Words from Web Worker

How do you answer the question – “what do you do?” If you attend an event where you are meeting strangers, you will be asked this question – ‘so what do you do?’.  At this point do you say state the features of the service you provide?…e.g.  I am an accountant. Or do you state the benefits of the service you provide? E.g. I help my clients pay the legal minimum amount of tax, not a penny more, not a penny less. So, which is it? You need to state the benefits of the service you provide, in one short ‘sound bite’ or tag line. E.g. “I help professional advisors achieve better results for less effort” OR “I help professional advisors generate more profitable revenue for the same amount of time”

We’ve shifted from a society of artists and specialists to one that stares at digital pixels all day. In April 2008, the New York Times published an article which uncovered that nearly a third of one’s work day is spent on irrelevant items and distractions such as email. What’s more, the Radicati Group found that the average person is on track to spend nearly half of their day staring at email. Our innovation and information has quadrupled over the past century. But why hasn’t our value grown proportionally? If our innovation has sky-rocketed, why hasn’t our effectiveness sky-rocketed? Looking at the late nineties and early twenty-first century, our innovation within the information realm outshines the industrial age. It’s absolutely staggering. The wealth of available information on demand, as well as our ability to communicate anytime, anywhere, is absolutely insane. Yet, amidst this firestorm of information innovation, we’ve lost touch with what truly adds value to the world, ...

The recently concluded CES brought home one simple fact: We will soon be hard-pressed to find consumer electronics that don’t feature a built-in Internet connection. From e-readers to tablets to Blu-ray players, we should be preparing for a connected experience. Especially those of portable entertainment devices, according to In-Stat, a Scottsdale, Ariz.-based research service. Sales of e-readers, navigation systems, digital music players, handheld game consoles and portable media players, which currently total some 400 million, are seen approaching 600 million units by 2013, In-Stat predicts . WiFi-enabled entertainment device shipments are seen rising to 177.3 million in 2013, the research group says, from 108.8 million in 2009.

In a land of cellphone giants,  Palm  is a mouse compared with  Apple ,  Research in Motion , Samsung,  Google ,  Microsoft  and  Nokia , which are battling to control the future of smartphones. Palm invented the category of a Web-surfing pocket-computer phone with its Treo line in 2002. But more recently it lost its way as some of its rivals developed more innovative phones. Its new management team, introduced a new generation of smartphones with the $199 Palm Pre and $99  Pixi .  Both phones got good reviews for being easy to use and great for Web browsing. But in recent weeks, Google’s Android operating system for smartphones has grabbed the attention of the public, as  Verizon  heavily promotes the  Motorola  Droid phone.  While no one expected Palm’s sales would rival the sales of iPhones or BlackBerrys — and they have not — developers have not rushed to write applications for the phone as they...

"You have a new email messages from A", "B wants to be your friend on Facebook", "C sent you a direct message on Twitter", "You have D unread items in Google Reader", "Your friend E is available for chat on Skype", "There’s a new SMS from F on your mobile phone"… and the list continues. Whether you are at the computer or using a smartphone, there are plenty of things happening around you simultaneously that can easily distract you from the task at hand.

Recently, I had a chance to attend Management talk, and the topic was ‘First break all the rules’, It would have been better to call it ‘Change in Management’ instead. Regardless, talk was too boring to learn much from it on practical areas. That made me think of pinning down What really managers should do when they have responsibility to manage people truly. Never hold a meeting without an agenda. If you don’t know what you’re going to do there, then no one else will know what you’re doing, either. Bringing them to a meeting without an agenda is wasting their time, and that is disrespectful. A meeting without an agenda is like saying, “My time is so much important than yours that instead of preparing, I’m going to find out what we’re doing in real-time, and you will sit here and watch me.” So the first rule, is to be respectful. Managing people by helping them grow along with you. Your job as a manager is to make sure your employees are growing and learning and enjoying their t...

Many of us have come to realize how useful RSS is when it comes to tracking news headlines or your favorite blogs. It’s a great way to keep up without having to visit many websites. What most people don’t know is that RSS is an incredibly flexible technology that can do all sorts of other things. The following list is a collection of 25 alternative uses for RSS. We hope you’ll find some of them useful. Track Specific News Headlines : You can keep track of news on particular topics by subscribing to specific news search results. Here’s a constantly updated news search on the Seattle Seahawks via Google . Here’s another by Yahoo! that tracks the headlines coming in on the U.S. Supreme Court. To subscribe, just do your search and find the RSS feed link. New Homes: realtors can provide updated feeds of new home listings on the market. Find Shopping Deals: Another cool use of RSS is the ability to get entries when a shopping deal or coupon comes along. Slickdeals ( feed ), Ben’s Bargains...