Mind Media Review

No  18  Welcome To Mind Media -- Home Of Personal Development On The Web

February 2002

Highlights include:

	Welcome to Mind Media:Home Of Personal Development On The Web

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Welcome To Mind Media -- Home Of Personal Development On The Web

by Bruce Ehrlich, Founder of the Mindware Catalog

This is a special issue of the Mindware Review. The Mindware Review is one of the longest running Internet newsletters --having sent out its first issue to subscribers in early 1995. The publication is written by the Mind Media staff and is sent to a subscriber list which has now grown to over 100,000. I am sending it to you on an opt-out basis -- because you either sent me email or visited the site and so I know you are interested in what I call Mindware. Please excuse me if I sent it to you in error,

Mind Media Review is about "Mindware" -- a term I coined back in 1988 to describe software that I had been collecting while I was finishing my doctorate in P.M. Actually, just when I was going to write my dissertation, I decided to start a small "side-business" called the Mindware catalog. The 32 page color catalog grew from a circulation of 5000 for issue mailed out in the spring of '88 to 500,000 mailed in the summer of 1994 -- our last issue.

Just to add a bit of confusion to this otherwise lucid essay, the first issue of the Mindware catalog was called The Mindware Review -- which was the hot idea of a marketing company I had hired to put out the first issue. When I found out I could print 50,000 catalogs for about twice as much as 5,000, I left that company and found a local designer named Scott Sandow who was a great layout artist but an also had been in business and marketing his entire life. As someone who had come from Grad School (I didn't know the difference between an invoice and a purchase order), I was glad to have him spend hours with me figuring out what this mindware thing was all about and who would be interested in using it.

This is an excerpt from the "Letter from the President" from that second Mindware catalog.

"Welcome to Mindware! An extra dimension has been added to your personal computer with the arrival of a new genre of software we call mind appliances. These mind appliances cover many areas but share a common purpose: the enhancement of human intelligence in all its aspects -- and so our name became, "Mindware."

Mindware was conceived and created to be more than a business in the normal sense. We sincerely believe that anyone can benefit from this new relationship between computers and the mind!

By the time we had grown to half a million catalogs, we were the first catalog to have sold a CD-ROM drive along with CD-ROMs to play in them and also the first to sell voice recognition software. In a sense, we were kind of a "Sharper Image" of computer software as well as a self- improvement catalog.

One half-million catalogs costs a lot to mail. Our post office bill was so large, I thought we should be given red carpet treatment at the post office -- but we had to stand in line like everyone else. Our team at Mindware was always dreaming of starting something like America Online or even to be given a section of AOL or than equally prominent CompuServe in order to replace or at least supplement the catalog.

My main assistant at the time,Thad Atkins had a couple of friends who were starting a company to do catalogs on something called the World Wide Web. When I ordered an ISDN line and started browsing, I was sure that this was where I wanted real estate. So as the web began to become more than just a place for scientists, we were one of the earliest online. Our first web site was at mindware.com but we decided to create a larger site called the Mind Media Life- Enhancement Network so that we could feature more than just the Mindware Catalog Online.

In 1995, we stopped printing catalogs and went entirely online. The same year, I came out with the first email edition of the Mindware Review. At the time there were only about a hundred online newsletters and so were actually read and even enjoyed (I got a lot of email asking questions when I wrote something which is how I know).

But by the end of the decade, the Internet revolution occurred --which actually made it more difficult for us in many ways. All of the good programmers and web artists were suddenly working for large corporations that formerly only had stores and advertised on TV. Search engines were selling ranking -- and we didn't have the money to pay. From less than twenty online catalogs that were around when we started, now there were 200,000. Many of them started what became known as the "dot comers" -- people who had made money in other businesses and now were getting Venture Capital which allowed them to out spend us by huge factors.

Perhaps the one of the strangest stories of my twelve years in the computer human potential business was an event that took place in the fall of 1999. It was right in the middle of the Internet boom -- when you drove through Silicon Valley and saw billboards from VC companies. A woman called me. She told me that she had an online art gallery but that her first love was personal development - - the kind of products and services that we provide. She then told me she represented someone in the "self-help" field whose name I would instantly recognize. He had acquired a publicly traded shell (a stock in which the company no longer exists but which is still listed on a stock exchange -- a fast way of raising public money is to buy one of these "shells" and put your company and a few others together into it.).

She was looking for a few good personal development sites which you could join together under this self-improvement figure. At one point, she had me on the line with a gentleman who asked me what my gross sales were. He had seen my business plan, which is posted on our web site and mistakenly took our projections based on one million dollars investment as our current earnings. When he found out we weren't making the projected figure, he hurriedly got off the phone.

Who was the mysterious man? A few months afterward, Anthony Robbins launched his high-profile web site -- Dreamlife.com. And here is an excerpt from a January 10, 2000 Newsweek Magazine (International Edition):

"This much is clear: if success is the goal, the gurus have found it. Anthony Robbins leads the pack. Of all the gurus, he's most focused on the Net. Last summer Robbins took control of a publicly traded shell company whose stock cost just pennies a share and announced plans to build a self- improvement Web site, Dreamlife.com. The site still isn't operational, but investors don't seem to mind. Last week its stock stood at $16 a share, putting Robbins's stake at more than $300 million.

Well Robbins site was slick and "did everything right" -- from personalized membership to an online interactive tutorial which identified the parts of life that needed improvement, complete with Tony Robbins voice and picture to guide you. I joined the site and was bombarded with Newsletters on a daily basis.

Now in one of the business plans I wrote, before the Internet became so fashionable -- I suggested that Mind Media approach individuals such a Robbins, Deepak Chopra

Stephen Covey. In "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, and John Gray, the former Hindu monk from right here in Mind Media Country, Santa Cruz, California -- who wrote "Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus," with the idea of Mind Media using its expertise to give them a web presence. So when the VC money flowed like wine and all of the big guys jumped aboard, little Mind Media remained pretty much a slowly evolving web organism as it always had been.

Well in mid-2001, a year after its launch, Dreamlife.com was dead. And Mind Media is still here.. Back in 1990, one of the software publishers I featured on in the Mindware Catalog, Bert Shaw, sent me this quotation which still hands on my bulletin board.

"Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proconservation alone will not; the world is full of educated derelicts."

The saying had nobody it was attributed to, so I decided to look it up on the web as I was wring this, I found out it was said by good old "Silent" Calvin Coolidge himself, so I thought about taking it down since he doesn't have much of a reputation] as he had articulated an idea missed by many in the trendy self-improvement arena.

So this special issue is dedicated to the future of what I called Mindware back in 1988. Its come a long way. In this issue, I’ll start with three free programs we give away on our site. Then I’m going to take sections of two previous issues to introduce you to five great downloads on the Web (not on our site) and five of the best of the online applications And finally I’ll put in a plug for five of my favorite Mind Media Products.

So I'm still carrying the torch Mindware. My dream is to make our West into a portal dedicated to the use of computers as mind appliances -- for individual success and personal development and the enhancement of the diverse aspects of human intelligence. How is that for perseverance?

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