Showing posts with label communication. Show all posts
Showing posts with label communication. Show all posts

Monday, February 10, 2020

Facebook workplace Kintaba

Facebook Workplace Co-Founder Launches Downtime Fire Alarm Kintaba (techcrunch.com)9

Facebook Workplace co-founder John Egan is launching Kintaba, "a more holistic solution to incident response," reports TechCrunch. From the report:Code failure downtimes, server outages and hack attacks plague engineering teams. Yet the tools for waking up the right employees, assembling a team to fix the problem and doing a post-mortem to assess how to prevent it from happening again can be as chaotic as the crisis itself. Text messages, Slack channels, task managers and Google Docs aren't sufficient for actually learning from mistakes. Alerting systems like PagerDuty focus on the rapid response, but not the educational process in the aftermath. The Kintaba team experienced these pains firsthand while working at Facebook after Egan and Zac Morris' Y Combinator-backed data transfer startup Caffeinated Mind was acqui-hired in 2012. Years later, when they tried to build a blockchain startup and the whole stack was constantly in flames, they longed for a better incident alert tool. So they built one themselves and named it after the Japanese art of Kintsugi, where gold is used to fill in cracked pottery, "which teaches us to embrace the imperfect and to value the repaired," Egan says.

With today's launch, Kintaba offers a clear dashboard where everyone in the company can see what major problems have cropped up, plus who's responding and how. Kintaba's live activity log and collaboration space for responders let them debate and analyze their mitigation moves. It integrates with Slack, and lets team members subscribe to different levels of alerts or search through issues with categorized hashtags. As the fire gets contained, Kintaba provides a rich text editor connected to its dashboard for quickly constructing a post-mortem of what went wrong, why, what fixes were tried, what worked and how to safeguard systems for the future. Its automated scheduling assistant helps teams plan meetings to internalize the post-mortem.

Saturday, July 13, 2019

DesignOps

Latest

Design Brief


https://airtable.com/shrYnipJOkh9IVJnZ/tbl02v8ktFhZMdQ1E/viw6CeA1RsDLUKtCZ?blocks=hide


Conference / Workshops


sponsored by THD





Resources

DesignOps handbook - InVision





Articles









Video presentations 


Dave Malouf - Digital Ocean

Notes:

Aaron Walters - InVision

Notes:

Meredith Black - Pinterest

Notes:

Brennan Hartich - Intuit

Notes:

2013 DesignOps presentation

Dave Malouf





People

Home Depot DesignOps 

Dave Malouf

Josh Silverman
role-problem-research-process-solution-result/slack channel, monthly call via rosenfeld

Chris Blow


Educational considerations

PMP Certification

SAFE certification

safe lead - $997 if sign up 2 week-advance

safe product owner/manager - $997 if sign up 2 week-advance
UGA IO masters



UX Grad programs

u of baltimore interaction design
Program Director 
Greg Walsh
410.837.5473
--
u of washington visual comm design/interaction design
Graduate Advisor, Ann Langford-Fuchs, at gradart@uw.edu.
--

Contact: William M. Gribbons, Bentley College, 175 Forest Street, Waltham, MA 02452781/891-2926wgribbons@bentley.edu;

--
--
Pete Lutz, Graduate Program Director
(585) 475-6162Peter.Lutz@rit.edu

Atlanta Enterprise UX
Honeywell
Home Depot
AT&T
EY
State Farm
ADP
Cox
Sales Force
Verizon
IHG
NCR

--

Areas of Business


  • Workflow: how the design work flows within the company
  • Tools: what they need to get the job done
  • Governance: who needs to see the work, and when
  • Infrastructure: what the team needs to work more efficiently
  • Budget: how much running that team costs, and why
  • Headcount: how many people are needed, with which skills
  • Pipeline: projects coming up and how well staffed the team is
  • Retention: how to make people want to stay
  • Education: what skills are missing and how to learn them
  • Evangelization: help the org understand the value of design





