Category: News

Last week, Intel hosted a unique event — an afternoon of TED Talks delivered by their very own resident innovators, thinkers and dreamers. Through a partnership with TED, they received guidance on event production and curation. The final product — TED@Intel, themed “the future in progress” — was a moment for the organization to celebrate and communicate their best ideas.

According to Intel staffer Jeremy Schulz, these are the five most intriguing ideas he heard from the event’s 18 speakers:

1) To create technology that truly enriches people’s lives, you have to ask users what they need and immerse yourself in their challenges. Then think: What can you make that would be most useful for them? Tony Salvador has spent 20 years as an ethnographer at Intel doing exactly that. As he shared in the talk, “The Importance of Listening,” you can’t bring preconceived ideas into the process or you’ll only “hear what [you] want to hear.”

2) Employees living outside the U.S. negotiate an important but delicate balancing act between Intel’s open — but U.S.-centric — culture and the local cultural norms. Makiko Eda, who leads marketing and branding for Asia Pacific, gave the talk “The Corporation as an Agent of Cultural Fusion,” explaining that the balancing act practiced by people on the ground is vital to connecting the global company to local cultures.

3) “A little bit of insurrection” is necessary to keep new ideas alive inside corporations. In Peter Biddle’s “straight-shooting” talk, called “Plucky Rebels: Being Agile in an Un-agile Place,” he gave these pithy tips:

• Make an attractive corpse: Projects get cancelled and plans change, but with an agile approach, your team will have built something and will have tangibles that at worst could go on a resume. “Worked for 2 years on 3-year project that got cancelled” is useless.
• Keep it secret—until you have something real to show: In a large company, lots of people will want to “help” you, but “don’t be afraid to go dark until you have something to show.” Then show it—don’t rely on PowerPoint.
• Find some users and make them happy: Anybody can create hockey-stick earnings charts, but “if you have people that are happy with what you’ve done, you’ve got superpower.” (See idea #1 again!)

4) Parents should act as shepherds to the online world, not gatekeepers. In the talk “Are You ‘Technically’ Fit to be a Parent?” McAfee CTO  and father Michael Fey shared how parents should negotiate the scary world of their children and the internet. He says that if you learn the ins and outs of the online community, “you can learn how to mitigate risk and prevent harm, and you can use technology to better connect with your child.”

5) If you tap into your community you will find “a fountain of creative and courageous people.” As Schulz wrote on Intel’s internal blog, “I came looking for ideas, but it was the people that left the greatest mark.”

You can still send Snoop Dogg links to streams of your demo tape over Facebook (FB), but it’s going to cost you. The Sunday Times reports that Facebook has started rolling out a program in the United Kingdom that allows Facebook users to send celebrities direct messages if they pay a fee. Facebook says that the charges are intended to help people reduce the number of unwanted messages they receive from people don’t know since paid messages are delivered directly to the user’s inbox at the top of the page while unpaid messages from unknown people are dumped into a less prominent folder. Facebook also says that it’s “testing a number of price points in the U.K. and other countries to establish the optimal fee that signals importance.”

Choosing a career path (or changing one) is, for most of us, a confusing and anxiety-riddled experience. Many will tell you to “follow your passion” or “do what you love,” but as Cal Newport argues in So Good They Can’t Ignore You, this is not very useful advice. When I graduated from college, I liked lots of things. But love? Passion? That would have been seriously overstating it.

We all want to choose a career that will make us happy, but how can we know what that will be? Research suggests that human beings are remarkably bad at predicting how they will feel when doing something in the future. It’s not hard to find someone who started out thinking that they would love their chosen profession, only to wind up hating it. In fairness, how are you supposed to know if you will be happy as an investment banker, or an artist, or a professor, if you haven’t actually done any of these things yet? Who has ever, in the history of mankind, taken a job and had it turn out exactly as they imagined it would?

So if passion and expected happiness can’t be your guides, what can be? Well, you can begin by choosing a career that fits well with your skills and values. Since you actually have some sense of what those are (hopefully), this is a good starting place.

