May 2012
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Flow Adds Virtual Concierge Service
I got an email from the people from Flow, the task management tool, announcing an integrated virtual assistant capability, here indicated by the green icon to the right. The use case is 1/ I create a task, 2/ delegate to the concierge service, and then 3/ magic happens.
click to enlarge
Alas, I didn’t get to experience the magic part because the 14 day free trial does not support even a...
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Gaining Savings and Productivity From Smaller... →
22squared compressed into two floors instead of three, and reorganized the space to shape a new culture:
J Michael Welton via NYTimes.com
“We wanted people to be able to work wherever the work is, in whatever style,” said Mike Grindell, the executive vice president and chief administrative officer of 22squared, an advertising agency in Atlanta that recently completed a renovation.
The agency...
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Gaining Savings and Productivity From Smaller... →
GlaxoSmithKline is an example of a global corporation that is rethinking the workspace and making drastic changes to increase productivity and save money:
J Michael Welton via NYTimes.com
Christian Bigsby, the senior vice president for worldwide real estate and facilities at GlaxoSmithKline, said the company was engaging in what it called an opportunistic “footprint reduction program.” It began...
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“Content strategy is to copywriting as information architecture is to design.”
– Rachel Lovinger, Content Strategy: The Philosophy of Data via Boxes and Arrows
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The Content Strategist as Digital Curator - Erin... →
This is a great survey piece that I somehow never encountered before, and despite its age (December 2009) is a must read even today for anyone wanting to grasp what this new-fangled notion of digital curation is all about.
The Content Strategist as Digital Curator - Erin Scime via A List Apart
The term “curate” is the interactive world’s new buzzword. During content creation and governance...
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The Quiet Revolution - Gensler →
More evidence that a feeling of engagement with work has large consequences:
Sense Of Engagement
“Place making is back in the corporate vocabulary,” says Tom Vecchione [a workplace leader at Gensler New York]. Perhaps the most tangible sign of the workplace revolution’s next phase is a renewed belief that work’s settings should be inspiring, above all else. “When people are engaged by their...
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229: The average number of friends a person has on... →
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More Research On The Second Screen
Nielsen continues its measurement of the second screen:
Cory Bergman, What TV viewers are doing on their tablets [study]
Nielsen answers the question, what are they doing on their tablets? And how does it change across demographic groups?
Most of what is going on isn’t related to the TV shows being watched, but my bet is that because the second screen solutions haven’t rolled...
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The Original Bitly Javascript Bookmarklet
For those who want the old style of Bitly, this javascript still works for me. Copy it and past it into a toolbar bookmark in Firefox, or the equivalent in other browsers.
javascript:var%20e=document.createElement('script');e.setAttribute('language','javascript');e.setAttribute('src','//bitly.com/bookmarklet/load.js');document.body.appendChild(e);void(0);
When you click this while on a page,...
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Cooperative Innovation Trumps Collaborative...
Matt McAlister makes a distinction between leading and managing in this examination of Chinese motorcycle supply chain dynamics:
Matt McAlister, Leadership lessons from China
John Seely Brown and John Hagel examine how a network of motorcycle parts assemblers in China break traditional centralized management tactics to optimize for innovation in a paper called “Innovation blowback: Disruptive...
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19-Year-Old Lives In AOL Offices For 2 Months, No... →
soupsoup:
For two months last fall, Eric Simons secretly took up residence inside the Internet giant’s Palo Alto, Calif., campus, eating free food, enjoying gym access, and building a startup in the process.
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WatchA number of twitterers answered my tweet, where I asked for insights into the future of everyday small group meetings.
My basic feeling about most meetings is expressed by this wisecrack:
A meeting is an interaction where the unwilling, selected from the uninformed, led by the unsuitable, to discuss the unnecessary, are required to write a report about the unimportant.
- T.A. Keyser
I can...
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“@nytimesbusiness: #Facebook down more than 5% today. Since FB’s troubled...”
– May 29, 2012 at 07:41AM via http://bit.ly/K9A6Fk
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Facebook Entering The Next Social Battlefield:...
A lot of buzz on the interwebs today about Facebook’s apparent third effort to build their own smart phone, and people trying to dissect the reasoning behind it.
Nick Bilton, Facebook Might Have a Smartphone in Its Future - NYTimes.com
For Facebook, the motivation is clear; as a newly public company, it must find new sources of revenue, and it fears being left behind in mobile, one of the...
