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Microsoft continues the trend of expanding the interoperability options of its flagship unified communications product, Lync Server 2013 — federation with Skype arrives in June.

Microsoft Lync Server 2013 is an already impressive offering with instant messaging, presence, enterprise telephony, conferencing and collaboration features out of the box. The latest version of the Lync client features even tighter integration with Microsoft Office, as well as a robust mobile version for the three major platforms. Lync Server 2013 is also being touted as an enterprise ready PBX replacement with major improvements around high availability and disaster recovery options. Other highlights include support for a hybrid voice topology that integrates with Lync online, and support for virtualizing all workloads including voice. The product continues to make impressive inroads with enterprise customers, already adopted by 70 percent of the Fortune 500.

Lync Server federates today with the major public IM providers such as MSN, Yahoo and AOL Instant Messenger, as well as XMPP based services like Google Talk. The genius in adding federation support for Skype is how this will significantly change the way many see the product as a solution for bridging business and consumer communications. Imagine using Lync Server in an enterprise setting to connect with customers around the globe that use Skype across a multitude of devices, including the console in a growing number of living rooms — Xbox.

Another focal point for many is that the Lync 2013 mobile client supports audio and video calling on both a mobile data and wireless network connection. Skype federation will initially support audio calls and instant messaging, but the addition of video support shouldn’t be far behind, allowing many to communicate from their mobile clients with Skype users in a new way. By enabling seamless communications from business to consumer products, Microsoft sheds some light on the plans it has for Skype.

Microsoft’s acquisition of Skype was recognized by many as a major investment in the transformation taking place in the telecommunications space. Skype is basically a telecommunications company — it has always offered PSTN calling services at a cost. Extending those capabilities to the Lync online offering is an obvious next step. While 90 percent of Lync implementations are on premise today, this could open up a lot of possibilities for the small and medium business market.

Skype federation is founded in what Microsoft terms as a B2X strategy. At a basic level, this places the emphasis on human interaction and enabling fluid communications from business to consumer, and vice versa, rather than communications as disparate technology silos focused on a single task. Simply put, unified communications is becoming truly unified.

I am positive that businesses interested in harvesting the productivity benefits and cost savings of Microsoft unified communications will be looking at the ways they can leverage this latest milestone in Lync Server, and will be anxiously waiting for more from Microsoft on what might come next.

Photo Credit: Sergey150770/Shutterstock

Martin Barron is lead architect, Microsoft Unified Communications at En Pointe Technologies, which holds a Gold Communications Competency in the Microsoft Partner Network. For more information, follow @EnPointTech on Twitter or visit the company on LinkedIN and Facebook.

Following Juniper Networks’ acquisition of software-defined networking (SDN) startup Contrail, the company’s new JunosV Contrail controller for software-defined networking is now being deployed in beta tests with AT&T, the China Mobile Research Institute and other enterprises and service providers. The controller will become broadly available in the second half of the year.

Juniper says its Contrail software will be widely adoptable across devices from many vendors because it supports common protocols such as BGP and XMPP, although not OpenFlow. The controller “doesn’t have a dependency on a particular protocol like OpenFlow,” said Brad Brooks, vice president of business development at Juniper. So network admins can run the software on much of their existing Juniper or Cisco gear. Still, the architecture of the Contrail software is flexible and could support OpenFlow in the future, said Jennifer Lin, Juniper’s senior director of product management (pictured).

As it prepares to sell the controller as part of a new software-licensing model for the company emphasizing the ability to pay for it independent of hardware, Juniper is following through on a long-term strategic shift. The strategy could help Juniper stay relevant with software that can work with current and forthcoming hardware, preventing commoditization while enabling centralized configuration and programmability and applications higher up the stack.

Those objectives are increasingly important as data centers become more complex and fluid with virtualization, multitenancy and rapid scale-out. Juniper wants to run networks that allow those things to happen easily — and stay in the hardware business, too.

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Sunstone Components Group has signed a letter of intent with Pancon Corp. to sell substantially all of the company’s assets. Sunstone said it has consented to involuntary Chapter 11 petitions filed against it in April. Sunstone expects to complete the sale to Pancon and emerge from Chapter 11 in about 75 day. Temecula, Calif.-based Sunstone provides precision metal stamping and insert injection moldings. Pancon is backed by Milestone Partners.

PRESS RELEASE
Sunstone Components Group, a leading provider of precision metal stamping and insert injection moldings, today announced that it has signed a Letter of Intent (LOI) with Pancon Corporation to sell substantially all of the Company’s assets.