But a bit less obviously — though just as important — you also want to choose an occupation that provides a good motivational fit for you as well.

As I describe in my new book with Columbia Business School’s Tory Higgins, Focus and in our recent HBR article, there are two ways you can be motivated to reach your goals.

Some of us tend to see our goals (at work and in life) as opportunities for advancement, achievement and rewards. We think about what we might gain if we are successful in reaching them. If you are someone who sees your goals this way, you have what’s called a promotion focus.

The rest of us see our goals as being about security — about not losing everything we’ve worked so hard for. When you are prevention-focused, you want to avoid danger, fulfill your responsibilities, and be someone people can count on. You want to keep things running smoothly.

Everyone is motivated by both promotion and prevention, but we also tend to have a dominant motivational focus in particular domains of life, like work, love, and parenting. What’s essential to understand is that promotion and prevention-focused people have — because of their different motivations — distinct strengths and weaknesses. To give you a flavor of what I mean:

Promotion- focused people excel at:

• Creativity & innovation
• Seizing opportunities to get ahead
• Embracing risk
• Working quickly
• Generating lots of options and alternatives
• Abstract thinking

(Unfortunately, they are also more error-prone, overly-optimistic, and more likely to take risks that land them in hot water)

Prevention-focused people excel at:

• Thoroughness and being detail-oriented
• Analytical thinking and reasoning
• Planning
• Accuracy (working flawlessly)
• Reliability
• Anticipating problems

(Unfortunately, they are also wary of change or taking chances, rigid, and work more slowly. Diligence takes time.)

By now you probably have a sense of your own focus in the workplace, but if you don’t, try our free online assessment.

Knowing your dominant focus, you can now evaluate how well-suited you are motivationally to different kinds of careers, or different positions in your organization. More than a decade of research shows that when people experience a fit between their own motivation and the way they work, they are not only more effective, but they also find their work more interesting and engaging, and value it more.

If you are promotion-focused, look for jobs that offer advancement and growth. Consider fast-paced industries where products and services are rapidly changing, and where the ability to identify opportunities will be essential, like the tech sector or social media. To use a sports metaphor, look for a career where you get to play offense — where boldness, speed, and outside-the-box thinking pay off.

If you are prevention-focused, look for jobs that offer you a sense of stability and security. You are good at keeping things running, at handling complexity and always having a Plan B (and C and D) ready at a moment’s notice. Consider careers where your thoroughness and attention to detail are valued — for instance, as a contract lawyer or data guru. You work best when you are playing defense — you can spot a threat a mile away, and protect your company or client from harm.

But what about entrepreneurs? you ask. I’m thinking of starting my own business — which motivational focus is best for that? For any successful venture, the truth is that you need both promotion and prevention. An entrepreneur who is all promotion may get her business going, but she probably won’t keep it going for long, since she’ll be unprepared for the obstacles that will inevitably come her way. And the prevention-focused entrepreneur will get so bogged down worrying about obstacles that his business may never get off the ground at all.

This is one of the reasons that good partnerships can be so invaluable — it often takes a Steve Jobs to see a product’s potential, and a Steve Wozniak to actually build it and make it work. So if you are starting a new venture, make sure that you’ve got a healthy balance of promotion and prevention thinking in the right places.

If there’s a poster child for Ireland’s ideal climate for free cooling, it would be the huge data center in Dublin that powers Microsoft’s online services in Europe. Our photo feature, Inside Microsoft’s European Cloud Hub, examines how Microsoft has optimized its data center design to make efficient use of fresh air, and follows the path of the air through the giant facility.

Mobile app store downloads from the four major stores — Apple, BlackBerry, Google and Microsoft — reached 13.4 billion in first quarter, generating $2.2 billion revenue, according to Canalys. Combined, revenue from new sales, in-app purchases and subscriptions grew 9 percent from fourth quarter, while number of downloads climbed by 11 percent.

There are a half-dozen measures that mark successful platforms, with money being the most important. Developers typically go where they earn more. That’s preface to a fascinating juxtaposition partly explaining developer preference for iOS, even though more Android devices ship and cumulative sales (750 million to 500 million) are larger. Google Play accounted for 51 percent of downloads during Q1. But Apple’s App Store generated 74 percent of the revenue. Ponder those numbers for a moment.

