The image of legions of headphone-wearing employees sitting silently at their workstations, oblivious to the flesh-and-blood community around them but actively engaged with a virtual world, seems like a dystopian future envisioned in movies like Minority Report. But that future is here. A Wall Street Journal piece on the "officeless office" had a sidebar with six new rules for office etiquette which included #1, no sneaking up; #5, limit chit-chat; and #6 use headphones. That may increase a certain kind of productivity, but at what cost?

Management professors Sigal Barsade at Wharton and Hakan Ozcelik at Cal State Sacramento are among the pioneers in studying how employee isolation correlates with organizational outcomes. In a recent study, they found "because they feel more estranged and less connected to coworkers, lonelier employees will be more likely to experience a lack of belongingness at work, thus decreasing their affective commitment to their organizations." Something to think about before you decide to limit social chit-chat or put those headphones back on.

Very nice handbook from Valve.

I once asked Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney what smaller teams should focus on during development, and he said polish. “The area where most teams fail is insufficient polish. Cliff [Bleszinksi] always says there’s the first 90 percent of the project, and then the second 90 percent. Because once your game is completely playable and it works, you’re really only halfway,” Sweeney explained. “It takes an incredible amount of tweaking to get to the level of polish where people take your game seriously.”

Most novice developers don’t understand the enormity of game development, and the act of creating a good game is herculean, no matter the size of your team or the scope of your game. If you haven’t shipped at least one or two games, or if your team lacks someone of sufficient experience, you could look like a very bad bet to the eyes of the investor—or Kickstarter backer.

“Overall, I want to ‘invest’ in a game that I want to play or made by a guy that I adore,” Dent said. “I spoke to/begged David Jaffe recently about using Kickstarter to make a game. I have no idea where he is on that or if he is going to go down that route. My point is that I love Jaffe’s games, so if I were to see that he was setting that up in Kickstarter, I would instantly support it.” This might be the best, or at least safest, use of Kickstarter: The service allows proven talent to create games with a large audience but limited appeal to traditional investors.

Apps are the new Starbucks. Apps are our new guilty pleasure.

A daily "pick me up" that gives a longer and more fulfilling dopamine rush than a frappuccino -- and without the calories (y'all heard on "60 Minutes" that sugar is now toxic, right?).

If you're going to burn $3 to $5 a day consuming something, an app is the perfect little fix.    

Apple's neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) has trained us to solve our problems with apps.

You have problems? We have solutions.

"There's an App for that" is a cult manifesto on par with "live your best life!"

Bottom line, we've been programmed that "installing" the latest app will make our lives better. The progress status bar at the bottom of an app icon is an emptying syringe.

We're all app junkies, and for good reason: they're a delightful rush and cheap.

There's a reason why crack and apps are the same price.

The Mac App Store has been a huge boon to Mac software developers, but has an enormous flaw: it needs to allow developers to charge existing customers a discounted price for major upgrades.

Right now developers selling through the Mac App Store face a lose/lose choice: either provide all major upgrades to existing customers for free (thus losing a quarter of our revenue), or create a “new” product for each major version (creating customer confusion) and charge existing customers full price again (creating customer anger).

How to Hire a Programmer
There's no magic bullet for hiring programmers. But I can share advice on a few techniques that I've seen work, that I've written about here and personally tried out over the years.

1. First, pass a few simple "Hello World" online tests.
I know it sounds crazy, but some people who call themselves programmers can barely program. To this day, I still get regular pings from people who tell me they had candidates fail the most basic programming test imaginable.

That's why extremely simple programming tests are step one of any sane interview process. These tests should happen online, and the goal is not to prove that the candidate is some kind of coding genius, but that they know what the heck programming is. Yes, it's sad and kind of depressing that this is even necessary, but if you don't perform this sanity check, trust me – you'll be sorry.

Some services that do online code screening (I am sure there are more, but these are the ones I know about) are Interview Zen and codility.

The "Spanish Theory" says that management's job is to extract the maximum resources (= developer effort)  from the smallest amount of money (= developer salary). In practice what this often means for the developer is unpaid overtime (also known as "crunch time"), something very familiar to game developers, and also common in traditional software development, as the project nears its deadline. But those unpaid hours are actually costing you, the developer, because you can't get them back. You've sacrificed time in your personal life with your family and instead have chosen to work on the company's project - something of large value has been sacrificed for something of lesser value. If this imbalance continues past a reasonable level and unpaid overtime becomes the norm, then many developers will become dissatisfied and leave the company, increasing the company's staff turnover (churn) rate.

