We asked how people stay productive in offices full of distractions. Here are four methods that work.
When it's time to get things done, interruptions can be the bane of a productive person's existence. Email and instant messages, phone calls, and co-workers with "just a quick question" can easily eat up hours of our day and, basically, make our work lives hell.
But it's possible to develop effective strategies to manage interruptions and train your co-workers and even supervisors to give you some space while you finish your work. Here are four real-life examples of tactics that worked.
When team members at branding agency Motto want to block out interruption-free time, they grab the "Shhh" sign. Initially a promotional item sent by a printing company, one of Motto's staffers tucked the bright orange sign into an equally bright orange letter-holder shaped like a dog. There's only one in the office, so it's on a first-come, first-served basis, says cofounder Ashleigh Hansberger. But when the sign is planted on someone's desk, it signals "back off" and "keep it down" to co-workers without saying a word.
"It's good for telling other people not to distract you, but then we also have to manage our own distractions, like email and text notifications—the ones we have control over," Hansberger says.
Jake Tully, who works in public relations for TruckDrivingJobs.com, a job listing website for people seeking jobs in trucking, conducted a workplace interruption experiment without even realizing it at first. Sometimes, when he was at his desk, he would wear earbuds. And, sometimes, he would opt for larger, noise-canceling earphones. There wasn't really any rhyme or reason to it, he says. It was just whatever he felt like doing that day.
But, soon, he realized that people were less likely to interrupt him when they saw he had the larger headphones on. When he was wearing the earbuds, they were more likely to take his attention away from what he was working on. "I guess, mentally, people see [the ear buds] as more casual," he says.
So, he adopted the earphones as an interruption-management tool. Now it's well known that when Tully has the big headphones on, he means business. When he's sporting earbuds, co-workers can tap him for what they need.
Some days, business consultant Al Levi felt like he couldn't get anything done. At the time, the author of The 7-Power Contractor was part of the second-generation leadership team at his family's thriving plumbing, heating, and air conditioning company and employees were often interrupting his day with questions and requests.
So, he began a scheduling system with designated hours for specific types of inquiries. Of course, if something was truly urgent, he was available. But requests for help or other discussions that were job-related and didn't require an immediate response needed to be scheduled during specific hours. He also had scheduling slots after 5 p.m. for inquiries that weren't urgent and weren't related to the employee's assigned tasks, such as discussing raises or promotions, etc.
The system gave him back hours of uninterrupted time and conversations were more focused. He found that many inquiries were resolved by the employee before the meeting they requested. In addition, the after-hours meetings were appreciated by some "because you don't want to discuss everything during office hours," he says.
At QuickBooks consulting and analytics firm Bison Analytics, CEO Kurt Steckel says he uses "the "block and tackle" method to keep interruptions at bay. His team has daily half-hour morning staff meetings that are designed to allow people to ask questions, get advice, and resolve issues. Employees know that they'll have access to him and each other. If the question can wait until the morning meeting, they hold it until then.
Beyond that, Steckel has also formalized internal communication to limit interruptions. Everyone knows to:
Email if you don't need a response within 4 hours
Send an instant message via Slack if you need a pretty immediate response
Call if there is an emergency
The escalation strategy makes people think through how important the inquiry really is before taking up someone else's time. In addition, it helps his team get answers quicker when they really need them. "We all know to answer internal calls and chats because they are invariably important," he says.
While the impact of the Oregon city's new law remains to be seen, it may move the national conversation about income inequality forward.
Last week, Portland, Oregon, became the first city in the nation to impose a tax on publicly traded companies that pay their CEOs more than 100 times the median employee pay.
Portland's City Council passed an ordinance that will have companies pay an additional 10% surtax on top of the city's current 2.2% adjusted net income tax if the gap exists. Those leaders who make in excess of 250 times more than their staff must pay an additional 25%.
Portland's ordinance dovetails with a change in the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) disclosure and reporting requirements set to begin in January 2017. Congress approved the Dodd-Frank law in 2010 that requires such information be published, but it took the SEC until 2015 to adopt a rule that would require public companies to disclose the ratio of compensation of the company's CEO to the median compensation of all its employees.
Before the law, calculating the CEO-to-worker pay ratio was left to researchers, such as those at the Economic Policy Institute, which drew from a variety of data, including from the Federal Reserve. In the last two years, both Glassdoor and PayScale have done their own reports on the CEO-to-staff pay ratio as well as survey workers about how they perceived the gap.
Portland's Revenue Bureau identified more than 500 publicly traded companies currently doing business in the city including Wells Fargo, Walmart, and General Electric. According to the most recent data from PayScale, Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf made 130 times more, Walmart's Douglas McMillon made 209 times more, and GE's Jeffrey Immelt made 202 times more than the average median wage of employees.
A statement from Portland's City Council observed that the surtax may generate an estimated $2.5 million to $3.5 million per year, and revenue from the proposal will accrue to the General Fund and help the Portland Housing Bureau meet the city's commitment to funding homelessness services.
The City Council's proposal for the surtax included an argument that not only would it add to Portland's revenue stream, but also that it would support human services by extension. The ultimate goal, according to City Commissioner Steve Novick, was for it to tackle income inequality. "When I first read about the idea of applying a higher tax rate to companies with extreme ratios of CEO pay to typical worker pay, I thought it was a fascinating idea—the closest thing I'd seen to a tax on inequality itself," Novick said in a statement.
He cited the work of French economist Thomas Piketty, who found "60% to 70% . . . of the top 0.1% of the income hierarchy in 2000-2010 consisted of top managers in large firms." The average gap between CEO and worker pay was around 70 to 1 in PayScale's survey. The found a similar ratio that, while still falling below the average in the 2000s, is still far higher than it was in the 1960s through the 1990s.
Critics of the ordinance include Sandra McDonough, president and CEO of the Portland Business Alliance, who told Fortune that the tax will have "virtually no impact" on income inequality. "This tax is yet another signal that Portland is hard on businesses that want to invest here," she said. "I really think this was more of a media stunt than a real, sincere effort to address income inequality."
For its part, the City Council admitted that the ordinance itself is "unlikely to cause companies to reconsider their pay structure." However, they stated:
The SEC's new rule offers local and state governments, as well as Congress, the opportunity to develop policies to address the growing gap between the very rich and the middle class. If other governments adopt policies based on the SEC's publicly reported ratio, companies may consider changes. California and Rhode Island have already considered proposals based on the new SEC filing.
Both California and Rhode Island have also led legislation to offer paid parental leave benefits in absence of a federal policy. We've since seen that other states and cities have joined their ranks to create a patchwork of similar benefits across the country. Naysayers such as those in the Portland Business Alliance may be right about a potential hit to economic development, but the fact is that for business to be successful, it must also be sustainable.
The recent PayScale study of CEO-to-employee pay gaps revealed that 72% of lower-wage employees approve of their CEO's compensation, and among those who disapprove, 57% said it negatively affects their view of the company. Unhappy workers are more likely to look for work elsewhere, and the employer may have a tough time making a case to attract new talent to replace them.
Its technology could make cable-free smartphone charging a lot more enticing. Now it's working with a chipmaker to speed it to market.
Energous, the company long rumored to be working with Apple on long-range wireless charging for the iPhone, has taken on an important partner that might open doors for it in the future.
Last month Energoustook a $10 million investment from the power management chip maker Dialog Semiconductor, which makes the bulk of its revenue supplying. One source told me that as much as three quarters of Dialog's business is with Apple.
Overall, though, Dialog makes chips for lots of different products, including wearables, mobile devices, and internet of things (IoT) devices. Aside from its power management chips, it sells Bluetooth and audio chips for wearables and smartphones, among other things. Dialog also makes chips for fast-charging systems for mobile devices.
But Dialog is anything but a passive investor. The chip fabricator is also folding Energous under its wing in some important ways.
"We're actually transferring all of our silicon operations to Dialog," says Energous CEO Steve Rizzone. "All the Energous technology will be sold under the Dialog branding and all sales orders will be going through Dialog. It'll take us about 90 days to do all that," Rizzone said.
In other words, companies that want to buy the Energous wireless charging technology may never see the Energous brand. It'll be just like they're buying wireless charging technology from Dialog.
People have long speculated that Energous is working with Apple on putting its WattUp RF charging tech inside the iPhone. It stems from Energous's statement that it signed a development and licensing agreement in February 2015 with "one of the top consumer electronic companies in the world" to integrate the WattUp technology into the partner's "consumer devices."
The statement may or may not refer to Apple as the partner, and the Dialog investment is certainly no proof of such an arrangement. But if Energous were trying to get into a position to supply technology to Apple, it couldn't have made a better move than tucking itself under Dialog's wing.
If Apple were to build a long-range wireless charging receiver into the iPhone it would very likely have to integrate with Dialog's power-management chip in the iPhone.
On its own, Energous is probably too small to be an Apple supplier. Apple suppliers have to be large enough to reliably supply parts at Apple's huge scale. Dialog obviously already has that capacity. With the Energous technology basically being folded into the Dialog structure, all of a sudden Energous has it too.
And then there are the relationships. Dealing with Apple, any supplier will tell you, is a special dance. You have to understand how Apple works, how it negotiates, and what it demands. That understanding can take years to build. Energous can now use the experience of Dialog's people.
And to take the speculation one step further, building in the Energous technology—if it works well—just seems like something Apple would do. Who doesn't set their iPhone down on the desk next to their Mac when it's time for some sit-down work? It'd be great if the phone could just charge up automatically while it's sitting there. That's a scenario that Energous tech could make happen, if Apple were to turn Macs into wireless charging stations for iPhones.
In the lab, at least, Energous has been making progress with its system's design and range. At CES earlier this year, the company demonstrated technology that sends power from a USB device plugged into a laptop to mobile devices nearby.
Now Energous is talking about embedding the receiver inside the device. "WattUp uses small form factor antennas that are formed using the existing device's printed circuit board, removing the need for larger, more expensive coils," the company explains in a statement. "This enables broader adoption of wireless charging in a larger range of battery-powered devices, such as smartphones, tablets . . ."
Apple has managed to stay up to speed with its smartphone rival Samsung in most areas, but it hasn't built any form of wireless charging into the iPhone. And wireless charging of the sort that Samsung has incorporated—the kind where you have to sit your phone down on a pad and then plug in the mat—is old news. Apple is more likely to add wireless charging when it can do it in some new way. And the long-range charging Energous is developing could be a major advance—if it works, safely, every time.
Energous, which was founded in 2013, reported a net loss of $21.1 million during the first half of 2016, and the loss of another $10 million in the September-ending quarter.
The company says it has $25 million in cash on hand and no debt. It spent $7.5 million on research and development during the first half of the year.
Even with Dialog's help, the Energous technology itself has never been proven to work reliably at scale. It's made a couple of impressive showings at CES, but hasn't been deployed in any large trials.
Sending energy over the air is, in general, difficult. One source told me that wireless charging is by nature very inefficient, meaning that lots of energy gets lost in the air between the transmitter and the receiver. And the greater the distance between the two, the more power that's lost. The only way to make sure enough power is making it to the receiver is to pump up the power output of the transmitter, the source said, and there are limits to how far you can push such an approach.
Energous is working on technology that can charge a device 15 feet away from the transmitter. But that's not likely the type of solution the company will go to market with first. Even charging a device sitting just a few feet away seems far more worthwhile than the kind of wireless charging that involves a plug-in mat.
Rizzone says he expects Energous's technology to begin shipping in real products in the second quarter of 2017. The tie-up with Dialog, he says, was spurred by the two companies' common interest in the wearables and IoT markets. "Dialog has already released a bunch of Bluetooth and power management chips into those markets, and this is where we want to play," he explains.
Naturally enough, Rizzone wouldn't comment on the idea that his company is getting itself in a position to do business with Apple.
A coalition of elite universities wants to increase economic mobility by enrolling more lower-income students.
The engine that used to drive the American Dream is in danger of grinding to a halt. Nine out of 10 children born in 1940 went on to earn more than their parents, according to research published last week. But just half of children born in 1980, who are now in their mid-30s, can say the same today.
