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If I see one more article or blog post about how you should never be “critical” or “negative” when giving feedback to an employee or colleague (or, for that matter, your children), I think my head will explode. It’s incredibly frustrating. This kind of advice is surely well meant, and it certainly sounds good. After all, you probably don’t relish the thought of having to tell someone else what they are doing wrong — at minimum, it’s a little embarrassing for everyone involved.

But avoiding negative feedback is both wrong-headed and dangerous. Wrong-headed because, when delivered the right way, at the right time, criticism is in fact highly motivating. Dangerous because without awareness of the mistakes he or she is making, no one can possibly improve. Staying “positive” when doling out feedback will only get you so far.

Hang on, you say. Can’t negative feedback be discouraging? Demotivating?

That’s perfectly true.

And don’t people need encouragement to feel confident? Doesn’t that help them stay motivated?

In many cases, yes.

Confusing, isn’t it? Thankfully, brilliant new research by Stacey Finkelstein (Columbia University) and Ayelet Fishbach (University of Chicago) sheds light on the seemingly paradoxical nature of feedback, by making it clear why, when, and for whom negative feedback is appropriate.

It’s important to begin by understanding the function that positive and negative feedback serve. Positive feedback (e.g., Here’s what you did really well….) increases commitment to the work you do, by enhancing both your experience and your confidence. Negative feedback (e.g., Here’s where you went wrong….), on the other hand, is informative — it tells you where you need to spend your effort, and offers insight into how you might improve.

Given these two different functions, positive and negative feedback should be more effective (and more motivating) for different people at different times. For instance, when you don’t really know what you are doing, positive feedback helps you to stay optimistic and feel more at ease with the challenges you are facing — something novices tend to need. But when you are an expert, and you already more or less know what you are doing, it’s negative feedback that can help you do what it takes to get to the top of your game.

As Finkelstein and Fishbach show, novices and experts are indeed looking for, and motivated by, different kinds of information. In one of their studies, American students taking either beginner or advanced-level French classes were asked whether they would prefer an instructor who emphasized what they were doing right (focusing on their strengths) or what they were doing wrong (focusing on their mistakes and how to correct them). Beginners overwhelmingly preferred a cheerleading, strength-focused instructor. Advanced students, on the other hand, preferred a more critical instructor who would help them develop their weaker skills.

In a second study, the researchers looked at a very different behavior: engaging in environmentally friendly actions. Their “experts” were members of environmental organizations (e.g., Greenpeace), while their “novices” were non-members. Each participant in the study made a list of the actions they regulatory took that helped the environment — things like recycling, avoiding bottled water, and taking shorter showers. They were offered feedback from an environmental consultant on the effectiveness of their actions, and were given a choice: Would you prefer to know more about the actions you take that are effective, or about the actions you take that are not? Experts were much more likely to choose the negative feedback — about ineffective actions — than novices.

Taken together, these studies show that people who are experienced in a given domain — people who already have developed some knowledge and skills — don’t actually live in fear of negative feedback. If anything, they seek it out. Intuitively they realize that negative feedback offers the key to getting ahead, while positive feedback merely tells them what they already know.

But what about motivation? What kind of feedback makes you want to take action? When participants in the environmental study were randomly given either positive or negative feedback about their actions, and were then asked how much of their $25 study compensation they would like to donate to Greenpeace, the type of feedback they received had a dramatic effect on their motivation to give. When negative feedback was given, experts gave more on average to Greenpeace ($8.53) than novices ($1.24). But when positive feedback was given, novices ($8.31) gave far more than experts ($2.92).

Just to be clear, I’m not suggesting that you never tell the rookie about his mistakes, or that you never praise the seasoned professional for her outstanding work. And of course negative feedback should always be accompanied by good advice, and given with tact.

But I am suggesting that piling on praise is a more effective motivator for the rookie than the pro. And I’m saying, point blank, that you shouldn’t worry so much when it comes to pointing out mistakes to someone experienced. Negative feedback won’t crush their confidence, but it just might give them the information they need to take their performance to the next level.

Networking giant Cisco (CSCO) and storage specialist NetApp (NTAP) announced an expanded partnership to deliver new converged infrastructure under the FlexPod architecture. Cisco and NetApp are looking to present a shared vision of the unified data center, connecting enterprise clouds to service providers, enterprises to branch offices and clouds to clouds. The expanded partnership will provide deeper integration for the more than 2,100 FlexPod customers.

FlexPod is a Cisco and NetApp validated data center platform for hosting business applications on virtualized or bare-metal servers. The set of solutions will bring together NetApp Clustered ONTAP and NetApp FAS storage systems with Cisco UCS servers and Cisco Nexus 7000 Series Switches to create dynamically provisioned pools of server, storage and network resources that can be scaled up and scaled down by service providers depending on application requirements.

To enhance architecture integration, FlexPod will provide the ability to manage up to 10,000 servers, allowing organizations to aggregate several FlexPod racks and enable multihop Fiber Channel over Ethernet (FCOE).  Support is also being added for Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud (Cisco IAC) to allow cloud management solutions for FlexPod customers. To accelerate momentum in the service provider market Cisco and NetApp are developing flexible, massively scalable FlexPod solutions capable of handling multi-data-center service provider architectures.

ExpressPod, with support for VMware vSphere, will also soon include support for Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V, and will be extended to meet the compute, network and storage needs of branch offices. Cisco and NetApp are expanding solution coverage to add more mission-critical applications and private cloud solutions for the datacenter. Mission critical solutions include Oracle Database and applications, SAP BusinessObjects business intelligence and the SAP HANA platform, and private cloud offerings include Microsoft private cloud and Citrix CloudPlatform.

