I want to wish you all a happy thanksgiving and would like you to enter my latest contest, when you have a minute. I’m still giving away a few more free books! Other than that, I have a few announcements from my friends and a few new books that I just finished reading.
Friend announcements
Jim Kukral is one of the top internet marketers around, as well as someone who constantly provides value through video and his blog. His latest creation is called TheBizWebCoach.com, which helps small businesses solve their biggest problem, time. Small business owners do everything from taking out the trash to marketing. So what they don’t need is another 200-page ebook to read or 12-set DVD guide to spends months learning. They need small, time-saving, quick and actionable tips and guidance about how to improve their business. That’s what TheBizWebCoach.com provides.
Rajesh Setty is a long-time personal branding evangelist and the author of “Beyond Code,” which has a forward by Tom Peters. He is giving away his entire book for free over the internet. This was a gesture from Rajesh because it’s thanksgiving and he wanted to give back in a big way.
Jason Alba just finished a 2nd edition of his book “I’m on LinkedIn — Now What???.” This book is available as an eBook and as a paperback book. The book tells you all the ways that you can use LinkedIn to enhance your career, find a job and locate new business. If you want to make 30% on the sale, you can sign up as an affiliate on happyabout.info/linkedinhelp.php.
Jack Humphrey, a columnist for Personal Branding Magazine and an expert in blogging and web 2.0 stuff. He just launched a contest around his new site, BlogSuccess.com. There are going to be incredible prizes, such as The Bellaggio Deluxe Package for Two Nights in Las Vegas for 2 people, which is valued at $3,500! The other prizes include a 42 inch LCD Vizio HDTV, an Apple Macbook and a Flip Mino video camera. The Blog Success JV contest runs from December 2nd 2008 until December 15th 2008 at 12:00 PM EDT. The top 10 affiliates that sell the most Blog Success memberships will each receive highly valuable prizes. The affiliate who generates the most downloads of our free Blog Talk Monitor software but does not make
it into the top 10 will also receive a prize.
Book recommendations
Scott Shane is a Professor of Entrepreneurial Studies, in the Department of Economics at the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University. He just released his 12th book called Fool’s Gold?: The Truth Behind Angel Investing in America.
In Fool’s Gold, he draws on hard data from the Federal Reserve and other sources to paint the first reliable group portrait of the lionized angel investors. Surprisingly, he finds that angel investors are fewer, contribute less, and involve themselves in fewer start-ups than the conventional wisdom suggests. Most angels typically still have their day jobs, make investments of $10,000 or less, and take little or no role in assisting entrepreneurs build their companies. Drawing on his rich store of data, Shane offers recommendations to entrepreneurs and angels alike for the most productive use of angel investing, and suggests how policymakers can encourage it. Massively researched and briskly written, Fools’ Gold offers the first real resource on this misunderstood aspect of our entrepreneurial system.
Leonard Mlodinow teaches about randomness to future scientists at Caltech. Along the way he also wrote for the television series MacGyver and Star Trek: The Next Generation. He is the author of The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives.
A drunkard’s walk is a type of random statistical distribution with important applications in scientific studies ranging from biology to astronomy. Mlodinow leads us on a walk through the hills and valleys of randomness and how it directs our lives more than we realize. Mlodinow introduces important historical figures such as Bernoulli, Laplace and Pascal, emphasizing their ideas rather than their tumultuous private lives. Mlodinow defines such tricky concepts as regression to the mean and the law of large numbers, which should help us navigate the daily deluge of election polls and new studies on how to live to 100.
