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Lately, everybody speaks about how you can increase productivity with better collaboration. Let’s think about how we are used to work together: in-person meetings, one-on-one discussions, phone calls that never end etc. Remember those days when, if you stepped away from your desk phone for just a few minutes, you had every chance to miss a business opportunity, or play phone tag for the remainder of the day?! Well, not anymore.
“I would drape myself in velvet if it were socially acceptable.” This famous line from Seinfled is something many of us relate to. We all have a favorite set of clothes that we love to wear around the house but can’t take outside because of society. But what if you could work in those clothes? You know: carry out the usual office duties, but without actually heading to the office.
Two weeks ago we announced the 4PSA Partner Meetup that will take place in Madrid, Spain at the beginning of summer on June 1-2, 2015. We want to see you there, face to face, and chat the good old-fashioned way 🙂 You will also be able to meet with fellow service providers, exchange ideas, share experience, and have some drinks.
Besides the fun part, there are lots of reasons to join us there. In April we released VoipNow 3.5, in the following days we’ll be launching VoipNow Mobile 2.0 and VoipNow 3.6, and Hubgets is round the corner. With every new version, we are extending the feature set, creating new opportunities for service providers. We want to make sure that you know how to make money out of all the new stuff.
We’ve always heard about Bill Gates the geek versus Steve Jobs the visionary, but the reality is both had a bit of the other in them. In fact, Gates had probably more vision than Jobs had a geeky side. Here’s some compelling evidence of that.
After reading Gates’ 1999 book “Business @ the Speed of Thought,” Markus Kirjonen – who is a business student at Aalto University in Finland – did a writeup aggregating the Microsoft founder’s boldest predictions for the future. Not surprisingly (to us, at least) many of them have or are in the process of being fulfilled.
Good team work yields positive results in any type of organization, but it’s easier said than done, unfortunately. While technology lets us do pretty much anything these days, we often fail to make proper use of the ingeniously-crafted tools around us.
One such example is team collaboration and the solutions design to assist this process. More often than not they fail to spur productivity when implemented without notice or training, and worse still – before any research has been done about the company’s actual need for these tools. This was the key finding in a study conducted by Softchoice on firms where the managers failed to understand unified communications (UC) and collaboration tools.
The poll was carried out on 250 IT managers and 750 line-of-business employees to determine the impact of typical UC and collaboration rollouts on employee habits, preferences and overall satisfaction at the workplace. One of the first things the survey managed to uncover was that many IT managers are actually hesitant to invest in new collaboration technology because, as they put it, the ones they already have implemented are not being used.
Photo by Hermes Rivera on Unsplash
Offices aren’t for everyone. Creative minds and free thinkers often have no place in a 9-to-5 environment, but many still do it if the pay is good and the work is somewhat fulfilling. However, if there’s one thing that even proficient office workers hate, it’s meetings.
Touchdown!
Greetings from Europa Park in Rust, Germany. We can’t wait to lift the cloth off our newborn baby – Hubgets – an awesome new collaboration platform that promises to forever change the way we work. Only a few more hours ’till the keynote!
Booth D01 is our temporary home at WHD and we’re available to discuss the latest technology we’ve come up with to help businesses grow. Visitors are currently getting a hands-on with Hubgets. Here’s why we’re so excited about it!
For the past three years, 4PSA’s girls cycling team mounted the podium in the women’s category at the Skoda Velo Challenge. We have a dedicated corner in our open space filled with the trophies they brought home. This is a good motivation to train hard every year, because maintaining a top place is not an easy task. And now we’ve raced our bikes in the Baneasa forest once again.
For those of you who do not know what Skoda Velo Challenge is, here’s the short story: it’s a relay cycling race opened for people working at the same company. We team up to compete against other companies in the same field of work or in the general classification. It’s basically a fun day in the woods, without computers and tasks, but with deadlines to meet. Well, you do need to beat the other competitors’ times, don’t you?
With only two girls willing to join the ranks this year, we took a different approach. We entered the race with two teams in the mixed competition. Team Hubgets and Team VoipNow, each made of three boys and one girl, lined up at the starting grid, along with 81 teams from other companies. Team Hubgets relied on stronger riders and aimed high. Team VoipNow was all about the fun of it.
