NationalField – “This is social with clear ROI”

If any of you read the Metro on your way to work this morning you may have noticed an article entitled ‘The new Social Network’ regarding the enterprising NationalField. For those of you who didn’t, the double page spread lavished praise on Edward Saatchi’s (yes, the son of Charles Saatchi) brainchild, an internal social network similar to that of Yammer and Jive. Known to some as ‘Social software’ solutions, all of the above platforms are meant to enable a set of cost reduction / productivity increase practices including ‘fewer meetings’, ‘more ideas generated’, ‘less email’ and a significantly ‘greater feeling of community’ within companies.

National Field’s home page states that their product allows for 27% fewer meetings, 32% more ideas generated, 21% less email – $2,500 (£1,600) in savings per person per year, as well as an impressive 61% greater feeling of community. Those impressive figures have led to the San Franciscan based company securing some rather large clients including the BBC, the Washing Post, CNN and none other than the Barack Obama administration.

“NationalField represents a new way of doing social in the enterprise. This is social with clear ROI.”

–Chris Hughes, co-founder, Facebook & Obama08, founder, Jumo

NationalField now also look set to help the NHS cut their costs in what is being described as a ‘long-haul project’ which will see (in time) a total of 1.3 million staff signed up to the service. Once this happens, it will be the largest private social network in the world!

Mr Saatchi believes it is important to empower staff – particularly if they don’t have the means to communicate their ideas to their superiors. He claims a quarter of British workers don’t share their ideas with their boss. ‘You shouldn’t just give up on work being meaningful. If you can create a sense of community and make people want to work, that’s a really valuable thing.’

Do you think a solution such as this could work for the company you’re at?

 

facebook, Jive, NationalField, NHS, Obama, Saatchi, Yammer

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Powwownow ❤ Pintrest

With the New Year comes a whole host of new innovation! From the pioneering Skillshare, which offers an online marketplace for offline classes, to the increasingly popular Dwolla, a tool that facilitates the transfer of money via social networks and now processes $1 million per day. There are tens of new technologies keeping our office positively buzzing, but it seems there is one website that attracts more kudos than anything else. We just can’t stop discussing Pintrest, an invitation-only site that describes itself as a pinboard to organise and share things you love. The growing phenomenon looks to be this year’s hot ticket in the social networking space, and thus far has managed to attract four million users in little over twelve months.

Pintrest combines two of the most captivating aspects of social media: visual content and sharing who you are. Not to mention, it looks as sexy as any website we’ve ever seen.

What is the appeal of Pinterest, you may ask? I think the best way to explain the attraction of the visually appealing website is best done by Don Reisinger, cnet.com blogger, who described it as “scrap-booking on the Web.”

Pinterest features a range of content, but it is dominated by home decor, fashion, food, and crafts. Hitwise found that 58 percent of the visitors in the past three months were women, and most, 59 percent, were between 25 and 44. And while there aren’t many brands using Pinterest just yet, there is lots of talk about that changing very quickly!

The idea is that users click on a bookmarklet in their browser when they find images they like on a web page, or they snap a photo with the Pinterest iPhone app, and then they are asked to categorize and describe the images. A collection of categorized images can be built by one person or can be opened up to contributions from other users. Users can then subscribe to an individual collection or to everything another user posts.

It’s funny that some people say mainstream users don’t want to go to the trouble of categorizing web content, but other people say that there is a core human desire to organize things. Pinterest’s early success seems to indicate that people want to organize things when there are beautiful things to organize and the interface for doing so is relatively attractive. There are already Pinterest users with 20,000 followers

Only a handful of brands (Whole Foods, USA today, and the Travel Channel, to name a few) have really got engaged, but of those who have, it would seem each one knows exactly what they’re doing. Simply put, the audience on Pinterest is different from the major social networks because most people use it to find inspiration, whether they are hosting a party, getting married, remodeling their bathroom, or looking for a recipe for dinner. In other words, many are using Pinterest to help guide their buying decisions, and this is what brands have to bear in mind.

