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From BusinessWeek, here’s an article with 10 tips for delivering effective presentations. this felt like a timely article, as students are starting to deliver presentations in their courses around this time of year.

The author uses Steve Jobs and his product announcements as an example, but many of these tips will work well for any presentation.

My favorite points on the list are:

1) Set the theme. Let the audience know what they will learn from the talk.

4) Use meaningful numbers. Discuss ratios, percentages and results in ways that the audience can understand. Never assume that the audience will do the analysis themselves. I sometimes hear graduate students claim that a company is doing well because it is earning a profit. My follow-up questions focus on their evidence for that claim.

Don’t sweat the small stuff. Product announcements sometimes become awkward when the technology malfunctions. Avoid fancy transitions and tools that take extra preparation, support or time to use.

10) Rehearse, rehearse, rehearse. A presentation is a performance. Most of the audience members have delivered presentations themselves, but they won’t cut the presenter much slack. The best content and slides cannot save a boring or poorly delivered presentation.

BusinessWeek reports on modu, an Israeli company that has developed a modular mobile phone around the size of an iPod Nano. The Associated Press reports the phone will be launched on 1 October 2008 in Italy, Russia and Israel.

As Reuters pointed out yesterday, telecoms and mobile phone manufacturers will be out in force at this week’s Mobile World Congress in Frankfurt, Germany.  Modu is only one of several hundred manufacturers who will use their booths to show off their latest hardware.

Modu has designed a basic GSM phone that could be used on its own, but the company wants third parties to license the technology and build “jackets”. These are devices like media players, mobile handsets and other gadgets that have a slot for the modu phone. The jackets provide a larger, more comfortable form-factor for everyday use, and provide opportunities to decorate, brand and extend the phone.

Founder Dov Moran has the experience and connections to pull this off, having sold his flash memory business, M-Systems, to SanDisk in 2006 for US$1.5 billion. He’s invested US$5 million in modu, according to Reuters, and believes his new company could generate US$1 billion in sales revenue by 2011. That would rival the largest mobile phone manufacturers like Nokia and Samsung, whose businesses rely on a traditional business model. Consumers buy a handset, use it for a while, and upgrade to a different model.

The modu concept would let manufacturers add mobile connectivity to a wide range of electronic devices. Digital cameras could have a modu slot, for example. Car stereo systems might include a modu slot, as shown in the concept video on the modu website. A modu-compatible media player would be an interesting rival for the iPhone.

Creating a consumer hardware standard is tricky. Video games are a good example. Cartridges and software from one system usually do not work with another manufacturer’s console.

The Washington Post reported yesterday on allegations that US Customs agents have inspected and confiscated laptop computers, iPods, and mobile phones during passenger inspections. Passengers claim they were asked to provide passwords and open files. In some cases, mobile phones were inspected and returned with purged call logs. One person claims their laptop has been held for an over a year.

According to this article, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Asian Law Caucus have filed a civil lawsuit against the Federal Government, based on 20 complaints from Northern California residents. The goal is disclosure of the US government’s boder search policies. One sourse of concern is an apparent pattern of racial profiling, in which agents targeted Asian and Muslim passengers.

The US Department of Justice asserts that electronic equipment falls into the same category as a briefcase, and may be searched and confiscated for inspection.

However, the scenarios described in this article sound more like coercion or out-and-out robbery.

Of course, many corporate travelers have confidential or private information on their computers and phones. The Post article cites a Canadian law firm that sends corporate travelers headed to the United States with “empty hard drives”. There’s an operating system and a web browser on the laptop, of course, but employees access their email and documents through a secure Internet connection such as a virtual private network (VPN). This helps keep confidential data off the drive, as the law firm fears discovery by search more than a hacked Internet connection.

BoingBoing and the Consumerist each had articles about the Post report, although both blogs misidentified US Customs as the TSA.

