In the spirit of the season, I wanted to share some really cool ‘gifts’ that I ran across this week – fascinating, helpful, interesting and fun.  I don’t know if you’ll get stuff this cool at home during the holidays (apologies if I’m spoiling you). 

Gift 1 – the Gift of Challenge

Hopefully you’re familiar with Seth Godin – his approach is unlike anyone else on the internet.  I’d suggest that more people should emulate him, but I’m not sure it would work – he’s interesting and unique and he does some really cool things that are just him.

His latest cool thing is organizing a free eBook he’s giving away on his site.  It has some ties to promoting some charitable organizations, but mostly it’s a series of 1 page essays written by a very diverse group of authors and experts with a general theme of what they are all thinking about and doing now.

It’s called What Matters Now and it’s well worth the download – go check it out.

I especially enjoyed Hugh MacLeod, Howard Mann, Jackie Huba and Ben McConnell, Daniel Pink to name a few – who challenged your thinking?

Gift 2 – the Gift of Tech

Special thanks to Don Rossberg of KCDataworks – he was the first to point out Seth’s eBook to me and he also wrote a great blog post recently on the 12 Days of (free) Tech where he shares 12 online tech tools / gadgets that are free and more importantly really helpful stuff.  He covers everything from Xobni (check it out – highly recommended) to a way to print things easily and quickly to a PDF format.

By the way, if you are a business owner who’s struggling with the appropriate tech support and you’d like to work with someone you can trust, someone who can actually talk to you like a person AND knows what they’re talking about – you should meet with Don.  He’s a great guy and would be a huge benefit to any small business owner!

Gift 3 – the Gift of Ooooh and Aaaaah

One of the reasons why I like Twitter is that it’s a great way to find stuff that you’d never come across on your own.  It’s like walking along a beach and getting to see all sorts of interesting stuff wash up.  One of the things that washed up this afternoon was a really cool photography site that will grab your attention and make your jaw drop.

The first post is a set of 360 degree panoramic photos from stunning locations (like the top of Mount Everest)!  I’m not sure how they got some of these shots, but it is very cool (make sure to click through to get to the actual 360 shot).  You can find the panoramic gallery here.

As if that wasn’t cool enough – the same site has a set of extreme macro photos of Snowflakes, which are amazingly beautiful and a lot more varied and interesting than I would have thought – check out the Snowflakes here.

What cool online things are you sharing these days?  Share them in the comments below – I’d love to check them out.

Shawn Kinkade Kansas City Business Coach

  photo by emdot 

It’s a Friday afternoon and I thought I would share 3 fun and interesting, but totally unrelated things.  The internet is an amazing resource…what is it not capable of?

Item #1 – Accidental Innovation

Most of the time you think about inventors laboring away in the lab, spending years coming up with great ideas and products.  However for a lot of products, the innovation actually comes about accidentally.

You may have heard the story about Post-its as an accidental creation at 3M, but did you know that  Corn Flakes were totally an accident discovered by the Kellogg brothers in the late 1800s?

Or that the x-ray was discovered accidentally when a fluorescent screen unexpectedly started glowing during an unrelated experiment? 

The fun folks over at Business Pundit have pulled together an article on popular products that were invented by accident – you can see it here at the unique origins of 25 popular products!

Item #2 – Unbelievable Photos!

I’m a big fan of photography and the amazing things you can do with Photoshop, but it’s even more amazing to find untouched photos that are unbelievable.

  photo by phillip perold

The WebUrbanist has come up with 15 incredible images that look altered but aren’t.  As an example, the picture above is actually a reflection on a beach, not a body of water.  Cool stuff – check it out.

Item #3 – Google Wave is coming!

Finally, if you haven’t heard about Google Wave, you’re hearing about it now and you’ll be hearing a lot more in the next couple of months.  The quick explanation of Google Wave is that it’s a new platform / technology / application that represents what email would be if it were invented today instead of 40 years ago – bringing in all of the real-time collaboration and sharing that people are using in Social Media applications everywhere else. 

Confused?  Me too – but this video might help you make sense of it (and it’s only 2 minutes long!). 

If you can’t see the video, you can find it here.

I can see a ton of uses for something like this and with Google’s backing you know it’s going to get a lot of exposure.  Stay tuned, it will be interesting.

If you’ve seen some fun stuff lately, share it in the comments below – I’d love to see it.

Shawn Kinkade   Kansas City Business Coach