Drinks

As far as we know, there is no official Social Media Day. But we do think there should be one. So we invite you to celebrate the revolution of media becoming a social dialogue by attending or organizing a Social Media Day meetup in your area on June 30. What better way to celebrate social media than connecting with other enthusiasts in your area?

On Wednesday, June 30, we’ll be organizing meetups in cities where we have staff using Meetup Everywhere. So come join us for drinks in New York City or San Francisco or anywhere. Because we can’t be everywhere, we encourage you to attend or organize a meetup in your community using our Meetup Everywhere page (or by creating a meetup using the widget below).

Social media has changed our lives. It has not only changed the way we communicate, but the way we connect with one another, consume our news, conduct our work, organize our lives, and much more. So why not celebrate?

Tags: announcements, Events, mashable, meetup everywhere, social media day

When partnering with brands for you location-based network, it’s probably best to choose companies that are ubiquitous. As in, Starbucks ubiquitous. With over 17,000 store locations around the world (including over 11,000 in the U.S. alone), the chain, as everyone knows, is everywhere. So it looks like Brightkite chose wisely.

Brightkite has a new deal with with coffee chain that with give users of the service deals on drinks. They’ve also worked with Starbucks to create branded badges for the first time, moving into the virtual good realm that rivals Foursquare and Gowalla have been exploring for a while. Brightkite says it’s the biggest brand integration they’ve done so far.

So what’s the deal? Brightkite doesn’t want to give away all the details at the risk of ruining some surprises, but one aspect is that if you check-in (or post something like a note or image) at a local Starbucks during “Frappuccino happy hour” (that is, 3 PM to 5 PM until May 16th), you’ll get half-priced Frappuccinos. You’ll also unlock other features and rewards, including Frappuccino badges that you can pin to your profile.

Again, this is nothing new in the world of check-in services, but it shows that different brands are getting more interested in striking deals with many of the players. And why wouldn’t they? All of these different services offer ways to get more customers in stores.

Brightkite says to expect more deals like this in the future.

There are two sides to every story, but this email exchange between Mahalo founder and CEO Jason Calacanis and one of his (now former) employees is a lesson in how not to handle a resignation.

Jason says this was a private exchange and that he was just being honest with Evan. Evan says Jason can’t control his emotions.

If you’re going to trash your employee, do it verbally so that there isn’t a record of it on the Internet later. Or, don’t trash them at all and organize drinks with the team to see them off so that the rest of your employees know you care. Read from the bottom up.

April 20, 2010

Resignation

Jason Calacanis at his finest.

I should note, that instead of responding, he instead removed my email account. Real pro of him. Good thing I forwarded it to myself first :P

Begin forwarded message:

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Evan Culver
Date: Tue, Apr 20, 2010 at 10:53 PM
Subject: Re: Resignation
To: jason@calacanis.com

Really?

What is your deal? I will ultimately *have* to come back to Mahalo to pick up my things. Why so rash, what is your rationale? This seems really unprofessional and when other developers and employees see this, it just makes them want to leave ASAP. Is it really that big of a deal that people find better things for them than Mahalo?

On Tue, Apr 20, 2010 at 10:19 PM, wrote:

Evan,

Don’t come back to the office, do not email the team list.

Elliot will send you paperwork tomorrow. Today was your last day.

Good luck being employee 4,367 at a dying company.

Horribly disappointed in you.

J

Sent via BlackBerry from T-Mobile

From: Evan Culver
Date: Tue, 20 Apr 2010 21:48:37 -0700
To: Jason Calacanis; Jacob Burch; Jeff Ammons
Subject: Resignation

Hey guys,

This isn’t an easy email to write, but as the subject suggests, this email is to inform you of my resignation from Mahalo effective in 2 weeks. An amazing opportunity came out of nowhere that I just couldn’t say no to. I’ll be writing code as a UI engineer at and contributing to the open-source project on a full-time basis.

I’ve never worked with such a great team and learned so much in such a short period of time. I owe all of it to the opportunity you’ve given me, Jason and I thank you immensely for that. Jeff and Jacob, you guys are amazingly brave for tackling such a great undertaking. I’m impressed you do it with seemingly such ease. Many people would fail quickly in your shoes and I applaud you for your leadership in such a fast-paced environment and against such great odds.

I certainly won’t be going far (), so I hope to continue a lasting relationship and hope that we all can work together sometime in the future.

