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Use your meetings for decision making and exchange of ideas rather than routine updates. Instead, email or post the updates ahead of time so people can read through them prior to the meetingMeetings should be no longer than 90 minutes.  If meetings are longer than 90 minutes offer your team members a 10 minute breakBe realistic about how many agenda items can be covered in a meetingAt the end of each meeting discuss what worked, what did not work, what could be improvedIf possible, rotate roles-scribe, timekeeper and facilitatorHave multiple presenters. The change of voice and pitch can help keep people engagedAgree to start and end on timeRead more at virtualteambuilders.wordpress.com

Mark Zuckerberg and his college roommates were computer science students without any real plan. They started Facebook because it was fun, used their talents, and was a novel way for Harvard students and alumni to stay in touch. Zuckerberg never anticipated it would host over 400 million members. And he had no clear idea where the money would come from. But he kept at it until, in 2007, Facebook let outside developers create applications for it, and game developers started buying ads on Facebook to keep attracting players. Hardly Zuckerberg’s strategy in 2004.And when Larry Page and Sergey Brin, founders of Google, started writing code in 1996 they had no clear plan or idea how they would make money either. But that didn’t stop them from starting. It wasn’t until 2002 and 2003 that AdWords and AdSense became the company’s money-making platform. Last week, in Don’t Get Distracted by Your Plan, I wrote about the importance of staying flexible, about the dangers of sticking too closely to your plan. But what if you have no plan? Read more at blogs.hbr.org

It’s Your Problem, So What Are You Going To Do About It” 3 Ways to Communicate More Effectively With Your TeamThe Four Powerful Keys to Virtual Team Success Creating virtual teams is not challenge-free. Why? Imagine trying to communicate effectively with people you have never met and whose personalities you are not familiar with. If this hurdle is not overcome, establishing successful virtual teams can be extremely frustrating.

The Secret to Being an Effective Virtual Team How do you foster communication and collaboration when project members are geographically dispersed? An effective starting point is the creation of a team operating agreement. Virtual Teams Generate Real Sales: How To Save Money And Generate Revenue Without Leaving Your ChairBusiness Continuity in a Crisis Environment Is your business capable of surviving a crisis situation? Will you be able to manage your staff for an effective return to “business as usual”? With some foresight and careful planning, the worst storm can be weathered. “Virtual teams” offer a compelling way to offset potential risks.

Read more at www.virtualteambuilders.com

"Drawing on cognitive science, an increasing number of game theorists and designers say that our growing love of video games has important things to tell us about our intrinsic desires and motivations. Central to it all is a simple theory – that games are fun because they teach us interesting things and they do it in a way that our brains prefer – through systems and puzzles. 'With games, learning is the drug,' writes Raph Koster, the designer of seminal multiplayer fantasy games such as Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies. 'In game theory, this is often spoken of as the "magic circle": you enter into a realm where the rules of the real world don't apply – and typically being judged on success and failure is part of the real world. People need to feel free to try things and to learn without being judged or penalised.' Another important element is autonomy as games tap into our need to have control.

Finally another important game design facet is 'disproportionate feedback,' in which players are hugely rewarded for achieving very simple tasks. In highly successful shooters such as Call of Duty and Bulletstorm, when an enemy is shot, they don't just collapse to the floor, they explode into chunks. 'You're good, you're a success – you're powerful,' writes Stuart. 'Disproportionate feedback is an endorphin come-on.'"

But bubbles can pop with a bang or deflate with a long, slow hiss. There is a growing feeling that an eight-year boom is over. It is one thing when non-tech Neanderthals guffaw at the very idea of Twitter, but quite another when those blessed by the Valley’s recent success worry that the gig is up.

To create a successful tech company, he wrote, “you have to find an idea that 1) has escaped the attention of the major internet companies, which are better run than ever before; 2) is capable of being launched and proven out for ~$5m, the typical seed plus series A investment; and 3) is protectable from the onslaught of those big companies once they figure out what you’re on to. How many ideas like that are left?”

To build a significant tech company in a new space, you cannot be trivial. Yet this is exactly how many start-ups and some big tech companies now feel. Ten of the top 15 paid apps on iTunes this week are games. For all of Apple’s commercials showing people doing clever, scientific-looking things with their devices, most people are using them to play Angry Birds rather than solve the world’s problems.

The so-called digital wallet made important strides in 2011, sometimes eliminating the logistical need for paper vouchers, mobile apps, QR codes, and even cell phones.

