Friday marked the much-anticipated Facebook IPO, and boy, do we have have a lot of resources for that topic. Whether you have no idea what an I…

Source: http://feeds.mashable.com/~r/Mashable/~3/Ua_3ZZqXTt8/

Aki Ross Alecia Elliott Alessandra Ambrosio

Incredibly counter-intuitive research out of Harvard suggests a novel way to make your employees feel more free: Give them more to do. Huh?

Sometimes scientific findings of such head-slapping obviousness–talking on the phone makes you a worse driver and men generally favor large breasts, for example–that they make the average lay person wonder how anyone ever got funding to investigate the question in the first place. But then every once in a while, you run into a research result on the opposite end of the spectrum–something so counter-intuitive you can hardly believe it’s true.

Harvard Business School just produced one of the latter, and it’s of particular interest to entrepreneurs hoping to help their busy employees feel less of a time crunch. Michael Norton, an associate professor of business administration, wanted to find out how bosses can help their teams feel like they have more time. Given that we can’t slow the sun’s crossing of the sky, the obvious alternative is to simply give employees fewer tasks. But it turns out this common sense response is actually the exact opposite of what Norton discovered.

To figure out what can relieve our sense of time pressure, Norton conducted a series of experiments that gave some study subjects an unexpected block of free time, by sending them home 15 minutes early from an experiment they were told would take an hour for example. Another group was instead told to fill the time with worthwhile activities to help others such as editing essays for low-income students. Which group reported back that they felt they had enough time for all the tasks in their day?

Surprisingly, the answer is those who spend time helping others rather than those who were given additional free time. By doing activities that make them feel useful, employees increase their sense of “time affluence,” the researchers conclude, implying that the source of our perceived time famine isn’t really lack of hours but a lack of a sense of purpose and accomplishment. Norton offered three suggestions for how managers could put thus insight to use to Business Insider:

Make employees participate in a company volunteer effort, particularly if they can use part of their workday to do it.

Let employees know how their day-to-day tasks are helping others. If they can hear how the employee helped a customer, this will also make them more satisfied with their job.

Use fun strategies to encourage team members to help each other. Norton tells of one experiment where salespeople were given $20 bonus money and told they had to spend on another team member. Those teams sold more than other groups that were told to spend the $20 on themselves.

This latest research finding of Norton’s follows earlier studies showing analogous, counter-intuitive results. One finding, for instance, revealed that letting employees give bonuses to others is actually more motivating than receiving bonuses themselves.

Do you think forcing your team to spend time on worthy tasks to help others would relieve their sense of being time poor–or just start a mutiny?

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/inc/headlines/~3/vnRK0UzSLJM/to-make-your-employees-feel-less-busy-give-them-more-to-do.html

Charli Baltimore Charlies Angels Charlize Theron

As Tuts+ Premium continues to sky-rocket, our ability to post better, more frequent, content has improved dramatically as well. This week, we have a variety of fun new things available to members!

Course – How To Be A Terminal Pro

In this fifteen-episode course, you?ll learn how to take advantage of that scary app you never touch: Terminal! We?ll begin with the obligatory ?hello world? command, and work our way up to advanced usage.

Course – JavaScript Testing With Jasmine

Admit it: you say that you test your JavaScript, but, in reality, you?don?t. That?s okay; the idea of testing JavaScript is a relatively new thing. And unfortunately, there aren?t too many ?hold your hand? resources for getting up and running. Well, that all changes with this course. We start from scratch, and slowly work our way up the testing chain.

Along the way, we?ll take advantage of the fantastic Jasmine BDD (Behavior-Driven Development) framework to make our tests as readable as possible. Upon completion of the course, you?ll not only have a robust test suite at your fingertips, but your tests will also make for fantastic documentation!

eBook - Client Centric Web Design

Other than Internet Explorer, what is the most challenging part of your job? Did you answer clients? If so, this eBook, by Paul Boag, is for you. Discover how to keep your clients happy, maintain your own sanity and produce the most effective websites you have ever built, resulting in happier clients, better websites, and improved job satisfaction.

eBook - Building Websites for Return on Investment

?Building Websites for Return on Investment? uncovers the secrets of sites that successfully generate real return on investment. This book will enable you to transform your website from an expense to a measurable source of income.

Article – Are You Using CoffeeScript?

For those who haven’t yet had the chance to dig into CoffeeScript, this article will get you up and running in no time!

Coming Soon to Tuts+ Premium

Nothing above pique your interest? That’s okay; we have plenty of amazing new content on the near horizon, including the following courses:

• PHP Fundamentals
• What’s New in PHP 5.4?
• Cleaner Code With CoffeeScript
• Backbone.js Fundamentals
• The Sublime Text 2 Guide
• Test-Driven Development in Ruby

Already a member? What requests do you have? Haven’t signed up yet? Well now’s the perfect time!

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/nettuts/~3/FDs5xPovxac/

Denise Richards Desiree Dymond Diane Kruger

At the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting, I had a chance to meet several leaders of Berkshire-owned companies. Here’s what I learned.

