by Edmond Lau

A great presentation consists of two important parts: well-structured content that empowers the idea that you’re trying to convey and an eloquent style of delivery that keeps your audience’s attention on your content.  Both parts aim to facilitate the communication of your idea to an audience.  Poor structure makes it more difficult for your audience to follow along and extract the salient points, and poor delivery detracts from the content.

An effective and general paradigm for structuring content that’s applicable to any presentation, essay, research paper, funding pitch, job application presentation, resume, or tech talk comes from what MIT Professor Patrick Winston — an AI veteran with a lecture series on How to Speak — calls VSNC. [1]  Based on this structure, any compelling presentation or paper builds upon the following four cornerstones:

• a clearly defined vision statement,
• an enumeration of concrete steps toward achieving the vision,
• an articulation of salient news and results with clarifying details, and
• a summary of contributions.

Most presentations, surprisingly enough, can fit into this paradigm and become much more powerful when designed with it in mind; weak presentations usually omit one or more of these parts.

Offering a succinct and clear vision (preferably on its own slide if slides are used) early in the presentation establishes the thematic goal of the talk.  It defines the boundaries of what’s relevant in the ideas presented and provides the glue that ties various points together.  Succinctness and clarity in the vision ensure focus in the talk.  Overly detail-focused individuals, in particular, sometimes create presentations whose themes are only implicitly defined and whose points flail around haphazardly.

Once the high-level vision is established, enumerating the concrete steps for attaining that vision gives the audience a mental path to follow and understand what’s necessary to reach the goal.  The steps review progress already made and highlight what still needs to be done.  Most presenters tend to get this part right since it’s a straightforward summary of completed and future work.

With the path enumerated, sharing news and details about recent accomplishments provides an excellent opportunity to enrapture the audience.  Numbers, statistics, graphs, analogies, demos, and stories that showcase results often work well.  Engineers tend to overvalue abstraction and to inadvertently neglect to include the details, but the details and stories are often what make the talk compelling.

Wrapping up the talk should be a summary of contributions.  A common mistake is to end a well-organized presentation merely with a rehash of major points rather than crystallizing the unique contributions that the presenter or the presenter’s team actually accomplished.  The contributions may be completed work that moves a field, product, or company forward or they may simply the be the refinements of ideas that offer a completely new perspective.

To make the VSNC concepts of vision, steps, news, and contributions more concrete, let’s take a look at how they apply to a real-life presentation and how they help convey ideas more clearly.  Mac and technology fans look forward to Steve Jobs’s Apple keynote presentations, partly because they’re dying to know the next visionary Apple product and partly because Jobs’s presentations are extremely well-executed.  His commanding stage presence definitely helps, but a decomposition of his recent March 2nd keynote [2, 3] on the iPad 2 reveals that the VSNC paradigm provides a powerful framework for understanding how his presentations are typically organized.

Jobs starts his presentation by summarizing the vision for the iPad 2 in a single, crisp slide: “Our most advanced technology in a magical and revolutionary device at an unbelievable price.”

What were the concrete steps involved in building this magical and revolutionary device?  Jobs outlines the steps in these two slides, reviewing upgrades to faster dual-core processors and graphics while maintaining low power usage and the efforts to make the device even more lightweight and 33% thinner:

Having established the vision and the steps to getting there, Jobs pitches the new iPad 2 by going over salient news and results to get the audience excited.  He chooses to do this by showcasing demos on the iPad 2 of FaceTime, PhotoBooth, iMovie, and GarageBand:

At other keynote presentations where Jobs also reviews the momentum of existing products, Jobs will often augment the news portion by sharing and marveling at numbers and details on how many iPhones or iPads were sold in the past year.

Jobs concludes with a summary of new engineering, product, and pricing contributions to convince the audience that 2011 will be the year of the iPad 2.  Some of the points were previously covered in other slides; others like the statistic on 65,000 iPad apps reminds the audience that contributions made to the original iPad still apply to the iPad 2.

The application of the VSNC paradigm to Jobs’s keynotes illustrates that VSNC  is a surprisingly versatile and powerful framework for both crafting and critiquing the organizational structure of presentations.