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“@techguerilla: @stoweboyd learn to get comfortable having some unstructured...”
– May 29, 2012 at 06:51AM via http://bit.ly/K9u9Ig
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BYOD Spells Doom For Enterprise Solutions
Cisco’s has recently shut down a short list of strangely named products — Eos (social blogging platform), Umi (video conferencing), and Cius (tablet) — and while the first two might be interpreted as Cisco backing away from consumer products, the third is the opposite: companies embracing consumer products. Apparently, companies aren’t provisioning their employees with...
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“I don’t like New York. I just think it’s the best place for my business.”
– Josh Miller, describing why he moved Branch to NYC after a brief time in San Francisco, cited by Joshua Brustein, in For Tech Start-Ups, New York Has Increasing Allure via NYTimes.com
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Can China Become A 21st Century Innovator?
James Fallows, Can China Escape the Low-Wage Trap? via NYTimes.com
After another several-month stay in China last year, I came up with one proxy for China’s ability to take this next step: how slow its Internet service is, compared with South Korea’s or Japan’s.
In much of America, the Internet is slow by those standards, but mainly for infrastructure reasons. In China it’s slow because of...
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“@michaelwolf: Cisco Umi, Eos, Cius: All killed in last 12 months. If...”
– May 25, 2012 at 02:21PM via http://bit.ly/KIw1kA
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Synchronizing Ads On The Second Screen: A Study
Hill Holliday and SecondScreen Networks set up a study to find out how they might sunchronize the head shifting that goes along with the ‘swarm of devices’ style of TV use that goes on these days, given the emergence of the second screen:
Ilya Vedrashko, Smartphones Distract People Away from TV, Mobile Ads Help Bring Them Back
When people are in front of the TV, they don’t just...
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“What is important is providing the conditions through which people can achieve...”
– L. Hunter Lovins, Reframing The Global Economy To Include Happiness via Co.Exist
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Future Work Skills 2020
futurist-foresight:
The Institute for the Future released a report on future work skills that will be needed by 2020. They are:
Sense-making.
Social intelligence.
Novel and adaptive thinking.
Cross-cultural competency.
Computational thinking.
New-media literacy.
Transdisciplinarity.
Design mind-set.
Cognitive load management.
Virtual collaboration.
(Gigaom gives a quick breakdown)
...
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“It’s worth contemplating one of the primary factors that drove Facebook’s...”
– - Christopher Mims, How Facebook Saved Us from Suburbia via Technology Review
(via courtenaybird)
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“Phatic posts (or small talk) in communication processes online are very...”
– - Danica Radovanovic, Phatic Posts: Even the Small Talk Can Be Big via Scientific American
Small talk is big again.
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Social Discovery Hasn't Found Its Way, Yet
Andrew Keen pans the current crop of social discovery apps, like Highlight, Glancee, Banjo, and Sonar:
Andrew Keen, Messing With Fate via The Atlantic
Applying algorithms to the personal data on networks like Facebook and LinkedIn, these apps try to introduce us to nearby people whom we might like to meet—because we listed the same career on LinkedIn, say, or because we “liked” the same bands...
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Big Data and Data Inequality: Research Is Just The...
There was a recent hoo-ha at a scientific conference in France, when Bernardo Huberman was furious when researchers from Google and a contributing university presenting results of social data analysis declined to share the data.
John Markoff, Big Data Troves Stay Forbidden to Social Scientists via NYTimes.com
The issue came to a boil last month at a scientific conference in Lyon, France, when...
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“@stoweboyd: Can SAP Make Business Processes Social? http://t.co/haXECM7i A...”
– via Twitter: May 25, 2012 at 01:41AM via http://bit.ly/JxeYnG
I take a hard look at a recent Financial Times opinion piece by SAP Co-CEO, Jim Snabe, and although it’s not necessarily socialwash, it doesn’t really get to the heart of the matter: how to create a social environment that...
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“@huddle: RT @PandoTicker: Huddle Raises $24 Million for Enterprise Collaboration...”
– May 24, 2012 at 08:54AM via http://bit.ly/JuMfjk
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What Happened To The Hype About Hyperlocal?
Two things today made me assess the small progress made in hyperlocal journalism to date, and to reconsider the direction we might be headed in.
