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Facebook Co-Founder’s Startup Asana Launches Publicly



While still at Facebook, Asana co-founders Dustin Moskovitz and Justin Rosenstein developed a prototype task manager that helps groups cut down on email chains and meetings. After watching the prototype take off within Facebook, they left the giant social network that Moskovitz helped found and continued developing what would become Asana. Now they’re introducing that collaboration tool to the world by opening it to the public for the first time.

Asana, which has been in private beta for about a year, is a free, single-shared task list for groups. It helps everybody on a team keep track of what they and others are working on without what the startup has termed “work about work,” or unnecessary logistical conversations.

“People ask us, ‘Is this a to do list?’” Rosenstein says. “We’re like ‘No, this is the to do list.’”

What sets Asana apart from dozens of other task manager programs, he says, is real-time updates, flexibility to fit any project’s work flow and simplicity that makes updating Asana quicker than updating a Word document. That, and the fact that Asana wants to be seen more like email than corporate software: a go-to organization method for everything from class projects to small companies.

A tangle of startups have attempted to streamline project communications — corporate or otherwise — but haven’t breached mainstream adoption. That doesn’t seem to faze Moskovitz and Rosenstein.

“The reason there are a million of these out there is the same reason that before Facebook, there were a million social networks and before Google, there were a million search engines,” Moskovitz says.

In other words, despite an environment of email overload that demands an efficient group collaboration product, nobody has delivered the right one yet.

For Facebook, the prototype that inspired Asana turned out to be just right. Moskovitz and Rosenstein say the social network is still using the prototype to manage projects.

Since becoming Asana, the same idea that inspired that prototype has become a full product, transformed from something focused on power users to something that anybody can pick up in a few minutes and spawned a complementary mobile site. It’s not something that’s designed for a large company like Facebook — though the startup says that such a premium product is on the roadmap.

The second company that Moskovitz co-founded could transform the workspace with a task-oriented product the same way that his first transformed the social space with a people-oriented one.

Or, it could become one more to-do list program that managers pressure employees to update weekly — a Friendster rather than a Facebook.

More About: asana, Dustin Moskovitz, Facebook, trending

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Daily Mac App: QREncoder


QREncoder

QR codes are a great way of instantly sharing information with a quick camera snap? QREncoder is app for your Mac that'll let you quickly and easily generate them for printing, uploading and sharing.

You can encode almost any sort of text into a QR code: a URL, phone number, text message, email address, twitter handle -- maybe even a haiku. QREncoder makes creating codes easy. Fire up the app, select the type of code you want, and bung your text in the box.

You've got a choice of size for your QR code, 5, 6, 9 and 12px and you can save it as a PNG for later use.

QREncoder is quick, easy to use and free from the Mac App Store, so is well worth checking out if you want to create quick response codes.

Daily Mac App: QREncoder originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 31 Oct 2011 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Classic Elite, Interplay titles coming to iOS


Touch Arcade has some good and bad news for fans of classic PC RPGs out there. The bad news is that the expected Elite Collection (which was set to come out last week and round up some of old developer Elite Systems' best games on iOS, has been delayed due to some rights issues. One of the companies involved that had previously agreed to share its games decided instead to claim a trademark at the last minute, which will hold up the process for a while, perhaps only a week or two.

The good news, however, is that that extra time will allow the folks behind the apps to add in some extra titles, which TA presumes are some really amazing Interplay games, including The Bard's Tale and the great RPG Wasteland. That would be awesome -- almost all of Interplay's old titles are classics, and it'd be great to get those up and running on iOS devices.

We'll see -- Elite is still working on getting everything together, but as I said, news should be out in the next couple of weeks. Here's hoping iOS gamers get their hands on this great collection soon.

Classic Elite, Interplay titles coming to iOS originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 31 Oct 2011 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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5 Reasons Google+ Could Win the Social Enterprise Battle



Balakrishna Narasimhan leads solution marketing for Appirio, a cloud solution provider that helps enterprises adopt, connect and extend cloud platforms such as salesforce.com, Google and Workday. Follow him on Twitter: @bnara75

Last Thursday, Google announced that Google+ will be available for Google Apps users. This means that the millions of people using Google Apps for their businesses will now have access to the Google+ social collaboration platform.

With Google+’s unique features for search, selective sharing and rich communication, it offers consumers a very different user experience than the established social networks. For individuals, Google+ has quickly become a great place to build your interest graph — that is, find the latest content and people related to topics you’re interested in.

SEE ALSO: Google+: The Complete Guide

With its seamless integration with Google Apps, Google+ promises a very different type of social enterprise experience. In fact, Google+ has five unique advantages over other social business platforms.


1. Smart Integration With Existing Google Apps


Google+ is fully integrated with Google Apps. As a user, you don’t need a new login — it’s just another tab like mail, calendar, docs or video. Most business users spend their day in mail or calendar, so a tool that’s easily accessible from the daily workflow has advantages over third-party software.

Thinking a bit ahead of where the product is, the possibilities that are opened up by the integration with Google Apps are pretty exciting. You can imagine “+1” buttons and rich collaboration across sites, docs, spreadsheets, presentations, blogs, videos, photos and more. Or imagine working within a doc and starting a hangout with collaborators while sharing your screen. For companies using Google Apps, taking advantage of these features would require no additional software, logins or changes in behavior.