"The idea that you're going to do better than your parents defines the American Dream," says Howard Wolfson, a former political strategist who now oversees education initiatives for Bloomberg Philanthropies, the charitable organization founded by billionaire Mike Bloomberg. "For a lot of people, that's not happening."
Higher education, which once greased the wheels of America's powerful economic engine, has lately been exacerbating the problem. Just one in four students at U.S. colleges and universities comes from a family on the bottom half of the income ladder. Yet data shows that the wage premium for higher education continues to rise; Americans with a four-year degree out-earn their peers by 98%, up from 64% in the 1980s. And while the post-recession job market has become more grueling for college graduates, the unemployment rate for civilians with a bachelor's degree has been steadily falling since 2010, landing at 2.3% in November. In short, college is still a solid bet despite the cost.
Students from low- and moderate-income families are missing out on that opportunity, in many cases because they are overwhelmed or uninformed when it comes to the byzantine processes governing admissions and financial aid. But a coalition of colleges and universities wants to solve those challenges—and enroll an additional 50,000 high-achieving, lower-income students by 2025.
"Colleges and universities need to appreciate that they're playing a critical social mission," says Wolfson, whose team at Bloomberg will be convening the schools and funding research on their efforts. "They need to ensure that they provide a gateway for qualified kids regardless of background."
So far, 30 top schools, based on their high graduation rates, have joined what Bloomberg Philanthropies has dubbed the American Talent Initiative. The list includes prominent Ivies like Harvard and Yale, large public universities like the University of California, Los Angeles and the University of Maryland, College Park, and private liberal arts colleges like Davidson and Williams.
Catharine Hill, an economist who served as president of Vassar College for the past decade before taking on a new role as managing director of nonprofit research firm Ithaka S+R, will oversee research on best practices developed by the participating institutions in partnership with the Aspen Institute. "You've got to get the students into your applicant pool, you've got to admit them, you've got to give them enough financial aid, and you've got to figure out how to support them," Hill says. Simple in theory, but difficult in execution.
As a seasoned college president well versed in socioeconomic diversity—under her watch, Vassar won a $1 million prize for its success attracting low-income applicants—Hill sympathizes with the trade-offs that higher education's leaders face. "We've got kids at the top end [of the income bracket] whose parents can write a check for $65,000 and in fact want a lot of the services that go along with that," she says. Schools need to attract those students from wealthy families in order to cover their costs, but end up having to raise tuition to pay for the amenities and resources that privileged students expect to see. "Every dollar that you allocate to need-based financial aid is a dollar you don't have to spend on something else that helps recruit the students who don't need financial aid."
At Franklin & Marshall College, one of the coalition schools, administrators have found success recruiting applicants through partnerships with K12 schools and enrichment programs that serve lower-income populations, such as public charter schools like KIPP and nonprofits like College Track. "Their goals and our goals are aligned," says Dan Porterfield, president of Franklin & Marshall.
Under Porterfield's watch, the college has also pursued a series of financial strategies designed to increase its aid budget: phasing out merit-based aid, increasing enrollment overall, and restructuring the college's debt. "That work has really strengthened the talent base of the school," says Porterfield, who also serves on the steering committee for the Bloomberg initiative. "Aid brings talent and talent benefits every student. Financial aid is an academic investment."
CollegePoint, a free virtual advising service for high-achieving, lower-income students that Bloomberg Philanthropies launched two years ago, will serve as a companion to the American Talent Initiative. This past fall, CollegePoint advisors worked with 12,000 students.
"The country doesn't work unless people know that these opportunities are available to them, that outstanding people can attend outstanding schools regardless of their circumstance," Wolfson says.
In parallel, schools and organizations separate from the Bloomberg coalition are taking steps to increase access for lower-income students. This coming February, the University of Pennsylvania, for example, plans to introduce a free online course on "How to Apply to College," via Coursera. Last summer, author and education advocate Dave Eggers helped orchestrate the launch of ScholarMatch, a college search tool designed for students from households earning less than $50,000 per year.
Higher education initiatives like these, on their own, will not solve the problem of rising inequality, which economists say accounts for 70% of the decline in upward mobility. Indeed, by design the American Talent Initiative focuses on atypical students who have overcome enormous obstacles and demonstrated exceptional talent. Porterfield and his peers see value in preparing those students to become leaders.
"The goal is to make sure that the institutions in this country that are the springboard to leadership opportunities open their doors and expand their vision so that 50,000 more low-income students have the advantage of attending," he says.
Fifty-thousand more American dreamers, 50,000 fewer doubters: It's a start.
A new survey proves that when consumers can't tell that an ad's an ad, it's bad for publishers, too. But the problem is solvable.
In 2016, just 32% of Americans trust the mainstream media—down 8% since last year. By comparison, 78% trust the technology industry. Heck, even 51% of people trust the financial industry.
These existing trust issues contributed to the media industry's latest crisis: the spread of fake news across Facebook, which likely influenced the election. A BuzzFeed report found that the top 20 fake news stories about the election were shared 1.4 million times more than the top 20 real news stories. When Americans don't trust verified news sources, they're more likely to believe the "reports" pushed out by fake news sites.
Amid this controversy, it's hard not to wonder about the ramifications of native advertising. For the past few years, media critics like Jeff Jarvis and Andrew Sullivan have worried that native ads, which resemble editorial content but are actually sponsored by brands, confuse readers and erode trust in publishers.
As it turns out, they do.
This fall, my team at Contently partnered with the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at CUNY to conduct an in-depth study of how consumers interpret native advertising. Through focus group studies and a survey of 1,212 adults who regularly access the internet, we found:
Most people (54%) have felt deceived by native advertising in the past.
The vast majority (77%) did not interpret native ads as advertising.
Almost half (44%) were not able to correctly identify the sponsor of the native ad they read.
A similar number (43%) lose trust in a publisher when it features native advertising from an untrustworthy brand.
Given that reader trust is a scarce commodity for media companies right now, both digital publishers and the FTC need to fix this problem. Our study revealed some promising solutions that could help.
Last December, the FTC released long-anticipated guidelines for native advertising. The incredibly confusing document provides 17 different examples of how and when to disclose native advertising, many of which seem to contradict each other and the FTC's overarching recommendations. Example 2, for instance, seems to state that if a native ad for a brand isn't explicitly promoting a product, it doesn't have to be labeled at all as an advertising. That's insane. If a brand is paying for a piece of advertising to be produced, it needs to be labeled as such.
Given these ambiguities, it's not surprising that 70% of publishers aren't compliant with the FTC's labeling guidelines, according to a MediaRadar analysis. Just 23% of consumers in our study correctly identified native ads as advertising (the rest thought it was editorial content or a hybrid of advertising and editorial content).
There's one simple way to fix this: adopt a standard label for native advertising. Currently, major publishers rely on a confusing array of terms. In some cases, a single publisher uses three or four different labels on the same site. It's ridiculous to expect consumers to keep up.
Native Ad Labeling on Publisher Sites, Observed by Contently 10/19/2016
In its guidelines, the FTC pushes "advertising" as the standard label publishers should adopt. Yet publishers uniformly reject doing so, perceiving native differently than display.
"A great display ad will divert people's attention from what they sought out to do," Mike Dyer, president of The Daily Beast (which uses the label "Sponsored Content"), told Adweek. "Content is the thing people are seeking out. It is the end of the behavior chain."
"Nuances and labeling aside, we offer marketing solutions for brands," said Stephane Krzywoglowy, director of ad product at BuzzFeed. "We embrace the fact that a variety of advertising exists and know that even within the 'native' category, it takes a variety of forms."
However, there is an alternate label for native advertising that consumers prefer and publishers would accept: "Sponsored." In our study, 49% of respondents said that "Sponsored" was the least confusing label for native advertising. "Advertising," at 25%, was second.
Many sites have already adopted the "Sponsored" label, including Facebook, the world's largest distributor of native advertising. A single standard enforced across the industry would help consumers identify native advertising and make smart choices about the content they choose to consume. The FTC needs to work with publishers to simplify guidelines and make this happen.
For publishers, native advertising is a high-risk game. If they partner with untrustworthy brands, they could lose a large chunk of their audience. As noted above, when a trusted publisher features native advertising for an untrustworthy brand, 43% of consumers lose trust in that publisher.
But when a trusted publisher partners with a trusted brand, the opposite occurs: 41% of readers trust the publisher even more.
"I feel like [publishers] need to be selective in what they put on their sites and who they allow to, I guess, buy into their sites," said Sara, a 29-year-old focus group respondent. "You want something reputable or it will take away from the credibility of the site."
Relatedly, a 2014 study on native advertising by Edelman and the Interactive Advertising Bureau found that "brand relevance, authority, and trust were the most important factors to driving consumer interest in in-feed sponsored content across all media verticals."
In other words, publishers shouldn't make native-ad deals with unreliable brands, no matter the short-term financial gain. The long-term erosion of trust is just too hazardous.
But it isn't just a place where fake news spreads. Publishers like BuzzFeed spend millions of dollars every month to distribute native advertising on Facebook since it has the most powerful combination of targeting and cost efficiency of all the paid-distribution platforms. Could native ads confuse consumers just as much as fake news?
Our study found that wasn't the case. When consumers were first exposed to a native ad via a Sponsored Post in a Facebook feed, 73% identified it as advertising before they clicked through—likely because they're used to seeing advertising units in their Facebook feed and the "sponsored" label that accompanies it.
There's been a lot of talk since the election about how the media lives in a political echo chamber. This applies to how we think about native advertising as well—the way publishers label native advertising may seem transparent to a trained media professional, but it's just plain confusing to most people. We need simple guidelines, uniform labels that everyone uses, and more visual markers to distinguish native advertising from editorial content. (Seventy-four percent of respondents said that native ads should include both the brand name and logo and have a dedicated place where they appear on publisher sites.)
Right now, consumers trust the media industry far less than they do the bankers who caused the greatest economic disaster in a century. If publishers want to regain trust, they can't continue to show people content that seems designed to trick them.
From language lessons to virtual reality, here are some suggestions for experiential gift giving this holiday season.
Time and again, science has proven that experiential gifts bring far more happiness to people than a traditional gift. To aid your gift giving, we've put together a list of some experiential gifts you could dole out this holiday season. Happy shopping!
Fluent City offers language and culture classes.[Photo: courtesy of Fluent City]
For your city-dwelling East Coast friends, there's Fluent City, an education startup that offers private and group language classes. It has recently expanded to include other subjects, like a Bloody Mary mixology class and a four-week French cultural immersion course. Sign your friends up before December 20 and get $50 off.
Ah, what a year for virtual reality to make its commercial debut. And while giving someone this particular experience as a present does require the purchase of a thing in the form of a VR system, it's the virtual-reality journey itself that will make the lasting impact. If you're seeking a top-of-the-line model, go with the Oculus Rift or the HTC Vive (provided you have the means). For something a bit more affordable, there's always Sony's PlayStation VR.
Usually, gifting lipstick would fall squarely in the "gift of things" category. But at the Bite Beauty Lip Lab (currently only located in New York City, Toronto, and the Bay Area), you can create a lipstick from start to finish, customizing it to get exactly the shade and finish you want. Bite Beauty's lip products are handmade and all-natural—so much so that you could eat your lipstick (though we're sure you would rather wear it).
At the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema (in various U.S. locations), moviegoers can dine in style as they watch films: The theater's servers come to you, and its full menu stocks cocktails, craft beer, flatbread, and freshly baked chocolate chip cookies. Plus, Alamo Drafthouse has strict rules about people not using their phones in the theater—perfect for family time.
This one's for your friends who are New Yorkers and music aficionados: With boozy music lessons at Bantam Studio, students can learn the violin, guitar, ukelele, or mandolin between sips of beer and wine.
Learn how to make the famed birthday truffles—or, if you prefer, the crack pie or grasshopper cake—whipped up by Momofuku Milk Bar chef and founder Christina Tosi. For better or worse, you can take home everything you make at the end of the class. (Maybe also give the gift of SoulCycle classes while you're at it.)
Location, location, location. It's an old mantra of traditional marketers and a reason why so many startups all cluster in the same place. For many of those in the San Francisco Bay Area or New York City, location really is everything. The connections and access to the right people might seem limitless in these areas, and without them, your company might never have had a future.
