Financial Times Unveils 70-Foot Interactive Wall in Grand Central Terminal

The Financial Times took the wraps off it’s latest U.S. marketing campaign in New York’s Grand Central Terminal Tuesday. The exhibit and accompanying campaign, which boasts both online and offline components, highlights the publication’s growing investment in data journalism.
Between now and Thursday, those passing by are invited to interact with a large, touch-sensitive floor mat positioned on the west end of Grand Central, in Vanderbilt Hall. With the help of three “brand ambassadors,” who will be positioned by the exhibit at all times, visitors can move around an FT-branded mat to interact with a series of 3D interactive infographics projected 70 feet high on the hall’s south wall.
The infographics touch on three central topics of the FT‘s coverage: the position of the U.S. relative to the global economy, the spread and growth of mobile technology, and the global recession and recovery, U.S. managing editor Rob Grimshaw said in an interview with Mashable. All three were designed by David McCandless, author of Information Is Beautiful (and this great TED Talk).

The online extension of the campaign resides at ftgraphicworld.com, where visitors can watch videos of the infographics in action and share their reactions through an embedded Facebook comment widget. Visitors can also take advantage of a free, one-week subscription offer from the FT.com.
While were impressed by the infographics and the data housed therein, it seems unfortunate that the FT didn’t develop infographics that could have worked on the website in addition to — or even instead of — the exhibit set up in Grand Central. The decision certainly limited the much wider reception the campaign might have enjoyed online, we think.
Images courtesy of The Financial Times, Mashable.

08:56 by Robert dawne · 0

Use Facebook While Studying, Get Lower Grades

Students should think twice before logging into Facebook or sending text messages during study time, suggests a study to be published in the journal Computers & Education.
The study — which controlled for demographics, high school GPA, internet skills and amount of study time — asked 1,624 students at a four-year university about their multitasking habits.
The study included questions about how often students IM, email, search and talk during study time, but only Facebook and texting ultimately correlated with a lower GPA. There was no relationship between grades and using other technologies while studying.
Scientists already know that the brain isn’t capable of successful multitasking. “Human information processing is insufficient for attending to multiple input streams and for performing simultaneous tasks,” write the study’s authors Reynol Junco and Shelia R. Cotton.
Previous studies have determined, for instance, that driving while talking on a cell phone can have more of an impact on driving performance than alcohol does. Even simply walking and talking on the phone at the same time can throw our brain off of its game.
In other words, one would think that any multitasking during study time — not just using Facebook and texting — would have a negative impact on grades.
Junco suggests the difference might have something to do with how students are using different technologies. Students may be more likely to email professors and search out of academic curiosity than to socialize through email or search, while they’re unlikely to text message their teaching assistants for homework help.
“It could be that students with lower grades just happen to do more Facebook and texting,” Junco tells Mashable. “But I think this study in the context of other research does seem to show that it is about what they’re doing while they study and not the other way around.”
On average, students in the study sent 97 text messages and spent 101 minutes on Facebook every day. Junco doesn’t think that they’ll leave either technology behind, but in his own classes at Lock Haven University he encourages students to think about how they use them.
“What I tell them is, ‘look, you’re going to sit down to study anyway,” he says. “You might as well make it the most efficient use of your time.’”

11:43 by Robert dawne · 0

How to Get the Most Out of Your Morning (Even if You're a Night Owl)

