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The iPad and the Enterprise

2010-09-10T09:57:43Z

(photo cc attrib. pntphoto thanks!)

I have seen several keynotes from software executives lately. I recollect that all of them had iPads in them. Seasoned software executives have been getting positively giddy about the iPad.

It has given Steve Jobs a sales force that he didn’t know he had. It seems without really planning for it, the iPad has become the must have enterprise device.

But what I’ve not yet seen is the must have enterprise application on the iPad. Yes, I’ve seen some neat repurposed reports and simple entry screens but I’ve not yet seen an application that makes me sit up and say wow, that is a new and fundamentally better process enabled by the device. So far the innovation is all about Apple.

If the iPad means that enterprise software companies build executive dashboards and actually get executives engaging with the software, then fine, okay, that is an improvement from where we are today, but it misses the big opportunity.

Just fixing the executive user experience has a whiff of the Potemkin about it. It would be a whole lot better if the iPad helped to prompt a rethink of how everyone interacts with enterprise software. Today the iPad merely illustrates the chasm between the typical enterprise software user experience and delightful design.

Filed under: design, IT Related, software

You Don’t Want That Job

2010-06-17T10:45:23Z

I know you think you want that job but you don’t.

You want to work, yes, but do you really want to work there? Let’s take a look at your situation.

The hours are soul-crushing. Admit it, you don’t want to work that hard.
You aren’t really committed to your career or the industry. You could shovel dog poop and be happier.
The commute is further than you’d like. You could spend your paycheck on rent or gas. Pick one.
The boss is a jerk. You know this. You saw the way he acted in the interview. You would have to put up with him every. single. freakin. day.
No one seems happy. Maybe they aren’t. Maybe you should run.
You don’t really like the brand/product/service. Why would you want to help that company make money?
The office interior is ugly. They haven’t invested in new chairs since 1997. The cubicles are metal and beige. If they can’t upgrade the interior every century, what does this say about the company?
The job title stinks. You’re not looking to be the next CEO, but you are looking to show career progression.
The company website sucks and the social media policy is harsh. If your mom has a better IT infrastructure, keep looking.
The pay isn’t worth it. When you calculate the benefit of earning a paycheck versus the time you’ll spend hating the job and looking for a new one, you might as well pass on the opportunity.

Go ahead. Keep looking.

Think Global, Work Local?

2010-06-11T02:46:34Z

I read a great article the other day on a favourite blog of mine – Invisible Oranges.

Invisible Oranges is predominantly concerned with heavy music and the streaming tracks are the major drawcard, but I tend to read every article on the site as the writing is generally excellent and thought provoking. (I know this sounds like someone who reads Playboy for the articles – but in this case it is true).

The article in question examines the concept of whether a “local” or “regional” sound applies to music in an age when access to influences from around the globe are both mere seconds away and largely free. This idea of a localised voice is also reflected in the art world where the best art (most affecting/arresting/interesting) has historically been a reflection of time and place.

What is happening in the world of work?

Maybe the ongoing push to globalisation has been at the expense of what makes organisations and the experience of work itself unique. Without regional separation, can individual thinking and innovation have the necessary breathing room to develop and become the point of difference required to compete? Or will we merely have a slightly less interesting environment with the same top 10 hits on the chart, the same workforce strategies and a homogenous business culture?

What an inspiring place that would be.

Let me know if you have encountered any negative impacts of globalisation at work (or any top tips on bands to check out)

How to get people to read your blog post

2010-03-24T12:00:00Z

… is a useful question, but it’s the wrong one. Catchy titles and controversial topics are good at drawing eyes, but you don’t want to be just one sensational gimmick after another. Your goal isn’t just to get read. Your goals are to share what you know, save people time, and make people think.

The first question then is: How do you write blog posts worth reading? That takes lots and lots of practice. Braindump everything you can, and the important stuff will float to the top of your brain.

The second question is: How can you find your own posts again? At least in the beginning, the primary user of your blog will be you. When people e-mail you a question you’ve already thought about before, find the blog post you shared the answer in, and send a link. When people bring up something in conversation, follow up by sending them a link to the relevant blog post. When you find yourself solving a problem you solved six months ago, look up the answer in your blog. This is why you need to record as much as you can.

The third question is: How can searchers find your posts? Don’t worry about search engine optimization. You don’t need to be the first hit for popular searches. All you need to do is make sure that people can find the obscure bits of knowledge you’ve shared in your blog when they need it, even if they don’t know you in the first place. If you get the second question sorted out (finding your own posts), this often comes for free.

The fourth question is: How can people learn from your archives? Okay, you’ve got searchers coming in and reading random pages of your blog. Can they easily find relevant posts they might be interested in? Use categories for simple organization, and use plugins to offer more choices.

The fifth question is: How can people subscribe to your blog? So people come in becomes of searches or links. They like what they see. They read your archives and they think you’ve got good things to say. Make subscription easy. Point it out. Offer an e-mail subscription. Services like FeedBurner let you add all sorts of options to your feed. If you write about a broad range of topics, offer people choices so that they can subscribe to just the kinds of posts they like.

When you’ve figured out the first five questions, you’ve gotten the hang of creating useful posts and making them findable long after you’ve forgotten them.

Then you’ll probably feel comfortable cross-pollinating your social networks: mention you have a blog on Twitter, and point to your Twitter account from your blog, put your blog URL in your e-mail signature and your card. Make it easy for people who value what you share in one area to find more from you in others.

Don’t worry if, in the beginning, no one reads your blog. Start by writing for yourself. Build an archive. Learn from what people value. Make it easy for yourself and others. And have fun!

Post from: sacha chua :: enterprise 2.0 consultant, storyteller, geek. Check out my blog for tips on managing virtual assistants, Drupal, and other topics!

How to get people to read your blog post

Usability doesn’t mean UI

2010-03-21T21:20:05Z

I have mentioned many times that the latest, coolest UI technology doesn’t mean that an application has good usability. Good design requires ingenuity and creativity but it also requires discipline and a focus on details.

