Infotrade

At W.L. Gore, innovation is more than skin deep: The culture is as imaginative as the products. When  Fast Company  set out to find the most innovative company in America, we wanted to rely on objective measurements, but that proved daunting. How can you quantify something as intangible as innovation? You can count up patents and discover that IBM is the leader, with a record 3,415 awarded in 2003. But patents have come to mean a lot less than they used to. The most creative companies of the Internet era -- Amazon, Google, Yahoo, eBay -- have only a few patents apiece. You can look at who spends the most on R&D, but a torrent of cash hardly guarantees breakthrough innovation. Over the past decade, Microsoft has poured $5 billion or more a year into research, but its vast expenditures still haven't yielded the next big thing (see page 68). So we gave up on crunching numbers and focused on other criteria. For starters, we looked for a company with a long history ...

Mistake #1: We fall into a combat mentality. When difficult conversations turn toxic, it's often because we've made a key mistake: we've fallen into a combat mentality. This allows the conversation to become a zero-sum game, with a winner and a loser. But the reality is, when we let conversations take on this tenor – especially at the office – everyone looks bad, and everyone loses. The real enemy is not your conversational counterpart, but the combat mentality itself. And you can defeat it, with strategy and skill. Mistake #2: We try to oversimplify the problem. If the subject of your argument were straightforward, chances are you wouldn't be arguing about it. Because it's daunting to try and tackle several issues at once, we may try to roll these problems up into a less-complex Über-Problem. But the existence of such a beast is often an illusion. To avoid oversimplifying, remind yourself that if the issue weren't complicated, it probably wouldn't be so ha...

A lot has been said about  reputation management  and social media promotion recently. Jeff did two great posts on  pre-emptive reputation management  and also on powerful resources that will help you " bury negative posts about you or your company ". Today I am adding a few tips on  promoting your online profiles  and organizing your reputation management campaign. (image credit:  eVisibility ) Create Online Profiles Below is the table of a few popular services that allow to create a dedicated profile page. They are all general (no niche-specific ones) and I only included services that were  designed  for creating personal online pages – thus I skipped numerous social bookmarking sites (e.g.  Digg ,  Netscape ) and other social networking sites (e.g.  Twitter ) which can be rather effective for reputation management but are meant for other purposes. Being focused will also allow you to properly set up your profiles ...

While it may be true that there are no shortcuts to anywhere worth going, there certainly are ways of needlessly prolonging the journey. We often waste lots of time because nobody ever taught us the most effective and efficient way to practice. Whether it's learning how to code, improving your writing skills, or playing a musical instrument, practicing the right way can mean the difference between good and great. You have probably heard the old joke about the tourist who asks a cab driver how to get to Carnegie Hall, only to be told: "Practice, practice, practice!" I began playing the violin at age two, and for as long as I can remember, there was one question which haunted me every day. Am I practicing enough? What Do Performers Say? I scoured books and interviews with great artists, looking for a consensus on practice time that would ease my conscience. I read an interview with Rubinstein, in which he stated that nobody should have to practice more than fou...

Now that you know  how to get started with online credit card processing , here are 3 things you should know before you dive in that nobody tells you about. The fees, my god the fees! I know what you’re thinking, only an imbecile wouldn’t know there are fees associated with credit card processing, but hold on a minute. Most people don’t consider the full picture of what these fees entail and how they can impact some business more than others. For starters, prepare to pay 2 sets of fees. One to the credit card processor, and another to the gateway. The credit card processor fees will include the fees from the credit card companies along with per-transaction fees and service fees. The gateway will have another per-transaction fee and a service fee. Credit Card Processor Fee Examples Visa/Mastercard 2.3% AMEX/Discover 3.5% Transaction Fee $0.30 per transaction Service Fee $10 per month Processing Minimum* $25 per month *If your Visa/Mastercard fee isn’t more tha...