Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

The Army has a well-established history of using television commercials to reach possible recruits. The Times quotes the simply impossibly named Lt. Gen. Benjamin C. Freakley on the motivation for the new direction in recruiting. "We're working hard to increase our social media. We fully recognize that young people TiVo over commercials or are multitasking on their smartphones when the commercials come on...We have to reach out in forms like we're discussing to get them to want to know more, to join us in social media and extend the dialog." The branding message remains consistent, if not terribly clear to me: "Army Strong." It plays out across a number of properties, including a website, Army Strong Stories, and a Go Army Facebook page (complete with exclusive X-Men movie footage).

Chance favors the connected mind. That is what author Steven B. Johnson says to those looking for the next big idea. Johnson is the author of "Where Ideas Come From" a book that looks at the macro trends on how innovation evolves. Ideas are rarely created through a "eureka" moment. It may seem like Doc Brown fell off his toilet and invented the flux capacitor, but really the idea for time travel and how to do it were converging in his brain for quite some time before the blow to head. Instead of an "aha!" moment, Johnson believes that ideas are born of a "slow hunch" that are made possible through periods of technological innovation and evolution. If you are creating a startup, where do you get your ideas from?

Instant access to information has change the world. In the early days of the Internet, people buzzed about the "Information Superhighway." Thinking back to the early 1990s and the first iterations of America Online and Netscape, everything seems so...quaint. In the mid-1990s, it took two minutes or more for a modem to make a connection and boot the World Wide Web for your "surfing" pleasure. Two minutes is an eternity in today's Internet and communications landscape. The ability to send messages and find information in real-time has certainly changed the way we work and live.

Companies that build systems that people use have power. But they have to be very very very careful about how they assert that power. It's really easy to come in and try to configure the user through force. It's a lot harder to work diligently to design and build the ecosystem in which healthy norms emerge. Yet, the latter is of critical importance to the creation of a healthy community. Cuz you can't get to a healthy community through force.

Much has been written about employee motivation and retention. It's written by folks who actively use words like motivation and retention and generally don't have a clue about the daily necessity of keeping your team professionally content because they've either never done the work or have forgotten how it's done. These are the people who show up when your single best engineer casually and unexpectedly announces, "I'm quitting. I'm joining my good friend to found a start-up. This is my two weeks' notice." You call on the motivation and retention police because you believe they can perform the legendary "diving save". Whether it's HR or a well-intentioned manager with a distinguished title, these people scurry impressively. Meetings that go long into the evening are instantly scheduled with the disenfranchised employee. It's an impressive show of force, and it sometimes works, but even if they stay, the damage has been done. They've quit, and when someone quits they are effectively saying, "I no longer believe in this company". What's worse is that what they were originally thinking was, "I'm bored". Boredom is easier to fix than an absence of belief.

If you thought Wikipedia had seen its heyday, you'd have thought wrong. A small study performed by Wikipedia staff and published today found that new Editors are signing up and making edits to the site at a far greater rate than they were years ago. A slight majority of their first edits are acceptable or better. The number of new editors registering on the site has grown from 60 on an typical day in 2004 (when the site was 3 years old) to now 1800 people joining English Wikipedia and making at least 1 edit in a given day today. Vandalism is way up but still makes up less than 25% of edits from new editors. 55% of first edits by new editors today meet the site's (increasingly) stringent quality controls and require no clean-up by other editors. While that's down from 72% in 2004, it's still pretty good.

Kiln Group, an insurance specialist underwriting firm at Lloyds of London, wants to protect companies from the damage that Stupid Tweet Syndrome (our name for the disease) can cause. Details are not clear as to what exactly the insurance would pay out but if a brand is substantially damage by a vindictive or careless tweet, Kiln Group would be able to cover it.

In Innovation Deep Dive, Lisa Strausfeld from Pentagram has contrasted the drivers and the impact of innovation of various countries by way of an interactive line ranking. The visualization uses quite a large set of different datasets, ranging from Gallup and business schools reports, to the usual suspects like the UNESCO and the World Bank. The interface requires some trial-and-error to get used to (e.g. the data categories at the top are clickable), but creates a compelling overview of how different nations actually perform versus how their business executives perceive the same issue.

I will mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy. Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that. Everything except the first sentence is found in King's book, Strength to Love, and seems to have been said originally in a 1957 sermon he gave on loving your enemies.  Unlike the first quotation, it does sound like King, and it was easy to assume that the whole thing came from him. So how did they get mixed together? Thanks to Jessica Dovey, a Facebook user, that's how.  And contrary to my initial assumption, it wasn't malicious.

Location based social network Foursquare celebrated 10 million registered users yesterday but how are businesses and organizations using the platform? I wrote a year ago next month about the incredible potential offered by Foursquare accounts for organizations: following a Foursquare page as a user is like opting-in to view the world through the lens of that organization's geo-annotations. It can be awesome. (My favorites? History Channel and Eater.) Are businesses getting into it? For one perspective on that question, I extracted some data from the 128 most recent Foursquare Pages that have been created. The 128 most recent Foursquare Page holders have added 728 tips in 311 cities so far. They've amassed a total of over 8,000 Foursquare followers and they came in with some social media experience as well: those organizations already had an aggregate of over 800,000 Twitter followers.

After Local Motors won the XC2V competition, they were given a mere 14 weeks to build a prototype of their "FLYPMODE" concept, a vehicle built on a common chassis capable of performing both combat resupply and medical evacuation missions. As it turns out, they didn't even need all 14 weeks, and were able to complete the prototype ahead of schedule, no problem. Check out a bunch of pics of the not yet armed but otherwise fully operational XC2V vehicle in the gallery below. Part of the point of this whole exercise was to see how effectively crowd-sourcing through private industry could be used to design, develop, and build a new vehicle. In a result that will shock nobody at all, the XC2V went from concept to prototype some five times faster than it normally takes our ponderously bloated war machine to come up with something similar. While DARPA hasn't commented on cost, I imagine that it was exponentially cheaper, too.

Mobile quiz startup Qrank will announce next week that it has raised a seed round of funding, including an investment from early Twitter VP of Product Jason Goldman. Qrank is building out a platform that will let any organization with a backlog of content use it to create smart, fast-paced mobile trivia games. The games incorporate social networks, location, chat and other social features. It sounds awesome. Goldman is one of five investors in a convertible note of $350,000, ReadWriteWeb has learned and the company has confirmed. The company will use the funding to build a self-service platform, acquire more high-profile customers and complete an analytics dashboard. The existing consumer app gets high marks for responsiveness and user engagement.