Steve Jobs was ousted from his position with Apple Computer in 1985, too early in my life to pay attention or give much care. Not until his return to the company in 1996, when he rescued the then-flagging company and over the next fifteen years, built it into the corporate juggernaut we know today, did the man fall into my sphere of attention.

It goes without saying at this point that Apple Computer, now Apple Inc., has not seen a successful time without its electric co-founder, Steve Jobs. It remains to be seen how the company will fare without the man, without him to be able to make a dramatic return and save it, should Apple need saving in the future. But the general indication is, at least, that thanks to the strong foundations that Jobs spent his years building and then reinforcing, that won’t be necessary.

Why is that? What is it about Steve Jobs that makes Apple Inc. invincible for the foreseeable future? And what can we learn – or at least, what have I learned – that is worth emulating in my own business?

First, don’t fear failure. When Jobs was ousted from Apple in 1985, he called it devastating at first, but looking back on it, he referred to the process as “freeing.”

“I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me,” said Jobs during a commencement address at Stanford University back in 2005. “The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.”

The world will keep turning, even if you don’t succeed. The sun will continue to rise and set, the moon will revolve around the earth, and none of them never need rest on your shoulders. You can turn your failures, however public or private, into an opportunity to do something new, or something better.

Next, there’s the importance of doing your utmost. Obviously this is a lesson that you can learn nearly anywhere, but as a craftsman, in the technology space, there’s no better man to learn from than the guy who’s selling computers at two or three times the price of his competitors, and winning. In talking to Playboy magazine back in 1985, Jobs had this to say:

“When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.”

Don’t cut corners. Your quality will suffer, and your customers will be able to tell.

On perseverance, well, that’s important too. In building a business, it’s not a rare thing to come up against adversity. You’re going to struggle. Sometimes, it’s going to hurt.

Jobs says, “There are many moments that are filled with despair and agony, when you have to fire people and cancel things and deal with very difficult situations. That’s when you find out who you are and what your values are.”

And he’s right, you know. This is an easy lesson to get away from, for me, for several reasons. Suffice to say that a big key to both personal growth, and growth in one’s business, is to learn to best analyze the hardship, to learn from it and extract the lessons you need to move forward, better and stronger.

Oh, and one more thing.

I’ve long been aware of mortality – both mine and those around me. But rarely do I have to face it. Of course, that’s not really the point of things in the first place.

“No one wants to die,” said Jobs in that Stanford address. “Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

The point of it is this: Courage. The courage to achieve what you want, the courage to do what you will. When you combine that with a dedication to quality, and a fearlessness when it comes to failure – knowing that you can learn from your mistakes and do better next time – I believe you can achieve a success that you can be proud of.

This is the education that I have taken from Steve Jobs. It may have only started tangentially on an Apple IIe, but it grew to encompass so much more than that little tiny green screen could have possibly done, all those years ago. He died today, at the age of 56. But his legacy lives on, as a business leader, a creative visionary and an entrepreneur whose drive and spirit, we can all learn from.

Thanks, Steve. So long.

As part of the analysis of The Jungle’s first $10 billion quarter, the latest earnings statement notes that “Kindle books have now overtaken paperback books as the most popular format on Amazon.com.”

I’m not going to tell anybody to hurl their stock certificates in Random House into the creek, screaming epithets to the sky. Book publishing is by no means going away. But as always, times they are a-changin’. Books are one of the last mediums to democratize. Frankly, it’s about freakin’ time.

TV and movies have been independent for pretty much forever, though certainly websites like YouTube and Vimeo have helped distribute folks’ video creations to the masses, and the plummeting price of increasingly powerful cameras and editing suites help to make those endeavors ever easier. Music has been set free thanks to the Internet as well, and I’m not talking Napster. Any aspiring band can set up a website and make their music available for the cost of a single CD, which anybody can burn at their desk, now. Game developers can distribute their work on the web as well. Journalists can build a blog, develop a media empire of sorts if they like. Just ask Nick Denton or Julian Assange about that one.

So why not books? Why NOT books? Up until devices like the Kindle, Nook or iPad came around, the only method for publishing a book were the traditional routes or via vanity presses that generally cost more to produce than they made for the vast majority of authors.

But with digital books, the several barriers to entry go away. Concerns and scare resources like shelf space and manufacturing costs are gone, and ultimately the biggest concern is quality. The best books can rise to the top, regardless of who they come from. And the idea of the rare book can fall by the wayside as well, since anybody can get a copy of a desired book whenever they want.

