Some tips to start every day refreshed

Move your alarm clock
You may want to have you alarm clock close to hand so you can constantly keep leaning over and pressing it for a few extra minutes snooze time. The reality is it doesn’t really help. Place your alarm just that bit further away so that you really have to stretch or even get up to reach it – any stretching movement stimulates the waking part of the brain.

Avoid caffeine
It may be through habit that one of the first things we do when we get up is go straight for the caffeine hit, but this should be avoided if possible. Since your body has been several hours without fluid, what you need is a proper rehydrating drink such as freshly squeezed orange or grapefruit juice. A cup of hot water with a touch of lemon and honey is also a good way to start the day. If you can, add some ginger – this acts as an extra boost your circulatory system.

Deep breathe
There is often a sense of anxiety ahead of a stressful day and sometimes we are far from relaxed when we get up. To get your body into a state of relaxation, it is important to control the functions of the body, like the beating of the heart and breathing properly. A good method is to try 2:1 breathing, this is easy and really effective – you gently slow the rate of exhalation so that you are exhaling twice as long as you are inhaling.

Surroundings
Your surroundings can have an impact on your mood from the moment you wake. If you wake up surrounded by clutter, then that is hardly going to get you off to the right start. Keep your bedroom as clutter free as possible. You can also pay attention to your decor – certain colours can be good for your mood, choose something that uplifts you. If possible have some green plants in your bedroom – a little bit of greenery can do wonders to enhance your mood and positivity.

Good posture
Your body position is fundamental, bad posture has the effect of limiting the flow of oxygen through your body, meaning you are not getting the maximum benefit, and waking your body up will be a real struggle. Pay attention to straightening your posture, feet flat on the floor, hold your stomach in and extend up through your spine. These small movements will work wonders and act to relieve tension before you get out and face the day ahead.

Exercising in the morning
Although many of us probably don’t feel like it, a bit of morning exercise will help. We are not talking about a full-on several-mile run, just some activity to increase your body temperature, and get your metabolism and enzyme activity kick-started. This could involve just doing a few basic stretches or even jogging on the spot. If you do fancy taking on something more energetic in the morning, then ensure that you have thoroughly warmed-up.

Breakfast
Is this the most important meal of the day? Yes! After a long sleep, breakfast is responsible for replacing your liver glycogen, which helps you stay focused and switched-on throughout the morning. Choose your breakfast carefully – sugary breakfast cereals only give you a quick hit and can rapidly wear off. The best bet is to eat some protein combined with carbohydrate to help maintain your alertness throughout the morning. If you find yourself hungry before you have even reached work, you might want to consider eating part of your breakfast at home, and then preparing the remainder to have at work.

refers HERE

Facebook email notifications driving you nuts? Here’s how to turn ‘em off

Ever innocently comment on, say, the latest baby picture from one of your Facebook pals, only to be hit with one email after another—all of them notifying you of everyone else who’s ooohing and ahhing? Yep, it gets a little nuts after awhile.

Well, Facebook’s recent redesign of its account settings page makes it a little easier to pinpoint where the torrent of email notifications is coming from—and how to turn off the spigot. Ready for a little peace and quiet?

1. Go to Facebook, click the Account link in the top-right corner of the page, then select Account Settings.

2. If you’ve ever visited Facebook’s Account Settings page, you’ll notice there’s been a little redecorating going on. Instead of a tabbed box of settings, there’s now a series of headings on the left side of the page, while your current settings (such as your displayed name, primary email, and Facebook address) are in the main column. For now, just click the Notifications option in the left column.

3. On the following page, you’ll see a bunch of settings for all the notification options on Facebook—and better yet, a brief rundown of the most recent notifications you’ve received, making it much easier to zero in on the event that’s triggered any annoying Facebook emails.

4. Find the comment, the calendar event, or the “Like” that’s sparked all the notifications? If so, click the nearby email icon to stop the emails cold. Note that by clicking the icon, you’re turning off all email notifications for a given type of event; unfortunately, you can’t stop notifications for, say, the exact “Oh, how cute!” comment you posted on those baby pictures.

5. Want to turn off other Facebook email notifications while you’re at it? Check out the list of settings below your most recent notifications; here, you’ll find settings for everything ranging from alerts when you’re tagged in a photo (a good notification to leave on, perhaps) to a pending purchase on your Facebook “Credits” account (ditto).

Have more questions about your Facebook settings? Let me know!

details refer HERE

Let's read a magazine

A touch to learn and discover with Timbuktu, first iPad magazine for kids

Learning, discovering… touching. There is a huge opportunity in the intersection between tablet computers and education: two young Italian entrepreneurs decided to explore it, launching Timbuktu, first News magazine for children on the iPad. Their mission is creating  editorial programs on touch screen for kids, for educators and parents too. Being next generation of educational publishing, using technologies as an instrument for imagination and discovery of the world.

“By 2015 we will have 40 titles plus the magazine in six languages, addressing also the Asian markets with a Chinese and a Japanese version” said Elena Favilli, journalist who studied at Bologna University and Uc Berkeley, Ceo of Timbuktu Labs and Editor in Chief of Timbuktu magazine, unveiling the opening of the iPad magazine on Japanese market in 2012.

Winner of the 2010 Working Capital Telecom Prize, start up competition sponsored by Telecom Italia,  Timbuktu Labs builds cross-platform reading experiences that bring the most advanced methods of education into the publishing market.

