Tom Blomfield: Making something people want - The GoCardless story. I’m a co-founder of GoCardless, a direct debit payments company in London. This is the story of our first two years and the people we’ve met along the way. Making something no-one wants One startup I know very well in San Francisco was started by 3 ex-financiers. Their idea involved an industry in which none of the 3 had any experience - they wanted to build software to help building contractors bid for big construction projects. None of them knew how to code, so they specced up a “prototype” and engaged a web-development agency to build this “MVP”. They’d spent so long story-boarding their product that they had a really good idea of how it would work once they’d achieved huge market penetration. They had some pretty great features that were novel for the industry at the time - sharing quotes electronically (step 8), exchanging & signing contracts online (step 11) and eventually paying for the services (step 13) as part of the process.
"An idea for a startup… is only a beginning. People. Structure Your Presentation Like a Story - Nancy Duarte. After studying hundreds of speeches, I’ve found that the most effective presenters use the same techniques as great storytellers: By reminding people of the status quo and then revealing the path to a better way, they set up a conflict that needs to be resolved. That tension helps them persuade the audience to adopt a new mindset or behave differently — to move from what is to what could be.
And by following Aristotle’s three-part story structure (beginning, middle, end), they create a message that’s easy to digest, remember, and retell. Here’s how it looks when you chart it out: And here’s how to do it in your own presentations. Craft the Beginning Start by describing life as the audience knows it. People should be nodding their heads in recognition because you’re articulating what they already understand. This creates a bond between you and them, and opens them up to hear your ideas for change. After you set that baseline of what is, introduce your vision of what could be.
EFFECTIVE INFORMATION VISUALIZATION by Matthias Shapiro - EP 31. 5 Things That Waste Your Time at Work [INFOGRAPHIC] Aside from the time you purposefully waste at work — checking Facebook or playing Draw Something, as the kids do — there's a lot of other stuff that can slow you down at the office. The productivity of a "knowledge worker" (read: non-farmer) hinges on communication and the ability to locate information quickly. VoIP communications company Fonality conducted a survey to find out which mundane office tasks suck the most time out of the day.
Pinpointing and compiling all those wasted man hours could save companies some substantial coin. The folks at social performance management tool Rypple compiled the infographic below based on that data. The top time stealer? Trying to contact customers or colleagues. Duplicate or unwanted information (including spam) ranks highly as well. SEE ALSO: The Internet Is Ruining Your Brain [INFOGRAPHIC] The study also proposes that "unified communications" (UC) solutions can reduce much of this waste, though it's difficult to determine by how much.
Knowledge engineer. A knowledge engineer integrates knowledge into computer systems in order to solve complex problems normally requiring a high level of human expertise. Overview[edit] Often knowledge engineers are employed to translate the information elicited from domain experts into terms which cannot be easily communicated by the highly technalized domain expert (ESDG 2000). Knowledge engineers interpret and organize information on how to make systems decisions (Aylett & Doniat 2002). The term "Knowledge engineer" first appeared in the 1980s in the first wave of commercialization of AI – the purpose of the job is to work with a client who wants an expert system created for them or their business. Validation & verification with knowledge engineers[edit] Validation is the process of ensuring that something is correct or conforms to a certain standard. It is important that a knowledge engineer incorporates validation procedures into their systems within the program code.
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