At times this transition seems to be sneaking up on us. Earlier this month, thousands of merchants nationwide didn't know they had gained foot traffic and sales thanks to American Express and Foursquare. Amex rewarded consumers who synced their credit cards with their Foursquare accounts with $10 back if they spent the same at local businesses after checking in with the geo-social app. That effort followed up a successful post-Black Friday stint dubbed "Small Business Saturday," when Amex users checking in on Foursquare could get a $25 credit if they spent $25 with a local merchant.

Jake Furst, a business development director at New York-based Foursquare, said there was little to no organizational outreach to local businesses. "The merchants didn't necessarily know what was happening as we drove customers to their locations," he explained. "Small Business Saturday was a huge success. We got a ton of interest from Foursquare users and Amex card holders that didn't know about Foursquare yet."

The business climate, it turns out, is a lot like the weather. And we've entered a next-two-hours era. The pace of change in our economy and our culture is accelerating--fueled by global adoption of social, mobile, and other new technologies--and our visibility about the future is declining.

Uncertainty has taken hold in boardrooms and cubicles, as executives and workers (employed and unemployed) struggle with core questions: Which competitive advantages have staying power? What skills matter most? How can you weigh risk and opportunity when the fundamentals of your business may change overnight?

Look at the global cell-phone business. Just five years ago, three companies controlled 64% of the smartphone market: Nokia, Research in Motion, and Motorola. Today, two different companies are at the top of the industry: Samsung and Apple. This sudden complete swap in the pecking order of a global multibillion-dollar industry is unprecedented. Consider the meteoric rise of Groupon and Zynga, the disruption in advertising and publishing, the advent of mobile ultrasound and other "mHealth" breakthroughs (see "Open Your Mouth And Say 'Aah!'). Online-education efforts are eroding our assumptions about what schooling looks like. Cars are becoming rolling, talking, cloud-connected media hubs. In an age where Twitter and other social-media tools play key roles in recasting the political map in the Mideast; where impoverished residents of refugee camps would rather go without food than without their cell phones; where all types of media, from music to TV to movies, are being remade, redefined, defended, and attacked every day in novel ways--there is no question that we are in a new world.

The world of work for knowledge and information workers has seen enormous shifts over the past decade, and it is something that impacts a disproportionate number of entrepreneurs.  According to the 2006 US Census, 49% of US businesses were based out of the home.  While these ranks used to be dominated by the trades (e.g. construction, electricians, plumbers, etc.), advances in technology have swelled the ranks of the home-based knowledge worker (e.g. consultants, web designers, developers, writers, etc.).This creates a whole new set of challenges when it comes to getting work done.  Because information-based work is almost never done in a vacuum, most of us work in teams.  And a large percentage of those teams can go weeks — if ever — without seeing each other face-to-face.  Making this work well sounds like it should be easy given all of today’s technology: email, Skype, ooVoo, Twitter, etc.  But, as usual, the issue that requires the most management is not the technology, it’s the people.This creates a whole new set of challenges when it comes to getting work done.  Because information-based work is almost never done in a vacuum, most of us work in teams.  And a large percentage of those teams can go weeks — if ever — without seeing each other face-to-face.  Making this work well sounds like it should be easy given all of

today’s technology: email, Skype, ooVoo, Twitter, etc.  But, as usual, the issue that requires the most management is not the technology, it’s the people.Becky McCray of SmallBizSurvival recently posted an article on MyVenturePad discussing this very thing.  In “6 Tips for managing a distributed workforce,” she discussed several valuable tips in successfully leading a team that is all working remotely (presumably from their homes).  In addition to some of her great tips — ranging from reading The One Minute Manager to explicitly declaring the weekend off — here are a couple more items that I’ve recently been reminded are critical to the success of a virtual team.Clarifying priorities.Rules of engagement.

Roles and responsibilities.Talk through assumptions.Ask, Then DecideRead more at www.workingpoint.com 

With all the ephemeral and seemingly disconnected data that it holds on us, the company hopes to "one day tell people things they may want to know as they are walking down the street, without having to type in any search queries", reports Scott Morrison in the Wall Street Journal. "Think of it as a serendipity engine," said Google's Eric Schmidt at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference last September."Serendipity" is the latest holy grail in the Silicon Valley software zeitgeist: an ill-defined buzzword that developers use to describe services that will connect people with online ephemera they would not normally find on their own. Yet a website's success relies on delivering successes, and something that tries to predict serendipity will fail almost every time. "If you can plan it, how is it serendipitous?" asks reader ShockJockey on the Guardian's Technology blog. Indeed.