But more and more lately, you don't have to be based in a major urban hub in order to run a successful company. I should know. In a little over three years, I've built a million-dollar company while living in a city most enterprise clients wouldn't consider searching in for a digital marketing firm: Utica, New York.
I know what you're thinking: Utica is hardly a global hotbed of fast-paced business innovation. But that doesn't mean innovation isn't happening here—or in dozens of other places you may never have thought to look. By using some low-cost strategies to build a sales funnel and some creative techniques to nurture relationships—both right outside my doorstep and further afield—I've been able to launch and grow a successful digital business.
Three factors have so far proved critical to my company's growth:
Using lead-focused online marketing to reach people in other areas
Making connections locally that have connections elsewhere
Developing key relationships in the areas I want to grow
When you're in the middle of nowhere (relatively speaking), digital marketing may play an even bigger role in your company's fate than ever. It helped me generate leads from companies that were already interested in my specific services, which helped me keep my marketing efforts relatively cheap and better targeted.
First and foremost, that meant getting my business listed where potential clients were searching for my services. Since I run an SEO startup, I started by submitting my website to directories and optimizing my own site for search engines. That's where my expertise in the same market I wanted to serve came in handy, but some of those steps are no-brainers. For example, I created a $16/month listing in MediaBistro that led to a crucial client relationship yielding over $200,000 in the last two years.
If that helped me secure my footing locally, the next step was to start building connections in the big cities closest to me. I compiled a list of more than 100 agencies I wanted to work with and emailed specific people at each one. Keeping it personal was key. I made sure to comment individually about the types of clients they worked with. As a result, I've received over $80,000 in revenue from one agency alone, plus potential projects with major brands.
Who should you contact? Here, too, a little basic market research comes in handy. Hunt down relevant local directories that list similar services to yours. So for example, if you want to build networks in Boston or New York, try submitting to VentureApp, a website connecting startups with the services they need.
I was able to find people with offices within close distance of me who had connections in bigger markets, like Boston and San Francisco, who would eventually connect me with the enterprise clients I was targeting. In other words, you don't need to build your regional or national network all by yourself. It's all about referrals—and it can start right in your local area.
First, I identified local business groups right here in Utica. That led to introductions to other local businesses that had the connections I needed outside our immediate community. For instance, I joined a local nonprofit group called Upstate Venture Connect, which focuses on connecting entrepreneurs to investors and other resources in upstate New York.
Up to that point, I hadn't put much effort into seeking local contacts since I was building leads online and thinking more about developing relationships in New York and Boston. But UVC actually helped me do that even better by connecting me with other online marketers whose contacts in major cities have proved really useful.
Where can you find them? Use a tool like SimilarWeb to find which business groups in your area are all linking to similar companies. Or just search Google or the small-business directory Manta to find local businesses that are complementary to yours—then use SimilarWeb to deepen your research.
And yes, some of the most useful connections in your local network may be competitors, or at least companies operating on similar turf. But startup communities have a way of being more supportive than you might imagine in out-of-the-way places, and typically there's still plenty of business to go around.
Some of the connections I wound up developing aren't the enterprise clients I typically work with, but I was interested in nurturing any type of relationship I might be able to build upon in order to meet the people I wanted to. The rule here is simple: Just treat everyone as if they were your key account—even if they may not fit your ideal client profile.
For instance, one contact of mine in San Francisco, which brought my business only $3,000 in revenue, happened to introduce me to another ultimate client that's led to over $120,000 last year. Not only that, but the relationship has led to no fewer than three additional clients, which will lead to over $5,000 per month each next year.
When you aren't based in a booming tech hub, maintaining these connections and investing a lot of energy in cultivating them is mission critical. I recommend keeping a list of all the relationships you have in other areas, and doing at least one thing in the next few months that will help their business. They'll be more likely to think of you the next time your service or product comes up in conversation.
What I've learned in the past few years is that your network is truly not limited to your location. Find directories that list startups similar to yours so potential clients that are searching for your service can find you. Then locate some business groups in your area that can lead to some strategic local connections—and build up from there. Put some energy into developing relationships with sources who can refer you to your target customers.
As is true for every startup just about everywhere, not every lead will pan out, but those that do can pave the way for ever bigger opportunities—including far outside your home turf.
Kevin Rowe is the founder and CEO of Rowe Digital, an SEO intelligence provider whose clients include Fortune 100 companies as well as Silicon Valley startups.
There's a lot of money in people's poop. If the developing world finds ways to harvest it as they add toilets and plumbing, it will be far ahead of us in monetizing an important resource.
If we think about human waste as a resource instead of as "waste," we might get sanitation to the billions of people who need it much more quickly. Turning poo and pee into energy, agricultural manure, animal feeds, and even pharmaceutical products could create valuable income streams, making investment in sanitation infrastructure easier. Sensing for disease and ill-health in municipal or home toilet systems could also be a monetize-able business in the future.
This all comes from a report from the wonderfully named Toilet Board Coalition, an association of toilet brands, consumer groups, and non-profits like Water Aid. It looks at the potential for a "circular economy" in sanitation, where "resources" are recycled to create "self-sustaining sanitation businesses and encourage investment in sanitation, reducing dependence on public and aid funding."
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Human waste can be turned into energy in the form of biogas (using an anaerobic digester), or made into solid fuel (as in Sanivation's business in Kenya). It can be converted to agricultural compost, organic fertilizer and soil conditioner, and you can extract water from human waste—fecal matter is 75% water, urine 95%. Another possibility is to re-harvest the nutrients in human waste by growing maggots. The maggots become maggot meal, which is then fed to pigs. A South African company is working on this last idea.
The report argues that low income countries can leapfrog more mature countries by taking up opportunities in the "biological" cycle (or biocycle), as well as the "technical" cycle (metals and plastics recycling). "We believe that enabling the biological cycle of the Circular Economy, to include toilet resources and all biological resource streams, could be the next transformative shift for low-income markets and their sustainable development," it says.
Today, Facebook is starting to roll out an update to its platform, the first in many promised updates to stop the spread of fake news. It allows users to flag news for fact-checking, and marks questionable content shared on the service. But it stops short of explicitly labeling stories fake.
CNN: "Drunk Hillary" Beat Sh*t Out Of Bill Clinton On Election Night
Taylor Swift SHOCKS Music Industry: "I Voted For Trump"
Hillary Clinton In 2013: 'I Would Like To See People Like Donald Trump Run For Office; They're Honest And Can't Be Bought
These are real headlines that have all trended on Facebook, but none of the stories are true. They're part of the epidemic of fake news. Fake news—unbelievable headlines backed by entirely fabricated stories—is a phenomenon that was by no means invented during the 2016 election cycle, but it was this political season that fake publishers perfected the system, banking on the sensational sharing of misinformation, all while drowning out real information. Many even believe fake news may have swayed a close election in Trump's favor.
Whether or not that happened, fake news is a real problem. One study has found that 75% of people who see fake news believe it. While another, using publicly available Facebook APIs, discovered that the share behind the Denver Guardian's top story outpaced the Washington Post's top story by over 10 times. The Denver Guardian isn't a real paper. That's why we're not even italicizing it.
Facebook's new updates, the company tells us, are only the earliest moves in what will span many design decisions that will play out over the coming years to balance this wrong.
The main feature is called Disputed Posts. By clicking a new button on the upper right hand corner of every post on Facebook, you can flag a story as fictitious. If enough people flag the post, it will be sent to a member of Poynter's International Fact Checking Network, a reputable third party that will parse the news for veracity. If it's found to be fake, the story will still be shareable, but it will be marked as "disputed" whenever it's displayed on the platform—as well as flagged to someone the moment directly before she shares in hopes that she'll think twice about sharing. Notably, Facebook is not labeling these stories "fake" or "false." It's using the euphemistic term "disputed," which literally means "debated."
Disputed Posts only launches in the United States at this time. And it's being rolled out conservatively. Facebook tells us that the company will be flagging only the most obvious posts for Poynter to fact check. When asked what would happen to politically sensitive stories that were less outrageous but perhaps just as dangerous—like hyperpartisan headlines that question the scientific consensus of climate change—a Facebook spokesperson said the company had to be careful and keep Facebook a place where all people feel like they could have conversations most important to them.
Which gets to the real dilemma facing Facebook as it considers design solutions to the problem of fake news. On one hand, Facebook argues that it is not a media company. It recently even fired its editorial staff largely to avoid claims of bias, letting algorithms manage news instead.
But Facebook is a media company. Through those algorithms, it makes personalized, editorial decisions every time you open its app or website—whether you see a friend's baby photos or a story from Breitbart. And the company is not transparent about how the algorithms work.
In this regard, relying on a third party fact checker could prove too little too late. Stories can go viral in minutes, and Facebook admits to not yet knowing how long the fact-checking process will take. The user interface will only be as effective as the speed with which real assessments are made. Furthermore, while Facebook will flag stories as disputed to users, truth doesn't seem impact how often Facebook's algorithms share a story—nor will multiple disputes all leading to a single publication weigh down its prioritization across feeds. In other words, even if Fast Company publishes five individual stories in one week that fact checkers flag as disputed, Facebook still won't curtail the spread of Fast Company stories at large. Each story is treated as an isolated incident.
Finally, Facebook's UI is making one critical assumption: That people will believe Facebook enough to question their own beliefs—or the depressing believability of fake news itself. Because ultimately it's Facebook's UI that's flagging a story as disputed. And if you are prone to believe a Denver Guardian headline more than Facebook or Poytner? That "disputed" flag might just serve as confirmation for the liberal media bias. People are known to weigh "facts" supporting their world view more than those that question it—right or wrong, it's a basic psychological phenomenon that Facebook must account for in its design.
Which is why it's so irresponsible that Facebook is hedging by labeling fake news "disputed" rather than "false." The use of the word "disputed" treats the facts themselves as if they're up for debate, which is precisely the mentality driving fake news and the post-truth era.
Indeed, Facebook's more useful interventions will probably happen inside their invisible algorithms, and its most promising new initiative may be one your eyes never see: Facebook has plans to experiment with ranking stories lower if people don't tend to share them after reading, as Facebook claims this pattern can correlate with misleading content.
Because for Facebook to squash fake news for good, the only real design intervention may be that it stops making it so shareable. Sure, some of that can be fixed by slowing down users who are about to share fake news, but fake news is only a phenomenon because it has a huge audience being presented these stories in the first place. And that culpability falls on companies like Google, Twitter, and Facebook. After all, Facebook is the world's largest publisher, whether it claims the title or not.
A new AI camera tool enables special effects and streamlined photo and video posting in Messenger.
In keeping with social media's visual push, Facebook has revamped its Messenger app for more streamlined, image-driven, and personalized communication.
Rolling out globally over the next few days after two years in development, the improved app—called Messenger Camera—centers around a faster, more user-friendly, artificially intelligent in-app camera that integrates art and special effects into photos—such as scribbling messages or posting pre-set art filters. Now users can tap or press a shutter button in the center of the Messenger screen to take photos or record a video, then choose from thousands of newly added stickers, frames, 3D masks, and effects to dress up their shots and text messages before sending them.
Other improvements include an upgraded inbox that lists favorite friends and those currently using the app, instead of having to click to another section, as well as an ability to resend the same content concurrently to multiple, separate conversations. More features are planned for the near future.
"It's technology meeting art that allows you to construct visual pieces that you would not be able to do anywhere else," says Stan Chudnovsky, head of product for Messenger.
Stan Chudnovsky
"Our plan has been to figure out what people want and try to give them the most efficient way of doing that," he adds. "The world has been moving toward visual messaging, with people sending hundreds of videos and images to each other. It wasn't like that before, when people mostly wrote messages. Now it's video and images augmented with text, so it's flipped."
The Messenger team developed the improvements after noting that emoji and sticker use was outpacing text—to the tune of 2.5 billion emojis, photos, stickers, and videos sent daily on Messenger—and users increasingly preferred video to audio calls. In addition, conversations were becoming more immediate and targeted.