Once the content is solid, the other foundation of a great presentation is delivery and style, for which here are a few useful pointers:

• Enunciate and speak slowly.  Unbridled enthusiasm for your work or your idea and nervousness to finish the presentation as fast as possible can easily lead to an overly quick delivery and slurred words.  If you feel that you’re speaking at a slow and comfortable pace, slow down further to about 50% of that pace.  Speaking slowly provides a variety of benefits beyond the obvious of ensuring that your audience can understand what you’re saying; it gives you more time to choose your next words, helps slow down the pace to keep you relaxed and in control, and provides more of an opportunity for you to watch the audience’s expressions and re-adjust your presentation strategy (for example, by rewording an explanation upon detection of blank faces) as necessary.
• Train yourself to avoid sprinkling your speech with “ums” and “likes,” and replace them instead with pauses.  Either have a friend count your “ums” or “likes” or record your own presentation and count them yourself later.  While initially uncomfortable, pauses actually sound more professional and help accentuate key points that you’re trying to communicate.  Colin Firth’s Oscar-winning performance and delivery in theThe King’s Speech exemplifies how a carefully enunciated and pause-filled speech can motivate and move an audience.
• Maintain eye contact with the audience.  In particular, pick a few friendly faces from the audience that appear to be reacting to your presentation.  Their nods of approval and understanding give positive feedback and bolster your confidence during the presentation, and any confused expressions act as an indicator that you might need to slow down and re-explain a possibly tricky point.
• Don’t read directly from your slides.  Time spent on reading slides is time not spent maintaining eye contact with the audience.  Moreover, reading long sentence-like bullet points on slides conveys a lack of preparation and  reduces the incentive for the audience to actually listen to you since they can just read the text faster themselves.  A better approach is to list key, succinct points on the slides and to connect them together with your own words.  This incentivizes you to better rehearse to have fluid transitions between points and forces the audience to pay attention in order to understand the presentation.
• Move deliberately in time with your points, so that transitions in your physical stage presence correspond to transitions in your presentation.  This helps to both reduce the amount of haphazard pacing while accentuating important transitions in your presentations.  If your presentation has three points, one simple way of doing this to walk in the shape of squished baseball diamond so that you walk to a new base as you transition to each point and then walk back to home plate as you conclude.
• If your presentation involves writing on a whiteboard, make sure to write with an open body that’s perpendicular to the board rather than facing the board.  Facing the board while you write occludes the text or diagrams and increases the lag between when you’re writing (and likely speaking) and when the audience can actually read what you wrote.
• If there is Q&A at the end of the presentation, always repeat the question, possibly rephrasing in your own words.  Repeating the question ensures both a) that the audience is able to hear the question, and b) that you’ve actually heard the question correctly and don’t waste time or look silly while answering an incorrect interpretation of the quesiton.

Skills in structuring effective presentations and delivering them clearly come with practice.  Keeping vision, steps, news, and contributions in mind for any talk or presentation will make it stronger, and dissecting strong presentations and critiquing weak ones to understand how the speaker handled or mishandled each cornerstone will make your own talks better.

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[1] http://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.8…
[2] http://events.apple.com.edgesuit…
[3] http://www.geeksugar.com/Apple-i…

by Srininvasan R

You never get a second chance, to make a first impression! The same rings true for presentations. As a leader, you have to deliver your messages with laser guided precision. So how do you ensure that you

You never get a second chance, to make a first impression! The same rings true for presentations. As a leader, you have to deliver your messages with laser guided precision. So how do you ensure that you ace that presentation? Well, for starters, you leave nothing to chance. But, that’s perhaps, easier said than done. Here are a few key pointers that could help you make that brilliant presentation.

Open with something completely unexpected

The first 30 seconds to one minute, are crucial in a presentation. That’s when your audience is sizing you up and you set expectations. If you are unable to capture the attention of the audience during that critical time, you have an uphill task of redeeming your presentation.

Here is how Steve Jobs, started at the 2005 Commencement Address at Stanford University:

“Truth be told, I never graduated from college, and this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today, I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it, no big deal—just three stories. The first story is about connecting the dots. I dropped out of Reed College after the first six months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another eighteen months or so before I really quit. So why’d I drop out? It started before I was born.”

Please see link to the video of the speech- http://vimeo.com/7976699

Create a strong story line and use pictures to tell your story

A picture is worth a thousand words.

The human brain has remarkable abilities to craft stories out of personal experiences and relate it to visual cues.

That’s why when you have a story to share, audiences can relate to it, instantly.

The picture here says it all. You don’t have to describe ‘Loyalty‘; the image does it for you.

Less is More

There is a term in the corporate world called- ‘Death by Slides’. It refers to a surfeit of slides that were unnecessary in the first place.

Nothing dampens a presentation, as much as unending slides.

When in doubt, keep your presentation shorter than you would, otherwise.

