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Contents contributed and discussions participated by Gary Edwards

Gary Edwards

Announcing Usermind: finally harmony among SaaS apps… | Matt Murphy | LinkedIn - 0 views

  • One thing is clear: the shift to SaaS and its consumption and digitization of almost all enterprise processes, is unstoppable. Along with this transformation has come an explosion of vertical apps and data silos. If you want to check your user cohort data, send a customer an email or notification, make a payment, evaluate churn, or prioritize which customers to contact — there’s an app for that. However, if you want to write a simple process or workflow across those applications, it’s complicated, often manual, and slow.
  • The best apps focus on solving a key pain point, and thus end up having a fairly narrow scope. If you want to work in the best-in-class applications for your use case, you end up with a broad tech stack and disconnected processes. This is where Usermind comes in: a platform to automate cross-application workflows and business processes, and unify disconnected customer and product data from all of those applications.
  • It’s a great time to be investing in SaaS. We are particularly interested in the next wave of SaaS (affectionately called SaaS 2.0), which offers some combination of “mobile first,” integrates machine learning to make workflows smarter and better (e.g., Insidesales.com), and moves beyond "the system of record” (e.g., CRM, HRM) to reimagine a variety of new horizontal and vertical apps — or in the case of Usermind, enable them all to work well together!
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    "I'm thrilled to announce the public launch of Usermind, my first investment at Menlo Ventures, and one that I'm particularly excited about. Within the first 10 minutes of meeting Michel Feaster, founder and CEO of Usermind, I knew I had to invest. Michel is an impressive entrepreneur - smart, high-energy, passionate, thoughtful, and a big product thinker - and she just happens to be addressing an incredibly important problem in the enterprise that is getting more pronounced by the day."
Gary Edwards

Google adds support for Microsoft Office, Facebook at Work, Slack and others to its sin... - 0 views

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    "Google doesn't just offer its own web-based productivity apps, but it also offers a service for business users who want to use Google as an identity provider for accessing other online services using the widely used SAML standard. Today, Google is adding a few new options to this program, which now includes a number of Google competitors. Among the 14 new pre-configured options are the likes of Microsoft Office 365, Facebook at Work, New Relic, Concur, Box, Tableau, HipChat and Slack."
Gary Edwards

The suddenly exciting future of enterprise communications | TechCrunch - 0 views

  • Enterprise communications is not a sector that typically generates palpable excitement. In the enterprise, the plumbing is never as exciting as the fixtures, and people spend more time noticing what communications enables than how it’s delivered. It doesn’t help that enterprise communications is often dismissed as slow to innovate, given its high capital costs to deploy new infrastructure and natural monopolies. But this bias is now outdated, largely because software has taken the lead in an industry that was previously hardware-centric. And communications is one of very few markets where startups can claim their share of a trillion-dollar market. Companies like Slack, Fuze (formerly ThinkingPhones) and Twilio have carved out large and growing businesses in new categories to improve the way enterprises communicate. One of the main drivers for this shift is because communications is moving from one of the most closed tech ecosystems to one of the most open. In the era of telecom monopolies and copper wires, only a few trusted wizards actually knew how to build and maintain complicated systems that needed to deliver 99.999 percent uptime. As infrastructure has moved to data, faster networks and the cloud, it has become much easier not only to provide basic connectivity, but also to layer on additional services.
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    "Enterprise communications is not a sector that typically generates palpable excitement. In the enterprise, the plumbing is never as exciting as the fixtures, and people spend more time noticing what communications enables than how it's delivered. It doesn't help that enterprise communications is often dismissed as slow to innovate, given its high capital costs to deploy new infrastructure and natural monopolies. But this bias is now outdated, largely because software has taken the lead in an industry that was previously hardware-centric. And communications is one of very few markets where startups can claim their share of a trillion-dollar market. Companies like Slack, Fuze (formerly ThinkingPhones) and Twilio have carved out large and growing businesses in new categories to improve the way enterprises communicate. One of the main drivers for this shift is because communications is moving from one of the most closed tech ecosystems to one of the most open. In the era of telecom monopolies and copper wires, only a few trusted wizards actually knew how to build and maintain complicated systems that needed to deliver 99.999 percent uptime. As infrastructure has moved to data, faster networks and the cloud, it has become much easier not only to provide basic connectivity, but also to layer on additional services."
Gary Edwards

Werner Vogels: Amazon builds it own tech - Business Insider - 0 views

  • To decode that a little, he's saying that by using AWS, businesses turn their IT into a monthly operating expense. But Amazon still has to cough up huge chunks of capital-expense cash in advance to outfit its data center, so it's motivated to find ways to do that as cheaply as possible.
  • That's already playing out with Facebook's OCP project. Although Amazon hasn't publicly said it is working with the OCP, just about every large cloud company has signed up, including Apple, Microsoft and, more recently, Google. And so have some very large enterprises like Goldman Sachs.  While vendors like Dell and HP are involved in OCP, they aren't in the driver's seat. For the first time, that seat is filled with the companies who are using the equipment, not the vendors selling it.
  • Vogels believes the move to the cloud will get even more intense (and most market researchers agree with him).
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  • It has already reshaped how startups are launched. AppleThese days, all you need to launch a startup is a laptop."The startup world is radically different today than it was 10 years ago. A typical investment 10 years ago, to be able to get a business off the ground that needs to scale in one way or another, was around $5 million. Today, for $50,000-$100,000, you can get yourself a pretty good businesses started ... the rise of the whole startup culture is largely driven by cloud." The same thing is happening now to established companies, even those who previously ran their own private data centers. "Moving over to the cloud allows them [companies] to have their engineers focus on things that matter for the business," he tells us.
  • "If you look at other cloud providers in the market, there's quite a few of them still sort of in the phase where AWS was five, six years ago — in 2010 — at the moment we were still much more focused on the infrastructure side of things than the sort of rich collection of services."
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    "There's no question Amazon is turning the screws on the $140 billion data-center-tech industry. Amazon has grown to become the largest player in the rapidly growing cloud industry as its cloud platform, Amazon Web Services (AWS), celebrates its 10-year anniversary.  And in the process, AWS has sent shockwaves through the traditional enterprise sector. In an interview with Business Insider, Werner Vogels - the CTO of Amazon in charge of AWS - explained why hardware companies aren't going to get any respite any time soon. Hardware builders are getting squeezed out the game Right now, instead of buying all of their own computers, networks, and software, businesses large and small are opting to rent it all from cloud-computing vendors. That spells bad news for companies like IBM, HP, Dell, EMC, Cisco, the hardware makers selling companies the servers, storage, and management software."
Gary Edwards

