Author: Connor Livingston

There have been questions over the last few years about the validity of social media as a marketing or business tool. Some have embraced it and swear by it, while others have tried it and failed, writing it off as a fad that didn’t work for their industry. The reality is that both are right to some extent. Much of the success or failure of using Facebook in particular for business is industry-specific. Granted, there are ways to be creative and use it in ways that others do not, but there’s a reason why BMW has more Facebook likes than Ford. This infographic by our friends at Pagemodo breaks down some of…

Meg Whitman’s name has always done well in business. Despite not becoming governor of California, her career with eBay and other tech firms (including being on the board at Hewlett-Packard) has nearly always been accompanied by success. In short, she’s tech-firm gold. It’s no surprise that Whitman is being considered to take the top spot as CEO of HP. If she is indeed offered the position and accepts, there will be renewed buzz surrounding the company, one that has been relatively quiet for some time now (other than their failed incursion into the tablet market). She would be a strong leader and…

While the privacy war wages on one end of the spectrum with people, companies, and even governments going after Facebook, Twitter, and Google about how they handle the information that people give (or do not give) them, the other end of the spectrum is using their mobile devices to announce anything and everything they’re doing and where they’re going. The differences are striking. More and more people are giving stalkers everything they need to keep track of them. Mobile devices are using automatic tracking and one-touch check in features to put our whereabouts out there to the public web. As…

Looking at individuals and breaking down their traits, how one inclination affects another habit, and why we choose to do the things we do is often challenging. Causation is difficult to isolate in the individual because there are simply too many factors amongst the things we can see and no about, let alone the plethora of underlying circumstances that remain hidden from us and outside observers, often for our entire lives. When we break the data down into groups and start analyzing it in reference to masses of people rather than individuals, we can often see the forest more clearly than we can see…

The internet allows us to learn in ways that were never possible before. It helps us reach an educational potential in most things that is greater than live training alone. There are, however, exceptions. Certain things just shouldn’t be taught online. Gun safety, for example, should require physical attendance by the learners. It’s a gun. How does one learn everything they need to know about gun safety from their computer? We’re still waiting for that answer from the state of Maryland. They have failed to reply at this point. The infographic below by Mindflash takes a look at some of the most asinine…

It was big news two weeks ago. Somehow, Michael Arrington’s CrunchFund jump and the subsequent drama that has unfolded since has stayed at the top of tech news for longer than Steve Jobs resigning as CEO of Apple. Accusations are flying. People are quitting publicly. Resignations are being accepted publicly. Analysis of the resignations and the acceptance of the resignations are being posted publicly. This has gotten out of hand. Techcrunch is not the only publication that allows editorial freedom. My editor supports Michael Arrington, Erick Schonfeld, and just about everyone involved…

Facebook is going the way of Twitter and Google+ in the way they allow people to view others’ feeds. By introducing the subscribe button, Facebook is allowing users to follow people within their stream even if they are not friends. It is much the way that Twitter has always been and is akin to what Google+ offers in allowing people to add others to their circles. What does this mean for business? Will big-ticket businesses like real estate and the automotive industry be able to use this feature to help with their business? Absolutely. All it takes is an email address. If that email address is attached…

The closed-platform style of an intranet (not to be confused with the internet) allows for secure distribution and communication of information within a company or organization. In the good ol’ days (a decade ago) company intranets were extremely useful in transferring data, sharing files, and collaboration. Today, it’s much less useful. The speed in which information is able to travel with today’s technology makes the intranet a much-less valuable part of the business world. Still, it’s not dead, and as more exploits are found to gather data from companies using internet-only protocols,…

If you pull this into Photoshop, you can check the colors. The “blue’ and “green” are actually the same. In the RGB format, the way we perceive colors is affected by the surrounding colors. If you pull out the other colors and leave only the blue/green, you’ll see what we mean. Sort of trippy. …

There are memes out there that make fun of people who pretend to be geeks because “geek is chic” in 2011. In many cases, it has given the real geeks of the world a bad name. Thanks to the good folks at Uncommongoods, you can keep a good test on your wrist at all times. Just whip this puppy out to so-called geeks and ask them to decipher it. No, it’s not good enough for them to know that 3! is six just because it’s at the bottom. They need to know that it means 3 factorial (basic stuff for many juniors in high school, let alone a true geek). If they can get 4 or 5 of them right, they might be a geek. Half or more and you’re…