De-clutter your slides

Nothing kills a slide, as much as clutter. If you try and cram all that you can fit into it, you will lose the audience instantly. People use fonts as small as 10 or 11 on their slides.

Try projecting it. You will need to walk up to the screen and then use a magnifying glass to see what’s on the screen. Remember, you are not there to antagonize the audience! A font size of over 20 usually works, depending on the size of the room.

Engage your audience

Sharing information alone is not enough. You need to engage the audience. If you have people asking you questions, responding to what you say, your impact would be significantly higher than if they were sitting with deadpan expressions and not saying anything.

Ask questions, show pictures, engage the audience, in your own way.

Your objective is not to say your piece and exit. It is to achieve the purpose of making the presentation, in the first place.

Appeal to emotions

Emotions get our attention and audiences tend to retain emotionally charged content long after the presentation. Audiences seldom identify with a presentation devoid of emotional appeal. Find the right emotion to appeal to and make your pitch accordingly.

Don’t let the means become the end

No matter how slick your presentation slides are and how attractive you have made them, sometimes participants just won’t buy in.

So what do you do then? Change what you have to say on the spot to quickly address what key participants are looking for and minimize reliance on the slides.

Maintain eye contact

A great presentation is like a one on one conversation where each participant feels that the speaker is directly talking to him. And, the only way this can happen, is with continuous eye contact.

A good presentation is all about preparation and inspiration

As Thomas Edison once said, ‘Genius is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration‘. In a presentation, inspiration gives you the perspective while preparation gives you the edge. But, no matter how good you are at presentations, there is no substitute for rigorous preparation and multiple rehearsals.

———————–

Many of you would have made some brilliant presentations yourself. It would be interesting to know your experiences and what worked for you. Please feel free to share your thoughts.

Picture courtesy: Stanford University; Walter Isaacson

———————–

There’s a lot going into creating a compelling presentation. From planning to creating and delivering, and you should tackle each process accordingly.

Planning your story

A good exercise is to sketch your story as a timeline. I’d say 99% of presentations tell a story, either if it’s a sales deck, a startup pitch, a business report or even a thesis; you are always walking your audience through a story.

Once you sit in front of your presentation software and start adding slides you will be terribly distracted from the story; this is why paper, I believe, works best. This is a great guide that you can follow, I often use it for my investor and sales decks.

The world seems to have become accustomed to overcrowded presentations, where people literally cram everything they can into one single slide. Please, don’t. There’s also no need to ‘decorate’ them; remember your audience will probably be reading from afar, and anything that’s too small will just become noise.

by Garr Reynolds

1. Show your passion

If I had only one tip to give, it would be to be passionate about your topic and let that enthusiasm come out. Yes, you need great content. Yes, you need professional, well designed visuals. But it is all for naught if you do not have a deep, heartfelt belief in your topic. The biggest item that separates mediocre presenters from world class ones is the ability to connect with an audience in an honest and exciting way. Don’t hold back. Be confident. And let your passion for your topic come out for all to see.

2. Start strong

You’ve heard it before: First impressions are powerful. Believe it. The first 2-3 minutes of the presentation are the most important. The audience wants to like you and they will give you a few minutes at the beginning to engage them — don’t miss the opportunity. Most presenters fail here because they ramble on too long about superfluous background information or their personal/professional history, etc.

3. Keep it short

Humans have short attention spans when it comes to passively sitting and listening to a speaker. Audience attention is greatest at the opening and then again when you say something like “In conclusion….” This is just the human condition, especially so for the busy (often tired) knowledge worker of today. So, if you have 30 minutes for your talk, finish in 25 minutes. It is better to have the audience wanting more (of you) than to feel that they have had more than enough. Professional entertainers know this very well.

4. Move away from the podium

Get closer to your audience by moving away from or in front of the podium. The podium is a barrier between you and the audience, but the goal of our presentation is to connect with the audience. Removing physical barriers between you and the audience will help you build rapport and make a connection.

5. Use a remote-control device

To advance your slides and builds, use a small, handheld remote. A handheld remote will allow you to move away from the podium. This is an absolute must. Keyspan has two good ones. I highly recommend the Keyspan Presentation Remote. Many people like the Interlink remote as well.

6. Remember the “B” key

If you press the “B” key while your PowerPoint or Keynote slide is showing, the screen will go blank. This is useful if you need to digress or move off the topic presented on the slide. By having the slide blank, all the attention can now be placed back on you. When you are ready to move on, just press the “B” key again and the image reappears.