The app inventor's guide to unlocking investment funds | VentureBeat | Entrepreneur | b... - 1 views

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    "The great thing about ideas is that they don't cost anything. Today there are more ways than ever to turn your app ideas into something material for close to free, but at the next steps of app entrepreneurship, you'll need more than pocket change. This article is for app inventors who already have a minimum viable product on hand. When you're ready to truly launch your product into the world, you'll need sufficient capital and a team of people behind you who can help you take it to the next level. This role is often best filled by experienced angel, seed, and venture investors. The key to securing an investor or investors is doing your homework. You'll need to first take your idea to the people who can push the concept, and you, further. Think of securing funding as looking for a new job, because that's really what it is. You're on the hunt for the funds that will make self-employment and professional self-realization possible. So, where to start? First, ask yourself if you are prepared for conversations with investors. It's great to get a meeting, but you'll usually only have one shot with a potential backer. Have you validated that your idea works? Can you effectively acquire users and monetize your business? If the answer is yes to these questions, then make sure you have a concise and well-designed 10-page pitch deck that explains how you will execute and scale your idea. If you're not sure what should be in the deck, try a quick Google search for some helpful examples, or refer to this video that explains the key components. Next, you need to make a list of appropriate investors. Narrow the list to only funds that invest in your sector and understand the size relative to the round you are trying to raise. If you're contacting growth funds for your $200K seed round, you're wasting your time. Vet your list against Crunchbase and AngelList, two resources that will give you the full scoop on the funds you are looking at. Once you've p
Gary Edwards

The 5 Best Free Word Processors - 0 views

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    "We've all used Microsoft Word, the most ubiquitous word processor on the market, at one point in our lives. It still proves to be a staple, especially in education, but there are plenty of competitors vying for our word processing loyalty."
Gary Edwards

Why Microsoft is building HoloLens - Business Insider - 0 views

  • Jumpstarting the future The iPhone and Android have a stranglehold on the mobile market. Apple has ridden the iPhone to becoming the most valuable company in the world, while Google's Android is now the most powerful operating system in the world. Microsoft missed that boat. And Microsoft, going forward, has to decide if it wants to keep throwing good money after bad into its struggling Windows phone business while it tries to force the next big thing to happen. 
  • Microsoft has decided to build the devices it wants to see in the world. And with PC sales shrinking, Microsoft is looking to more science-fictional concepts. The tone was set in 2012, when Microsoft launched the Surface, its first tablet. That was followed up by the Surface Pro laptop/tablet hybrid, and eventually, the Surface Book, Microsoft's first full-fledged laptop.  
  • And in all cases, those cloned devices are running the Microsoft Windows 10 operating system.
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  • Building a computer (or a hologram headset, or a car) is labor-intensive, requires a lot of specialized parts, and takes time to make each and every unit. Dell's margins hover around 3%; Ford's are around 7%.  Meanwhile, one of Microsoft's big advantages has always been that software is a much higher-margin business than hardware. In 1999, right at the height of its powers, Microsoft's operating margins were 51.7%.
  • Microsoft's smart move was to make profitable software, and let companies like IBM, Dell, HP, and Compaq build their low-margin, "IBM Compatible" PCs. After all, they all still needed buckets of pricey Windows licenses, no matter what they charged for their computers.
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    The key to the Microsoft Empire has always been that of controlling the "interoperability layer". It's something Bill Gates learned in 1980, when he opted to forgo royalty payments from IBM for DOS, in order to control all rights to DOS. "Probably the smartest choice Bill Gates ever made came in 1980, when he decided not to hand over the copyright for Microsoft's first-ever operating system to IBM.  In 1980, IBM contracted a startup called Microsoft to deliver DOS, an operating system for its forthcoming IBM PC, on a tight deadline. The IBM PC came out in 1981, and soon became a smash hit, surpassing the leading Apple II. A horde of competitors rushed to build their own "IBM Compatible" clones that could run all of the same software and use all of the same hardware upgrades. But to build those IBM clones, they needed DOS. And if they wanted DOS, they needed to fork over cash to Microsoft. Microsoft kept the rights in lieu of royalties from IBM. DOS put Microsoft the very center of the PC revolution, even through the era of Windows, and even after IBM left the PC market, eventually selling off that business. 36 years later, it's been a long time since the IBM PC moment. And with the Apple iPhone and Google Android ruling the all-important mobile market, Microsoft missed its shot at the mobile operating system revolution.  That's why Microsoft, which keeps boasting about how much it loves selling cloud services and subscriptions, is suddenly investing so much in hardware like the HoloLens and the Surface. If no new IBM PC will come along like in 1981, Microsoft will just have to build it itself. "
Gary Edwards

