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38% of remote workers work from bed

New study reveals how Americans have built home offices and workspaces for remote work. Sixty-four percent of those surveyed have made an effort to curate their background in some way, most commonly by people working in HR, recruiting, and accounting. Those working remotely in legal, insurance, nonprofits, and social services made the least effort in this area. Sixty-three percent of people have spent money to improve how they look on calls, on average spending $195. This can include everything from a nicer webcam to a ring light to houseplants or wall art to spruce up what’s seen in the frame. In addition to spending money, 47 percent take advantage of the free option to “touch-up” their appearance on Zoom and other leading video conferencing platforms.

Covaxin effectively neutralises both Alpha, Delta variants of Covid-19: US' top health institute

The National Institute of Health (NIH) in the United States has found that Bharat Biotech’s COVAXIN vaccine generates antibodies that effectively neutralize both Alpha and Delta variants of COVID-19. “Results from two studies of blood serum from people who had received suggest that the vaccine generates antibodies that effectively neutralize the B.1.1.7 (Alpha) and B.1.617 (Delta) variants of SARS-CoV-2, first identified in the United Kingdom and India, respectively,” NIH said in a statement.

Don’t Write Code for a Startup: Confessions of a developer

Confessions of a serial startup software developer. 1. You’re Giving Up Mentorship You won’t get the mentorship you need from senior engineers. 2. High Breadth but Little Depth There’s too much to do and nobody knows what works yet. 3. You’ll Work Hard Instead of SmartThere’s too much to do and nobody knows what works yet. 4. Hire Fast, Fire Faster I don’t know who coined this phrase, but it always felt irresponsible. 5. Your Equity Is Worth Nothing You’re giving up your salary now in hopes of cashing out equity later.

Do Chance Meetings at the Office Boost Innovation? There’s No Evidence of It.

For some, the office even stifles creativity. As the pandemic eases in the U.S., a few companies seek to reimagine what work might look like. “The idea you can only be collaborative face-to-face is a bias,”  “And I’d ask, how much creativity and innovation have been driven out of the office because you weren’t in the insider group, you weren’t listened to, you didn’t go to the same places as the people in positions of power were gathering?

Your competitors don't matter

Your real competition isn’t your competitors, it’s the status quo. Visa’s biggest competition isn’t Amex, it’s cash. This was true with our kreplace situation as well. We were concerned that the Linux community would adopt their technology instead of ours. In the end, they adopted neither—they preserved the status quo.

6 Product Frameworks From Tony Fadell, the Inventor of the iPod, iPhone & Nest

Tony Fadell on product design do’s and don’ts. 1. “What do you see?”  It is in our human nature to stop seeing what’s right in front of us. 2. “For truly great designs, 50% of the design is the design. 50% of the design is the story behind the design.” 3. Create your constraints   4. Find Your Product Development Heartbeat 5. What A World-Changing Founder Looks Like 6. Be A Troublemaker

The problem isn’t remote working – it’s clinging to office-based practices

Do we need to go to offices? Work 9 to 5? At this unique moment in history, employers can rethink everything, says researcher Alexia Cambon. How about the “where” of work? It is apparent just from the language we use that the office is still viewed as the headquarters for work. Even the term “remote” implies that you are away from the place work is usually done. The dominance of the office was necessary in a time without home internet or laptops, but we are long past needing to prove that work can be done outside an employer-owned space. The “how” of work was perhaps the most worrying discovery of our research. There is a long-held assumption that the hallowed meeting is the best way for us to collaborate. This culture of meetings was established in the 1950s, before methods of work that allowed us to collaborate outside meetings (back then, that meant memos passed from one secretary to the next) had today’s speed and efficiency (email, instant messaging, shared drives).

Tech Companies Are Training AI to Read Your Lips

First came facial recognition. Now, an early form of lip-reading AI is being deployed in hospitals, power plants, public transportation, and more. Many of the problems with facial recognition have become public knowledge only within the last several years, due in large part to research and activism by people who were actively being harmed by it. Specifically, the landmark 2018 paper in which Joy Buolamwini and Timnit Gebru first revealed that facial recognition is less accurate for women and people of color.

Your product is a joke (and that's brilliant!)

The rules that help make good improv comedy can surprisingly help make good product too. Let’s run through interesting parallels between the two, and how you can apply some lessons from improv to build better product. The key product lesson is that you should understand the world you are in before you do anything else. This is the base reality of your product. Who are your customers? What are their problems? What do they do about these problems? What part of the existing solutions will you not change? Resist the natural rush to be creative with features, designs, engineering – and first observe and understand your base reality. The base reality shouldn’t be innovative and you should be careful about contriving it to be what you wish. Be specific and truthful. Here are some examples of base realities..

Trajectory matters more than state

When considering how to grow your business, it’s not about where you are, it’s about where you’re going and how fast you’re getting there. Long-term thinking is hard for a very simple reason: every company is in a race against the clock. Whether you’re bootstrapped or bankrolled, that clock is always ticking. Creating a product company requires an upfront investment of time and money and gives you a limited window to either break even or show enough evidence of growth to secure funding. It’s hard to worry about future problems when you have a hardwired focus on hitting a short-term target. But think of it this way: which deserves more attention, a big wound that’s healing, or a tiny tumor that’s growing? It’s not about where it is, it’s about where it’s going.

The Black Box Inventor Was Told to Drop the Idea

Warren was studying for his amateur radio license when a World War II ban on hobby radio forced him to redirect his efforts to chemistry sets. But when Warren gave his supervisor Technical Memorandum 142, describing the use of a wire to record several minutes of cockpit conversation, his boss showed no enthusiasm. Warren was told to pass the idea to the instruments group and “get on with blowing up fuel tanks,” as Warren was quoted in a 2019 BBC News article.

9 Ways to Build Virality into your Product

If your startup is building a consumer product, your product has to be viral. For consumer products, the average revenue per user tends to be relatively low, so you won’t be able to afford spending much on advertising or sales. It’s hard to slap a viral channel onto an existing product, and you’ll have to think about how to make viral growth happen right at the start. Consumer product startups have to bake a viral channel into their product from the get-go. They can’t merely glue it on later.

Flipkart to pilot drone delivery of Covid-19 vaccines in Telangana

Flipkart will utilise learnings from its tech-enabled supply chain to deploy drones and enable deliveries of medical supplies. The pilot, which is expected to be conducted for over six days, will be tested out for delivering thousands of Covid-19 vaccines in Hyderabad while keeping in mind all the safety and efficiency parameters.