Infotrade

Leadership tycoon Warren Bennis once said, “We seem to collect information because we have the ability to do so, but we are so busy collecting it that we haven’t devised a means of using it. The true measure of any society is not what it knows but what it does with what it knows.” There is a wealth of information at our disposal today on the latest discoveries in brain science. While we enjoy reading about these findings and expanding our intellect, how many of us actually apply these concepts? We can either drown in this information or turn it into a lifesaver by extracting its practical knowledge. This article offers several important tips based on discoveries in brain research that can help us improve our personal and professional lives, as well as help others in our sphere of influence. Use visualization to learn a new skill Neuroplasticity is the ability of the brain to continuously create new neural pathways. When we repeat a skill that we are trying to master, we st...

Update :  Also see our 40-minute  interview  on this topic. Picking a co-founder is your most important decision. It’s more important than your product, market, and investors. The ideal founding team is two individuals, with a history of working together, of similar age and financial standing, with mutual respect. One is good at building products and the other is good at selling them. The power of two Two is the right number — avoid the  three-body problem . Think Jobs and Wozniak, Allen and Gates, Ellison and Lane, Hewlett and Packard, Larry and Sergei, Yang and Filo, Omidyar and Skoll. One founder companies  can  work, against the odds (hello, Mark Zuckerberg). So can three founder companies (hello, @biz, @ev, and @jack). In three founder companies, the politics can be tough — gang-up votes, jockeying for board seats, etc. — but it’s manageable. Four is an extremely unstable configuration and  five is right out . When 4-5 founder compa...

With a slow economy, many people have turned to entrepreneurship as a means to pay the bills. Which begs the question, what’s better today — getting a job or starting a business? We dug deep to find out the numbers and have compared the risk of starting a business to keeping a job. If you’ve ever thought about starting your own company, take a look at our graphic below to help decide if entrepreneurship is right for you. What do you think? Is it now more risky to keep a job?

The phrase "free shipping" is like a siren song to many who shop on the Internet. For whatever reason, a free shipping offer that saves a customer $6.99 is more appealing to many than a discount that cuts the purchase price by $10, says Wharton marketing professor  David Bell . Bell noticed this phenomenon a few years ago while doing research for an online grocery store, and the observation prompted him to look more closely at the ways Internet retailers use shipping charges -- or the lack thereof -- as a promotional tool. The result is a model that can help managers set shipping fees in ways that both appeal to customers and drive them to buy in quantities that can be efficiently processed. "There is no direct analog to this in the traditional retail world," Bell says. "It seemed to us that firms had not figured out the 'right' shipping policy, so there's a lot of experimentation going on without clear guidelines." Internet-based ...

What is the Singularity? The Singularity is the technological creation of smarter-than-human intelligence. There are several technologies that are often mentioned as heading in this direction. The most commonly mentioned is probably Artificial Intelligence, but there are others: direct brain-computer interfaces, biological augmentation of the brain, genetic engineering, ultra-high-resolution scans of the brain followed by computer emulation. Some of these technologies seem likely to arrive much earlier than the others, but there are nonetheless several independent technologies all heading in the direction of the Singularity – several different technologies which, if they reached a threshold level of sophistication, would enable the creation of smarter-than-human intelligence. A future that contains smarter-than-human minds is genuinely different in a way that goes beyond the usual visions of a future filled with bigger and better gadgets. Vernor Vinge originally coined the term ...

In the main, entries to this year’s Interaction Design Awards were good. The apps, the websites, the interfaces, and the games were slick and sleek. For the most part, they checked the design boxes we have all come to expect. Sure, some seemed to have beamed in from the early days of Netscape, but in the main, buttons, pushed, sent you somewhere you thought you might go. Screens, swiped, loaded the information you expected to see. So far so good, right? After all, isn’t that what we want from our interaction design? That it does what we expect it to do (and then, ideally, that it gets the hell out of our way until we need it again?) Yet, somehow, the main achievement of all of this resolute competence was to confirm the long-held idea: that the very best design--the design that transcends the merely “good”--is way more than skin or screen-deep. As juror Jonas Löwgren, a professor at Malmö University in Sweden, commented, “It feels like interaction design has solidified to become a...