The Berkshire Hathaway Annual Shareholders’ Meeting in Omaha is truly to capitalists what Talladega is to NASCAR fans.

It’s a spectacle, a tradition–over the top and reassuringly familiar to the faithful. At this writing, a Berkshire’s class A shares price out over $121,000 for a single share, but a class B share is about $80. The good news is that either share will qualify you for a ticket to the annual meeting. And it’s worth the share price, travel costs, and time to attend this crash-course in business excellence.

I attended this year’s session in Omaha and got the chance to meet all sorts of great people–including the leaders of the various companies owned by Berkshire Hathaway: Dairy Queen, World Book, BNSF and many others.

I learned a lot from meeting and watching these CEOs and executives. Surprisingly, perhaps, the common theme is love.

Love your customers.

Hollywood often portrays business leaders as stuffed suits, brusque and self-important. Not this group. They are on fire, accessible, warm and friendly. They seek and serve their customers and shareholders with genuine interest. Buffett likes to tell shareholders that the managers who run Berkshire’s companies are all rich enough to quit any day; they stay for reasons other than money.

Love what you sell.

I got to talk to the founder of Pampered Chef for a moment. She pulled me over to show three different products on sale for half-price, $5 each. I have the leader of a billion-dollar company demonstrating a no-drip wine stopper as if we were in my home and she’d brought it as a host gift. And a Dilly Bar from DQ? Served with a smile and an enthusiastic “Still love ‘em after all of these years!” from the CEO of Dairy Queen. The excitement hasn’t left these people. They still love their products and services and can’t wait to tell people about them.

Love what you do.

Working the booth, talking to shareholders and customers, chatting with their staff, you would think you were attending an Up With People rally. The working of the floor is not beneath them or a burden. They love what they do and they bring the energy to everything they are doing.

Love your people.

Elbow to elbow with their front-line staff, these people were not followed by an entourage. If it weren’t for the different color badges, you’d have difficulty picking out some executives from any other member of the team. Joking while jostled in the crowd, setting the pace for reaching out to customers, pitching in–it was clear that these leaders love their people.

I guess demonizing business and business leaders is in vogue. The picture of the heartless Gordon Gekko seems to still come to mind for script-writers when they are creating characters.

But I find these attitudes at many executive levels–from single-employee start-ups all the way to organizations with thousands of employees. Most often, in well-run organizations, when you get a few minutes with the leaders, you find love.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/inc/headlines/~3/psiWkRPEKbU/warren-buffetts-berkshire-hathaway-ceos-business-lessons.html

Janet Jackson January Jones Jennie Finch

In 1986-1987, astronaut Sally Ride, the first American woman in space, led a team that proposed a fast manned Mars mission as one of four “leadership initiatives” for NASA. Among the most realistic blueprints for NASA’s post-Space Station future yet conceived, the Ride team’s proposals marked an early break from the traditional space station-moon-Mars progression that guides most NASA planning to this day.

Source: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/05/piloted-splitsprint-mission-to-mars-1987/

Ashley Olsen Ashley Scott Ashley Tappin

In Insert Coin, we look at an exciting new tech project that requires funding before it can hit production. If you’d like to pitch a project, please send us a tip with “Insert Coin” as the subject line.

If you’re an Android tablet owner, you’re likely very familiar with the drill: after you unlock the device, you’re presented with a static home screen full of apps and widgets, which may or may not be relevant to your current need. The creators of Chameleon, a home screen replacement for Android 3.2 / 4.0 tablets, would like to change all that with a dynamic environment that’ll adapt to your current GPS location, WiFi network or the time of day. Users may design and customize their ideal layouts, which may include news and social feeds in the morning, a calendar and tasks for the work environment and an assortment of entertainment options for the evening at home. Switching between these layouts isn’t a problem, either, as you’ll be able to flick between home screens just as you would with the standard Android interface.

Like a good rug, the interface is attractive and really pulls everything together. Chameleon is currently a Kickstarter project, and its creators intend to unleash the creation into the Google Play Store this September. Those who donate $5 or more can expect early delivery of the app, which is currently slated for August. It never hurts to be early in line, and Chameleon might just rekindle your love for Android tablets. For a quick peek of what’s in store, check the video after the break.

[Thanks, Greg]

Continue reading Insert Coin: Chameleon adaptive home screen replacement for Android tablets

Insert Coin: Chameleon adaptive home screen replacement for Android tablets originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 18 May 2012 08:15:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/tjfMb25IHEU/

Emmanuelle Vaugier Emmy Rossum Erica Leerhsen

The drink we call Coca Cola is invented, by accident, in a Georgia backyard.

Source: http://www.wired.com/thisdayintech/2012/05/may-8-1886-looking-for-pain-relief-and-finding-coca-cola-instead/

Carol Grow Carrie Underwood Cat Power

Toshiba is announcing a slate of new machines that all sport Intel’s Ivy Bridge internals. The more austere Dynabook Qosmio T752 sheds the color-changing shell of its predecessor in favor of brushed aluminum. The AV-centric machine sports a TV Tuner and Blu-Ray drive in addition to its 15.6-inch LED-backlit 1366 x 768 display, a 1TB HDD and 8GB of RAM — all playing second fiddle to that 2.3GHz Core i7 CPU. You can also pick up the glasses-free 3D Qosmio T852 with an autostereoscopic display and a Dynabook T552, with all of those fun features stripped out, but promising a slightly (five hour) more longevous battery life.