First, I saw a tweet go by pointing to a WSJ story:
Keach Hagey, For AOL, a Costly Gamble On Local News Draws Trouble
Mr. Armstrong, has held his ground in defending Patch, which he co-founded in 2007 before he joined AOL, but he recently promised to...
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“@LeanBack2_0: GigaOm’s @matthewi says @Twitter is becoming a media company...”
– May 23, 2012 at 08:13AM via http://bit.ly/KyCG0X
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F.C.C. Weighs Treating Video Sites Like Cable... →
The FCC is likely to let the genii out of th bottle, and redefine who is a Multichannel Video Programming Distributor, or MVPDs, now effectively limited to the linear TV players like Comcast and DirecTV. If the rules are changed to include streaming video services like Hulu and YouTube, the landscape of TV will never be the same:
Brian Stelter via NYTimes.com
Major distributors like Comcast and...
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“The broad consensus is that Google is an empty city where the masses go to set...”
– Cotton Delo, Google a Ghost Town as Brands Decamp for Pinterest via Advertising Age
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Readlists via Arc90 Lab →
Arc90 — the people behind Readability — have launched a new service called Readlists. Users can create a collation of links — of whatever sort — and bundle into an e-book that can be read on a Kindle, iPad, or iPhone.
I created one using the links I pulled together yesterday on Social Operating Systems, here. They are featuring a number on the www.readlists.com landing...
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A Model For Open Work Media
Over at Work Talk Research, I’ve written a short introduction to a big idea that I call Open Work. I use the term ‘work media’ to refer to the enterprise social networking tools that are being rapidly adopted in business these days, but I think the basic premises for those tools are too limiting and limited.
Stowe Boyd, A Model For Open Work Media
I am deep into a number of...
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“ Good design is innovative
Good design makes a product useful
Good design is...”
– Dieter Ram’s ten commandments of good design, via Brain Pickings
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Are Smart Phones Spreading Faster than Any... →
Michael DeGusta via Technology Review
[…] smart phones, after a relatively fast start, have also outpaced nearly any comparable technology in the leap to mainstream use. It took landline telephones about 45 years to get from 5 percent to 50 percent penetration among U.S. households, and mobile phones took around seven years to reach a similar proportion of consumers. Smart phones have gone from...
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“It’s unlikely that journalism will morph from digital roadkill to the next big...”
– David Carr, The Atavist Matures as a Publisher and a Platform via NYTimes.com
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The Social Operating System: A Reader
For the sake of my pal Valdis Krebs, I am collating a list of posts I’ve made in recent years on the idea of a social operating system. The basic notion:
Stowe Boyd, Rockmelt: Why The Social Browser Won’t Matter
The next generation of operating systems will be social at the core.We won’t be fooling with files and folders. We will be connecting with others, reading streams from our...
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“@jayrosen_nyu: Morning! New at my Tumblr: USA Today has a new boss. He thinks...”
– May 21, 2012 at 06:00AM via http://bit.ly/JgDRnj
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“Headphones are the new wall.”
– Ray Udeshi cited by John Tierney in From Cubicles, Cry for Quiet Pierces Office Buzz via NYTimes.com, discussing how office workers deal with the increasing noise in open space offices.
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“There is no winning formula or established convention for measuring long-term...”
– Matt Kingdon, ‘Not Everything That Matters Can Be Measured’
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“@lrainie: Cooperation via social software, not competition, is where real future...”
– May 18, 2012 at 07:46AM via http://bit.ly/Lk3ysj
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“@robhof: Old world, new world: HP lays off 30,000 people, Facebook goes public...”
– May 18, 2012 at 07:07AM via http://bit.ly/M111jr
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“@jowyang: Fantastic presentation by @stoweboyd who has a lens of Sociology,...”
– May 16, 2012 at 02:53PM via http://bit.ly/LVUPZY
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More On The New Aesthetic
Is Fashion Ready For A New Aesthetic?, Jay Owens via BOF
For the last few years, the stylistic purview of much of the creative class in places like Shoreditch in London, the borough of Brooklyn in New York, and Berlin’s Mitte district has been curiously backward-looking. Perhaps this retreat into retro nostalgia is a reaction to economic uncertainty and technological change. Maybe it’s a...
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“I suspect that Facebook will forever live within this dialectic, expanding the...”
– Steven Johnson on Can Anything Take Down the Facebook Juggernaut? | Epicenter | Wired.com
(via thisistheverge) 