Now this doesn’t mean that printed books have to go away. There’ll always be room for printed works, either for wildly popular works and seminal classics, or important books that need to be spread as far and as wide as they can. And in areas that don’t have an infrastructure that can support electronic books, they’ll be even more important.

But e-books have the power to revolutionize, and more importantly, democratize their given medium. Finally books can catch up to their other counterparts in media, and now, nearly 600 years after Gutenberg’s debut of his own printing press is book authorship really open to everybody. Any book can be available to anyone, anytime, anywhere. It’s a change we’d do well to embrace.

So the good folks at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers have really been on a roll over the last few years, throwing down some serious cash on technology bets which, it seems, have come up big. Two years ago, they kicked off the $100 million iFund, focused solely on businesses developing products for the iPhone, iPod and iPad. This March, they doubled that amount. Now today, Kleiner Perkins got together with Amazon, Facebook and Zynga to announce the new sFund, $250 million focused on social applications.

It’s interesting to note that Google and Yahoo! were not present for this gathering, whatsoever. According to KPCB partner John Doerr, Facebook is the social platform to focus on. “Facebook is it,” he said.

This isn’t saying that Kleiner Perkins is a kingmaker or anything, I’m not saying we’ll be seeing Facebook eclipse Google anytime soon. But it’s been pretty clear over the latter portion of the decade that KPCB seems to know how to pick winners. Other companies that WERE present and are partners in the fund included Comcast, Liberty Media and Allen & Company, LLC.

The fund has already invested in one company, Cafébots, who announced a $5 million round this morning – it’s not precisely clear what they do, but they claim to be working on a product involved in “Friend Relationship Management.” That sounds pretty social. They expect to have a product ready by the end of the year.

The thing about “social” is that is kind of a nebulous term. Obviously, it means involving other people, but just about anything can involve other people.

Could it be that this is just another tech bubble, like the dot-com bubble of years past? Kleiner Perks put down $250 million saying it isn’t. What do you think? Are you out to grab a piece of that for yourself?

*Note: Much as I’d like to claim otherwise, I am not actually Iron Man.

There’s a great article written by Mark Crump for The Apple Blog regarding using the newly announced iPad for business uses, that echo what I’ve often told people since the official announcement of the device. As somebody who uses Macs for daily work, business use on the iPad was indeed at the forefront of my considerations for such a tool. Certainly, there is more to it than just being able to run the iWork suite on it, though it is definitely a boon.

A lot of folks have been disheartened by the iPad, calling it little more than an oversized iPod Touch. And sure, it’s fair to make that comparison. Both devices use iPhone OS, and both devices share a large amount of functionality, as well as expansion protocols wrought by Apple’s proprietary Application Store.However, it’s important to remember that iPhone OS is still simply an embedded version of OS X, and as such it can handle a lot of what developers throw at it. Obviously nobody is going to be running Xcode or Maya on an iPad anytime soon, but for the traveling professional, this device may just be what we’re looking for.

It’s extremely portable – far more so than a comparatively bulky Macbook Pro, and decidedly lighter to boot. That makes it ideal for any kind of commute, or airline travel. It’s a very sexy piece of equipment for the folks who need to give presentations and conduct meetings, and since it’ll connect to most projectors, the effective usage of the device won’t be reduced.

And for folks who subscribe to the GTD model of productivity, it’s a great reminder to work lightly while on the go. Let’s face it, if you’re on the go, what are you REALLY going to work on? The iPad is great for email, keeping up on articles, a bit of word processing, Keynote-ing and spreadsheets. For most people, a Macbook Pro or other comparable laptop is just over the top, and creates distractions.

Anyway, take a look at the article for the more verbose read, but come on back here and let me know what you think in the comments!

Disclosure: I write this article as an Apple iPhone developer, but not as somebody privileged enough to receive advance information on the impending tablet device which we believe will be officially announced this month according to a Wall Street Journal report. I don’t have any other information aside from what most other tech bloggers and prognosticators have, it’s all speculation on my part.