Headquartered in Stoughton, Mass., Pancon Corporation manufactures custom and standard connectors that are used in power and signal applications and multilayer polymer capacitors across varied industries, including automotive. Pancon also has the strong backing of its private equity owner, Milestone Partners.
To facilitate the sale and establish a process for the receipt of higher and better bids, the Company has consented to the involuntary Chapter 11 petitions filed against it on April 5, 2013. Sunstone Components Group is expected to complete the sale and emerge from Chapter 11 in approximately 75 days.
“This transaction is a positive development for our company, our customers and our employees,” said Sunstone Components Group Chairman and CEO Brad Adams. “We are pleased to have attracted a strong strategic partner for our business with the resources necessary to secure a strong future for our company.
“After careful consideration, we have decided to consent to the involuntary Chapter 11 proceedings. The Chapter 11 process is essentially a tool that will allow us to complete the sale swiftly and ensure a smooth transition.”
The Company also announced that in addition to having continuing availability under its existing facility with Comerica, it has obtained commitments for approximately $220,000 in debtor-in-possession (DIP) financing, pending Court approval. As a result, the Company has the availability of approximately $2.2 million to meet its ongoing obligations to customers, suppliers and employees during the brief Chapter 11 and sale process.
Customers should see no changes while the company completes the sale of its business. Sunstone Components Group does not intend to reduce its workforce as a result of the filing, and employees will continue to work their usual schedules and receive normal compensation and benefits, pending routine Court approval.
“Throughout the sale process and beyond, our daily operations will continue without interruption,” Adams said. “We will continue to manufacture and deliver the high-quality, mission-critical components our customers require. It will be business as usual while we complete the sale.”
On May 2, 2013, the Company consented to involuntary Chapter 11 petitions filed against it in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Central District of California in Riverside. The Company is represented by Landau Gottfried & Berger LLP in its Chapter 11 proceedings.
About Sunstone Components Group
Sunstone Components Group was originally established in 1981 as Solid State Stamping (S3). In April 2008, Solid State Stamping acquired Molding International and Engineering (MIE), an insert molder based in Temecula, Calif. At that time, Solid State Stamping changed its name to Sunstone Components Group, and MIE along with S3 began operating side by side. Today the Company provides precision metal stamping and insert molding and is a leading manufacturer of complex and mission critical components.

The post Sunstone Signs Letter of Intent to Sell to Pancon appeared first on peHUB.

Private equity firms TPG Capital and Warburg Pincus LLC are exploring a sale or a public offering of Neiman Marcus Group Inc, according to a Bloomberg News report late on Sunday.

(Reuters) – Private equity firms TPG Capital and Warburg Pincus LLC are exploring a sale or a public offering of Neiman Marcus Group Inc, according to a Bloomberg News report late on Sunday.

The private equity firms, which bought the Dallas-based retailer in 2005 for $5.1 billion, have interviewed banks and are about to hire Credit Suisse Group AG (MLPN.P) to run the dual track process, according to the report, which cited two people familiar with the situation.

A Credit Suisse spokesman declined to comment. E-mails to Warburg, Neiman Marcus and TPG were not immediately returned.

TPG and Warburg are in the early stages of exploring their options and if they do not find a buyer or demand is weak for an IPO, they may decide to pursue a dividend recapitalization instead, according to the report.

The post Private Equity Firms Eye Neiman Marcus Exit: Bloomberg appeared first on peHUB.

CCMP Capital Advisors has agreed to buy Pure Gym. Financial terms weren’t announced. Pure Gym is an affordable gym operator in the U.K. Canaccord Genuity provided financial advice to Pure Gym.

PRESS RELEASE

CCMP Capital Advisors, LLC (“CCMP”) today announced that it has signed a definitive agreement under which affiliates of CCMP will acquire Pure Gym Ltd (“Pure Gym”), the leading affordable gym operator in the United Kingdom. The agreement, in partnership with current management, will support Pure Gym’s aggressive expansion drive across the UK. Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

Founded in 2009, Pure Gym is the market leader in the rapidly growing low-cost segment of the £4 billion UK gym

market. With 45 locations and more than 240,000 members, Pure Gym offers a highly compelling customer value

proposition, with the latest in high quality facilities and equipment, low upfront and monthly membership rates,

and no fixed contract. CCMP will support Pure Gym’s rollout strategy which will include the opening of an

additional 40 new gyms over the next 12 months.

