As you'll read on the Google Docs blog, starting today and over the coming weeks we're rolling out offline editing access to word processing documents to Google Docs users. You no longer need an Internet connection when inspiration strikes. Whether you're working on an airplane or in a cafe, you can automatically access all your docs on your own computer.
Lots of iPhone users tried the new interface (hence the bump in Gmail pageviews between January and February), but they didn't stick around like we hoped they would. Over the course of the next few weeks, we made some tweaks to drastically improve the speed of the product, and Gmail pageviews on the iPhone not only stabilized, but began to rise, as the graph below shows.
The graph shows us daily pageviews in blue, with the latency overlaid in yellow. Latency, according to the open source Wiktionary is "A delay, a period between the initiation of something and the occurrence." For the average end user, the easiest way to understand latency is to consider how long you have to wait from the time you request a webpage until the webpage loads. Clearly the high latency at the end of January was driving users away - working to reduce that wait time (latency) brought users back and kept them.
we decided that 2008 was going to be a year of workplace experiments ... make 37signals one of the best places in the world to work, learn, and generally be happy.
Shorter work weeks
Last summer we experimented with 4-day work weeks. People should enjoy the weather in the summer. We found that just about the same amount of work gets done in four days vs. five days.
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So recently we’ve instituted a four-day work week as standard. We take Fridays off. We’re around for emergencies, and we still do customer service/support on Fridays, and but other than that work is not required on Fridays. Three-day weekends mean people come back extra refreshed on Monday. Three-day weekends mean people come back happier on Monday. Three-day weekends mean people actually work harder and more efficiently during the four-day work week. Funding people’s passions
We decided that 37signals would help people pay for their passions, interests, or other curiosities. We want our people to experience new things, discover new hobbies, and generally be interesting people.
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If someone wants to take cooking lessons, we’ll help pay for those. If someone wants to take a woodworking class, we’ll help pay for that. Part of the deal is that if 37signals helps you pay, you have to share what you’ve learned with everyone. Not just everyone at 37signals, but everyone who reads our blog. So expect to see some blog posts about these experiences.
Discretionary spending accounts
We’re in the process of giving everyone at 37signals a no-limit credit card. If you want a book or some software or you want to go to a conference, it’s on us. We just ask people to be reasonable with their spending. If there’s a problem, we’ll let the person know. We’d rather trust people to make reasonable spending decisions than assume people will abuse the privilege by default.
If you think that iPods are used just for listening to music, you obviously haven’t been keeping up with the latest technology The Apple-developed music player now features all kinds of accessories to help you study better, and now other companies are in a rush to get their designs in sync with the iPod. Pre-teens, college kids and even adults are taking advantage of the educational benefits an iPod affords them. From downloadable podcasts to just-for-iPod study guides and applications, learning on the go has never been easier. To find out about the many different ways you can transform your iPod into a learning device, check out our list below.
Obama sketched out a different theory of social change than the one Clinton had implied earlier in the evening. Instead of relying on a president who fights for those who feel invisible, Obama, in the climactic passage of his speech, described how change bubbles from the bottom-up: “And because that somebody stood up, a few more stood up. And then a few thousand stood up. And then a few million stood up. And standing up, with courage and clear purpose, they somehow managed to change the world!”
For people raised on Jane Jacobs, who emphasized how a spontaneous dynamic order could emerge from thousands of individual decisions, this is a persuasive way of seeing the world. For young people who have grown up on Facebook, YouTube, open-source software and an array of decentralized networks, this is a compelling theory of how change happens.
In this figure, each of the 10 possible digits (0-9) of the number pi is displayed as a unique color. Likewise is the audible version, you first select 10 notes (again corresponding to 0-9) and the first 10,000 digits of pi are converted to "musical" notes.