I you want to check how seriously a vendor takes usability, do this simple test. Have a look at the error messages. I’m not talking here about witty 404 errors, but the stuff that happens when the payroll currency conversion field is incomplete.

If they are up to date, accurate and easy to to understand, chances are the application is too. If there are spelling mistakes, missing entries and unintelligible codes then the vendor’s commitment to usability is skin deep.

Error messages aren’t hip, glamorous, or agile, but they are a window into the development ethos. Error messages are the canvas in a suit.

Ask for a list of all error messages when you do your next vendor evaluation. You will learn more about the vendor’s commitment to usability and product quality than you will fathom from a slick demo.

Filed under: design

Use Cases for Talent and Employee Communities

2010-03-13T06:20:00Z

Over at the 2020 Social Blog we've been thinking hard about the various ways in which organizations can leverage different kinds of social tools and technologies to connect and build conversations.

One of the ways we've started to articulate it over the last few weeks is focusing on use cases.

So thinking about what organizations could do to build talent communities and employee communities we came up with this presentation

2020 Social Decoding Employee Communities Mar 2010

View more presentations from 2020 Social.

Today, I try and extend this framework to look at the various ways organizations and people communicate.

So if you look at the diagram above , communication can be from few to many, few to few, many to few and between many to many.

So the implications for Talent and Employee Communities are quite different

Take a look at the use cases given below

These can also be represented in the Employee Life Cycle - where an Alumni community also comes to the fore

What examples do you have to share on how your organization has utilized social technologies for cultivating Talent and Employee Communities?

Connect on Twitter | Linkedin | Facebook | HR Community |

@anywhere

2010-03-15T19:25:00Z

When we designed Twitter, we took a different approach—we didn’t require a relationship model like that of a social network. Keeping things open meant you could browse our site to read tweets from friends, celebrities, companies, media outlets, fictional characters, and more. You could follow any account and be followed by any account. As a result, companies started interacting with customers, celebrities connected with fans, governments became more transparent, and people started discovering and sharing information in a new, participatory manner.

We’ve developed a new set of frameworks for adding this Twitter experience anywhere on the web. Soon, sites many of us visit every day will be able to recreate these open, engaging interactions providing a new layer of value for visitors without sending them to Twitter.com. Our open technology platform is well known and Twitter APIs are already widely implemented but this is a different approach because we’ve created something incredibly simple. Rather than implementing APIs, site owners need only drop in a few lines of javascript. This new set of frameworks is called @anywhere.

Twitter will be part of our favorite sites!

When we're ready to launch, initial participating sites will include Amazon, AdAge, Bing, Citysearch, Digg, eBay, The Huffington Post, Meebo, MSNBC.com, The New York Times, Salesforce.com, Yahoo!, and YouTube. Imagine being able to follow a New York Times journalist directly from her byline, tweet about a video without leaving YouTube, and discover new Twitter accounts while visiting the Yahoo! home page—and that’s just the beginning. Twitter has proven to be compelling in a variety of ways. With @anywhere, web site owners and operators will be able to offer visitors more value with less heavy lifting.

Are you suffering from Social Media addiction like this? (video)

2010-02-17T09:43:50Z

Social media is addictive, especially the technology that facilitates it. Just think about that.....

Do you have a Blackberry, an iPhone or a smartphone? Are you on it all the time? Are you finding yourself on Twitter and Facebook day and night? Do you tweet in bed?

I would like to bet the answer is YES!

Technology enablement has led to a complete information overload. Has social media has actually made this worse!

When I saw this video today on YouTube, I just had to share this with you. It made me laugh, because I actually recognise a few traits in this myself !!

Thanks to David Zinger for bringing it to my attention on his great blog.

If you like reading this blog, then click on the orange RSS icon here and get the latest Sirona Says posts delivered to your RSS reader or your inbox the moment they come out.

9th Annual Source of Hire Report

2010-02-19T01:28:34Z

Industry heavy weights Gerry Crispin and Mark Mehler will be releasing their 9th Annual Source of Hire report on Friday US time on the CareerXRoads web site. I was lucky enough to be sent an advanced copy by Gerry.

Once again the reports details where corporations in the US found their employees during 2009, this year they look at 176,420 hires.

While the report is not generally available I will share some of the results with you below. However beforehand please note the the quote from Gerry and Mark that appears at the beginning of the document:

If the reader assumes that the data sliced and diced in this whitepaper is truly representative of where firms find their hires in the US, then you will have missed our point entirely. Indeed, this whitepaper, which we have published now for nearly a decade, is constructed as a lab report to examine the problems and the promise of how well corporations measure one part of the staffing process.

Our intent is to hold up a mirror so firms can look at themselves and their increasingly critical and vulnerable supply chain. Vendors can help, but only if staffing leaders are disciplined enough to do their part and get vendors to focus on needed changes as a priority.

So on with the results.

Internal Hires

51% of all hires were internal movement or promotions. Indicating the continued trend of internal talent management activities around succession planning and development. The report highlights that one of the stated employee value propositions (EVPs) of most organisations is to develop their employees. A result of around 51% of hires through internal placement tends to indicate that these organisation are fulfilling this development promise.

The bad news in Australia is when compared to the 2009 Sources of Talent Report it was found that only 6.29% of hires were through internal promotion. What does this say about how Australian employers fulfill their EVPs?

External Hires

75% of all external hires came from 5 sources:

Referrals
Career Site
Job Boards
Direct Sourcing

Referrals have been consistently the number one source of external hires for the last five years.

When comparing to the Australian report referrals were the number four source of external hires, at only 7.57% of all hires. Once again there is a huge opportunity for Australian organisations to increase their use of employee referral programs instead of continually relying on the “post and pray” approach through job boards. Don’t know how to do referrals, check out our ebook.

