Company Blocks ‘Reply All’ Email Function – Brilliant Move

I love this so so so much. Nielsen, the audeince measuring company, have blocked the use of Reply All in the Microsoft Office email clients of every single one of their 35,000 staff. What a fantastic idea!

According to an email sent to all staff:

Eliminating the “Reply to All” function will:

• Require us to copy only those who need to be involved in an e-mail conversation
• Reduce non-essential messages in mailboxes, freeing up our time as well as server space

We waste so much time reading emails that aren’t really intended for us or have no relevance to our daily lives and though I understand that this move was because of a cock up by an employee last year, I hope it sets a prescience.

Source: techcrunch

Google Drive About To Launch?

Stuff Facebook. Sod Twitter. I’m obsessed by Google. I know this statement doesn’t make me cooler, smarter or sexier but they really do make nice web products. So when I saw this bit of gossipy news, I got very excited.

Apparently, venturebeat reports that a bit of code has been found in Google Pack software which reads:

GDrive provides reliable storage for all of your files, including photos, music and documents.

With another bit saying:

GDrive allows you to access your files from anywhere, anytime, and from any device – be it from your desktop, web browser or cellular phone.

Eek!It makes perfect sense to me that they should offer this facility and I think they have suitably held out for a long time.

During my time at AOL I worked on a localised project of numerous names but would be most people will know it as XDrive. Though a great idea – virtual storage and lots of it – the time and market thirst for such a product wasn’t right (we weren’t sharing large files or viewing video in the way we are now) and it cost a lot of money to run with little viable sources of direct income. I think the imminent launch of Google Drive will be interesting as, it seems, Google have held out and waited until there was a market for the product.

Using picassa, google docs, gmail for all my web stuff, I am starting to find that my 10GB storage allowance across the Google network is being quickly used up but I am unwilling to pay for additional access as right now I can’t use the additional space as I wish. Google Drive will change this as I then have a virtual drive, something mac users are used to with .mac. Couple this with Google Gears, the offline access tool, for all Google products and full integration with mobile (and in particular my iPhone) and you’re getting closer and close to the perfect consumer web apps solution. For me, at least!

Source: venturebeat

Bad NASA – They Faked an image

I wouldn’t be able to tell if this is real or not. It all looks a bit Star Trek to me.

Apparently a blogger at Discover Magazine picked it up straight away!

Gun Ruler

When I was a little kid, my dad would go out in the garden and nail two pieces of wood together into an L shape. He’d hand it to me and call it a gun. I’d spend the next few weeks “pow pow pow”ing around the house and garden getting a handful of splinters and making the neighbour’s dogs bark like crazy. I’m not now a gun carrying gangsta and I’ve no plans to be one.

So why is is that when I saw this Gun Ruler available for 9€ from French store Atypyk, thoughts of ‘inappropriate’ crossed my mind? Argh! I’m morphing into Mary Whitehouse. Stuff it, I’m going to buy one and “pow pow pow” around the office.

Online Pawn Broker – Borro

Has the bank refused you for a credit card? Can’t get someone to tide you over until payday? Find it really difficult to walk into a pawn brokers in case someone spots you? Well this might be a great way of getting cash now and worrying about how you’ll pay it back, if at all, later.

The site launched back last year and offers short term personal loans with a valuable item held as a guarantee. Gold, jewellery, even cars with a resale value over £25,000 are all acceptable pawning items. The item is checked into Borro’s site and valued. A courrier comes to collect it and then on receipt and accurate valuation, Borro dumps 40% of the object’s resale value into your bank account. Should they take the plunge, the borrower couriers their item to Borro, receiving their loan via bank transfer or postal order. The interest rate is “4% simple interest per month” (a whopping 53.8%APR), and for loans of less than £1000 charges are 6% “simple interest per month” (an eye watering 85.0%APR) but you are expected to pay the loan back in 6 months to get your item back, so it would be unfair to compare this to a longer term method of lending, such as a bank loan. Unless you fail to pay, that is!

This sitebrings a  shady and poorly marketed industry into a more modern and acceptable arena. It will be interesting to see at this time of credit crisis crunching capers whether it becomes a viable method to borrow over a short term.

Source: Borro

Brilliant Flickr Tool

I love it when I find things like this. The Multicolr Search Lab allows you filter images from Flickr that have a Creative Commons license by the domiant colours. I’ve used tools like this before where you can pick one colour but this one lets you pick up to 10! Arghh I am in love. At least for the next day or two until I get bored.

Aside from being available for Flickr, it’s also available for Alamy stock phototgraphy.

AOL’s probably going to sell Bebo

I’m not really that surprised though.

