Seeing the tremendous growth around Metrotown I am excited for the future of Surrey’s new city centre. The new Surrey Library is a great anchor to our city. The vision of the Surrey Central development is finally coming to realization.

Serendipity

These are some of the Twitter accounts that I follow either in my main feed or via a Twitter list.

• Michael Hyatt
• Smart Planet
• Kelly Butler
• Marc and Angel
• Seth Godin
• Andy Blumenthal

Earth | Time Lapse View from Space, Fly Over | NASA, ISS from Michael König on Vimeo.

With the Facebook timeline rolling out it becomes real easy to peer back into the past and remember (or try to forget) activities from your past. In some cases a little bit of culling might be in order. There is just so much information that has been dropped into this black hole.

Early users of the timeline have reported that they are surprised when they look back at the timeline and immediately start on a pruning process. One can hide items from the timeline, delete them permanently or highlight certain events or photos.

Facebook is trying to become the single source or aggregator of you life stream. It will be our choice if they will be given the keys.

What meeting?

Wonder why your brainstorming sessions are a bust? Mitch Ditkoff (Ideachampions) gives us some of the most common reasons:

1. Poor facilitation
2. Wrong (or poorly articulated) topic
3. Unmotivated participants
4. Insufficient diversity of participants
5. Inadequate orientation
6. No transition from “business as usual”
7. Lack of clear ground rules
8. Sterile meeting space
9. Hidden (or competing) agendas
10. Lack of robust participation
11. Insufficient listening
12. Habitual idea killing behavior
13. Attachment to old (“pet”) ideas
14. Discomfort with ambiguity
15. Hyper-seriousness (not enough fun)
16. Endless interruptions
17. PDA addiction (Crackberries)
18. Impatience (premature adoption of the first “right idea”)
19. Group think
20. Hierarchy and/or competing sub-groups
21. Imbalance of divergent and convergent thinking
22. No tools and techniques to spark the imagination
23. Inelegant ways of capturing new ideas
24. No time for personal reflection
25. Pre-mature evaluation
26. No follow-up plan

Now that you’ve finished nodding your head 26 times, check out some of the excellent advice to make your next brainstorming session a success. 26 Reasons Why Most Brainstorming Session Fail (and what to do about it)

• Each year the amount of information created in the enterprise, paper and digital combined, grows faster than 65%.
• Non-productive information work, such as reformatting documents or reentering documents into computers, consumed more than $1.5 trillion in U.S. salaries last year.
• Survey respondents spend as much as 26% of their time trying to manage information overload.
• Respondents split their time evenly between dealing with paper and digital information, but 71% prefer to deal with digital information.
• The amount of time U.S. information workers spent last year managing paper-driven information overload cost $460 billion in salaries.
• Reducing the time wasted dealing with information overload by 15% could save a company with 500 employees more than $2 million a year.

Source: IDC survey, Information Overload Site

And more serious:

• 28% – The percentage of the typical workday wasted by interruptions caused by unnecessary information
• 53% – The percentage of people who believe that less than half of the information they receive is valuable
• 42% – The percentage of people who accidentally use the wrong information at least once per week

So what is IOS? Watch this video!

Many of us spend most of our working hours in offices that were designed in the 1970′s.  But we don’t need to. Check out officesnapshots.com and laze away a while checking out the digs of all your favourite companies. The tech companies, advertising firms, innovation groups and every stripe in-between.

Dream and enjoy.  And don’t forget to check out the nutrition stations, meeting rooms and fun spaces.

One of the really, on the edge ones, is the offices of Selgas Cano in Madrid.

So how does your office rate?

Inn At The Quay, originally uploaded by Elwin Witzke.

I really like the architecture of this hotel built right on the Fraser River in New Westminster, B.C.

Peaceful on Deer Lake, originally uploaded by Elwin Witzke.

While taking a stroll around Deer Lake we saw a number of people enjoying this quiet jewel in the middle of Burnaby. It’s a beautiful place to come an spend an hour in a busy day.

I made this Gigapan image from the north press platform during President Obama’s inaugural address at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, DC on January 20, 2009. It’s made up of 220 images and the final image size is 59,783 X 24,658 pixels or 1,474 megapixels.

Inauguration

You can view the image on his blog or in fullscreen at
http://gigapan.org/viewGigapanFullscreen.php?id=15374

Zoom in and pan around. It’s lots of fun.

I was in the Skytrain station (Granville) a few days ago and noticed all the Telus ads. New smartphones, Blackberrys and all kinds cell phones. Stay in touch, access the internet etc, etc.  Kinda makes me want to visit my local Telus dealer to get something new.

But wait!

Telus doesn’t have any service in the underground Skytrain stations in Vancouver. Hasn’t had it ever that I can remember and I’ve been a Telus customer for at least 15 years. I see lots of people using their phones – I wonder who they are with? Definitely not with Telus or Bell, our local CDMA carriers.

Why is that Telus can’t get it together and get the appropriate antenna system installed in the tunnel? Not enough high-paying business customers? They seemed to be able to do it for the tunnel by the PNE. Well,  the worlds a-changin, and more and more of those high-paying business customers are moving transit (ie. Skytrain). 

What a joke, advertising your phones and the cool ($$) services in a place that has no signal.

I think Telus marketing needs to have a heart to heart with Telus engineering and infrastructure delivery.

Then comes the “call to action” – implement some of these techniques in my everyday life.

The following is a short interview with Veronica Belmont on Mahalo Daily.

From: Mahalo Daily

For the more advanced user check out the first 2-3 minutes of this one. And you thought a stylus for your PDA/Smartphone was a recent invention.