There are books and articles that offer advice on how to become a millionaire, but this one could be called How to Become a Billionaire. Instead, it's called Alibaba's World, written by Porter Erisman, a man who was there at the beginning of a company that went public in America last year at a valuation that exceeded Amazon and eBay combined. It was the largest initial stock offering ever.
Erisman worked at the company for eight years. Joy heard him speak, bought the book, and read it in a flash.
The story begins with Jack Ma, an English teacher making $12 a month in China, a typical salary in the 1990s. His first trip to the U.S. as a translator was a wake-up call. Friends in Seattle let him try out the Web on their computers. He typed in "beer," and marveled at the choices. He typed in "Chinese beer--" no results. Then "China--" no results. This was early days for the Web, and although he knew nothing about computers, he set off to create one of the world's most successful online shopping and auction sites. Remarkably, this was accomplished at a time when few Chinese owned credit cards or had ever been on the Web. The first Web pages had to be created on paper and mailed to the Seattle engineers from China.
At the end of the book, there are 40 lessons -- a tip of the hat to the famous story from the Arabian Nights: Alibaba and the 40 Thieves. Alibaba's World is $27 from US.Macmillan.com.
On Track
We know personal trackers are quite the rage right now, but this is wild. Of course it does offer something different: tracking a woman's ovulation period. But there's nothing high tech about that, it just tracks the number of days.
The new device is called the Bellabeat Leaf. It looks like a silver leaf you pin to your outfit. The first 10,000 units sold out in 48 hours. The second shipment was 94 percent sold when we went to press. A special edition sold in one hour.
All of which proves you can move a fitness tracker by adding some special appeal. It doesn't have to be much, it just has to be useful in some way. The Leaf monitors sleep, stress and all the usual stuff, like calories burned and distance walked, and offers suggestions for better health. It's $119 from bellabeat.com and apparently has hit a nerve.
Gmail Tips
• "Auto-Advance" is helping Joy to get through her Gmail a wee bit faster. What it does is automatically advance you to the next email in your list, so you don't have to waste time leaving an email and going back to check another. To enable it, click the picture of a tiny gear, then "settings," then choose "Labs." Click "enable" next to "Auto-Advance."
• "Boomerang for Gmail" is a plug-in for scheduling emails to go out when you want them to go out. You may be writing at 3 a.m., but you'd rather they went out the next morning at 9. It's free unless you're a heavy user, and works with Chrome, Firefox and Safari Web browsers.
• To get a good print of a Gmail email, use the right print command. Click on a message and then click a tiny triangle to the right of where you see the current time. Click "print" from that menu and you'll get just the message, instead of a page cluttered with folder names off to the side.
TeamChat
If you're in a big company, how do you communicate with thousands of employees? Some, such as the ride-sharing service Flywheel, an Uber competitor, are using "TeamChat." In Bombay, India, the police force uses it to communicate with officers.
It's a messaging service for an unlimited number of participants. The party of India's new prime minister, Narendra Modi, used it to rally the vote and he won in a landslide.
TeamChat is from the same people who made Elance, a website for freelance workers. It's a chat service for an unlimited number of people and works by organizing and summarizing messages to make them easier to read. The service is free, but premium extras have fees. More info is at TeamChat.com.
Internuts
• "Rarely Seen Enchanted Moments of World History" starts with a photo of a woman born in 1746 who was photographed in 1840. There's a photo of Carl Akeley posing with the body of the leopard that attacked him. He killed it with his bare hands. Akeley was director of the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. (Museum directors were tougher back then.) Another photo shows Audrey Hepburn shopping with her pet deer in 1958.
• "100 Legal Websites to Download Books": Search on that phrase to find thousands of free books. We were already familiar with Bartleby and Project Gutenberg, but many others, like Fiction.us and ByGosh.com, were new to us. They're listed by category, including classics, textbooks, children's books, math and science, foreign language, plays, history, mystery and so on.
• "Veritasium" is a YouTube channel for science videos. We looked at the world's roundest object and why the most venomous creatures prefer warm climates, especially Mexico, with 80 kinds of deadly venomous creatures. Brazil and Australia follow closely, but here's the mystery: Australia's most venomous snakes live in the coldest places. It turns out that there are more venomous snakes in warm countries, but as a percentage of the total number of snakes, there are less.
Tips and Tricks
Here are some time and frustration saving tips and tricks:
• Scroll down a website by tapping the space bar. It's faster than finding the scroll bar with your mouse.
• When filling out a form online, tap the "Tab" key to jump to the next field.
• To find your state quickly in a drop-down list that has all of them, keep tapping the first letter until it pops up.
• To increase the size of text on the screen, hold down the "Ctrl" key (or the "Cmd" key on the Mac), and then tap the plus sign. Ctrl-minus will decrease the size.
• On a smartphone, tap the period to fill in ".com" automatically. When you're in an email, tapping the period will give you a choice of other punctuation marks.
SundayMonday Business on 07/05/2015