Thomas Walker, Managing Director at CCMP’s London affiliate, said: “We’re delighted to be partnering with

management to accelerate the growth of Pure Gym, an outstanding business with tremendous customer appeal.

Under CEO Peter Roberts’ vision and guidance, the Company has secured its leadership position by offering a

unique combination of a premier gym experience at an affordable price and on flexible terms. Given Pure Gym’s

relatively low market penetration and the widespread appeal of a high-quality low-cost fitness option, we believe

there is a significant opportunity to expand Pure Gym aggressively across the UK. We look forward to bringing our

successful experience in growing consumer-facing businesses to bear as Pure Gym enters its next phase of

development.”

Peter Roberts, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Pure Gym, commented: “I speak for the entire management

team when I say that we are thrilled to partner with CCMP as we work to seize the exciting opportunities ahead for

Pure Gym. With their support and experience in building successful consumer businesses, Pure Gym will be well-

positioned to execute on our targeted expansion plans, while continuing to provide an outstanding experience for

our members.”

The transaction is expected to close in the second quarter of 2013, subject to customary closing conditions.

Canaccord Genuity acted as financial advisor and Travers Smith acted as legal advisor to Pure Gym, and Liberty

Corporate Finance acted as advisor to Pure Gym’s management. Kirkland & Ellis acted as legal advisors to CCMP.

About Pure Gym

Pure Gym was established in 2008 by leisure entrepreneur Peter Roberts, who has been a key driving force behind the growth of the affordable fitness sector, with the popularity of low cost gyms continuing to rise. The Company is known for not burdening its members with contractual commitments as it offers membership from £10.99 a month with no fixed contract, and members have access to gyms 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

CCMP Capital Advisors, LLC (“CCMP”) specializes in upper-middle market buyouts and growth equity investments of $100 million to $500 million in the U.S. and Europe. CCMP focuses on generating alpha through the operational transformation of its portfolio companies. With offices in New York, Houston and London, CCMP invests in four primary industries: Consumer, Industrial, Energy and Healthcare. Selected investments under management include: ARAMARK Corporation, Chaparral Energy, Edwards Group, Generac Power Systems, Infogroup, Jetro Holdings, LHP Hospital Group, Medpace, Milacron, Newark Energy and Ollie’s Bargain Outlet.

The post CCMP Inks Buy of Pure Gym appeared first on peHUB.

I subscribe to Office 365, as it is a great value — for just under $10 per month I can install Office 2013 on up to five computers and even gain an additional 20GB of SkyDrive storage, taking my total to 45GB, thanks to being grandfathered into the 25GB free plan. The subscription even gives me a bit of free Skype that, perhaps, one day I shall actually use. All of this sounds great — what more could you want? Well, how about a payment system that has customers in mind?

Over this past weekend, I had occasion to meet with the dysfunctional payment system that Microsoft has implemented. While I use many of the company’s products, Office 365 Home Premium is my first occasion making monthly payments to the software giant. I am used to doing so with other services, such as Amazon.

It all began a month ago when some made a fraudulent purchase with my credit card. The company immediately cancelled the account and issued a new one. I began the arduous task of finding which services regularly billed to the card and making the changes. One that I missed was Microsoft, which alerted to this via an email.

We are contacting you because we have been unable to charge your credit card for your Office 365 Home Premium service(s) being billed to you through Microsoft Online Services. The following credit card is the current payment method on your billing account.

I immediately went to the account and added the new number — I could find no way to removed the old, but I assumed the new would override that as the new default. Not so fast. Another similar email arrived the following day.

Unlike Amazon, which makes this process simple with options for “set as default” and “delete”, Microsoft has no such capacity on its site. Despite my best efforts to amend this, I ended up in a chat room with a company representative. To Microsoft’s credit, the service has 24-7 live chat and a rep was with me within a minute of logging in. She was able to fix my problem, but unable to explain any way that I could have done so myself.

I pointed out the problem. I alerted her to the fact that Amazon, among others, makes this easy, but she could only tell me that my voice would be heard.

So, here is an open plea to Microsoft — many of us love your new Office model and do not mind paying the recurring charge for the service. However, you must make this simpler for the user. When a former IT worker cannot figure it out then how on earth do you expect the average customer to cope?

Photo Credit: Aleksandar Mijatovic/Shutterstock

Barnes and Noble surprised people earlier this week when they brought Google Play access to their Nook HD and HD+ tablets, allowing users to download thousands of apps they never had access to before. As if that wasn’t enough to convince potential buyers, Barnes and Noble has lowered the price of all Nook HD and HD+ models for this week only. The sale will be running from today until Next Sunday, May 12th (Mother’s Day) and probably won’t happen again for a while.