An example of a pintrest page

Whilst at first the site may seem to niche to benefit a wide range of brands, there are still three major benefits that can be applied to any company. Getting seen is vitally important to any business, especially those too small to really compete for paid search terms. Kerry Jones from blueglass.com put it perfectly when she said, “Discoverability” is a word I’ve seen thrown around a lot regarding Pinterest. Meaning, Pinterest helps people find new products/brands/styles they would normally not come across by plugging keywords into a search engine. Chances are, the people I choose to follow on Pinterest have similar taste to me. I know I can check out their pin boards and probably see pins of jeans that would suit my taste. If I do a search for jeans on Pinterest, I know I’ll find trendy options and smaller brands I don’t know about, or even a DIY project for turning an old pair of jeans into a mini skirt. If I search for jeans tomorrow, I will see something new since results change as new pins are added.”

It has also been made clear that are strong link building opportunities here. For example, every time someone pins something from your site, it automatically pulls in not just the image from your site, but also the link. There is a chance for that pin to be repined multiple times, and in doing so build up a healthy amount of backlinks. For more on linkbuilding with Pintrested, read this.

Finally, brands are building fantastic advocates via the site, as people can not only pin a singular image or article, but dedicate an entire pin board to brands. We think this works best if you don’t (sorry to remind you again) oversell yourself. So for example, if you’re running a cake business, your followers might also like to know about complimentary great coffees, or places to buy ingredients – other companies, in different countries for example. The trick here is to massage your followers’ interests.

If you need simple break down of exactly how to get started, Mashable wrote a wonderful beginners guide recently which we strongly advise you check out. Or, if you’d rather throw yourself in at the deep end then head straight over to Pintrest homepage now! Whatever you do be sure to let us know what you think of this new and exciting concept.

advocates, Dwolla, hitwise, link building, Pintrest, Skillshare, Social Media

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Look what came in the Pow Wow post today…

Last month we teamed up with UK Business Zone and asked their members to tell us their costliest business mistake in the hope to win a MacBook Pro. We were inundated with responses with everything from being mis-sold a franchise to mis-understanding an event speaker’s contract and being hit with a bill for thousands. However, there had to be a winner and we were only too glad to announce Bhavin Patel, marketing director at IdeaBright, as the fortunate (unfortunate??) winner a few weeks back.

We sent the Mac. He received the Mac (we were informed), and neither party thought anything more about it. It wasn’t until today, when Mr Patel got in touch with us we thought we had to share this with you. He sent such a nice (and unexpected) letter we thought we must share at least a few exerts with you all.

“Great competition!” it read, “I am normally very sceptical about entering competitions as I never believe there true. This has changed my misconception and a lot of my friends and colleagues. I truly didn’t expect to win and was extremely shocked. When I entered I was at work and came across the email shot from UK Business Forums & thought why not? So I just starting tapping away, a few weeks or so later I received the call. GREAT NEWS!!!

He went on further to say, “Although such a costly mistake was made by me, I am very lucky to have such an understanding Manager oh and not to mention MY JOB!!! My Manger likes to take on the theory that mistakes will improve you’re efficiency. He’s right because that mistake will never be made again and I have learnt and progressed a lot from making it. In his opinion I have definitely made up for it”

“I am sooo glad I won the Mac! It really made my day when I received the call. I am a designer by trade and it will make a great difference for me to have a Mac on the go. I would like to thank everyone at both Powwownow and UK Business Zones once more!”

Well Bhavin, the pleasure was all ours! And if you’re sat there reading this, wondering exactly why he was so deserved, then wonder no more. If you read on, you’ll see what we mean.  The word ‘OUCH!’ springs to mind.

“I learnt Google adwords when coming to this company just over a year ago. A few months in and after receiving hundreds of calls from agencies claiming that they have reviewed our campaign and a lot of improvements can be made to help improve business.

I was an amateur on Google adwords and not Google certified as they claimed, so I decided to take up one of the companies offers – Tron Media. Stupidly I didn’t go into much intensity when researching the company. Only after it all went wrong, did I find coincidently a comment on one the forums from ukbusinessforums.

