Monthly Archives: July 2014

ROI: Babson Beats Harvard for Best Bang-for-the-Buck!

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Here is a great article which references this week’s Money’s article ranking Babson as Best Bang-for-the-Buck college in the US…the best quote from this article would be:

“M.I.T., Stanford and the California Institute of Technology are all in the top 10. But so are Brigham Young, Harvey Mudd College and Babson College. Babson is a business-focused institution in Massachusetts that most people have probably never heard of. According to Money, it’s the No. 1 college in America.”

In my experience on the west coast barely anyone, outside of east coast transplants and people who are looking into, or have graduated from, business school have ever heard of Babson – this will be our key marketing challenge for the next generation of graduates.  Right now, as a graduate of the 3rd San Francisco cohort of Babson’s MBA program, the main marketing channel seems to be word-of-mouth referrals.

Building a Better College Ranking System. Wait, Babson Beats Harvard?

Cabin: iPhone Battery Case with MagSafe-like Connector

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HEVO Labs has just come up with a great accessory for the iPhone which addresses its most annoying/weakest feature – the %$#! Lightning port which is used for power & data.  It’s an Apple-only “standard” which I admit is nicer than there clunkier 30-pin port but

I honestly wish them the best of luck but there’s a reason why no non-Apple hardware manufacturers have developed any “Magsafe-Like” power adapters for either phones or laptops because Apple would sue the pants off them.

This a great idea though – to have a minimalist, aluminum-bodied 2200mAh battery case, that converts the Lightning port to a magnetically connected charging port.  This magnetic feature allows clean connectivity to their own docking stand and charging cables without the risk of physical wear & tear/damage that the traditional Lightning or MicroUSB ports have.  It combines the ease-of-use of wireless magnetic induction (popular on some Android) and the speed

Cult of Mac Article

Apple Magsafe US Patent

They state some of the Risks and Challenges include logistics and manufacturing but I think their biggest threat to success is Apple’s penchant for litigation against supposed IP violations – the L in the PESTLE analysis for you MBA nerds.  Apple neither licenses the Magsafe connector nor the patent which means…they’ll be hoarding and suing anyone that poses a threat. So with that big threat looming on the horizon I’m both curious and worried for the Cabin system.

One Cool Thing: School or Pool?

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Infographic showing where families’ priorities lie with the majority of home buyers opting more to pay a premium for the schools of their choice than for certain luxury amenities like a pool/spa.

This supports the current pricing trends in areas with the highest ranked schools (Cupertino, Saratoga, Los Gatos, Los Altos) where purchase prices can be up to 25% higher than original list prices!

Smallpdf – Compress, Merge, and Split PDFs Online

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If you’re like me you work with a LOT of documents in both soft and hard copy. Although the world is becoming more and more paperless some of us still have to deal with hard copy documents which need to be (e)signed, manipulated, and scanned back into different electronic distribution systems – email, contract systems, etc.

Working with PDFs, although a great format, gets pretty messy quickly.

I have used PDFSplit! many many times as it lets you break up large PDFs into smaller files – imagine you scanned a dozen documents into one PDF file and wanted to process it all later – that would be the best use case for PDFSplit!

I just came upon a situation where I scanned a series of consecutive docs but needed to reorder them. This is where I found Smallpdf – another great online PDF tool which allows you to do the following:

  • Compress
  • JPG to PDF
  • PDF to JPG
  • Merge PDF – you can view in Page Mode and rearrange pages
  • Split PDF
  • Word, Excel, and Powerpoint to PDF

Basically you drag and drop a PDF file into the web app and begin manipulating from there.  There is a File Mode and a Page Mode.  Page Mode allows you to visually reorder pages which is very convenient.

If security is a concern Smallpdf states that the files you upload are kept on their servers for only an hour and no backups are made so that’s some good reassurance.