Motivating Gen Xers

Room to grow. Offer Gen X employees clear statements of goals

Opportunities to make choices. Since this generation has become accustomed to "fending for themselves," provide options--options for task selection, options for challenges, options to formulate new processes, and options to develop creative yet appropriate conclusions.

companies must:

Empower employees

STOP being afraid of your customer!

Perhaps you’ve recently read about the Tampa Bay Lightning’s innovative chip-embedded jerseys. Blending physical gamification techniques such as a special badge to denote a certain level of status – in this case a season ticket holder – and embedded chip technology in the patch that issues those donning the jersey automatic discounts on concessions and merchandise while at the arena, the Lightning have a bona fide innovation hit on their hands. As a marketing ploy, you can not argue with the success of this experiment. As a technological innovation, what you see here – a piece of connected clothing – is just a rudimentary beginning of Web 3.0.

Gamification describes a series of design principles, processes and systems used to influence, engage and motivate individuals, groups and communities to drive behaviors and effect desired outcomes. Originating from the video game industry, many of these pioneering concepts now play a key role in driving incentive and behavior management for both brands in the consumer world and internal scenarios in the workplace. Enterprise gamification is a user experience (UX) and consumerization of IT (CoIT) trend that will take the market by storm in 2012. Constellation believes that by 2013, more than 50 percent of all social business initiatives will include an enterprise gamification component.

In interviews with 55 early adopters of enterprise gamification, Constellation identifies the three core pillars that include measurable action, reputation and incentives. By creating triggers through both monetary and non-monetary incentives among customers, employees, partners, suppliers and other interested parties, organizations can secure sustainable engagement and drive business outcomes such as improved marketing response from external communities, sustained long-term customer loyalty, increased collaboration among internal teams, or enriched onboarding, delivering success with new hires, partners, and customers.

Enterprise gamification requires an application of psychology and behavioral economics to incentivize outcomes. Because enterprise gamification maps closely to human behavior, organizations will want to follow Constellation’s best practices in appealing to the “Seven Deadly Sins” for gamification design.

The Starbucks brand may be synonymous with pricey lattes, but the coffee conglomerate has pushed a number of mobile initiatives in 2011 to make its name also stand for digital innovation.

New numbers released Monday suggest that the strategy is working.

Starbucks has now processed more than 26 million mobile payments since January, Adam Brotman, vice president and general manager of digital ventures at Starbucks, told VentureBeat.

Gamification describes a series of design principles, processes and systems used to influence, engage and motivate individuals, groups and communities to drive behaviors and effect desired outcomes. Originating from the video game industry, many of these pioneering concepts now play a key role in driving incentive and behavior management for both brands in the consumer world and internal scenarios in the workplace. Enterprise gamification is a user experience (UX) and consumerization of IT (CoIT) trend that will take the market by storm in 2012. Constellation believes that by 2013, more than 50 percent of all social business initiatives will include an enterprise gamification component.

In interviews with 55 early adopters of enterprise gamification, Constellation identifies the three core pillars that include measurable action, reputation and incentives. By creating triggers through both monetary and non-monetary incentives among customers, employees, partners, suppliers and other interested parties, organizations can secure sustainable engagement and drive business outcomes such as improved marketing response from external communities, sustained long-term customer loyalty, increased collaboration among internal teams, or enriched onboarding, delivering success with new hires, partners, and customers.

Enterprise gamification requires an application of psychology and behavioral economics to incentivize outcomes. Because enterprise gamification maps closely to human behavior, organizations will want to follow Constellation’s best practices in appealing to the “Seven Deadly Sins” for gamification design.

Despite all of this 99% of brands and businesses are ill prepared for this new flood of mobile tech. They literally don’t have a clue where to start. Most brands think that building an app is the solution to all their mobile problems but with over a million apps across the various platforms they are notoriously hard to promote and rarely get cut through. Many businesses have started implementing mobile sites but that is only really the tip of the iceberg and the vast majority of businesses wouldn’t even know what a mobile site was (have a look at some of the biggest businesses in your country to see how bad it is). The simple reality is that brands and businesses don’t even know that they should have a strong mobile presence yet and that presents a huge opportunity to a new breed of entrepreneurs willing to provide solutions.

