Jobs on Guts and Trust

“You have to trust in something: your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”

–Steve Jobs (1955 – )
American businessman
Co-founder and CEO of Apple Inc.

There’s nothing more powerful to the salesday than enthusiasm. It excites everyone to positive action…

  • you
  • your team
  • your prospect
  • the new customer you just brought on board
  • the internal department responsible for the delivery of what you just sold
  • the receptionist who talks with your prospects and customers first

As you work with your people today (and tomorrow) your level of enthusiasm will impact all of them (one way or the other). What do you want your impact to be?

TGIS (Thank God it’s Smonday*)
_____

Daniel Tunkelang Leaving Google Maps to Join LinkedIn

Daniel Tunkelang has announced on his blog today that he is leaving his position at Google Maps for an exciting research position at LinkedIn. Daniel was hired at Google about a year ago. There he worked on authority pages and the of mapping businesses to their official home pages.

When Daniel was first hired at Google as an engineer he did something that was amazing and delightful. He reached out to me, looking to understand issues and concerns that I had with Google Maps and their approach to Local. We initially had several detailed email exchanges and a long telephone call. He was gracious, inquisitive and forthright. All things that I respect and honor. He reached across a chasm that typically exists between Google and me and was sincere in his efforts to understand my critiques. Google could learn much from his outreach efforts (although as he pointed out personal contact doesn’t scale well :) ).

We have stayed in touch, off and on throughout the year and I have appreciated the occasional communications and (personal) assistance that he has provided. Even though I don’t know him in a truly personal sense, I consider him a friend and wish him well at LinkedIn.

Google’s party site

More and more websites are enhancing their login systems to include buttons for identity providers such as Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, etc. Users generally prefer this approach because it makes it easier for them to sign up for a new site that they visit. However if a user already has an account at a website, and they are used to logging in with their email and password, then it is hard to get them to switch to using an identity provider.

Google has recently released a sample site that shows how a website can migrate users away from password based logins, and instead have them leverage an identity provider. This sample site incorporates many of the ideas of the Internet Identity community, as well as feedback from numerous websites who have been on the cutting edge of applying these techniques. The following video provides highlights of some elements of the user experience.

The sample site is at openidsamplestore.com, but we suggest first reading this FAQ which describes the site and has links to additional videos of some of the features. We hope website developers will use these techniques to reduce the need for passwords on their site.