Most people have said it, heard it or thought it on a daily basis: there’s just not enough time in the day to get everything done. And while running a small business is a hectic time- and energy-intensive endeavor, there are ways to plan better and maximize the time you have.
One of the simplest, surest ways to pack more productivity into your workdays is to rise early and take advantage of the extra time you gain in the morning hours. True, an extra 15 or 20 minutes of sleep might feel like it’ll be the difference between going through your day functionally or like a zombie, but if you approach the first part of your day the right way, you’ll be surprised at your focus, efficiency and get-up-and-go.
Studies show that early risers are more productive throughout the day. Plus, waking up early helps lower your stress and supplies extra time other ways too, like allowing you to beat traffic. Here are a few ways to start your mornings the right way, to lay the foundation for more dynamic days.
Eat a healthy breakfast
For generations, it’s been heralded as the most important meal of the day. Well, it’s time we listen. Studies have shown children who eat breakfast perform better at school, and it only seems natural that those results translate to adults. A combination of high-fiber and protein-filled foods (like vegetables, fruits, whole grains and eggs) will provide you the most energy and keep you full until lunch, and on your game when it comes to focusing and solving problems.
Get physical
Integrate a little bit of physical activity to your morning routine, and you'll find your energy levels on the rise—along with your productivity and general demeanor (thanks to those endorphins), too. But don't worry, it doesn't take a 10-mile run or an intense early-morning spin class to help you get a morning boost. Try biking to work instead of taking your car or public transit. Or, explore lower-impact options that are still effective, like taking a walk around your neighborhood or doing some yoga.
Pick out your clothes the night before
It's such an easy—yet often overlooked—way to streamline your morning routine. Michael Harrison at Wired names setting out his outfits the night before as one of his time-saving morning rituals. He rightly notes that even small challenges, like choosing this tie or that, can be more trying and time-consuming than they should be in the day's slow-going early hours. Raid your closet the night before to free up some valuable morning time.
Create a reason to get up early
Embracing the notion of getting up early is one thing, but getting inspired enough to actually enjoy doing it is something else. Having a reason that makes getting out of bed more worthwhile than hitting the snooze button is key. Dave Cheong, a software engineer and entrepreneur who wakes up at 5:30 a.m. every day, recommends thinking each evening about what you'd like to accomplish the following day. Be clear with yourself about what you'd like to accomplish and why it's valuable, and you'll be a more invigorated and enthusiastic early riser. Writing down your ideas can be helpful, Cheong says.
Meditate
Taking some time to center yourself can clear your head, help you to identify your workday priorities and help you cultivate a healthy approach to tackle your day. Jesse Langley at the Meditation Den says it's easy—you just need about 40 minutes of free time in the morning to do it, because it's pointless if you're rushed. That said, you’re free to blend in parts of your typical morning routine, like your must-have cup of joe, to meditation. Calm yourself, focus on your breathing and clear your mind. When your mind is empty, Langley says, start contemplating your priorities for the day, set your goals and decide how to accomplish them most effectively. As you incorporate meditation into your mornings.
So you're a night owl? You don't have to hate mornings
If you run on a more nocturnal schedule, early rising can still work for you—it just takes a little bit more work and adjustment. In order to embrace waking up early, make it part of your routine. It might be tough at first to go to bed at a set (reasonable) time, but the more you do it, the more natural it will feel.
You can help yourself fall asleep and sleep well by eating certain foods (Ecosalon recommends potatoes, bananas and yogurt as good before-bedtime foods). Relaxing activities before you turn in also help. (Dr. Joseph Mercola suggests journaling or listening to relaxing CDs.) Moving your alarm clock away from your bedside will help you start your day at the buzzer instead of snoozing away your morning, Mercola adds.

12:28 by Robert dawne · 0

Twitter Co-Founder: Spending Too Much Time On the Site is ‘Unhealthy’

Biz Stone, a cofounder of Twitter, told an audience in Montreal this week that spending up to 12 hours a day on the platform is not necessarily a great idea.
“To me, that sounds unhealthy,” he said on Wednesday at the Board of Trade of Metropolitan Montreal business conference, according to a report in The Guardian. Stone told the audience that users should leave the site after they found the information they were looking for.
“I like the kind of engagement where you go to the website and you leave because you’ve found what you are looking for or you found something very interesting and you learned something,” Stone said, according to the report.”I think that’s a much healthier engagement. Obviously, we want you to come frequently.”
Twitter doesn’t provide stats on the average amount of time users spend on the site. Alexa, however, pegs that time at about four and a half minutes a day on the site. According to a 2009 report by Sysomos, only 1.13% of Twitter users update more than 10 times a day. Some 85.4% of Twitter members tweet zero times a day and about 6.5% tweet once a day.
The relative healthiness or unhealthiness of compulsive tweeting wasn’t the only subject that Stone discussed. He also described how he thought it was important for entrepreneurs to take pride in their mistakes. Before Stone helped create Twitter in 2006 with Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass and Evan Williams, he created a company that let people send broadcasts to iPods. “We thought we were geniuses,” Stone said, according to The Montreal Gazette. “It turns out it was called podcasting and people were already doing it.”
Stone also outlined his vision of social media — including Twitter — as a positive force. “The more connected we get through all social media, the more humanity can move as one,” he said. “Maybe I’m just being hallucinogenically optimistic, but the idea that once we’re connected we’ll be able to move together, suggests we’ll be able to get a lot more done in a lot shorter time.”