Basically they decided that they would use one of their tools that would make thousands of campaigns and keywords in our existing Google adwords campaign. A few months later I signed into our Google account only to see all our campaigns had been truncated. I decided to look deeper into the keywords they were creating. Let’s just say the relevance of the keyword to what product the customer was taken to was extremely poor. Our Google adwords account was shut down for over 3 WEEKS, I even tried making a new account and the same thing happened Google had officially blocked us. Tron Media was adamant the problem was nothing to do with them! Something I fail to believe. I was even told by a Google Advisor that it was what Tron Media had done in the campaign that caused this chaos! Plus its just a major coincidence that prior to having taken on Tron Media our account was running fine for 5years. Well now for the damage…£60000 loss later and the cheek of Tron Media that when I told them I wanted to leave their services, they charged me for a full extra month just because one of their colleagues had done a liitle bit of work on the campaign 1 day into the month. We own a .com website which we had to change to .co.uk for a few months to be able to advertise. Since then we have changed back to .com but the Google adwords account is left in no ones hands but mine”

Ad Words, Business, IdeaBright, MacBook Pro, Mistake, UK Business Zone

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How To Bag The Tech Job Of Your Dreams; 8 Key Core Skills To Remember

In the midst of fears regarding a double dip recession and on-going worries about the Eurozone crisis, we must console ourselves with the fact it’s not all doom and gloom; at least not for technical folk.  Highly skilled developers and coders are still very much in high demand, and by 2018, Network Systems and Data Communications Analysts are expected to see a 53+% increase in salary, with Computer Software Engineers close behind with an anticipated 34% increase in salary.

Requirements for these kinds of jobs obviously vary depending on whether you are in charge of the ‘front end’ or ‘back end’, but nonetheless, every company loves an all-rounder. So it is with that in mind, our Technical team want to advise you on the core skills they (or any other tech company for that matter) recommend you may wish to brush up before that fateful first phone interview.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

If you are going to apply for any technical job whatsoever, there are certain key terms and skills we would advise you to be familiar with. Below is a list what we deem to be the seven most important and our reasons as to why.

Browser Compatibility: Behind each browser there is a different rendering engine which means the same HTML (or CSS) code will appear differently on different browsers (and operating systems).

HTML/DHTML/CSS: Over the last few years however HTML has evolved and ‘table layouts’ are not as appreciated these days. We would advise you therefore to be familiar with DIV layouts. These don’t have to be complicated, instead they must be simple, aesthetically pleasing, but most importantly, contain valid code. Many developers use HTML validators to check their code is well formed. Errors in your code disappoint anyone that knows their trade- so be sure to focus on this and don’t even think about applying for a job without sound knowledge of this area. You should also be aware of developments within HTML5. Following its immediate predecessors HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.1, its core aims have been to improve the language with support for the latest multimedia while keeping it easily readable by humans and consistently understood by computers and devicesCSS enables you to abstract away your styling from your content.

JavaScript: Javascript is used to manipulate elements on the page and you will be expected to be able to write a simple function to manipulate the DOM (Document Object Model). Additionally, there are further libraries such as jQuery, Prototype or Mootools that speed up developing the code – most sites these days do not use just Javascript, they use one of the above libraries – so in the majority of cases this is a requirement. Once again, you don’t need to be an expert, but you must know how to work with at least one of these libraries.

APIs: Working with different APIs is very much in demand. Facebook, Twitter, Google and Paypal’s APIs are arguably the most popular right now, especially given the dramatic rise of social media integration into websites.  APIs allow you to display content on your website that comes from a different provider and also enables you to add rich functionality to your application without having to write the code. The flipside of this is if you have useful functions in your code, you may wish to expose these via your own API. APIs are generally exposed via webs services which used to be fairly complex (SOAP) but have become simpler to write and consume in recent times with the arrival of RESTful services. We cannot compare the APIs because, for example, if you want to add the Facebook ‘Like’ button to a site it is a single line of code, whereas if you want to set up recurring payment via PayPal (or any other payment system), this is much more complicated as it involves encryption keys. Try and be familiar using as many different APIs possible as you there is no doubting you will need to use at least one at some point.

Object-oriented programming: Object-oriented programming can best be described as a programming paradigm; a methodology of programming adopted by a programmer. OOP provides greater flexibility and easier maintenance across large systems and can sometimes make understanding and analysing complex procedures a lot easier. You should understand the concepts involved including objects, classes, inheritance, delegation, interfaces and polymorphism.