7. Make good eye contact

Try looking at individuals rather than scanning the group. Since you are using a computer, you never need to look at the screen behind you — just glance down at the computer screen briefly. One sure way to lose an audience is to turn your back on them. And while you’re maintaining great eye contact, don’t forget to smile as well. Unless your topic is very grim, a smile can be a very powerful thing.

8. Keep the lights on

If you are speaking in a meeting room or a classroom, the temptation is to turn the lights off so that the slides look better. But go for a compromise between a bright screen image and ambient room lighting. Turning the lights off — besides inducing sleep — puts all the focus on the screen. The audience should be looking at you more than the screen. Today’s projectors are bright enough to allow you to keep many of the lights on.

9. Use a TV for small groups

If you are presenting to a small group, then you can connect your computer to a large TV (via the s-video line-in). With a TV screen, you can keep all or most of the lights on. Make sure your text and graphics are large enough to be seen on the small the screen. You will probably have to increase the type size significantly.

10. At all times: courteous, gracious, & professional

When audience members ask questions or give comments, you should be gracious and thank them for their input. Even if someone is being difficult, you must keep to the high ground and at all times be a gentleman or lady and courteously deal with such individuals. The true professional can always remain cool and in control. Remember, it is your reputation, so always remain gracious even with the most challenging of audiences.

By  Sandra Schrift

Most of us would agree that having humor in our lives increases rapport, strengthens our relationships and overcomes communication barriers. People who work in a positive, often playful environment are more likely to stay. Productivity and creativity increase while stress is reduced. We just feel better after a good laugh. Think funny!

1. Open with a humorous story. . I remember the time the lights when out and I fell off the stage. I wasn’t hurt and quickly said, Now I will take questions from the floor. I’m at my best when taking questions in the dark. Before you can be funny, you must learn to see funny. Find the humor around you, in your life every day. The lady who takes an aisle seat rather tan sit next to the window . . . doesn’t want to mess up her hair. Practice telling the story out loud, and cut out any parts that aren’t crucial. As Shakespeare so wisely said, “Brevity is the soul of wit.”

2. Use props (candy bars, hats, funny faces, etc.) Props can be used as a metaphor or an analogy for a point you are introducing. They get your creative juices working while providing an anchor for your audience to focus on.

3. Cartoons use your own or others a picture saves a 1000 words. Put cartoons on an overhead or use as part of a PowerPoint presentation.

4. Humor – should be relevant to your topic. Tom Peters said, I deeply believe in humor; not in jokes. Humor is spectacular. Humor relieves anxiety and tension, serves as outlet for hostility and anger, and provides a healthy escape from reality. It lightens heaviness related to critical illness, trauma, disfigurement, and death. It comes as no surprise that many people are utilizing humor to deal with the trying times. But is the humor timely? Is it appropriate?

Do not use ethnic, racist, political or religious jokes. Include a joke that helps bring back the attention of the audience or as a way to lighten up your remarks. We all can use a good laugh from a well timed, funny joke.

5. Self effacing humor- it is better to admit you made a mistake than to admit that you are one. One of my lines as a mother of five is: For someone who isn’t Catholic, I sure did my share for the pope! Phyllis Diller is in the Guinness Book of World Records as having the most laughs per minute. A laugh is measured by:

5 points if everyone is laughing and applauding
4 points if everyone is laughing and there’s a smattering of applause
3 points if everyone laughs but there’s no applause
2 points if some people are laughing
1 point for a titter or giggle

6.Mime- Marcel Marceau makes us laugh and moves us. Charlie Chaplin was an all time great without using the spoken word.

7.Move Your Body Try lifting your nose, look off to the side, jut out the bottom of your jaw, and notice how you become arrogant or aloof, Take a wide stance, shift your hips forward, and now you’ve just gained 50 pounds. The use of body movements will help to visually enhance your remarks.

8.Repetitive oral recitation- (repeat after me, Remember, if you can see funny, you can be funny. Repeat a particular sentence throughout your presentation to encourage audience retention.

9. Use taped music for a stretch break. Get the audience to sing a funny song. Pass out words to a song. Lighten up your attendees have some fun and your audience retention will increase. Don’t be afraid to be theatrical or silly. It’s why we pay actors the big bucks; and your audiences won’t forget you. Be outrageous. It’s the only place that isn’t crowded.