Direct Sourcing/Internal Recruiters

One very interesting area of the report is where they try and define what is direct sourcing. As part of the survey they asked the participants what do they consider direct sourcing to be, the options:

Mining our internal ATS for candidates who have not applied
Mining external candidate databases for leads we can convert into prospects and candidates
Researching profiles on social networks such as LinkedIn, Facebook etc
Developing Search Engine Marketing campaigns to create prospects from leads
Cold Calls/contacting individuals from internal or external research

The results are shown in the table below.

Given internal recruiters are the second largest source of hire in Australia what do you consider direct sourcing?

Further Thoughts

Throughout the report Gerry and Mark write about many of the same challenges Phillip Tusing and I encountered when preparing the Australian report. For example, the devil is in the detail and it is very hard to keep everyone working on the same definition of each source. And even if you place a job in print it will still end up online, so is that a job board or print source. What is a source vs a channel, or a tool vs a process?

At the end of the report that provide some good suggestions on how we can all improve the tracking and usage of source of hire data. These include:

Fixing the inherent issues with candidates self reporting source
Deciding where the source starts, in the channel or at the destination
Look at additional methods to capture source of hire data to supplement self reporting
Understand patterns in your source data
Implement more discipline in process and practices

I would highly recommend you go and download the report when it is available.

Southwest Tweets, Blogs Apology to Kevin Smith

2010-02-15T02:25:54Z

Filmmaker Kevin Smith sent a series of exasperated Tweets this weekend claiming that he’d been kicked off a Southwest Airlines flight for being “too fat”.

Proving, perhaps, the speed at which Twitter can spread messages about your brand, the Tweets have been picked up by the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, ABC and other major outlets.

The incident, which took place on Saturday, resulted in dozens of Tweets on Smith’s account (he has 1.6 million followers at the time of writing). A brief sampling:

Dear @SouthwestAir – I know I’m fat, but was Captain Leysath really justified in throwing me off a flight for which I was already seated?
Wanna tell me I’m too wide for the sky? Totally cool. But fair warning, folks: IF YOU LOOK LIKE ME, YOU MAY BE EJECTED FROM @SOUTHWESTAIR.
Dear @SouthwestAir, I’m on another one of your planes, safely seated & buckled-in again, waiting to be dragged off in front of the normies. (accompanied by a Twitpic, top right)

Southwest, which also counts over 1 million Twitter followers, responded:

@ThatKevinSmith hey Kevin! I’m so sorry for your experience tonight! Hopefully we can make things right, please follow so we may DM!
Hey folks – trust me, I saw the tweets from @ThatKevinSmith I’ll get all the details and handle accordingly! Thanks for your concerns!
I read every single tweet that comes into this account, and take every tweet seriously. We’ll handle @thatkevinsmith issue asap
I’ve read the tweets all night from @thatkevinsmith – He’ll be getting a call at home from our Customer Relations VP tonight.
@ThatKevinSmith Ok, I’ll be sure to check it out. Hopefully you received our voicemail earlier this evening.
@ThatKevinSmith Again, I’m very sorry for the experience you had tonight. Please let me know if there is anything else I can do.
@ThatKevinSmith We called you on the number you had on file in your reservation. If you prefer a different number, please DM me. Thanks!
Our apology to @ThatKevinSmith and more details regarding the events from last night – http://cot.ag/96KHC7 #Southwest

That final Tweet links to a blog post with an apology and explanation by Southwest. The blog is currently down (possibly due to too much traffic), but you can view the entry on the Southwest press site.

While debating the “size policies” of major airlines is best left to other blogs — and the social media team certainly doesn’t have any control of those — Southwest’s use of social media in addressing the situation could be said to be commendable. We counted at least eight Twitter replies from Southwest to Smith over the weekend, in addition to their attempts to make a phone call and today’s apologetic blog post.

Do you think Southwest handled the Twitter storm amicably? Could they have done better?

Reviews: Twitpic, Twitter

Tags: kevin smith, Southwest, twitter

People You Like are Good Business

2010-02-15T17:37:25Z

The Modus Cooperandi business plan for 2010 is very simple and very short. We want to work with people we like and respect on projects that are fulfilling. We've learned over the years a (sort of) simple equation:

Variables:

PYL - People you like
PYDL - People you dislike
PROJ - Projects
CT - Completion Time
AT - Acquisition Time
WA - Work to Acquire Project
T$ - Time it takes to get paid
A$ - Amount you get paid
PP - Pain to complete the Project
SC - Satisfaction of Completion

Projects with People You Like

PROJ (PYL) = AT + CT + WA + T$ + PP - A$ - SC

versus

Projects with People You Don't Like

PROJ (PYDL) = ATx2 + CTx2 + WA*4 + T$*4 + PP*6 - A$*2 - SC*0

The equations balance the work of acquiring and doing and administering a project. We have found that work with people you don't like is:

Harder to acquire
Takes longer to complete
Takes longer to acquire
Takes longer to get paid, and
Are painful to complete

but

You get paid more

but

By the time you get the money you have zero satisfaction in the project.

So this incredibly unscientific equation is saying, work is balanced by income and satisfaction. And we've found that the cost / benefit analysis of working with people we like so far and away outweighs the opportunity costs of making more money with unenjoyable people.

But it gets better. I think there’s a Time Value of Money and a Psychological Value of Money – which I’ll describe in my next post.

Photo by Rsms

HOW TO: Integrate Google Buzz Into Your WordPress Blog

2010-02-15T20:01:55Z

Shared by Michael
Some good tips on integrating Buzz with Wordpress

We’ve discussed how you can integrate Buzz with your other social networks, but what about integrating Buzz with your blog? If you use a self-hosted WordPress blog (sorry, WordPress.com users), there are already a variety of Google Buzz plugins and add-ons available.

While it’s clear that people are really taking to using Buzz to share content and communicate, the service will undoubtedly reach more users as its sharing tools are integrated into other social sites. From buttons to social stream in your side bar, here’s how you can integrate Buzz with your WordPress blog.