How Not to Die - 0 views

  • If you can just avoid dying, you get rich. That sounds like a joke, but it's actually a pretty good description of what happens in a typical startup. It certainly describes what happened in Viaweb. We avoided dying till we got rich.
  • It was really close, too. When we were visiting Yahoo to talk about being acquired, we had to interrupt everything and borrow one of their conference rooms to talk down an investor who was about to back out of a new funding round we needed to stay alive. So even in the middle of getting rich we were fighting off the grim reaper.You may have heard that quote about luck consisting of opportunity meeting preparation. You've now done the preparation. The work you've done so far has, in effect, put you in a position to get lucky: you can now get rich by not letting your company die. That's more than most people have. So let's talk about how not to die.
  • Another feeling that seems alarming but is in fact normal in a startup is the feeling that what you're doing isn't working. The reason you can expect to feel this is that what you do probably won't work. Startups almost never get it right the first time. Much more commonly you launch something, and no one cares. Don't assume when this happens that you've failed. That's normal for startups. But don't sit around doing nothing. Iterate.
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  • One of the most interesting things we've discovered from working on Y Combinator is that founders are more motivated by the fear of looking bad than by the hope of getting millions of dollars. So if you want to get millions of dollars, put yourself in a position where failure will be public and humiliating.
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    "August 2007 (This is a talk I gave at the last Y Combinator dinner of the summer. Usually we don't have a speaker at the last dinner; it's more of a party. But it seemed worth spoiling the atmosphere if I could save some of the startups from preventable deaths. So at the last minute I cooked up this rather grim talk. I didn't mean this as an essay; I wrote it down because I only had two hours before dinner and think fastest while writing.) A couple days ago I told a reporter that we expected about a third of the companies we funded to succeed. Actually I was being conservative. I'm hoping it might be as much as a half. Wouldn't it be amazing if we could achieve a 50% success rate? Another way of saying that is that half of you are going to die. Phrased that way, it doesn't sound good at all. In fact, it's kind of weird when you think about it, because our definition of success is that the founders get rich. If half the startups we fund succeed, then half of you are going to get rich and the other half are going to get nothing."
Gary Edwards

MS Office 365 and its Influence on Business - 0 views

  • “MS Office has virtually no rivals with its volume of functionality and compatibility of the document formats”
  • Office 365: what is going on at the market? Offline version of MS Office has actually not many competitors with the comparable functionality. LibreOffice, OpenOffice, CorelOffice etc. may be referred among them. But if you examine the cross-platform solutions for the offline document editing, MS Office has virtually no rivals with its volume of functionality and compatibility of the document formats.
  • Costs of the full-fledged package MS Office 365 (including its cloud-based capacities) and the offline version of MS Office 2013/2016 for the home users are comparable. Therefore the progressive transition of the majority of users to MS Office 365 may be forecasted.
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  • Currently the primary market spreading the MS Office 365 services is the corporate sector. However soon, due to the flexible pricing policy of Microsoft, new home users will progressively give their preference to MS Office 365. Rise of popularity of the off-the-shelf Microsoft solutions in the corporate sector, especially in the midst of the small and mid-sized business, is also expected. Integration of MS Office 365 with SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, Skype, OneDrive, PowerBIand Lync Online allows the full-scaled employment of the MS stack for document management and solution of other company tasks (video conferences, corporate mail, team-work with documents, data monitoring and analyze etc.).
  • There are three essential reasons why Office 365 will be highly demanded by business: - Business currently needs services for collaborative editing of the huge documents as well as for arrangement and management of their ample quantities; provision of the required safety level in the document workflow systems without additional expenses. Set of the Microsoft services and its integration with MS Office 365 offer solution for these tasks with some minor reservations. -Integration of MS Office 365 with existing services and employment of the off-the-shelf Microsoft solutions for organization of the document workflow are also the promising trends. -Good results can be expected from employment of the cloud-based Azure platform for extension of the MS Office 365 capacities and building process setup and document workflow systems in the small and mid-sized business environment.
  • But if you examine the cross-platform solutions for the offline document editing, MS Office has virtually no rivals with its volume of functionality and compatibility of the document formats.
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    "Microsoft Office 365: what is important for business to know about the "cloud-based" office? Cloud-based service Microsoft Office 365 has become more and more popular solution for managing document workflow in companies. Subsequently, the number of MS Office 365 subscribers is growing by tens percent every year. For instance in the third quarter of 2015 the cloud-based services Office 365, Azure and Dynamics CRM became the principal drivers of the profit markup of Microsoft. Office 365: what is going on at the market? Offline version of MS Office has actually not many competitors with the comparable functionality. LibreOffice, OpenOffice, CorelOffice etc. may be referred among them. But if you examine the cross-platform solutions for the offline document editing, MS Office has virtually no rivals with its volume of functionality and compatibility of the document formats. Costs of the full-fledged package MS Office 365 (including its cloud-based capacities) and the offline version of MS Office 2013/2016 for the home users are comparable. Therefore the progressive transition of the majority of users to MS Office 365 may be forecasted. Currently the primary market spreading the MS Office 365 services is the corporate sector. However soon, due to the flexible pricing policy of Microsoft, new home users will progressively give their preference to MS Office 365. Rise of popularity of the off-the-shelf Microsoft solutions in the corporate sector, especially in the midst of the small and mid-sized business, is also expected. Integration of MS Office 365 with SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, Skype, OneDrive, PowerBIand Lync Online allows the full-scaled employment of the MS stack for document management and solution of other company tasks (video conferences, corporate mail, team-work with documents, data monitoring and analyze etc.). "MS Office has virtually no rivals with its volume of functionality and compatibility of the document formats" "
Gary Edwards