In one corner of Manoj Bhargava’s office is a cemetery of sorts. It’s a Formica bookcase, its shelves lined with hundreds of garishly colored screw-top plastic bottles not much taller than shot glasses. Front and center is a Cadillac-red bottle of 5-Hour Energy, the two-ounce caffeine and vitamin elixir that purports to keep you alert without crashing. In eight years 5-Hour has gone from nowhere to $1 billion in retail sales. Truckers swear by it. So do the traders in Oliver Stone’s 2010 sequel to Wall Street. So do hungover ­students. It’s $3 a bottle, and it has made Bhargava a fortune.

Take, for example, the case of iOS developer Anton Sinelnikov. By looking at the screenshot taken a few weeks ago, you are faced with an incredible feat. Sinelnikov has managed to create not just one popular iOS app, but several! Hits like Plants vs. Zombies, Temple Run, Tiny Wings and Angry Birds, all coming from one developer!

Oh. Wait a second. My mistake, it turns out that instead of coming up with original ideas, Sinelnikov takes a different strategy. He copies other applications, takes a similar name, and then forces the application into the Top 100 list, where users mistake it for the original app. After a day or so, Apple notices that these apps aren’t actually providing they promise and kick the apps out, but not before users spend tens of thousands of dollars on the apps – money that the developers get to keep, as users rarely ask for a refund.

Of course, this wouldn’t be such a big deal if it was one developer, but the problem is that close to a dozen scam apps have made their way into the Top lists on the iOS App Store, netting a veritable fortune for the scammers. Some developers have been pointing this out for a while, asking Apple to fix the situation and be proactive. Apple has yet to respond with the needed force.

Since your meeting has a clearly defined mission statement, everyone attending the meeting knows in advance what they need to talk about and share, and has it ready to go before they walk into the room. Right? That's how we can keep the meeting down to an hour. If you haven't done your homework, you shouldn't be in the meeting. If nobody has done their homework, the meeting should be cancelled.

The problem is that most “exciting new company” lore is intermingled with that of Startup Culture™. This means it’s hard to find your identity when it doesn’t match the latest company write-up of How Those Crazy Kids Turned VC Millions Into Billions!!!

Most people will look at that and say that’s not me. I don’t have 110% to give. I have a family, I have a mortgage, I have other interests. Where’s my place in the startup world if all I have to give is 60%? What can putting in part-time give?

The good news is much more than you think. The marginal value of the last hour put into a business idea is usually much less than the first. The world is full of ideas that can be executed with 10 to 20 hours per week, let alone 40. The number of projects that are truly impossible unless you put in 80 or 120 hours per week are vanishingly small by comparison.

This is of course nothing new. We’ve been playing this bongo drum for years. But every time I see people crumble and quit from the crunch-mode pressure cooker, I think what a shame, it didn’t have to be like that. It’s the same when I read yet another story about someone who won the startup lottery, and the stereotypical startup role model is glorified and cemented again.

At this point in my life, I feel strongly that my three most important jobs are being a good dad, a good entrepreneur, and a good husband. Over the past year, I’ve found that it’s incredibly difficult to excel at all three simultaneously. Perhaps, for people better than I, it’s an easy task. I’m not a member of that club.

Every meeting must have one clear decision maker. If there's no decision maker -- or no decision to be made -- the meeting shouldn't happen.
No more than 10 people should attend.
Every person should give input, otherwise they shouldn't be there.
No decision should ever wait for a meeting. If a meeting absolutely has to happen before a decision should be made, then the meeting should be scheduled immediately.

Among our many cherished verities and assumed assumptions is the widespread belief—nearly universal practice actually—that salespeople are to be paid commissions. It’s the way things are done. Stop signs are red. Salespeople get commissions.

But why?

This is a practice so deeply ingrained that almost everyone assumes that commissions are an unalloyed good, and that salespeople won’t work without them. I’ll return to that notion about work shortly, but it’s somewhat amazing that commissions are so widely lauded when they come laden with so many recurring problems. These issues pop up with distressing regularity.

In today’s paradoxical world of maximizing shareholder value, which Jack Welch himself has called “the dumbest idea in the world”, the situation is the reverse. CEOs and their top managers have massive incentives to focus most of their attentions on the expectations market, rather than the real job of running the company producing real products and services.

The diamond invention—the creation of the idea that diamonds are rare and valuable, and are essential signs of esteem—is a relatively recent development in the history of the diamond trade. Until the late nineteenth century, diamonds were found only in a few riverbeds in India and in the jungles of Brazil, and the entire world production of gem diamonds amounted to a few pounds a year. In 1870, however, huge diamond mines were discovered near the Orange River, in South Africa, where diamonds were soon being scooped out by the ton. Suddenly, the market was deluged with diamonds. The British financiers who had organized the South African mines quickly realized that their investment was endangered; diamonds had little intrinsic value—and their price depended almost entirely on their scarcity. The financiers feared that when new mines were developed in South Africa, diamonds would become at best only semiprecious gems.