The HD model which normally sells for $199 is now on sale for $149, a savings of $50. This 7″ tablet has 8GB of memory, a 1440 x 900 resolution display, 1GB of RAM and a 1.3GHz TI OMAP 4470 processor. The HD+ model is on sale for $179, down $90 from its original $269 price tag. This model has a 10-inch 1920 x 1280 resolution display, 16 GB of memory, 1GB of RAM and a 1.5GHz TI OMAP 4470 processor.

Both tablets are loaded with Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich and ship for free from the source link. If you aren’t into online shopping head into any Barnes and Noble store for the same deal.

Source: Barnes and Noble

Come comment on this article: Barnes and Noble Nook HD and HD+ tablets on sale this week only

The Samsung Galaxy S III went essentially unchallenged last year as the top Android phone on the market— but this year, the Galaxy S 4 certainly has some competition.  Consumers have taken quite an interest in the aluminum-clad HTC One, but how is it stacking up against Galaxy S 4 sales? While the HTC One has been selling very well (which is good news for the Taiwanese based manufacturer), the Galaxy S 4 has somehow been selling even better, despite a two week head-start for the HTC One and the lack of a limited distribution that the Galaxy S 4 had, allowing the Galaxy S 4 still stands on top.  

One argument may be that the nation’s largest carrier, Verizon, isn’t carrying the HTC One— however, Big Red isn’t going to be releasing the Galaxy S 4 until the end of the month.  In terms of returns, Sprint employees have stated that more HTC Ones have been returned than Galaxy S 4 models due to blown out speakers and dead pixels.  This could be an issue, but it has yet to become a major problem for the phone’s sales.

Samsung continues its highly successful assault over the television and radio airwaves, releasing its newest ad last week.  We’ll soon see how well the HTC One ends up doing, but until then, what you guys think about HTC’s flagship device?  Which phone do you prefer?  Let us know in the comments!

Source: Examiner

Come comment on this article: Sales on HTC One great, but not on par with Samsung Galaxy S 4

MailChimp Chief Data Scientist John Foreman likes to talk about orange juice. On the surface, it’s a strange way to start a discussion about data, but it all starts to make sense when you peel back the rind. It’s a way of thinking that’s letting MailChimp — which sends about 35 billion emails a year on behalf of roughly 3 million users — transform itself into a data-driven business 12 years into its existence.

When you’re in Atlanta, as I was during a recent trip, the obvious place to start talking about orange juice and data is with Coca-Cola. Foreman can tell you all about how the beverage giant — whose headquarters tower over the city just a just a mile away from MailChimp’s office — uses advanced algorithms and giant vats of different juices to ensure the proper flavor of its Simply Orange line of orange juice. However, it’s something else Coca-Cola is doing that inspired the way Foreman thinks about data and that’s helping MailChimp re-imagine what it means to engage with fans, readers and customer through their inboxes.

Anyone familiar with how large web companies came to pioneer the practice of what we now call “big data” should appreciate the analogy. Coca-Cola, which also owns Minute Maid, produces a lot of excess pulp when it makes orange juice. For decades, presumably, it had just been throwing that pulp away, but in 2006 it decided to make use of it by launching a new product called Minute Maid Pulpy. Sold primarily in Asian countries, Pulpy has become a billion-dollar business for Coca-Cola.

Once MailChimp is done with its primary business of sending emails, it has a lot of pulp of its own in the form of data. And rather than just ignoring it or writing up some cute blog posts (which he also does), Foreman and his bosses want to turn that data into revenue.

First things first: Making better orange juice

Neil Bainton

Actually, though, MailChimp first brought in Foreman in 2011 to help the company improve its core business of letting users build and send their emails. MailChimp’s culture was built around many things, COO Neil Bainton told me, but data wasn’t one of them. It had “various fits and starts” through the years trying to work data into its business model, and each step just added more complexity.

The challenges were technological as well as cultural, but Foreman had a plan, of which focus was a key aspect. Keeping a tight focus meant Foreman and his lone-developer sidekick could build what they needed to in a short timeframe. It also meant the company didn’t have to worry about some massive overnight transformation into a data-obsessed company like Google.

John Foreman

“[They] don’t need to be afraid the entire culture is gonna fall down if we bring in this weird math guy,” he joked.