Hyland tosses hat into EFSS ring with launch of ShareBase - FierceContentManagement - 0 views

  • ECM vendor Hyland tossed its hat into the EFSS ring this week with the release of ShareBase, a cloud-based file sync and share app for enterprise. Though it can be used independently of Hyland's flagship ECM product, OnBase, the app is primarily designed to allow OnBase customers to securely share and access documents in and outside the organization. ShareBase only works with corporate email addresses, so shared documents remain firmly under administrator control. User rights are easy to change, transfer and revoke so content remains unaffected by employee turnover. The app automates notifications and sharing when used with OnBase, triggering events as soon as documents upload into ShareBase.
  • "The creation of ShareBase was our response to continual feedback from customers needing a better way to share and collaborate on content," Bill Priemer, president and CEO of Hyland,
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    "ECM vendor Hyland tossed its hat into the EFSS ring this week with the release of ShareBase, a cloud-based file sync and share app for enterprise. Though it can be used independently of Hyland's flagship ECM product, OnBase, the app is primarily designed to allow OnBase customers to securely share and access documents in and outside the organization. ShareBase only works with corporate email addresses, so shared documents remain firmly under administrator control. User rights are easy to change, transfer and revoke so content remains unaffected by employee turnover. The app automates notifications and sharing when used with OnBase, triggering events as soon as documents upload into ShareBase."
Gary Edwards

Uh Oh Google Hangouts, Slack Is Adding Video - 0 views

  • Now Here’s the Twist There is a technology that is getting disrupted but it is not another real-time messaging app. Instead it is traditional telephony.
  • The survey unearthed that an eye-popping 71 percent of small-to-medium will not invest in another phone system at all or will not increase their investment in these systems, in large part because of real-time instant messaging and video conferencing applications.
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    "It says something about the state of collaboration tech that the disruptors of a few years ago are at danger of being disrupted.  For example, take Google Hangouts. A novel development when it was released by Google in 2013, Hangouts can be used to message a friend or co-worker or up to one hundred people for a group chat. But now it could conceivably be displaced by San Francisco-based Slack Technologies, a workspace collaboration tool that has quickly grown in popularity as well as third-party features - and is now adding video and voice to the menu. So could Skype Technologies, for that matter, which Microsoft acquired in May 2011 for $8.5 billion. Indeed, Google Hangouts was referred to as a Skype-killer when it was introduced some two years later. Spot the Pattern? New York City-based BetterCloud did and it discusses this trend in its unbelievably well-timed report, "Real-time Messaging Research and Comparison Real-Time Messaging: Data Unearths Surprising Findings on Usage, Distraction, and Organizational Impact." However, the report's finding take on a surprising twist. The disruptors-get-disrupted story line does not pan out. Instead it finds that, as of right now, there is enough room for multiple messaging apps in the enterprise and indeed, we can see with our own eyes that Google Hangouts didn't kill Skype.  More than likely, Slack is not going to turn out to be a Hangouts assassin. More than half, or 57 percent, of respondents told BetterCloud that their organizations use two more real-time messaging apps with little conflict."
Gary Edwards

Google's Working On a Wireless End to Phishing #RSAC - 0 views

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    "In a few years' time, you may have the opportunity to carry a device with you that authenticates your identity wirelessly to systems and mobile devices. And your employer may require you to carry a wireless authenticator to apply the same degree of access policies to your headquarters building as it does to your network. This may end up becoming the same device. There are folks who believe that should be the mobile phone, but there may yet be solid arguments against it, including this one: Do you really want your wireless carrier involved in your employer/employee relationships? Mapping the Future During an unscheduled demo at the RSA Conference here yesterday, senior officials from Google introduced a working model for a next-generation authentication device - a device to go beyond two-factor authentication systems, which have been exploited by "phishers." For now, this unnamed device provides an instantaneous second factor of authentication without needing to be plugged into a USB port, like current security keys today that follow the open FIDO U2F standard. Google first incorporated support for physical keys like Yubikey into its draft of FIDO U2F in October 2014."
Gary Edwards

Facebook adds 36K Telenor employees to Facebook at Work as it gears up for global launc... - 0 views

  • Facebook at Work — the enterprise version of Facebook that lets businesses build their own secure social networks — has racked up over 60,000 companies on a waiting list while still in closed beta. And as it gears up for a full global launch and new features like an app platform later this year, Facebook is announcing its newest big customer. As of today, Telenor, the carrier based out of Norway with operations in some 13 countries covering 203 million people, is turning on Facebook for 36,000 employees globally.
  • New integration platform in the works with Quip, Box, And More Looking forward, Codorniou says that Facebook will be adding an increasing number of features to Facebook at Work after is launches out of beta later this year. This will include actually asking people to pay to use the product, which for now is still being offered to businesses free of charge.
  • Facebook at Work will continue to add features that give it parity with the core Facebook product — one notable example is the Work Chat app that Facebook released earlier this year, which essentially is a version of Messenger for those using Facebook at Work; another is the addition of Reactions, the “super-charged” Like button that was finally rolled out globally last week, which was also added to Facebook at Work at the same time.
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  • Facebook is already in discussions with Quip (the cloud-based word processing app co-founded by Facebook’s ex-CTO and in use by FB globally), as well as Dropbox and Box, and he also mentioned Microsoft’s Office 365 as another popular app Facebook would want to integrate.
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    "Facebook at Work - the enterprise version of Facebook that lets businesses build their own secure social networks - has racked up over 60,000 companies on a waiting list while still in closed beta. And as it gears up for a full global launch and new features like an app platform later this year, Facebook is announcing its newest big customer. As of today, Telenor, the carrier based out of Norway with operations in some 13 countries covering 203 million people, is turning on Facebook for 36,000 employees globally."
Gary Edwards