The major investors in the diamond mines realized that they had no alternative but to merge their interests into a single entity that would be powerful enough to control production and perpetuate the illusion of scarcity of diamonds. The instrument they created, in 1888, was called De Beers Consolidated Mines, Ltd., incorporated in South Africa. As De Beers took control of all aspects of the world diamond trade, it assumed many forms. In London, it operated under the innocuous name of the Diamond Trading Company. In Israel, it was known as "The Syndicate." In Europe, it was called the "C.S.O." -- initials referring to the Central Selling Organization, which was an arm of the Diamond Trading Company. And in black Africa, it disguised its South African origins under subsidiaries with names like Diamond Development Corporation and Mining Services, Inc. At its height -- for most of this century -- it not only either directly owned or controlled all the diamond mines in southern Africa but also owned diamond trading companies in England, Portugal, Israel, Belgium, Holland, and Switzerland.

So I get email from a good former student, applying for a job and asking for a recommendation. “Sure”, I say, “Tell me what you think I should say.” I then get a draft letter back in which the student has described their work and fitness for the job in terms so superlative it would make an Assistant Brand Manager blush.

So I write my letter, looking over the student’s self-assessment and toning it down so that it sounds like it’s coming from a person and not a PR department, and send it off. And then, as I get over my annoyance, I realize that, by overstating their abilities, the student has probably gotten the best letter out of me they could have gotten.

Now, can you guess the gender of the student involved?

So if your goal is to enrich the Arringtons of the world while maybe, if you win the lottery, scooping some of the groundscore that they overlooked, then by all means, bust your ass while the bankers and speculators cheer you on.

Instead of that, I recommend that you do what you love because you love doing it. If that means long hours, fantastic. If that means leaving the office by 6pm every day for your underwater basket-weaving class, also fantastic.

Here’s that rare Steve Jobs story, one that’s never been told, about the company that got away. Jobs had been tracking a young software developer named Drew Houston, who blasted his way onto Apple’s radar screen when he reverse-engineered Apple’s file system so that his startup’s logo, an unfolding box, appeared elegantly tucked inside. Not even an Apple SWAT team had been able to do that.

Many people have explained what one can learn from Steve Jobs. But few, if any, of these people have been inside the tent and experienced first hand what it was like to work with him. I don’t want any lessons to be lost or forgotten, so here is my list of the top twelve lessons that I learned from Steve Jobs.

IN the memorials to Steven P. Jobs this week, Apple’s co-founder was compared with the world’s great inventor-entrepreneurs: Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Alexander Graham Bell. Yet virtually none of the obituaries mentioned the man Jobs himself considered his hero, the person on whose career he explicitly modeled his own: Edwin H. Land, the genius domus of Polaroid Corporation and inventor of instant photography.

Land, in his time, was nearly as visible as Jobs was in his. In 1972, he made the covers of both Time and Life magazines, probably the only chemist ever to do so. (Instant photography was a genuine phenomenon back then, and Land had created the entire medium, once joking that he’d worked out the whole idea in a few hours, then spent nearly 30 years getting those last few details down.) And the more you learn about Land, the more you realize how closely Jobs echoed him.

Expenses
Link a credit card
Log hours and track mileage
Manage your spending
Receipts
Guaranteed eReceipts
Mobile receipt capture apps
Infinite storage
Reports
Create reports instantly
Reimburse expenses online
Completely paper free

Take Control of Your Paperless Office

Learn the best ways to cut back on incoming and outgoing paper!

Join Joe Kissell as he helps you clear up the chaos of an office overflowing with paper. With Joe’s guidance you can develop a personal clean-up strategy and choose your Mac-compatible tools—a document scanner and the software you need to perform OCR (optical character recognition), devices and services for storing your digitized documents, and tools to categorize, locate, and view your digital document collections. Once you have your gear in hand, Joe then shows you convert your paper documents to digitized files and gives you ideas for how to organize your office workflow, explaining how to develop the day-to-day techniques that reduce the amount of time you spend pressing buttons, launching software, and otherwise managing your war on clutter.

I have come to the conclusion that what has made Apple so different is that instead of having a profit motive at its core, it has something else entirely. Many big companies like to pretend this is the case — “we put our customers first” — but very few truly live by that mantra. When the pressure is on and the CEO of a big public company has to choose between doing what’s best for the customer or making the quarter’s numbers… most CEOs will choose the numbers.

