Nonfiction assortment
Feb. 19th, 2015 02:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
vamysteryfanCrossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers by Geoffrey A. Moore. This is the 2014 update to the marketing classic, with new and timely examples. The author discusses and analyzes the challenges of bringing high tech products to market. He starts by clearly explaining his terms and how he sees the issues. The crux is how to make the jump from a niche to a wider market. I found the discussion extremely helpful. I think his ideas apply to intangibles as well as tangible products. It changed the way I thought about some of the Internet collapses we’ve seen over the past few years. Even if you aren’t in the field, the business insights are worth reading.
Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products by Nir Eyal. This was an interesting discussion of getting people to return to your product, whether it’s web content, an online game, or something tangible. He uses the model of Trigger => Action => Variable Reward => Investment to describe his ideas. The power of variable rewards comes from differences each time the user clicks. The difference can just be more or different photos (as on Pinterest). Investment can be time, not just money. He also offers exercises to apply his process to the reader’s project.
In Montmartre: Picasso, Matisse and the Birth of Modernist Art by Sue Roe. I was fortunate to receive an ARC for this book. In 1900 a teenaged Pablo Picasso arrived in Paris. Already there or soon to arrive were Derain, Vlaminck, Rousseau, Leo and Gertrude Stein, Paul Poiret, Diaghilev and of course Henri Matisse. The first decade of the 20th century changed the world for art, cinema, dance and fashion. The author keeps the focus tightly on culture – there isn’t much mention of political or scientific events. I learned a great deal about this remarkable decade and the development of Fauvism, Cubism and Modernism. She makes a persuasive argument that the development of cinema had an important effect on artists of the period. It is well written and interesting.