10. Group exercise a fun way to conclude your presentation is to use a group exercise. Use the football huddle to get the group to repeat a cheer or an affirmation to take some action.

by Viviana Woodbury, 

What with the almost universal proliferation of smartphones among students, even at the elementary school level, it would seem like a no-brainer for an educator to utilize mobile apps as effective and readily-accepted learning tools. And if an educator can’t find an app that does exactly what he or she wants, the logical next step is to develop and publish their own. Besides, what else do they have to do with all the free time with which all educators are blessed?

Now that you’ve finished laughing, let’s take a realistic look at how an educator can best go about publishing an app. First of all, it’s probably pretty safe to assume that most educators lack the time, if not the technical knowledge, to develop their own apps, much less to publish them. In fact, the very notion of having to write lines and lines of code would probably send most educators in a frantic dash back to grading their students’ papers. And even if they have the knowledge and time to actually create functional apps, they would also have to find a way to make the app engaging to their students.

And the process of actually publishing the app is a whole ‘nother ball game altogether. For these reasons, this post will focus upon a few tools that prevent the busy educator from having to create the wheel before getting his or her app up and rolling. But please don’t expect this to be a comprehensive list. There are just too many different methods available, The following examples are just to get you started.

For those who lack the time, knowledge, or incentive to write their own code, there are any number of app publishing resources available. The free ones are somewhat limited in the degree to which you can customize the apps you create, or place ads in the apps you create. The free software/service companies offer their paid premium versions for those whose needs aren’t met by the no-cost version. A few examples are given below.

1. App Development Software – Ironically, some of the most highly user-rated software programs are free, either open source or proprietary. One of the most versatile of these is the open source eclipse Classic. This software enables the user to create apps for most major mobile operating systems, including Android, iOS, iPhone, as well as desktop OS’ including Windows, Linux, and Mac. While it does require coding knowledge, it offers a wide range of plugins, as well as the required editor, debugger, and version control.

2. Appmakr – Robust apps for iPhone and Android devices. Even the free version allows you to publish a test app to see your finished product before publishing it in the App Store.

3. Appypie – Highly popular, especially among those who have no interest in writing code. Not only allows you to build your apps, it automatically publishes the completed apps to the appropriate app stores.

4. Appsbar – A free, simple app maker that allows the user to create, publish, and promote your apps, including on social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

5. Appery.io – Cloud-based, with a drag and drop visual editor using a wide array of available components. Though the app is developed in the cloud, the finished apps can also be exported and hosted elsewhere.

Of course, there are many other options, as well as other software and cloud-based services for educators who are comfortable writing their own code and handling the submission process directly through the various app stores, such as Google and Apple’s App Store. The only real limitations upon what you can do are your own level of expertise, how much time you are willing to devote to the process, and what you can spend.

In the end, a well designed and published app can be a useful tool that will go a long way toward engaging your students and inspiring them to learn the skills they will need as they continue their academic and professional careers.

Having been a start-up lawyer, entrepreneur, and venture capitalist, I have been asked many of the following questions over the years from entrepreneurs when starting a business. Sometimes there isn’t an easy answer, and as lawyers often like to say, “It depends on the circumstances.” But, here are my short-hand answers to the frequently asked start-up questions, which hopefully will be right 95% of the time.

1. Should I form my company as C corporation, an S corporation, an LLC, a partnership or a sole proprietorship?

Start it as an S corporation, unless you have to issue both common stock and preferred stock; in that case start it as a C corporation. And an S corporation can easily be converted later into a C corporation. LLCs are popular, but can get overly complicated. Partnerships and sole proprietorships are to be avoided because of the potential personal liability to the owners of the business.

2. Where should I incorporate my business?

The standard answer to this is Delaware because of its well developed corporate law. My answer is that it should be the state where the business is located, as this will save you some fees and complexities. You can always reincorporate later in Delaware.

3. How much should I capitalize my business with at the beginning?

As much as you can reasonably afford, and in an amount to at least carry you for 6-9 months with no income. What you will find is that it always takes you longer to get revenues, and that you will experience more expenses than you anticipated.

4. How likely will it be that I can get venture capital financing?

Extremely unlikely. Get a product done, gain some traction, get a good management team, and then consider getting venture financing.

5. Should I require prospective angel or venture capital investors to sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) so they don’t steal my idea?

No, don’t waste your time. It will be counterproductive and slow down your fundraising. And many investors will refuse anyway. It’s hard enough to get a meeting with an investor — don’t put another roadblock in the way. For the most part, it’s not the idea that is important, it’s the implementation of the idea and the entrepreneurs behind it.

