You look sweet

The way you dress does matter. In fact, by most accounts, it matters a lot.

According to Cynthia Nellis, a style expert at about.com, you have to always put forward your best image: “If casual wear is acceptable at the job, it has to be freshly cleaned and neat to take it a notch above others that presume casual wear means sloppy. They will never make a good first impression.” Just behind communication and presentation skills, how someone is dressed was the most important attribute in getting and keeping a job, according to a study by Total Executive, Inc. and Syracuse University.

We’re Not Casual About Casual Wear

D’Boss Cleaners

Sure, you may be able to wash your casual clothing at home, but time spent doing that along with the most hated household chore — ironing—only takes away time from family and other pursuits. We have the skills to make your clothes look and feel their best by creating a crispness that simply cannot be duplicated with home care. No matter what the surroundings and circumstances, you never get a second chance to make a good first impression.

How You Can Help

Stains and soil left too long can be impossible to remove. Studies by the Dry cleaning & Laundry Institute show that after aging for only one week, 20% of stains cannot be removed satisfactorily. After three weeks, this increases to 47%. If staining occurs, bring it to us as soon as possible. Don’t press stained or soiled clothes. Heat is another factor that makes stains more difficult to remove. Please point out spills such as those from white wine, fruit juices, or soft drinks, or other stains that may not be visible, when you bring in your cleaning. These invisible stains require special attention by us in order to prevent them from permanently discoloring your item. Perspiration can cause dyes in fabrics to change color so, if possible, protect your garments from excessive contact with perspiration. Always allow lotions, antiperspirants, perfume, and other toiletries to dry before you get dressed. These products can contain ingredients that cause color loss or color changes in your garments. Protect your garments from prolonged exposure to direct sunlight or strong artificial lights. This too can affect the color in your items. Before putting clothes away for storage, have them cleaned to remove stains first. This prevents insects from causing holes in the fabric, and stains from aging and discoloring. Clean all matching pieces together. Whether your work surroundings call for appropriate casual or traditional attire, we know that how you look does matter. That’s one of the reasons we work hard for you and all that you wear.

Who Gets Rich in the Tumblr-Yahoo Deal

Tumblr’s $1.1 billion exit has minted a number of new millionaires—and made some rich folks even richer.Here’s who made what, according to PrivCo, which studies private companies. These are the revised figures corrected by PrivCo after initial numbers showed even more lavish returns for several venture-capital firms,setting off a Twitter war.

STAKEHOLDERS	PERCENTAGE HELD	PAYOUT (in millions)
Union Square Ventures	18	198
Sequoia Capital	19.8	217.8
Spark Capital	18	198
David Karp	19	209
Other Series A individual investors	8.8	96.8
Series E venture capital firms (Greylock, Insight, CrunchFund, DFJ)	10.4	114.4
The 178 employees of Tumblr	6	66

(Data from PrivCo)

Some of the biggest winners, of course, are the venture capitalists who got in the earliest. Union Square Ventures and Spark Capital, for instance, are each pocketing a 1,423 percent return on their investments.

But a few millionaires are definitely coming from within Tumblr’s ranks as well. According to PrivCo’s data, 178 employees will take in six percent of the $1.1 billion purchase price, for an average payout of $370,787. PrivCo calculates that fully vested employees who were among the first 10 to join Tumblr would make $6.2 million each, while those within the first 30 would make $3.6 million.

Steven Johnson, the author of Future Perfect, argues in an essay on Medium that the chance for nonexecutives to get rich is what makes tech different from other generators of wealth in the U.S.:

“Sure, companies went public or sold for staggering sums, but companies have been going public or selling out for generations without creating tens of thousands of millionaires along the way.The defining difference between Silicon Valley companies and almost every other industry in the U.S. is the virtually universal practice among tech companies of distributing meaningful equity (usually in the form of stock options) to ordinary employees. Before companies like Fairchild and Hewlett-Packard began the practice fifty years ago, distributing stock options to anyone other than top management was virtually unheard of. But the engineering tradition that spawned Silicon Valley was much more egalitarian than traditional corporate culture.