“The past 10 years of partnering with NetApp have proven to be successful in bringing a Cisco validated, FlexPod architecture to our customers,” said Padmasree Warrior, chief technology and strategy officer at Cisco. Building on that success, we’re now expanding our partnership to deliver deeper technology integration and broader solution development across the unified data center for an open, scalable, multicloud infrastructure. Together we can help our customers use their current data center investment to address the challenges of a mobile-cloud era.”

“NetApp and Cisco share a common vision for the future of the data center and will continue to collaborate on innovations that connect organizations under a holistic cloud architecture,” said Manish Goel, executive vice president, Product Operations at NetApp. Our development, sales, and channel teams will work even closer to deliver new solutions that broaden the market opportunities for both companies and our partners, and help customers gain a competitive advantage from their flexible and efficient agile data center infrastructure.”

At the Data Center Jobs Board, we have a new job listing from QTS (Quality Technology Services), which is seeking a Data Center Operations Technician in Sacramento, California.

The Data Center Operations Technician is responsible for assisting customers on the Data Center floor both in person and via the telephone, performing customer equipment installs, managing tickets within the define ticketing system, performing base device configuration and troubleshooting. In order to resolve unique network and system related challenges and to promote growth in individual employee skill sets, other duties and responsibilities will be assigned by management as needed. To view full details and apply, see job listing details.

Are you hiring for your data center? You can list your company’s job openings on the Data Center Jobs Board, and also track new openings via our jobs RSS feed.

PhrozenSoft has released Mirage Anti-Bot 3.0, a tiny tool which aims to prevent your PC from accessing sites infected by the Zeus, SpyEye and Palevo families of malware.

The core of the program remains very simple. It just downloads the excellent www.abuse.ch blocklist and updates your HOSTS file accordingly, immediately preventing you from accessing any of the included malicious domains.

The official release statement said that Mirage Anti-Bot 3.0 will now handle this update “silently and automatically”, though. The new release is also able to log any attempts to reach a blocked site. And you can even add new sites to the HOSTS file yourself, perhaps useful if you want to prevent your children from reaching some specific domains. (This isn’t exactly bullet-proof protection, but may be enough to baffle young children or the less technical in general.)

And in general the author claims Mirage Anti-Bot 3.0 has been recoded entirely, making it better performing and easier to use.

Does the reality match up? Not entirely. The program does suffer from one issue, in that it needs to run as an administrator, but not only fails to tell you this, but also doesn’t complain if you forget. So when we first launched Mirage Anti-Bot as normal, it told us our system had been updated even though actually nothing had changed at all.

Of course, once you’ve realised the problem, this is simple enough to fix, for example just by tweaking the program’s shortcut to ensure it’s launched with the necessary rights (right-click, click Properties > Compatibility, check “Run this program as an administrator”).

And with that sorted, Mirage Anti-Bot 3.0 provides a quick way to block access to many Zeus, SpyEye and Palevo-infected sites. It’s also easy to use, relatively lightweight (it required barely 7MB of RAM on our test PC), and on balance could help to provide a useful extra layer of security for most systems.

Photo credit: Albert Ziganshin/Shutterstock

In a move that aims to consolidate the company’s branded app selection on Lumia Windows Phones, Nokia has unveiled a new, subscription-based premium service dubbed Nokia Music+, that builds atop of the established Nokia Music platform. A “+” sign can make quite the difference.

Music+ is not designed to replace currently available free services such as Mix Radio, but rather to offer Lumia owners the paid option for “unlimited music discovery”. The Finnish manufacturer says that Music+ is aimed at “people who care enough about music to pay something for more quality and choice” and, depending on the user’s location, will run for around EUR3.99 or $3.99 per month. But what are the advantages?

Music+ allows users to take advantage of unlimited skips, perform unlimited downloads from the maximum four Mixes available with the free service, play music in higher quality with downloads at eight times the existing quality, and view lyrics. Music+ also provides access to the service straight from a web-app, without having to use a Lumia device.

Nokia has yet to provide an exact release date, only stating that Music+ will be available “in the next few weeks”. There is also no word on whether the service will come to other Windows Phone devices.

Gridlee for iOS is a fairly arcade average game, certainly nothing to get excited about. You wouldn’t want to play it more than once, and, to be honest, you probably wouldn’t want to download it in the first place, even though it’s free. Except there’s more to Gridlee than meets the eye.

The game, which was developed by Videa Inc. in 1982, isn’t a remake for iOS. It’s the actual original ROM image running on an up-to-date full version of the MAME4iOS Reloaded Project by Seleuco, an excellent arcade emulator banned by Apple. And if you know how, you can use Gridlee to play a wealth of classic arcade games on your iOS device for free. No jailbreak required.

Apple has a long standing policy of not allowing emulators on its devices (with a few high profile exceptions, such as Atari and Capcom), and pulled iMAME from the App Store in December 2011. Gridlee gives users a chance to use the emulator than powered that app.

To make the most of its capabilities, you’ll need iFunBox, a free program which can tunnel into iOS’ file system. Navigate to iFunBox Classic> Connected Devices> [your device]> User Applications> Gridlee> Documents> roms and drag a collection of zipped MAME ROM images to it (you can find games to play with a little Googling). When you next run Gridlee you’ll be able to choose the game you actually want to play.

The knowing App Store reviews for Gridlee are quite fun. DominusSeph says: “This game has a lot of….potential! Just need to look a little under the surface”, while Boberttiswas adds: “At first glance, this game might seem quite underwhelming, but stick with it and you’ll find a number of features under the bland exterior that make this game so fun, it’s almost as if you’re playing a whole load of completely different games”.