Winner takes Bronz

“Apple’s App Store and Google Play remain the heavyweights in the app store world”, Tim Shepherd, Canalys senior analyst, says. “In comparison, BlackBerry World and the Windows Phone Store remain distant challengers today, though they still should not be ignored”.

BlackBerry and Windows Phone, once dominant smartphone operating systems, struggle for relevance with consumers and developers. “BlackBerry and Microsoft particularly need to continue to proactively work to attract fresh, innovative content and services to their respective catalogs, and fill gaps in their inventories”, Shepard says. Some of those holes are huge, with homegrown apps for services like Facebook and nothing at for others, such as Instagram.

“They also need to increase device sales around BlackBerry 10 and Windows Phone 8 to increase the addressable market opportunities on offer to developers”, Shepard warns. BlackBerry and Microsoft had respective smartphone OS sales share of 3.5 percent and 3 percent during fourth quarter, according to Gartner.

BlackBerry and Windows Phone struggle with the age-old chicken-and-egg scenario. Which comes first users or apps? Developers don’t want to invest in platforms if there aren’t users for the apps. Meanwhile people don’t typically adopt platforms without there being apps. Vying against Android and iOS, which are more widely adopted and pack stores with hundreds of thousands more apps, extenuates the dilemmas.

Platform Winners

Typically, successful platforms share six common traits:

• There are good development tools and APIs for easily creating applications
• There is at least one killer application people really want
• There is breadth of useful applications
• Third parties make lots of money
• The platform is broadly available
• There is a robust ecosystem

By most measures, BlackBerry and Windows Phone currently fail to meet the final four.

“The strength of app ecosystems will increasingly help to determine winners and losers in the smart device industry”, Shepard acknowledges. “BlackBerry 10 now has more than 100,000 apps available through its storefront, showing good growth from the 70,000 it boasted at launch, and the new devices on the platform have given BlackBerry a much greater chance to compete for consumer attention. Its app story is going from strength to strength, but there is no room for complacency”.

But the majority of newer BlackBerry apps are Android ports, which signals less-than-stellar developer commitment.

“Microsoft, with the help of partners such as Nokia, is also making good progress attracting some important titles to the Windows Phone platform, but it too needs to do more to make building apps for its platform a priority for developers and also do a better job of marketing and communicating the already established strength of its app story”, Shepard says.

Android-iOS success leaves room, at best, for one more platform, which puts BlackBerry and Windows Phone in direct competition — groveling share at the bottom rather than raking it off the top.

That said, “the Apple-Google duopoly creates certain challenges for app publishers, carriers, investors and device vendors, so there is intense interest in the possible emergence of a third ecosystem”, Adam Daum, Canalys chief analyst, says.

Global Trends

More broadly, tracking with recent device buying trends, emerging markets — Brazil, Indonesia and South Africa — lifted app downloads. Mature markets also saw healthy growth rates: revenue and downloads grew by 8 percent and 6 percent, respectively, in North America and 8 percent and 10 percent in Western Europe.

“Apps have had a huge impact on the way consumers use mobile devices, what they value, and what they expect from smart phones and tablets”, Daum emphasizes. “They are now central to how consumers engage with content and connected services, and how they personalize their devices around the app-enabled features that are important to them”.

Mobile app success feeds the whole “PC is dead” debate. Last week, Gartner offered grim forecast for the personal computer, as shipments decline, as smartphones and tablets make heady gains.

“This is a multi-billion-dollar growth market, with more and more consumers around the world now comfortable and confident in finding apps, downloading them and making in-app purchases, on a growing addressable base of smartphones and tablets”, Daum asserts.

Photo Credit: David Andrew Larsen/Shutterstock

Google has just announced that they are making Google Calendar much more friendly to Latin American Spanish speakers.

Starting today, Google Calendar has a new Español (Latinoamérica) option. Spanish is spoken is much of the world, but the Spanish isn’t the same in every location. Google knows this, and has made a Spanish variant that better suits their Latin American users.