Frameworks: Frameworks simplify your job as a developer and speed up the process of developing the code. In general, they are a set of libraries that allow you to focus on your logic – if you use  Frameworks the task should be much simpler, more scalable and easier for another developer to understand. You don’t need to write as much code; instead you can focus on how it should work. The most popular Frameworks these days are MVC frameworks such as Zend and Symfony for PHP or SpringMVC or Stuts for Java.  It’s a good idea to be familiar with these or at least the MVC concept. You may also wish to make yourself familiar with some common ‘design patterns’. They are a set of accepted coding best practices that help you structure your code in the best way to tackle a given task.

Language (PHP, .Net, Java, Perl, Pyton, etc): The most popular these days for web applications is PHP; it’s simple, lightweight and open source so it costs nothing, but it can also be very powerful. If you want to manipulate data in the back end, you will probably need to use one of these languages. It could be for very simple purposes such as web tracking, additional API codes or A/B testing, but the wider your skill set here the better.

Databases: In most cases, at some point you will need to store data. Therefore you have to be able to design a database and then write SQL queries, insert and update those queries (CRUD-Create, replace, update, delete). Most companies use my MySQL, mainly because it’s lightweight, open source and fast. In the past, people used commercial databases such as Oracle or Sybase but these are falling out of favour because you cannot use them free of charge. You should also have some knowledge of ORM tools. Object Relational Mapping allows you to easily access data in the database as objects in your code. You may also wish to brush up on the features such as Translation Control and Connection Pooling.

 

So there you have it, our top tips on what we deem to be the 8 most important skills potential tech employers will be looking for. If you think we’ve missed something please get in contact. Alternatively, if you like this article, please feel free to share it and spread the word. Thanks and bye for now, The Powwownow Tech’ Team.  

.net, APIs, Browser Compatibility, CRUD, databases, Frameworks, java, JavaScript, Language, php, tech

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Onboarding Remote Staff

Last week we read about Mashable’s Digital Career Series and were bowled over by the amount of advice on everything from ‘considerations for creating remote policies’ to articles on how to ‘better communicate with remote start-up employees’. However, the article that we found most useful and interesting, was the piece titled ‘5 Tips For Onboarding Remote Workers’. In it, Sharlyn Lauby detailed a series of smart and savvy tips for recruiting, initiating, and developing a long-term relationship with remote workers. Below, we’ve included a copy of that article along with just a few of our thoughts which we hope you might find equally interesting. If you have had experience in ‘onboarding’ remote staff then we’d also love to hear what you think.

 The Digital Careers Series is supported by Elance, the world’s leading site for online work. Check out Startup Cloud for tips on how to build a remote team.

There might be an assumption that recruiting is easier when unemployment is high, but that’s simply not true. According to Manpower Group, 52% of employers reported having a difficult time finding qualified employees to fill jobs. Employers cast a wide net when it comes to finding candidates, and remote workers can be attractive to companies because they can fill an opening that’s difficult to place with a local.

It’s more important than ever to ensure that new hires become engaged immediately upon entering their new place of employment through a well-designed onboarding process. Successful onboarding programs aren’t just a paperwork-filled orientation: They create a connection between employees, their work and the goals of the organization. Here are a few best practices from companies that effectively onboard remote workers.


1. Bring the Office to Them


In a traditional office environment, it’s easy to forget what it’s like for a remote employee. Sometimes we take for granted the ability to walk around the corner and ask a quick question. David Lewis, president and CEO of OperationsInc, a human resources outsourcing and consulting firm, has several employees who work virtually. He says the key to a successful workplace is creating a way for new hires to experience the office regardless of where they’re located.

“We get them connected with the team, make sure they know who does what and bring the office to them,” Lewis says. “Slides with pictures. Organizational charts. All geared to paint a picture.”

“This is an absolute must” says Powwownow joint-CEO, Andrew Pearce. “It’s something many companies overlook but it is imperative you ensure happens. You want to make all employees feel equal, otherwise going forward, at some point; you will encounter issues in your company culture. Small or medium size businesses in particular should bare this in mind. When companies grow, especially if they grow quickly, there is leeway for a company to lose its personality which is often a defining factor for any new business that wants to stand out from competition. SMEs should have an all for one and one for all mentality, and if your remote workers have not even seen the office then it’s impossible to move forward with that ethos.”


2. Connect Face-to-Face

The ability to connect a face with a voice is an essential part of building relationships. For Cheezburger, the online humor publisher behind the wildly popular I Can Has Cheezburger?, the key to success is in building a team culture despite having employees all over the country.