Google Buzz Buttons

Mashable started sporting some nifty Buzz buttons a few days ago and lots of our readers have wanted to know how to add a similar feature to their own blogs. As it stands right now, how our Google Buzz buttons work (and how the buttons other sites are using also work) is that they create a share link from that post to Google Reader. As long as Google Reader is connected with your Google Buzz account, your publicly shared items will also be shared on Buzz.

Already, a number of enterprising WordPress plugin developers have answered the call to add Google Buzz buttons to WordPress posts.

Let’s take a look:

Google Buzz Button

Internet Techies created the Google Buzz Button plugin that allows you to add a “Buzz This” button to each of your WordPress posts. That icon probably looks pretty familiar — that’s because the button was designed here at Mashable (though it isn’t the same plugin).

The plugin options are relatively limited — you can choose what “rel” attribute you include with the link (the default is “nofollow”) and you can choose to display the button before or after your post content. You can also specify the icon’s height and width. Making some changes to your WordPress theme’s CSS options, you could further customize the appearance of the button, but as it stands, it’s a pretty basic (and easy) way to add a Buzz button. If you want to add Buzz manually to only certain posts, there is a template tag that you can add to those posts.

WP Google-buzz

Another button plugin option is WP Google-buzz from Arpit Shah. This button is extremely similar to the Google Buzz Button plugin, but it adds a few more options. You can choose to show the button before or after content or to add it to posts manually, but there are also options for what style button you want to use. Depending on how you have your blog setup, you might want to use a different size or style of button.

WPBuzzer

Hameedulah’s WPBuzzer is the most robust of the Google Buzz button plugins as of right now. The style of the button is almost identical to what Mashable and the Google Buzz Button use (albeit, not quite as clean), but the options are where this plugin really shines.

You can choose where you want your buttons to appear (on posts, on pages, on the home page, in your RSS feed), whether your want the button to appear before or after the post, the target for the button (a new window or a pop-up share option) and even the CSS style. You can also choose to use a small or large button.

The biggest feature is that you can track share counts (just like we do at Mashable) if you have a Bit.ly API key and login.

Light Social

The Light Social plugin takes a slightly different approach to the Google Buzz button. Light Social is a plugin that inserts a set of social share links at the bottom of each of your WordPress posts. This way links to Digg, Reddit, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter are all automatically at the bottom of the post. The developer of Light Social updated the plugin to include a Google Buzz icon and share link as well. If you want to add lots of social options to your posts — Light Social is a good approach.

Buzz In Your Sidebar

It’s one thing to let other people share your content to their buzz accounts, but a big advantage of Buzz is that you can aggregate your social activities into one place as well. If you want to share your Buzz content on your blog, check out the Google Buzz ER plugin. Google Buzz ER is extremely cool. It’s a widget that will display your public Buzz content. Just enter in your username and define how many Buzz entries you want to display and drag the widget to your designated choice in your blog.

That’s it! Now you have Buzz in your sidebar! Plus, as an added benefit, other users can click on “comment” to immediately respond to what you share. As of right now, the Buzz API doesn’t allow other people’s comments to become viewable, so only your public content is going to appear on your blog.

Buzz Your Comments

There are a number of different all-inclusive comment solutions for WordPress — there’s Echo, Disqus (which we use here at Mashable) and IntenseDebate. IntenseDebate is owned by Automattic, the people behind WordPress.com and some of the main contributors to the WordPress.org project. So it probably shouldn’t be a surprise that it’s the first of the solutions to offer Buzz integration into its service.

If you use IntenseDebate on your blog, you can now easily add a Buzz It button to the top of your comment form. This won’t let people Buzz their own comments (we expect something like that will come in the future), but it adds another “Share on Buzz” option for your post to your visitors. If you use IntenseDebate, you can activate the Google Buzz This plugin by enabling it in the Plugins Directory.

Keep Your Eyes Peeled

As Google Buzz continues to evolve (remember, it isn’t even a week old), more and more integration options are going to sprout up. Let us know what sort of integration options you’d like to see in the future in the comments! If we missed one of your favorite Buzz plugins, let us know!

Reviews: Digg, Disqus, Facebook, Google Buzz, Google Reader, LinkedIn, Mashable, Twitter, WordPress

Tags: buzz, Google, google buzz, how to, List, Lists, Wordpress, wordpress plugins

[extracted from HOW TO: Integrate Google Buzz Into Your WordPress Blog via feedly]

25 Color Combination Tools For Designers

2010-01-25T16:00:55Z

Color is difficult to get right. There’s a near infinite number of combinations out there, but only a few that will actually look right for your project. Because it’s so important to a design’s success, it’s worth taking a little time to work out your palette.

There are a lot of online tools to help out with this. They all vary slightly to suit designers with different preferences on how they work. We’ve collected together 25 of the best here, with a quick overview on each to help you decide which to try.

Website Color Match

Color Match is a website tool that shows you how to do color matching and also giving guidance in choosing the best color. It also displays the HTML code for the color, which saves you time in your design work.

Toucan Color Palettes

There are various tools available from Toucan Color Palettes, such as an image editor, color editor, audio editor, effect editor, vector editor and image markup. Toucan Color Palettes helps you to inject color into your design.

The Color Wizard

Color Wizard is a very cool tool, you submit your own base color and it automatically returns matching colors for the one you selected.

The Color Tool

Color Tool is dedicated to the display of color combinations, changing CSS styles, and displaying many powerful and unique color and font tools. It lets you view and experiment with thousands of color combinations.

Slayeroffice Color Palette Creator

SlayerOffice Color Palette Creator shows 10 shades of the base color (located in the top-left), very useful for monotone designs.

Pro Color Palette Software from Colourlovers

Pro Color Palette includes a photo tool to extract colors from an image, an advanced color picker and color theory wheel to give you your inspiration, and it lets you save the colors you’ve been working with.

Pictaculous

Pictaculous is easy to use; just click a button and upload your image. It then automatically builds a palette for you based on that image.

