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What It’s Like To Work In An Office Designed For Telecommuting
Plantronics’ new office for telecommuting sounds like paradise to some and hell to others. But how is it changing the way the company’s employees work?
Imagine working for a company that has designed its office to encourage employees to work from home (or wherever else they want). It’s not a fantasy for employees of wireless headset manufacturer Plantronics, which recently built a new headquarters in Santa Cruz, Calif. designed to make telecommuting easy. The building is loaded with video chat rooms, quiet "focus" rooms, wall-mounted TV screens for videoconferencing, and enough desk space for just 60% to 70% of employees. There is no assigned seating.
After writing about the headquarters last week, we received plenty of skeptical reader comments; many of you suggested that such a setup would encourage people to become workaholics since work can be taken anywhere. Others questioned the loss of coworker camaraderie. We spoke to a handful of Plantronics employees to find out.
Global Internet Traffic Projected to Quadruple by 2015
Cisco Visual Networking Index Projects Network-Connected Devices Will Outnumber People 2 to 1; a Million Minutes of Internet Video to Be Transmitted Per Second
SAN JOSE, Calif. – June 1, 2011 –Ciscopredicts that the number of network-connected devices will be more than 15 billion, twice the world's population, by 2015. In the fifth annualCisco® Visual Networking Index (VNI) Forecast (2010-2015) released today, the company also said the total amount of global Internet traffic will quadruple by 2015 and reach 966 exabytes per year.
The projected increase of Internet traffic between 2014 and 2015 alone is 200 exabytes, which is greater than the total amount of Internet Protocol traffic generated globally in 2010. On the verge of reaching 1 zettabyte, which is equal to a sextillion bytes, or a trillion gigabytes by 2015, global IP traffic growth is driven by four primary factors, according to Cisco. They are:
An increasing number of devices: The proliferation of tablets, mobile phones, connected appliances and other smart machines is driving up the demand for connectivity. By 2015, there will be nearly 15 billion network connections via devices -- including machine-to-machine -- and more than two connections for each person on earth.
More Internet users: By 2015, there will be nearly 3 billion Internet users --more than 40 percent of the world's projected population.
Faster broadband speed: The average fixed broadband speed is expected to increase four-fold, from 7 megabits per second in 2010 to 28 Mbps in 2015. The average broadband speed has already doubled within the past year from 3.5 Mbps to 7 Mbps.
More video: By 2015, 1 million video minutes --the equivalent of 674 days --will traverse the Internet every second.
Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter are the royal family of social networking sites in the U.S., but that doesn't mean they rule the virtual world overseas. To be sure, Facebook ranks No. 1 in some countries—Britain, France, and Spain are smitten, among others—but even there it faces healthy competition from other players, some local and some global.
Social networking sites sometimes migrate unexpectedly across borders: Pioneering U.S. site Friendster, for instance, has faded dramatically back home but has found receptive new markets in Asia, while Google's Orkut is a star in Brazil. Many of Facebook's fiercest rivals around the world are homegrown champions. With 200 million registered users, China's Qzone vies for the title of the world's largest social networking site, while VKontakte is far and away the largest player in Russia.
Click on to meet some of the up-and-coming social networking sites from around the world, ranked from largest to smallest.
Facebook may have 500 million users, but having an outpost on the social-media site won't necessarily increase sales or referrals to your website. But the right tools, used strategically, can help make Facebook an important part of your marketing, lead acquisition and customer-service strategies.
Here are some do's and don'ts for your company's Facebook page.
Why Do You Need a Facebook Fan Page? You may ask, “Why do I even need a Facebook fan page?” Here’s why: Facebook currently has an Alexa ranking of 2. They are the second most trafficked website next only to Google!
This means your Facebook page will be indexed faster on Google and other search engines, so if you don’t have a fan page, be sure to add one and promote it.
If you have had a home business for awhile, chances are good that you have a great local following that provides you with most of your business. This might be great but you might feel as if you have reached a ceiling as far as your payment goes, and what you are going to be making from your home business. If you feel like you can’t go any farther with the local responsibilities that you have, you might want to move your home business online. This is something that you should consider if you find yourself wanting to grow, but don’t’ find the avenues for it locally.
First Steps
First, you have to decide if you are going to benefit from being online. Remember that if you move your home business online, you can expect more business right away. So you have to decide whether or not you are going to be able to handle more business, and if you are, you have to decide if it is going to be worth it. If you have the time and the resources to be able to handle a jump in business, then you might be ready to move online.
Next, you have to find a good web hosting site and get a website that you can use. What you do here is going to depend on how good you are at websites. IS this something that you can do on your own, or is it something that you are going to need help with? The decision is up to you, but you have to be reasonable about what your skills are online, and whether or not you are going to be able to maintain and build a website. If you feel that you can’t do a very good job you should hire it done. Remember that online today there are lots of great sites, and you are going to have a lot of competition. This means that if you are going to have a site, you had better make sure that it is good.
After you have a good website, you have to concentrate on how you are going to market your business. Be sure that you are finding lots of places to advertise your website, because remember that it isn’t going to advertise itself. You have to put the time into getting your name out there, but it is worth it because after you have done so, you’ll find that the business continues to grow. It can be something that is really frustrating, but in the end, it can end up making you the proudest business owner who really knows how to get the business going. If you are confidant, then you can move your business online, and you will see great success.
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