Your email organized

Imagine coming into your office and finding all your files rearranged for better organization. You get a note saying: “You’ll now find your important files here, your social media files here, and your promotions over there.”

That’s just about what Gmail did with inboxes a few weeks back. While I don’t really mind having my email organized according to the Gmail system, Google's ability to make the change really drove home the point to me that email metadata is open for use.
Read more in Learning About You From Your Email Metadata.

Pictured here is an example of the raw metadata sent to me by the Immersion team at MIT.

A straight pitch?

Today I received the following email (personal identifiers removed):

Ariella,

As you may know, in my capacity as Chief Marketing Guy for The __ __ Project, I help facilitate networking meetings for professionals who are members of ___ with other professionals who I am connected with on LinkedIn and in other networks.
There is a ___ member named ___, [She] is looking to meet and network with (NOT sell to) other professional business women who are serious about their businesses and careers. I was wondering if I can make an introduction and facilitate a networking meeting between the two of you.
Let me know.
Make it a wonderful day. 

I responded that I would just send an invitation to connect on LI, which I did (though I then discovered that the person was there twice, having failed to remove her old profile). I got this response to that:

Ok cool.

Would you be interested in us setting up a meeting  between the two of you?

I declined that honor because I really don't favor in-person meetings. 

He didn't like that and tried to still persuade me by saying, "Really? Why is that? They are extremely effective. I have meetings multiple times a week, and thus grow my network effectively and successfully."

Well, good for him. I happen to be connected to over 1300 people and organizations online, though I've only met a small handful of them. And some people I've taken the time to meet have proven to be a huge waste of my time.  
 I wrote back:
 "Just a matter of personal preference. I don’t mind talking on the phone, and I’ve found it works just as well." 

He finally dropped the matter. The fact that he was so keen on the meeting, though, makes me suspect that the woman he was contacting was not just trying to meet other professionals but to try to sell her services to them. That is what she does professionally, marketing.  And that would make the original claim that said "(NOT sell to) false." In fact, likely that's what he was being paid to do, procure prospective clients for her under the guise of setting up networking.

What makes this even more suspect is that the guy who claims he loves meetings hasn't even met the person he's promoting! I sent her a message about the pitch via LinkedIn and she said that someone else at the same organization is trying to set up a meeting between him and her. Hmm...

Crowdsourcing creativity in the cloud

Betterific is the attempt to harness the power of the web to improve on the concept of a suggestion box and on just about everything else. It is intended to give people a chance to not only voice their ideas for improving what is already out there, but to be heard as well. Read more in 

Crowdsourcing the Corporate Suggestion Box

Big data for dogs of all sizes

Devoted as people are to their dogs, they can’t watch them every minute of the day. But now there are devices that do for dogs what Fitbit does for people. Some have launched, and some are still working on funding through Kickstarter.  Read more in 

The Quantified Canine

Don't leave earth without it

Whether it will be in just a matter of years or of decades, the possibility of regular people taking trips into space the same way they travel to the far reaches of the globe could become a reality within our lifetime. The question is: when you set off for such a trip, what do you pack along for money?
While previous generations may have packed travelers’ cheques, such paper relics just don’t seem to fit in with the space age. The only feasible solution to the problem of payments in, to, and from space, is a digital one. PayPal believes it will handle that problem with its introduction of PayPal Galactic.  But that answer raises a number of other questions. Read more here

Related post: http://writewaypro.blogspot.com/2013/05/star-trek-and-final-frontier-of-currency.html

3D printing really takes off with the help of big data

The only thing holding GE back from fully integrating 3D printing was insufficient data to assure uniform results. "A part is made out of thousands of layers, and each layer is a potential failure mode," Prabhjot Singh, head of the GE lab working on such processes, told MIT Technology Review. "We still don't understand why a part comes out slightly differently on one machine than it does on another, or even on the same machine on a different day."Now GE has come up with a big data solution to that problem.

Read more in 

Big Data Helps 3D Printing Take Off

How green is my internet?

The late Ed Koch, who served as mayor of New York City for multiple terms in the 1980s, was famous for asking, “How am I doing?” Extending the question to the impact of its operations on the health of the planet, eBay has developed a way to get an automatically updated response. And the online auction powerhouse hopes to encourage other businesses to ask the same question, too.

In March, eBay released Digital Service Efficiency (DSE) -- http://dse.ebay.com/ -- a dashboard designed to reveal the company's datacenter energy efficiency in the style of a car’s MPG rating. The metric is based on “four key areas: performance, cost, environmental impact and revenue,” eBay said. Quarterly performance reports are measured against the yearly goals.

On May 24, eBay posted its first quarter results on its DSE blog.

Read more in 

Everybody Wins in eBay's Eco-Friendly Bid