Problems with Slack - Business Insider - 0 views

  • Slack, you’re asking for A LOT of my time I may have been fooling myself when we were still in the honeymoon phase, but when there was all the talk of you killing email, I have to admit I thought it was the email problem you were attacking, not just the emailplatform. Which is to say, I thought you were providing some relief from the torrential influx of messages, alerts, and notifications I was receiving on a daily basis. “Me + Slack = Fewer distractions and more productivity,” I thought at the time. I have to say, though, that I’ve since found it to be the opposite. Like, WAY the opposite. With you in my life, I’ve received exponentially more messages than I ever have before. And while it’s been awesome to have such a connection with you, it has been absolutely brutal on my productivity.
  • You’re splitting my attention into a thousand tiny pieces While it’s true that email was (and, despite your valiant efforts, still very much is) a barely-manageable firehose of to-do list items controlled by strangers, one of the few things that it did have going for it was that at least everything was in one place. Trying to keep up with the manifold follow-up tasks from the manifold conversations in your manifold teams and channels requires a Skynet-like metapresence that is simply beyond me. With you, the firehose problem has become a hydra-headed monster.
  • You’re actually making it HARDER to have a conversation Back before we met, I had two primary modes of digitally communicating with people: Real TimeSome of the digital platforms I used were inherently “real time” (phone, Skype, IRC, Google Hangouts, etc.), where there was a built-in expectation of an immediate, rapid-fire conversation wherein everyone involved was more or less fully-present and participating. AsynchronousConversely, there were other platforms that were inherently asynchronous(email, voicemail, iMessage, Twitter DMs, etc.), where there was no expectation of an immediate response, and people tended to send cogent feedback in their own time. Then you came along, and rocked everyone’s world by introducing a conversational melting pot that is neither fully real time, nor fully asynchronous. You’re somewhere in between: You’re asynchronish. 
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  • You’re turning my workdays into one long Franken-meeting I think you and I can both agree that meetings are kind of the worst. And, on the surface, you do totally obviate the need for a ton of them. I can definitely think of many times in which a quick Slack whip-around has saved me from all kinds of interpersonal tedium. So thank you for that. However, I’m wondering what the cost of it is. Specifically, I wonder if conducting business in an asynchronish environment simply turns every minute into an opportunity for conversation, essentially “meeting-izing” the entire workday. All-day meetings every day of the week are substantially more “meetings” than the ones you’re saving me from.
  • Lastly, you’re a bit on the possessive side I will put this simply, Slack: not unlike Jake Gyllenhaal in Brokeback Mountain, I wish I knew how to quit you. When I started feeling like our relationship was getting to be just a little too much, I decided to take a few days off. That was never a problem when I was with email — I’d just fire up a vacation autoresponder and be on my merry way. With you, though, there’s apparently no option for deescalating our relationship outside of a few hours in “Do Not Disturb” mode. This means there’s no bigger-picture safety valve to make sure we’re not about to drive off a cliff hand-in-hand, like a socio-digital Thelma & Louise.
  • I’m sorry, but I need my space Maybe you will say I’m afraid of commitment, but I’m just not interested in a relationship that seems to want to swallow up more and more of my time and attention, and demand that more and more of my interactions with other people go through you first.
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    "Hey there, Slack. This won't be easy, but it's for the best. As you and I both know, things started out so wonderfully. Me with my exploding inbox, you with your (very sexy) ambition to make email obsolete. Only, I don't know if we're so good for each other, after all. Or, more to the point, I don't know if firing up a relationship with you ever really fixed what was broken in my other one to begin with. Everyone knows email and I had our issues. Email started as a frisky exploration into a whole new world and quickly escalated to a scale beyond anyone's expectations. Next thing I knew, email and I had not only put a ring on it, we'd bought a minivan and moved into a little place in the suburbs. Was it rushed? Sure. I think if we'd known just how big the relationship was going to become, email and I would have set things up very differently from the start. Still, a commitment's a commitment, and we'd settled into a routine we could at least call our own. Then, out of nowhere, here you come riding into my life like a goddamned Clint Eastwood straight out of Bridges of Madison County. The personality! The colors! You were all promises, rose petals, and sex appeal. And SO much more responsive to my needs. Soon, we were messaging every day. It wasn't long until it was hard to think of a time I'd ever gotten things done without you. "
Gary Edwards