Of course, it isn’t easy to find a variation of Spanish that works for someone living in say, South America, but also feels natural to a Spanish speaker in the United States or Caribbean for example. The Spanish spoken in these regions differs greatly from one country to the next due to geography, separate cultures, customs, and histories. To give all of our Latin American Spanish speakers an option that looks, feels, and sounds right, Google Localization constructed a Spanish variant that combines the most common elements from the different dialects. So whether you speak Spanish or any one of Calendar’s 42 languages, it’s now even easier to keep up with your busy schedule!” says Google.

Google has already offered Gmail in Latin American Spanish since last year, and if you’re new to Calendar but have been using this option inside Gmail, you should be ready to go in Español (Latinoamérica) automatically. Otherwise, simply go to your Calendar settings and click the gear icon and change languages.

The Galaxy Note 3 is slated to launch in September and according to a new report, will be the first Samsung device to feature S Orb. We originally expected this feature to debut in the Galaxy S 4. S Orb is very similar to Photo Sphere on the Nexus 4 and allows users to take 360-degree panorama photos. There are a couple reasons why the Galaxy Note 3 could get S Orb ahead of the Galaxy S 4. Samsung appears to be waiting on upgrading to Android 5.0 Key Lime Pie which won’t be announced until Google I/O in May. With the Galaxy S 4 launching ahead of the announcement, that means an update is further down the line. However, Samsung could ship the Galaxy Note 3 in September with Android 5.0 installed.

Source: Android Geeks

Come comment on this article: Galaxy Note 3 Will Be First Device With Samsung’s S Orb Photo Feature

Over the past 18 months or so, we have watched HTC’s financial deep dive as it keeps setting record-low quarterly profit numbers. HTC was banking on the HTC One leading a rebound for the company. That could still happen, but after delays, the HTC One was not able to ship in any meaningful numbers during the first quarter of 2013, leading to more disappointing financial results for HTC. According to HTC’s just released report, net income for the first quarter was NT$85 million ($2.84 million USD), a mere pittance compared to the NT$10.9 billion ($363 million USD) for the same period a year earlier.

In addition to yet another disappointing quarter, HTC also missed analysts’ revenue forecasts. HTC was expected to post net income of NT$467.5 million on first quarter revenue of NT$50-$60 billion. Instead, revenues were only NT$42.8 billion. The delay of the HTC One is expected to reverberate throughout 2013 for HTC. Despite opening against the Samsung Galaxy S 4, analyst Dennis Chan with Yuanta Securities thinks HTC will experience a rebound in the second quarter. However, that will be short-lived as it will “be very difficult to push on the mid- and low-end phones when HTC launches them in Q3-Q4.” Daiwa analyst Birdy Lu is also skeptical that the recently announced partnership with Facebook will be of much help because Facebook Home will only be sought by “Facebook addicts, and the distribution channel for HTC First is very limited.”

source: Reuters

Come comment on this article: HTC profits continue in wrong direction in record-setting fashion

An array of enemies, from professors to Google to the Supreme Court, are dragging the U.S. towards copyright nihilism that resembles Russia — at least this seems to be the view of Authors Guild President, Scott Turow, whose latest screed entitled “The Slow Death of the American Author” claims the country is betraying its writers.

Turow’s piece, which appeared in this weekend’s New York Times, could have been a rallying cry to support American literature. Instead, it amounts to a hysterical rant full of slipshod reasoning that shows again the Guild’s propensity for tactical errors and alienating potential allies.

The central conceit of the piece is the U.S. Constitution’s intellectual property clause, which permits Congress to grant limited monopolies to “promote the Progress of Science and Useful Arts.” Turow, despite being a lawyer, miscasts the clause to suggest it awards a constitutional right to authors and to say that the current copyright system betrays the founders. This is misleading twice over.

First, the grant of copyright is discretionary — as with many of the other items listed in Article I, Section 8, copyright is a power (like declaring war or borrowing money) that Congress can choose to exercise when it sees fit. The clause does not, as Turow writes, “instruct” Congress to protect authors’ rights.

