Want to send a message from the great beyond? There’s an app for that. Lizzy Duffy at NPR reports on several services that will maintain your online presence for you long after you’re dead and gone. DeadSoci.al, which launched at SXSW last week, is a service that will stash away future-dated Facebook or Twitter posts for after your death, so you can continue to send well-wishes for special occasions, or keep some long-running joke running even longer. _LivesOn (your social afterlife) is a service that learns your social media habits, and then predicts what you would like or tweet if you were alive — and does it for you. Their tag line? “When your heart stops beating, you’ll keep tweeting.” A Facebook app called if i die lets you create a video or text message (your last words, a long-kept secret, an old score you wanted to settle, or some valuable advice, for example) that will only be published after you die. Duffy offers readers her condolences in advance: May you tweet in peace.
Executive Time Isn’t the Infinite Resource That Companies Assume It Is (McKinsey Quarterly)
Just 52% of executives surveyed worldwide say the way they spend their time fits well with their organizations’ strategic priorities. What’s more, nearly half of these leaders acknowledge that they aren’t concentrating sufficiently on guiding the strategic direction of the business, write McKinsey’s Frankki Bevins and Aaron De Smet. This suggests that time challenges aren’t just a major hassle for executives but are hurting business performance too. The problem, Bevins and De Smet say, is that companies don’t treat executive time as the precious resource it really is. Too often, new projects are heaped on “day jobs.” Companies should establish “time budgets” for priority initiatives, the writers say. — Andy O’Connell
A 1936 Insight About Technology Was Prescient (Nature)
Before there was Moore’s Law predicting the exponential fall in the cost of manufacturing a transistor, there was Wright’s Law: Aeronautical engineer Theodore Wright, having noticed that the cost of airplanes fell as the number of planes manufactured rose, proposed in 1936 that the cost of making planes was proportional to the inverse of the number of planes manufactured raised to some power. Researchers at the Santa Fe Institute and MIT recently tested Wright’s Law and found that it described the trajectories of numerous modern technologies over a span of decades. Moore’s Law did almost as well, they found, implying that Moore’s Law applies to many industries, not just computers. What does all this prove? That the more we make stuff, the better and more efficient we get at making it. — Andy O’Connell
Airing of the Grievances
How Frustrated Are Small Business Owners With Washington? (Bloomberg Businessweek)
When People Write for Free, Who Pays? (Gawker)
Google Is Working on a Talking Shoe (Business Insider)