Thanks again,

It turns out that, at least for smart restaurateurs, making the dining experience ridiculously noisy is good for business: people buy more drinks per hour, and they finish eating and leave sooner.

George Prochnik at The Daily Beast says the drive for higher profits isn't the only reason restaurants are noisy. There's also been a general trend toward a type of decor that magnifies sound instead of muffling it (think concrete floors and hard surfaces everywhere), and an architect tells Prochnik that people want the feeling of an "urban hoedown" when they go out to eat these days, not a refined/stuffy experience.

But then there's the money angle:

In the mid-1980s, researchers at Fairfield University demonstrated that people increased their rate of chewing by almost a third when listening to faster, louder music, accelerating from 3.83 bites a minute to 4.4 bites a minute. Stoked with data of this nature, chain restaurants, such as Dick Clark’s American Bandstand Grill, developed computerized sound systems that were preset to raise the tempo and volume of music at hours of the day when corporate wanted to turn tables.

And a study completed in the summer of 2008 in France found that when music was played at 72 decibels, men consumed an average of 2.6 drinks at a rate of one drink per 14.51 minutes. When the sound level was cranked up to 88 decibels, the numbers spiked to an average of 3.4 drinks, with one consumed every 11.47 minutes.

Why does this work? Prochnik says it may partly be that you drink and eat more when it's not easy to talk. But he also says that there may be something going on at the brain chemistry level--that "noise is a real, physical stimulant." For example, Italian researchers demonstrated that "acoustic stimulation" heightens the effect of ecstasy, in what was likely the best study to participate in ever, and Prochnik claims "soldiers on battle missions crave heavy metal."

So the next time you're out with friends at a noisy restaurant, keep an eye on your eating and drinking habits, or you might end up spending more than you planned to before the music kicked in.

"How Restaurants Get You Drunk" [The Daily Beast]

When it’s 40 degrees outside in Tokyo, the obvious thing to do is pay $70 to go into a bar where it’s 20 degrees. But hey, drinks in ice glasses!

I recently met for drinks with a friend of a friend who works at LinkedIn. At the time, I was working on a consulting assignment where one of our challenges is to design a compelling, social media inspired, intranet experience. During the conversation, I had an idea that brought these two things together: LinkedIn should encourage organisations to host LinkedIn discussion content embedded within their intranets.

The idea is straightforward. LinkedIn work with (larger) organisations to identify relevant industry groups, and then allow the discussions within these groups to be embedded into their intranets. These groups will have to be preselected to suit the interests of the “host” organisation. Also, they need to retain LinkedIn branding as users should still need LinkedIn profiles to participate on them. Most importantly, the discussions aren’t exclusive to the host organisation, they are regular group discussions which are available to Joe Public on LinkedIn’s site and to Joe Employee on their intranet.

There are three drivers for LinkedIn. Firstly, the capturing of target audiences – members of the host organisation who are not LinkedIn members will likely join. Secondly, and perhaps of greater interest, the groups function is driven by user generated content and the use of relevant captive audiences will hopefully drive more relevant content into the groups discussions. Thirdly, by embedding themselves into their audience, LinkedIn further entrench themselves as the premier professional networking site.

For host organisations there are two immediate benefits. Host organisations will immediately have compelling intranet content which will should drive increased participation – a key measure of intranet success. Additionally, by participating in public discussions, the host organisation’s employees build their credibility as recognised practitioners in their professional fields which, in turn, builds the hosts market credibility.

There are cultural and organisational barriers to overcome. LinkedIn need to be a little more comfortable about lowering the walled garden they maintain around their site. Organisations need to be confident about their employees participating on LinkedIn as effective representatives of their organisation. That said, my sense is the benefits outweigh the risks and I would be interested in seeing this type of industry integration from LinkedIn.

Original title and link for this post: How LinkedIn Should Embed Itself Into Our Professional Lives

This guest post from Avistew is part of the new “reader stories” feature here at Get Rich Slowly. Some reader stories contain general “how I did X” advice, and others will be examples of how a GRS reader achieved financial success — or failure. For the past year or so, Avistew has been an active and eloquent commenter on this site. Here’s her story.

Many readers of this blog started their journey with debt, and had to learn to save. My journey was the opposite. I had to learn to spend. The important part of “Get Rich Slowly” for me was always the “Slowly”. I used to think I was doing fine: I put money aside every month, I barely spent anything — I didn’t even need to pay a rent. But I was miserable.