The second problem with the constitutional conceit is that Turow and others would likely have been appalled by the Founders’ ideas of about copyright conception. This was an age when Alexander Hamilton opted for piracy as an industrial strategy, and authors’ rights were precarious at best. Indeed, foreign writers received none at all (ask Charles Dickens what he thought of the Founders’ copyright law).

In lamenting the attenuated state of U.S. copyright law, Turow also fails to mention that protection for authors has been expanded from its original 28-year term to the life of the author plus 70 years. Congress and the courts, in other words, have signed off on a scheme that locks up titles like Presumed Innocent until the year 2200 or beyond — is this not enough copyright for you, Mr. Turow?

It is these absurd terms — plus harsh penalties of up to $150,000 per infringement — that have helped to make copyright such a mess in the digital age. In an era when the internet grants every writer a printing press and a distribution system, it seems absurd to hand out century-long copyright terms.

Instead of discussing how copyright can work in digital times, Turow instead lashes out at academics and librarians who are trying to find a way to distribute neglected books and locked-up research to broader audiences through efforts like the Hathi Trust. In my experience, these people respect copyright — they just don’t like the way that some abuse it — and their goal is expanding access to knowledge. Librarians at Duke are among those who are most forcefully challenging the current state of copyright; you can decide for yourself here if they are selling out authors.

In addition to a potshot at the Supreme Court, Turow also trots out the usual canard that sites like Google and Yahoo are complicit in book piracy with “paid ads decorating the margins of [their] pages.” While book piracy is indeed a problem, Turow’s suggestion that search engines are engaged in deliberate criminal behavior is far-fetched; these are mature companies with big and legitimate customers that have scant need or interest to pander to pirates. (While Google has landed in very hot water in the past over ads for illegal pharmacies, it now says it vies to curtail the bad advertising actors.)

In short, what Turow has done is to raise an important issue — how to devise an economic means to support modern literary culture — and then alienate nearly every potential ally, not to mention distorting the picture to his own ends. If Turow and the Authors Guild are really on the side of writers, they should toss the specious and acerbic arguments and work instead to build a coalition of advocates for a fair and workable copyright regime.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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Tragedy struck in Denver, North Carolina this weekend, as two children died in an accident at a construction site.

According to a report from Charlotte ABC affiliate WBTV, two children were playing in a dirt pit when a dirt wall collapsed on them. James Caldwell, age 7, and Chloe Arwood, age 6, were buried beneath thousands of pounds of dirt in the incident.

Caldwell’s father, who was working at the construction site, called police, who began efforts to dig the children out of the 24-feet deep pit. The search for the children lasted through the night, with around 75 rescue workers digging non-stop. The children’s bodies were located early Monday morning.

Neighbors have told WBTV that the children were cousins. The basement for a house was being dug out at the construction site at the time of the event.

Mildly funny conspiracy theory alert: This is not confirmed. I haven’t talked to anyone inside Facebook with knowledge on this topic. This is simply something that I observed, and I’m pretty sure I’m on to something.

OK, so you probably heard about Facebook’s big event last Thursday where they unveiled Facebook Home, their Android takeover “app family” that basically turns any phone that installs it into a Facebook Phone. So, during that event, CEO Mark Zuckerberg introduced an ad for the feature called “Airplane.” In that ad, we noticed that the background music sounded quite similar to an Eminem song. Specifically, “Under the Influence” off of The Marshall Mathers LP.

Coincidence? Probably.

But the plot thickens.

A few days after the event, Facebook finally released the “Airplane” ad on their official YouTube channel. It’s the same ad that we saw during the event – expect for one small detail. The background song has, without a doubt, been altered. The melody is similar, but not the same.

So…did Facebook have to change up their ad because it reminded people of a decade-old catchy but obscene Eminem song?

Here are exhibits A,B, and C.

The original ad starts at about 28:05 in the video below:

And here’s the Eminem song that the first version of the ad sounds like. NSFW lyrics, obviously:

And finally, here’s the version of the ad that Facebook released this weekend. The song in the background sounds similar, but has been changed around significantly.

