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A Crucible for Blogging, Business & Life in the Bubble

Microsoft’s Future Grounded in the Here and Now

Microsoft have unveiled their vision of the future in a slick tube imaginatively titled Productivity Future Vision (2011). While the video showcases Microsoft “innovations” [rather than an actual vision of the future] some of the the comments are timeless, ensuring this glitzy promo will be talked about for all the wrong reasons…

  • “I never asked for this.”
  • “Fake! The World will ends in 2012.”
  • “OMG, you left your porn on the fridge again.”
  • “I was expecting more than a better touch screen.”
  • “Cannot retrieve user data. Data Plan may be exceeded.”
  • “How about Microsoft stop daydreaming and create some damn jobs for the working class.”
  • “That mom is having affair with that Japanese administrator, while father is forced to stay home with daughter, cooking like a woman.”
  • “Where are the fucking robots and flying cars already?”

Do leave a comment of your own, won’t you?



[No video? watch it on YouTube]

 

What Happened to Downtime? The Extinction of Deep Thinking and Sacred Space by Scott Belsky | 99 Percent

Interruption-free space is sacred. Yet, in the digital era we live in, we are losing hold of the few sacred spaces that remain untouched by email, the internet, people, and other forms of distraction. Our cars now have mobile phone integration and a thousand satellite radio stations. When walking from one place to another, we have our devices streaming data from dozens of sources. Even at our bedside, we now have our iPads with heaps of digital apps and the world’s information at our fingertips.

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Making Ends Meet

Making Ends MeetThere’s something about lofty reports published by scholars with names like Lusardi, Schneider and Tufano that smack of an authority only a fool would challenge.

Well, I’m a fool and the paper in question, Financially Fragile Households: Evidence and Implications is authored by the aforementioned trio of financial laureates.

In short, the paper “examines households’ financial fragility by looking at their capacity to come up with $2,000 in 30 days”.

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How Executives Are Using Social Media by Mark Horton | The Future of Work

The time constraints on today’s executives are more numerous than ever before. Between the economic downturn, ever-changing industry regulations, fast-moving information and simple day-to-day management tasks, corporate executives are trapped in the virtual jail cell that is today’s business climate. The unintended result of executive “information-imprisonment” is a workplace where they may have little insight into employee morale, culture, and general goings-on during the workday. Blinded by the reflection of their own to-do-lists, executives are turning to consumer social networks to stay connected to the people that execute on daily tasks inside their organizations.

[Nice graphic]

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Curating Social Media Policies in the Workplace

Ever since I started using WebCite a couple of years ago I have been interested in the idea of online curation. It seems that there has been a proliferation of curator services of late and a heightened sense of the potential benefits that come with the extraction and aggregation of content from tweets, Facebook, blog posts, RSS feeds and what-have-you.

Services like Paper.li, Tabbloid, The Tweeted Times, and Feedly mash-up the linked-to content, typically in a newspaper or magazine format.  I am noticing that even sites like LinkedIn are jumping on the bandwagon with the recent launch of LinkedIn Today. Whatever next?

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Top Remote Work Trends to Watch for in 2011 | GigaOM Pro

Driven by improvements in technology — and particularly by an explosion in the availability of mobile technology and increased access to broadband — the world of work is changing rapidly. From solving employer-employee trust issues through better communication to cultivating an increasingly mobile, cloud-based workforce, here are the top trends and key issues we found for the future of work in 2011.

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2010 Ethics & Workplace Survey | Deloitte

During challenging economic times, the relationship between employees and employers is often tested. Frequently, executives are forced to make decisions that broadly affect their workforces and alter what matters in the workplace. Today’s business environment is no exception; it appears that the recession has diminished two important forms of business currency: trust and ethics.

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Hit the Road, Jacque

Imagine this: An expectant mother decides she will go to the hospital because it seems that the baby is coming, no time to wait. Her sister carries the bags to the car, helps her sibling get in and they leave for the medical center.

So it was with Rose Mirielle Exumé and her sister Alta Grace Garcon who one Monday afternoon left their home in Deerfield Beach, Florida to travel the 15 miles or so to Broward General.

What is normally a routine journey on I-95 was for this family anything but and Olivier Jean Paul Exumé was born in the fast lane in the back seat of his auntie’s SUV.

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Hey, Facebook is a Country, Y’all…

I remember watching Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us and feeling at the end that something profound had just happened. That was in 2007, not that long ago really.  Around the same time I watched Shift Happens and was left similarly inspired by the rate at which my world was changing.

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A Brief History of Pretty Much Everything


Watch it on YouTube.

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