"These transitions are the result of: As technology improves, people's behavior changes, and then we want to lean into that and make it easier for people to do what they're trying to do," says Peter Martinazzi, director of product management.
Peter Martinazzi
Facebook enlisted design ideas from several social media influencers after bringing them to its San Francisco headquarters for brainstorming sessions. Some who have monetized their followings see them as applicable to business as socializing.
Ally Chen, who consulted on user experience and contributed the "You Gotta Love a Latte" filter, sees the improvements as a way to even further personalize and diversify an online presence that already draws some 20 million views to her San Francisco-based Fashion By Ally lifestyle channel and social media accounts.
Kathy Cano-Murillo, who heads the Arizona-based Latina lifestyle and crafts consultancy The Crafty Chica, plans to use the improvements to more personally engage with her collective 200,000 social media followers and newsletter subscribers.
"I'm going to use the new features to be more personable when people write to me," says Cano-Murillo. "Instead of just typing 'Thank you' or adding a smiley face, I can enhance it so much more by using one of the cool stickers because it adds more personality, shows my appreciation that they've written, and makes them feel more special. I have two filters on there—'Stay Gold' and 'Craftastrophy'—so I'll be telling everyone to use them.
"I've built my entire company through social media," she adds. "It's about creating friendship and connecting with other creative, positive people. So the more personality, the better."
The New York-based company gives us a behind-the-scenes peek at how it created a custom VR app for Sony's Bravia Android TVs.
Smart televisions are big business. Televisions in millions of American homes are internet-connected, hooked up to Netflix and Hulu via Rokus and Apple TVs. As smart TVs become even more popular, an unexpected new challenge emerges: Companies who are used to making apps for smartphones and tablets suddenly have to adapt to making apps for televisions.
Littlstar is one of those companies. A New York-based virtual reality startup that's backed by Disney, Littlstar is pioneering a new market for app-makers. The company released a new app this month designed specifically for Sony's Bravia Android televisions (which start at approximately $600). Through the app, users can watch virtual reality content from Littlstar's partners: Showtime, the Discovery Channel, National Geographic, and ABC Television Group.
Here's how it works: Users download Littlstar's app to their television through the Google Play store, and then use their remote control to navigate around the VR content. (The remote control functions as a somewhat ungainly substitute for the head motions of users wearing a VR headset.) Although the remote is the navigation interface, the goal is the same: interacting with virtual reality video.
The Littlstar app isn't an exact replica of the mobile one. "It has more curated content than our mobile application. Our mobile app basically has everything in our database, but we're a bit more selective about what shows up on television," says Littlstar CEO Tony Mugavero. "We want to make sure it meets certain thresholds on resolution and quality of content. Because the image will be blown up on a larger screen, we want to make sure it's as good as possible. It's a little different than on a phone, where you can get away with lower quality and the content is a bit more snackable."
Littlstar is among a small group of tech companies—Netflix, Hulu, and Sony's Playstation Now among them—that have created custom Android apps for smart TVs. And, as Littlstar has discovered, that process is distinct from making apps for touch-sensitive smartphones or tablets. "The interface changes," Mugavero says. "You want the content to be viewable and clear from 10 feet away, particularly in terms of the app interface. Also, obviously, some televisions have additional external Bluetooth remote controls and things like that." Making VR for television adds an additional layer of complexity (which Littlstar encountered on a previous app it created for Apple TV). Projects that might look acceptable on a phone or Google Cardboard won't necessarily pass muster on a significantly bigger screen.
The way infrared remote controls interact with a television is also different from a smartphone interface. "Instead of smooth, clean directional sweeps, there are lots of infrared responses being sent to the television," Mugavero says. "This means that the television thinks you're sending signals a bunch of times versus making a smooth thumb swipe on Apple TV on your phone. We made modifications to playback, so when you're holding down the controller, we can create a smooth movement through the video player." By working with Sony, he adds, Littlstar was able to adapt the interface to the TV remote.
Then there's the issue of market fragmentation. While Apple only sells one smart television product (the Apple TV), there is a small army of smart TV devices that use Google's Android, each with its own operating system. Designing specifically for Sony's Bravias, then, meant creating a unique system, separate from Android television products used in the Nvidia Shield or Sharp Aquous.
(Meanwhile, Samsung—one of the biggest television manufacturers in the world—built its smart televisions around Tizen, yet another alternative operating system.)
As 2016 draws to a close, it's clear Littlstar is betting on television as a major content channel. The company plans on rolling out versions of the VR app for other Android smart TVs by December 31. Happy New Year to tech.
Our picks of the companies that have carefully designed products to improve the quality of women's lives.
Technology designed for women exploded in 2016, with new products hitting the market ranging from wearable trackers for expectant mothers to networking apps to help female professionals get ahead. "The online consumer market of women is a new phenomenon" in part because investors are waking up to the opportunity, says Anu Duggal, founding partner of the Female Founders Fund, a firm that invests in women-led startups. "The purchasing power of women is massive and becoming clearer."
Many of the female founders that made our list struggled for years to raise capital, but were able to convince investors in their vision through persistence and creativity (and of course, a solid business pitch). Miki Agrawal from Thinx, a period underwear maker, tells us she requested that one of her male investors wear a maxi pad during an entire meeting to get him to empathize with what women experience. Others like Morena Simatic, cofounder of wearables startup Bellabeat, had little trouble raising financing for a product designed specifically for women rather than a pink version of an existing product.
Five years ago, Harvard Business Review conducted a landmark survey of professional women and found that most felt vastly underserved in the marketplace compared to men. That's starting to change. "Women were a neglected category, until recently," says Simatic.
To compile this list, we asked a range of investors and entrepreneurs and solicited feedback from dozens of women. Here are their picks, in no particular order:
Honorable Mention: Rent the Runway Unlimited, Third Love For recognizing that you have #BetterThingsToDo than shop for work clothes
One of our most popular fashion stories this year was about MM.Lafleur, a startup specifically designed for women who hate to shop. Sarah Lafleur, cofounder and CEO, had the idea for the company in her early twenties when she was a management consultant and needed to build a wardrobe of work outfits. Not only was it hard to find simple, well-made, work-appropriate clothing, the entire shopping process was a bore and ate into the little free time she had.
When she launched MM.Lafleur in 2013, she created the "Bento Box" system, where a woman can explain her preferences, size, and body type, and receive a box full of pieces chosen by a stylist. She can pay for the items she wants to keep, return the rest, then continue shopping online, or request another box. The idea is that women with full lives have #BetterThingsToDo than rifle through racks of dresses. Unlike subscription services like Stitchfix or La Tote, women can request boxes only when they need them, and, since MM.Lafleur only delivers products they make, they can ensure the quality is high.
Besides the innovative retail model, the clothes themselves are an important addition to the market. Miyako Nakamura, the other cofounder and creative director, designs simple work clothes that every professional woman needs—shift dresses, pencil skirts, blazers, silk tops. The clothes have a minimalistic aesthetic, clean lines, and are meant to look good on a range of body types. Many are made to be machine washable, because who has time to go to the dry cleaners every week? Stay tuned in 2017 for a new collection of shoes and bags, as well as plus sizes.
Among other innovative fashion brands over the last year, Rent the Runway launched a subscription service that allows you to wear an unlimited number of dresses for $139. Third Love has also emerged as a key lingerie brand that uses technology to assess a woman's bra size accurately without requiring to get them fitted in a store.
For making smart jewelry that goes with everything you wear
While fitness trackers are handy, most aren't something you'd want to wear all day. Many are made of rubber or plastic to be sweat-resistant. The more fashionable ones often make too much of a statement to be worn all the time. But Bellabeat is a bio-tracker that is carefully designed to be worn all the time. It is a pendant in the shape of a leaf and made of a lightweight material that looks like stone, in a muted palette of gray and metal. It can be worn as a bracelet, a necklace, and a clip. It is sturdy and water-resistant, but it looks like a piece of everyday jewelry. It's also small and unobtrusive enough that a woman can easily clip it to her bra, if she wants it out of sight, or to pajamas or underwear to track her sleep.
The technology behind the device is equally impressive. The Bellabeat tracks not only steps and sleep, but also a woman's period, and it weaves all of the information together to predict how stressed she might be at any given time. If it determines you slept poorly and it is the day before your period is about to start, it might predict you have a 65% chance of being stressed, allowing you to mentally adjust, get some exercise, and preempt your own irritability. The app also comes with a series of meditation exercises so if you don't have time to step out for some fresh air, you can do breathing exercises for a few minutes to reclaim your calm.
For creating a beautiful machine that doesn't make new moms feel like cows
Breastfeeding can be an intimate form of bonding with your newborn. But using a breast pump is an unpleasant necessity for new moms who can't always be with their babies. There has been little innovation in the technology in decades. Most pumps are clunky machines that suck milk from a woman's breasts with vacuum pressure, much in the same way that cows are milked. They are noisy, heavy, and require many parts that need to be washed after every use.
Naya is a startup that has been working on new pump technology for the last two years. Their device is smaller and more portable than the average breast pump, quiet, and looks like it was made by Apple. It has clean lines and simple colors, like white and silver. The $1,000 device only begins shipping this month, so technology hasn't been heavily tested or reviewed, but the founders explain that rather than using vacuum technology to suck out the milk, they have used a water-based technology that expresses milk from the breast. The device also massages the breast to help stimulate milk extraction, making it more effective than competing pumps.
Honorable mention: Knixwear, Clue For taking some of the hassle and embarrassment out of menstruation products
For centuries, periods have been a source of shame and anxiety. As Thinx founder Agrawal is fond of saying, the very word "taboo" comes from a Polynesian word that happens to refer to menstruation. But in 2016, with women shattering glass ceilings across industries and running for the highest office in the land, it seems ludicrous that something as common and natural as a period continues to make women cringe.
Agrawal wanted to tackle the shame of periods head on. Her first line of attack was to create beautiful high-tech underwear that makes periods less of a hassle by preventing leaks with an absorbent, antimicrobial layer of fabric. After all, a big part of the embarrassment of menstruating is unsightly brownish blood stains on your pants or skirts. The garments feel as comfortable as regular underwear, come in a wide range of silhouettes (including a boy short designed for trans men), and have pretty details like lace.
But Thinx is committed to broader cultural change. It wants to change the conversation about periods, to tackle the taboo head-on and redefine it as something that is beautiful. Its advertising campaigns feature artistic images women in elegant poses and fruit that evokes a woman's anatomy. In 2017, the company will release other clothing items that feature its proprietary fabric technology as well as a reusable silicone applicator for its own organic cotton tampons.
As close runners-up, underwear brand Knix Wear has developed a line of intimates that prevent leaks during periods with an in-built panty liner, but have used their technology to create knickers that are perfect for sport as well as a brand-new bra that provides lift without wires. Period app Clue has established itself as an important tool for 5 million women from more than 190 countries who want to keep on top of their menstrual cycles and fertility.
For creating a safe and welcoming space for political discourse and action
On November 8, millions of women across the nation went to the polls to cast their vote for the first female candidate at the top of the presidential ballot. There was a festive mood in the streets, thanks in part to many women wearing pantsuits, Hillary Clinton's outfit of choice throughout her career. On social media, women posted pictures of themselves with the hashtag #PantsuitNation.
Pantsuit Nation began as a grassroots movement on Facebook. Libby Chamberlain, 33, created the Pantsuit Nation group three weeks before the election in an effort to express support—and collection donations—for Clinton. Clinton herself knew about the group. The day before the election, she passed on a message to the more than 2.5 million people in the group. "For some of you, it's been difficult to feel like you could wear your support on your sleeve," she wrote. "That's why this community has been such a special place."
Later, during her concession speech—a heartbreaking moment for many in the group—Clinton once again referred to #PantsuitNation. "And to the millions of volunteers, community leaders, activists, and union organizers who knocked on doors, talked to their neighbors, posted on Facebook—even in secret private Facebook sites," she said. "I want everybody coming out from behind that and make sure your voices are heard going forward."
Now, the Facebook group has morphed into a place to support one another in the wake of Clinton's loss, as well as share ideas for activism. Elsewhere online #PantsuitNation has evolved into a rallying cry to push forward with the effort to ensure that a woman does, one day, break the highest glass ceiling there is.
