HOW, AND WHEN, TO MAKE A DECISION

Seemingly trivial things have a huge influence on the way that we make decisions, research shows. Bill Ridgers reports ...

From INTELLIGENT LIFE Magazine, Summer 2011

You have a big decision to make. Whether to put in an offer on a house, say, or change jobs. Which of the following will help you make the right choice: being in a state of sexual excitement or having a full bladder? Most likely, it is not something you have pondered. Psychologists, however, have long studied the ways that external factors such as these influence our decision-making.

9 Steps To Quitting Your “Have To Have" Job And Pursuing Your Dream

How many of us have dreamed of leaving our current jobs to do what we really want to do? And yet, not many of us have actually left the safety of what we do daily unless forced out by layoffs and downsizing.

Why is that? I would argue it’s due to one or more of these reasons:

• We haven’t taken the time to identify a vocation that would serve our passion.
• We lack a plan to make a successful exit.
• We are paralyzed by a combination of our workload, fear of leaving the world we know, and concern about how we will do financially. 

I’d like to share the concrete steps you need to take before you make your move. It’s based on my personal experience moving from an executive position in a multi-billion-dollar technology company into academia. In my new role as a business school lecturer at the MBA@UNC program, I have more control over my work, I’ve expanded my network to meet new and interesting people, I have more time to learn about things that interest me, and I have more free time to pursue outside interests and hobbies. Plus less stress.

1 in 5 parents use gadgets as in-home intercom with kids

In another sign of how technology can foster more communication, a new survey in Britain found that one in five parents use tech gadgets to talk to their own children while inside the same home. Supermarket chain Asda recently conducted a nationwide survey and found parents were increasingly using technology as a form of in-home intercom with their kids, calling them to dinner or telling them to do their chores.

This 28-Year-Old's Startup Is Moving $350 Million And Wants To Completely Kill Credit Cards

Alyson Shontell of businessinsider.com
Nov. 11, 2011, 8:37 AM

Dwolla was founded by 28-year-old Ben Milne; it's an innovative online payment system that sidesteps credit cards completely.

Milne has no finance background yet his little operation is moving between $30 and $50 million per month; it's on track to move more than $350 million in the next year.

Unlike PayPal, Dwolla doesn't take a percentage of the transaction. It only asks for $0.25  whether it's moving $1 or $1,000.

Zendesk CEO Mikkel Svane: Complaints Are Good for Business

Mikkel Svane of Zendesk explains how he grew his cloud-based help desk software startup in the wake of customer complaints. "The best thing a company can do," he tells us, "is embrace its mistakes." You listening, Netflix?

Right now, Mikkel Svane is sitting at the helm of an incredibly successful company. Zendesk, established in 2007, is a cloud-based help desk software company with over 10,000 clients in 100 countries ranging from Animoto and IKEA, to the Denver Broncos and Zappos. To serve 30 million end users every day (and counting!) Zendesk recently added an office in Australia and a development center in Denmark.

SMART Muni app designed over a weekend

The city of San Francisco's Information and Communication Technology Plan offers a bold vision for modernizing the government's technology infrastructure. And it will only take five short years.

By then, the city will "embrace" things like social networking, cloud computing, crowd sourcing and location-aware apps. In other words, by 2016, the city earnestly hopes to have made use of the greatest technology hits of 2010. Fortunately, we've seen time and again how technology periodically stands stock still to allow governments and grandparents to catch up, so I can't imagine a flaw with the plan. But there are some folks out there who think that maybe this sort of thing can be done on a slightly accelerated timeline. Like, say, a weekend.