My Quick Take on Quicktate (Convenient Transcription Has Finally Arrived)
It is rare that I get so excited about a new service I feel compelled to grab a pen mic smartphone and blog about it. But today it just happened: the service I’m going to talk about is Quicktate. For background, let me just come clear and admit that I’m a really lousy typist and [...]
Video: Future According To Microsoft
Today Microsoft released a concept video about how they see the future of productivity is going to be. We would like to share the video with our readers. I am not sure what timeline they are talking about but I will expect most of what is shown to be available in 3-5 years. Some of [...]
Why Email May Be Draining Your Company’s Productivity
Email. Ah, email. That great productivity drain that we somehow all buy into. I’ve taken to saying, “Email is our personal to-do list that anybody adds to – whether they know us or not.” I was lamenting it tonight when I saw the most brilliant response Tweet by Andrew Hyde “inbox = tetris getting zero [...]
Evernote Celebrates Birthday by Joining the Billion Dollar Club (Really?)
Evernote has recently celebrated their third birthday. I also recently had my 21st birthday – it feels good to be able to legally grab a drink finally. (Hey, if Evernote can lie about their age, so can I…). Joke apart, I have no idea why a company would pretend to be half as young as [...]
Can Office 365 Help Microsoft’s Future?
Microsoft today took the wrappers off their Office 365 offering and allowed any business to try out the beta version. The general availability is scheduled for sometime later in the year. Office 365 is Microsoft’s answer to other online Office Suites such as Google Apps and Zoho Office Suite. After dilly dallying for a long [...]
Time Allocation > Goal Setting
Every personal productivity guru preaches the importance of goal-setting. But of you’re like me, your problem isn’t a lack of goals. It’s a lack of time.I often feel like I have too many goals, all clamoring for my time. Setting all those goals becomes…
Collaboration Tools Improve Productivity Drastically
With Enterprise 2.0 just over, I am still talking about social and collaboration with others. I came across an interesting data about the collaboration space and thought I will highlight it here. We all know how the modern collaboration tools increase the productivity in an organization by manyfold. There are many studies that put a [...]
Gmail, Don’t be a Yahoo!
In the 90’s I used to laugh at friends who all used Yahoo! as their personal email service. I did not understand how anyone could put up with the slow speeds of web-mail, and tried to convince them to install a decent email client, like Outlook, which is what most of them used in their [...]
iPad’s Climb Up the Disruptive Innovation Cycle
Blockbuster’s recent bankruptcy filing was yet another chapter in the Clayton Christensen annals of disruptive innovation. A major brand with convenient locations that got disrupted by a website and the U.S. Mail. Note that we’re seeing the backend of the disruption, when it all seems so clear. How easy is it to see such a [...]
GOutlook. Gmail Back to Earth… in Search of Revenue.
I’ve been long-time Gmail fan, having used it from the very early days, for almost 5 years now. The key reasons why I switched and have stuck with the service ever since were the productivity boosters, first of all: Threaded conversations Labels Search Google did to email what all new product teams should: throw away [...]
Focus and Serendipity: You Need Both
Technology critics like Nicholas Carr often complain that the Internet is hampering our ability to think. Facebook, and even more so Twitter, exemplify this trend. Back during the ancient days of my youth, when dinosaurs roamed the planet, and shortly after fire was invented, I would communicate with my Stanford friends over the summer by [...]
When Real-time is Too Much – Can You Handle the Firehose?
This morning I’ve been testing TweetDeck’s new super-fast version, based on the new Twitter User Streams API. TweetDeck provides fair warning: This is a VERY experimental version of TweetDeck I saw a few small glitches, but nothing major. Yet I am in trouble, and it’s not because of the product. It’s me. My brain… The [...]
E2.0, Productivity and Joblessness
In the months leading up to last year’s Defrag, I began to blog about what I called “the productivity boom .” By that I meant this broad phase that we’re in, whereby we’ll see productivity in the enterprise make better than normal gains. The boom has a couple of pieces: 1. the advent of cloud [...]
Gmail Back to Earth – In Search of $, I Suppose…
I’ve been long-time Gmail fan, having used it from the very early days, for almost 5 years now. The key reasons why I switched and have stuck with the service ever since were the productivity boosters, first of all: Threaded conversations Labels Search I also must say that for all other Web Office needs I [...]
Yammer – What You Need to Know
My boss walked in and just started laughing. Not a condescending laugh, but a contagious chuckle at my expense. In a company of 5000 people, I had emailed all of them in search of a team or individual that had handled a similar challenge as the one I was facing at a large retailer. It [...]