Foreman’s first project — deploying artificial intelligence models that would automatically detect spammy email lists from MailChimp’s users – is actually critical to the way MailChimp operates, though. It was up and running in production within a year, after a technologically challenging effort of merging separate database instances for each customer into a single environment that would let MailChimp run complex analyses across its customer base.

It’s such an important project, Foreman explained, because internet service and email providers keep reputation scores on the IP addresses that send email through their systems. Because MailChimp serves as the email engine for its millions of users, sending too many messages that get flagged as spam and lower MailChimp’s reputation will have a negative impact on everyone. The company used to deal with spam manually, and only after recipients began complaining about the messages they received.

“It used to be before we had that AI model in place that everyone had a crappier experience,” Foreman said.

Say goodbye to those ’90s fans, Pearl Jam

Source: MailChimp

Now, however, MailChimp knows some of the telltale signs of spam for which it should be on the lookout. If too high a percentage of email addresses on a given list are also available via publicly available lists or those you can buy on sketchy corners of the internet, it’s probably spam. Too many old and far-more-likely-to-be-dead Earthlink or Compuserve addresses, or letters within one keystroke of each other as if someone just mashed the keyboard? Probably spam.

Thankfully, though, about 98 percent of the spam that MailChimp identifies is what Foreman calls “ignorant” — that is, people or companies that just don’t know the laws or best practices around sending emails. But ignorance doesn’t mean MailChimp relaxes its rules. Recently, it even flagged Pearl Jam for spammy practices because the band was trying to reconnect with old fans whose email addresses read like a who’s who list of 1990s email providers.

Having such a high percentage of ignorant spam actually has a positive effect on the company’s overall goal of monetizing its vast data repositories. Because the AI model automates what used to be a manual process, and because most innocent spammers will fall in line quickly once they’re notified (as opposed to nefarious spammers who constantly try to outsmart the system), MailChimp can pretty much set the model loose, forget about it and get to work on new efforts, Foreman said.

Now, about that pulp

Spam under control, MailChimp can focus its efforts on actually building new products with data, just like Coca-Cola did with that extra pulp. One of its first orders of business is figuring out how to help customers get to know better the people to whom they’re sending their newsletters.

With this in mind, the company built a service called Wavelength that shows customers other newsletters that are similar to theirs. But the system that powers Wavelength also stores pretty much every interaction that every email address in the company’s database has with the newsletters they’re sent. That means what emails they open and when they open them, what links they click and when they click them, and what other newsletters they’re subscribed to. MailChimp also has a feature called Ecommerce360 that lets customers track clicks right through to conversions (marketing speak for someone actually buying something).

The company has been playing around with this data to identify clusters of users based on their behaviors and their interests — some of which Foreman has detailed on the company’s blog — and now it wants to roll it out to customers via a product MailChimp is calling ChimpQuery. Built atop Google’s BigQuery analytics service, ChimpQuery will let customers start doing this type of clustering and segmentation on their own, while saving MailChimp the troubles of hosting that infrastructure itself. (You can play with a monstrous, interactive graph of the entire MailChimp subscriber list here.)

If you sell knitting supplies and you find out there’s a big cluster of people on your mailing list who also are interested in wedding planning and custom jewelry, there might be an opportunity to create your content with these interests in mind or even to partner with companies in those spaces.

A sample cluster of subscribers.

Another topic that has been on Foreman’s mind lately is what he calls “frequency elasticity of engagement.” He’s done research suggesting that blasting the heck out of your email list might actually have detrimental effects in the long term (regardless of how the Obama campaign successfully exploited this strategy) but noted that engagement also has a lot to do with content and a particular company’s given user list. MailChimp’s data could help customers figure out the ideal schedule for emailing their subscribers.

For example, Birchbox has really high engagement because people love the service and have to open their emails to find out what goodies they’re receiving. Emails from a company like Papa John’s, on the other hand, might sit in someone’s inbox essentially as spam until they want to order a pizza and go searching for a coupon. Everyone has to figure out what pace and engagement metrics work for them.

Reining expectations back in

However, now that management is fully sold on the power of data, Foreman sometimes finds himself managing expectations rather than just pitching his ideas. COO Bainton, for example, is adamant that MailChimp start aiding its publishing-industry customers by using techniques such as natural-language processing and semantic analysis to help them personalize emails based on readers stated and unstated interests (that is, what boxes they check when they sign up and what stuff they actually click on).

