Technology

American Family Information Services – 87 Layoffs – Insurance Networking News

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The company has reduced its total workforce by 730 positions, or almost 10 percent, over the past four years, mainly by attrition.

via American Family Information Services Department Incurs 87 Layoffs – Insurance Networking News.

Short articles like this make me wonder what’s really happening.  We don’t know the total number of staff in the company’s IT department so we cannot know what percentage of the entire staff was affected.  So I went online and found the following:

The cut positions included 85 people based at the company headquarters at 6000 American Parkway and its other Madison location, off Milwaukee Street, plus two people outside Madison. There are 850 people remaining in the company’s information services division, making the job reductions equal to about a 10 percent cut there.

So now we know the IT department was 937 before the layoffs.  Hmmm….

Life Underwriting Expert Witness Search Results on Google Alternatives

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We get so focused on Google that it’s easy to forget there are alternatives to Google search. Granted, the alternatives are not nearly as popular. At 66% market share and 11.7 billion searches during the month of February 2012 alone, Google clearly is the leader. But other search engines are worth understanding — both from the perspective of when you are a searcher for information, and from the perspective of a site owner knowing that visitors may come from those other search engines.

via Google Alternatives.

I came across this article while catching up on news one Saturday morning.  For fun I ran the search string “life underwriting expert witness” without quotation marks on all of the search engines listed in the article.  I must admit that I was surprised at the search findings on all of the engines.

Let’s just say I’m a happy guy this morning.

Tablet and E-Book Reader Ownership Nearly Doubles

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The share of adults in the United States who own tablet computers nearly doubled from 10% to 19% between mid-December and early January and the same surge in growth also applied to e-book readers, which also jumped from 10% to 19% over the same time period.

The number of Americans owning at least one of these digital reading devices jumped from 18% in December to 29% in January.

via Tablet and E-book reader Ownership Nearly Double Over the Holiday Gift-Giving Period | Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project.

Faithful followers are aware this author abandoned his Read a Book a Week project sometime in 2011.  Workload got very busy so I ultimately had to trade non-work reading time for revenue.  Not a bad trade-off but I still miss my recreational reading time.

I’ve owned a Kindle for over a year now and received a smart phone this past Christmas.  I can now access my Kindle books on my phone.  We’ll see if this helps me read more books this year.

Click through to the Pew website where you can download a PDF copy of this study.

Networking for Survival – HBR

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Without the network, you don’t get new ideas into your organization, you don’t see trends and issues that affect you and your customers, you don’t grow and develop your people with new challenges and opportunities, you aren’t attractive for young talent, you don’t learn about new technologies or business models, you don’t create new markets and you risk deluding yourself with your own ideas. You don’t increase your own value and advance your own career. Without the network you stagnate, you become stale. With the network you grow, provide meaningful and valuable solutions to your customers and not just survive, but thrive.

via Networking for Survival – Deborah Mills-Scofield – Harvard Business Review.

Great post and well worth reading.  One comment caught my eye,

When new forms of communication emerge, don’t just look at how to improve what you’re doing already, but at new ways of doing.

I immediately thought of social media as a new way of doing.  My transition from a dumb phone to a smartphone is a new way of doing (for me).  One of my new projects for the New Year is to create a Google+ business page.  Is this an “improvement”?  Not really.  It’s just a new way of doing.

Over 700,000 Android Devices Activated Daily

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Google’s Andy Rubin: Over 700,000 Android devices activated daily – latimes.com.

Android-powered devices are the No.1 target for cyber crooks in the mobile phone arena. Popular bill-paying methods and apps on smartphones are expected to be major targets.

via Smartphones offer easy access to malware purveyors | Herald Sun.

OK. I’ll admit to writing somewhat smugly about not owning or using a smartphone in a post two weeks ago.  I’m glad I didn’t make a comment about never owning or using a smartphone because I am now one of the 700,000 Androids that get activated daily.

Resistance is futile.  But you still have to be smart about how you use your smartphone.  See the second link above.

Facebook Is Making Us Miserable – Harvard Business Review

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Facebook is negatively affecting what psychology Professor Jeffrey Parker refers to as “the closeness properties of friendship.”

via Facebook Is Making Us Miserable – Daniel Gulati – Harvard Business Review.

Please note I am not the author of the HBR blog article so please don’t shoot the messenger.  I’m neither a huge fan nor harsh critic of what the pundits term as “the dominant communication platform of the future”.  I simply don’t use Facebook a lot.  I don’t have a smart phone.  I have a dumb phone.  I don’t use an iPad.  I use an old-fashioned laptop if necessary.

If anyone wishes to communicate with me, email or phone works just fine thank you.

Or we could meet in person!