13:13 by Robert dawne · 0

Decide if Social Media Is Right for Your Business

Social media is often a big help when you're developing your brand. It allows businesses to connect to customers on a more personal level. But that doesn't mean it's right for every small business.
Sheryl Sandberg, the COO of Facebook, believes that 9 million small businesses in the U.S. use Facebook.
Twitter and Facebook are useful in different ways. Twitter is known to be better for customer engagement, while Facebook helps funnel traffic to your site. Both sites help you better your search engine optimization (SEO).
Take three steps before launching Twitter and Facebook campaigns and decide which social media platform is right for your small business.
1. Is social media right for your company?
Remember the old question, “If everyone was jumping off a bridge would you do it too?”
The buzz makes everybody feel that social media helps their business. It's likely that's true, but it’s vital that you decide if social media is necessary for your business to succeed right now.
Though millions of small businesses have jumped on the social media train, your target audience might not be caught up in it. If you feel that's the case, it makes sense to hold off. Or, perhaps you aren’t ready to make the most of social media's benefits, so wait until your company is ready.
2. Timing is everything
Having a strong presence in social media takes a lot of time and a lot of resources. If you can’t dedicate the manpower to keeping up a quality profile, it might hurt your brand in the long run.
Look at your team and decide if your business can handle the workload. If it can, then be fully prepared to implement it. Like any good marketing campaign, your social media portfolio has to have a clear identity, and reach your target audience.
If you forge ahead, prepare the information you want to share each week. Figure out what time of the day your posts and tweets have the most impact by reaching your core customers.
3. Set goals and guidelines
In 2011, companies saw a 63 percent increase in marketing effectiveness. But businesses of all sizes are trying to establish a strong ROI when it comes to social media.
Setting goals for the next few weeks, months and years helps you decide if your valuable time is worth the effort and if you’re using social media successfully. It’s also important to set ground rules of who in your company will handle your social media sites.
Decide on what content is and isn’t appropriate to post. Learn how to handle customer interaction and what steps to take if something goes wrong. Then spend some time educating your staff before the first day of having a visible social media profile.
Once you have created a place for your business in the social media realm, look around your direct and indirect competitors' pages. It helps you understand what the best practices are to engage customers.
Also research the different ways social media platforms are reaching out to help small businesses advertise. See if those steps are right for your brand as well.
In the end, social media is another tool for your company’s toolbox. It will only be effective if you can take the time to learn how to use it properly.

16:43 by iliot Atlas · 0

iOS 5.0.1 Bug Allows Very Persistent Villain To Access Contacts

An iOS 5 bug allowed pictures to be displayed on a password-protected iPhone if the time on the device was set to an earlier time and date than the real timestamp of the pictures. A new security flaw has been discovered, this time on iOS 5.0.1, but it takes a very persistent villain several tries to get passed the lock screen.




In theory, the password protected iPhone must have a missed call. Swiping the missed call notification in an area without network coverage, or by removing the SIM card from the phone, could expose, after several attempts, the entire Contact list together with Favorites on the device. Luckily this is highly unlikely to happen because you have to leave the hacker alone with your phone and a SIM card eject tool for quite a long time. Check out the video below and see how many attempts it takes to replicate the bug.