Foreman, well, he’s pretty sure that’s too big a challenge for MailChimp to tackle considering how many publishing customers it has. MailChimp would have to understand all those customers’ industries to some degree (open source tools tend to highlight technically but not situationally relevant relationships, he said, and don’t always understand things like sarcasm) and probably the different languages they publish in, as well. Rather than understand content, he’d rather focus personalization efforts around how users are connected.

The company also needs to balance its ambitions with what’s legally and socially acceptable. The creep factor might be more important than what’s legal when it comes to email marketing. MailChimp determines the legality of everything it does before rolling it out, Foreman explained, but in era of “post-modern spam” where legitimacy is in the eye of the recipient and where some people use their “spam” button as a proxy for unsubscribing, companies must be careful not to offend.

“The more we can tell you about that list without getting creepy is really useful,” Bainton said. However, he added, ”I think expectation is more important than law.”

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For those of you who purchased the Samsung Galaxy S 4 through T-Mobile, today is a good day to tinker. CyanogenMod founder Steve Kondik just released the first build of CyanogenMod 10.1 for the T-Mobile variant of Samsung’s excellent flagship device. Considering Kondik’s recent departure from Samsung, this is a relief to those who purchased the phone hoping to use it to its full potential. Additionally, Kondik also promises builds for all other variants of the S 4 very soon. While this is the first build for the S 4, Kondik says that it is stable enough to be a daily driver, so if you have an S 4 and you’re on T-Mobile hit the source to download this awesome ROM.

Source: Steve Kondik’s Google+

Come comment on this article: CyanogenMod 10.1 available for T-Mobile Galaxy S4 with other variants soon to come

Not long after unveiling their newest project Halo, the Paranoid Android team has released alpha builds featuring the new feature for a handful of devices. Owners of the Nexus 4, Nexus 7, Galaxy Nexus (GSM users only) and the Oppo Find 5 can all head to Paranoid Android’s Google+ page to download builds for their devices.

For those who haven’t followed the progress of this project, Halo is Paranoid Android’s solution to multi-tasking in Android. Inspired by Facebook’s recent Chat Heads feature, Halo places a small notification bubble on top of whatever application you are running. Tapping the Halo opens a small applet where you can respond accordingly. While this is in its earliest stages, the developers promise this is only the beginning. This is an alpha build  so if you are brave enough to try it, be warned that there will be bugs. Hit the break for a video of this feature in action.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Source: Paranoid Android’s Google+

Come comment on this article: Paranoid Android’s new Halo notification system hits testing stage with builds available for Nexus 4, Nexus 7, Galaxy Nexus (GSM), and Oppo Find 5

Over the past year-and-a-half while developing Handle, our entire company was in a race to zero. Inbox zero, to be precise. We set out to create a product that would allow us to leave work with zero emails in our inboxes and, so the thinking went, would lead to lives of zero stress (or at least until the next morning). We wanted to go home for dinner with friends and families and be fully present, in both body and mind. Wouldn’t that be amazing, transformative – invaluable, even?

Yes. So would alchemy, but neither exist. Inbox Zero, we discovered, is a mirage. My team and I learned a lot in the process about what contributes to real productivity gains. They informed our decisions about product design but they aren’t tied to any specific technology choice: We think these insights apply universally.

Inbox Zero: The myth

You could always open your email client, select all, hit delete and, in theory at least, experience a moment of peace. Inevitably though it would be followed by panic, because you know there were important things in that pile you just vaporized: all those opportunities, responsibilities, duties and interactions in your work and personal life now left unresolved.

The alternative, which most of us struggle with every day, is keeping up with an inbox in a uniform, disciplined way. Yes, you can take an opportunity out of your inbox or your brain and write it down (as David Allen suggests), but the real problem is that, so long as opportunities exist or work is in progress, your backlog of to-dos will always be greater than zero, no matter how you track them, define them, or how quickly you complete them. Your subconscious is always keenly aware of it. Even with delegation, you can pass a hot potato to someone else to move it forward, but it always comes back, often hotter the second time around.

Peace of mind

The first step in achieving peace of mind is facing — and accepting — the fact that we will never be “done.” Our perfect inboxes are fleeting. Our task lists will never be empty. The Twittersphere will keep fluttering. And that’s a good thing, believe it or not. If you admit and surrender, you can embrace the world as your oyster. Suddenly, you’ve entered a place of endless possibility for learning and doing.

How, then, does one find peace? Here are three things that we learned in our journey.