This is how my life was before, when my husband and I were living in France:

• I had a stressful, minimum-wage job. I worked in a frozen-food store, which meant I split my time between carrying boxes of frozen goods into a huge freezer (which made my asthma worse) and dealing with customers at rush hour. I hated it.
• I didn’t pay rent: My parents let my husband and I use an small apartment they owned. For free. This came with a heavy price, though. My parents would drop by without warning, and meddle with our life constantly. But it meant free rent, so we put up with it.
• We were more than frugal — we were cheap. We bought the cheapest of everything, no matter if the quality wasn’t there. We dropped what we called “luxuries”, basically anything that wasn’t needed to survive. We bought food, but no junk food, no frozen pizzas, no chocolate, no desserts (save for fruit), no treats. Ever. We never bought drinks: Water was good enough and we could get it from the tap. We never ate out or ordered in. We didn’t buy any entertainment-related things. No books, CDs, DVDs, or comic books. No going to the theatre. Everything we owned was borrowed, a gift, or something we had purchased prior to getting married.

We were piling up money, so we thought we were doing things right. But it was never enough. I started being obsessed with money. We could never save enough of it: I wanted to cut off more and more. Sometimes I’d go without eating just to spend less.

I’d forgotten that money is a means, not an end. I’d forgotten that the goal is to save up to have a good life, not to have more money.

And then the crap hit the fan.

And here my troubles began
First came the health problems. My husband’s psoriasis (which is stress-triggered) spread to over 90% of his body, accompanied by intense swelling. He had to spend two weeks in the hospital before he was allowed to come out.

Without him to keep me sane, I stressed out more and more. I started having anxiety attacks and developed agoraphobia. I quit my job after having a breakdown in front of everyone in the store.

My parents were worried. The became more present than ever, even when I told them about my stress, and that I needed them to stay away, not contact us unless contacted, and not drop by unannounced. They kept doing it all until I became terrified of them.

Soon after my husband was released from the hospital, my parents came banging at our door one night. When I refused to see them, they accused my husband of keeping me locked up against my will. They threatened to denounce him to the police, and said they would get me in an asylum.

I was already completely panicked, and this didn’t help. Both my parents are doctors, I thought, is there a way they could do it? I would certainly seem crazy to anyone who checked up on me. Hell, I seemed crazy to me.

They were noisy enough to alert the neighbors, who made them leave. We were completely panicked. What if they came back? What if they had us taken away and separated? We needed each other more than ever.

A survivor’s tale
My husband is Canadian, I’m French. We decided right away that we’d move to Canada, stay with his parents at first, and get our own place once we could afford it. We immediately booked plane tickets online. This was Friday. We bought the first available seats on Tuesday.

We had a weekend to get ready before leaving for another continent. That weekend was in some ways the hardest of my life; in other ways, it was a blessing.

We had to sort through all our possessions. With such a short notice, we didn’t have time to sell anything. Neither could we take everything along, with only two suitcases allowed each.

• Books and the like mostly had to be left behind. The bibliophile in me cried the hardest at that. I had books from the time I was born until the time I got married, only a year prior. Every one of them had memories attached to it.
  We gathered those we couldn’t live without and had them shipped — at a hefty price.
• CDs, DVDs, videogames had to be packed without their cases. That was probably harder than it should have been. How can you care so much about a plastic case?
• Furniture, appliances had to be left behind. What wasn’t too big to take along or ship wouldn’t have been compatible in Canada anyways.

And we left. We sent the keys and a letter explaining everything to my parents from the airport. As soon as the plane took off, we felt so much better. Like we had escaped from a prison. (But for the most part, we’d built that prison ourselves.)

Learning from the past
We were adamant that we wouldn’t make the same mistakes again in Canada, so here’s what we did:

• We left my husband’s parents’ place as soon as he got a job. We could have stayed longer — it would have been cheaper — but who knows how that would have turned out?
• We established an actual budget. Up to that point, it was “buy whatever is cheapest”. Now, with an actual budget, we know if we can treat ourselves without putting a hole in our pockets.
• We created entertainment categories. One for the two of us, and one each. Now we can have a date, or buy something we like, and we don’t need to worry too much about it. Because we have our individual fun funds, we can buy a gift for each other without spending each other’s money.

The biggest lesson there though is that although money is important, it’s not that important. [J.D.'s note: Repeat after me, everyone: "It's more important to be happy than it is to be rich."]

