Week 12 Shorts

Give Your Employees Unlimited Vacation Days. Will it improve company culture? Sure. But can giving workers all the time off they want also increase their productivity? The 9 a.m.-to-5 p.m. workplace is almost dead. Throw your preconceived notions about vacation out the window and give your employees the no-strings-attached, unlimited vacation days they deserve or you’ll soon be a dinosaur.

With an unparalleled culture in which our people actually enjoy coming to work (see Your Employees Need a Treehouse and Let Your Employees Choose Their Titles) as the foundation, every last Red Frog employee is unflinchingly focused and devoted to our mission. Producing vast amounts of quality work is the norm, so we reward them with unlimited vacation and they, in return, reward Red Frog with outstanding work that blows me away every single day. [Learn more]

SpareOne, A $50 Cell Phone That Runs On One AA Battery. NO FUMBLING FOR CHARGERS WITH THIS BURNER.
At this point, we should probably retire the word “smartphone” and just call the touch-screen-equipped real-world tricorders we all carry “phones.” They’re the market standard in both functionality and form factor. Anything less is a “feature phone” (a bizarre euphemism if I ever heard one), or more accurately, a “dumbphone.” But if you’re really strapped for cash and need a hassle-free way [Learn more]

How to Make Money on Facebook. Is your Facebook page a real snoozer? You won’t make much money that way! Even the smallest business can make money on Facebook. Here’s how. As a small-business owner, you probably don’t have the resources that a large corporation employs for online advertising campaigns, but social media consultant and author Brian Carter says that even solopreneurs with limited funds can gain the competitive edge in this vast cyber-arena. [Learn more]

Facebook, Myspace and Twitter chide Google with ‘Don’t be evil’ add-on. Browser bookmarklet will show US users how search results should look if Google’s changes – which artificially push Google+ results up rankings – are reversed.

Facebook, Twitter and Myspace engineers have devised a software add-on for browsers which negates the effect of Google’s alteration of its search results to favour its own Google+ social network – with a piece of code they call “Don’t be evil”.

The move intensifies the increasingly bitter war of words between Google, which is trying to push the “social” element of searches, and the major social networks, which assert that the search engine is polluting its own search results and diverging from its core purpose of giving the user the best possible search by downgrading them in results. [Learn more]

How to Make a Brilliant Mistake. The difference between a great company and a mediocre one isn’t whether it avoids mistakes. It’s how much it learns when it makes them.Everyone makes mistakes—every entrepreneur, every business leader, every employee. The mark of a great company isn’t that it avoids failures—that’s impossible—but that it has the wisdom to take full advantage of them.

Behavioural economics tells us that we humans are short-sighted by nature. We are wired to seek out evidence that confirms what we already believe and to ignore evidence that contradicts it. On top of that, [Learn more]

Doctor appointments now a click away. HealthEngine director Marcus Tan says the service will lighten the load on hospitals. Perth residents can now book GP appointments online after the launch of an Australian-first service today, which doctors hope will take the pressure of public hospitals. [Learn more]

The 3 Claims That Give B2B Marketing A Bad Name. Most business owners would be skeptical of a financial planner that claimed that they could guarantee a comfortable retirement within one of implementing a plan. I wish that business owners were just as skeptical of marketers who claim they can solve lead conversion in a quick and easy way.

Just as financial planning deals with mathematical realities and unforeseen economic changes, marketing deals with human behaviour realities and market changes. Strategy, discipline and perseverance are required in both cases. So I cringe when I hear the claims that some marketers make – because they give the profession and practice a bad name. [Learn more]

10 Meaningless Sales Terms. At one time, these phrases made a real impact on potential customers. Not anymore. Words—spoken or written—can make sales happen. Or not. Read Web copy and brochures. Listen to salespeople. Often you see and hear the same old words and phrases.

Once those words made a real impact. Now they’re almost meaningless, if only because they’ve been used so often.

If the following terms are used in your marketing, advertising, or sales processes, put yourself in the customer’s position and consider their reaction—because that’s the only reaction that matters. [Learn more]

Lastly, our favourite webco, 37Signals have Basecamp Next coming out. Here is the UI preview from Jason in Feb 16

When we started thinking about the design of the all new Basecamp, we had three key things in mind:

• Speed
• Big picture
• Focus

With that in mind, and many experiments later, we came up with a unique interface that is crazy fast, excellent for big picture broad overviews, and perfectly tailored for quick focus with no distractions.

We call it page stacking and we think you’re going to love it. [Learn more]

Week Shorts is a short compendium of interesting news articles compiled at Connected and published for those interested in the new media world. All the articles are taken from third party sources and links are provided back to see the full article after minor editing and formatting changes. Connected acknowledges the owners of the work and respective copyrights. The article is provided, as-is with no warranty as to its accuracy. Connected cannot control and therefore will not be held liable for the content of third-party web-sites.