The today market of fifty millions tablets, 10 millions of which owned by people with kids, “Will become five times bigger in five years: this means a potential of 50 millions users”, said Francesca Cavallo, Creative Director and co-founder of Timbuktu, which has today users in more than 50 countries.

Timbuktu were among the finalists in the Start up competition at the Mind The Bridge Venture Camp last week in Milan. Where Favilli and Cavallo made an impressive pitch (some excerpts in the video above).

Ashton Kutcher's Tweet-Too-Soon and the Quality of Speed

The Penn State scandal left a lot of people blind sided, and no one more so than Ashton Kutcher. AsKashmir Hill describes in her ‘Google before you tweet’ post, Kutcher was tragically behind the news in a medium where, to quote a conversation I had with Forbes Chief Product Officer Lewis DVorkin, “Speed is Quality.”* Kutcher’s speed and immediacy has indeed been an important quality of his online success, since few genuine celebrities are willing to ride bareback as he has on Twitter.

The Penn State scandal left a lot of people blind sided, and no one more so than Ashton Kutcher. AsKashmir Hill describes in her ‘Google before you tweet’ post, Kutcher was tragically behind the news in a medium where, to quote a conversation I had with Forbes Chief Product Officer Lewis DVorkin, “Speed is Quality.”* Kutcher’s speed and immediacy has indeed been an important quality of his online success, since few genuine celebrities are willing to ride bareback as he has on Twitter.

But Kutcher’s quick retraction and promise to have his tweets vetted by his PR company didn’t salvage his reputation as much as slowing down a bit and reflecting (in public) on his need for speed would have. As online content producers, we’re all in this position of balancing our concern for propagation (now, now, now!) vs. persistance (and then, and then, and then…) Barring a takedown of the internet by Conficker, what you post or tweet will be with you forever. No question, the odds of something embarrassing surfacing in front of a potential employer, a curious electorate or future father-in-law can always be cut down by some prophylactic Googling. But slowing down is in itself a quality and one that can lead to better content, especially in its persistant form.

I’m a busy guy , and I don’t post as often or as immediately as I would like to. And though I sometimes feel like I’m letting the team down, many times I find that if I wait a beat something will emerge that gives me an original angle on something that I would have missed if I felt compelled to file immediately.

As a case in point, I write a blog for the City of Portland, Maine, calledLiveWork Portland that promotes the creative economy here to artists and entrepreneurs from away who might consider relocating to Portland. Last weekend I was covering a creative economy conference in Camden, Maine, called Juice 3.0. I wanted to write a post about what was distinctive about the creative entrepreneurs that I met at the conference and the kind of innovation culture that I see developing in Maine. Sure enough, a few days after the conference, The New Yorker shows up in my mailbox (yes, the physical magazine, not the app!) and Malcolm Gladwell has an article about Steve Jobsas a “tweaker.”

Gladwell’s point about Jobs is that his “sensibility was editorial, not inventive. His gift lay in taking what was in front of him … and ruthlessly refining it.” But even more important than his revisionist recasting of Jobs’ creative genius (still formidable) is his description of the origins of the Industrial Revolution in England:

One of the great puzzles of the industrial revolution is why it began in England. Why not France, or Germany? Many reasons have been offered. Britain had plentiful supplies of coal, for instance. It had a good patent system in place. It had relatively high labor costs, which encouraged the search for labor-saving innovations. In an article published earlier this year, however, the economists Ralf Meisenzahl and Joel Mokyr focus on a different explanation: the role of Britain’s human-capital advantage—in particular, on a group they call “tweakers.” They believe that Britain dominated the industrial revolution because it had a far larger population of skilled engineers and artisans than its competitors: resourceful and creative men who took the signature inventions of the industrial age and tweaked them—refined and perfected them, and made them work.

In 1779, Samuel Crompton, a retiring genius from Lancashire, invented the spinning mule, which made possible the mechanization of cotton manufacture. Yet England’s real advantage was that it had Henry Stones, of Horwich, who added metal rollers to the mule; and James Hargreaves, of Tottington, who figured out how to smooth the acceleration and deceleration of the spinning wheel; and William Kelly, of Glasgow, who worked out how to add water power to the draw stroke; and John Kennedy, of Manchester, who adapted the wheel to turn out fine counts; and, finally, Richard Roberts, also of Manchester, a master of precision machine tooling—and the tweaker’s tweaker. He created the “automatic” spinning mule: an exacting, high-speed, reliable rethinking of Crompton’s original creation. Such men, the economists argue, provided the “micro inventions necessary to make macro inventions highly productive and remunerative.”

And there I had it! That was my lead, that was my angle. What I had seen at the Juice conference was that the intersection of the creative economy and the innovation economy in Maine was being powered by a larger than average concentration of “tweakers.” What I have found in Portland and now in this network of innovation clusters spreading throughout the state is that kind of engineering of the possible that powered the Industrial Revolution and could well power the Post-Industrial one. And not only that. Just as I managed to get Ashton Kutcher into the headline and the lead of this post (quite organically, I think) I managed to get Steve Jobs into the LiveWork Portland post!

Paradoxically, learning to slow down can help you speed up when you need to. Years ago, I studied tai chi with the great William C.C. Chen, in New York. I was surprised to find out that many of Chen’s senior students were boxers and that the ultimate goal of this slow, peaceful, controlled movement was fighting. But sure enough, if you speed up those slow arm and leg movements you’ve got some dynamite punches and kicks at your disposal.

* See Lewis’s inaugural post at Forbes where he says , “In the ruckus of the online universe, quality is evolving. Right now, it’s more about timeliness.”