6. How much dilution in share ownership of my company should I give up to investors in my business?

Whatever amount gets you funded. Don’t try to over-optimize on ownership. Get cash to grow your business and make your investors happy as well.

7. How big should a stock option pool for employees be?

15-20%. Standard vesting for options is 4 years, with a one year “cliff vesting” and monthly vesting after that. “Cliff vesting” in this context means the employee must be employed by the company for a minimum of one year before the employee earns any of the options.

8. How can I get a venture capitalist to pay attention to me?

Any of the following:

• Get a ton of traction in the marketplace
• Have meaningful growing revenues
• Have a world-class management team
• Have truly innovative technology with a big market opportunity
• Get a personal introduction to one of the VC firm partners from a respected colleague

9. How can I come up with a great name for my business?

This is difficult. First brainstorm with a bunch of different names. Then do a Google search to see what is already taken, and that will eliminate 95% of your choices. Make it easy to spell. Make it interesting. Don’t pick a nonsensical name where people won’t have a clue as to what you do (with all due consideration to names like “Google,” “Yahoo,” and the like). Do a trademark/tradename search on the name. Then make sure you can get the domain name. Consider hiring a name consultant like Alexandra Watkins at www.eatmywords.com.

10. What are the biggest challenges to starting a business?

The answers are:

• Shortage of capital and cash flow
• Having a good business plan
• Coming up with a great product or service
• Sticking to it
• Working more than you expected
• Getting through the frustrations of being constantly rejected by customers
• Hiring good employees
• Knowing when to fire bad employees
• Having to wear so many hats
• Managing your time
• Maintaining some kind of work/life balance

11. What kind of business should I start?

A business that

• You are passionate about
• Doesn’t take a kazillion dollars to fund
• Has the potential to grow into something big in a reasonable time frame
• You have some experience in (avoiding the problem of “you don’t know what you don’t know”)
• You would enjoy doing (don’t build a business that you will dread going to everyday)
• One that can cause meaningful improvement in users’ lives

12. What are the biggest mistakes made by start-up entrepreneurs?

• Not starting with enough capital
• Thinking that success will come quickly
• Not carefully budgeting
• Not focusing on the quality of the product or service
• Underestimating the importance of sales and marketing
• Not adapting or iterating quickly enough
• Not understanding the competitive landscape
• Ignoring legal and contract matters
• Hiring the wrong employees
• Mispricing the product or service

13. How can I protect my great idea?

Ideas are a dime a dozen. It’s the actual implementation of an idea that is more important. If it’s truly unique, get a patent for it (see www.uspto.gov). You may get some protection through copyright, trade secret programs, or NDA’s, but not a lot.

14. Do I need a lawyer to start a business?

No. If it’s a simple business with one owner, as you can incorporate through online services like LegalZoom.com and RocketLawyer.com. But, it’s usually a good idea to have an experienced business lawyer on your team who has advised many start-ups. Hire only a business lawyer, not a general practitioner or divorce lawyer. Experience matters.

15. How can I obtain the domain name I want?

Every good “.com” domain name is already taken. And I usually only recommend “.com” names. Ultimately, 99% of domain names are available to be bought — you just have to be prepared to pay for the name. Do a “WHOIS Search” at www.networksolutions.com to find out the contact information for the owner of the domain name you are interested in, and offer to buy the name. Don’t be naive and offer $500 for a premium domain name. You will be ignored. Be willing to pay a fair amount for a good name.

16. How can I drive traffic to my website for my business?

Entire books are written on this topic. The key ways are as follows:

• Pay Google, Bing, Yahoo or other search engines to send you traffic (such as through the Google Adwords program).
• Build a great site with lots of high-quality original content that is search engine optimized.
• Have a smart social media plan to drive traffic from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr, and other free social media sites.

17. I have an invention idea. What do I do to check that someone hasn’t already invented this idea?

Key things:

• Do a Google search on the key words associated with your invention.
• Do a search online of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office at www.uspto.gov.
• If that works and you want to get a patent on the idea, hire a patent lawyer.

18. Do I need a business plan?

It’s useful to come up with a business plan to think through what you want to do for the development of the product or service, marketing, financial projections and more. Then get input from trusted business/finance advisors. But don’t go overboard with a 50-page business plan. In reality many start-ups have to deviate from their plan.