Remember the lyrics to that Eminem song:

“You can suck my dick if you don’t like my shit. ‘Cause I was high when I wrote this so suck my dick.”

Maybe that was Facebook’s subtle way of letting us all know that they welcomed the criticism.

Joking aside, it’s not impossible that someone made the last-minute song change because the original song sounded exactly like that Eminem song. Whether it was intentionally designed to mimic that song, or it was just an odd coincidence, someone could have pointed out the resemblance and that prompted the change.

Maybe my brain is just spinning uncontrollably. It’s a Monday afternoon and I didn’t get a lot of sleep over the weekend. But damn if it’s not funny to think about. Especially considering Mark Zuckerberg’s recently unearthed penchant for Eminem jokes.

Incomedia has released WebSite X5 Free v10.0, a major new version of its beginner-friendly web building tool for Windows. The app, which is also available in a number of paid-for versions, now boasts an integrated webserver for faster site previews, overhauled template gallery and HTML5 image galleries.

Changes to the program’s interface include better file management, whereby all files linked to a project are automatically copied so the originals are left untouched. Aside from the new integrated web server, WebSite X5 10 also replaces the default IE engine for browser previews with Chrome’s Chromium engine.

New visual controls are designed to make the program more intuitive and quicker to use and the app is now loaded dynamically, ensuring its resource demands are cut as well as loading more quickly.

The Template Gallery has been overhauled to make it easier to browse, and users can now edit default templates as well as more easily insert custom code into pages thanks in part to syntax highlighting in the program editor.

WebSite X5 also improves its structural map creation tools by allowing the home page to be treated like all other pages on the website, allowing users to search special pages and adding new methods for selecting pages on the map.

In terms of content creation, Flash-based galleries have also been dropped in favour of native HTML5 galleries, while movement and zoom effects along with image protection are handled by JavaScript rather than Flash to enhance compatibility with touchscreens. HTML5 is also implemented for video insertion and management, allowing WebSite X5 to claim full compatibility with all mobile devices. New objects include Social Network and Map, plus Guestbook, the latter of which isn’t available in the free version. The update is rounded off with improved project export and preview options.

The top-of-the-line Evolution version of WebSite X5, which costs €69.99 (around $92) also boasts several new business-friendly features: Advertising Message component for inserting ads into websites, Data Management section for the collection and collation of data submitted to user websites, and improved ecommerce optimisation (including Rich Snippets).

WebSite X5 Free v10.0 is available as a freeware download for PCs running Windows XP SP3 or later. More fully featured versions of the program are also available, with prices starting from €19.99 (around $26) for WebSite X5 Home 10.

Photo Credit:  YuanDen/Shutterstock

There’s been plenty of bad news for heavily indebted Greece in the past three years – the banking crisis in neighbouring Cyprus being the latest of the country’s woes – but not all the news is gloomy.

MSCI’s Greece index was one of the developed world’s best performers this year, according to the index compiler’s quarterly survey, giving returns of 14.02 percent.

Morgan Stanley is one bank to have grown more enthusiastic about the troubled euro zone peripheral economy.

In a note out today, its analysts say:

We are more constructive on Greece than consensus expectations. A recovery hasn’t started yet, but soft data are becoming less bad, as the shocks that hit the Greek economy – including euro exit worries – are starting to dissipate, and bank deposit flows now look fully stabilised.

Morgan Stanley says Greece is likely to show some moderate growth in early 2014, after shrinking 4 percent this year. The country has also beaten its fiscal targets in the first couple of months of 2013, and is likely to maintain a budget surplus, the bank says. Price competitiveness has improved due to large wage cuts and labour market reforms, it adds:

By the end of this year, the competitiveness loss experienced since 2001 – when Greece joined the euro zone – will have been recouped entirely, judging by current trends. And from that point onwards, competitiveness levels are likely to improve further.

Greece has held onto its place in the euro zone but that didn’t stop Russell Indexes from downgrading the country’s stock market to emerging market status last month, citing rising risks and falling liquidity, and MSCI could follow suit. Yet this may attract more risk-hungry emerging market investors. 

