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Get ready for a world where whether you land a particular job doesn't depend so much on what's written on your resume, or even on glowing references former employers, but instead, on information about you floating around the web.

Taking a look at a candidate's online activity, which will also include public Facebook and Twitter postings, can tell you how much passion a person has for the subject matters they'll be dealing with, Bounds says. It can also give clues about how well regarded the candidate is, based on who's following them.

Bounds says the information Path.To collects this way will only be "additive"--it will act as bonus points, as it were, underlining someone's fit for a particular position. The information, he says, will never be used to knock points off a candidate's score.

kids are building a personal brand from an early age. Their digital footprint will have an impact on their future. Where they end up getting admitted to college, getting a job, and more. Social media will help connect them with like-minded individuals, including mentors, that share similar interests and aspirations that can help them achieve their long-term goals.

Facebook has a minimum age restriction of 13 years old to create an account. But according to Consumer Reports, last year 78% of parents helped create their children’s Facebook pages and 7.5 million users are under the age of 13 and lied about the age associated with the account.

After getting into a discussion with the third graders, we learned that several of them had abandoned their Facebook accounts because that’s where their parents were. They knew that the adult powers that be are a hop, skip, and a click away from monitoring the kid’s accounts on Facebook. The third-grade solution was to hop from Facebook to Instagram (which, ironically, Facebook also owns). In some cases, kids said they created new, rogue Facebook accounts where they connected with their friends and used their old ones as a decoy for parental supervision.

more online adults use it than Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram or Pinterest (according to the Pew Internet and American Life Project).

Three out of four workers access social media on the job from their mobile devices at least once a day, and 60% access it multiple times, according to a survey of more than 1,100 employees in North America

But they’re not goofing off, the survey shows. Nearly half said connecting with co-workers was the top reason they used social media at work, followed by connecting with others on a fun social platform and connecting with customers.

Other leading reasons for using social media at work included having a platform for sharing work-related content and collaborating to drive new ideas and innovative thinking.

What are the key steps of the invention process? I describe it with my model, the Innovation Engine. First, there's an internal part. People normally start with imagination, being able to conjure ideas up in your mind. You need a base of knowledge with which you can work; if you don't have a base of knowledge, then you don't have a toolbox for your imagination. You also have to have the motivation and drive to solve the problem, because getting beyond the obvious answers requires a tremendous amount of activation energy.You need the imagination, you need the knowledge, and you need the attitude, which is the spark for this process, but there are also a lot of external factors that people do not take into account. What are these external factors?You need an environment where creativity is supported: everything from the physical space you're in, to the people you're with, the rules, the rewards, the constraints, the culture, and the resources present. All of these things have a huge impact on how an individual, a team, or an organization functions from a creative perspective.

How can managers create an environment nourishing to creativity? I've talked to some executives about this question, and they say, "My job as a manager is to create a habitat that fosters innovation." The innovation engine can get sparked anywhere--it's a kind of Möbius cube--there's no beginning and no end. If you're a manager, your job is to create a habitat that stimulates the imagination of your team, of your employees, of your colleagues.

One of the most common things that people say during a brainstorming session is "let me build on that." It’s a great way, even if you're going to take a tangential turn from what someone just said, to validate what they said and come up with an interesting segue to something else. You want to keep moving forward and going beyond the first wave of ideas and the second wave of ideas and keep pushing. The worst way to brainstorm is when everyone has their own ideas and nobody has taken [one another’s ideas] in different directions. Everyone feels a sense of ownership for their own idea, and then when you make the decision about what you're going to do, you have a lot of "Well, I like my idea," "I like my idea."

Sixty-nine percent of the heads of households in the U.S. play computer and video games. And 97% of young people — your emerging talent pool — play them

Endless sameness. People come to work and, without climactic events, do essentially the same thing every day forever — like a mountain climber who never sees a peak ahead.

Little sense of personal achievement. Most people lack sharply measured goals. They can work diligently every day but never have a significant success — or failure.

research suggests that readers prefer their tablets' Web browsers to the meaty, slow-to-update and even more slow-to-evolve native apps that publishers have been eagerly developing since Steve Jobs first held up the iPad on stage in 2010.

Inspired by the Netflix model, magazine subscription service Next Issue launched on iOS in July. For $10 per month, readers can get access to dozens of magazines from the likes of Conde Nast, Time Inc. and Hearst. This approach comes with challenges of its own, but it's certainly worth a try. 