Saturday, March 2, 2019

HBO ATT

https://theweek.com/articles/826605/creeping-netflixification-hbo

The question of quality over quantity is a no brainer. Would you rather win a three-week vacation to the Somerset, New Jersey, Comfort Inn or three nights at the Hôtel Ritz Paris? Would you rather eat at Panera Bread twice a month, or have dinner biannually at Eleven Madison Park? Would you rather be in possession of an army of thousands of mercenaries or a dragon?
The choice seems pretty clear, not the least because, after three weeks, Somerset begins to lose some of its charm, you eventually get sick of ordering the same sandwich from Panera all the time, and repeatedly losing to Daenerys Targaryen gets boring. The important part of this equation, though, is the fact that you do get a choice; in many facets of our lives, we still get to pick if we want lots of little things or one really nice thing. For fans of television, though, that choice is narrowing as HBO, the longtime bastion of "prestige television," creeps closer and closer towards Netflix's tantalizingly profitable "quantity" model.
The first sign of trouble came last summer, just after AT&T completed its acquisition of Time Warner Inc., and with it, Warner Bros., HBO, Turner, and brands like Bleacher Report and the beloved streaming service FilmStruck. In a July 8 company meeting with HBO employees, AT&T executive John Stankey announced: "I want more hours of engagement." As he put it, HBO needed "hours a day. It's not hours a week, and it's not hours a month … You are competing with devices that sit in people's hands that capture their attention every 15 minutes." By October, AT&T had shuttered Filmstruck for being too niche; by winter, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson was reassuring he had no plans to turn HBO into "another Netflix." But yesterday, after the government's final antitrust challenge against the merger failed in court, the longtime chairman and CEO of HBO, Richard Plepler, announced he was resigning.
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You may not know Plepler's name offhand, but you'll be familiar with the phenomenon he is credited for: the so-called "Golden Age of Television." Shows like The SopranosThe Wire, Sex and the CityVeep, and more recently Westworld and Game of Thrones, all came during his tenure; HBO won more than 160 Emmys while Plepler was at the helm, The New York Times reports. But Plepler's exit — for which he offered no direct explanation — not only threatens the Golden Age of Television, but the very philosophy that allowed its rise. It is a symbolic end to what Plepler summed up to The Wall Street Journal in 2017 as "more is not better. Only better is better."
The creeping Netflixification at hand represents an about-face from Plepler's understanding of HBO's role in the increasingly crowded streaming marketplace. In 2018, Netflix put out more than 90,000 hours in original content, including some 58,000 hours of original series; to keep up, Quartz found, would be an entire part-time job. That's not to say there haven't been great Netflix TV shows — the platform is home to Orange Is the New BlackHouse of Cards, and Russian Doll — but there is a downside to trying to give users an endless ocean of exactly the content they want. One need look no further than the example of the multi-film deal Netflix inked with Adam Sandler, whose terrible The Ridiculous 6 (0 percent on Rotten Tomatoes) was also the streaming service's most-watched film ever in its initial 30 days back in 2015 (it has likely since been surpassed by Bird Box, although Netflix famously doesn't reveal its viewership). In the TV realm, this means dozens of shows, binged one week, are forgotten the next. When's the last time you heard someone talk about Altered CarbonHaters Back OffGirlboss, or Between?
While HBO wanted to make the best television in the world, Netflix went for global domination. Opening the Netflix app is almost a painful process, with autoplay trailers hawking the next it TV show with as much boisterousness as the holograms in Blade Runner. Finishing one episode of TV, another immediately begins; Netflix even allows users to skip show intros to further streamline binging. Netflix wants to be in front of your eyes at all times. HBO, by contrast, is a destination, an app you open specifically to finish Big Little Lies.
Fascinatingly, there doesn't need to be an either/or dynamic here at all. Despite how AT&T is treating it, HBO is profitable; a year ago in February, the premium network added the most subscribers in its history. In 2017, more than 60 percent of people who subscribed to HBO Now also subscribed to Netflix, indicating there are different demands being fulfilled for users by both services. That is likely only to grow; by 2020, 62 percentof Americans are expected to subscribe to at least two streaming services. But as one particularly prickly exchange between AT&T's Stankey and HBO's Plepler went last June:
... Mr. Stankey said, "We've got to make money at the end of the day, right?"
"We do that," Mr. Plepler responded.
"Yes, you do," Mr. Stankey said. "Just not enough." [The New York Times]
The mistake here is in likening HBO and Netflix as true competitors. There is nothing wrong with the Netflix model, just as there is nothing wrong with eating at Olive Garden or reading movie tie-in paperbacks. What is a problem is determining that, due to the success of quantity, there is no point in continuing to invest in quality.
With Plepler's exit, HBO looks to already be past the point of no return. The bigwigs at AT&T peered in their pocketbooks and made their call: More is, in fact, better.