Know what you MUST do

Not what you should do, or want to do, or what someone else wants you to do, but what you MUST do to be able to live with yourself, according to your own goals and ambitions and higher purpose. That may involve keeping your job. It may not. It may involve helping a friend, or doing a stranger a favor. Each moment is a value judgment, and only yours to make.

In that moment, seek clarity. We’ve found through both empirical and anecdotal research that identifying MUSTs and organizing around them is the ultimate secret to most successes.

Make sure the list is complete.

We’ve learned that incompleteness is what hurts people’s productivity most. It’s about more than just missing a deadline, however. Not having MUSTs captured in a trusted system leads to difficulty focusing on tasks at hand. Our subconscious interrupts and forces a context switch.

So if there’s paper in folders, voicemails, texts, meeting notes, scribbles on stickies, etc. that represent a MUST, you MUST go find them. Granted, there will always be surprises, even some that you MUST deal with. But incompleteness is nothing more than human error – your error – and is completely avoidable.

Make a plan.

In our company book club, we came across an interesting explanation for the subconscious interruption called the Zeigarnik effect. The gist is that when an objective is incomplete and no plan is in place, the mind interrupts itself with intrusive thoughts until the situation is remedied.

MUSTs take blocks of time and heavy mental energy – they won’t fit into small gaps in between emails. So placing MUSTs in the context of time helps focus, and more importantly, makes sure those MUSTs actually get done. (But don’t go too far out; over-scheduling tasks has risks too. Commitments with ourselves are the easiest to break, after all.) The key seems to lie in these steps: scripting just today where visibility is best, leaving standing whitespace in your calendar most days, and having a complete accompanying list that gets consistent review and prioritization.

With your MUSTs done, booked, and queued up for review, your mental space is freed to focus on the payoff. More days can be good, even great. Temptations still strike during booked MUST windows and we, too, often succumb. It is a journey for us and for us all, but one we’re making progress on by the week.

Shawn is co-founder and CEO of Handle, a priority engine for making people more effective, and runner-up TC Disrupt NY 2013. He is also Managing Director at Menlo Ventures, where he led the first investment in Siri, and currently sits on the Boards of IMVU, PlayPhone, Roku, Telenav and YuMe. 

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Photo courtesy of  REATISTA/Shutterstock.com.

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We all know about shows like Top Gear, Fifth Gear and hell, even Fast N Loud. But there’s another automotive program that actually trumps every single one of them. It’s called Best Motoring and it’s featured only in Japan. The show pits super-cars against each other in no-holds-barred track battles that are truly epic. What you are about to see has been out for awhile, however once you hit the play button I think you’ll forget about that. Think Ferrari F40 vs Porsche GT2 vs Lamborghini Diablo vs GT3 RS vs Ferrari 355 vs Nissan GT-R vs Ferrari F50. Crazy right! Check it out after the jump.

Source: Youtube.com

Too many clouds chasing too little business?

There’s a paradox in the cloud vendor community. All the players agree there is tons of demand for cloud and cloud services — at least for their cloud and their cloud services. The future is bright, the upside enormous.  But when pressed, many also say that we’re due for lots of consolidation — that there really isn’t market demand for umpteen different cloud flavors and the vendors that sell them. In short demand is great for my cloud, but not nearly enough for all these other guys’ clouds.

Last week’s news that Xeround is shutting its doors sparked this talk anew. Xeround gave users of its free database service just over a week to vacate the premises and paying customers two weeks. There have been other examples of cloud services shutting down.

One cloud watcher who requested anonymity because he works with many of these services said many companies who “tried to do free have gotten their heads handed to them. And other cloud services companies are consolidating the number of cloud infrastructures they support because “API bloat has gotten horrific.”
So what goes on here? The gist is we are really early in the cloud business and there will be a ton of work. But is there enough work for 90 different OpenStack players plus CloudStack plus Eucalyptus along with Amazon? Or 50 cloud database providers or Platform-as-a-Service providers? Um, not so sure.

In an interview at the OpenStack Summit last month, OpenStack executive director Jonathan Bryce applied his own paradox when asked if he expected there to be more or fewer OpenStack players going forward. “The answer is both. Over time you’ll see a greater variety of vertically oriented flavors of OpenStack — versions built for highly secure, highly regulated workloads but you’ll also see a number of general-purpose versions that will solidify.” Solidify. Hmm.

At the summit, HP cloud master Saar Gillai said he expects consolidation. OpenStack is much more complex than Linux — it includes complicated networking and storage as well as compute aspects. Building and testing all that takes money and if a company cannot make money off its work, it won’t be in the business long.