Gridlee’s chances of surviving for very long in the App Store are slim, so if it appeals be sure to grab a copy now.

Photo Credit: Radoman Durkovic/Shutterstock

Comedy video site My Damn Channel is expanding its online programming with the launch of My Damn Channel Comedy Network, which will aim to offer “hundreds” of new series this year. The network is looking for content creators to submit ideas for original series, and accepted videos will be distributed on MyDamnChannel.com and on the company’s YouTube channels.

My Damn Channel has appointed Eric Mortensen, who was previously Blip’s senior director of content and network programming, as its director of programming and acquisitions, a new role. ”We’re investing in the team and the infrastructure to make the My Damn Channel Comedy Network the first choice for fans and the right choice for content,” said founder and CEO Rob Barnett in a statement.

In 2012, My Damn Channel launched a live daily comedy show on YouTube. The company says it saw a 91 percent increase in total video views across all its sites in 2012 compared to the previous year.

My Damn Channel’s search for more original content comes at a time when other companies are looking for the same thing. Amazon Studios recently announced its first six comedy pilots, including offerings from The Onion and “Doonesbury” author Garry Trudeau. And Yahoo launched its first original comedies last March. Barnett told me he’s “encouraged” to see other companies “beginning to fund great original content and we are working with some of them.” My Damn Channel Comedy Network stands out, he says, because it is aimed at creators “looking for a network partner who specializes in comedy series.”

It may just be early adopter tech types who log every step they take or calorie they burn using Fitbits, Nike Fuelbands, and other devices, but that hardly means they’re the only ones who track their health.

About 7 in 10 American adults told the Pew Internet & American Life Project that they track a health indicator like weight, diet, exercise or a symptom. But despite growing buzz around the “quantified self” movement and the explosion of gadgets and apps that help people measure and analyze everything from their activity and sleep patterns to blood glucose levels and other vital signs, just a small slice of health trackers rely on high tech devices.

Indeed, according to the study released Monday, which was conducted via telephone and included 3,014 adults, nearly half of the trackers don’t use any kind of external tool at all.

Pew reports that 49 percent of the trackers said they track their progress “in their heads,” while 34 percent said they record the data on paper (for example, in a notebook or journal) and just 21 percent said they use some form of technology to track their health data. Respondents were allowed to provide more than one response, which is why the total is greater than 100 percent.  But Pew said it considers 50 percent of respondents to be “formal trackers” who log their data in an organized way with notebooks or apps and 44 percent to be “informal trackers” who only record progress in their heads.

A benchmark for the future

A Pew study from 2011 looked at the health tracking behaviors of U.S. Internet users, finding that a quarter of them track their health online. But Susannah Fox, Pew’s associate director of digital strategy, said this is the first national survey measuring health data tracking among the general population. As digital tools for monitoring health data continue to proliferate, this survey can provide a benchmark against which future progress can be measured.

“We’ve got this massive potential of a market and yet we still have relatively low uptake,” Fox said. “We don’t have the answers in terms of what will change their minds or entice them to change their habits. What we do know now is how many people are doing it and already what impact that is having. Maybe in the future, if people can be seduced to upgrade to fancier technology that will actually move the needle on their heath outcome.”

Implications for digital health companies

For companies pushing health-monitoring technology, Pew’s study could strengthen their case, as it shows that tracking can make a difference. For example:

• 46 percent of trackers said it changed their approach to maintaining their own health or the health of someone for whom they provide care.
• 49 percent said it led them to ask a doctor a new question or seek a second opinion.
• 34 percent it affected a decision about how to treat an illness or condition.

The report also indicates that there are several markets within health tracking that are ripe for the tapping.  Potential consumers span from casual health trackers interested in losing weight and improving their diet to those with chronic conditions to caretakers.

But the considerable number of people who seem content with taking the low-tech route means that digital health companies need to provide options that can compete with the convenience and familiarity of a notebook or the ease of just remembering information in your head. Developers and device makers are increasingly offering sophisticated health tracking and analysis technology. But, given that plenty of health apps are little more than digitized notebooks with minimal functionality, you can’t blame people who’d rather just scribble in a journal.

“The competition for mind share is not between different health apps,” said Fox. “It’s between health apps and a notebook and health apps and just your scale at home.”

You can check out the full report on Pew’s website, but here are some other interesting findings:

• The majority of respondents – 60 percent – say they track their weight, diet or exercise, with older Americans reporting that they’re more likely to track these metrics than younger Americans. About a third track health indicators like blood pressure, blood sugar, headaches or sleep patterns, and 12 percent say they track health indicators for a loved one.
• Those with no chronic conditions are least likely to say that they track health indicators (19 percent), while 40 percent of adults with one condition are trackers and 62 percent with 2+ conditions are trackers.
• Younger adults are more likely to keep track of their data in their heads (55 percent of 18-29 year-olds vs. 44 percent of those 65-year-olds and older), as are men (54 percent of men compared with 44 percent of women).

Image by daniaphoto via Shutterstock.

Lyatiss, a startup that came out of a French research consortium wants to create a new communication layer designed for the cloud and the upcoming world of federated apps. The idea is to use software installed on servers in different clouds — Amazon Web Services to start with — to monitor and then remediate problems associated with network traffic flows.

Lyatiss has raised $4 million in Series A funding from Idinvest Partners and others. It has headquarters in Santa Clara, Calif. and a research office in Lyon France, where the company originally began as a spin out from Inria, the French National Computer Science Research Institute.