Cheezeburger’s CTO, Scott Porad says they typically bring remote employees to headquarters for the first week, but sometimes that isn’t possible. “We have onboarded several employees remotely,” Porad adds. “We use pair-programming through voice and video conferencing and screen-sharing tools to make this happen.”

Video conferencing also eliminates the stress associated with travel, especially if you’re working for a new company. Alison Sheehan, senior vice president of human resources at virtual meetings developer PGi, says it was a no-brainer to embrace remote onboarding: “As a collaboration company that provides virtual meeting tools to business, we took what we know to be effective in face-to-face meetings and applied it to remote onboarding and other HR processes.”

PGi uses a combination of email, video meetings and learning management system (LMS) tools to connect with and onboard remote workers. The cornerstone of its program is a proprietary video conferencing tool,iMeet. “Using iMeet’s group video capabilities is a great way for us to meet face-to-face in a virtual setting to connect with new hires,” Sheehan explains. “You can make eye contact (or note when others are not), you can observe body language, and you can even use the social media tools within iMeet to learn more about the people with whom you are meeting. This personal interaction strengthens their bond and enhances the synergy of the group — all without ever leaving their home offices.”

“In theory I agree with everything that is said here,” says our I.T Director, Conor Maguire. “Although, on a personal level I much prefer using Vidyo. It’s much easier to set up and use, and the real time file/application sharing facility in Vidyo allows for more lifelike interactions, the sort that might happen around an actual meeting room. When recruiting new members of staff it’s a real advantage to be able to see their face in a first stage interview. With technologies such as these, as appose to the days of old when we had to make do with a crackly land line, it’s much easier to gage a sense of the person you’re speaking to. Despite the recession, or perhaps as a result, interest in video conferencing has never been higher, with vendors reporting growing sales, and growing interest from customers looking to use video conferencing to either replace travel, or improve collaboration for distributed workgroups. There are so many uses for video conferencing and it’s something I’m personally very passionate about the future of. I’d love to hear from you if you use video conferencing or if you know of any interesting news/developments regarding video right now.”


3. Teach the Job in Steps


Companies also have to figure out how to show remote workers the technical aspects of the work they will be doing. In a traditional office environment, employees might attend a class or be a part of on-the-job training, but neither are practical choices with remote workers.

Tracy Brisson, founder and CEO of The Opportunities Project encourages “scaffolding” as an effective learning process. In short, you break up the content into building blocks that are taught in chunks. “When students demonstrate they’ve learned the material and can do it independently, you teach the next step and build upon prior skills and knowledge,” she says.

In an office, a manager can see a new team member performing and provide immediate feedback. Brisson shares the process for virtual workers, too. “You have to know that they can do it on their own without that instant feedback loop,” Brisson explains. “It helps to create a learning plan before the person starts, where job responsibilities are introduced at a slower pace, but the result is faster overall mastery and a great work product.”

“Once again, nobody would disagree with what is being said. Though it is equally important to know which tools to use so to make this process as seamless as possible,” says our Marketing Manager, Casey Williams. “For both brainstorming with and training new staff I personally use Dropbox to initially transfer or store files both parties might need. In case you haven’t come across this yet, this is a great service for sharing files between say your desktop PC and your laptop without having to copy from your PC to a flashdrive, and then from the flashdrive to your laptop. You can transfer up to 2Gig for free which is more than enough in my experience. I also use Yuuguu web conferencing on occasions as it allows me and the member of staff in question, to not only screen share, but also take control of one another’s computer. This is of fantastic benefit when wanting to carry out demonstrations or work collaboratively on a project.”


4. Evaluate the Process


Any time you create and actively use a process, it’s necessary to evaluate its effectiveness. Brendon Schrader, founder and CEO of strategic marketing consultancy Antenna, says his company’s onboarding assessment “is based on one metric: employee satisfaction.”

Antenna worked with enterprise social network Yammer to create a new onboarding process, largely due to that fact that the platform provides tools to measure each stage of hiring. When asked how employees respond to the remote onboarding experience, Schrader indicated the feedback has been one of their best sources of information. “Our consultants have time and time again expressed their happiness with our process and how the platform helps them stay connected with their colleagues,” Schrader explains. “We may not be sitting across a desk from our employees, but the Yammer platform allows us to redefine how we work together.”