Design Student? Run run as fast as you can!

As the recession bites it seems that senior industry figures who have experienced working through a recession, unlike anyone born in the late 70s or 80s, are willing to dispense lots of advice. The latest bit? If you’re a design student you’re wasting your time as there aren’t enough jobs.

Ian Cochrane, managing director of management consultancy Ticegroup, is quoted in Design Week as saying “‘Look for jobs in industries that have vacancies – I mean, if you want to design restaurants, it is good to have worked in one or two”. I have to admit this made me smirk, I used to be aghast at the quality of candidates we’d receive CVs from directly or, worse still, from recruitment agencies.

Many of the design candidates I see for Acknowledgement come out of university with a portfolio that would put GCSE students to shame and a CV with more spelling and gramatical mistakes than this blog (and that’s saying something!)

They don’t spend time researching our company, the clients we work with or have a critical view of our past work. In addition many couldn’t effectively communicate their own creative process. What many of them do for three years, or more, at University baffles me (but doesn’t keep me awake at night).

Occasionally you’d come across gems: they we the polor oppositie of everything above and seemed to have a passion for doing a great job. We would hire those ones, or at least try to as they’d also get snapped up by the competition.

So I think it’s very wise to advise design students, as Cochrane has, to seek alternative routes to employment but what about those currently studying a design course with their sights set on working for a digital agency? I think there is still a market out there for great digital talent and here are my (non-designer) tips for standing out:

• Be a good designer. Sounds daft but if you can’t create digital media akin to the stuff you see major brands turning out then maybe this isn’t your industry!
• Have an online portfolio that demonstrates you understand the full breadth of digital work. So aside from webpage designs, include banners, widgets, sites that are focused around typography, email designs, ecommerce designs, interstitial pages, rollovers, video players.. anything that goes beyond just a website/banner design will stand out.
• Your portfolio should contain lots of real world brands even if you haven’t actually worked on them.
• Show you can use Flash and also have a good understanding of ActionScript – you wouldn’t believe how much more desirable you become
• Have a critical view on digital design. Be prepared to criqitue the work of others constructivly and suggest how you would make improvements for the benefit of the client and end user. It’s often easy to forget that as a digital designer you’re working to please three groups: the place you work, the business that’s appointed them and the end users of said business.
• Become immersed in social media: twitter, myspace, linkedin, last,fm.. any of it. Use it often, do it well. Make it part of your portfolio. Try to use the same username across everything you want an employer to find but at the same time, watch out for those pics of you trashed at a friend’s house part on flickr also with the same username!
• Make sure your spelling is perfect. So many design student CVs I’ve reviewed have spelling mistakes so those who can spell, use apostrophies and know the difference between ‘your’ and ‘you’re’ really stand out!
• Ask for feedback if you get turned away and tell them you want some honesty. Usually people I’ve turned away never ask why but when they do I try to be as constructive as possible. I imagine many other people would do the same.

I can’t draw for toffee and I’ve never opened an adobe application apart from PDF viewer. I can, however, count on one hand the number of entry level digital designers who’ve done just half of the above. They really do stand out!

Anyway, careers advice over. I’m off to get myself a geography tecacher styled cardigan.

Caffine Packed Crisps

Isn’t this world caffined-up enough? Daily I see huge queues outside places like Starbucks and little coffee shops of people desperate for their morning fix.

“I can’t operate if I don’t have my coffee”, “I don’t wake up until I have my coffee”, “Without coffee I don’t function”. Sorry but I think it’s all bollocks but then I don’t drink hot drinks so don’t buy into this mentality. And don’t then get me started on the coffee purists. Is instant coffee REALLY that different from stuff you pay three quid for at a chain? I’m yet to be convinced.

Anyway, this product from Japan (where else) comes from Frito Lay, the international version of our Walkers crisps. These corn crisps come in two – interesting – flavours, Caramel Macchiatto and Green Tea Latte. Each pack rams the equivalent of two cups of coffee’s worth of caffeine. Kind of put a bag of Cheese & Onion to shame, don’t they?

Source: Japan Frito-Lay

Facebook & chums beat porn in the UK

Old news, as apparently the BBC covered this last week, but still it’s worth mentioning as it’s gone against a trend that I have grown up with: the most popular stuff on the internet is porn.

Hitwise reported something that in the UK social networking websites are now more popular than adult sites. It adds this happened in the US mid-2007 but since then there hasnn’t been a clear and outright leader.

It’s quite interesting to see that as we start to embrace the internet as a daily part of our lives, rather than a source of.. ahem.. entertainment or something we use at work, how the online norms I’ve lived with in the past 15 years are now being challenged.

Source: hitwise