Honorable mention: Glossier, Ever For fighting for safer beauty products, both in the lab and on Capitol Hill
While the United States has only banned 11 chemicals in personal care products, the European Union has banned more than 1,300 products and has restricted the level of more than 250 others. Beautycounter has been working to change that. The company has created its own list of chemicals that it will never use in its products. But this is a tall order. Its scientists need to work hard to find ways to use safe ingredients to make products that are as effective as anything else on the market. This year, it launched a mascara, which was particularly challenging to make without harsh chemicals known to cause harm.
This summer, Beautycounter brought a hundred of its representatives to Capitol Hill to lobby for the government to better regulate beauty products. It partnered with Target to broaden its customer base. It also acquired Nude, an all-natural beauty brand founded in the U.K. by Bono and his wife, Ali Hewson.
Glossier, a brand that emerged from the popular blog Into the Gloss, has been an important addition to the beauty landscape, by creating an unfussy range of products that makes getting ready in the morning quicker and easier. Ever, the skin care brand launched by Stella & Dot, has developed an all-natural line that uses an ingredients extracted from the magnolia plant in its range of anti-aging, brightening, and smoothing products.
Honorable mention: Wildflower Health For connecting women with the care they need, when they need it
For many women, a family doctor simply isn't equipped to handle questions specific to women's health. Some women will see their gynecologist, but that's not always appropriate for issues related to hormones and nutrition, for instance. That's where Maven Clinic, a telehealth company for women founded by former journalist Katherine Ryder, comes in. The company works with hundreds of providers that sit inside and outside of the traditional medical system, including lactation consultants, midwives, family doctors, obstetricians, and physical therapists—and all of them were vetted for their ability to serve female patients.
Ryder, who recently had her first child, started the company after seeing a huge gap in the market for a service that specifically catered to pregnant women and new mothers. Maven's maternity service is available 24/7 for those who have niggling questions about their or their newborn's health. The company also rolled out a specialty service for women on college campuses, which helps students access birth control and mental health support, among other services. Ryder's mission? "To help more women have access to a health provider they can talk to comfortably and easily, so no person goes without care."
Wildflower Health, a San Francisco-based startup, helps pregnant woman and their families manage all that paperwork, including insurance benefits, and schedule doctor visits. The company was founded in 2012 by Leah Sparks, who struggled to deal with her health plan benefits while expecting her first child.
Honorable mention: Make Love Not Porn, Nuelle For reimagining the future of sex
Two words: Vaginal cannabis. Many of the women we spoke to raved about Foria Relief, a cocoa butter-based cannabis for the vagina that is designed to help with menstrual cramps and other sexual health issues. That accompanies Foria Pleasure, a product that aims to increase sexual pleasure through a lubricant spray. As one happy customer described the experience: "(It was) like my vagina was kicking back on the beach in Mexico, without a care in the world." Sex and sexual health is a notoriously underfunded space, but Foria has garnered rave reviews from users and continues to sell well in Colorado and California.
Make Love Not Porn is the brainchild of Cindy Gallop, a former advertising consultant and sex educator, who believes that hardcore pornography has negatively impacted how younger generations of men think about sex. Gallop isn't against porn; but she is critical of the unrealistic expectations that it leaves its viewers with. Gallop's alternative—a website for real people to share their sexual adventures—describes itself as "pro-sex, pro-porn, and pro-knowing the difference." Nuelle, which was founded by veteran medical device executive Karen Long, is developing a product called Fiera that is an intimacy enhancer for women struggling with sexual arousal.
Honorable mention: Bumble For taking dating apps to the next level: friendship
When Olivia June Poole first moved to San Francisco, she had few friends in the city. So Poole signed up to OKCupid and started messaging women, not for the purposes of a forming a romantic relationship but a platonic one. That ultimately gave her the idea for Vina, an app that is essentially a Tinder for female friendships.
Women who sign up to the app answer quiz-style questions about their lifestyle and habits to ensure that the app can connect them with friends who share their interests. It's ideal for those who recently relocated to a new place, or are too busy juggling professional and family lives and don't have time to make friends. Vina seems to have hit on a bigger trend: Also this year, dating app Bumble announced a "BFF" feature for those who want to switch from searching for romantic partners to platonic, same-sex relationships.
Honorable mention: Après For helping women advance professionally, especially during times of transition
Landit, the startup that is making a name for itself as the "LinkedIn for women," is designed to help women make big changes in their professional lives. Landit was founded by former health care investor Lisa Skeete Tatum, who had the lightbulb moment to start the company after hitting a crossroads in her own career. The site focuses on those transitional moments, such as when its users are feeling stuck in their current role or are newly reentering the workforce. In that sense, it's similar to Après, a company that is designed for moms who want to reenter the workforce after taking a career break.
On Landit, women share information about their career experiences and skills in exchange for personalized job listings, as well as access to premium coaching services. The site also helps women develop a public-facing brand, if that's important to their career growth. Landit will likely be available to anyone in the coming years, but Skeete Tatum told the Wall Street Journal that she's opted to work exclusively with women for now as they "represent 51% of the workforce but are only in 19% of senior management roles. [Women] aren't progressing through the ranks of these organizations as we should be." Hear, hear.
Big Blue says its latest Watson tech enables chatbots, robots, and even smart cars and houses that can understand and relate to humans.
Though artificial intelligence experts may cringe at the portrayals of humanlike AI in science fiction, some researchers are nudging us closer to those visions. "I think it's useful that your user interface not only understand your emotions, your personality, your tone, your motivations, but that it also have a set of emotions, personality, motivations," says Rob High, the CTO of IBM Watson. "I think that makes it more natural for us."
Last month, High's company unveiled Project Intu, an experimental platform that allows developers the ability to build internet of things devices using its artificial intelligence services, like Conversation, Language and Visual Recognition. Someday, the system promises to let programmers create a staple character of sci-fi: the gregarious, hyper-connected AI like J.A.R.V.I.S. of Iron Man, KITT of Knight Rider, or Star Wars' C3PO.
But this isn't Westworld. High isn't talking about a robot that's conscious or sentient, with genuine feelings, but rather a "cognitive" AI that can analyze the mood and personality of a user and adjust how it expresses itself—in text, voice, online avatars, and physical robots. The result, he says, could transform industries like retail, elder care, and industrial and social robotics.
At IBM's 2016 Watson Developer Conference in San Francisco last month, Australian oil- and gas-drilling company Woodside showed an onscreen question-answering AI built with Project Intu. Willow, as she's known, is an animated abstract character with a sassy British voice. Her job is to take voice instructions and quickly scour hundreds of linked computer systems to retrieve engineering documents and detailed data, such as the current location of a tanker ship or the maximum weight of a helicopter that can land on an oil-drilling platform.
"Any sci-fi movie, any comic book you've ever read, this is the way that we have always wanted to interact with machines," says Russ Potapinski, Woodside's head of cognitive science.
High offers automated customer service as a prime example of the need for AI that can read human emotions. "The difference between somebody who's angry versus somebody who's disappointed matters. Somebody who's angry, chances are they're in a pretty irrational state of mind…you've gotta get them back to the point where they can be rational," says High. "Somebody who's disappointed… they don't like what you did, but they're not irrational about it."
There are limits to what an onscreen bot can do, High acknowledges, which is why IBM is determined to go further. "If you ask me a question about direction, it would be hard for me to answer that without being able to point," he says. "But it's not just [hand] gestures. It's body language, it's facial gestures… All that adds to your understanding of what I mean."
Project Intu is not the first effort to build empathetic-seeming bots, and IBM is hardly alone when it comes to artificial intelligence research. Salesforce, Google, Facebook, Amazon, and other large tech companies are also investing heavily in their own AI systems. But as an open-access cloud service, Intu promises to let anyone, even a garage programmer, create socially sophisticated AIs that can be useful for communicating with humans who need answers, be they inside a company or customers who call or chat with customer service questions. "We deliver tools, and other people turn them into actual running examples," says High.
Customers are encountering more nonhumans when trying to resolve certain service issues, with mixed results. In a June study with a dozen participants by U.K. media agency Mindshare, which included Watson-powered bots, about 60% of people said that they would consider using an AI bot to get in touch with a brand, but as many of them agreed that "it would feel patronizing if a chatbot starting asking me how my day is going." And half of them agreed that "it feels creepy if the chatbot is pretending to be human."
A much larger survey of 24,000 respondents across 12 countries, conducted by research firms Verint, Opinium Research, and IDC looked at all the ways customers communicate with companies. It didn't specifically compare humans to bots, but it did reveal that telephone support is most popular and chat is least loved. (Think about the current stilted state of conversation with Siri or Alexa.)
That IBM debuted Project Intu the day after an election that evoked a lot of human emotion wasn't lost on High. "If I'm already depressed because of some political situation that I'm aware of today, I may not want this thing to be entirely chirpy to me this morning, right?" he says.
Project Intu builds on technologies that IBM has already developed. An existing service called Watson Tone Analyzer, for instance, reads through text like social media posts to judge "emotional sentiment." It even helped a musician, Alex da Kid, write some moody songs for his recent EP.
Automated sentiment analysis isn't brand new. It has been offered by companies like Adobe and Lexalytics to understand consumer opinions on platforms like Facebook and Twitter. In fact there are dozens of companies just doing text-based analysis, such as Viralheat for social media, Api.ai and DigitalGenius for conversational interfaces, Textio for HR, and Receptiviti for personality profiling.
My personality assessment, as Roztayger read from my Twitter feed. (Click to enlarge.)
Another Watson tool incorporated into Project Intu, Personality Insights, promises to analyze text like email or Twitter and Facebook posts to ferret out people's traits. Online retailer Roztayger has an experimental tool called Designer Match that uses Watson to recommend products that suit their personality. It found me to be pretty dour, based on my businesslike Twitter feed. Designer Match might understand me better if I'd given it access to my Facebook account, but I didn't want to share that much, especially not with an AI I'd only just met. The privacy implications of Project Intu are considerable (more about that later).
Watson's speech engine can also feign some personality in its responses. "We can adjust things like its cadence or breathiness or its pitch, make it sound more like an old person or a child," says High. "We can put inflection in it that makes it either happier, you know lighter, lilting, or more apologetic." And IBM already has a bunch of tools for building chatbots.
To attempt to achieve emotional and empathetic interactions with humans, Intu needs to go beyond just talking, be it through a chatbot or a voice-based assistant like Amazon's Alexa. One advanced version of Intu, says High, might be a more sophisticated online avatar—an animated character that more closely resembles a real human assistant—without going too far into the uncanny valley.
A similar approach is at work at the U.S. Dept. of Defense, which funds a project called Virtual Humans that was developed by the Institute for Creative Technologies at the University of Southern California. The video game-style characters role play with soldiers to practice their interpersonal skills with colleagues.
They also provide counseling. The system reads tension in voice, word choice, posture, and facial expressions to assess someone's mental state. Professor Jon Gratch, who runs the Virtual Humans program at USC, says that some service people are more comfortable opening up to a virtual human than to a real one who may be judgmental. Given the cost and ever shakier status of mental health care coverage, AI may fill a gap that human professionals can't.
Powered by the pre-Intu version of Watson, IDavatars Sophie advises patients on their medical care, but her personality is a bit stilted.
"I think it goes back to the same theory, the same premise," says High about Virtual Humans, "which is that, for us to effect a natural interaction between humans and machines, it has to be more than simply a running set of text." (Virtual Humans draw on prerecorded dialog, but USC is working toward AI that can converse extemporaneously.)
Watson launched in the health care field, and that business now accounts for two-thirds of the Watson unit's employment. Much of the focus has been on analyzing medical and genomic data to help doctors make decisions and design tailored therapies. But other companies, such as iDAvatars, have also been using Watson to power virtual assistants that communicate directly with patients.
IBM is joining a trend. Japan has long been the land of social robots. They're now coming across the Pacific, bringing over robots like Pepper, the doe-eyed android that serves as a sales assistant in stores. It monitors video and audio to distinguish and respond to four human emotions: happiness, joy, sadness, and anger. High's lab is connecting Pepper and similar robots with Intu to make them more socially adept.