Palette Man

Palette Man’s uniqueness is in its limitations. It will only allow you to choose a color from the limited set of web-safe colors. It will then help you work out combinations using others from that palette.

Kuler

Adobe Kuler is a free web app for themes that can inspire your design. No matter what you’re creating, with Kuler you can experiment quickly with color variations and browse thousands of them.

Kolur

Kolur is a simple tool for you to browse color palettes. Designs displayed in the gallery go beyond the generic 3 colored dots, and attempt to portray the possibilities in palettes (As you can see from the image above!).

Instant Color Schemes

Instant Color schemes uses an interesting method of generating the corresponding colors for you; no color theory at all. Instead, it grabs related images from the web and picks the color suggestions out of those.

Infobound Color Schemer

Infobound Color Schemer is a simple tool to help you experiment with various color schemes for your next web or print project. Anyone who uses Photoshop often will know color picker this interface very well!

Hex Color Scheme Generator

Let’s say you want to use red in your design but you don’t know what will work with it, just pick the red color and Hex Color Scheme Generator automatically comes out with 3 matching colors for you.

CSSDrive’s Image To Colors Palette Generator

CSSDrive is another tool for grabbing colors from images. They also run one of the biggest CSS galleries around, and there’s no reason why you couldn’t upload an image from that gallery to see the original palette and how it was used.

Color Wheel from Colors On The Web

The Color Wheel randomizes 6 million colors, simply spin it and it comes out with three matching color ideas for your design. This is for when you’re really stuck for ideas!

Color Wheel Color Calculator

Color Wheel Color Calculator helps designers select HTML, RGB, or CMYK colors and identifies color harmonies and schemes.

ColorToy 2.0

ColorToy 2.0 is a flash based color scheme generator and picker. It generates complementary color schemes based on your inputted color values, or randomly (which is much more fun!).

Color Schemer Online v2

Color Schemer Online v2 has 16 boxes which contain matching color ideas, simply pick a color and it automatically generates matching colors for your art work.

Color Scheme Designer

Color Scheme Designer provides color space conversions, better preview, enhanced scheme creation system, unique scheme IDs and permanent URL of the scheme. That’s a lot of great features, with one of the nicest interfaces on this list!

Color Palette Generator from DeGraeve

This color Palette Generator generates a color palette based on an image; upload the image you want and it grabs the color scheme for your art work.

Color Hunter

Color Hunter is a palette gallery where the palette is displayed next to the image it came from. It’s a great way to browse because you can see both the scheme, and a great example of what it can produce!

Color Explorer

ColorExplorer is a free set of tools that include color matching and libraries of color. It’s well developed and has another fantastic interface.

Color Combos

With Color Combos, you can find the perfect color combination for your design. It allows you to select and test the website color combination.

Color Combinations Tester

What I like about Color Combinations Tester is that it fills the screen with your previews. Most of the others give colors in very small boxes.

Daily Color Scheme

Daily Color Scheme is also known as the Every-Day Color Resource, because every day they bring you a fresh color scheme. It’s like daily inspiration from a design gallery, but purely for colors! (NB – This site hasn’t been updated in quite a while now, but we thought the idea and design were cool enough to be worth showcasing anyway!)

Conclusion

That’s our roundup of the top 25. Are there any we’ve missed out on though? What tool do you use to help with your color schemes, or do you just experiment with your design until you get it right?

Inspecht TV Update

2010-02-10T08:52:51Z

Over the last week there have been several videos published over at Inspecht TV and lined up content over the next few weeks. So if you are interested in the latest HR and recruitment video content go subscribe.

In the meantime if you have not subscribed here are some of the videos:

Recruitment Video – Defense
Macquarie Bank employee watches girl on TV
Did You Know HC Edition
My RecruitTECH 2009 presentation in 3 part, 1, 2 & 3

Some of the content lined up includes presentations by Seth Godin, Jimmy Wales, Clay Shirky, Dave Ulrich and others.

Siri Assistant Turns Your iPhone into a Personal Assistant

2010-02-05T05:02:32Z

At the beginning of the week, Dag Kittlaus wrote a post for Mashable about the birth of the virtual assistant. Today, Dag’s company, Siri, is releasing its iPhone app, Siri Assistant. Siri helps people get things done by combining intelligent voice recognition with hooks into tons of different web services, making it easy for people to use their mobile devices to get things done.

When I talked to Dag a few weeks ago, he gave me a demo of what Siri Assistant is and what it does. The concept is pretty powerful: Talk to your phone and let it find and make plans for you. So instead of going directly to a website and doing a traditional search for movie tickets at a certain time, I can just say, “Get me movie tickets for Shutter *Island around 9 pm” and options for theaters near me (or theaters that I have previously indicated are my favorites) will show up and I can then purchase tickets directly from my phone.

Check out this screencast to see more of what Siri Assistant can do:

Siri was born from SRI’s CALO Project. The CALO Project (or Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes) is the largest Artificial Intelligence project in U.S. History. DARPA invested $150 million into CALO over the course of five years. What was learned from CALO has been implemented into Siri.

Using natural language understanding (think the Dragon Search and Dragon Dictation apps for the iPhone) to connect with existing services and APIs and traditional search components, Siri can become very adept at helping people get things done.

Siri has more than 30 different partners whose APIs the app can plug into when answering a request. These include services like OpenTable, MovieTickets.com, Eventful, StubHub, Taxi Magic, Rotten Tomatos, Bing, Google Maps and Yelp. This list of partners will continue to expand over time.

What I was particularly impressed with is that if you have existing accounts with these services, you can log in to them and have Siri remember those credentials — so you can get your OpenTable points or use your MovieWatcher card. Siri will also offer up results from Bing if it can’t find something with one of its partners, so you aren’t just limited to the services that are integrated at the API level with Siri.

When I think about the best use cases for something like Siri, I think about when unexpected things come up — say you need to book a flight to a different city and also get a hotel room and taxi — and time is of the essence. It’s much easier and faster to say what you need than to have to go through the manual search mechanisms.