2. Google+ Already Knows a Lot About You


Because of its tight integration with Google Apps, Google+ could take advantage of what it already knows about each business user, including whom they email, how often and how recently, as well as the topics they write about and search for. Google+ is in a position to help an enterprise user not only quickly build out his internal circles, but also discover those outside the company who are talking about the same topics or industry. If Google chooses to pursue this, it would make a great tool to help each user build out broad interest-based professional networks.


3. Google+ Is Uniquely Positioned to Help You Find and Share Interesting Content


Nobody has a better index of what’s on the web than Google. So nobody is better positioned to help you find interesting content and people from both inside and outside your company. Google+ Sparks let you follow the latest from the web on topics you’re interested in, and one can imagine something similar within your domain. Internal Sparks could let you quickly find content and experts within your company on work-related topics you’re most interested in.


4. Google+ Integrates Public and Private Sharing


Unlike other social enterprise platforms, which keep most shared content behind company walls, Google+ integrates public and private sharing. When I’m using Google+, I can decide for each post whether I want to share it with my colleagues, my clients, or certain subsets of either category. Also, because a number of websites have already embedded +1 buttons, it’s easy to “like” content from across the web and share it with targeted groups.


5. Android Phones Sync Easily With the Entire Apps Suite


Finally, an Android mobile phone brings this complete integration to users on the go. Activating Android handsets with your company’s Google Apps account brings all this productive and social functionality to the palm of your employees’ hands. And the wide variety of devices and carriers means greater flexibility.


A Video Explanation of Google+



The Google+ project: A quick look


Google provides an overview of the entire Google+ project.

Click here to view this gallery.

More About: Business, contributor, features, Google, Social Media


The 24-Hour Countdown Clock Is a Shot in the Arm to Get Things Done [Motivation]


Ideally you're always so excited about tackling your next task that the only motivation you need is another cup of coffee. Unfortunately we don't all live in that world, and sometimes we need a little help getting into gear. If all you need to motivate yourself is a simple reminder that the clock is ticking, Maker Eugene Baumstein's web-based 24-hour countdown clock does what it sounds like. More »


Bright House TV app brings rebranded Time Warner Cable TV to the iPad


Congratulations Bright House Networks customers, your off-brand Time Warner Cable experience now includes live TV streaming on your iPad. The Bright House TV tablet app has hit iTunes and is, unsurprisingly, a direct clone of the TWCable TV app, although it's not the latest version as it doesn't have parental controls yet. Otherwise it's basically the same experience, complete with the restriction to using it at home on your own WiFi network and its initial unfriendliness towards jailbroken iPads. there's no word on which channels are available, but we wouldn't be surprised if they also mirror the Time Warner list. If you're jailbroken, check the MacRumors link below for a workaround, otherwise you can just head to iTunes and download the app directly.

[Thanks, EvilSpock]

Bright House TV app brings rebranded Time Warner Cable TV to the iPad originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 30 Oct 2011 09:23:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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57 New Digital Media Resources You May Have Missed


icon heads image


Since Halloween weekend is currently in full swing (despite the snowy weather in the U.S. Northeast), we know many of you are probably busy modeling your costumes in front of your mirror in preparation for tonight’s festivities. Before you put your masks and wigs on, Mashable wants to share a roundup of the week’s special features with you.

From the Netflix downturn to the spooky Halloween tech-inspired pumpkins, this list has it all.


Editor’s Picks



Social Media


For more social media news and resources, you can follow Mashable’s social media channel on Twitter and become a fan on Facebook.


Tech & Mobile


For more tech news and resources, you can follow Mashable’s tech channel on Twitter and become a fan on Facebook.


Business & Marketing


For more business news and resources, you can follow Mashable’s business channel on Twitter and become a fan on Facebook.

Image courtesy of PSDDude

More About: Business, List, Mobile, Social Media, web

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AWS Load Balancer Sends 2 Million Netflix API Reqs To Wrong Customer


rsk writes "Amazon Web Services' Elastic Load Balancer is a dynamic load-balancer managed by Amazon. Load balancers regularly swapped around with each other which can lead to surprising results; like getting millions of requests meant for a different AWS customer. Using ELBs can result in AWS unintentionally introducing a man-in-the-middle (attack) into your application environment. Most AWS users do not realize this can happen and have not secured against it."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Beware the Digital Disruptors: They’re Coming for Your Industry



James L. McQuivey, Ph.D. is a Vice President and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research serving Consumer Product Strategy professionals. Follow him on Twitter at @jmcquivey.

Growing up in the ’70s, I was the world’s biggest fan of The Six Million Dollar Man. Every Sunday night at 7 p.m. you could find me glued to our Trinitron TV to watch Steve Austin battle every villain from Bionic Sasquatch to the evil Dr. Dolenz. The appeal of the show was simple: Amplified by technology, the Bionic Man is better, stronger, and faster than his enemies.