"Imagine eventually robots in your home, social robots, or in your bank lobbies or store lobbies or anywhere else that you go," says High. He extends "robot" to mean other kinds of machinery. "You can imagine your room itself as a device," he says. "It can have control of your lights and your shades and appliances in your room." That sounds like J.A.R.V.I.S., the omnipresent AI that helps Tony Stark control his house, workshop, even his Iron Man suit. High agrees, though seems a tad uncomfortable with a comic-book comparison.
What about the biggest machine people may own, one that's always getting more "intelligent"? "When you get into your car, it's not just about driving someplace," says High. The experience extends to the music, the seat position, the temperature, the nav system. "Now if all of that could be orchestrated, so that when you get in your car, it feels like it's alive to you, that would be profoundly different," he says.
I can't not allude to KITT, the wise-talking, robotic car that sped David Hasselhoff on crime-fighting missions in the 1980's show Knight Rider. Again, High hesitates at a Hollywood reference, but concedes, "That's the idea that it could progress to." (Though he may not mean the crimefighting part.)
That model could be problematic if KITT drives out of cellphone range, since Watson is a web service. It might be able to adjust the seats from time to time, but it had better not be in charge of the collision avoidance system when the car hits a wireless dead spot. It wouldn't be: At the moment, self-driving systems all depend upon a computer in the car. A less-dramatic example: I tried to chat with some basic Intu bots running on laptops, but overtaxed Wi-Fi at the conference left them close to crippled. Here IBM may be bucking a trend of bringing AI right down to devices. Even recent-model smartphones are now capable of running sophisticated neural networks on their CPU and graphics processors.
Another roadblock could be privacy. High describes AI's that build long-term relationships with users, such as customers of a bank. From a customer's life events—say, shopping that indicates the birth of a child—an Intu bot could know that they may be looking to buy a larger house, for instance.
If people are concerned about companies collecting their personal data, how will they feel about collecting personality data? I put the question to High, who says the purpose would be to use understanding of personality only in the moment of conversation, not to retain it and build a profile. "I think it's a separate issue, and certainly one of concern, that we all need to be aware of as to what people do with that information if aggregated and exploited for marketing purposes." But as High says, IBM only makes the tools. It's up to its clients how they use, or abuse, them.
The star of the recent film Floyd Norman: An Animated Life writes about an iconic entrepreneur on the 50th anniversary of his death.
When Walt Disney passed away 50 years ago, on December 15, 1966, the world of entertainment lost a visionary innovator who never seemed to run out of ideas. He began his career as a scruffy young filmmaker in Kansas City and in time he would migrate to Hollywood where he would confound his critics by building a creative empire.
Floyd Norman
Even with his success, Disney regretted not having a college education. Yet, his business skills would soon be evident. A man of his time, Walt Disney had the scrappy determination of an American entrepreneur and totally believed success could be found through hard work and the sincere belief in a dream. However, even the business of magic is still business. A totally self-taught tycoon, he could easily have taught business-school graduates a thing or two. He knew his audience better than anyone. He never called them customers. They were his guests.
Much like Steve Jobs, who Floyd Norman later worked for at Pixar, Walt Disney could intimidate his employees—but he also inspired them
So, how does one manage magic? I can't think of a better example than my old boss. We called him "The Old Maestro" because Disney conducted his remarkable enterprise from his Tinseltown podium. Much like the Sorcerer in Fantasia, he wielded his baton like a magic wand. With a confident wave, Disney could command a platoon of living broomsticks or turn a little wooden puppet into a real boy. He could teach an elephant to fly or transform a pumpkin into a glistening silver carriage.
Confident with his movie product, Walt fearlessly entered the medium of television when other Hollywood studio executives deemed it a threat to their business. He recognized an ally when he saw one and was determined to use the emerging new platform to sell his product. I arrived at the studio in the '50s, during what could only be called a creative explosion. Along with his live-action and animated film product, Walt had embraced television and created the first theme park in nearby Anaheim. As far as he was concerned, the sky was the limit.
The decade of the '60s provided more creative and business opportunities, and Disney met them head on. He partnered with the New York City World's Fair in 1964 and pondered the construction of a ski resort in California's High Sierras. A new theme park in Florida was on his agenda along with what might be called the biggest gamble of his career. No longer satisfied with simply providing entertainment venues, the Old Maestro began planning something he called EPCOT—"Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow"—on the vast properties he had acquired in the southern state.
By caprice, I found myself working with Walt Disney in 1966 on what would be his final film, The Jungle Book. Seriously ill, with only months to live, he continued his role as creative leader. Not a person on our team was the wiser about the limited time he had left, because the Old Maestro worked with the same furious determination that characterized him earlier in his career. Then without warning, he was gone.
Walt Disney's remarkable enterprise continues to enjoy success. Yet, I'd venture few at his amazing magic factory know much about the man who cofounded the company with his older brother Roy. Some may have childhood memories of the avuncular television host who introduced fanciful stories about princesses and bunny rabbits. Some might consider him a P.T. Barnum-like pitchman who sold fanciful dreams to an eager public. However, there was nothing cynical about Walt Disney. He truly believed in his special mix of business and magic. Lucky for us, we believed it as well.
Floyd Norman got his start in the animation business as an apprentice artist on Disney's Sleeping Beauty (1959). He later contributed to the story for Jungle Book (1967); cofounded Vignette Films, which produced animation for everything from Sesame Street to Soul Train; and did story work for Pixar's Toy Story 2 and Monsters Inc., among many other credits.
A new offering from Airbnb taps into the charitable tourism trend. It's an admirable undertaking, but only if it can avoid certain pitfalls.
In November, Airbnb announced a plan to become a one-stop shop for the next generation of travelers. In a Steve Jobs-style address, the company's CEO Brian Chesky announced new Airbnb initiatives, including the possibility of booking air travel and restaurant reservations. Airbnb now offers what it calls Experiences, where users pay to book a three-day pottery workshop in Tokyo, for instance, burlesque classes in London, or a day with a reality TV exec in Los Angeles. Or you could pick one with a charitable twist. About 10% of the Experiences currently on offer are called "social impact experiences" and are run by local non-profits that collect 100% of Airbnb's fee from each transaction.
Say mass incarceration is an issue that you follow closely, and you happen to be traveling to Los Angeles. You might sign up for Life-Changing Music, where your $200 supports Give a Beat, an organization "bridging global electronic dance music culture with youth and families impacted by incarceration." On day one, you'll spend two hours visiting Homeboy Industries, learning about its employment training for the formerly incarcerated. On day two, you'll get a private DJ lesson in Silverlake, along with entry to an underground dance club.
At the moment, most social impact experiences run between $150-$250, usually for several days of activities. In San Francisco, you can serve the poor a meal in the Tenderloin neighborhood in support of GLIDE Memorial Church), or walk aging dogs to help fund Muttville, a senior dog rescue organization). If you're traveling to Nairobi, $150 buys you two days of learning Maasai crafts and Kenyan cooking (proceeds go to the women's empowerment nonprofit Zawadisha).
"We heard from hosts and guests, on both sides, that they wanted to be able to find more ways to contribute to the communities where they live, or where they stay as a guest," Airbnb's Head of Social Impact, Kim Rubey, tells Fast Company. "There's a strong universe of travelers who do want to have that ability to give back and benefit local organizations."
The idea of traveling the world to help improve it has a long history, from centuries-old missionary traditions to the modern Peace Corps. But the idea of marrying tourism with charity is particularly zeitgeisty these days—and Airbnb isn't the only company to tap into it. Kind Traveler unlocks hotel deals when you donate a minimum of $10 per night to a charity listed on the website. A recently-formed organization called Travel+SocialGood aims, in Executive Director Kelley Louise's words, to "propel the travel industry to meet its potential for positive impact." Even Carnival Cruises has dabbled. Last year, it announced a spinoff brand, Fathom, devoted to volunteer voyages to the Dominican Republic and Cuba (although it recently decided to scale back those efforts).
The trend is new enough that defining it is still tricky. A 2016 report from a DC-based group called the Center for Responsible Travel points to five related types of tourism, from ecotourism ("responsible travel to natural areas that conserves the environment") to ethical tourism ("tourism in a destination where ethical issues are the key driver") to pro-poor tourism ("tourism that results in increased net benefit for the poor people in a destination"). A 2015 survey-driven study commissioned by the nonprofit organization Tourism Cares (a philanthropic arm of the tourism industry) concluded that "a growing segment of the traveling population" cares about social responsibility and, when traveling, "wants to learn about local issues and how to help." The report went farther, declaring that "Engaging this new traveler is increasingly important for...business."
Exactly how important for business, it's hard to say. Because the categories are so varied, it's difficult to pin down what sliver of the global travel business, which contributes more than $7 trillion to the worldwide economy annually, has a charitable component attached. But some statistics in the report from Tourism Cares make clear that if you're not in the charitable tourism business in the U.S. at least, you might be missing out.
Ten percent of American families surveyed reported having taken a volunteer trip, with an additional 22% saying they planned to. As with other industries, trends in tourism suggest a preference for ethical, sustainable companies. While conceding that price was the most important factor for most travelers, the report found that a third of participants "also consider a company's commitment to social responsibility." When it comes to the environment and sustainability, the study found that the "percentage of consumers who are willing to pay more for sustainable brands that showed commitment to social and environmental values went up from 55% to 66% between 2014 and 2015," and that "73% of the younger generations—Millennials and Generation Z—are more likely to pay more for sustainability, compared to 51% of Baby Boomers." Sustainability isn't synonymous with charity, of course, but the kind of person who cares about the first is more likely to care about the second. In other words, doing good is doing well with consumers.
Whether motivated by altruism, the bottom line, or both, Airbnb's social impact experiences seem encouraging to several industry experts. Travel+Social Good's Kelley Louise says the program "shows a lot of promise because they're working with locals non-profits. I think that by going to the community and saying, 'How can we help you, what services do you need?' instead of saying 'You need XYZ'—that's a huge consideration."
Louise does caution, however, that good intentions aren't always enough. Particularly when traveling to a different society and culture, a seemingly good deed may in fact be the opposite. She points to an organization called the Better Care Network, whose research concluded that in many places calling themselves orphanages in the developing world, most of the children have a living parent; the centers are essentially tourist lures. Samantha Hogenson, the managing director of the Center for Responsible Travel, says that in all cases, the best research suggests it's inadvisable to volunteer with children for a duration of less than six months. Her organization has a 12-page guide to the "dos and don'ts of travel giving" that explains how in many instances, charitable donations of certain goods can breed dependency and harm local economies. (To this end, many international aid organizations are rethinking donations, exploring the benefits of cash transfers over tangible goods.)
If Airbnb's social impact experience scales anything like its lodging service, can we be assured it will be a force for unequivocal good? Currently, says Airbnb's Rubey, any would-be host for the social impact program must prove that it's a registered nonprofit, per the laws of the country in which it operates. She adds that where possible, Airbnb will "cross-reference those nonprofit partners with an independent third-party vetting service." Rubey is aware of concerns surrounding orphanage volunteering and explains, "We're not exploring opportunities with orphanages at this time." She says that for now, most NGO's on the Airbnb platform don't ask for much in the way of volunteering at all. Rather, "they see this as more of a way to educate and showcase their work. They use it more more as a marketing opportunity."
Kristin Lamoureux, associate dean of NYU's Tisch Center for Hospitality and Tourism, says that when she first saw Airbnb's announcement on social impact experiences, she fretted. She wrote her dissertation on volunteer tourism and knows the potential pitfalls well. As she scanned the website, she was relieved to learn that Airbnb doesn't work with orphanages; she was also impressed that 100% of the fees would be going to locally based nonprofits.
At the same time, Lamoureux knows better than to think we're witnessing the beginning of a revolution in travel-based altruism. She has found that the main reason consumers take volunteer trips is less about doing good and more about "being able to talk about it, to share," she says. "And I don't think that's getting less in the social media culture." She tells of a colleague who visited a volunteer tourism destination, where a priest showed her to something he called "the painting wall." He explained: "When the gringos come down, we have a wall, and we let them paint it." Group after group of Americans would repaint the same wall, again and again, so they could feel like they had contributed in a tangible way. Each group could see a freshly painted wall, feel good, take some pictures, and return home with a story to share.
