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"Known as the "guru of direct response marketing," Brian Kurtz distills the expertise he's gained after almost four decades in the industry to teach readers how to build a business that lasts a lifetime on the fundamentals of direct response. Marketing is critical to every kind of business, whether you're a new entrepreneur or a seasoned marketer. In this book, "titan" of direct marketing Brian Kurtz teaches you how to find and sell to your audience without ever losing sight of the people you are selling to, and without compromising on the respect and care they deserve. This book is about direct marketing, or "measurable marketing," in any medium. Direct marketing is the only way to get a specific return on your investment--every time you run a campaign, there has to be some way to measure it. Brian shows you how to track what is effective in marketing to the people in your target audience and how to diversify your marketing to ensure you can provide for them over the long haul. Brian explains the 4 Pillars of Being Extraordinary, the 5 Principles of Original Source, how to track the metrics that matter, strategies and tactics to build a responsive database (list building), how to tailor offers to your list, the 7 Characteristics of World-Class Copy-Writers, multichannel marketing, the importance of customer service, how to overdeliver, and so much more!"--

Tom Lean tells the story of how computers invaded British homes for the first time, as people set aside their worries of electronic brains and Big Brother and embraced the wonder-technology of the 1980s. This book charts the history of the rise and fall of the home computer, the family of futuristic and quirky machines that took computing from the realm of science and science fiction to being a user-friendly domestic technology. It is a tale of unexpected consequences, when the machines that parents bought to help their kids with homework ended up giving birth to the video games industry, and of unrealised ambitions, like the ahead-of-its-time Prestel network that first put the British home online but failed to change the world. Ultimately, it's the story of the people who made the boom happen, the inventors and entrepreneurs like Clive Sinclair and Alan Sugar seeking new markets, bedroom programmers and computer hackers, and the millions of everyday folk who bought in to the electronic dream and let the computer into their lives.

"What's Your Quest? examines the future of electronic literature in a world where tablets and e-readers are becoming as common as printed books and where fans everywhere are blurring of the positions of reader and author. The magic of Youtube, the iPad, and adventure gaming draws upon a history of convergence in digital storytelling that has evolved alongside computing itself, as new tools and models for interactive narrative and the increased accessibility of those tools have allowed for a broad range of storytellers to build on these emerging models for literary interaction"--

The Walkman. Karaoke. Pikachu. Pac-Man. Akira. Emoji. We've all fallen in love with one or another of Japan's pop-culture creations, from the techy to the wild to the super-kawaii. But as Japanese media veteran Matt Alt proves in this brilliant investigation of Tokyo's pop-fantasy complex, we don't know the half of it. Japan's toys, gadgets, and fantasy worlds didn't merely entertain. They profoundly transformed the way we live. In the 1970s and '80s, Japan seemed to exist in some near future, soaring on the superior technology of Sony and Toyota while the West struggled to catch up. Then a catastrophic 1990 stock-market crash ushered in the "lost decades" of deep recession and social dysfunction. The end of the boom times should have plunged Japan into irrelevance, but that's precisely when its cultural clout soared-when, once again, Japan got to the future a little ahead of the rest of us. Hello Kitty, the Nintendo Entertainment System, and entertainment empires like Pokémon and Dragon Ball Z were more than marketing hits. Artfully packaged, dangerously cute, and dizzyingly fun, these products made Japan the forge of the world's fantasies, and gave us new tools for coping with trying times. They also transformed us as we consumed them-connecting as well as isolating us in new ways, opening vistas of imagination and pathways to revolution. Through the stories of an indelible group of artists, geniuses, and oddballs, Pure Invention reveals how Japanese ingenuity remade global culture and may have created modern life as we know it. It's Japan's world; we're just gaming, texting, singing, and dreaming in it

Introduction: A fable of politics, community, and virtuality -- Digital monsters : show and tell on capitol hill -- Hacking aristotle : what is digital rhetoric -- The desert of the unreal : democracy and military-funded games and simulations -- The war from the web : an atlas of conflict, government, and citizenship -- Power points : the virtual state and its discontents -- Whistleblowers : traditional epistolary discourse and electronic communication -- Submit and render : digital satires about surveillance and authentication -- Reading room : the nation-state and digital library initiatives -- Waiting room : serious games about national security and public health -- The past as prologue : cultural politics and the founding narratives of information -- Science

"Video games such as Fortnite, Minecraft, and Pokemon Go have been business successes in recent years, but the industry has not always been that way. As with any field of business, there have been crashes and other market disruptions. Even so, these firms march on, thriving in the face of digitalization and adopting unusual strategies like giving content away for free in order to build market share and draw in customers. The author draws on three decades of industry data to explain how video games have transitioned from the fringes of the media and entertainment industry to become a mainstream form of entertainment. By analyzing dedicated game designers like Activision Blizzard, Electronic Arts, and Valve, as well as more diversified firms like Apple, Microsoft, and Tencent, he concludes that video game companies flourish wherever they bring the same level of creativity to business strategy as they do to game design. This style of business model innovation is illuminated by case studies of how these companies have succeeded-or failed-to grow."