Monday, November 19, 2018

GitLab all remote

GitLab's Secret To Success? All Its 350 Employees Work Remotely (inc.com)19

Inc. magazine explains a unique feature of GitLab. "Every employee of the San Francisco-based startup, which offers tools for software developers, works from home."Three years ago, that was nine people. Today, GitLab's 350 employees across 45 countries use video calls and Slack chats to stay constantly connected.... GitLab meetings and presentations are uploaded to YouTube. Its employee handbook -- over 1,000 pages long when printed -- is publicly available online as a resource, so employees can get questions answered without waking up co-workers in a different time zone.

The biggest advantage to an all-remote team is obvious: Your hiring pool is gigantic, and you don't need to convince top talent to move for you. GitLab's percentage of quality job applications is similar to other companies -- its dramatic number of recent hires is due to how many applications it receives, 13,000 in the second quarter of 2018 alone. On the other hand, maintaining a culture is really difficult. "To be honest, I was definitely a bit concerned," says Dave Munichiello, a general partner at Alphabet's venture capital arm, GV, which invested in GitLab in 2017. "What happens when the all-hands meeting isn't a bunch of folks hanging around the water cooler listening to the CEO articulate the vision and the mission?"

GitLab's leaders constantly think about it. Co-founder and CEO Sid Sijbrandij even hired away Netflix's vice president of talent, Barbie Brewer, to serve as chief people officer. Virtual coffee breaks, where employees talk about their lives outside GitLab, are built into everyone's schedules. Senior leaders hold office hours in video chat rooms that anyone can join. When GitLab meets its monthly goals, everyone gets a free dinner. "What we've learned from GitLab," Munichiello says, "is that when you have a leadership team that's as committed to remote-only as they are, and as communicative and transparent as they are, and as insistent on documentation as they are, it can work."

Wednesday, May 16, 2018

blockchain phone

http://bgr.com/2018/05/16/htc-exodus-bitcoin-phone-blockchain/



HTC is about to unveil a flagship phone that nobody will want to buy, the U12 handset the company teased using iPhone 6 parts not too long ago. But it turns out that, on its road to what appears to be inevitable doom, HTC is trying one more thing that nobody else has: The world’s first native blockchain phone. What’s even stranger about the HTC Exodus is that the phone did not get any teasers or leaks. Instead, HTC’s Phil Chen quietly dropped the news on Medium.
HTC has been struggling for many moons now, when it comes to selling phones, and many of us thought the mobile division will soon disappear given that Google already bought most of it.
But we’re not quite there yet. And, once again, the phone maker is first at something. HTC made the first Android smartphone in the world and the first Google Nexus handset soon after that. It also created the first Facebook phone in the world, and the company had not one, but two different 4G-ready phones when 4G LTE and Wi-Max technologies debuted a few years ago. It also introduced a dual-lens camera long before it was actually cool to do it. And then it was tapped to make the first Pixel phones in the world.
So in a way, we should not be surprised to see the HTC Exodus arrive out of the blue, a first device of its kind.
Chen said on Medium that he’s returning to HTC to focus on blockchain and cryptocurrencies:
The HTC Exodus is the first native blockchain phone dedicated to bringing end consumers the best decentralized application (DApp) experiences, including a built-in secure hardware enclave, and helping underlying protocols expand their base of dedicated nodes, thus expanding the total blockchain ecosystem.
The Exodus will support various blockchain technologies, including Bitcoin, Lightning Networks, Ethereum, Dfinity, and others.
What’s interesting about the initiative is that Chen wants to seemingly reinvent the mobile experience:
I want to see a world where the end consumers can truly own their data (browsing history, identity, assets, wallets, emails, messaging, etc) without the need for central authorities. There is a lot of work ahead of us, but I believe the mobile hardware layer can contribute significantly to our new decentralized world.
In other words, this device isn’t running Android.
That’s pretty much all we know about the Exodus, for the time being, so we’ll have to wait for HTC to announce more details about this iPhone and Android competitor in the future.