But even if travelers' motives aren't always as pure as we might hope, does it even matter, as long as local charities materially benefit? That's Lamoureux's greatest hope for the Airbnb program. As the priest had explained to her friend: While the freshly painted wall didn't improve the village measurably, the money the travelers brought in did.
Remember that employee handbook you never read? Now's the time to dust it off.
No matter how happy you are with your job, we're willing to bet that you have no love for your annual performance review.
You know that rite of passage that often happens at the end of the calendar year, where you sit down with your manager and determine what you've contributed to the company, if your future goals align, whether you've exceeded expectations—and if a promotion and salary hike are in the cards.
If it's any solace, your boss hates it, too. "Generally, no one on either side of the table likes or enjoys the process," says Fred R. Cooper, founder and managing partner of Compass HR Consulting. "It's time-consuming for the supervisor and creates anxiety on the employee side and involves talking about the positives and negatives that came out of your last review."
And even though some companies are revamping the experience to make it less of a stress-suck (scheduling more casual quarterly meetings, for example), the fact is, 90% of workplaces use the old school–style evaluation, says Cooper, where employees fill out a self-assessment and managers submit their own evaluation, then discuss both during a meeting.
With your job security, professional rep, and income on the line, you'll want to go into your review with all the bases covered and make the most of the experience. These five expert tips show you how to ace it.
New to the company—or in a new department? Download or dust off the employee manual. Skimming through the company values can give you an idea of what's important to your employer and what overall points you need to make to get ahead.
The employee manual could also hold insight into what your workplace's review process looks like, since every company does it a little differently. If not, ask your supervisor or an HR rep what to expect. "That would demonstrate maturity, commitment, and respect for time of all parties involved," Cooper says.
Talk to your coworkers for the inside scoop, too. They can clue you in on how seriously your manager takes reviews and what you need to do to show you're rocking your position.
Remember all of the preparation you did for your initial interview when you applied for your job? Approach the review process the same way. "You're being interviewed for your continued employment but also for whatever comes from that beyond your continued employment," Cooper says. That could be a promotion, additional responsibility, a transfer to a better department, and/or a salary boost.
Revisit interview-prep best practices: Conduct a mock review with a friend, get a solid night of sleep, and be ready to present the best version of yourself, Cooper says. "You want to make a good presentation and, just like an interview, you want to make a good impression," he says.
That includes paying close attention to your wardrobe. What to wear depends on your company culture, of course, but consider keeping your jeans and sneakers in your closet and breaking out a suit or nice separates. It's a pulled-together outfit that conveys you're a professional who takes company practices seriously.
Your review is your time to make clear all you've contributed to your team or the company as a whole. Yet your goal is to come off as confident and not arrogant, Cooper says. One way to steer clear of boasting too much is to rely on other people to sing your praises for you.
Put together what Cooper calls a "brag book" filled with letters of recommendation, notes you've received when you blew clients out of the water, and copies of previous A-plus evaluations. Work up a spreadsheet that breaks down by week or month the new projects, milestones, and congratulations you've racked up, plus a key coworker involved with each who can vouch for how well you performed.
Not a fan of the spotlight? Get comfy with it, because the focus is supposed to be on you, says Dennis Theodorou, vice president of global executive recruiting firm JMJ Phillip. By outlining specific examples of how you've helped boost the company's bottom line, you ensure that your manager will leave the meeting certain of your value.
Many managers take the approach that the review can't be all positive, so they try to balance the good things with bad, Cooper says. It goes without saying, but no one likes to hear about what they're not doing right.
Ideally, you won't be caught off guard by any of the feedback you receive, but you should sincerely listen to it. "Whether you agree with it or not, that's what's being talked about and it could very well affect your future employment," Cooper says.
After you absorb it, assure your manager that you're committed to working on the points raised. Explain that you'd like to schedule follow-ups, so you can show you took the review seriously and have improved on what was discussed, suggests Cooper. Start by requesting meetings every other month so you're not annoying your manager or taking up big blocks of calendar time.
Above all, avoid slipping into defensive mode. "Anyone who truly wants to grow within the organization should be able to take constructive criticism," Theodorou says. Steal Cooper's stay-calm trick: Write down what your boss is saying as he's saying it. "It helps focus your energies away from being angry and gives you something to do other than listen helplessly," he says.
Your review is the time to discuss what you've brought to the table—and how the company can compensate you for your hard work and success. So directly and confidently, bring up the bonus or promotion you feel you deserve, especially if you've performed the steps to earn it.
"You have the manager's attention right then and there," Theodorou explains. Say, "'Last time we spoke, these were the requirements to be eligible for this type of bonus. I fulfilled those requirements, so what do I need to do to achieve that bonus?'"
Even if compensation isn't directly tied to your company's review process, you can initiate the conversation. Ask how you can grow within the company and what it will take to get to the next level. More often than not, this can lead to a discussion about money, he says. And that will ultimately leave you feeling like the prepping and practicing for your review was worthwhile.
This article originally appeared on LearnVest and is reprinted with permission.
How can an Electoral College member go against the will of voters in their state? This Harvard professor explains their moral logic.
What does it take to be a rebel, when your instinct is to follow the herd?
That's the question that comes to mind when you consider the Hamilton Electors, the growing movement of Republican electors who are choosing not to vote for Donald Trump next Monday. That's when all 538 members of the Electoral College will traipse to the capital cities in their states and cast their votes: 306 are Republicans and 232 are Democrats. In a normal election year, the Republicans would vote for their party's nominee. But, as we all know, this was no normal election year.
Chris Suprun, a presidential elector in Texas, is the only one who has publicly come out to say that he is not voting for Trump. This is a brave move, because it means going against the will of the millions of people that he represents in his state. As a faithless elector, he faces criminal charges, threats from angry Trump supporters, and intense pressure from the Republican party to toe the line.
And he's far from alone. Other Republican electors are thinking about voting against Trump, but are choosing to remain anonymous out of fear of retribution. The bipartisan Hamilton Electors—named for the founding father who believed that members of the Electoral College should vote their conscience—have identified 7 Republican voters who are willing to vote against Trump.
Their aversion to Trump has motivated these electors, both Democratic and Republican, to join together to elect another Republican candidate. "He's said so many nasty things that I would be fired for as a teacher. And all this conflict of interest! I don't have to go through all the things," says Jerad Sutton, one of the Hamilton Electors. "Someone has to say that's not okay, and more Americans did. But the way the math works out, not as many electors did."
Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard constitutional law professor, recently joined forces with Boston lawyer R.J. Lyman to launch an organization called "Electors Trust" to provide legal counsel to Republican electors who are considering voting against Trump. Lyman has identified 17 other voters (besides the Hamilton Electors') who are considering casting their vote for a different candidate. "A week ago there was one," Lessig tells Fast Company. "Today, there are at least 20. The point is that it is becoming more and more pressing for them to consider whether they are going to exercise this vote of conscience."
And it only takes 37 Republican voters to switch sides to at least stall Trump's election.
If enough voters defect, the decision will move to the House of Representatives. There, the top three vote-getters—Trump, Clinton, and whomever defectors pick as their alternative—would be on the table. The Hamilton Electors have said they are considering banding together to write in John Kasich as their choice, but this is still very much under discussion. These legislators would then vote about who becomes president. "It's a heavily Republican institution, obviously," Lessig says. "They would have the option to confirm Trump, or they would have the option to confirm somebody else."
For the entire nation's history, the Electoral College was seen largely as a formality. These voters don't have any particular qualifications, other than having been nominated by their party to do this job. They're not more educated or more moral than the rest of us: They're just everyday citizens. But on Monday, they might be able to play a role in changing the nation's history.
How does one even begin to make such a potentially earth-shattering decision that could plunge the country into chaos? How does an everyman or everywoman go against the will of millions of Americans they were chosen to represent?
Lessig, who has been working closely with possible defectors and trying to understand their thought processes, says that there are several ways to view the situation. Some of them are clearly worried about the instability that would ensue should they change their vote. But, at the same time, it's worth noting that the country is already facing instability given the recent revelations that Russians may have interfered with the democratic process in this country.
And an argument could be made that the Electoral College was an "emergency brake" mechanism created for circumstances like these. "We've been very fortunate that we've had 56 elections where we've not needed that emergency brake," Lessig says. "Now here's the 57th where, at least in the eyes of many Republican electors, they're facing the choice about whether to support someone they think raises all sorts of concerns about constitutional qualifications. You might say this throws the country into instability or you might say that everything has been stable so far because the country has never had the sufficient moral reason not to support their party's nominee."
What concerns are those?
Lessig points out that their reasons for rejecting Trump must be substantive. After all, they would be going against the will of their fellow citizens and neighbors—and 62 million people in the entire country—who believed that Trump was the right choice. This cannot just be about him being "temperamentally unfit," which is a subjective value judgment.
A more compelling reason to change their vote could be troubling issues or conflicts that did not fully come to light before November 8; American citizens would therefore not have known about them when they were going to the polls. For example, since the election Trump has refused to divest himself of foreign assets, which could potentially lead to violations of the Emoluments Clause, the provision of the Constitution that appears to ban payments from foreign countries.
In addition, the country's intelligence agencies have determined that Russian-backed hackers interfered with the election, hacking email servers at the Democratic National Committee, the Gmail account of Hillary Clinton's campaign chair, and other political organizations of the Democratic party. By voting their conscience, Electoral College members would be making an important statement about how foreign powers should never be able to tamper with our democratic process. Voting against Trump is even more important, argues Lessig, given that a Russian official admitted that Kremlin officials conferred with members of the Trump campaign during the election. (The Trump campaign did not deny those contacts, though the president-elect has expressed doubts that Russians were behind the hacking of Democratic groups.)
"When you've had a candidate who has basically admitted complicity to conspiring and colluding with a foreign government that has been found by our CIA to have interfered with our election, I don't know how any elector with integrity could vote to uphold that resolve," Lessig says. "As the CIA director put it, this is a kind of 9/11 for our democracy."
Voting against your party's candidate may seem like a terrifying decision, but Lessig points out that the founding fathers created the institution for complex circumstances such as those the country is facing now. "This is the election the Electoral College was created for," says Lessig."But so long as it's here, the constitutional judgment that they are suppose to exercise, they should exercise carefully. "
According to Glassdoor's economist, crazy perks and the gig economy will slow down while automation will speed up.
This was a "remarkable" year for hiring, according to Glassdoor's chief economist, Andrew Chamberlain. He says that the U.S. added an average 180,000 new jobs per month, well above the "break even" pace of job growth of 50,000 to 110,000 economists estimate the economy needs to keep Americans fully employed.
Pay is also on the rise. Median base pay for U.S. workers was up 3.1% from 2015, the fastest pace in three years. Can we top all that in 2017?
According to Glassdoor's newest report on job trends, there are also a record number of unfilled jobs—5.85 million as of April—which represents the most since the BLS started tracking job openings in 2000. That's compounded with the fact that every employer is hiring for tech roles, Chamberlain observes, and there are just so many talented candidates out there.
Which is why he's predicting that 2017 is going to be the year human resources transforms itself into "people science."
Chamberlain argues that the rise of big data has infiltrated and transformed everything from product design to finance. As businesses generate more data from their employees and customers, good analysis of that data can lead to smarter decisions, shorter project time lines, and happier consumers.
Unfortunately, HR and recruiting have been largely absent from this evolution, says Chamberlain. Data scientists, one of the most in-demand positions for the past two years, haven't been much of a presence in HR-related tasks. But as Chamberlain points out, "Using data science in HR to make even small improvements in recruiting, hiring, and engagement has the potential for huge benefits to organizations."
A good place for HR to start is by tapping into workforce analytics that can track every stage of an employee's progression through a company from on-boarding, through training and promotions. These are available at low cost through a number of third party providers.