Apple never has.

As paradoxical as it is that the pursuit of profit is what causes the long-term failure of companies, I believe that Apple’s lack of focus on profitability has actually made it one of the most successful companies in the history of capitalism.

Folio Focus has an article up titled ‘How to Choose a Web Designer’. It talks a lot about using design galleries to find someone experienced, who fits your budget and has the right style and skillset.
But these questions are trivial compared to the important stuff. They’re questions to ask the designer himself after you’ve identified him as a likely candidate.
Here, in five simple steps, is how to actually choose a web designer:–

Make no mistake, the changes of this week are deeply rooted and are based on pressures building for years. Nearly all the charts on this site are about these pressures. Like in an earthquake, pressure builds up gradually but is released suddenly.

A decade ago I started a web design company. We grew and grew, and after ten years of hard work, I’ve finally been able to get rid of it.

Don’t get me wrong – we were successful, had fun and did good work. At our peak we had over 200 clients and 15 full time staff, making us the largest such company in our city. We’ve worked on great projects for some big name clients and we even made some money too.

Little by little however, the years ate away at my soul. This year we finally left it all behind and moved onto our own products, and I’ve never been happier.

So this is why.

We have to accept that we aren’t super-human. Too many designers pride themselves on hand-crafting everything they produce. They write their own code and insist on designing every screen of a project themselves. Designers like this burn themselves out within a matter of years. When your business grows, your time invariably gets split between doing the work you love and keeping up with email, sending invoices and estimates, banking, updating the books, and all the other minutiae that goes along with running a business.

When I started MetaLab in 2006, the idea of handing anything off seemed insane. Hiring somebody terrified me. It seemed like a risky expense to take on. Since then, the company has grown to 20 people. Hiring them has been the best business decision I’ve ever made. It’s freed me up to build incredible products, let me focus on the stuff that I love, and given me the opportunity to work on projects that would have been impossible without the help of a great team. Being a one-man-band is great at first, but it’s unsustainable. Perfection is impossible. If you focus on design, your coding will slip. If you focus on coding, you’ll get behind on email. You can’t wear ten hats, and you can’t be everything to every client - you need to focus on what you love most and let others pick up the slack.

The way Jobs sees it, the stores look to be a sure thing. But even if they attain a measure of success, few outsiders think new stores, no matter how well-conceived, will get Apple back on the hot-growth path. Jobs's focus on selling just a few consumer Macs has helped boost profits, but it is keeping Apple from exploring potential new markets. And his perfectionist attention to aesthetics has resulted in beautiful but pricey products with limited appeal outside the faithful: Apple's market share is a measly 2.8%. "Apple's problem is it still believes the way to grow is serving caviar in a world that seems pretty content with cheese and crackers," gripes former Chief Financial Officer Joseph Graziano.

Rather than unveil a Velveeta Mac, Jobs thinks he can do a better job than experienced retailers at moving the beluga. Problem is, the numbers don't add up. Given the decision to set up shop in high-rent districts in Manhattan, Boston, Chicago, and Jobs's hometown of Palo Alto, Calif., the leases for Apple's stores could cost $1.2 million a year each, says David A. Goldstein, president of researcher Channel Marketing Corp. Since PC retailing gross margins are normally 10% or less, Apple would have to sell $12 million a year per store to pay for the space. Gateway does about $8 million annually at each of its Country Stores. Then there's the cost of construction, hiring experienced staff. "I give them two years before they're turning out the lights on a very painful and expensive mistake," says Goldstein.

Jeff Yang muses on how Apple managed to beat the tech titans of Japan by playing their game, only better

The better part of a month has gone by, and most pundits have already weighed in on this year's CES -- the global gadget extravaganza that makes Las Vegas the gravitational center of the geek universe every January. The consensus? Meh.

That's because the cacophony and crowds and celebrity sightings -- is there a rapper who doesn't have an audio accessory line at this point? -- couldn't disguise the fact that Apple, the new king of the tech hill, had once again refused to participate in a gathering dominated by old-guard standouts like Sony, whose gargantuan 25,000 square foot pavilion is always the show's largest, and which traditionally pulls out the razzle-dazzle stops in its presser (last year: country pixie Taylor Swift; this year, the stars of "The Green Hornet" -- and their car).

Five months ago, with no prior sales experience, I launched a new startup selling Photoshop Layer Styles. I've been building ad-supported sites for a few years, but this was my first attempt at actually creating and selling my own product line.


Last week I made my 100th sale. To celebrate, I'm publishing my sales numbers (scroll down if you want to peek) and sharing some lessons I've learned along the way: