising platform. The new iBooks app will be available for iPhone 4 as a free download from the App Store and includes Apple’s new iBookstore. iBooks users can also now read and store PDFs in iBooks.

iPhone 4 delivers seven hours of talk time on 3G networks, up to 10 hours of web browsing on Wi-Fi and up to six hours on 3G, and up to 10 hours of video playback and up to 40 hours of audio playback. It 4 is powered by Apple’s new A4 processor and has a second microphone to suppress unwanted background noise for improved call quality when in loud places. Included is 802.11n Wi-Fi networking and quad-band HSUPA to provide 7.2Mbps downlink and 5.8Mbps uplink capability.

iPhone 4 will roll out worldwide to 88 countries by the end of September and will be available by the end of July in Australia, New Zealand, much of western Europe, Singapore and South Korea. www.apple.com

Web users spend 69% of their time viewing the left half of the page and 30% viewing the right half. A conventional layout is thus more likely to make sites profitable.

My previous column discussed the distribution of user attention along the vertical dimension of Web pages. In short, people look at information above the fold far more than they do at information further down the page.

Here, we’ll do a 90-degree turn and look at user viewing patterns along the horizontal dimension. Using the same data set as my previous analysis, we find the following distribution of user attention from the left edge of the screen to the right:

In this chart, each bar shows the amount of time users spent on fixations within a 100-pixel-wide stripe running down the screen, starting from the very left.

People spent more than twice as much time looking at the left side of the page as they did the right:

• Left half of screen: 69% of viewing time
• Right half of screen: 30% of viewing time

The remaining 1% of viewing time was spent to the right of the initially-visible 1,024 pixels. Such information is visible only after horizontal scrolling, and the minute amount of attention it attracts confirms the guideline to avoid horizontal scrolling (mistake #3 of 2002).

Information to the right of the initially-visible area is in essence “below the fold,” except that they are beyond a right-hand fold instead of a bottom-of-window fold, and thus not literally “below.”

Read the rest of this post on the source site: Useit.com

—————————————–