Facebook Turns Off Website Internally To Force Mobile Development via Fast Company.
This is a great way to force folks to think of mobile and understand why it’s important to site development. We till spend 90 percent of our workday in front of laptops and desktops — often connected to large and beautiful monitors. While this is great for productivity, I’m afraid it causes a bit of mobile blindness.
Better than email. Better than meetings.
Dispatch helps teams discuss and organize their work, including the things they have in Dropbox, Google Drive, Evernote, and Box.
via Dispatch: Discuss and organize your work with your team..
Evernote has a new business tool that allows users to keep personal and professional, shareable and searchable notebooks for all business needs, ranging from HR Documents to project planning. It’s Evernote’s take on Sharepoint or Box.
Meet the Obama campaign’s $250 million fundraising platform.
Kyle Bush discusses building the Obama campaign’s online fundraising platform on top of Blue State Digital’s existing platform. After the building the platform the Obama team performed 240 a/b tests to perfect it. The difference between the original form (which is pretty standard industry fare) and the optimized form is above. And the difference is striking.
Also, if someone in your organization asks, “Why can’t we do that?” Pat of the answer is that the Obama Campaign employed 14 front-end engineers, with six dedicated to online fundraising.
Apple asks to be removed from EPEAT green computer listings, because they don’t conform with their design direction. This is design thinking run amok. Apple should be designing the best all around products and environmental sustainability should be a key part of their thinking, not an after thought that doesn’t “fit into their design direction.” Apple and Jonathan Ive are better than this — much better.
“They said their design direction was no longer consistent with the EPEAT requirements,” Frisbee said. The company did not elaborate, Frisbee said. “They were important supporters and we are disappointed that they don’t want their products measured by this standard anymore.” …
An Apple spokeswoman declined to comment, but referred to Apple’s website which contains reports on the environmental impact of its products. Apple offers several recycling programs through its stores and website.
One of Apple’s newest products, the MacBook Pro with a high-resolution “Retina” display, was nearly impossible to fully disassemble, said Kyle Wiens, co-founder of iFixit.com, a website that provides directions for users to repair their own machines. The battery was glued to the case, and the glass display was glued to its back. The product, released just a month ago, had not been submitted for EPEAT certification, according to the organization.
Frisbee said that the structure of that laptop would have made it ineligible for certification. “If the battery is glued to the case it means you can’t recycle the case and you can’t recycle the battery,” Frisbee said.
Apple was putting design first in an effort to make products smaller and have batteries last longer, said Shaw Wu an analyst at Sterne Agee. “They are not trying to purposely make it hard to open, they are just trying to pack as much as they can into a small space–it’s a design decision,” Wu said.
via Apple Removes Green EPEAT Electronics Certification From Products – The CIO Report – WSJ.
How Gojee Got 300,000 People To Sign Up For Its Site In A Few Short Months via Business Insider:
Everybody thinks that pushing the most information possible gives users more information so it’s a better method. But our platform is that if we reduce aggressively the amount of information you’re provided, but make it much more relevant, you can help people make a decision much faster. That’s how we build the food dynamic.
The founders of Gojee have some interesting ideas about how the web will work after the convergence of desktop, laptop, tablet and phone. In addition to bringing content down to its essence, they believe the web should be “delightful, emotional and fast” and they’re working on a cartoon project that will make the site more emotional and help them tell stories.
I agree with their premise that web content needs to find a place that relies less on information and more on emotion and storytelling. Adding a cartoon vertical to a food site sounds pretty wild and it will be interesting to see if Gojee can pull it off without it seeming distracting, tangential or gimmicky.
Original source for article and photo: Business Insider, How Gojee Got 300,000 People To Sign Up For Its Site In A Few Short Months
via The Seductive Danger Of Half Measures, by Aaron Harris on TechCrunch:
Keeping a conscious eye on what the point of a test or iteration is, not just to itself, but to your overall plan and mission how building a certain number of tutors in a given area influences student activity and community creation, in my case, rather than just the number of tutors removes the halfsies quality of a test. Rather than continually shifting a business strategy to reflect the results of a single test, aggregating data across a set of them, and altering your strategy accordingly creates consistent momentum for your company where the success or failure are equally useful.
Within that framework, there needs to be set decision points – moments where you predetermine that, based on given sets of data, you will make a decision.