Another solution is to use a sentiment tracker to gather feedback in real time. Amanda Moskowitz, founder of the startup leadership sharing resource Stacklist, told Fast Company in a interview[/url] that founders of companies that don't have formal HR departments are using tools like Glint and Small Improvements. Other available tools include platforms for A/B testing to experiment with different methods of workforce management. Chamberlain points out "there are many low-hanging fruit today for better data science in HR" and they don't cost much.
There's a lot of talk about automation and how much its advancement will make human workers obsolete. Chamberlain cites research from the Journal of Economic Perspectives that indicate mass layoffs due to automation are unlikely. This correlates with findings from the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) on the potential for automation across 54 countries and more than 2,000 work activities. The report found that the number of jobs that can be fully automated by adapting currently demonstrated technology is less than 5%. That number could go as high as 20% in some middle skill categories.
Says Chamberlain: "The jobs that will be most affected by automation are routine jobs that need to be done the same way and that don't require much flexibility or much creative judgment." As such MGI found that about 60% of all jobs have a least a third of activities that could be automated based on current technology such as answering email or scheduling meetings. "Workers increasingly need to build skills that are complementary to technology—learning to run the machine, not doing the same work the machine automates," Chamberlain observes.
From assistance with paying back student loans to unlimited food and beverages, the benefits packages at many companies have altered the standard health insurance and 401(k) matches. However, Chamberlain sees a move away from the more exotic perks and benefits.
That's because Glassdoor's research revealed that perks such as gym memberships, charitable giving, and other nontraditional offerings don't boost employee satisfaction as much as health insurance, 401(k) matches, and paid time off. If the goal of the compensation package (including both pay and benefits), says Chamberlain, is to "serve as a targeted investment, delivering great employee engagement, and keeping talent on board long term," then companies should be rethinking their offerings in 2017.
Chamberlain believes this is the year the gap will narrow because we're at a tipping point. More data is available than ever, transparency is a core value for many companies, and business leaders are recognizing that equal pay isn't just a compliance issue, it's a necessity to retain talent.
Sixty seven percent of U.S. employees said they were not likely to apply for a job at a company where men and women were paid unequally for the same work, according to Glassdoor's research. Expect to see wider adoption of building analysis into companies' pay practices in the coming year, says Chamberlain.
Chamberlain expects the growth in the gig economy will taper off in 2017. He offers three reasons for the slowdown.
Despite the visibility of Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, Task Rabbit and others, their impact is still quite small. A J.P. Morgan Chase Institute study found only about 4.3% of U.S. adults had ever earned income from an online "gig" platform as of June 2016, a figure that's been declining over the last three years. Another study from the EPI made a similar discovery, that the freelance economy isn't growing as much as we think. Gig work is inherently based on demand, and in times of less demand, those gigs dry up, further gutting potential growth.
Another limit to growth is that gigs by nature have to be simple and discrete projects or transactions. As Chamberlain notes,
"The fastest growing jobs today are ones that require human creativity, flexibility, judgment, and 'soft skills.' That list includes health care professionals, data scientists, sales leaders, strategy consultants, and product managers. Those are exactly the kind of jobs least likely to function well in a gig economy platform."
Therefore he says, it's not likely that you'll be able to get legal, financial, medical, engineering, or other services through a gig platform in 2017 and beyond.
It's a great time for both employers and workers to set themselves up to take advantage of the opportunities represented by these trends, says Chamberlain, so "Invest in skills and technology now while times are good."
The new features will launch first for Gear VR, but could one day come to Rift.
While there's plenty of disagreement about how big the virtual reality industry will eventually become, few people dispute that making the experience more social is key to its future growth.
Already there are numerous companies building businesses around social VR—Altspace, High Fidelity, even Facebook.
Now, Oculus, maker of the high-end Rift, as well as the software that powers Samsung's mobile Gear VR platform, has announced a new set of social tools designed to make it easy for friends to talk to each other while in VR and to do things with each other in a virtual world.
"While hardware is super important for VR," says Oculus product manager Madhu Muthukumar, "we know software is what will determine how people feel about VR. If we want people to enjoy VR, one of the biggest drivers is connecting people to friends."
Today, Facebook-owned Oculus unveiled Parties and Rooms. The former is meant to enable a multi-party voice conversation that can essentially ride on top of whatever each participant is doing with their Gear VR, whether it be playing a game, watching a movie, or just sitting around in a digital lounge.
Rooms is that digital lounge, a place where up to four people can come together to watch videos, play simple games, or use any of a number of apps that have been integrated with the platform.
Parties and Rooms are meant to work together, though you don't need to be in a shared room to take part in a Parties call.
And while there's no reason that both services can't work on the PC-based Rift, Muthukumar says, Oculus has decided to launch them initially for mobile virtual reality in an attempt to take advantage of the fact that there are more than a million Gear VR users and that "we've had a year of experience building for mobile VR and we just know more about that."
Oculus envisions Rooms as a place to gather with friends, both for doing activities together or for simply hanging out in the same space.
When you're there, you'll have a custom avatar, and the system does a nice job of establishing presence by showing each avatar's placement relative to others—you can move around the lounge as you like—and building in spatial audio, as well as making it so you can see others' heads moving, such as when they look toward you.
The first thing to do in the lounge is watch video together. Initially, at least, it's only Facebook video—things that are popular on the social network or that you or your friends have shared. Over time, Muthukumar says, Oculus may expand that to include outside video sources.
There is a work-around that will allow you to watch things like YouTube, however. More on that shortly.
There's also a games table that has a selection of very simple games—really just things to play together while you're chatting with friends.
In addition, there's an app area, where any tool—game, social experience, movie viewer, etc.—that has been uploaded to what's called the Coordinated App Launch can be used. They can be free, or paid, so long as they're social.
One example is Altspace, which is available through the system, and which has its own social gathering areas—and an ability to watch YouTube videos together. Altspace also hosts celebrities like Reggie Watts for parties.
There's also a slew of games, and other titles, and more will be added over time.
In some cases, a user might not have the app, and will have to download it, a process that can take time. Muthukumar says that would be the ideal time for other friends to go play a social game or watch videos together while they wait for their third friend to install the app.
It is interesting that Oculus is developing its own social virtual reality experiences, even as Facebook is making a big social VR push. Muthukumar chalks that up to everyone involved believing that "adding friends in VR is what's going to make it magical."
He also noted that the folks at Oculus and Facebook Social VR work together. In other words, they're not developing at cross-purposes.
Evidence has yet to emerge to back the CIA's reported claims of Russian hacking of Republican National Committee computer networks
Ever since last Friday's bombshell reports that the CIA believes Russian hackers penetrated both Democratic and Republican computer networks before the election, GOP officials have vehemently denied that systems linked to the Republican National Committee were hacked. By contrast, Democratic officials acknowledged last summer that Russian hackers had gained access to the Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and the email account of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman.
The reports, which describe a CIA assessment that the Kremlin interfered with the U.S. election in order to help Donald Trump win, have sparked a fierce divide between President-elect Trump and some Republican leaders in Congress. Trump has dismissed the reports, while Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham have joined Democrats in calling for investigations into the hacking. Among the most hotly debated details is that Russian agents hacked the RNC's computer systems but "did not release whatever information they gleaned from the Republican networks," per the New York Times.
"Number one, the RNC was not hacked," said Reince Priebus, chairman of the RNC and President-elect Donald Trump's pick for chief of staff, on NBC's Meet the Press Sunday. "I don't know of any employee, on any of their own Gmail accounts, that was hacked."
Priebus said in the televised interview that the RNC worked with the FBI after well-publicized digital attacks on the Democratic National Committee this year, and that the FBI found no evidence the RNC's systems were compromised. Through a spokeswoman, the RNC declined to provide Fast Company with additional information about the steps it took to determine its systems were hacker-free. According to a Friday report in The Wall Street Journal citing sources close to the investigation, experts found that the RNC's filters blocked phishing emails targeting a former staffer and believed that the hackers made a less determined effort to breach the RNC's systems.
Still, cybersecurity experts say it's generally difficult for an organization to definitively determine it hasn't been hacked and even to fully prevent attacks by sophisticated adversaries.
"Especially when a state-level adversary is going after an organization, there's very little you could do to prevent that," says Danny Rogers, CEO of security firm Terbium Labs.
Still, neither federal officials nor outside researchers have yet to publicly produce any evidence that RNC systems were penetrated, though Graham said in a Wednesday CNN interview that his own campaign attack was hacked by Russians.
A few hundred relatively innocuous emails appearing to be linked to state-level Republican organizations and campaign workers for Graham and fellow senator John McCain appeared online in data dumps linked to Russian state-sponsored hackers earlier this year, but there's been no evidence that the emails came from a system linked to national Republican organizations. Other Republican-linked information, like personal data about Republican primary delegates and Trump Organization staff, also appeared online earlier this year, says Rogers, though he says there's also no indication that it came from a breach of the RNC's network rather than from other sources.
Publications including The New York Timesreported that CIA officials believed Russian hackers had deliberately withheld information about Republican campaigns while leaking Democratic Party data in order to boost President-elect Donald Trump's campaign.
Multiple news outlets reported Wednesday that intelligence officials believe Russian President Vladimir Putin personally directed how some Democratic Party information was leaked. While the White House stopped short of directly accusing Putin of directing the attack, deputy national security advisor Ben Rhodes told MSNBC it's unlikely something "of this consequence" would take place without Putin's knowledge. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has dismissed the accusations against Putin, according to Reuters.
The RNC hasn't identified any security firms involved in securing its email systems or certifying them as free from breaches. But senior staff at a multiple companies involved in securing digital systems used for this summer's Republican National Convention told Fast Company they saw no sign of targeted, sophisticated attacks on convention networks, though the companies weren't directly involved with other RNC-related systems outside the convention.
"We didn't see anything that we felt was a nation-state adversary working in a very sophisticated manner," says Katherine Gronberg, vice president of government affairs at security firm ForeScout. "We didn't see evidence of something that we thought, just from our experience, could be attributed to one particular country or actor or group, like these groups in Russia."
Nor, says CEO Vince Crisler of Dark Cubed, did the companies securing convention systems hear at the time of any such attacks on other Republican Party computers.
"I know from all our interactions with them they have been engaged and proactive on this issue," Crisler says of the RNC.
Trump and some of his political allies have repeatedly questioned the reported assertions by federal intelligence agencies and outside analysts that Russian hackers were responsible for election-related hacks. He has also questioned the ability of analysts to determine who was responsible for a cyberattack after it's taken place.
Yet experts say it's often quite possible to determine who's responsible for a cyberattack based on digital clues left behind. "You could say hey, we have seen this code somewhere else or similar code and it was known to be used by this criminal group, so we can make the link," says Chenxi Wang, chief strategy officer at security firm Twistlock. Or, she says, compromised computers may connect to servers or other internet resources known to be connected with particular hacker groups.
Those sorts of clues were how security company CrowdStrike, which investigated the DNC breach, was able to identify Russian groups dubbed Fancy Bear and Cozy Bear as having accessed the network.
Online accounts at URL shorteners that were evidently used in targeted phishing attacks on some Democratic Party officials were also used for months prior to those attacks to attack political figures in Russia and Ukraine, consistent with Russian involvement, according to cybersecurity firm SecureWorks. That makes a false flag operation less likely, since another spy organization would be less likely to spend months of work attacking targets in the former Soviet countries only to frame Russia, says SecureWorks senior security researcher Phil Burdette.
"We certainly considered that possibility," he says. "If you're an intelligence service, at the end of the day you have timelines and you have budgets in which you have to execute."
Experts from security company ThreatConnect have similarly said DC Leaks, a site used to leak data tied to the Hillary Clinton campaign and the emails taken from Republican operatives, appears to be tied to Fancy Bear. That implies that even if the national party did indeed evade the pre-election wave of cyberattacks, Russian hackers still managed to grab some internal messages from Republican campaign operations.
"The DCLeaks website almost certainly was set up to be used as a public mouthpiece specifically to leak documents gleaned from Fancy Bear operations, as we assessed back in August," ThreatConnect senior intelligence researcher Kyle Ehmke wrote in an email response to questions. "We have seen no indication that DCLeaks has hosted information garnered through non-Fancy Bear operations."