Then there's The Magazine. Instapaper founder Marco Arment launched the stripped-down, iPad-only publication in October and it couldn't be more simple. For $2 per month, readers are promised eight thoughtful, well-written articles delivered in bi-weekly issues. The Magazine eschews the clunky, multimedia-loaded digital editions of print magazines in favor of a no-frills, high quality reading experience that Arment hopes people will think is good enough to pay for.

For the Xbox to be able to turn on, identify who you are, and log in to your profile at a moment's notice--simply at the sound of the voice command "Xbox on"--it needs to do something a bit creepy: It has to be listening to what people are saying in your living room all the time.

Microsoft almost definitely is not recording, let alone uploading and archiving, every sound that happens in your living room 24-7-365. That said, the fact remains that there is a microphone in your home that's always live and connected to some super-smart computing devices--and a very distant server.

Expect Labs made a smartphone app called Mind Meld that demonstrates their listening tech expertise. Mind Meld can listen to the online conversation of a group of people, and detect what they are talking to such a high level of automatic detection of content and context that it can magically suggest online sources of information that might interest the group.

shift toward what is now known as contextual computing

Amazon’s and Netflix’s recommendation engines, while not magnificently intuitive, feed you book and video recommendations based on your behavior and ratings. Facebook’s and Twitter’s valuations are premised on the notion that they can leverage knowledge of your acquaintances and interests to push out relevant content and market to you in more effective ways.

four data graphs essential to the rise of contextual computing: social, interest, behavior, and personal.

“Social media can’t belong to one person,” Preston said at the time. “It needs to be part of everyone’s job. It has to be integrated into the existing editorial process and production process.”

The downside of concentrating an audience in people instead of properties is that the former can change horses. After taking a buyout from the Times , Jim Roberts brought his nearly 100,000 followers to Reuters, flipping his handle from @nytjim to @nycjim.

one of the best ways to improve any experience is to simplify it--to remove complications, unnecessary layers, hassles, or distractions, while focusing on the essence of what people want and need in that particular situation.

Offering simplicity within a complex domain is likely to be so appreciated and valued by customers that it ends up being perceived as a luxury.

One way to carve out a luxury niche is by simplifying--by making it easier for customers to use a product or service without having to waste time thinking about it or sorting through too many options.

Deep in the oceans, hundreds of cables carry much of the world’s phone and Internet traffic. Since at least the early 1970s, the NSA has been tapping foreign cables. It doesn’t need permission. That’s its job.

shortly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, President George W. Bush secretly authorized the NSA to plug into the fiber optic cables that enter and leave the United States, knowing it would give the government unprecedented, warrantless access to Americans’ private conversations.

Tapping into those cables allows the NSA access to monitor emails, telephone calls, video chats, websites, bank transactions and more.

The music-listening part is only really worthwhile to those of us who pay for premium Spotify or Rdio accounts. Otherwise, we're going to continue to use those services' apps for the majority of your listening.

the "Me" and "Suggested" tabs of the app are of limited value if you don't follow a lot of musicians on Twitter. Indeed, using Twitter follows as a barometer for one's music taste is a curious choice. Sometimes musicians have worthwhile Twitter accounts, sometimes not.

Unlike the Facebook "like", the Twitter "follow" is not an explicit statement saying "I enjoy listening to this band." Instead, it's saying, "I think this band, whose music I happen to enjoy, might have interesting things to say, so I'm listening."

“The quality of shibumi evolves out of a process of complexity, though none of this complexity shows in the result.

Koko emphasizes restraint, exclusion, and omission. The goal is to present something that both appears spare and imparts a sense of focus and clarity.

Refrain from adding what is not absolutely necessary in the first place.

people who claimed their “usual” workweeks were longer than 75 hours were off, on average, by about 25 hours. You can guess in which direction. Those who claimed that a “usual” workweek was 65–74 hours were off by close to 20 hours. Those claiming a 55–64-hour workweek were still about 10 hours north of the truth. Subtracting these errors, you can see that most people top out at fewer than 60 work hours per week.

We live in a competitive world, and boasting about the number of hours we work has become a way to demonstrate how devoted we are to our jobs.

Gone are the days when you could stuff your website with low-quality articles packed with the right keywords or link spam exchanges to boost your Google rankings. Today the game is all about quality--content that’s authentic, informative, and, most of all, attractive to your intended audience. In short, we need to stop thinking about SEO as “search engine optimization” and more as “social engagement optimization,” as Greg Henderson at SEO Desk put it.

Our brains are getting inundated with messages all day long--so they respond well to pitches that are short and sweet. Short impactful statements on the homepage can do the job a whole lot better than huge blocks of copy that overexplain what you’re all about.

focus on quick ways to sum up how your product or service can change the customer’s life for the better.