I have written before about the book Rework and also Getting Real by the same authors.

One of the authors, Jason Fried, also has a column on Inc that is well worth a review.

Articles I really enjoyed include:

Don’t Exaggerate Your Size

Why I Run a Flat Company

Go Ahead, Raise Your Business’s Prices

I find the way Jason writes is very straight forward and to the point – much like the software his company 37Signals creates!

I’ve talked a little about Augmented Reality over the last couple of years and have seen many use cases, though many have seemed a little too gimmicky to me and not very practical.

Although this news is over a year old not I have only just come across it and I think Ikea have done a great job in showing a really practical use for AR and also have taken a step at revolutionising their product catalog.

Using their application you can actually place Ikea furniture in your house / office / room and see how it will look. The app uses your phones camera to show the room and places the required objects, which then can be photographed even though they don’t exist!

This is especially good for any New Zealander’s who want to take photos of their house with Ikea furniture – which is still not available in NZ!

Here is a video showcasing the IKEA iPhone application:

I just returned from 4 days leave in New Caledonia (yes it was very hot and relaxing!)

However, today I decided to get on top of my email before I head back to the office tomorrow. Once Outlook sync’d up I had 329 emails.

While sometimes I average over 200 emails/day, 80/day while on leave was quite a surprise!

I read once that email generates email, and I have had first hand experience that the more I send the more I receive – and fortunately the less I sent also resulted in less received.

All in all, not too sure how I received 80+ emails/day when I wasn’t sending any.

Anyway this reminded me of a post I recently read discussing the idea of an email charter:

Houston, we have a problem.

We all love the power of email connecting people across continents. But… we’re drowning in it.

Every year it gets a little worse. To the point where we can get trapped spending most of our working week simply handling the contents of our in-boxes.

And in doing so, we’re making the problem worse. Every reply, every cc, creates new work for our friends and colleagues.

We need to figure out a better way.

But how?

Here is the key cause of this problem:

The total time taken to respond to an email is often MORE than the time it took to create it.

The full post is definitely worth a read and to date there have been over 200 responses.

The overall result of the post has been the creation of http://emailcharter.org/