It is not just startups that follow this credo. Citing In the Company of Owners, a book from 2003 about stock options, Johnson points out that the top 100 technology companies granted 19 percent of their total ownership to nonsenior executive employees, compared with 2 percent for the rest of corporate America. Johnson’s essay does not address the Tumblr acquisition directly; he was responding to George Packer’s article about the politics of Silicon Valley in this week’s New Yorker, which lamented the rising inequality of northern California, where growing ranks of poor live near startup millionaries. One solution to widespread inequality, Johnson suggests, would be “to make the rest of corporate America act more like Silicon Valley.”

Skeptics will question whether the creation of more millionaires can really be held up as a sign of progressive policy (in part, that’s what Packer’s article is all about). But it sure has proven to be a powerful way to create new tech companies. The lifecycle goes like this: Young engineer joins or founds a startup, gets equity, cashes out, and begins investing in or starting new companies that pay young engineers with equity. The PayPal (EBAY) Mafia and Facebook’s (FB) early generation of employees are two cases in point.

Tumblr’s employees are getting a relatively modest return by comparison. In part, Tumblr became so valuable with so few employees that many people came on after the stock options were worth relatively little; Tumblr had no more than a dozen employees for its first three years. A similar dynamic could mark the eventual exits of companies such as Twitter and Pinterest. Also, Tumblr raised a lot of money from investors. Several people involved in the venture capital world cited a rule of thumb that about 20 percent of the option pool would be set aside for employees. But that goes down with each subsequent investment, and Tumblr raised a lot of money.

“When you raise a lot of money, folks who came on earlier get diluted down,” says Anand Sanwal, the co-founder of CB Insights, which studies the venture capital world. “The flip side of that is when you raise a lot of money, you’re not worried about your job every day.”

Marco Arment, who worked with Karp from the beginning on Tumblr, said that he won’t make “yacht-and-helicopter money” from the acquisition. “But as long as I manage investments properly and don’t spend recklessly, Tumblr has given my family a strong safety net and given me the freedom to work on whatever I want. And that’s exactly what I plan to do,” he wrote in a post on his blog.

So Tumblr may well spawn its own diaspora of new startups and investors seeded with proceeds from the sale to Yahoo! (YHOO), even if it’s a group that doesn’t quite have the resources and reach of those who came before it.

Brustein is a writer for Businessweek.com.

Why Your Unstructured Data is a Blessing, Not a Curse

If you’ve opened up a business magazine within the last year, you’ve likely read articles from big data evangelists, proclaiming that unstructured data is a problem that can sink your company’s time, focus and money.

You know the oft-repeated, dire facts. Rich media data types have exploded in number and in kind. The majority of the data received or produced by your company is messy, unstructured and terribly difficult to manage. The tools that allow anyone to create video, audio and other rich file formats have outpaced the tools we use to capture, store, search and analyze that data. Your employees spend much of their day swimming in a pool of unstructured data.

The data problem is like your garage at home. It’s easy to dump stuff there, but hard to find things later. Since slowing the accumulation of your stuff is nearly impossible, your options seem limited to two choices, both painful. You can begin cleaning your garage, trashing everything except what’s currently being used or obviously valuable. Or you can begin organizing your things before you toss them into the garage, making them easier to retrieve later.

Here’s the problem: Premature destruction of your data is riskier than allowing your data storage bills to grow. It’s impossible for you to determine which pieces of information will not be needed in the coming years. The other problem is that premature organization carries its own risk: the destruction of your employees’ productivity as they try to discern which data is truly valuable.

The alternate solution starts with realizing that your spaghetti tangle of data isn’t the problem you think it is.

Let’s go back to the garage metaphor. What if, among everything you stored in your garage, there was a box of old baseball cards. When you tossed the box in your garage, the cards were worth less than $10, but with the passage of time, now some of your cards are worth $10,000.

Good thing you didn’t try to purge your garage back when the cards were nearly worthless. And good thing you didn’t waste your time organizing the several items that are still worthless.

Now you can focus on finding your cards; the value of your rare collection more than makes up for the cost of storage and search.

The same principle applies to unstructured data. At least some of the media you store will be like those baseball cards: assets that have locked-in, increasing value, just waiting to be uncovered.

