My Stream
Unpolished short posts, statuses, tweets, links, videos, and brief thoughts.
Spot what’s wrong with this hotel room?
Yes, that’s right, no bed!
This was what greeted me at the Sheraton Toronto when I was there this week for IDEA09 (You can read my writeups at Bitcurrent) (well ok, there was a fold-down one.. but it was very odd nonetheless!) That’s what you get for booking through Hotwire – you get treated as a second class guest! Guess you get what you pay for. Ah well, it wasn’t so bad in the end. Great views from the 35th floor, as you can see.Read More
Dan Pink at TED: Financial rewards kill creativity; time for a new business model
Many times I’ve had conversations with friends about the problems of a money-centric economy, but we’ve always been stumped as to what the alternative would be.
In this video Dan Pink presents a scientific case as to why our current models of business are based on a flawed assumption – that monetary rewards yield better results, and presents a realistic alternative that has been proven to work.
It turns out that experiments have shown this is true for simple mechanical tasks but not for more complex tasks such as much of the knowledge work we do in the 21st century.
Dan argues that instead we should turn to intrinsic motivations of Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose as a means to get businesses succeed. This is why schemes like results only work environments, giveback, 20% time, hackdays and fedex days are becoming more commonplace – because they work, and they get better results faster than traditional carrot-and-stick approaches.
I think it also gives us a scientific reason as to why top execs and “fat cats” should not get such gigantic salaries and bonuses.
Play Multitask, a free online game on Kongregate
http://www.kongregate.com/games/IcyLime/multitask?sfa=twitter
multitasking
Read MoreThe Start-Up Chronicles: Chapter 2. Who, Part 3 | Steven Milstein’s Blog
http://stevenmilstein.com/2009/07/27/the-start-up-chronicles-chapter-2-who-part-3/
great video showing us why businesses are built on the wrong model. more comment at http://alexbowyer.posterous.com/dan-pink-at-ted-financial-rewards-kill-creati
Read MoreFinally, somebody notices the problem with Gmail “plus” labels
Most e-mail systems these days let you set up “disposable” e-mail
addresses, distinct from your main address which you can happily put
in sign up forms etc, without worrying about them being harvested by
spambots etc, as you can filter them to go straight to trash or
whatever should they abused. This is one example where Yahoo actually
does it better than Google, as they have a separate interface for
setting up and deleting these disposable addresses.
Gmail’s way of handling it is to let you append a label to your email
address, for example alex.bowyer+xyzco@googlemail.com would still come
through to my Gmail, but would automatically add the tag xyzco to the
mail, and I could optionally set up filters to treat it specially.
This also has the advantage that should xyzco pass my email address to
a third party, it’s clear who passed my address on.
Anyway this is all well and good, but there is a problem. Many (I
would say 40%) of websites that require an email address for sign up,
do not allow + as a valid character in an email address. And there’s
not a lot you can do about this. Use a different email
provider/address, or risk the company spamming you.
Which is why I breathed a sigh of relief when I signed up for
Confluence’s personal wiki and saw the alert shown – ok, they haven’t
fixed it yet, but the fact they’ve recognized the problem is a huge
step forward – it’s the first time I’ve seen any company notice this.
Of course, it would be better if Google just created a better way for
us to have disposable email addresses without having to use a
character that half the Internet thinks is illegal and expecting them
to change!