ALTERthought Blogs » Misc

Speaking @ DC Area PMI Luncheon Group

don — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 21:17:30 +0000

On Monday August 17th, Sunjay Pandey will be speaking at the Project Management Institute’s DC Area Luncheon Group . Sunjay will be presenting a topic entitled Project Plan Ninja which discusses how to manage Rapid Business Requirements generation on a Rapid Application Development project. Sunjay will be presenting proven techniques that can take your team from vision to requirements in hours, not weeks. This event is free of charge, however advanced registration is required. We look forward to seeing you there!

Genius in small things and the pruning of mail …

sunjay — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 12:05:30 +0000

Admission: I’m over thinking the release of a new Gmail feature, but I’m thinking its genius (little ‘g’). Given our experience with interactive transaction businesses on the Web (gaming, search, on-line advertising, etc.), I can sort of theorize with imaginary whiteboards and obligatory what-ifs, the benefit of said feature. And, I can see the practical benefit. Around Wednesday, July 1, I noticed Google’s introduction of a feature and understood the value to me personally, and — perhaps — to Google’s own operations immediately.

For some time, Google has offered a label feature that allows you to ‘tag’ any inbound or outbound email traffic with a label so you can better organize your mail. For people like me who use the browser exclusively for e-mail this is a major benefit. While I’ve found great value for labeling particular conversations I’d like to keep for posterity, I’ve used the labeling feature extensively to manage the daily barrage of offers, promos, newsletters, ‘freebies’, etc. I have not-so-intelligently signed up for over the years. So on Wednesday, I was delighted to find a little ‘hint’ introducing Google’s new feature: showing you only the labels that you use the most and allowing you to ‘drag-and-drop’ labels onto messages and vice versa. Now, this may not seem like much, but to me, the benefits are unmistakable

See below for a quick screen grab from one of my Google accounts — unfortunately, on the one account I use the most showing the cacophony of my 100+ labels I had already ‘accepted’ the hint before screen grabbing.

So, how does this little feature help me?

I immediately know which labels matter for me
I immediately know which ’sign-ups’ are really not that active
The stuff that is hidden is *probably* something I can consider deleting, unsubscribing, or sending straight to the ‘bit bucket’
The real estate it frees up for me to try other Google widgets is unmistakable (depending on the functionality, i can probably plug in 2-4 more widgets)

So, how might Google benefit from this new feature?

I may actually go through and start unsubscribing/deleting from all of the junk I’ve signed up for, thereby, perhaps saving Google infrastructure costs on storage, bandwidth and the like (the obvious cost benefit having been made for money saved from encouraging mail pruning/un-subscription/not ‘learning’ what ads to serve me from some of my content vs. tipping the scale to a ‘pay-for-storage’ account)
With the added real estate, Google may get me to try new features that may allow them to serve me more relevant ads/charge me more money

Or, it could simply be that users felt that all labels being visible and eating up precious screen real estate. Maybe the labeling process was too cumbersome for messages that you want to tag with existing labels … Dunno.

Either way, if its was not intended as a way for you and me to reduce my storage space and demands on Google’s infrastructure, its a nice armament in the war on spam.

Technorati Tags: gmail, gmail labels, gmail features, gmail spam, email spam, email storage, gmail storage

Hulu for Academic Lectures …

sunjay — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 19:08:49 +0000

Lifehacker reviews site Academic Earth – a Hulu-like creation for accessing free lectures and content from Universities and Entrepreneurs. Now you can follow in the footsteps of Steve Jobs without having to move to Mountain View and audit classes at Stanford.

I’m looking forward to checking out one from Princeton Professor Alan Binder on the origins of the financial mess. Or passing this one along to my sister on whether to pursue an MBA from Silicon Valley legend Guy Kawasaki.

Speaking @ Tyson’s Corner PMI Luncheon Group

sunjay — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 18:15:55 +0000

On Tuesday March 24th, Sunjay Pandey will be speaking at the Project Management Institute’s Tyson’s Corner Area Luncheon Group . Sunjay will be reprising a topic entitled The Switching Gears Factor which describes portions of ALTERthought’s IT Governance approaches – particularly estimation and budgeting. In this session, Sunjay will discuss how the multi-tasking arising from multi-project assignments can impact IT projects. He will also discuss how it can be accounted for and how to manage this impact. Registration is available on-line. We look forward to seeing you there.

Speaking @ PMI – Central Virginia Chapter

sunjay — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 18:10:33 +0000

On Thursday, March 19th, Sunjay Pandey will be speaking at the Project Management Institute’s Central Virginia Chapter. Sunjay will be presenting a topic entitled The Switching Gears Factor which describes portions of ALTERthought’s IT Governance approaches – particularly estimation and budgeting. Specifically, Sunjay’s presentation discusses how multi-tasking negatively impacts project schedules and budgets and how to measure and manage this impact. Registration is available on-line. We look forward to seeing you there.

ALTERthought Sponsors RailsDay 2006

don — Wed, 14 Jun 2006 19:23:47 +0000

If there’s one thing that we here at ALTERthought are passionate about – it’s Mackerel. Yeah, the fish. If there’s one other thing, though, it would be sponsoring geek’d-out Rails events.

To that end, ALTERthought has selflessly suspended its efforts to build the world’s largest free-standing Mackerel shrine built completely out of Mac-Minis and has donated one fresh from the factory as a RailsDay 2006 prize. (no, really – check out the logo bar on the RailsDay page – ’bout halfway down … no, not there … yeah there! … oh yeah, that’s our logo right there)

If ever there was a reason to blow a Friday and Saturday night coding – I’d say a free Mac-mini qualifies? Hurry up and sign up before it’s too late.

Do it for the mackerel.

RailsDay announcement
Our announcement

Technorati Tags: railsday, railsday2006, rails, rubyonrails, alterthought