At the same time, the company is outing a Regaza home-entertainment PC that comes hitched to a 23-inch 1920 x 1080 display, the same 2.3GHz Ivy Bridge chip and a pair of TV tuners, one analog and one digital. We’ll see these arrive in stores in Japan starting May 25th, with pricing and availability over here currently in the wind.

Toshiba strains metaphors, carries its laptop range over the Ivy Bridge originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 18 May 2012 06:24:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Source: http://www.engadget.com/2012/05/18/toshiba-ivy-bridge/

Daisy Fuentes Dania Ramirez Danica Patrick

Managing far-flung employees is always a challenge. (What are they doing, anyway?) Make it easier by hiring the right people first.

Chances are some of your employees work from home (or from wherever they like). You probably do too, at least some of the time. If you’re running a start-up where resources are scarce, that’s even more likely.

And even if all your employees work in established locations, the odds are most occasionally access data and mange tasks and projects outside the office on mobile devices.

Face it: No matter what your business, at least some of the time your employees are cloud workers.

That shift dramatically changes the nature of the workplace. According to Avinoam Nowogrodski, the CEO and co-founder of Clarizen, makers of online project management software and some really cool apps, that shift also changes the way you select and evaluate employees.

Some of the qualities employees need to succeed in a traditional work environment are less important, while these traits are vital for cloud-based employees:

1. Proactively set and share goals.

It’s easy for employees to get lost in the cloud. (Sorry, couldn’t resist.) Managers still set goals, but collaboration and water-cooler “aha!” moments are much less likely. And it’s easier for employees to slowly turn into not much more than to-do list “completers.”

Great remote employees actively suggest new ideas, create their own projects, set and share personal goals, and recommend solutions.

Working from home is appealing to relatively introverted people, so make sure the employees you hire enjoy working on their own but also thrive on stepping forward.

Sure, it’s a tough balance, but the best remote employees enjoy the benefits striking that balance provides.

2. Stay connected—almost obsessively.

Great team players are trustworthy—and available. Web and mobile connectivity makes it easier to connect with remote employees, yet also makes it harder and less certain. (Maybe he’s on a call with a client? Maybe he’s on Skype with another team member? Or maybe he’s just ducking me?)

It’s easy for remote employees to hide behind the technology… or lack thereof.

Whose responsibility is it to try to stay connected: the remote worker’s or the home office? Either opinion is correct, but great employees assume the onus is on them; that way, no matter what, they stay connected.

Great remote employees let others know when they won’t be available, and why… and how they can still be contacted in the event of an emergency. They see working remotely as a trade-off: They know they have more freedom, but they also recognize that with that freedom comes the responsibility of hyper-availability.

And they recognize that hyper-availability creates trust—with employees and with customers.

3. Focus on results, not time.

In some organizations it’s enough to show up and put in your time; what you actually accomplish is almost secondary to being present. (We’ve all known people who have a positions but don’t actually work.)

That’s obviously not the case for employees working outside of headquarters. Results, not presence, are everything. Great remote employees focus on accomplishing objectives as quickly and efficiently as possible. Who cares if a task “should” take a week; if it can be completed in three days that opens up time to accomplish other tasks.

Great remote employees finish tasks ahead of time—and ask for more.

4. Constantly want to learn.

Remote employees often, but not always, have very specific duties, focus on a set list of tasks, or work on well-defined projects, if only because that makes managing them easier. They don’t have access to some of the same formal or informal training and development opportunities.

So they push for development and learning opportunities. Constantly. Incessantly. To their boss, irritatingly.

And that’s a good thing.

5. Push to become irreplaceable.

Say business is down and you’re forced to let a few employees go. Who is easier to downsize: The employee in the office next to you or the employee on the other side of the country you never see ? (Come to think of it, he seems to get a lot done, but who knows how hard he’s really working?)

In an ideal world every employee is evaluated solely on performance. In the real world other factors come into play, sometimes fairly, sometimes not.

Great remote employees understand that perception and bias can be a factor. But they don’t just think, “That’s not fair…”

Instead of complaining they work hard to prove how valuable they are. In fact, they enjoy proving how valuable they are.

Which, of course, benefits them… and your business.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/inc/headlines/~3/8B_y8xP0CgY/5-traits-of-great-remote-employees.html

Georgina Grenville Gina Carano Gina Gershon

The converted tanker Ideal X leaves Newark, New Jersey, carrying 58 cargo-laden truck-trailers on its specially fitted deck. Containerization is born. Globalization has set sail.

Source: http://www.wired.com/thisdayintech/2012/04/april-26-1956-the-container-ships-maiden-voyage/

Aisha Tyler Aki Ross Alecia Elliott