It turns out to be a morality tale for our own day. But you are not the bionic man in the drama I’m unfolding — you are his target. Because while you were carefully planning your business strategy, hundreds — if not thousands — of individuals and competitors have been exploiting technology to make themselves better, stronger, and faster than you.

We call these people digital disruptors. And they’re coming right for you.

No matter what industry you are in, you are their target. Where you could once dismiss digital disruption as the sole province of the music or other media industries where it destroyed billions in value, digital disruption has now expanded. These disruptors employ technologies — and the platforms they enable — to build better products than you can, establish a stronger customer relationship than you have, and deliver it all to market faster than you ever thought possible.

Oh, and it doesn’t cost anywhere close to six million dollars for them to get started. I offer Lose It! as one of many case studies worth considering. Targeting the weight loss and fitness business — one of the most analog industries on the planet — Lose It! is disrupting the more than $40 billion Americans spend on weight loss each year. It’s a costly industry to enter — think of Jenny Craig’s marketing budget alone, then add its hundreds of physical locations, prepared meals, and all the infrastructure to support the entire enterprise. So while franchises like The Biggest Loser have succeeded in entering this business recently, they have done so at great cost.

Meanwhile, a single app that helps dieters keep track of the calories they consume on their smartphones has gone from 0 to 7 million downloads in just a few years. FitNow, the company behind the app, pulled this off with four employees, establishing an unheard of customer-per-employee metric of 1.75 million.

This is digital disruption at its finest: better, stronger, faster. The app got to market quickly, partly because as a digital disruptor, FitNow could afford to launch something that didn’t try to solve all the problems in the weight-loss world. As Charles Teague, CEO, told me recently, “Let’s not pretend that we know the endgame here. Let’s do the least amount of features to know if it will work. Then improve it if people use it.” And improve it they have, adding fitness tracking and more recently a robust social community of like-minded dieters.

Because it sounds so easy, a CEO I shared this with asked me why, if digital is so quick and dirty, his company’s website redesign was over time and over budget. I told him it was precisely because he staffed up his business under assumptions about design and functionality that were true in 2005 but are no longer the case. Digital disruption has even disrupted the digital businesses that preceded them.

While digital disruptors are better, stronger, and faster, they are not untouchable. Their ease of entry comes from the fact that traditional barriers have fallen to zero. That means your direct cost to emulate their practices can also be low.

That’s why I recommend you steal the digital disruptor’s handbook. Use the iPad, the Kinect, and whatever platform is next to build a digital bridge to your customers. Like with Lose It!, your bridge must engage customers more often than your current product can, packaging and delivering benefits that you didn’t realize were part of your consumer contract because before now, they weren’t. You have to change your understanding of your product so you can then change your customer’s understanding of it as well. This will require better thinking than you currently do – I previously explained how digital disruptors take advantage of a type of thinking called “innovating the adjacent possible.” It’s crucial to generating more ideas more quickly so that you can find the nearby opportunities that will succeed while quickly culling those that will fail.

There’s more to do, but before you can even begin, you have to know: Are you ready to do this? Does your company have the energy, skills, and policies to turn into a disruptor or are you more likely to be displaced by the digital disruptor nearest you?

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, Nikada

More About: apps, contributor, Disrupt, features, Startups, Tech

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Twitter Now Lets “X Factor” Viewers Vote via DMs



The fate of the 12 remaining contestants on the U.S. version of The X Factor will be in the hands of the viewers starting Nov. 2., and they’ll now have a new way to support their favorite performer: Twitter direct message-enabled voting.

Though other shows have used Twitter to create buzz, The X Factor will become the first TV competition to tally DM votes to help determine a winner.

The X Factor has raised the bar for innovative television with its use of Twitter,” says Chloe Sladden, Twitter’s director of content and programming. “We’re thrilled to see the creators of The X Factor push the envelope further by being the first television show to formalize this phenomenon through Twitter voting.”

Social media and technology continue to change the public’s TV-watching experience, but the evolution of social TV has affected competition shows the most.

For example, American Idol let viewers vote on the show’s Facebook Page during season 10. The Voice — a new singing competition that became a 24/7 social media conversation earlier this year — allowed viewers to vote by buying the contestants’ songs on iTunes. And design competition Project Runway let fans use Twitter hashtags to vote for a “Fan Favorite” every episode

The shows hope the new voting methods spark social buzz that will lead to better ratings.

The X Factor offers four other voting methods: Viewers can call, text, go to the show’s website or — if you’re a Verizon subscriber with an Android device — use The Xtra Factor App.

“Launching touch screen voting on Verizon’s The Xtra Factor App and the new voting on Twitter is really exciting,” says the show’s star judge Simon Cowell. “I love that the audience has more and more choice in the way that they can vote.”

SEE ALSO: The X Factor Gets Social With Help From Pepsi

To vote on Twitter, viewers must follow @TheXFactorUSA and DM their votes to that handle. Regular tweets will not be tallied. The X Factor has set a limit of 50 votes for viewers voting on the show’s website and on Twitter, while voting via SMS, SMS in-app and telephone is unlimited.

For a full list of contestants’ Twitter handles, click here.

More About: Social Media, social tv, television, Twitter, verizon, x factor

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