I was pretty on the fence about Apple’s iPhone, when it was first announced. Truth be told I was pretty on the fence about smartphones in general. I had an iPod, I had a PDA, I had a cell phone. I liked using all of those devices, but thought that convergence was going to be a problem – why would I listen to music all day and then prevent myself from making phone calls? It just didn’t jive for me. Even when I finally did wind up with a smartphone for necessity’s sake – an HTC Wizard (Cingular 8125 for the locals) – it just wasn’t as good as I’d hoped. It was slow, the web browser never worked, it was bulky, it had a terrible OS and its software support was abysmal.

During the time I used this phone, I had come to use an Apple laptop at the urging of one of my programmers and good friend. Boot Camp had come out and he insisted that Apple machines would be just as viable of a development platform as any otherwise-built pure Windows machine and then some. I’d discovered that OS X and its associated programs (iCal, Mail.app, et al) fit my workflow so much more perfectly that I made that switch, and bought a Mac Pro as soon as it was feasible.

And then the iPhone came out – as a recent Apple convert I was interested, but it was a smartphone. I’d had a terrible experience with a smartphone – my 8125 refused to synchronize well with my Macs, even with a copy of The Missing Sync helping it out. But by this point I could see the promise.

I bought the iPhone almost on a whim. I hadn’t planned on buying one, but I was in the local Apple store on launch day and there was one left. With a “what the hell” and a swipe of the credit card, I was on my way.

I’ve never looked back.

I can honestly say, unflinchingly, that the iPhone absolutely changed my digital life. Everything works the way it should, it’s accessible, it’s extensible, and quite frankly it’s everything I could want in a phone.

Recently on a trip to Asia, I bought a netbook for some easy portable computing. I had a deal on a Dell, I didn’t spend a lot and I didn’t want to, I do believe I got what I paid for. Netbooks however, were another bit of tech that I was on the fence on. Less so than smartphones, I ‘got’ the netbook’s utility a lot sooner, but never took the plunge until I really needed one, as opposed to my usual stance as an early adopter.

I hesitated, though, because I’d heard the rumor of Apple planning on releasing a netbook of its own – except not quite a netbook, but a tablet! Like an iPhone, only bigger! My mind whirled with the potential of such a device.

And it was my iPhone that sold me on the product: What the iPhone does for me in mobile connectivity and computing, I believe the iSlate will do on a larger scale.

It won’t be as powerful as a MacBook, but it won’t have to be. Certainly we will expect ports of existing iPhone apps – just shifting them over to the new device will cause the 480×320 pixel applications to look pretty darn ugly.

But much like how applications made the iPhone successful, the same model will apply here. When we find out precisely what hardware it’s working with later this month, we’ll know precisely how it’ll affect our lives, but after the iPhone, I’m convinced that it’ll be for the better.

You’ll find me in line on launch day.

One of the big talking points for Apple has been that this upgrade only costs $29 – well below the standard price of an operating system upgrade. (Unless you’re using Linux or something.) So the question remains – is it worth your $29?

One of the first things I noticed about Snow Leopard is how long it took to install. I put it on my older Mac Pro on top of a clean 10.5 – or, Leopard – installation, having backed everything up to a Time Machine drive, as well as a spare drive for safety and redundancy. It took about 45 minutes just to apply Snow Leopard to my machine from start to finish. For me, that wasn’t a big deal, I had other things to do, but I was astonished at how long this took, when a full install of the previous OS didn’t even take that long. This is not common with other experiences out there, generally people have found Snow Leopard to install more quickly than Leopard – sensibly so, since it is a smaller package, but for some reason it took me longer.

Apple made a big deal out of Snow Leopard being able to save you space by being smaller than its predecessors. There’s two ways it does this – both are noteworthy, but it’s not as straightforward as you’d think.

Less conspicuously, Snow Leopard has changed the way it reports disk space. In 10.6, disk space is reported to match manufacturers’ reports, so that if you buy a 100gb hard drive, then it will show up as a 100gb hard drive. It does this by calculating the disk size in base 10 instead of base 2, which all previous Apple OSes have used, as well as every version of Windows to date. It’s debatable as to whether this is beneficial, since software uses base 2 computation, and developers will be left without consistent file size and usage statistics across operating systems, but it does match up more with consumer expectation. Personally, I don’t know if more clearly reporting where that extra .3gb went is more useful, but maybe people will like that. It remains to be seen.