Lyatiss combines the ideas associated with software-defined networking –such as monitoring flow-level data and treating the networking layer as an abstraction — and applies them to business and performance rules associated with applications. In short, Lyatiss says it can do what many of the people who are excited about SDN really want — a way for the network to react and deliver what the application needs.

Pascale Vicat-Blanc, CEO of Lyatiss

Pascale Vicat-Blanc, the CEO and a co-founder of the company, likens it to creating a version of TCP for the cloud. The company calls this application-defined networking, but it’s probably safer to think of it a means to tie the application to the performance of the underlying hardware despite the increasing layers of virtualization in the way. For example, customers using Lyatiss’ CloudWeaver software (delivered as a service, of course) have been able to track their network flows to see where CPU usage was heating up and where network bottlenecks were occurring, thus letting the customers reallocate or size up their virtual machines as needed.

The service differs from a cloud-based networking monitoring program product such as Boundary’s, which tracks individual packets at the network level in that it tracks the entire flow — which includes where the packet is going and what might be stopping it or slowing it down along the way as opposed to just noticing that it has slowed down or stopped. This level of information, which can include details like the performance of the CPU and how that affects the network, is far more detailed.

This brings us back to TCP. This protocol helps define how devices talk to the web, ensuring that all packets sent around the web join up with their buddies at your end device. The protocol helps divide and track the packets that comprise an email, a movie or a digital photograph. In much the same way CloudWeaver’s application-defined networking hopes to use flow information to track how an application performs across multiple virtual machines, web services and eventually clouds.

It has started with an Amazon-based service, and promises to monitor and then let developers tweak their AWS settings when something is running a bit too hot or slowly. Developers could use this to see an outage before it occurs and then take swift action using the same software.

Eventually the plan is for such things to happen automatically if the developer sets it up that way. For those working in the cloud where scale is essential, the ability to monitor such flows and then have the hardware react to the needs of the application is somewhat of a holy grail. Lyatiss hasn’t managed to achieve this yet, but that’s where it is heading.

New research by the Financial Times indicates that the value of an advanced business degree is eroding — at least as measured by the rate of pay increases for recipients. Bottom line is that graduates of the top US programs in the mid 1990s tripled their salaries in five years on average, but grads from the same schools saw half that increase in 2008 and 2009.

That can’t feel good — though I’d wager those salaries are still pretty robust to begin with. But there is growing skepticism about whether a masters degree in business administration pays off the way it once did. This decline in pay hikes comes at a time when students pay 7 percent more per year for their degrees. In 2012, the fees for MBA programs were up 44 percent in real terms compared to 2005.

Whether an MBA is worth the effort and expense is a recurring debate especially among startups that value technology expertise above all else and many of which are led by geeks that didn’t stick around for their undergraduate diploma, let alone a graduate degree. The topic cropped up several times at the Harvard Business School’s Cyberposium 2012, in November where several startup panelists were asked whether they were hiring MBAs. (One exec with a big data startup said no, he preferred tech skills instead. That went over like a lead balloon.)

Harvard Business School was the priciest school — costing $126,000 over two years — but its graduates command the highest pay three years after finishing at about $190,000 per year. Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business was number two. The London Business School was tops in Europe and fourth overall while the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology came in first among Asian schools.

The top ten schools are below but check out the full FT Global MBA survey.

Suddenly, I feel sorry for the folks over at Apple. Chicken Little bloggers and Wall Street analysts run round crying “The sky is falling!” Strangely, they are believed. Apple shares are down 38 percent from September’s all-time high. On Friday, the company’s market cap fell below Exxon’s. Suddenly, the world’s most valuable company isn’t. I just don’t feel right kicking fruit as it falls down, so as a gesture of goodwill my boycott ends today.

That’s not to say I have plans to buy any Apple products. I’m more than satisfied with Chromebook and my three Nexus devices. That said, as an act of solidarity, I let Apple auto-charge my credit card for iTunes Match renewal today. I don’t own a single device that supports the service, but, hey, what’s $24.95 between friends? I was a loyal OS X and iOS user until my boycott started in June 2012, protesting aggressive patent lawsuits — unaffectionately called innovation by litigation.

The reasons for my boycott are unchanged. Apple is still a patent bully that also intimidates others. But following my boycott, Apple made a series of missteps that sent stock and brand perceptions steeply downward. Siri still sucks. iPhone 5 underwhelms. Releasing Apple Maps makes the exec team look petty (dropping Google’s product in process) and incompetent. iPad mini costs too much. Court-ordered apology to Samsung misleads and lies.

From that perspective, my concern: Should sympathy swell around Apple’s state, boycotters could cause even more. Arrogant, highest market cap, cash-hording (mainly overseas) Apple is easy for people to hate. But fallen Apple is sympathetic. So I have another reason for backing off the boycott, which shouldn’t be reason for anyone to feel even sorrier for the company.

Not that there is any real reason for sympathy. During calendar 2012, Apple generated $164.7 billion revenue, which is considerably more than Microsoft ($73.2 billion) and Google ($50.18 billion) combined. Net profit reached $39.58 billion, or more than twice Microsoft (when including a goodwill charge). Even fallen, Apple is a mighty fruit.

Sour Apple

I wouldn’t worry that anyone working there will go hungry. Cofounder Steve Jobs left behind a money machine, unlike anything seen since Microsoft, which, no coincidence, led the last computing era. Apple may be contender to lead the cloud-connected device era, but cracks in the facade are everywhere.

