Untangle the jargon and design your solar power system from scratch—even if you're new to this! Thomas Edison once said he'd invest in solar energy if he could. Now, you can make it a reality. Amidst the urgency to combat pollution from fossil fuels, solar energy stands out as the greenest and most profitable solution. Imagine harnessing sunlight's abundant energy to power your life – from calculators to entire homes.

Even the smartest among us can feel inept as we fail to figure out which light switch or oven burner to turn on, or whether to push, pull, or slide a door. The fault, argues this ingenious - even liberating - audiobook, lies not in ourselves, but in product design that ignores the needs of users and the principles of cognitive psychology. The Design of Everyday Things shows that good, usable design is possible. The rules are simple: make things visible, exploit natural relationships that couple function and control, and make intelligent use of constraints.

Womack and Jones, the authors of The Machine That Changed the World and creators of the "lean enterprise" theory, take leanness to the next step with a focus on what the customer really wants, not what it is possible to get him to accept. This is the management book for the next business generation.

Exceeding expectations rather than simply satisfying them is the cornerstone of the Disney approach to customer service. Now, in honor of the 10th anniversary of the original Be Our Guest, the Disney Institute, which specializes in helping professionals see new possibilities through concepts not found in the typical workplace, is revealing even more of the business behind the magic of quality service.

Amazon’s Alexa system is one of the most exciting pieces of technology released in the last several years. This audiobook contains a detailed guide to setting up and best using your Echo.

Chris Anderson takes you to the front lines of a new industrial revolution as today’s entrepreneurs, using open source design and 3-D printing, bring manufacturing to the desktop. In an age of custom-fabricated, do-it-yourself product design and creation, the collective potential of a million garage tinkerers and enthusiasts is about to be unleashed, driving a resurgence of American manufacturing. A generation of "Makers" using the Web’s innovation model will help drive the next big wave in the global economy, as the new technologies of digital design and rapid prototyping gives everyone the power to invent.

In 1999 Joseph Pine and James Gilmore offered readers the idea of the experience economy as a new way to connect with customers and secure their loyalty. As a result, their book The Experience Economy is now a classic, embraced by listeners and companies worldwide and available in more than a dozen languages. Though the world has changed in many ways since then, the way to a customer’s heart has not.

3D printing is dubbed the "democracy of manufacturing". Imagine, anyone can design and create anything for anyone, anywhere. This audiobook is the first guide on how to monetize your 3D printing skills. In addition to describing the technology in detail, it walks you through all the practical steps of turning your 3D printing skills into a business. The book will benefit both complete beginners and those more advanced in 3D printing technology. It also includes a list of the best software and hardware on the market today.

In this authoritative and fascinating new audiobook, Keith Sawyer, a psychologist at Washington University, tears down some of the most popular myths about creativity and erects new principles in their place. He reveals that creativity is always collaborative: even when you're alone. Sawyer's audiobook is filled with compelling stories about the inventions that changed our world.

Steve Jobs called Jony Ive his “spiritual partner at Apple.” The London-born genius was the second-most powerful person at Apple and the creative force who most embodies Jobs’s spirit, the man who designed the products adopted by hundreds of millions the world over: the iPod, iPad, MacBook Air, the iMac G3, and the iPhone.

The first-ever inside look at DARPA - the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency - the maverick and controversial group whose futuristic work has had amazing civilian and military applications, from the Internet to GPS to driverless cars

Are you excited about what artificial intelligence can do for you business? Are you ready to apply AI tools that can help scale up your business quickly? This audiobook is your gateway to artificial intelligence applications.

After having failed to create a market for tablets in the early 2000s, Microsoft launched a new hardware effort in 2012 to disastrous results. The company was forced to write down $900 million in inventory, and Surface’s future was in jeopardy. Beneath a Surface tells the inside story of how Microsoft turned its hardware dreams into a reality with new details about the challenges Panos and his team had to overcome as well as the internal politics that nearly killed the brand.

Instead of paying the energy companies for power, you can learn how solar energy is becoming more and more viable. Reductions in costs make it less money to install than one thinks. Harnessing the power of the sun is something unique that you won’t get via other energy sources.

Today, most of the music fans listen to is streamed via online services and highly compressed. It’s convenient, but, frustratingly, this comes at the cost of quality. Gone are the days when it was technologically necessary to compress music into the smallest possible file size, yet this remains the industry standard. The result is music that is robbed of its original quality - muddy and flat in sound compared to the rich, warm sound artists hear in the studio.

Exceeding expectations rather than simply satisfying them is the cornerstone of the Disney approach to customer service. Now, in honor of the 10th anniversary of the original Be Our Guest, the Disney Institute, which specializes in helping professionals see new possibilities through concepts not found in the typical workplace, is revealing even more of the business behind the magic of quality service.

Through narratives and case studies spanning the brilliant history of engineering, Madhavan shows how the concepts of prototyping, efficiency, reliability, standards, optimization, and feedback are put to use in fields as diverse as transportation, retail, health care, and entertainment. Equal parts personal, practical, and profound, Applied Minds charts a path to a future where we apply strategies borrowed from engineering to create useful and inspired solutions to our most pressing challenges.

IDEO, the widely admired, award-winning design and development firm that brought the world the Apple mouse, Polaroid's I-Zone instant camera, the Palm V, and hundreds of other cutting-edge products and services, reveals its secrets for fostering a culture and process of continuous innovation.

Universal Studios never really wanted to get into the theme park business. They wanted to be the anti-Disney. But when forced to do so, they did it in a big way. Despite the fits and starts of multiple owners, the parks have finally gained the momentum to mount a serious challenge to the Walt Disney Company. How did this happen? Who made it happen? What does this mean for the theme park industry?

This is a comprehensive bible to low-budget film production for emerging and professional producers. Structured to guide the listener through production meetings, every aspect of the film-production process is outlined in detail. Invaluable checklists - which begin 12 weeks before shooting and continue through principal (and secondary) photography and postproduction - keep the filmmaker on track and on target.

The Amazon Way on IoT is for the leader who wants to understand how the Internet of things is transforming business and society. Listeners will discover business cases, key concepts, technologies and tools to help develop, explain and execute their own IoT approach through understanding Amazon's and other leading companies sophisticated IoT technologies and strategies.

In this authoritative and fascinating new audiobook, Keith Sawyer, a psychologist at Washington University, tears down some of the most popular myths about creativity and erects new principles in their place. He reveals that creativity is always collaborative: even when you're alone. Sawyer's audiobook is filled with compelling stories about the inventions that changed our world.

In an age of Twitter, smartphones, and self-service kiosks, high-tech but still high-touch customer service is the answer. Today’s customers are a hard bunch to crack. Time-strapped, screen-addicted, value-savvy, and socially engaged, their expectations are tougher than ever for a business to keep up with. They are empowered like never before and expect businesses to respect that sense of empowerment - lashing out at those that don’t. Take heart: Old-fashioned customer service, fully retooled for today’s blistering pace and digitally connected reality, is what you need to build the kind of loyal customer base that allows you to survive - and thrive.

In Electronic Dreams, 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.

Look around you. Artificial intelligence is no longer just a futuristic notion. It's here right now - in software that senses what we need, supply chains that "think" in real time, and robots that respond to changes in their environment. Twenty-first-century pioneer companies are already using AI to innovate and grow fast. The bottom line is this: Businesses that understand how to harness AI can surge ahead. Those that neglect it will fall behind. Which side are you on?