“Yammer really is a fantastic tool and something we’ve considered rolling out within Powwownow,” says joint-CEO Paul Lees. “The ability to have what is essentially an in-house Facebook is appealing to many companies. As companies grow it is advisable to have a central hub which all employees can access, pool resources within, and stay connected via. Tools such as Yammer improve companies’ communication channels by making everything transparent. If you want companywide consensus on an issue, or to crowdsource advice from another area of the company, Yammer speeds up this process too. Multinationals benefit by being able to feel part of a ‘big team’, where everyone can understand fellow employees that may not simply be working in a different city, but a different country and timezone. ENGAGE and Cubetree are also worth checking out. They’re microblogging platforms that go a further than the others in so much as they allow linking outside your secure network to other programs like Twitter, Webex, Tripit and Salesforce.”


5. Constantly Refine the Process


For many of us, working remotely isn’t a new concept, but the responsibility of onboarding a remote team is. That was the situation for Sara Sutton Fell, CEO and founder of telework job service FlexJobs. Fell figured out what worked best for her company through a combination of instinct, trial and error, and feedback from colleagues who already had experience hiring remote workers.

Fell says the most important step when adding a new technology to the onboarding process is test first, then implement. “The more we test a particular technology to see if it meets our needs, the better chance we’ll have of selecting the most appropriate and useful technology,” Fell explains. “And we’re sure to avoid headaches down the road!”

As more organizations recognize the value in telework arrangements, we’ll see more remote workers move from the status of occasional freelancer to full-time employee. Creating an effective, efficient onboarding process will benefit both the new hire and the company.

What advice do you have for companies looking to onboard remote employees? Tell us your thoughts in the comments below.

“With no travelling and no commute I can’t recommend remote working enough,” says one of our customer service staff, Mike Kitchen. Mike, who has been working from his Warwickshire home for the last two years goes on to say, “With all the right tools at my disposal, it’s almost like being in the office without actually being in the office. Initially it seemed quite a strange concept, but as time’s gone on I’ve grown more and more comfortable in the role. If I’ve any issues everyone’s either a phone call or IM away, not forgetting one of the major benefits, being your time is your own, so long as the work load is done, everyone is happy. It’s win-win for both parties really. The only downside is lack of face-to-face contact, but with tools like Vidyo that problem is becoming less of an issue.”

 

Have you had experience in ‘onboarding’ remote workers? Or are you thinking about rolling out the process any time soon? If so, we’d love to hear your thoughts on the matter. Please leave a comment below.

 

Andrew Pearce, Career, Casey Williams, commute, Conor Macguire, crowdsource, Digital, Dropbox, iMeet, Mashable, onboarding, pgi, Remote Working, vidyo, Yuuguu

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The Technological Frontier – Help or Hindrance?

Tyler Cowen, the American economist, academic and writer recently went head to head with Erik Brynjolfsson of MIT’s Sloan business school, in a debate that was nothing short of fascinating. The impressive showdown between (arguably) two of the best minds in business theory centred around a very topical issue; ‘is technology society’s economic engine?’

Discussing facts and trends – it became apparent we (the Western world) have had economic growth, and productivity growth, and yet we haven’t had corresponding job growth. Could technology be the culprit?

Tyler made some fine points in stating “We’re basically trying to run the next industrial revolution on one sector”, and that “The one sector we have that’s doing phenomenal things is making it easier to outsource production and labour.”

In the U.S specifically, median income hasn’t risen since 1997, and since 1973 it is only up 25 percent, with no net job growth over the last decade.

Tyler argued that we are generating new ideas today at one sixth of the speed we did in the 1930’s, and that what is deemed to be our most productive and innovative time in our history is in fact a time of near stagnation by comparison. On the flipside, Erik then countered by stating “Technology is growing faster than it ever has before” and it is the ‘winners’ who are using that technology. Furthermore, stating “There has been more wealth created in the past ten years than ever before in human history.” – seemingly ignoring the fact those gains have been for an elite few, resulting in the very reason the worlds streets are awash with ‘Occupy X Protests’.

Mr Byronjolfsson went on to say, “The average person not keeping up is a symptom of fast growth, not stagnation”, angling at the fact there isn’t a problem per se, only with those who cannot keep up with technology.