1. Rising negative perceptions. For years, Apple was a perception stock, largely buoyed by smart marketing and Jobs’ ability to cast the so-called “Reality Distortion Field”, while generating cult-leader like adoration. Perceptions that lifted the stock high, now lay it low. How ironic, the people writing obsessively about Apple before continue to do so, but with more negative tone and concern as the bottom drops out of stock and brand.

2. “Where’s the innovation?“ It’s a common question among the Apple-obsessive. As 2013 started, analyst, blogger, reporter and social commentator puppy-love adoration gave way to persistent angst-questions about what’s next and why the stock, which soared in September, soured through most of fourth quarter. Everyone pines for Jobs’ “One More Thing” — that category creating or redefining new product and didn’t get it. Apple isn’t delivering.

3. iPhone’s uncertain future. iPhone is a monstrous money machine. Revenue rose to $30.67 billion in fourth quarter from $16.25 billion three months earlier. That’s 56 percent of total revenue, up from 45 percent in Q3. But shipments missed Wall Street consensus by more than 2 million units.

Meanwhile, iPhone 4 and huge iPhone 5 launch in China lifted fourth quarter — yes, iPhone 4, which Cook says was supply constrained for all three months, and that during iPhone 5’s first full quarter of sales. Carriers use subsidies to insulate buyers, offering iPhone 4 for free and 4S for $99. Those prices also determine iPhone’s perceived value to consumers, which for many is zero — they are unwilling to pay anything. Higher sales of lower-cost models mean thinner margins for Apple.

Then there is Android, which continues to widen its lead over iPhone, in large part thanks to Samsung. In fourth quarter 2011, Apple shipped more smartphones than Samsung — 23 million and 22.5 million, respectively, according to IDC. A year later, Samsung shipments rose 76 percent, with 63.7 million smartphones to Apple’s 47.8 million.

4. Concerns about iPad mini. The tablet costs either too much or too little. For the too-much crowd, iPad costs between $329 and $659, but based on BetaNews polls and analyst data, the sweet spot in the 7-7.9-inch tablet category is $199. If consumers continue to flock to lower-cost tablets, Apple loses. Meanwhile, the too-little crowd has a point. Every iPad mini sold helps to preserve Apple’s tablet market share but saps margins.

By my math, in fourth quarter, iPad category average selling prices fell 12.3 percent sequentially — from $535 to $467. But there’s more! Year over year, iPad ASPs are down $101, Apple’s CFO admits. Only the company’s inability to manufacture enough minis to meet demand during fourth quarter kept matters from being worse.

Contrasting Leadership

If I was anti-Apple, and I am not, all this trouble would be welcome. Something to really cheer about. But I like Apple, which is major reason for the boycott in the first place. I expect more from the company, and look sadly on greatness shaken from the trees as frost bites the crop.

Apple must learn from a bitter rival. Google innovates in all the ways, and more, Apple is perceived to. Name a day when there isn’t something new coming from the double-oh company — innovation at truly Internet speed. Meanwhile, at Apple, for all the talk about capitalizing on the so-called post-PC era, development goes at the old pace. Hell, the patent lawsuits move faster than Apple innovation. Last week I offered some pointers on how the company can get its mojo back. Perception, and reality, can with commitment.

But I wonder, observing the stark contrast of leadership. During the same week, Apple CEO Tim Cook and Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt made major trips to Asia — to China and North Korea, respectively. Cook culled relationships and deals in what he calls Apple’s most important country. Not North America, baby. His trip was really about money. Meanwhile Schmidt’s trip was more a goodwill mission. He and his daughter offer fascinating reflections, you should read. From the perspective of shareholders, Cook’s priority is right. But, personally, as a non-investor, I like Schmidt’s priority more.

Wrapping up, I’m still unhappy with Apple corporate behavior; now that perception, brand and stock sink, many more people are dissatisfied, too. I’m just one person, but every burden lifted must mean something. I’m off the boycott bandwagon, as you should be.

Photo Credit: Joe Wilcox

On the surface, you wouldn’t think of YouTubers as being the most reserved of people, but talking into a webcam doesn’t necessarily reveal all your secrets. Which is why the documentary Please Subscribe, directed by Dan Dodi, aims to illuminate the realities of what it’s like to create content for the YouTube community: chasing viewer numbers, aiming for ad dollars and dealing with the basic loneliness of the job.

But while Please Subscribe‘s target audience is the digital community, the film will first be seen someplace relatively unexpected: movie theaters.

For one night only, Please Subscribe will be distributed theatrically, specifically, Tuesday February 5th at 7:30 PM. “Anytime you make a movie, your number one goal is to make it into theaters. So [this] is pretty cool and pretty important,” Dodi said via phone.

“We wanted it to be more of an event,” Dodi said about the decision to go one night only.

According to David Wengrod of Screenvision, which is handling the theatrical distribution, Please Subscribe will be available in 217 theaters nation-wide, including San Francisco and New York. You can even see it in Hawaii.

“We have a pretty good national footprint,” Wengrod said via phone. “If we’re getting people who don’t normally go to see a movie on Tuesdays — people who normally experience stuff through their computers — then we’re a success.”

Following the theatrical premiere, Please Subscribe will be released via Chill Direct on March 22 — Screenvision requested a 45-day window. The film will cost $7.99 for a DRM-free file — but it’s currently available for pre-order at $6.20, 20 percent off.

Grace Helbig of Daily Grace, one of the eight YouTubers profiled in the film, got involved because it was an opportunity to expose those who might not be familiar with the YouTube community to what. “It’s important because it’s a such huge industry and it’s growing so fast — so it’s important for people to understand what’s happening,” she said via phone.

“It’s a deeper and more personal perspective on what it means to be a YouTuber,” Helbig added.