Using advanced extraction techniques, you can do the same thing with your unstructured data:

1. Find the relationship between documents. You can gather documents, spreadsheets, images and other data types that were generated for one project. It doesn’t matter that multiple people created the different files or that the project lasted for two years. A good algorithm can find the needle in the haystack.
2. Extract metadata. Useful information can be pulled from your unstructured data, like names, dates and locations. There’s no need to have a staff organize the data beforehand.
3. Redact information. In the days before big data management matured, a request for information in a business required a secretary to take a large black marker and cross out sensitive information before a document could be passed on. This isn’t the case today. Unstructured data tools, can determine what information needs to be hidden.

So don’t get overwhelmed by the sight of your data. And don’t make the mistake of throwing it away before it appreciates in value.

Instead of forcing your business into rigid records management, embrace your unstructured data with the confidence that you’ll one day use it to find valuable insights. This approach saves you from wasting time and effort layering a structure on your data before you know what should be analyzed.

The skyrocketing amount of data your business produces may seem like a curse, but it’s really a blessing. The data you capture today may become a valuable resource for your business tomorrow.

As CEO and founder of LatentView, he has over 18 years of experience in management consulting, technology and global IT services management. Before he founded LatentView, Venkat was part of the global leadership team for Cognizant’s Communications practice, where he was in charge of strategy and business development. Venkat holds a Bachelor’s degree in Engineering from IIT, Madras, and an MBA from IIM, Calcutta.

The Future of Technology in the Workplace

Celent recently held its first U.K. CIO Agenda Roundtable. The aim of this event was to bring together senior IT executives from across the U.K. insurance industry to debate shared topics of interest. The event was hosted by a CIO at their premises, and the prize for hosting was that the CIO got to choose the topics for discussion:

• The future of technology in the workplace
• Engaging suppliers in innovation

The debate was lively with open and frank contribution from all parties. Unfortunately, as the event was run on a ‘Chatham House Rules’ convention, I am not able to share the details of the debate. (For those of you unfamiliar with British History, Chatham House was one of the UK’s main establishments for military code breaking where all discussions were not shared outside of the house). So, instead, here’s a quick summary of the main themes:

Topic #1: The future of technology in the workplace

* Enabling new user driven technologies in the workplace is still largely a reactive exercise.

* However, the extent of tablet computing, BYOD, use of social networking for defined business use, and innovative uses of collaborative technologies is growing (such as tablet based video conferencing, web chat, IM, corporate networking, etc) — extending beyond the executive suite to front-line staff.

* As the CIO is ultimately responsible for all data and use of IT assets within the firm, security remains a critical concern.

* The main challenges faced by CIOs are: (1) Educating the business around the risks, (2) Working with suppliers to enable the changes required to open up new workplace technologies (owing to being tied into long-term agreements), and (3) Securing the investment.

Topic #2: Engaging suppliers in innovation

* Overall, insurers recognize that their suppliers are a critical partner in helping them to innovate and welcome their contributions.

* Some insurers have made use of their supplier’s capabilities for innovation (including facilities such as Innovation Labs and bespoke programmes). Although these facilities were appreciated by insurers, few had found them to be hugely successful in supporting the innovation agenda with the business.

* The main challenge highlighted by CIOs with long-term multi-year outsourcing partners was perceived to be contractual. Innovation objectives are often negotiated at the procurement stage of a long-term outsourcing contract and focused more on delivering long-term supplier productivity rather than short-term market-facing business goals, which can change from year-to-year and flex with changes in technology requiring an agile response.

* Furthermore, in global contracts, it was felt that local supplier teams are not always incentivised to innovate with their local client firms. It was felt that behaviours follow their local incentive plans targeted towards delivery and cost, as opposed to innovation.

* Where insurers have experienced success, it was observed that this was with either smaller suppliers on pilot programmes (where agility, rapid results, close business co-operation and shorter contracts are often exercised), and when local supplier teams have been ring-fenced and embedded into the client teams.

Both of these topics provide a rich seam for future Celent research. It was clear that these topics feature high on the agenda of many CIOs, where the need to be seen to lead the business around the technology agenda is great. So, watch this space.

This post first appeared at Insurance Networking News.