The world is getting tremendously wealthier, only it’s not being distributed evenly. When asked how to address this, Mr Byronjolfsson said the responsibility lay in the hands of entrepreneurs to create new industries and new jobs for the new, growing population. “We need easier ways for entrepreneurs and innovators to create and we need to lower the barriers for business creation”.

Curator of the debate, Erick Schonfeld (editor of Tech Crunch), said later “Many of us take for granted that technology is the brightest spot in the economy, where most of the innovation and job creation occurs. But if you look more broadly at the impact of technology across every industry, it doesn’t look so great. Is the western worker in the same position today as the workhorse was 100 years ago when it was replaced by another technology: the engine (first steam, and then internal combustion)? Peak employment for horses was in 1901, there were 3.25 million working horses in England. Those jobs went away with the introduction of machinery, tractors, cars, and trucks.”

So going forward, will technology (across the general population) help to aid job growth, or will it in fact hinder our progress out of the current issue surrounding mass unemployment and wealth inequality? This is a question almost impossible to answer definitively; however, we’d love to know your opinion.  Personally, we believe the root problem is in education. If you look at the graph below, granted it is for the U.S, the less people are educated and brought up in a culture of innovation and technology, the longer this problem will persist. Do you agree?

Watch the full debate here

Business, employment, Erik Brynjolfsson, Occupy Protest, Tech Crunch, Technology, The Future, Tyler Cowen, unemployment

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Hidden habits of ineffective people

Today we bring you a guest post from San Francisco based Chris Wake. Chris has been posting insightful responses and forward thinking advice to businesses and entrepreneurs alike on his Quora account for the past year, and this post in particular we thought too interesting to keep to ourselves. Here, Chris writes about the ‘Hidden habits of ineffective people’ – something we can all relate to, and hopefully learn from. If you want to hear more from Chris Wake you can follow him on Twitter @cjwake, or connect with him over LinkedIn here http://www.linkedin.com/in/chriswake.

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@cjwake, Chris Wake., effeciency, multi-tasking, Office, Prioritizing, Quora, time, time saving, time wasting, work

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Fresh Business Thinking LIVE! 2011

Powwownow are delighted to be working with Fresh Business Thinking LIVE! and would like to exclusively offer you the opportunity to win a  free ticket to attend their fantastic annual event for entrepreneurs and decision makers looking to grow and improve their businesses.

Fresh Business Thinking LIVE! is taking place on Tuesday 15th November 2011 at Old Billingsgate in London. It brings together more than 40 expert speakers, 2,000 business decision makersand over 60 exhibitors in one place on one day – a great day for learning, networking and reaching new customers.

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Business, entrepreneur, Fresh Business Thinking, Trade

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‘Appy Halloween! – The best smartphone apps for this Halloween

As the air gets colder and pumpkins begin to wear their fiery grins, it can only mean one thing. Yes, that’s right! The Halloween
weekend is well and truly upon us. In celebration of one our favourite public holidays, we here at Powwownow thought we’d share with you our five favourite spook-tastic apps. Covering all bases, this little selection will help you with everything from preparing frighteningly strong cocktails, to transforming yourself into a virtual zombie. There’s even an app for keeping an eye on the little ones whilst they are out and about filling their pockets full of sweets! Have a look, and be sure to let us know what you think.

True Ghost Stories

True Ghost Stories

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Apps, Halloween, house of horrors, loci, pocket cocktail, Smartphone, tech, true ghost stories, zombie booth

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Silicon Milkroundabout – A Must Attend Event!

Calling all aspiring Tech Gurus! If you don’t already know about Silicon Milkroundabout, where on earth have you  been?

This Sunday, October 30th, will see more than 100+ of the UK’s hottest start-ups decend on the Truman Brewery in East London to offer up over 500 jobs and salaries in excess of £100,000.

Amongst them will be big names such as Shazam, Mozilla and Last.FM, as well as smaller firms such as Songkick – a website and
service that provides personalized news about live music events, Moshi Monsters, Moo, Lyst, Mendeley, Stackoverflow, JustGiving and Just-Eat.co.uk.

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Last.FM, London, Mozilla, Shazam, Silicon, Silicon Milkroundabout, Silicon Valley, Start ups, tech

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