Microsoft has today launched the newly rebranded Office Online (www.office.com) suite of apps, succeeding the popular Web Apps. Today’s launch also paves the way for more usability improvements to make it easier for consumers to take advantage of available features, including easier collaboration and sharing with others. The original Microsoft suite of online Office apps were…
Awesome to see Office Online getting the branding, unification, and ease of access it sorely needed.
The tech/information sector supports 262,000 jobs in New York City, making it the second-biggest sector of the local economy. Hiring is definitely on the upswing and is there a company in the city that isnât screaming for tech help and even help in other areas? They may be screaming, but they just donât seem to be pulling the trigger and therein lies the rub. We come across articles all the time about how to hire your next employee, culture fit, and on and on.
The Goldilocks Syndrome: Why Startups Canât Find Employees
Working in small batches ensures that a startup can minimize the expenditure of time, money, and effort that ultimately turns out to have been wasted.
“The power of small batches” via StartupLessonsLearned.com
This came up in one of our team meetings the other day here at Contactive as we were talking about a processing workflow in our backend – should we go with small or large batches? Inaki (our CEO) shared this article and I was reminded again how powerful small, learning-based iterations can be for a startup.
Google Plus may not be much of a competitor to Facebook as a social network, but it is central to Google’s future — a lens that allows the company to peer more broadly into people’s digital life, and to gather an ever-richer trove of the personal information that advertisers covet. Some analysts even say that Google understands more about people’s social activity than Facebook does.
“The Plus in Google Plus? It’s Mostly for Google” via The New York Times.
I am mostly pleased (although sometimes caught off guard) whenever Google’s services help me out in a way I didn’t expect. My favorite scenario is a simple one: when I map an address on my Mac at work, and then 15 minutes after leaving the office I pull out Google Maps on my phone when I (inevitably) get lost getting to my destination. One tap in the search field and it pre-populates with the last search destination from my desktop, saving me a step. Again, nothing revolutionary but very helpful.
As a technologist and someone who wants to understand and make the most use of anything I sign up for, Google+ frustrates me because I don’t feel like I use it at all. This article is a good reminder that although many of us feel that way, G+ is becoming the key to Google’s service fabric and will likely have a big impact on the way you use their services (if it hasn’t already).
This part of the business — the lifestyle aspiration, further fueled by user content — is the next well to tap. As it becomes a challenge to differentiate at a hardware level, GoPro has an option not available to its competition: become a platform as well as a product.
“GoPro’s IPO isn’t about selling cameras, it’s about creating a media empire” via Engadget
A great read on some of the history of GoPro and how it has morphed from a pure hardware shop to an end-to-end ‘lifestyle experience’ provider. Given how much better prepared they are for an IPO than a few recent big technology companies (read = they have revenue and a sustainable business model), I’m very interested to see how they do this year.
Disclaimer: I do not own a GoPro camera. But I can’t stop watching that insane GoPro video of the Russian dudes climbing that crazy-tall tower in Shanghai.
Parcel brings even more convenience to online shopping by delivering your packages when you want them.
File this under #signmeupimmediately and #facepalm.
Parcel Delivers Packages After Hours, When You’re Actually Home
Tristan Walker has gone from oil trading to hawking shaving cream in six years. As an economics major at Stony Brook University in Long Island, Walker — who..
Cool personal story and even cooler product. +1.
“This caters specifically to the target segments that primarily want to use their apps on their smartphones and only secondarily use their phone to talk & text, which probably by now is the majority of the smartphone users.”
This is very much me. I still use SMS a lot but at the same time switch almost hourly through Skype, WhatsApp, GroupMe (yes, still), and several others since I have friends scattered across the networks.
And rather than shying away from technology because of the role it played in creating today’s problems—for example, synthetic nitrogen fertilizer, made from petroleum, fueled the explosive growth in the production of grains, soybeans, and corn, which in turn were used to make the processed foods that make up so much of the American diet—these new food reformers seek to use it strategically to produce what we want without costs to our environment and our health. That requires more complexity than a network of community gardens can provide.
“SILICON VALLEY’S NEXT BIG GOAL: FIXING OUR BROKEN FOOD SYSTEM” via FastCompany
Amy and I try to eat ‘smart’: know where our food comes from, try to stay away from processed goods and ingredients, and keep our meals as “primitive” as possible, though I firmly believe that cavemen had a way to make single-malt scotch. We believe in and support local, sustainable farms, and our family’s butcher shop sources from several local farms and producers.
Yet individual choices will likely never cause change on a massive scale, and I like this article’s perspective on the enormity of the problem. Yes, if we had to design the food system from scratch right now we’d likely do things very differently. Yes, folks like Amy and I try to do what we can to improve our own personal food system, and encourage friends and family to do the same. But the scale of change necessary to impact the nation (or world) is going to require recognition that our existing system is here to stay; that is, the needs of its users to have cheap, readily-available food will only grow and we can’t ignore it.
I’m excited to see what type of change tech+food companies can affect at scale.
LinkedIn engagement is rising, and its high-income audience is especially desirable for brands.
A good summary of how well LinkedIn is doing, but the article also includes some good tips on “key times to post” on the various networks. We’re working hard on our social media presence for Contactive and are always testing to find the best time to post, blog, tweet, and share.
LinkedIn May Not Be The Coolest Social Network, But It’s Only Becoming More Valuable To Businesses
#neato 