Hire for Unity

Shawn Blanc on what to look for when hiring:

Our culture is borderline obsessed with the focus on productivity and getting things done. And while I am certainly an advocate for those, at my office, and on my team, unity is far more valuable than productivity. Where there’s unity there’s people who love their job. And a lover will always out-work a worker.

One of the best hiring advice I have come across.

About.Me

What better way to start this blog then write about me? Few weeks back, I read about About.Me(:-)) on TechCrunch. Mike's article had a passionate appeal about getting your name reserved before somebody else grabs it. Since, I have been late at this game earlier also, I went and registered. But other namesakes of mine have already beaten me to the all short names I wanted to pick, like harish, hgarg, etc. So I had to be content with harishgarg. Ah well.

So I got registered and forgot about it. In the meanwhile, I received the invite code 3 weeks back but somehow got missed in the deluge of email spam I receive everyday. Today, since I have decided to resurrect my dormant Blogger account again after 3 years and start blogging, I needed some new way to fill the About Me section. That's when I remembered my About.Me invite code. It's live now with all my accounts. You can see it here - http://about.me/harishgarg.

And I realized I need some good high resolution photos of mine.

Grab Your About.Me, before somebody else does!

Kindle and Social

I am a big fan of Amazon Kindle. I don't own a Kindle, the device, yet. But I have the KIndle Apps installed everything I (or my wife) have. There is just something magical about starting a book on adevice, continuing on another and then finishing it on a 3rd. And all this without trying to remember which page/para I was reading last time.

Amazon has done an amazing job with releasing apps almost every PC/Mac or Mobile platform out there. However, recently, I have been thinking there is something missing in the whole KIndle ecosystem. I have always considered books as a very social thing. People are proud to display their prized (dead Trees) books for the visitors to see. However, right now, there is no good way to do this with the books I for example own in Kindle. Remember, here I am not talking about actually renting the books to my friends for reading; although that would be a amazing feature too. There is a social opportunity around the Kindle or other digital books everybody owns. And since Amazon already has a great e-commerce model, this will be a great addition to let people share what books they own, what books their friends have bought. Lot of the Books are referred and bought by word of mouth between friends and co-workers and people you know. Maybe, there is a opportunity for a startup here.

Anyway, here is what I have in Kindle as of today(lot of them are samples though; I have bought only 5-6 books so far)...

What do you have in your Kindle?