For sure, gamification – or the use of game mechanics in non-entertainment contexts – is one of the most overhyped and misunderstood subjects in enterprise today.

Yet from humble beginnings in 2010, M2 Research projects that companies will spend upwards of $2 billion on gamification services by 2015. By that same point, Gartner Group’s Brian Burke forecasts that 70 percent of the Global 2000 will employ gamification techniques, but that 80 percent of those projects will fail unless they’re designed thoughtfully. To meet these needs, we believe U.S. companies will need 5,000 certified gamification designers over the next three years to infuse every aspect of their operations with the science of engagement.

For my forthcoming book, “The Gamification Revolution” and through our GSummit conference , we looked at hundreds of leading companies that have successfully leveraged gamification in the enterprise to see how they found success. Here are the top five areas where companies are using gamification to find efficiencies and gain a competitive advantage:

Recruitment and hiring

Companies have used games to recruit for some time, but with social and game technologies it’s become more effective. Most famously, Google posted a billboard in Silicon Valley with a tough math question that led users through a series of game-like challenges, and eventually to a special job application queue; those who could solve the puzzle were “pre-screened” in a fun way.

Companies like Quixey have adapted Google’s approach (sans billboard) and recruit using a reality TV-style game that yields qualified engineering candidates for under $4,000/each – compared to $20,000-plus using traditional recruiters. The U.S. Army-developed America’s Army game has brought millions of potential recruits to the attention of the armed forces and has become its most cost-effective recruitment strategy (and one of the world’s most popular games on the way).

On a larger scale, Domino’s Pizza developed a game called Pizza Hero where you can pretend to be a pizzaiolo and make pies the way you like. The app lets you order pizza for delivery based on your design and apply for a job at your local Domino’s – if you’re good enough.

Employee training and development

Like Domino’s, Marriott needs to hire upwards of 50,000 people per year to fill positions in its hospitality division – and those employees also need training. So the company developed a game called My Marriott Hotel that lets you play various hotel roles, develop a basic understanding of how they work and apply for a job. The simplicity of My Marriott Hotel led to over 25,000 players joining in the first week, and is part of a major growth cycle of similar training games that are as easy to play as Angry Birds.

Several other major multinationals are finding success too:  Siemens use its online game Plantville to train plant operators; GE Healthcare’s Patient Shuffle game teaches health care workers how hospitals work; and Sun Microsystems built an adventure game to replace its stuffy new-hire onboarding training. For many companies, gamified training has lowered costs and raised engagement by over 50 percent.

Employee feedback

The lack of adaptability of employee feedback has led many leading organizations to question the structure of the annual review. Enter gamification-based recognition systems like Work.com (formerly Rypple), DueProps and PropstoYou. They use gamified approaches to persuade employees to provide feedback instantly on their mobile device. This peer recognition is turned into social achievements (like badges and leaderboards) that are shared throughout the organization, and typically replace direct cash bonuses or “spiffs.”

Companies like LivingSocial, Spotify and Facebook have embraced the approach, replacing annual reviews in many cases. The fun, instantaneous feedback loops have driven employee engagement to over 95 percent on an opt-in basis at many installations. Early successes led Salesforce.com to buy Toronto-based Rypple for a reported $65 million after just two years in operation, rebranding it as Work.com late last year.

Health and wellness

One critical approach to increasing employee performance is by helping to improve their health and wellness. Besides having the effect of improving cognition, it also results in reduced absenteeism (and thus health insurance costs, too). NextJump, a New York-based employee-incentive startup, has gotten international attention for its gamified approach to encouraging employee fitness.

Using team-based competition and peer support, over 80 percent of the company’s employees currently go to the gym two-plus times a week without a mandate. Similarly, to help others gamify workplace health, startups like Keas deliver “wellness as a service” (WaaS?) to customers like Pfizer and Reed Elsevier.

Creating new profit centers

As gamification’s power to change the enterprise has grown, it has also become a profit center for early adopter organizations. IBM developed a game-based BPM (Business Process Management) simulator called Innov8 that has spawned several B2B products, including a game called City Manager aimed at municipal executives.

Today, the Innov8 platform is used by over 1,000 institutions to teach BPM, and has become the company’s number-one lead generator. Similarly, global consulting giant NTTData has built a platform called GO! that enables its 60,000 worldwide employees to gamify BPM and professional development, helping the company close and retain clients.

Gabe Zicherman is editor of gamification.co and chair of the Gamification Summit. His book, The Gamification Revolution: How Leaders Leverage Game Mechanics to Crush the Competition (McGraw Hill) is due out April 5. Follow him on Twitter @gzicherm.

As the founder of a startup, I am probably the last person you’d expect to tell you that scale matters. And to be sure, there’s plenty of innovation coming from small, nimble companies that nonetheless are able to disrupt huge markets.

However, with Facebook’s recent addition of voice calling to its Messenger app, the company is poised to demonstrate to the mobile industry the benefits – and power – of scale, first hand. And in what can only be described as the perfect murder, Facebook is now in a position to effectively kill the traditional telephone, starting with the phone number.

How it could work

The implementation of Facebook’s voice features are straightforward yet unique: You make a call by tapping a name, not a number, a username, or any other type of identifier. You’re calling a social connection. That in itself is not shocking, but Facebook can go even further. Its database already contains the phone number of tens of millions of people. (For fun, just type a friend’s phone number in the Facebook search bar, and you’ll likely see their profile pop up instantly.)