How Google will beat Amazon's cloud | ZDNet - 0 views

  • The cloud has upended the enterprise storage market, but that isn't its competitive advantage. Local scale-out storage can be competitive with cloud because network bandwidth isn't cheap.What the cloud has that no enterprise-scale datacenter will ever have is the ability to spin up 10s of thousands CPUs - a virtual supercomputer - to run analytics against the data. CPUs are expensive - and they'll remain so as long as Intel can keep them that way.
  • The ready access to massive CPU cycles means that cloud will always be better at deep analytics, especially ad-hoc queries, than enterprise scale datacenters. But more importantly, cloud-based machine learning, neural networks and artificial intelligence are the next major evolution in how we use data.
  • And that's where Google has a huge lead over Amazon. Amazon's focus on building cloud-based datacenters makes them irresistable now, but the future of the cloud is with applications that can use thousands of cores to create value.
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    "THE EVOLUTION OF NEW TECHNOLOGY New technologies go through predictable phases. The hype cycle is phase one. Cloud is well beyond that. Phase two: we build what we already have with the new technology. So, cloud-based file storage. Amazon has moved far beyond storage. They enable customers to build entire data centers in the cloud. That is their key strategic advantage. Phase three is where life gets interesting: we build what we could not build before. More on that in a moment. That's the build side. What about the use side? Today, customers are happy building data centers in the cloud. They are looking for AWS to add more capabilities so they can run their legacy apps and get rid of their internal data centers altogether i.e. cloud admin will be a fast growing occupation; sys admin won't. THE NEXT STEP The cloud has upended the enterprise storage market, but that isn't its competitive advantage. Local scale-out storage can be competitive with cloud because network bandwidth isn't cheap. What the cloud has that no enterprise-scale datacenter will ever have is the ability to spin up 10s of thousands CPUs - a virtual supercomputer - to run analytics against the data. CPUs are expensive - and they'll remain so as long as Intel can keep them that way. The ready access to massive CPU cycles means that cloud will always be better at deep analytics, especially ad-hoc queries, than enterprise scale datacenters. But more importantly, cloud-based machine learning, neural networks and artificial intelligence are the next major evolution in how we use data. And that's where Google has a huge lead over Amazon. Amazon's focus on building cloud-based datacenters makes them irresistable now, but the future of the cloud is with applications that can use thousands of cores to create value. Look at what Google - and Microsoft - has done with machine translation. Yes, you need many petabytes of storage for the corpus, but the real key is in the compute resources and algorit
Gary Edwards