Frontier markets broker Exotix has extended its reach to Greece and Cyprus, and was also relatively sanguine today.

Exotix economist Gabriel Sterne said in a note that the Cyprus bail-out with its hit for bank depositors will have a negative long-term impact on risk aversion towards countries like Greece, but the impact will be “not a marked one”.

 

 

No… there’s no need to pinch yourselves because it’s true— Samsung has taken the wraps off of yet another addition to its Galaxy family. This new toy— called the Galaxy Win— is a lower-end mid-range device that comes with a 4.7-inch WVGA LCD TFT display with a 800 x 480 resolution, a 1.2GHz quad-core CPU inside, 1GB of RAM, a 5MP camera, a 2,000mAh battery and Android 4.1. Additionally, there’s no LTE on-board, but at least there’s HSPA+ support and full dual-SIM capabilities.

No word yet on when the device will hit store shelves or which carriers will feature the device just yet, but expect Sammy to give the Galaxy Win’s cost and availability sooner than later.

source: Samsung Tomorrow

Come comment on this article: Samsung announces the Galaxy Win smartphone featuring quad-core processor, dual-SIM capabilities and a whole lotta Jelly Bean

The global IT infrastructure is evolving beyond centralized data centers and into a distributed system of globally connected points. With more users, more devices, and a lot more data – the data center has become an integral part of any organization. US-based firms are now trying to bring data closer to the user to help deliver better end-user performance.

As cloud computing and IT consumerization continue to push technology forward, organizations will need to seek out new places to house their data centers. The city of Östersund, Sweden wants to be one of those new data center destinations, and is outlining the merits of its location for medium to web-scale data centers.

The site at Torvalla Industrial Park, located just outside the City Centre, is prepared for construction and is ”shovel ready”. The Östersund site offer includes:

• Location in the heart of the Power region
• National electricity price zone 2 – among the lowest price in Europe
• Reduced energy tax, 34 % lower than South Sweden
• Extremely stable grid, no interruptions last 30 years
• Redundant electricity supply connected to the national grid

Download this white paper on the new Östersund site to learn about an advanced location capable of delivering a powerfully redundant infrastructure. In designing a robust data center, there are many considerations that fall into place. In this white paper, all of those concerns are addressed and expectations are taken to the next level.

With the perfect climate, optimal cooling capabilities, and the ability to deliver a packet in 16ms or less to St. Petersburg – the Östersund site creates the optimal opportunity for any organization to distribute their infrastructure. The focus around data delivery and cloud components will only continue to evolve. With that evolution, organizations will need to find new places to locate their data centers; to ensure the consistent availability of information for the end-user.

With smartphones, as with any category of consumer electronics, we have no choice but to accept compromises. This has been the case throughout the history of cell phones and it continues to hold true even with best handsets on the market today. Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone 5 features a class-leading design with fast, smooth software, but it has a comparatively small display and lacks some of the great new functionality we’ve seen introduced on other platforms in recent years. The Samsung (005930) Galaxy S III is a sleek handset with a stunning screen and a great feature set, but it feels like a cheap toy, as does its successor. Nokia’s (NOK) Lumia 920 packs plenty of punch in a sleek package, but it’s thick and heavy, and it is missing a boatload of top apps. It’s inevitable — some level of compromise is inherent in all smartphones.

Continue reading…

My job description does not include managing email flow. Yours probably doesn’t, either. But it’s increasingly a big part of the work we do. In fact, in a single week last fall, I received 511 emails and sent 284. Almost 160 emails a day is ridiculous. Even if I was efficient and processed each email in 30 seconds, it would still take almost an hour and a half.

That same week, I further analyzed the activity in my inbox: 235 of my inbound emails were from people within the company, close to 46%. Colleagues copied me on 172 emails — the FYI culture that digitally drowns most executives. Another 47 emails had documents for my review.

These numbers were personally daunting, but I needed a more holistic view. By asking for the same information from others in the company, I found that my volume was slightly above average, but some of our senior executives were receiving close to 550 emails and sending almost 800 in a week. With an average of 32 words per email — about two sentences — many were likely superfluous update emails.