This means it could offer streamlined interoperability with existing phone networks in a way that a company like Skype, Viber, Whatsapp — or smaller voice calling startups — can’t so easily manage. Further, all the pages you “like” on Facebook have numbers connected to them, so calling a business is just as simple and at-hand as calling a friend. In the near future then, you will call a business via Facebook on the basis of a friend’s request or a like. No more unwanted calls. No more Yellow Pages. No more looking up a phone number you can’t remember. Just a connection.

What of the gatekeepers?

The real question is how existing gatekeepers of the mobile industry – namely phone carriers and manufacturers – will respond to this apparent threat to their apparent core business. The first, familiar route is to stick to their guns. Put up a blockade, offer low-level crippled integration, or just try to ignore it and hope it just goes away.

Or, they could embrace the disruption with open arms. Carriers need to realize that as the unlimited plan dies, there’s huge opportunity in sending more and more communication over a pay-per-use data line. (They just need to bill their customers in a transparent way.)

This second option would also include supporting Facebook’s interoperability with normal phone numbers. That means you’d be able to call grandma via Facebook whether or not she even has a Facebook account (or even knows what it is) – her old landline will ring just as easily. And when grandma calls you, your Facebook app picks up the call, using number forwarding that’s comparable to Google Voice.

Manufacturers could offer Facebook deeper integration as well. Currently VoIP calls on your iPhone don’t feel like a normal phone call, but they could if Apple were to allow Facebook to control or mimic the iPhone’s Phone app. (While that might sound impossible, don’t forget that Facebook is already integrated in the Contacts app – it is already on the iOS platform in a major way.) And Android is already giving Skype and other VoIP apps ways to generate an incoming call on a phone without sending an often overlooked push notification. Apple can go this route as well.

And now, the future

It’s safe to assume that Facebook is deep in talks already with operators and manufacturers to create a partnership that benefits all of them. To date though, even major VoIP companies like Skype have been unsuccessful in pulling this off. Facebook has a scale that even Skype needed at one point to reach enough people for VoIP calling to become ubiquitous. It won’t stop with this recent addition to the Messenger app. There’s too much for the company to win. (Yes, that includes blocking competitors.)

That Facebook phone you keep hearing about? I believe it’s an app. Sure, it could pull a Google Chrome and try and completely replace a broken platform with its own, but it doesn’t need to – its scale forces partners to listen. Facebook can kill the phone as we know it simply by rebuilding it as an app. It can completely replace Messenger, and it won’t have the voice call option as hidden as it is right now.

It will allow you to communicate through text, voice, and ultimately even video chat. It will use data, lots of it, and carriers might even learn to enjoy billing you for that on a pay-per-use basis. It will work over Wi-Fi too, which will come in handy as 4G LTE networks become more widespread. It will improve the quality of your call in the same way the CD improved the quality of your record collection.

And, by using a huge database of phone numbers, it will even let you call keep in touch with anyone stuck using that dated technology. “Grandma? This is Robert! I’m calling you on Facebook. No, it’s not a phone… .”

Disclosure: One of Karma’s minority investors is currently employed by Facebook, as a designer for products unrelated to this story.

Robert Gaal is co-founder of mobile data startup Karma. Follow him on Twitter @robertgaal. 

Photo courtesy of bluefish/Shutterstock.com.

What is the “stability-resiliency tradeoff,” and does it really exist? This — the third post in my series on devops, complex systems, anti-fragility and cloud computing — will focus on that question, the one that prompted Phil Jaenke to write the blog post that inspired this series.

Phil is a friend and he has an extensive background in systems and data center administration. His history is one of surviving the IT operations battles of the last decade or so. He cringes every time I mention concepts like continuous deployment, devops and — especially — the stability-resiliency tradeoff.

What is the stability-resiliency tradeoff?

The best description of the stability-resiliency tradeoff I can find is from C.S. Holling in a 1996 paper entitled “Command and Control and the Pathology of Natural Resource Management”:

“We call the result ‘the pathology of natural resource management’ (Holling 1986; Holling 1995), a simple but far-reaching observation defined here as follows: when the range of natural variation in a system is reduced, the system loses resilience. That is, a system in which natural levels of variation have been reduced through command-and-control activities will be less resilient than an unaltered system when subsequently faced with external perturbations, either of a natural (storms, fires, floods) or human-induced (social or institutional) origin. We believe this principle applies beyond ecosystems and is particularly relevant at the intersection of ecological, social, and economic systems.”

In other words, the more you try to control — or stabilize — a system by reducing variance in the system, the less resilient you make the system to unexpected events. Command-and-control, top-down approaches to complex systems operations actually make those systems more fragile in those cases.

Now, to be sure, for this principle to apply you must be talking about a complex system made up of many independent agents. Distributed applications are good examples of this. In fact, the more instances make up a distributed application, the more the principle applies.

And, of course, the entire portfolio of business and operational applications in a typical enterprise tends to create a higher-level complex system: Every agent (e.g., application, service or device) is connected to every other agent by just a few degrees of separation. (Just sharing a data center provides one common point of dependency for disparate software applications, for instance.)

Is there really a tradeoff?

Now, back to Phil. For him, stability is specific concept, and he thinks many have lost their way trying to repudiate it:

[It’s not an] AND versus OR argument. There’s a lot of folks who have gone completely overboard with this idea that if you don’t do continuous deployment, you’re doing it wrong. And the simple fact of the matter is that they’re wrong. IT is not a zero sum game, nor is it strictly OR operations. Most organizations don’t want or need continuous deployment. And many organizations (e.g. Google who likes to break their infrastructure at the expense of paying customers and products) are doing it completely wrong.