What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Today, on corporate campuses and within university laboratories, psychologists, sociologists and statisticians are devoting themselves to studying everything from team composition to email patterns in order to figure out how to make employees into faster, better and more productive versions of themselves.
  • ‘‘We’re living through a golden age of understanding personal productivity,’’ says Marshall Van Alstyne, a research scientist at M.I.T. who studies how people share information. ‘‘All of a sudden, we can pick apart the small choices that all of us make, decisions most of us don’t even notice, and figure out why some people are so much more effective than everyone else.’’
  • If a company wants to outstrip its competitors, it needs to influence not only how people work but also how they work together.
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  • ‘‘the time spent by managers and employees in collaborative activities has ballooned by 50 percent or more’’ over the last two decades and that, at many companies, more than three-quarters of an employee’s day is spent communicating with colleagues.
  • Five years ago, Google — one of the most public proselytizers of how studying workers can transform productivity — became focused on building the perfect team. In the last decade, the tech giant has spent untold millions of dollars measuring nearly every aspect of its employees’ lives. Google’s People Operations department has scrutinized everything from how frequently particular people eat together (the most productive employees tend to build larger networks by rotating dining companions) to which traits the best managers share (unsurprisingly, good communication and avoiding micromanaging is critical; more shocking, this was news to many Google managers).
  • In 2012, the company embarked on an initiative — code-named Project Aristotle — to study hundreds of Google’s teams and figure out why some stumbled while others soared. Dubey, a leader of the project, gathered some of the company’s best statisticians, organizational psychologists, sociologists and engineers. He also needed researchers. Rozovsky, by then, had decided that what she wanted to do with her life was study people’s habits and tendencies. After graduating from Yale, she was hired by Google and was soon assigned to Project Aristotle.
  • No matter how researchers arranged the data, though, it was almost impossible to find patterns — or any evidence that the composition of a team made any difference. ‘‘We looked at 180 teams from all over the company,’’ Dubey said. ‘‘We had lots of data, but there was nothing showing that a mix of specific personality types or skills or backgrounds made any difference. The ‘who’ part of the equation didn’t seem to matter.’’
  • As they struggled to figure out what made a team successful, Rozovsky and her colleagues kept coming across research by psychologists and sociologists that focused on what are known as ‘‘group norms.’’ Norms are the traditions, behavioral standards and unwritten rules that govern how we function when we gather: One team may come to a consensus that avoiding disagreement is more valuable than debate; another team might develop a culture that encourages vigorous arguments and spurns groupthink. Norms can be unspoken or openly acknowledged, but their influence is often profound.
  • Team members may behave in certain ways as individuals — they may chafe against authority or prefer working independently — but when they gather, the group’s norms typically override individual proclivities and encourage deference to the team.
  • After looking at over a hundred groups for more than a year, Project Aristotle researchers concluded that understanding and influencing group norms were the keys to improving Google’s teams. But Rozovsky, now a lead researcher, needed to figure out which norms mattered most. Google’s research had identified dozens of behaviors that seemed important, except that sometimes the norms of one effective team contrasted sharply with those of another equally successful group. Was it better to let everyone speak as much as they wanted, or should strong leaders end meandering debates? Was it more effective for people to openly disagree with one another, or should conflicts be played down? The data didn’t offer clear verdicts. In fact, the data sometimes pointed in opposite directions. The only thing worse than not finding a pattern is finding too many of them. Which norms, Rozovsky and her colleagues wondered, were the ones that successful teams shared?
  • the researchers wanted to know if there is a collective I. Q. that emerges within a team that is distinct from the smarts of any single member.
  • What interested the researchers most, however, was that teams that did well on one assignment usually did well on all the others. Conversely, teams that failed at one thing seemed to fail at everything. The researchers eventually concluded that what distinguished the ‘‘good’’ teams from the dysfunctional groups was how teammates treated one another. The right norms, in other words, could raise a group’s collective intelligence, whereas the wrong norms could hobble a team, even if, individually, all the members were exceptionally bright.
  • As the researchers studied the groups, however, they noticed two behaviors that all the good teams generally shared.
  • First, on the good teams, members spoke in roughly the same proportion, a phenomenon the researchers referred to as ‘‘equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking.’’
  • On some teams, everyone spoke during each task; on others, leadership shifted among teammates from assignment to assignment. But in each case, by the end of the day, everyone had spoken roughly the same amount. ‘‘As long as everyone got a chance to talk, the team did well,’’ Woolley said. ‘‘But if only one person or a small group spoke all the time, the collective intelligence declined.’’
  • Second, the good teams all had high ‘‘average social sensitivity’’ — a fancy way of saying they were skilled at intuiting how others felt based on their tone of voice, their expressions and other nonverbal cues.
  • One of the easiest ways to gauge social sensitivity is to show someone photos of people’s eyes and ask him or her to describe what the people are thinking or feeling — an exam known as the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test. People on the more successful teams in Woolley’s experiment scored above average on the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test. They seemed to know when someone was feeling upset or left out.
  • People on the ineffective teams, in contrast, scored below average. They seemed, as a group, to have less sensitivity toward their colleagues.
  • But all the team members speak as much as they need to. They are sensitive to one another’s moods and share personal stories and emotions. While Team B might not contain as many individual stars, the sum will be greater than its parts.
  • Within psychology, researchers sometimes colloquially refer to traits like ‘‘conversational turn-taking’’ and ‘‘average social sensitivity’’ as aspects of what’s known as psychological safety — a group culture that the Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson defines as a ‘‘shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking.’’
  • Psychological safety is ‘‘a sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject or punish someone for speaking up,
  • ‘‘It describes a team climate characterized by interpersonal trust and mutual respect in which people are comfortable being themselves.’’
  • Most of all, employees had talked about how various teams felt. ‘‘And that made a lot of sense to me, maybe because of my experiences at Yale,’’ Rozovsky said. ‘‘I’d been on some teams that left me feeling totally exhausted and others where I got so much energy from the group.’’
  • Rozovsky’s study group at Yale was draining because the norms — the fights over leadership, the tendency to critique — put her on guard.
  • Whereas the norms of her case-competition team — enthusiasm for one another’s ideas, joking around and having fun — allowed everyone to feel relaxed and energized.
  • For Project Aristotle, research on psychological safety pointed to particular norms that are vital to success. There were other behaviors that seemed important as well — like making sure teams had clear goals and creating a culture of dependability. But Google’s data indicated that psychological safety, more than anything else, was critical to making a team work.
  • the kinds of people who work at Google are often the ones who became software engineers because they wanted to avoid talking about feelings in the first place.
  • Rozovsky and her colleagues had figured out which norms were most critical. Now they had to find a way to make communication and empathy — the building blocks of forging real connections — into an algorithm they could easily scale.
  • They agreed to adopt some new norms: From now on, Sakaguchi would make an extra effort to let the team members know how their work fit into Google’s larger mission; they agreed to try harder to notice when someone on the team was feeling excluded or down.
  • But to Sakaguchi, it made sense that psychological safety and emotional conversations were related.
  • The behaviors that create psychological safety — conversational turn-taking and empathy — are part of the same unwritten rules we often turn to, as individuals, when we need to establish a bond. And those human bonds matter as much at work as anywhere else. In fact, they sometimes matter more.
  • What Project Aristotle has taught people within Google is that no one wants to put on a ‘‘work face’’ when they get to the office. No one wants to leave part of their personality and inner life at home. But to be fully present at work, to feel ‘‘psychologically safe,’’ we must know that we can be free enough, sometimes, to share the things that scare us without fear of recriminations.
  • We must be able to talk about what is messy or sad, to have hard conversations with colleagues who are driving us crazy. We can’t be focused just on efficiency. Rather, when we start the morning by collaborating with a team of engineers and then send emails to our marketing colleagues and then jump on a conference call, we want to know that those people really hear us. We want to know that work is more than just labor.
  • helping his team succeed ‘‘is the most meaningful work I’ve ever done,
  • He encourages the group to think about the way work and life mesh. Part of that, he says, is recognizing how fulfilling work can be.
  • Project Aristotle ‘‘proves how much a great team matters,’’ he said. ‘‘Why would I walk away from that? Why wouldn’t I spend time with people who care about me?’’
  • technology industry is not just one of the fastest growing parts of our economy; it is also increasingly the world’s dominant commercial culture.
  • The paradox, of course, is that Google’s intense data collection and number crunching have led it to the same conclusions that good managers have always known. In the best teams, members listen to one another and show sensitivity to feelings and needs.
  • Google, in other words, in its race to build the perfect team, has perhaps unintentionally demonstrated the usefulness of imperfection and done what Silicon Valley does best: figure out how to create psychological safety faster, better and in more productive ways.
  • ‘‘Don’t underestimate the power of giving people a common platform and operating language.’’
  • Project Aristotle is a reminder that when companies try to optimize everything, it’s sometimes easy to forget that success is often built on experiences — like emotional interactions and complicated conversations and discussions of who we want to be and how our teammates make us feel — that can’t really be optimized.
  •  
    "Five years ago, Google - one of the most public proselytizers of how studying workers can transform productivity - became focused on building the perfect team. In the last decade, the tech giant has spent untold millions of dollars measuring nearly every aspect of its employees' lives. Google's People Operations department has scrutinized everything from how frequently particular people eat together (the most productive employees tend to build larger networks by rotating dining companions) to which traits the best managers share (unsurprisingly, good communication and avoiding micromanaging is critical; more shocking, this was news to many Google managers)."
Gary Edwards