Sunday, March 11, 2018

China AR smart glasses

LLVision
Cost in 2016: US$608
AR for telecom maintenance service:https://www.crunchfish.com/crunchfish-signs-agreement-ar-company-llvision-gesture-interaction-smart-glasses/ 'Tier 1 telecom infrastructure company in China where technicians use them while doing maintenance service'.
AR for surgery:http://www.scmp.com/tech/social-gadgets/article/1909187/through-looking-glxss-augmented-reality-dream-come-true-couriers
Security trackinghttps://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-parliament-surveillance/china-eyes-black-tech-to-boost-security-as-parliament-meets-idUSKBN1GM06MAt a highway check point on the outskirts of Beijing, local police are this week testing out a new security tool: smart glasses that can pick up facial features and car registration plates, and match them in real-time with a database of suspects. The AI-powered glasses, made by LLVision, scan the faces of vehicle occupants and the plates, flagging with a red box and warning sign to the wearer when any match up with a centralized "blacklist".

The test -- which coincides with the annual meeting of China's parliament in central Beijing -- underscores a major push by China's leaders to leverage technology to boost security in the country... Wu Fei, chief executive of LLVision, said people should not be worried about privacy concerns because China's authorities were using the equipment for "noble causes", catching suspects and fugitives from the law. "We trust the government," he told Reuters at the company's headquarters in Beijing.

This weekend while China's President Xi Jinping is expected to push through a reform allowing him to stay in power indefinitely, Reuters reports that the Chinese goverment is pushing the use of cutting-edge technology "to track and control behavior that goes against the interests of the ruling Communist Party online and in the wider world... A key concern is that blacklists could include a wide range of people stretching from lawyers and artists to political dissidents, charity workers, journalists and rights activists... 

"The new technologies range from police robots for crowd control, to drones to monitor border areas, and artificially intelligent systems to track and censor behavior online," Reuters reports, citing one Hong Kong researcher who argues that China now sees internet and communication technologies "as absolutely indispensable tools of social and political control."

Thursday, March 8, 2018

Lost in Space title sequence, Saul Bass title inspiration

http://www.criticalcommons.org/Members/ccManager/clips/lostinspacetitlesbinarykitsch.mp4/view

Article comment: A binary kitsch aesthetic combines with Saul Bass-style high contrast animation in the title sequence for Irwin Allen's Lost in Space



The open and closing theme music was written by John Williams...


Here are some example compilations:



...and here are a few interview videos:




Saturday, February 17, 2018

Taboo comedy topics

I made this list the other day, seems like there are several topics that comedians all attempt to address - retard and midget jokes come to mind immediately and social topics like race and sexual preference. Not a lot of people tackling transgender, but that's the real challenge I think, not just to shock but to actually make the issues approachable for at least the sake of free speech if there's a legitimate point.

Comedy is used for addressing dark subjects, and humor can be the result of building tension and making people uncomfortable, but also the idea of saying lucid and outside of the subject which may help create a more objective point of view or put the dark subject into perspective or context.

Example 1: The Aristocrats joke told by Gilbert Godfrey after 9/11 - had nothing to do with 9/11, but the raw nature of his very graphic and sordid joke served to break the tension and enormous gravity of the tragic event - pure escapism.

Example 2: Comedy Central Roasts - the whole point being to say things that might be hurtful if it weren't for understanding the point is to roast. I thought it was interesting to hear that those being roasted already pre-approve the topics or jokes ahead of time - Charlie Sheen said no jokes about his mother.

who has license - why white or heterosexuals cannot make jokes about other minority groups or women

The woking list of taboo topics:

all vulnerabilities: tragedies
personal insecurities and public humiliation - any vice, failure, physical appearance
low brow - midgets, retards, sex, bathroom humor, body parts
tragic events like 9/11, the holocaust, slavery, mass shootings, suicide, murder, abortion
death
abuse, animal abuse, molestation, rape
drugs
prostitution
male taboos - being closeted or unmasculine
female taboos - being slutty or unfeminine
Sexual acts condemned by society, religion, or considered perversion: 
homosexuality, incest, beastiality, sodomy, pornography
racism, homophobia, xenophobia, misogyny
irreverence towards religion or religious figures
irreverence towards political groups or officials
old people
illness and death
mental illness
disability
being ugly
obesity
violence, threats
drunk driving
seven deadly sins: vices: jim gaffigan - gluttony - brian regan - feeling stupid, shame, rage
louis ck - being a pervert, hating children, gluttony, shame
Use of sarcasm