| Hello: Here’s the latest edition of MarketVolt’s Monday Mash-up. We’ll kick off every week with this quick collection of tips, recommendations, observations and other interesting, valuable stuff. – Tom |
| Monday, December 10, 2018 MarketVolt’s Monday Mash-UpRecommended Reading This is Marketing by Seth Godin If Seth Godin writes it, I read it (and usually recommend it). His latest book is no exception. I haven’t finished it yet. But so far, so good. Here’s a .pdf excerpt if you want to sample before you buy. A Disclaimer About OCR and Rocketbooks Last week, I recommended Rocketbook reusable notebooks. I said you can photograph the pages with the Rocketbook app which converts words to editable text and sends the scanned page(s) to wherever you designate — an email address, Dropbox, Evernote, Google Drive, etc. The more I use the app, the more I realize that the convert-to-editable-text (Optical Character Recognition or “OCR”) feature in this and similar apps is hit-and-miss — especially when you try to scan handwriting. Sometimes it does a good job. Sometimes it does a lousy job. I’m still loving Rocketbook, but it’s not ideal if I must convert my notes to editable text. If you want to test the Rocketbook app and its OCR capabilities, you can download free disposable Rocketbook pages here. Find the app in your app store and test its capabilities with the free pages. Other Options… For Scanning from Your Phone, without Rocketbook A few readers told me they like the idea of scanning from their phone, but they don’t want to buy the reusable notebooks. Here’s a good article that compares some of the more popular scan-from-phone apps (both for iPhone and Android). Like Rocketbook, these apps are inconsistent when scanning hand-writing to editable text. But I’ve tested several — including Abbyy, Adobe and ScanBot — and they do well with printed text and business cards. Very handy! I’m Listening to… American Songwriter’s Top-25 AlbumsI love this time of year when the various Best Of… lists arrive for music, books, movies, etc. I’m plowing through American Songwriter magazine’s Top 25 Albums of 2018 list. I like this list because it offers a variety of genres. I don’t love everything on the list, but I always discover some gems! Please let me know if you discover anything that you love. Mr. Potato Head, I Hate You With the holiday season in full swing, I was doing some research this month on ads that target children. I discovered that Mr. Potato Head, by Hasbro, was the first toy to have its own advertisement that targeted children. Here’s that ad. It’s an amusing, quaint blast from the past.But it also represents the start of “pester power.” Advertisers discovered how advertisements could fire up children to pester their parents for the latest and greatest toys. I still remember that “Mr. Potato Head, I love you…” ditty from my childhood. And, yes, I pestered my parents to buy me one. Here’s an interesting article about Mr. Potato Head and pester power. (Fun fact: The original toy was a box of plastic facial parts and accessories that you put into a real potato; Hasbro switched to a plastic potato after receiving complaints about moldy, rotten vegetables that heartbroken kids didn’t want to throw out). Any reading, listening, quoting, resourcing that you think we should share? Send us a tip. Until next time, enjoy the rest of this week and the weekend. Tom |
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