Not the Best Headline

Disclaimer: I am not the most environment concious individual and should definitely do a better job to minimize my impact on the environment.

However, the Business Week article titled "How to Cash in on a Warming Planet" is a bit disturbing. The content is fine since it looks at just another variable that could influence your purchasing decision. However, the title is just a bit of a turn off. If you read the comments you can see there is a good mix of extremely negative and positive commentary.

It may be the strategy of online magazines or newspapers to use controversial titles nowadays to attrack eyeballs. However, at a certain point you risk offending your user base and with your competitors now just a click away a lot of risk versus reward analysis needs to be done.

Preview of Upcoming iPhone Update

The folks at gearlive posted a preview of the upcoming software update. It looks fricken' awesome. Things just keep getting better and better.

Best Graphic RE: Twitter Downtime

It is amazing how many people have posted about Twitter being down for an equivalent of 6 days since February. I have seen comments about people recommending a change in infrastructure, or moving to another service. Pretty high maintenance end users. I think 98% downtime is pretty commendable for an up and coming company. I have talked to folks whose Corporate email systems are down on average a couple of hours a week or key internal tools go down for days at a time. That is a serious issue where 99.999% uptime is a must.

I just hope the people complaining about the downtime are the individual's actually using twitter. It seems like more and more people like to jump on the bandwagon of broadcasting bad news. The geekandpoke blog illustrates the side effects of the "catastrophic" downtime best.

Social Network Contacts = New Currency

I was going through my FB feed today and noticed one of my buddies had installed the "My Files" application from Box.net. I thought it looked interesting so I installed it as well. Then I got the following image:
I got 60 MB in additional storage since 3 of my buddies had installed the app. I could "spam" my buddies and hopefully get them to install the app so I could get more storage, but I was pretty sure that would piss some of them off.

Is this the future of software? The more # of users you have = the more eyeballs = the more potential to make money off of advertising.

Best Management Practice

I just started subscribing to the WSJ recently in order to get information from "official journalists". I noticed two interesting articles on the WSJ regarding how to manage your employees and how to recruit executive talent.

The first article is great since it acknowledges you need to focus on the individuals that do all the work. However, I think it does not emphasize how you motivate people. Some people say you can motivate people by paying them a great deal of money or showing them a promising career path, but I think that is just wrong. If you have employees that are worried only about compensation or career growth, you have a fundamental issue in your organization. You need to make sure people are passionate about what they are working on, or understand how big an impact they are making on your organization. All individuals regardless of rank should always feel they are making an impact. People say you can only make a significant impact in small companies, but I think that is just an excuse. You can make a big impact in a larger company it just takes a bit more effort to make it happen. More importantly, if an individual is making an impact in your organization they are obviously going to get compensated appropriately so their concerns around monetary compensation or career growth opportunities become less of an issue.

I think the article about inflating titles with "Chief" is just demoralizing to employees that do all the work. There are obviously some game changing individuals in each industry for whom no title can do them justice. For the individuals that are not game changers, if they are not passionate about your organization why try to recruit them by inflating their title. Regardless of their rank, they need to feel passionate about the cause and want to join your corporation. More importantly, title inflation demoralizes individuals lower on the totem pole and complicates matters years down the road as organizations mature.

I may have said you need to be "passionate about your job" one too many times, but I think that is truly the key to motivation. If you are a manager and you are passionate, your enthusiasm is going to rub off on folks. If you are an individual contributor and you love what you do, you are going to do a kick ass job. If you have an enthusiastic workplace, everything will fall into place nicely and you can through the "how to manage" books out the door.

Amazing Use of the Wiimote

My bro introduced me to Johnny Lee's website over the Christmas Break. Some of the the things Johnny has built with the Wiimote and some infrared equipment is just awesome.

Ads on Good Ol' TVs versus Online TVs

I noticed an article on techcrunch talking about the effectiveness of ads on standard TV shows versus online version of TV shows. Anyone that reads this would think great you should move your advertising online, but then I noticed this article on RWW mentioning how hard it is to get a broad reach of users with scripted content online.

I think the next couple of years are going to be very interesting for the world of proprietary video. I hope there no longer is a demarcation of content from your set-top box verus what you get on your computer. Provided there is enough bandwidth all content should be available from any device at any time. That is the ultimate utopia. If advertisers and the distribution companies figure out how to build compelling and context sensitive ads that is icing on the cake for both the end user and the advertisers.