Don't Take Money from VCs Until You've Asked 4 Questions - 0 views

  • Investors in VC funds see returns data from a wide range of firms, and those performance figures make it clear that many well-known “brand” VC funds consistently fail to generate minimum venture rates of return.
  • The minimum “venture rate of return” investors expect to receive from a VC fund is twice the money they invested, net of fees and carry. Entrepreneurs should remember that VC firms exist solely to generate great returns for their investors, which means significantly outperforming the public equity markets by at least 300-500 basis points annually. Most VC funds fail, by a wide margin, to deliver those minimum returns.
  • To evaluate a VC firm’s track record, entrepreneurs can ask about actual performance. Many VCs will be open with entrepreneurs who ask about their firm’s returns. Beware those who won’t offer visibility, or focus on anecdotes of a few good exits without addressing the fund’s overall performance. Good returns from one or two exits don’t mean great returns for the fund, and one or two “logo investments” — where VCs invest in hot companies just to add their logos to the portfolio — don’t mean anything unless you understand the amount and timing of the investment, and the valuation.
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  • How much money is the VC personally investing?
  • What is the VC’s track record?
  • How big is the VC fund?
  • Do you have a list of portfolio company CEOs?
  •  
    "n the race to get the check in hand, most entrepreneurs don't do in-depth due diligence - or any due diligence - on the venture capital (VC) firms they pitch. Founding teams eager to raise capital to grow their companies enter into long-term partnerships with VC firms they don't know well. It's a risky strategy that can leave startup CEOs in mis-aligned partnerships with unrealistic expectations. To better understand their investors, entrepreneurs should start by asking these four questions: What is the VC's track record?"
Gary Edwards

Businesses spending more on tech, worrying more about IT disruption | CIO - 0 views

  • The good news is that the vast majority of decision-makers expect to maintain or increase their 2016 IT budgets. Forty-eight percent are planning IT budget growth at an average increase of 22 percent over last year, according to the study, while just six percent of companies are planning to spend less on IT than last year. Medium-sized companies are growing their tech spending most aggressively, with 60 percent planning to increase their budget by an average of 17 percent over 2015. The study found 42 percent of small companies are planning to increase their budget by an average of 27 percent over 2015, while 44 percent of large companies are planning to increase their budget by 18 percent over 2015.
  • Adoption of new cloud technologies and solutions will continue at a rapid clip in 2016. The study found 89 percent of technology influencers cited cloud computing as the innovation that has had the most significant impact on technology today and 84 percent plan on investing in cloud services in 2016. Software as a Service (SaaS) is likely to lead the way with 54 percent planning to invest, followed by Security as a Service, with 49 percent planning to invest.
  •  
    "Technology leaders are disenchanted with the current state of their IT infrastructure. According to a study released Tuesday by global technology provider Insight Enterprises, tech leaders give their companies' current IT infrastructure a "B minus" grade. For its first Insight Enterprises Intelligent Technology index, Insight Enterprises used Market Intel Group to conduct an online survey of a random sample of 403 IT professionals with decision-making responsibilities between Nov. 30, 2015 and Dec. 8, 2015. How to use Windows 10 backup and recovery features Sooner or later, you're going to experience a hard drive failure, usually when you least expect it. READ NOW The study found that 55 percent of respondents felt the current technology in place at their business was a hindrance to incorporating or adopting new technologies, even as 65 percent of respondents were worried about disruption from technology innovation. While 65 percent of tech leaders overall were worried about the prospect of disruption, tech-decision makers at larger companies are especially feeling the pressure: The study found that 74 percent of tech influencers at large companies and 75 percent of tech influencers at medium-sized companies were concerned about disruption. "
Gary Edwards

Microsoft Lumia 650: sophisticated, metal design and Windows 10 under $200 USD | Micros... - 0 views

  • The Best of Microsoft Productivity If you’re like me when you work, you want to really get things done. We need to be able to seamlessly move between our work and personal needs. Building on our success of more than 200 million devices running Windows 10, the Lumia 650 puts Microsoft’s smooth, responsive and most productive OS in your pocket. Our business customers continue to send great feedback on Windows 10 and are compelled by the mobility of the Windows experience across devices. Lumia 650 runs the latest Microsoft Office apps right out of the box, allowing you to create and edit documents on-the-go and sync them to the cloud via OneDrive. It’s also perfect for picking up on email and an important presentation during your commute. And with Cortana, your very own personal assistant, you’re always organized and prepared for the day ahead.
  •  
    "The Best of Microsoft Productivity If you're like me when you work, you want to really get things done. We need to be able to seamlessly move between our work and personal needs. Building on our success of more than 200 million devices running Windows 10, the Lumia 650 puts Microsoft's smooth, responsive and most productive OS in your pocket. Our business customers continue to send great feedback on Windows 10 and are compelled by the mobility of the Windows experience across devices. Lumia 650 runs the latest Microsoft Office apps right out of the box, allowing you to create and edit documents on-the-go and sync them to the cloud via OneDrive. It's also perfect for picking up on email and an important presentation during your commute. And with Cortana, your very own personal assistant, you're always organized and prepared for the day ahead."
Gary Edwards

Native Documents Viewer-Editor-PDF Converter - 0 views

  •  
    Native Documents on line view-edit-pdf converter. Drag and drop a native Office document to view and edit. And convert that ND to PDF. This Web Service also demonstrates ND deep messaging. EX: Drag and drop a native Office document and the browser will open the document for viewing and editing. Highlight a section of the document that you want to discuss. The URL will reflect this highlight. Copy the URL and paste into another app such as Slack, and slack will display the highlighted text as a message. The reason this deep messaging is significant is that ND captures the moment of conversation and records the action. The basic idea behing deep messaging is that the conversations that surround in-process documents is logged with the document. When these in-process documents are loaded into worklow WORD processors, the conversations appear in the "documents" comments, with each comment connected to the relevant highlighted portion. Very cool! Very productive.
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