08:41 by Robert dawne · 0

8 Ways to Stop Wasting Time and Get More Done

There aren’t enough hours in the day to waste any. Time sucks backlog your output, slow your creative flow and frustrate you to the extreme. The bottom line: Small-business owners can’t afford to waste time.
And yet, they do, without even realizing it sometimes. By being more attentive and applying a few (relatively easy) fixes, small-business owners can boost their productivity and stop wasting time.
Know what needs to be done
List-making is a pain, but when you find a tool, app or method that works for you, embrace it, says Rivka Caroline of So Be Organized. She says you should never leave your office for the day without knowing the eight to 10 tasks that need to be done the following workday.
That might sound daunting, but there are ways to make it easier on yourself. Caroline likes to divide her tasksinto categories and split up her daily tasks between them. That way, she gets some variety and contributes to several different areas of her company.
Delegate
Even if you run a small operation, you can cut back on your workload to invest more time in the most important aspects of your company, says Donald Wetmore. He is a time-management expert at the Productivity Institute.
For the past 15 years, Wetmore has hired a college student to assist him with the minutiae. He sees it as purchasing 10 to 15 hours a week that he can devote to marketing and product development. Wetmore wrote Organizing Your Life and The Productivity Handbook.
Get to work early
Setting your hours to assure yourself a bit of alone time in the office before your employees show up could be key, Caroline says. It gives you time to devote to your to-do list without distraction (or at least with a lower chance for distraction).
But it's not about setting your work-life balance askew. If you come in early, you shouldn't be staying extra late, too.
"It shouldn't be about being in the workplace longer," she says. "It should be about leveraging your time-management [to maximize productivity]."
Keep a time log
For a week, Wetmore recommends dividing your days into either 15- or 30-minute increments, and tracking how you spend your time. This sort of "snapshot" of where your time goes can help you realize where you have fat to trim and where you need to delegate.
After that, integrate a time budget into your weekly routine.
"Ask yourself, 'Which [task] represents the best use of my time?'" Wetmore says. "I do this every Sunday when I look forward to my business week … I look at all the different dimensions of what makes my business work."
Track your interruptions
Interruptions are a fact of office life, particularly for small-business owners and managers. They're not all bad. A new customer calls to inquire about your product or service. But some of them can eat up your work time.
Wetmore suggests drawing up an "interruptions log." Create a few columns with dates and times of interruptions, their source and the duration. Spend a few days keeping track of all of them. By the end of that process, you'll have a good idea where your wasteful interruptions are coming from, and you'll be able to take action to reduce them.
Manage your information flow
The average person spends about two hours each day reading, according to Wetmore. We live in an age where the information flow is constant and access to it is easy.
"We can't stop that flow, but we can increase the rate at which we absorb it," he says.
So how do you do that? Wetmore suggests learning to speed-read. It's something that's offered through classes, and he says you can expect immediate results.
Skip meetings
The only thing worse than a meeting is an aimless meeting. The roundabout dialogue makes you feel like nothing gets accomplished. Without a clear outline and direction, meetings can be among the biggest time-sucks in your office. But Caroline offers a few suggestions for making meetings useful, productive and way less hateful.
First, have an exceedingly clear agenda. Know what you'll discuss, who you expect to contribute and why. Circulate a rough draft outline ahead of time and invite meeting participants to add notes or answer questions beforehand. Sometimes, that simple step eliminates the need for a meeting altogether.
Second, stand up. If you can't recline and swivel in your office chair, chances are meetings will speed right along.
Embrace "white space"
No one likes clutter. Eliminating it is a rule of thumb when it comes to advertising design and interior decorating, and the principle should carry over to your work life, too.
If your schedule doesn't have enough "white space" between appointments, tasks and deadlines, you can get overwhelmed and fumble the things you need to do, says organizing expert Harriet Schechter.
"White space functions as a sort of shock absorber for scheduling bumps caused by distractions, interruptions, emergencies and delays," she wrote in a piece for Entrepreneur.
"White space pumps flexibility into your schedule, and flexibility is one of the keys to an effective structure." Schechter also wrote Let Go of Clutter and pens answers for Ask Our Organizer at Stacks and Stacks.