Siri gets better the more you use it, can adapt to the places you frequent, and can use technologies like geolocation to find better results. You can correct it with text input if the voice recognition isn’t right and also use traditional text input to get results.

Siri Assistant is free and available right now in the App Store. It’s an amazing first glimpse of a Jetsonian type of future. Now all I need is my jetpack and my robotic maid!

What do you think about the advancements in voice recognition and how they are changing how we can get things done? Let us know!

Reviews: Bing, Eventful, Google Maps, Yelp

Tags: iphone app, siri, siri assistant, voice recognition

UFO’s: Unfinished Objects

2010-01-18T09:00:37Z

I’m not sure who first coined the term “shelfware.” Most of our IT departments have all sorts of stuff we have purchased that we intend to implement but just haven’t done so yet. Or we have implementations that we have abandoned, or we have technology and strategy roadmaps that are mid way through because we ran out of funding, or got stopped by a temporary glitch we didn’t have the mental will to push through. All in all, we have too much in the way of “shelfware” whether it’s actual software or just projects sitting around. And we don’t finish enough of them.

As a consultant, I’m always glad for the role I have. To be completely honest, I’m a strategist (whatever that means). I’m not good at the detailed stuff – testing and QA always drove me crazy, and I’m a really bad coder – because I like shortcuts and don’t like to figure out where I missed a semicolon. In one sense, I’m really glad I don’t usually have to stick around for the implementation of what I come up with. It’s nice to hand off to people at application vendors or system integrators to run an implementation because they are much better at that stuff than I am. At the same time, it’s incredible to me the amount of strategy projects that get held up or never get going after I leave.

In most cases, organization’s are just not staffed well enough to handle additional project loads. The realities of day to day operations cause them to lose focus, and these organizations also seem to have issues with using external consultants to do implementation work. Granted it’s the most costly way to go, but it’s also the easiest way to maintain your focus on the plan. Internal PMO organizations don’t usually like to play around with HR stuff, and that’s a shame.

Lexy Martin had a post a while back about unfinishable objects.

I’ve noticed, however, that in my studio I have a few UFOs — a quilter’s term for “unfinished objects.” I like to think of myself as not a quitter — as someone who finishes what I start. The UFO from that class, I’ve decided will never be finished as originally planned at that class. And, oh my…it feels good to recognize that. I declare it totally unfinishable! Of course, I will go through some doubts: 1. Is it unfinishable because my techniques are not up to it? 2. Is it unfinishable because I didn’t like the teacher and she did not help me to excel? 3. Is it unfinishable because…. You know what, I don’t need to know the reason. What I do know is that by declaring that one effort unfinishable,I feel ever so much more creative! Plus, it frees up one of my favorite fabrics that I want to use in another quilt project that is to be a gift for dear friends. ¹

The first is what I already mentioned above. Sometimes I need to plan better for an organization that is just not willing to approve an ongoing project with an external implementor. Organizations that really want to implement SAP on their own after deciding it’s the best fit for them…. Well… perhaps it’s my fault that I only told them 9 times and not 10 times that it’s really unwise to try to do it inhouse. That’s a bit tongue in check, but the reality is that perhaps it’s my fault that even with the best intentions, internal project teams fail to get funding that they need and just can’t handle the workload themselves. That comes to Lexy’s second point. Consultants often don’t provide a backup plan. We put so much time into preparing a business case that justifies the first option that when an organization can’t implement an ERP or global service delivery model (or whatever), that we didn’t tell them what’s next. Maybe just putting their 15 different payrolls on ADP was the right way to go, and they would have gotten funding for it. Not to avoid any mea culpa’s that should be coming my way, but consultants don’t always have the organizational knowledge to know how well you’ll be able to navigate through the approval and funding processes, we’re almost always guided by your judgment and the judgment of the executive sponsors. If you say you can do it, we kind of believe you.

That brings us to the last point. Sometimes, instead of blindly plugging along in the current state, or leaving a project on the shelf and pretending you’ll get to it eventually, you just need to get back to square one and start over. Usually, it’s not really square one, most consultants will have brought a number of good models for you to go after, and it’s just a re-evaluation of the new best fit with the new funding realities in mind. The point is, not to let anything sit there and fester while you do nothing. There was a good reason to tackle a project to begin with, and that reason is still there, whether it be service delivery, technology, process or anything else. Declare it a loss, and reevaluate the project so you can get going again.

UFO’s: Unfinished Objects

http://lexymartin.blogspot.com/2009/12/giving-yourself-permission-not-to.html

Lexy Martin had a post a while back about unfinishable objects.

I’ve noticed, however, that in my studio I have a few UFOs — a quilter’s term for “unfinished objects.” I like to think of myself as not a quitter — as someone who finishes what I start. The UFO from that class, I’ve decided will never be finished as originally planned at that class. And, oh my…it feels good to recognize that. I declare it totally unfinishable! Of course, I will go through some doubts: 1. Is it unfinishable because my techniques are not up to it? 2. Is it unfinishable because I didn’t like the teacher and she did not help me to excel? 3. Is it unfinishable because…. You know what, I don’t need to know the reason. What I do know is that by declaring that one effort unfinishable,I feel ever so much more creative! Plus, it frees up one of my favorite fabrics that I want to use in another quilt project that is to be a gift for dear friends. ((Martin, Alexia, December 22, 2009. “Giving yourself permission not to finish frees up energy – another quilting/work intersection.” Retrived from http://lexymartin.blogspot.com on December 25, 2009.))

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Martin, Alexia, December 22, 2009. “Giving yourself permission not to finish frees up energy – another quilting/work intersection.” Retrived from http://lexymartin.blogspot.com on December 25, 2009. [back]

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Research: Time spent on social media sites increased 82% in 2009

2010-01-28T15:35:33Z

According to research by Nielsen, global consumers spent nearly six hours on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter in December 2009 — an 82% increase from the same time last year.

