Many cities have been actively campaigning against Uber for various reasons in favor of the existing Taxi Cab networks. At times it’s resulted in Uber being blocked in some parts of the city, or some services (such as UberX), or being kicked out altogether.

Yet I recently saw an article, Show Me the Way to Go Home: An Empirical Investigation of Ride Sharing and Alcohol Related Motor Vehicle Homicide, which confirmed what myself and likely you have also suspected. In short, it found:

A significant drop in the rate of homicides [arises] after the introduction of Uber.

The article also confirmed that educational institutions have yet to adopt click bait headlines.

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I see more and more SaaS companies adopting use of the Net Promoter Score (NPS) metric.

If you don’t know yet what I’m talking about, you’ll surely recognize this survey question:

Net Promoter Score_orig

How likely are you to recommend XYZ product/service/etc to a friend?

Followed by a simple 0 to 10 point scale ranging from Not Likely to Very Likely. NPS is considered one of the best ways to measure customer loyalty and the growth potential of your product.
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This post is less about how to activate this Apple iOS feature and more about bringing awareness that it exists!

If you’ve ever been on an SMS or text chain with a half dozen of your friends it can get out of control quickly. Before you know it, a dozen back-to-back texts in the span of a minute has your vibrating and ringing phone making you feel more like you’re at a club instead of the office cubicle you’re sitting in. If you have an Apple Watch too, you really feel the pain!

Sure we all know how to turn off all text / SMS notifications, but did you know you can turn off notifications for an individual text chain?

Step 1. Open Up The Group Text

First, open the Apple Messages app from your iPhone and select the group you want to mute.

(A quick reminder, this guide is for iOS users – iPhones, iPads, iPods and the like – as of iOS 8.)

Step 2. Tap “Details”

Step 1

Step 3. Turn “Do Not Disturb” On to Mute

Step 3

And that’s it.

Don’t worry, you’ll still get the red number badges above the iOS Messages app so you’ll know when a new message is in, but without the distracting notifications!

Easy fix to a frustrating, but very real problem, as Gizmodo and GroupXiT agree. Thank you Apple for stopping the insanity!

Sometimes you can just drop an image right in to your site.

For example, if your image’s background and the site’s background are the same (or even better, the image’s background is transparent) then you’re probably just good-to-go, like this:

Iphone-1

However when you have an image with a different background color,

Various_iPods    Various_iPods

Or especially a changing border background color that’s inconsistent around the four sides,

after
after

A proper border can help create a smooth transition between your image and the rest of the page. It’ll make your post look a lot better without much work at all.

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Let’s try something different here.

On average the posts here are around 1,000 words and come in once a week or so. But what if the posts weren’t quite as involved?

John Carmack explores this idea when he talks about blogging about the little things.

It doesn’t need to be big, significant, detailed, mind-blowing to come out but just of a little value. It is helpful to think just of one person who had the exact same problem as yours and was helped by your post. Maybe the post won’t get thousands of shares as we see in our reading list but hey, it saved someone’s time :).

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At a recent coffee meeting a friend asked about a moving into the startup and technology world. He’s interested in changing careers but not sure how to go about it, if he’d be able to do it successfully, or if he’s crazy for even wanting to switch.

I’ve seen many people make the switch – some successfully and some not as much.

Perhaps the biggest lesson out of the gate is that it’s up to you. Nobody is going to magically transform your career except you!

As Jeff Hilimire says in a related post to new entrepreneurs on their startup ideas:

There is good news and bad news. The good news is, it matters very little what their current idea is for their startup, because EVERYTHING IS DEPENDENT ON THEM PERSONALLY. Then I told them that the bad news was the same…it matters very little what their current idea is, EVERYTHING DEPENDS ON THEM.

Similarly when looking to change your career, the good news is that the control is all in your own hands. The bad news is the same, it’s only in your hands.

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Recently I heard from an Apple Watch owner that they liked their Apple Watch, but they didn’t necessarily love it.

To most, the Apple Watch is only good for two things:

  1. Notifications, and
  2. Health Tracking

Sure it’s pretty good at those things, but it sounded like they were expecting more. Underwhelmed describes the feeling I’ve heard.

I’d agree for the most part but I’d also add in a third category for some niche uses, such as score and yardage golf tracking apps. Thing is, I’d bet that these many small niche categories are the ones that will have the biggest potential.

Eventually developers and users will truly understand how smart watches can change how we go about our day, the same way one niche apps like Uber (location tracking) and Instagram (photos) changed how we used smartphones. Remember, neither of those now omnipresent apps were on the iPhone 1!

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Expected value is a wonderful topic. Easy enough to learn in an hour, but complex and applicable enough to keep you interested for years.

As someone who’s always in search of the answer, always trying to synthesize (or let’s be honest, over analyze!) a dataset into meaning, EV has become my sliderule, toolbox, and IDE, letting me input the right parameters to spit out an objective solution.

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What if, as a Business Analyst, your approach to managing requirements could also apply to managing people? That’s an interesting proposition, right?

If you already have BA skills this makes the transition into a team leadership role easy. And as we’ll see, this management style is also well-suited to get the most out of the young knowledge workers filling up the modern entrepreneurial organization.

knowledge workers
Knowledge workers at work

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