06:06 by Robert dawne · 0

55% of Shoppers Are Uncomfortable Giving Credit Card Info to Social Networks [INFOGRAPHIC]

Despite the prevalence of social networks, consumers are still queasy about oversharing when it comes to credit card info.
That, at least, is the crux of an online survey executed by digital marketing firm Digitas and conducted by Harris Interactive in early January. Canvassing 2,247 would-be online shoppers, showed a slight majority weren’t ready to use Facebook et al. as a buying platform. Predictably, older and richer consumers were even less apt to share such data.
Other factoids that emerged in the survey: People are spending almost as much time accessing social networks via their mobile devices as they do via their PCs. (Perhaps that’s not so astonishing, since other surveys have showed time on mobile devices eclipsing PC time.) Another data point may be more surprising: Baby Boomers aged 45-54 — especially males — use their mobile device to access social networks more than 18-44 year-olds.
How about you? Are you using your mobile devices more to access Facebook and Twitter? Are you OK giving them your credit card number? Sound off in the comments.
For the full-size version of this infographic, click here.

17:30 by Robert dawne · 0

Top 10 Free Google Chrome Plugins for Small Businesses, to Increase Productivity

Since Google launched its Chrome Web store in December,
extensions have sprung up to speed up to simplify the messy
world of Internet browsing. If you're a member of the club that
spends more time looking at screens than people, some simple
browser add-ons can streamline many of your daily processes
on the job.
We brought you a list of great Google Chrome apps for small businesses shortly after the store's opening. Here are 10 new
ones that are sure to increase your web productivity while at work.




1. StayFocusd

We understand it's a bit much to ask you to go completely cold turkey from Angry Birds. Fortunately for the Internet-browsing addicts out there, StayFocusd puts a cap on a list of sites you choose to limit. Whether you're wasting time on social networks, blogs, shopping or gaming, you can customize your list of restricted sites. Then, set your limit to the amount of time you will allow yourself to waste.
2. Large Document


Say goodbye to e-mail bounce-back notifications for documents over 10 megabytes. The Large Document app lets you transfer what e-mail won't, and it's simpler than an external sharing site like YouSendIt or Dropbox. The Chrome extension converts your file into a URL you can share. An added bonus? No log-in information is required.
3. Docs PDF/PowerPoint Viewer

Docs PDF/PowerPoint Viewer ends the frustrating restriction of needing to download Doc and PowerPoint files to view them. Rather than wait to read several pages sent in e-mail, open Docs, PowerPoints and PDFs directly in your Chrome browser.
4. Yast

Whether you're timing your hours billed to clients or how long your lunch meeting lasted, Yast makes timing your work easy. The app generates time sheets you can comment on and color codes so you can organize all your time-related needs.
5. TabCloud

Sure, tabbed browsing makes everyone's life easier. That is, until your tabbing gets to be a disorganized mess. TabCloud lets you save browsing sessions for a later date. If you're researching a project, just save the set of tabs and return to the bunch at a later time. And, because they're stored in the cloud, you can access your tabs from any computer.
6. Screen Capture

Using Screen Capture, you can easily grab stills from your browser. More transferable than copy and paste and faster than taking notes, screen shots will speed up your work online.
Fun fact: This is the very app that took the photos for this gallery!
7. Popchrom

Expedite your typing by turning your commonly used phrases into abbreviated shortcuts. Let's say you add "lmk" as a shortcut for "let me know if you have any questions." Once you have the shortcut saved, all you need to do is place your mouse over the abbreviated shortcut—in our case, "lmk"—and press ctrl+space. The expanded text will replace your abbreviation.
8. HootSuite

HootSuite puts all your social networks in one simple dashboard, updated in real time. Track traffic to your site, monitor conversations and schedule messages using this handy app.
9. Read Later Fast

If you often find yourself distracted while reading every interesting story you stumble across during the work day, Read Later Fast can help you kick the habit. Rather than forgetting about all those interesting links, this app will store your stories in an easy to use inbox for reading at a later time.
10. Google Calendar Checker

Rather than navigating between your work and your schedule, this easy app counts down until your next engagement in the corner of your browser. Google Calendar Checker's simplicity keeps you focused on meeting your deadlines and preparing for engagements.
Let us know in the comments if you are using any of these apps. Which work for you? What did we miss?

11:42 by Robert dawne · 2