The study looked at both “unique audiences” and “time per person” for social media sites, and included data from the U.S., U.K., Australia, Brazil, Japan, Switzerland, France, Spain, and Italy.

Other findings from the study:

With 143% growth in average time spent on social networks, U.S. growth outpaces all others
At nearly 7 hours per month, Australia leads all nations in average time spent per person on social media sites
With 579% growth in unique visitors, Twitter continues to be the fastest growing social network in the U.S.

Learn More: Nielsen

On user interfaces, the iPad and Charles Dickens.

2010-01-28T09:19:10Z

Cross posted on my Gartner blog.

My colleagues, Ray, Allen, Mike, Mark, Andrew, Mark and Van, are all over the iPad. Ray’s posts are particularly thought provoking, as he looks at the strengths and weaknesses of the device. There is also lots of commentary on the web, and the consumer electronics bloggers have discussed its every detail. I’m not going to talk about how cool or not the device is, how naff the name is or what impact it will have on the media industry, or how Steve Jobs dresses. Yet again, Apple created a Great Expectation, and managed it profoundly well.

I was thinking this morning about what impact this device could and should have on UI design. Most enterprise applications are bound by keyboard centric design thinking, basically what I call navigation donuts. Almost every enterprise application I see is trapped in the amber of the table layouts that haven’t really fundamentally changed since the first screens appeared over 40 years ago.

Andy Bitterer commented in a recent note. (Gartner clients click here)

What would happen if Apple built a BI product? Users would probably love it and actually use it. There is hardly another company in any IT market that is considered a synonym for great design and usability. While Apple has not been known for going after the enterprise software market and rather focuses on consumer products, Apple could still easily use its visualization know-how to create an “iDecide,” “iReport” or “iAnalyze” product that was at least as attractive as those from the best-in-class vendors today. In fact, other BI vendors could learn from Apple how to build end-user-friendly and intuitive applications.

For all the talk from enterprise application vendors about user centric design and building engaging applications, the enterprise software world could really do with an Apple moment.

Many of the applications I see would not be out of place in Miss Havisham’s Mansion. The Enterprise UI design clocks stopped some time ago, and the usability wedding cake continues to rot.

So unchanging was the dull old house, the yellow light in the darkened room, the faded spectre in the chair by the dressing-table glass, that I felt as if the stopping of the clocks had stopped Time in that mysterious place, and while I and everything else outside it grew older, it stood still….It bewildered me, and under its influence I continued at heart to hate my trade and to be ashamed of home.

image from http://chantalpowell.wordpress.com/2008/07/31/miss-havishams-table/ a fascinating blog.

“I began to understand that everything in the room had stopped like the watch and the clock, a long time ago.” “Everything within my view which ought to be white had been white a long time ago, and had lost its lustre, and was faded and yellow.”

Posted in design

What We Learned About Apple Yesterday

2010-01-28T09:25:16Z

When I woke up today, it took me about half an hour to get up to speed with the iPad (I’m in Croatia, so the bulk of the news came in overnight for me). After I’d read a couple of articles, I already knew everything there was to know about it (and more): its advantages, its flaws and its potential.

But hidden between the lines of all that iPad coverage I’ve learned a thing or two about Apple and its plans, mostly from the things iPad is missing.

The thing is, Apple didn’t omit a camera or multitasking by accident. An engineer didn’t come up to Steve Jobs on Tuesday saying, “I don’t know how to tell you this, Steve, but we’ve forgotten about the camera. No, please, not the head! Ouch!” They’ve omitted all these things on purpose, and this purpose tells you more about Apple’s plans than the things they did put in.

First of all, Flash. For years, we’ve been hearing that Adobe and Apple are in talks to bring full Flash support on the iPhone. It was almost always described as “nearly there.” Well, now that the iPad is out — a bigger device, perfect for browsing the web — and there’s still no Flash in sight, we can assume that Apple is not only not bringing Flash to its mobile devices, it’s fighting against it. For some reason, Apple doesn’t see eye to eye with Adobe where Flash is concerned, and if they haven’t reached some sort of agreement now, it’s probably not just around the corner, either.

Then, there’s multi-tasking. Nearly everyone I’ve talked to thinks this is a huge deal-breaker, but I think it makes sense. Although Steve Jobs was trying hard to prove to us that the iPad is a computer, it isn’t. Just like the iPod and the iPhone, its main purpose is to give the users an easy way to consume certain types of digital content. After music (iPod) and mobile applications (iPhone) comes iPad with video, photos, e-books, e-magazines, games. Apple doesn’t really want you to do complex photo editing on the iPad; you’ve got your Mac or PC for that. Apple wants you to touch a button, and start consuming content (preferably paying a couple of dollars for it).

Finally, the camera. Yes, it would be nice to have video chat. But once again, Apple wants you to do that on a Mac. If you want to snap photos, you should do it on the iPhone — you’re carrying it with you all the time, anyway. Once again, it becomes clear that Apple doesn’t want to sell devices that can do everything; they want to find the best form factor to consume some types of digital content, and then focus on them. If you look at it, you can do pretty much everything on your personal computer; by that philosophy, you don’t need anything else besides a laptop. And yet, you’ve now got smartphones and e-readers selling very well. Could it be that one powerful device is not as good as several less powerful, but more focused ones?

The way I see it, the iPad is not about creating; it’s all about consuming content. It shouldn’t be sold in Apple stores, it should be sold on newsstands (together with a 24-month subscription to some newspaper), in video clubs, in libraries. I honestly expected a lot of subsidized options for the device if you agree to buy some content with it, but Apple hasn’t really delivered that — yet. If I’m right, and if Apple starts doing that, most of iPad’s shortcomings won’t matter.

Reviews: iPhone

Tags: apple, ipad, iphone, trending

How to Do 500 Times Better than AdSense

2010-01-27T14:56:46Z

Right around a year ago now, I made my first cent online. It was literally a cent — $0.01 — and it showed up in my Google AdSense account after a certain number of people had viewed an ad for dog food or a shiatsu massager or whatever on my old humor blog.