19. Where can I get money for my business?

Many books and articles have been written on this subject as well. Here is a summary of the most effective sources of capital:

• Personal funds
• Credit cards
• Friends and family
• Angel investors
• Crowdsourcing sites such as Indiegogo.com and Kickstarter.com
• Bank loans/SBA financings
• Venture capitalists
• Equipment loan financing

20. What permits, licenses or registrations do I need for my business?

Depending on the nature of the business, you may need the following permits, licenses or regulations:

• Permits need for regulated businesses (aviation, agriculture, alcohol, etc.)
• Sales tax license or permit
• Home-based business permits
• City and county business permits or licenses
• Zoning permit
• Sellers permit
• Health department permits (e.g., for restaurants)
• Federal and State tax/employer ID’s

21. What do I need to worry about in hiring an employee?

Nothing can frustrate an audience more than listening to a boring or ‘bad’ public speaker.

One of the things that you should remember when delivering a presentation is that it is very easy to divert the audience’s attention. Once they find your presentation uninteresting, they will cease to pay attention to you. They will just let their mind wander or pay attention to something else.

It is your responsibility as a public speaker to avoid this.

Here are some tips on how you can grab the public’s attention when delivering your speech:

1. Make the speech speak for itself.

Just like a book, it is the content that sells. Nobody ever reads a book which has a great cover but a very poor plot.

The same principle will apply to your speech. Make sure that the material is compelling enough to immediately grasp the listener’s attention.

2. Use visual aids to help you in the presentation.

Another way to catch the audience’s attention when speaking in public is by showing eye-catching visuals. You may use videos, photos and other presentation materials to help you further explain the topic.

People line up the at the theaters to see movies, because they are entertaining. Make sure to inject enough of the same ‘entertainment factor’ when delivering your speech. Delivering a speech on an ordinary topic can be spiced up by lacing your speech with attention-grabbing visuals.

However, becareful not to over do the visuals and lose your message.

3. Use the power of your voice.

If you speak in a monotonous voice, your speech will sound boring. Do not let the audience fall asleep on you when they hear your voice. Vary the pitch, tone and loudness of your voice.

Always use the active voice in your sentences and always speak in a conversational manner.

4. Use humor to make the point

Add some humor to your presentation if you want your audience to stay with you. People love to laugh and enjoy appropriate humor in any situation.

You don’t have to tell a joke to be funny. You can tell a humorous story or anecdote that will help reinforce your points. However, make sure the story fits with the content of your message.

By following these four simple tips, you are sure to grab your audience’s attention once you are up there delivering your presentation.

When you create a Keynote presentation on your Mac that you intend to share to an iPad, your presentations will look their best if you follow the recommendations below.

Summarizing the 12 brain rules below, you may want to check out brainrules.net for details

Brain rule 1 for presenters: Exercise boosts brain power.
1. Our brains were built for walking—12 miles a day!
2. To improve your thinking skills, move.
3. Exercise gets blood to your brain, bringing it glucose for energy and oxygen to soak up the toxic electrons that are left over. It also stimulates the protein that keeps neurons connecting.
4. Aerobic exercise just twice a week halves your risk of general dementia. It cuts your risk of Alzheimer’s by 60 percent.

Brain Rule #2 for presenters: The human brain evolved, too.
1. We don’t have one brain in our heads; we have three.
2. We started with a “lizard brain” to keep us breathing, then added a brain like a cat’s, and then topped those with the thin layer of Jell-O known as the cortex—the third, and powerful, “human” brain.
3. We took over the Earth by adapting to change itself, after we were forced from the trees to the savannah when climate swings disrupted our food supply.
4. Going from four legs to two to walk on the savannah freed up energy to develop a complex brain.
5. Symbolic reasoning is a uniquely human talent. It may have arisen from our need to understand one another’s intentions and motivations, allowing us to coordinate within a group.

Brain Rule #3 for presenters: Every brain is wired differently.
1. What you do and learn in life physically changes what your brain looks like—it literally rewires it.
2. The various regions of the brain develop at different rates in different people.
3. No two people’s brains store the same information in the same way in the same place.
4. We have a great number of ways of being intelligent, many of which don’t show up on IQ tests.

Brain Rule #4 for presenters: We don’t pay attention to boring things.
1. The brain’s attentional “spotlight” can focus on only one thing at a time: no multitasking.
2. We are better at seeing patterns and abstracting the meaning of an event than we are at recording detail.
3. Emotional arousal helps the brain learn.
4. Audiences check out after 10 minutes, but you can keep grabbing them back by telling narratives or creating events rich in emotion.