Anecdotally this clearly affected our company’s efficiency, but we had all the data points to calculate the bottom-line financial impact. By calculating average typing speed, reading speed, response rate, volume of email, average salary, and total employees, we were looking at a seven-figure price tag to quantify our email pollution. A “free and frictionless” method of communication had soft costs equivalent to procuring a small company Learjet. Each individual email ate up 95 cents of labor costs.

Upon further analysis, we learned that all of the departments had approximately the same volume of email, except for one. The outlier had only one-third of the typical email volume. Not only that, but each message had an average of 140 words, or roughly three paragraphs — one-third of the emails and each four times longer. Why?

I have spent time at a startup, a large consulting firm, a small PR firm, and the White House. During the arc of my career, the amount of email noise was often inversely correlated with the availability of alternate communication channels, as well as an organization’s relative digital literacy. I’ve also found that an open office plan decreased overuse of email, since removing the physical barriers to communication dramatically lowers email reliance.

These traits were all present in our outlier group. They had an open and egalitarian office, with no individual offices. Every screen had an array of windows open — Skype, GChat, Campfire, Dropbox, Yammer, and Google Docs — the right technology for the right situation. And, the team was staffed with digitally savvy employees, most of whom have lived half of their lives plugged into the Internet.

This is what a digital office should be. It is the paradigm I want to see ingrained in our entire company’s DNA. Email is the killer app of a generation… to a fault. For many employees it likely was their entrée into a digitally networked world, and has devolved over the last decade into a bloated and messy Franken-system. Mobile and frictionless, with no perceived cost, everything goes through email. The quick lunch invite, the short status update, the confirmation of receipt, the FYI email copying seven others, the surreptitious blind copy, and the list goes on. Our bad behavior has been compounding annually with very little hindrance.

The good news is that tools exist to fix this mess — collaboration software, social communities, instant messenger, telepresence, all powered by the omnipresent cloud. A few months ago, we moved the entire company to Google Apps, improving mobility and collaboration. Immediately, there was a massive shift in communication culture. One employee summed it up best when she commented that a “collaboration bomb exploded” in the office. Walking around the office now, you can see everyone using instant messenger to communicate. There’s no need to email documents with collaborative editing in Google Docs. Early results are anecdotal, but initial data shows that it has been successful at decreasing our email abuse and increasing collaboration. My own email use has gone down by about 15%.

To me, email is the most abused method of communication in every office environment. And the widespread perception that it has no incremental cost is chronically damaging workplace efficiency. The challenge we are facing isn’t an aversion to technology, but change. There is an entrenched level of comfort with email, making it habitual and a communications crutch. We have to take a holistic view and see email as one of many channels for collaboration. Adopt a breadth of tools to connect people, teach them the appropriate use of each and encourage smarter use of the right technology.

Google has launched an update (1.3.0) for its Google Drive iPhone app. It now includes the ability to edit documents and spreadsheets in landscape.

In addition to that, the app now loads faster and has quicker editing support, according to Google. The update also comes with some minor bug fixes.

The app is compatible with iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad, and requires iOS 5.0 or later. It’s optimized for iPhone 5.

Last week, Google launched Quickoffice for iPhone (as well as Android) to complement an iPad app launched back in December. Edits can be made to files using Quickoffice, and those files can be saved back to Google Drive.

[via 9to5google]

Last week, Facebook unveiled Facebook Home, the company’s Android takeover “app family” that basically turns any phone that installs it into a Facebook Phone. Home turns your Android homescreen into a Facebook experience, with a scrolling news feed, integrated Facebook messaging, and more.

Shortly after the big reveal, Facebook released an ad for Home. Now, they’ve finally released the other ad – the one that Zuckerberg introduced during the event. The ad, called “Airplane,” attempts to impart the message that having Facebook Home integrates the experience of Facebook into every little aspect of your life. But it’s a little strange. Check it out:

Kind of odd, huh?

Facebook Home will become available on April 12th.