Sadly, the activities alleged in this lawsuit do not surprise me. BusinessWeek recently reported on Indian IT outsourcing firms that have systematically underpaid IT workers who were brought to the United States on H1-B visas. These workers make tempting targets, as their outsourcing companies can send the workers back home for any reason. By the time some workers determined they would never get their back-pay, they were no longer in the US. It seems that only a few lawyers or client companies will step in to help these guest workers.

Hawaiian Telcom CEO Mike Ruley was dismissed yesterday. His replacement is Stephen Cooper, co-founder or Kroll Zolfo Cooper, a New York City-based interim management firm. Cooper is best known as the Enron’s CEO during the company’s bankruptcy. Today’s Star-Bulletin article has a brief biography of Cooper. Kevin Nystrom, a senior director at KZC, will join HawTel as COO.

While Cooper stated in today’s Honolulu Advertiser that HawTel is not a “distressed company”, it’s now clear that the Carlyle Group is unhappy with their acquisition’s performance. HawTel has lost thousands of subscribers to mobile carriers and Time Warner Oceanic’s VoIP services, leading to US$137 million in financial losses since 2006. I mentioned some of the operational issues on my old blog on 16 November 2006, and last week BusinessWeek discussed how market forces have affected the US telecom industry overall.

The Advertiser noted that Ruley put his Kahala home on the market in early January, which is a possible indication that changes were coming at HawTel. The company has eliminated over 100 management positions since October 2007.

In the past, I’ve posted links to articles in the New York Times in this blog. I read the Times’ web site several times a week. I got into the Times Web habit in 1995, actually. It beats waiting for the Sunday Honolulu Advertiser to reprint dated, abridged versions of the same articles.

There was always one problem with linking to the Times – their archiving policy. After two weeks, most recent Times news stories shifted from free access to subscriber-only access through a paid service called Times Select. Launched in 2005, Times Select was a bold revenue play on a web site that currently attracts 13 million unique visitors each month.

Authoritative news has its price

When I pointed users or students to a New York Times article, I wasn’t asking them to subscribe to the Times or buy the article. Readers didn’t like paying US$50 a year to use the Times archives. Yes, print subscribers received a free Web subscription, as did some educational subscribers. The Times also determined that more Web readers were following links from Google, Yahoo and other search engines to Times content. If the user wasn’t a Times subscriber, they might not see the Times content or ads.

Keep in mind that advertising helps subsidize much of the alleged “free” content on the Web. The bandwidth required to connect users to a web server can be expense at times. The servers, programming, and other services required to keep even a small web site going cost money.

Advertising, in turn, helps fuel electronic commerce. It’s far less expensive for an electronic merchant to advertise online, especially when the ads can be targeted to specific websites, users, and geographies. Customers who will consider an online merchant are more likely to read their news on the Web in the first place. It’s expensive to convert readers of print newspapers or television viewers to an online business model.

I run ads at the bottom of my site’s web pages more as an experiment than anything else. The revenue that I receive is laughably small, but I don’t pay that much for my web hosting at DreamHost, either. Google announced today that it is expanding its advertising business to mobile platforms, and other Web advertising services are moving in the same direction.

In the end, management determined that the Times would be better off without its subscription service, letting these readers read stories for free while viewing advertising sold by the Times.

Free the content – sell more ads

The Times announced today that Times Select will end tomorrow. Web site visitors will get free access to sections of the Times’s news and column archives, including the last twenty years. BoingBoing and Kaaawa blog iLind.net ran a quick mention of the change as well.

The Wall Street Journal may be the next major news daily to free its Web content. The Journal’s subscriber-only policies were more expensive and more restrictive than the Times’. The Journal are also one of the few newspapers that made money from its Web operations– at least US$50 million in subscriber revenue each year, according to this article in ZDNet. New owner Rupert Murdoch is already pushing MySpace towards targeted advertising based on user profile data, according to this NY Times article (via BoingBoing). I would not be surprised if the Journal and Dow Jones changed their business models.