Digital agencies will still be pumping out apps for the next couple of years to support campaigns and PR firms are not even at the races. Most importantly you would have to focus. Focus on nothing but mobile. As tempting as it would be to build websites and carry out traditional advertising that will just bring you down to the level of your competitors. The opportunities are immense though because mobile is not something that is just going to go away. It would take you 2-3 years to position yourself correctly but if you started now you would be miles ahead of the curve when this stuff really hit the mainstream from a marketing perspective.

We are adding our own mobile capabilities to compliment social because the two go hand in hand but there is plenty more room for agencies all over the world to spring up who are purely focused on mobile. It will without a doubt be the next big marketing frontier. That is my free business idea for the year so just send over the check if you do go ahead and give it a go and it turns in to a huge success

Big box retailer Home Depot is ramping up its mobile strategy by testing a PayPal-enabled mobile payment solution at select stores

The news marks Home Depot as the first retailer to sign on with PayPal as part of a bigger initiative from Paypal to bridge online and in-store traffic for retailers. The program has been in use since early December in five Home Depot locations in the United States and utilizes PayPal’s point-of-sale mobile payment service.

“Retail is changing with the emergence of these technologies that blur the lines between online and offline,” said Anuj Nayar, director of communications for PayPal, San Jose, CA

Building on its success with laptops designed for developing countries, the One Laptop Per Child project is set to unveil a long-awaited tablet at CES next week. Here's what you get for $100.

The OLPC has been kicking around the idea of a super-affordable tablet for over a year. Originally known as the XO-3, but now dubbed the XO 3.0, the tablet will feature an 8-inch 1024x768 screen with some models also offering a PixelQi 3qi display that mimics E-paper. A Marvell Armada PXA618 chip and 512MB of RAM reside in the tablet's ruggedized shell and will run either Linux Sugar or Android OS.

It is often said that a picture paints a thousand words - well if that is the case, I suppose a good video can write a book. In the early days of mobile banking some crude mobile banking video's were made - a clear indication that the product specialists could not describe what they wanted to build to the video producers. But since a few years ago, some brilliant little video-clips were produced - either to advertise a new service or to inform or educate stakeholders. Below are some of the best clips that I know of:

The first mPesa advert (according to rumour produced on a very small budget). (Watch here) One of my favourite adverts, ever, is the one used for the launch of the product (Watch here). Telenor has subsequently produced a few more masterpieces (Watch here and here). The documentary produced in collaboration with the Worldbank for Wizzit in 2007 was also one of the great videos (Watch here) A delightful little ad (that I really enjoy) was produced for MTN in West Africa in 2010 (Watch here) Great Airtel Money ad (Watch here) Using local comedians in a series of adverts for mKesh in Mozambique was very successful (Watch here and here) A simple, but very cute advert for BSP bank in PNG, was produced recently (Watch here) The energy and pace of the Gemalto advert for their NFC product is a lot of fun (Watch here) And many others (Watch here, here, here and here)

It’s no secret that credit card companies are shelling out big bucks and aggressively forming partnerships and deals to start cashing in on the mobile and digital payments innovations currently taking place. American Express, which recently debuted its own digital payments product Serve, has been particularly aggressive on the partnerships front, striking recent deals with both Foursquare and Facebook. Mastercard has bet on NFC with a partnership with Google for Google Wallet and bought online payments gateway DataCash for $520 million last fall. And Visa has made a number of major moves in the mobile and digital payments space of late; including making an investment (and taking on an advisory role) in disruptive startup Square, buying virtual goods payments platform PlaySpan for $190 million, and acquiring mobile payments company Fundamo for $110 million. We sat down with Visa’s Global Head of Mobile Product Bill Gajda and the company’s Head of Global Product Strategy, Innovation and eCommerce Jennifer Schulz to discuss how the financial company is planning to compete in both mobile and digital payments.

In May, Visa announced its plans for the digital wallet. We’ll explain this initiative later in the post, but part of this platform would allow you to access your loyalty points, credit cards and more from your mobile phone at the point of sale. And the third pillar of Visa’s mobile strategy is incorporating value-added services like real-time alerts, contextual services, and offers at point of shopping based on where you are.

Gajda explains that Visa is licensing mobile payments applications PayWave for integration with the ISIS wallet and the company is actively looking for other ways to integrate with NFC into the company’s mobile payments structure.