Marvin Lee Dot Net

It looks like I have been reading quite a number of Business category books of late.

Delivering Happiness is the first book by Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos.com. I don’t know about you, but I’m not very familiar with Zappos until recently. Truth is, I was reading this blog post Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh is Delivering Happiness from NikiCheong.com and instead of trying to get a free copy there, I went directly to deliveringhappiness.com to get a review copy.

So here it is, the review of the Delivering Happiness book. I have extra copies of the book too, so if you care to read to the end of this post, I’ll tell you how you can get one.

The book is put into three sections.

Section 1 – Profits
This section is the personal story of Tony Hsieh about his growing up in US, going through college and trying to make money since a very young age.
I personally find this section of the book the most interesting, probably the fact that I’m a software developer and that he wrote it in a funny and simple to understand way.
Tony told stories of his multiple startup business, some of which failed and a few succeeded.
He even had a very short stint in Oracle before starting up his own LinkExchange with a partner and later sold it off for $265 million to Microsoft!
After selling LinkExchange and becoming a millionnaire, Tony then went on to start Zappos and then played poker. No, seriously, poker.

Section 2 – Profits and Passion
While Section 1 is Tony’s personal story, Section 2 is the story of Zappos. This part of the book tells of how Zappos went past survival and then growth.
Zappos had went through growth, downsizing, funding, problem with products shipping and moving from San Francisco to Las Vegas.
Rarely do companies reveal their story and how things work but in this section, Tony shares about how the company culture is and more uniquely, a list of ten core values of Zappos.
Read more about the core values here.
The one that I admire most is Be Humble.

Be Humble is probably the core value that ends up affecting our hiring decisions the most. There are a lot of experienced, smart, and talented people we interview that we know can make and immediate impact on our top or bottom line. But a lot of them are also really egotistical, so we end up not hiring them. At most companies, the hiring manager would probably argue that we should hire such a candidate because he or she will add a lot of value to the company, which is probably why most large corporations don’t have great cultures.

Section 3 – Profits, Passion and Purpose
This final section is finally the purpose of this book, delivering happiness.
Tony shares his finding that happiness is actually the common thing that everyone looks for, although in short term, they might have objective such as retiring early, making money, finding a soulmate or running faster.

My personal opinion is that this book is one of those better ones that instead of becoming reference book, is more of a conversational business book that I will recommend my friends.
It’s a good read if you like stories about web entrepreneur, life of a millionnaire and something about finding happiness in what you do.

Do you have a personal favourite business book that isn’t just another reference book? Recommend me one in the comment section below and if you could, please let me know why it is your favourite. A random selection of comments will receive a copy of Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh delivered to you anywhere in the world.

Books, Review Amazon, Delivering Happiness, LinkExchange, Microsoft, Tony Hsieh, Zappos

First and foremost, I’d like to make it clear that I support local projects.

So when I first got to know about this Project 500 on Twitter, I sort of immediately sign up to join their beta testers.

Project 500 has since evolved to be Weave.

It was finally made known to the public that the party behind it is Digi.

Weave is just like friendfeed, a social network aggregators, where you will be able to link all your social networks in a single website and view them or update them in a single place.

Most of the social networks are available for integration, but I still have not find myself the compelling reason to actively use it.

First of all, I have doubt this insecurity of giving my login credentials of a website to a third party.

Well, that was fixed for Facebook, as it now uses Facebook connect.

However, there are other services that are not.

Besides, an aggregator mostly do not have all the functions available from the original service. How do you retweet for twitter for instance, or whatever new features that are being released?

I think Weeave will or should think about how this project should be compelling enough to be used by the users.
Maybe it could utilize the infrastructure of Digi for additional functions, rather than just pure sms commands.
Besides, the sms commands only acts as revenue for Digi and doesn’t really bring advantage to users.

Think about it.

Internet, Review, Software DiGi, Facebook, Project 500, Weeave

Credit to Kai Shen for sharing this piece of awesome technology, Tissot Reality enabled me to try out multiple TISSOT watches in a short time.

Multiple reasons why it is so cool to try out Tissot in Augmented Reality:

• TISSOT watches are expensive to even try out
• they are always locked in glass cabinet?
• this is so in-the-future!

Augmented Reality, made far-fetched things closer to you.

I made a video (with very limited resources, mind you) to try it out and demonstrate it.

Try it yourself by visiting Tissot Reality.

All you need to do is just
1. Download a PDF with the watch to be printed out.
2. Print the watch and cut it out, wear it.
3. Download the software and run it on a computer with webcam.
4. Flaunt it!

There of course could be some difference with the actual thing. I believe the colour is slightly off, but isn’t this better for a seller to approach their prospects rather than locking their expensive products in cabinet?

I printed the page straight-away in A4 and if you notice my watch is kinda small.
It could’ve been better to print just the watch in a single A4 paper.

Yeah, this piece of tear-away paper become a TISSOT watch.

Technology like this is very useful for humans to try out products in appearance before making a purchase.
The other thing like this that I was looking forward to was Microsoft Natal but Tissot just made it ahead of anybody else.

Call me whatever names you want, but I think this technology would be advantageous for the lingerie industry.
What say you?
And no, you won’t expect a video of me in Augmented Reality undies.

Internet Marketing, Review, Software, Technology 3D, Augmented Reality, Tissot, Virtual Reality