Then what most people have heard about by now, is that Snow Leopard removes “Rosetta,” which allows older programs not explicitly written for Intel machines. It’s part of Apple’s push to get everybody to upgrade, of course, but what this also results in is a bunch of broken programs. The good folks over at Wikidot have compiled a fairly exhaustive list of OS X programs, and their compatibilities with Snow Leopard. It’s absolutely worth checking, to see if your favorite programs work in Snow Leopard before taking the plunge. This also doesn’t include plugins for Safari, or other items that live in your System Preferences pane, so do a little extra research first.

Other things that break, I’ve found, include some custom Apache installs and server scripts – I haven’t delved too deep into why this is yet, and it may take somebody more learned on the subject than myself to really get it, but as with your software, if there’s anything essential, proceed with caution.

As far as speed goes, tech blog Gizmodo did a number of benchmark tests, which note a number of interesting results. Ultimately, they found that Snow Leopard is faster than Leopard – though mostly in first-party applications. This is pretty consistent with my own experience, while Mail, iCal, iTunes and other Apple apps absolutely ran snappier, neither Photoshop CS4 Extended, Flash CS4 nor even Firefox really seemed to experience any kind of benefit from the new OS.

So how does Snow Leopard get faster? In a nutshell, Apple has improved its multicore processor support, and rewritten most of the applications it ships with to run in 64-bit mode to take advantage of this. Since most third-party apps AREN’T written in 64-bit, that generally explains the discrepancy.

While Apple has been pretty satisfied with their UI as of Leopard, they did make a few tweaks in Snow Leopard that some folks might find useful.

For one, icons in Finder are now scalable, via a little slider in the window.

Icons now scale up to 512×512, which is not really that useful for most people, but it does mean that you can preview movie files in the icon now. I personally prefer the quick look functionality introduced in 10.5, but everybody has their own preferences of course.

The dock, and Exposé have been improved as well, enabling users to select which instance of a window they’d like open, which is nice. Stacks, which came about in the previous OS has been improved as well, enabling users to do more than just drag items in and out of the stack, or open a file. Scrolling has now been enabled in grid view, as well as adding a “smart list” view which helps to see more items in the stack at one time.

Some of the included apps have seen upgrades beyond simply running in 64-bit, as well. Mail, Address Book and iCal now work with Microsoft Exchange, which has been a big deal for a number of enterprise workers who have wanted to hook their Macs into their work network.

Quicktime 10 has seen a particularly notable upgrade, enabling video editing as well as screen (video) capture – great for amateur filmmakers and screencasters alike.

There’re more added features as well, which Gizmodo has done a great job of visually rounding up. Take a look for more of the gooey details on that front.

Of course, the ultimate question is whether Snow Leopard is worth it. The big thing – which a number of other critics agree – is that Snow Leopard is essentially a service pack for 10.5. There aren’t enough new features to really go ahead and call it a new operating system. However, the improvements it DOES make are certainly worthwhile, if you could use them. Exchange support, built-in screencasting utilities and other accoutrements are pretty nice to have – they’re nothing that you didn’t know you needed, but they’re great for folks who need them.

Is it worth shelling out $29 for a service pack? Well in my case, I was going to buy a screencasting package in the coming weeks so getting an update to my operating system along with it sure isn’t a bad way to go. It was good for me, but your mileage may vary.

Images courtesy of Apple Co. and Gizmodo. Thanks guys!

A smashed computer in a Tehran University dormitory, suspected of Tweeting news outside the country

“Kasra is dead & I don’t know where is Masood, lost him in the crowd yesterday.” So writes a young Iranian, formerly known only as “Change_for_Iran,” on the Internet service known as Twitter. (He or she has since changed their username to avoid detection by the national government.)

“I see many ppl with broken arms/legs/heads – blood everywhere – pepper gas like war,” writes persiankiwi, another Twitter user. “They were waiting for us – they all have guns and riot uniforms – it was like a mouse trap – ppl being shot like animals.”

These and other “tweets” – the term used to describe the brief, 140 character messages posted on the Twitter service – paint the terrifying and bloody picture of life in Iran after the June 11 presidential election, in which Mahmood Ahmedinejad was declared winner mere hours after the ballots closed, and opposition leaders claimed fraud.

In the days and weeks following the election, as we are now all aware, Iranian citizens took to the streets in riot and rebellion, decrying the current regime and demanding a true democratic resolution to the election, in which candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi was heavily expected to win by a wide margin. In an effort to crack down on the civil unrest, state-run media and technology attempted to put a clamp on the news escaping the country. Foreign journalists received “suggestions” to leave, cell phone traffic and MMS messages were halted, and Internet connectivity was heavily filtered. Among the sites first blocked to Iranians were Facebook and Youtube.