That first cent was exciting, because it proved that you really could make money online in the way it seemed that everyone said you could — by creating sites populated with ads, and then sitting back and letting the earnings pile up. Then, if the gurus were to be believed, it was only a matter of time before I would be living in Hawaii, while bikini girls used the Mona Lisa to wax my Lamborghini.

So I read a ton about how to use AdSense, took a few courses, and built a bunch of little search-engine-optimized niche websites. I worked and worked and built and built, and eventually I amassed a couple dozen of these little moneymakers.

Slowly, visitors began to come to my sites, click on the expensive Google ads for lawyers and insurance, and make me some money. Then, reasonably content with my Google army, I put those sites on “set it and forget it” mode (like a Ronco Rotisserie) and started something new.

A different way to do it

Specifically, in April of last year, I started the Johnny B. Truant biz. The business model basically consisted of trying to write funny blog posts and generally just hanging out online, and then parlaying that good will into its logical succession, which is, of course, technology services.

I worked very hard, but it didn’t feel like work — especially compared to what I had been doing on the niche sites. It felt like being an amiable jackass in the right places, and meeting people, and kind of screwing around. Eventually it also started to feel like building a business, but that happened slowly and by degrees.

Nine months passed, with both venues making me money in their own unique way.

At the end of 2009, I recorded my second five-figure month in the JBT technology biz, after building between eighty and a hundred blogs for clients in December.

And at around the same time, I got my first ever AdSense check from Google. It was for $111.

The best way to “make money online” is probably not what you think.

Spend a few minutes Googling around for ways to make money online. Go ahead; I’ll wait.

If you didn’t do that search just now, it’s probably because you’ve tried it before and already knew what you would find. Almost every site, course, and guru out there will tell you that to make money online, you should sign up for AdSense (or maybe for a large advertiser’s affiliate program), rustle up some long-tail keywords, and start gaming Google traffic.

I’m not going to tell you that doesn’t work . . . but I am going to tell you that it didn’t work for me, and that it’s unlikely to work for you if you’re even one iota like me.

Here’s why I don’t like the AdSense strategy as a business model:

It’s not a business model. Any time you can talk about “monetization,” you’re probably not talking about a real business because “monetizing” a business is redundant. “Monetizing” is slapping a moneymaker on top of something that doesn’t naturally produce income. The way that 99.99% of people dive into AdSense, they’re simply putting something out there and waiting for the dollars to roll in. There is no real planning, no accounting forecasts, no intention down the road to improve workflow or expand offerings or enlarge the sales funnel, no exploiting the best abilities of yourself and partners to create benefit for others.
It doesn’t add value. Technicalities aside, there is no real product or service in the way most AdSense “make money online” campaigns are run. There is simply arbitrage. You’re not increasing widget sales; you’re trying to make sure more of the existing sales will occur through your ads. I learned my lesson trying to play the stock market (and failing) and then investing in real estate (and failing at an epic level): Sustainable incomes come from using your talents to create value for others, not from gambling and playing the numbers.
It contradicts the way the Net is supposed to work. Yes, yes, I know . . . some people blog in a heartfelt manner about cabinetry and run cabinetry ads, and visitors click them to buy cabinets and the site owner makes money. But most AdSense strategies are all about gaming the system. When I was creating insurance niche sites, I couldn’t have cared less about insurance. I was simply trying to draw traffic away from the legit insurance sites so that people would click on my ads instead of finding an insurance company a different way. That’s not the way that the Web is supposed to work . . . which is to efficiently connect the searcher and what she’s searching for.
It’s anonymous. Few “make money online” strategies will tell you to blog under your own name, include your own picture, and make a big deal about being the guy or gal who created this site. In fact, I spent a lot of my time trying to obscure who I was. Many courses even tell you to use hosting that will generate random, non-sequential IP addresses for each site, so that even Google won’t know that one person owns them all. Anonymity conflicts directly with what I consider to be the most important reasons for my success, which are honesty, authenticity, trust-building, and transparency.

You can do better, no matter who you are

I worked really, really, really hard on those AdSense sites. I worked 15-hour days; I wrote keyword-laced post after keyword-laced post; I entered them in article directories and put them through social media bulk submitters; I launched site after site, tweaked, customized, and researched.

And by doing that, I made $111 in a year.

Maybe I didn’t work hard enough. Maybe I used the wrong system. Maybe, if someone else had done it, they might have done it twice as well. And maybe that same person would have done it for three times as long as I did, building sites for the whole year instead of only doing it for four months.

So yeah, maybe that super-ambitious person might have made $888.

Now, stop and think about that for a second.

Anyone who doesn’t believe that they could start a business today, being themselves, playing to their own strengths, and creating value for others, and not make more than $888 in a year should . . . well, those people should really just stop reading about business right now.

Am I saying that you can’t use AdSense to make money online? No. Am I saying that every “system” for striking it rich on the Net — like creating anonymous niche sites that use AdWords ads to draw traffic to affiliate products — is an impossible scam? No.

I’m just saying that the average person is probably going to have better luck building a real business. Meaning:

One that you can stand behind publicly.
One that’s based on helping others in exchange for pay.
One that benefits from being a real, authentic person.
One that matches your best abilities to the needs of others.

This Third Tribe thing? This new internet era of being real and honest and open in business and marketing rather than relying on tricks, games, yellow-highlighted text, and the hard sell? It’s real, folks. And at least for me, using that approach turned my Google earnings into an afterthought.

If the “Third Tribe” style of doing business appeals to you, subscribe to the free Copyblogger newsletter, Internet Marketing for Smart People. We’re within a few days of announcing a brand-new tribe for online entrepreneurs. And our newsletter subscribers will be the very first to learn about it.

About the Author: Johnny B. Truant is an amiable jackass who may or may not have invented Post-It Notes. You can hire him to tell you how to do better than AdSense, or, failing that, you should at least follow him on Twitter because sometimes he tweets about zombies.