Given all that would-be cloud deployers really need to assess the risks — and mitigate them going in, as Derrick Harris wrote Friday.

When is a cloud not a cloud?

Amazon, the dominant public cloud company, is sick of the hype around private clouds. All too often these private implementations do not offer the true benefits of a public cloud, at least according to Andrew Jassy, SVP of Amazon Web Services.

At Amazon’s Global Summit Series event in San Francisco last week,  Jassy slammed private cloud purveyors for selling what is not, in actuality, a cloud at all. Citing a survey by Forrester Research, just 24 percent of companies surveyed had self-service provisioning; 14 percent could charge back costs to their departments; and 27 percent had built resource automation, according to Nancy Gohring over at  ITWorld. 

Covering the same event, The Wall Street Journal quoted other Forrester numbers however. These hold that nearly one-third (31 percent) of companies in North America and Europe have deployed private clouds with another 17 percent planning go do so by next year. On the other hand, just 10 percent say they have adopted public cloud with another 7 percent saying they plan to do so.  No wonder AWS is so grumpy especially given the emphasis it’s put on winning over enterprise workloads that go beyond test-and-dev and that it will face more public cloud competition — from HP, from VMware, from Pivotal, from IBM( s ibm), going forward.

It was interesting that, at the same event, AWS trotted out Nokia to talk about moving its  analytics over to AWS’ RedShift, given Nokia’s tight relationship with Microsoft in the mobile phone arena. In mid-April Microsoft made its Azure IaaS, which competes with AWS, broadly available. One might think Microsoft would really, really want companies like Nokia to use Azure.

Oh, and by the way, last week Microsoft said its cloud business reaped $1 billion in sales over the past 12 months, a figure that raised many eyebrows. The cloud number includes Azure but also software deployed at sites run by partners — partners like Rackspace and Amazon. We live in a complicated world.

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• Cloud computing infrastructure: 2012 and beyond
• Infrastructure Q1: Cloud and big data woo enterprises
• Federated clouds: for when one cloud isn’t good enough

Sir Ken Robinson is not just an amazing orator — he is the most-viewed speaker on TED.com. His three talks have been viewed an astounding 21.5 million times, making him the sneezing baby panda of the TED ecosystem. Naturally, this made us curious: what talks does Robinson absolutely love?

In this new playlist, Robinson selects 10 talks about education that he finds both inspiring and insightful. His list, given in no particular order, contains talks from Alison Gopnik on what babies think, TED Prize winner Sugata Mitra on his vision of a School in the Cloud, and Shane Koyczan on the ways bullying sticks with us.

TED playlists are collections of talks around a topic, built to illuminate ideas in context. A new playlist is added every week. We hope you enjoy this installment.

This week’s GigaOM podcasts covered a wide range of topics, starting with the GigaOM Chrome Show. Chris Albrecht tells everyone how he really feels about Samsung’s low-cost Chromebook in addition to the Chrome OS software from Google.

On the Internet of Things podcast, Stacey Higginbotham chats with Austin Energy on how the company manages electricity price fluctuations with technology. And on the GigaOM Weekly Wrapup podcast, the focus is on potential iOS design changes from Apple: Should we say good-bye to realistic physical representations in software?

(Download the GigaOM Chrome Show)

(Download the GigaOM Internet of Things podcast)

(Download the GigaOM Weekly Wrapup podcast)

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• What Amazon’s new Kindle line means for Apple, Netflix and online media
• How consumer media will change in 2013
• Podcast: Mobile winners and losers in 2012 and what to expect in 2013

NASA certainly isn’t new to the task of taking images of the earth from space— however, this would be the first time that these images were taken using “PhoneSats,” a new, super-cheap, super-small type of satellite powered by Android smartphones.

Launched into orbit last month with the goal of showing that it is possible to create space-worthy hardware from consumer-grade devices, Alexander, Graham, and Bell (the names of the three satellite devices) returned blurry images before burning up in the atmosphere as planned on April 27th.  

Using their stock cameras, the three satellites, built from two HTC Nexus One smartphones and one Samsung Nexus S smartphone, snapped images and transmitted them back to the earth in separate pieces, as packets of data over the UHF radio band.

Surprisingly, the project only cost NASA $3,500 per satellite, including build and launch.  The next generation of the PhoneSats are expected to launch later this year, with added functionality and increased longevity.

Source: NASA

Come comment on this article: NASA receives images from Nexus PhoneSat satellites