Soon Iranians, many of them students, began to spread the idea of using Twitter to make their voices heard, as well as coordinate the movements of their growing rebellion. For the better part of two weeks, these Twitter users were the only ones reporting on the status of the country and the Iranian people.

It wasn’t long before the Iranian government learned about this news leak and began to attempt to block Twitter as well. But at this point, the rest of the world began to intervene and provide private proxy servers, in many cases people rigging their own personal computers so that Iranians could use them as Internet gateways, to reach the outside world.

Government agents began using the service to spread misinformation amongst the rebellion, as well as attempt to track user accounts and discover these proxy servers, so to shut them down and prevent further unrestricted access to the Internet by Iran’s citizens. As the days wore on, users started to become more secretive about their messages, urging each other to watch what they say, and even going so far as to request that Twitter users outside Iran to change their location and time zones to Tehran, working off the assumption that the Iranian government can’t block everybody, and the more users they have to sort through, the tougher it will be to block actual Iranians.

While many throughout the world have found it to be heartbreaking, being able to watch and interact with these Iranians embroiled in a truly dangerous situation, but unable to help, it has also been a fascinating case study of the use of technology in facilitating what may well be a national revolution.

The shift in some users’ Twitter pages is interesting, such as in the case of one user known as “smileofcrash,” who spends his days complaining about his exams and anticipating the upcoming season of Lost, to reporting on the status of the injured and arrested during the pro-Mousavi demonstrations.

Other users’ experiences are significantly more dramatic, with persiankiwi and Change_for_Iran being some of the bigger examples. As persiankiwi writes about constantly fleeing from location to location, stealing Internet connections where she and her group can, uploading photos and videos of the day’s protests, and Change_for_Iran providing gut-wrenching descriptions of the violence in the streets, Twitter has become a place of riveting human drama to watch, unfolding.

While for the last couple of years, Twitter has been examined as a unique piece of the Internet, as the service has played roles in reporting the California wildfires in 2007 to the spreading of news, evacuation reports and shelters during the disaster wrought by Hurricane Gustav, the freeing of an American student jailed abroad and even its use by candidates during the 2008 American presidential election. Yet, skeptics remained critical of the service and its utility, wondering aloud who would ever care to use a messaging service so limited in its scope and service?

Critics have dismissed it as simply another outlet for Internet-based narcissism, for people to reach out for attention. The UK’s Times Online posted an article in February in which one clinical psychologist is quoted as stating that “Twittering stems from a lack of identity. It’s a constant update of who you are, what you are, where you are. Nobody would Twitter if they had a strong sense of identity.”

Another neurologist at the University of Sussex adds, “Using Twitter suggests a level of insecurity whereby, unless people recognise you, you cease to exist. It may stave off insecurity in the short term, but it won’t cure it.”

And yet, it is clear by now that at this point, Twitter has gone beyond notifying one’s friends and family what dinner consisted of, or how traffic is on the 405.

It’s been said that the elections in Iran will be Twitter’s coming-out party, where the world can see just how revolutionary the service is to the way we communicate. Only three years old, the site’s audience has surged more than 1000% in the last year, boasting more than six million users as of this printing. Small stuff compared to other Internet services, but certainly that will be changing in the near future. And with founders Biz Stone, 34, and Evan Williams, 36, rejecting offers upwards of $500 million to purchase the service, it remains to be seen what kind of growth lies ahead for Twitter. Certainly, it is a Silicon Valleyite’s dream come true.

But for university students in Tehran, its value is much more elemental. It is the means to communicate, coordinate and in some cases, survive.

A young Iranian woman shows off her ink-stained fingers from voting

persiankiwi’s last posting was on June 24, where she wrote “in Baharestan we saw militia with axe choping ppl like meat – blood everywhere – like butcher” – she wrote again minutes later, stating “we must go – dont know when we can get internet – they take 1 of us, they will torture and get names – now we must move fast.” She signed off with “Allah – you are the creator of all and all must return to you – Allah Akbar - #Iranelection Sea of Green” – and has not been heard from since.

Change_for_Iran and Masood were, however, reunited.

As of this printing, the situation has yet to be resolved.