25 Companies that Help Strike the Proper Life-to-Work Balance

by Maximilian Lemos on January 22, 2013

Having the correct life-to-work balance is essential these days. Balance is constantly under assault, whether it’s an overbearing boss or well-intentioned ambition turned self-defeating, it’s important to assess whether we’re living to work or working to live.

The same technology that allows most of us the luxury of greater work efficiency can quickly become a crutch if we allow it. I believe that if companies encourage their employees to seek a more balanced life, they’ll ultimately foster a stronger culture and happier, more productive workers.

I present you with the top 25 companies that understand how to help accommodate that proper work/life balance.

The Top 25 Companies To Work For If You Want To Have A Personal Life

As employees are logging more hours, work-life balance has become an increasingly important factor to overall satisfaction in the workplace.

To find out which companies support work-life balance, we turned to Glassdoor.com, which put together a list of the top 25 companies that encourage their workers to also have personal lives. [click to continue…]

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What do you get when you combine the world’s largest online retailer, a massive following of 14 million people on Facebook, Black Friday, and an evil genius Marketing team? You get Amazon.com’s abusive, bait-and-switch, Thanksgiving Facebook “Non-Offer.” Allow me to elaborate.

Setting the stage for a very lucrative Black Friday

On Thanksgiving Day (November 22, 2012) Amazon.com’s Facebook Page distributed a Facebook Offer that received hundreds of thousands of redemptions in a matter of 24-hours, an exceptionally high amount of engagement, even for a brand as large as they are.

The Facebook Offer, as it appears in Newsfeeds, is on your right. As you can see, the offer is exceptionally vague, a Thanksgiving Turkey and a message that reads “A Happy Thanksgiving” but no other supporting information or any indication of what kind of “Offer” the Facebook fan is getting them self into.

Once a user redeems their “Offer,” they are immediately presented with the same “Happy Thanksgiving” message and a link to Amazon’s main web page and an email in their email inbox, where you find that there is no offer at all:

“This offer consists of a warm “Thank You” to our customers, fans, employees and all their families this Thanksgiving weekend. Plus our wishes for an enjoyable, relaxing and safe holiday.

The offer includes, but is not limited to: enjoying the company of family and friends, sharing one or more Thanksgiving meals, and taking time to reflect on that for which you are thankful.” [click to continue…]

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When a Blog grows up and becomes a Real Website

by Christopher Foley on January 24, 2012

One of the greatest things about building your site in WordPress (self-hosted) is that there will always be room to grow.

Those of us who have been in the game for a while can easily remember a time when WordPress was very little more than a blogging platform, competing with services like TypePad and Moveble Type.  Sure, even then you could hack into the code base and create some pretty wild things, if you knew your .php and CSS, but a website platform, it was not.

Back then, we built some pretty cool-looking blogs, but for customers needing a website with a blog, the done thing was to build the site in .html with a few .php elements, and then hang a WordPress blog installation off of it, and skin them up so that they looked like the same installation.  (Oh boy, I don’t miss those days!)

Click to Enlarge

Here’s a really great example of a blog converted over to a site:  Rewire Your Brain For Love is a project we helped launch a couple of years ago.  Neuropsychologist Dr. Marsha Lucas was fixing to write a book combining the disciplines of neuroscience and neuroplasticity with mindfulness meditation, to teach readers how to literally rewire their brains to improve their relationships and ultimately, their lives.  Pretty cool project, we thought, as we sat down to come up with a long-term web strategy.

Like many grass roots projects, we had a moderate budget to work with, and so we decided to put together a blog, built on WordPress so that Dr. Lucas could compose and publish her own posts, and we took on growing her Twitter channel while she labored with her book. [click to continue…]

How many times have you seen this DM in the past month?:

If you’re a casual Twitter user you may not find this sort of thing to be much of an annoyance.  After all, you may not even pay attention to your DM’s. If if you do, you may be bright enough not to click on any links sent to you by strangers.  If you’re a professional brand-manager, as I am, this situation is more than just an annoyance.

I receive this message, and many other similar phishing scams up to 30 times per day across the handful of channels I monitor.  The barrage of spam DM messages basically renders my entire DM channel useless to me, and it fills my iPhone Notification Center up with garbage, such that I miss important communications from the brands’ customers, vendors, and PR personnel.

I’ve seen a few individuals rail directly at Twitter from time to time about doing more to close down spam accounts, bots, and other malcontents who are pissing in the Twitter stream, and that made a lot of sense until quite recently.  Now that doesn’t’ make a lot of sense, and here’s what’s changed:

It used to be that these garbage DM’s and spam-link @ mentions were coming almost exclusively from fake profiles created, often in bulk, by spammers and folks pushing botnet links.  Now, these messages are coming from YOU.  That’s right.  There’s a new strategy in town, and that strategy targets the profiles of legitimate Twitter users, susses out their user/password combination, and then sets up an Auto-DM sequence with one of the many such services, sending out bulk spam DM’s without the profile owner ever knowing that they’ve been compromised.

Would you like to know whose fault it is?  Are you sure?  Okay, here it comes.  [click to continue…]

Accessibility | Zoom It & Siri

by Maximilian Lemos on January 11, 2012

Apple goes above and beyond when it comes to helping the visually impaired. With brilliant accessibility tools across all of their product lines, they are looking out for most everyone. In fact one could even say the greatest accessibility tool is Siri. Having a personal assistant to help you perform tasks on your phone without the need of even looking at the screen is an advancement that will certainly help everyone, especially, the visually impaired.

It won’t be to long before you see a super-intelligent rendition of Siri implemented across OS X.  However, even amazingly smart artificial intelligence has it’s limits. When it comes down to it, Siri has no way of helping you read the words on your screen. In the mean time, while we wait for Siri to be able to think and see for us, apps like Zoom It make zooming in on your Mac quick and easy.

Get the big picture from your menu bar

There are already so many tools in OS X for helping visually impaired users that we initially scratched our collective head at Zoom It, an application that lets you magnify parts of your screen with a customizable loupe. But although it’s no substitute for OS X’s built-in visual accessibility features, it’s a handy way to access some of them quickly. [click to continue…]

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Hard Drive Cleanup

by Maximilian Lemos on November 21, 2011

This MacLife article caught my eye because I recently went through my own hard drive and eliminated all the extra fluff I did not need. I freed nearly 100GB just by following simple guidelines like the ones presented in this article. Sometimes a task that may seem daunting isn’t all that bad when approached with the right tools and attitude. Good luck and happy pruning. [click to continue…]

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