Phil goes on to explore the definitions of “stable” and “resilient,” and to argue that what you want is stability and resiliency, as they are critical to running a business. He argues that these new models are detrimental to achieving both.

Read the post, and think about what he says.

Stability and resiliency in different contexts

If you have read the other posts in the series, especially the last one, you know that I disagree with Phil on his stances that “most organizations don’t want or need continuous deployment.” But as I read Phil’s post a second time, I began to see a distinction that I hadn’t considered before.

The stability being described in Holling’s paper is command-and-control approaches to squeezing variability out of a system. We see this in traditional approaches to architecture, ship building and other disciplines, where the belief that absolute control over all design parameters of a complex structure is both possible and mandatory for safety.

The stability that Phil introduces is also about “efforts to reduce the number of shocks the process or system is subjected to,” but he’s looking at it from the perspective of ending up with something that works after a failure. Which is also what resilience is all about, right?

So why would Phil argue so adamantly that stability and resiliency are interrelated? Perhaps because, from a hardware perspective, it’s obvious they are. At some level, stability is required for a CPU or — at the very least — a transistor. Higher-order systems may build resiliency around many such stable (e.g., unchanging) components, but some level of stability is desirable at some level within every complex system.

It’s just that trying to arbitrarily limit variance in the complex system is detrimental to the system. The system becomes less resilient as a result.

How should IT consider stability and resiliency?

Ultimately, perhaps the design decision is as simple as:

• If the system being designed is best operated as a complex adaptive system, with highly independent agents and a dynamic structure, then the focus should be on resiliency and variance. The various teams that own the agents, the relationships between agents and the goals the business has for that system should drive this.
• If the system is instead fairly static and/or made of few agents, choose a more prescriptive, static design approach. Limit what agents can participate in the system, and hardwire the relationships between agents so change is less dynamic (or not dynamic at all).
• Since complex adaptive systems can be made of static components, the IT organization should be prepared for the full range of approaches needed to operate everything in the system.

(Keep in mind that the IT portfolio, if large enough, is itself a complex system, so resiliency and variance should dominate at that scale.)

While I disagree with Phil about the validity of continuous integration and continuous delivery approaches for enterprise software projects, I do agree that IT itself doesn’t have a stability/resiliency tradeoff. The tradeoff exists solely for each system structure, and not necessarily for the agents of those systems themselves.

My next post will turn its attention to practical matters, exploring sources of information to explore these topics further, and suggesting a few steps that enterprises can consider today with respect to devops adoption, resiliency and anti-fragility.

Thoughts? Comment below or find me on Twitter at @jamesurquhart.

James Urquhart is vice president of products at enStratus and a regular GigaOM contributor.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user Olivier Le Moal.

Inside Koenigsegg provides a look behind the scenes at Koenigsegg and examines how innovation within the highest echelon of sports car manufacturers will affect the broader automotive world. In this episode, company founder and principal, Christian Von Koenigsegg explains the methodology of the 200+ hour paint process that is unique to the Koenigsegg line.

Source: Youtube.com/DRIVE

MoTR 288 is 57 minutes long and is a 34.5 MB file in MP3 format.

CLICK HERE to download the file and listen directly.

HOSTS: Matthew Miller (Seattle) and Kevin C. Tofel (Philadelphia)

TOPICS:

• First thoughts of the Acer W510 Windows 8 tablet / dock. Build quality, specs, performance, usage.
• Unlocking your phone is now illegal, although a carrier can still do it for you. Good, bad or just silly?
• Galaxy Note 8.0: looks legit and interesting; particularly because of the speaker at the top. A small tablet with voice, perhaps.
• Nokia Drive+ comes to other Windows Phones. Does this help Microsoft or Nokia?
• Nokia announces Nokia Music+ subscription service for Lumia owners
• Vine for iOS, Twitter video service

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Moving and shaking at VMware, EMC, Pivotal Initiative

There’s some personnel shuffling going on over at the EMC-VMware-Pivotal Initiative axis. As reported here on Friday, star engineer Mark Lucovsky is now back at VMware, having handed the Cloud Foundry PaaS over to the Pivotal Initiative spin off. At VMware, he is working on an unspecified  ”mega” cloud project according to a now-defunct Twitter profile. Since then we learned that Scott Lowe,  virtualization expert at EMC is now part of the Nicira virtual networking team at VMware working with Martin Casado.

A lot of folks are watching who goes where from VMware, EMC since the two companies offloaded cloud-related IP and people to the Pivotal Initiative, more details of which will be disclosed this quarter. There has also been a flow of high-level VMware people leaving the fold — most recently CTO Steve Herrod is moving to VC firm General Catalyst.

NetApp and Cisco cinch ties

Cisco and NetApp are working on more FlexPod converged hardware designs for use in branch offices and in the public cloud settings, both companies said last week.  FlexPods incorporate Cisco servers and networking and NetApp storage. The companies are also working to incorporate fast flash storage into FlexPod designs.

Since Cisco is also part of the 3-year-old VCE alliance that combines its networking and server hardware with EMC storage and VMware virtualization into converged hardware, people watch developments on the Cisco-NetApp side carefully.  VMware’s purchase of Nicira and its software-defined networking prowess last summer, has further stressed a relationship that many say was already strained.

Here are some other quick hits from the week.

Beware 7 sins of cloud computing.

What happens if your PaaS  passes?  

Big data super powers: IBM, Cloudera, General Electric??

Big data and cloud computing take human jobs

Citing Superstorm Sandy, Xand adds disaster recovery space

IBM claims huge cloud growth off of unknown base

Cisco’s private cloud: pain and profit

Joyent fires up Hadoop as a Service