When we left, it cost us a lot. Plane tickets bought a few days before the date, boxes shipped the day before we left, and of course all our utilities had to be cancelled on such a short notice, so there were fees involved there. If we hadn’t been living in France, the hospital stay might have ruined us, too.

But the thing is, we didn’t care. We didn’t think the money was as important. And sure, we wasted a lot of it. Had we not pushed ourselves so much, we wouldn’t have had to spend nearly as much. But we’re glad we spent it.

My advice to everyone would be: Invest in yourself. Invest in your happiness, your health, your education. If you don’t, it’ll cost you more than you’ll save. (Financially or otherwise.)

And you know what? We’re still saving! We didn’t make the opposite mistake of overspending and going into debt. There’s a middle ground.

I think there’s a danger, when you used to be in debt, to overdo it and make the opposite mistakes. To become what I used to be. I want to tell you: It’s not worth it. Try to reach a balance. If you’re saving, you’re saving, and that’s good. Could you save more? Maybe, but make sure it’s worth it first.
Sometimes, it’s better in the long run to save less.

Reminder: This is a story from one of your fellow readers. Please be nice. After nearly a decade of blogging, I have a thick skin, but it can be scary to put your story out in public for the first time. Remember that this guest author isn’t a professional writer, and is just learning about money like you are.

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Related Articles at Get Rich Slowly:

• How One Father Taught His Son About Money
• Reader Story: The Secret Millionaire and the Mathmobile
• Reader Story: What My Father Taught Me About Debt
• Reader Story: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Moved in with Mom
• Reader Story: How I Saved Hundreds of Dollars on Insurance

No, no, I’m not talking about going to the Diggnation party and downing a couple of drinks. This year there’s some geekier ways to augment your reality while you walk from panel to panel or event to party.

Here’s a few.

1. Win $1,000 by using SXSW version of the Junaio augmented reality app. The game is called ScavengAR and you can get details on the game here. Sorry, only for iPhone 3GS users. If you see me at the Rackspace Revolution party on Monday night (I’ll be working the door so should be easy to find) I’ll be wearing one of the T-shirts that can help you win this game (and the augmented reality stuff it does on my shirt is pretty mind-blowing. ).

2. Get the SXSW QR code app. There will be a ton of QR codes at SXSW, including on everyone’s badges. If you have a QR code app on your phone you’ll be able to easily exchange information without having to collect old-style business cards.

3. Use Gowalla, MyTown, and Foursquare and watch out for other location-based games that will do something fun at SXSW. Foursquare just announced their SXSW badges and I’m meeting with Gowalla’s co-founder later today to get the skinny on what they are doing. Foursquare is releasing a new iPhone app tomorrow, which has a much better design and new features. Gowalla is expected to do a lot too, and has a huge party at SXSW that’s already sold out. Are you not sure which one is best for you? Check out the shootout I put up on Google Buzz that got hundreds of comments.

4. Plan out your SXSW fun with Plancast (a new kind of event planner). They have a whole page dedicated to SXSW and most of my geeky friends are using Plancast to find events.

5. Prepare for wireless troubles. I talk about some of the preparations that AT&T is saying they’ve made to get ready for SXSW over on Google Buzz, but we still expect troubles so some of this stuff might not work at all. I’m carrying a Droid that will be on Verizon. At CES that served me well. Unfortunately not everyone has the luxury of being able to afford two devices. AT&T says they’ll have a bunch of wifi access points throughout downtown, though, which should help reduce the load on their cell towers.

6. Get some Stickybits and hand them out like business cards and stick them to all your friends’ computers like I will be. Hah. What are these? Little stickers with a barcode that you can put information into. Or, turn into a forum. Techcrunch explains.

I’m sure I’m missing a ton of apps that we could use to augment our realities, so please leave your favorite apps that you recommend other SXSW attendees to use in the comments here and I’ll probably write another post later in the week.

Oh, and the news? The ScavengAR app is built on top of the new Junaio 2.0 platform that’s the first Augmented Reality app that is designed to be used indoors where GPS might not work properly. That makes it great for using it at parties, or at museums. They are also shipping two new channels, one for BART (Bay Area transit, will show you station locations and estimated arrival times) and one for Eventful, which will show you event data from Eventful, which is a comprehensive calendar of local events. You can download Junaio 2.0 now from the app store (the video for ScavangAR shows you how) and there will be more details on 2.0 on Junaio’s website by the end of the day.