Brain Rule #5 for presenters: Repeat to remember.
1. The brain has many types of memory systems. One type follows four stages of processing: encoding, storing, retrieving, and forgetting.
2. Information coming into your brain is immediately split into fragments that are sent to different regions of the cortex for storage.
3. Most of the events that predict whether something learned also will be remembered occur in the first few seconds of learning. The more elaborately we encode a memory during its initial
4. You can improve your chances of remembering something if you reproduce the environment in which you first put it into your brain.

Brain Rule #6 for presenters: Remember to repeat.
1. Most memories disappear within minutes, but those that survive the fragile period strengthen with time.
2. Long-term memories are formed in a two-way conversation between the hippocampus and the cortex, until the hippocampus breaks the connection and the memory is fixed in the cortex—which can take years.
3. Our brains give us only an approximate view of reality, because they mix new knowledge with past memories and store them together as one.
4. The way to make long-term memory more reliable is to incorporate new information gradually and repeat it in timed intervals.

Brain Rule #7 for presenters: Sleep well, think well.
1. The brain is in a constant state of tension between cells and chemicals that try to put you to sleep and cells and chemicals that try to keep you awake.
2. The neurons of your brain show vigorous rhythmical activity when you’re asleep—perhaps replaying what you learned that day.
3. People vary in how much sleep they need and when they prefer to get it, but the biological drive for an afternoon nap is universal.
4. Loss of sleep hurts attention, executive function, working memory, mood, quantitative skills, logical reasoning, and even motor dexterity.

Brain Rule #8 for presenters: Stressed brains don’t learn the same way.
1. Your body’s defense system—the release of adrenaline and cortisol—is built for an immediate response to a serious but passing danger, such as a saber-toothed tiger.
2. Chronic stress, such as hostility at home, dangerously deregulates a system built only to deal with short-term responses.
3. Under chronic stress, adrenaline creates scars in your blood vessels that can cause a heart attack or stroke, and cortisol damages the cells of the hippocampus, crippling your ability to learn and remember.
4. Individually, the worst kind of stress is the feeling that you have no control over the problem—you are helpless.
5. Emotional stress has huge impacts across society, on children’s ability to learn

Brain Rule #9 for presenters: Stimulate more of the senses.
1. We absorb information about an event through our senses, translate it into electrical signals (some for sight, others from sound, etc.), disperse those signals to separate parts of the brain, then reconstruct what happened, eventually perceiving the event as a whole.
2. The brain seems to rely partly on past experience in deciding how to combine these signals, so two people can perceive the same event very differently.
3. Our senses evolved to work together—vision influencing hearing, for example—which means that we learn best if we stimulate several senses at once.
4. Smells have an unusual power to bring back memories, maybe because smell signals bypass the thalamus and head straight to their destinations, which include that supervisor of emotions known as the amygdala.

Brain Rule #10 for presenters: Vision trumps all other senses.
1. Vision is by far our most dominant sense, taking up half of our brain’s resources.
2. What we see is only what our brain tells us we see, and it’s not 100 percent accurate.
3. The visual analysis we do has many steps. The retina assembles photons into little movie-like streams of information. The visual cortex processes these streams, some areas registering motion, others registering color, etc. Finally, we combine that information back together so we can see.
4. We learn and remember best through pictures, not through written or spoken words.

Brain Rule #11 for presenters: Male and female brains are different.
1. The X chromosome that males have one of and females have two of—though one acts as a backup—is a cognitive “hot spot,” carrying an unusually large percentage of genes involved in brain manufacture.
2. Women are genetically more complex, because the active X chromosomes in their cells are a mix of Mom’s and Dad’s. Men’s X chromosomes all come from Mom, and their Y chromosome carries less than 100 genes, compared with about 1,500 for the X chromosome.
3. Men’s and women’s brains are different structurally and biochemically—men have a bigger amygdala and produce serotonin faster, for example—but we don’t know if those differences have significance.
4. Men and women respond differently to acute stress: Women activate the left hemisphere’s amygdala and remember the emotional details. Men use the right amygdala and get the gist.

Brain Rule #12 for presenters: We are powerful and natural explorers.
1. Babies are the model of how we learn—not by passive reaction to the environment but by active testing through observation, hypothesis, experiment, and conclusion.
2. Specific parts of the brain allow this scientific approach. The right prefrontal cortex looks for errors in our hypothesis (“The saber-toothed tiger is not harmless”), and an adjoining region tells us to change behavior (“Run!”).
3. We can recognize and imitate behavior because of “mirror neurons” scattered across the brain.
4. Some parts of our adult brains stay as malleable as a baby’s, so we can create neurons and learn new things throughout our lives.