#though at this point it should be 'quarterly roundup' really

[blysse-and-blunder]

midweek commonplace book: the rough drafts

5pm, wednesday, june 28, 2023

it's been over a month since i drafted the following ilcb post, and here i am again, in the same coffee shop i was in back then, again avoiding working on a cover letter for a course instructorship position. in the intervening time, i a) got that job b) taught that whole class, c) took a weekend trip to see a friend get married, and d) am now applying for the next one! figured it was time to open the vault (my chaotic drafts folder) and let these musings see the light of day. maybe it's the key to my success.

edits and new text below in [brackets] to preserve the original draft's ~authenticity~. XD

in lieu of a commonplace book: may day

3pm sunday, april 30 -- 6pm sunday, may 7, 2023

it's rainy and there are so many flowers starting to emerge in the neighborhood, and i've been cozily reading escapist fantasy instead of writing my syllabus or facing the future head on.

reading since i last made one of these posts, i've finished reading the following: the golden enclaves by naomi novik (audio), the jasmine throne by tasha suri, the seven husbands of evelyn hugo by taylor jenkins reid (audio), dial a for aunties by jesse sutanto (audio), and the tyrant baru cormorant by seth dickinson. this not being exclusively a book review series, unfortunately, we're just going to talk about the [left out the title but did include the picture so we know it was at the feet of the sun by victoria goddard!].

[i think i failed to actually write out my thought about this one because a number of people who follow me (@spoonierbard, @hematiterings) were either reading it or were about to start reading it, and i didn't want to color their experiences. i was also not entirely sure how i felt about it? i think i went in with expectations this time, which is a recipe for disappointment-- and i also had actual literary 'critique' thoughts primed and ready, as opposed to the pure vibes and pleasure with which i approached hote. overall-- and i say this as someone who reads and loves fan fiction-- it felt like reading fan fiction, ambitious, self-indulgent, big focus on relationships and feelings, and with a definite Point to Make. a behemoth of a book, and full of things to love--but less transcendent, for me, than its precursor. happy to expand on these feelings in a pm!]

listening

[i didn't write anything here, but i did include the two videos below. both were new to me this spring-- i never had a fallout boy phase in high school, please don't laugh, so it was very exciting to fall in love with first so much for stardust and then, at the recommendation of my housemate g, this track from folie a deux. 'disloyal order of water buffaloes']

[i think both of these songs are saying something about the mood i was in this spring-- yearning? defiant? a little pissed off? "hundred days" was a sptify recommendation, and fuck if they didn't get me in one. i have since investigated the duo behind the album a little and realized i have... possible thoughts, about their oeuvre, about making art out of their relationship, but this particular song unfortunately goes extremely hard for folk so i am compelled to love it! there's just something about the main melodic hook, the plaintive/desperate tone of some of the lyrics (especially 'i want / a hundred days / of bright light' each! time!), and the way there's so much going on in the arrangement at 2:34 ish-- i wish the rest of the album was as good as this one track. i want a hundred good days! of bright light! I do regularly think about things i'm trying or striving for and think "I want ! a hundred days !" of whatever it is. At least 100 days. there's something almost reminiscent of tiffany aching to this, for me-- using your selfishness/unvarnished wants to motivate you.]

watching taking a break from prestige tv!... with more prestige tv. started severance while my fellow succession and ted lasso-viewing housemate is out of the country. i love the stylization, the aesthetic, the eeriness! this is what i was hoping don't worry darling (2022) would be, in terms of combining a mid-century aesthetic with our main characters working for some enigmatic brain-washing Company or Project. Lumon better not be a simulation-- as i discovered back in january, i like it when there's some *there* there, when the conspiracy is actually as trippy as it seems, i understand that sometimes people want to write misdirection but man i am sad anytime something was all an illusion after all. also watched a bit of the first season of the gilded age and the first truly wild episode of mrs. davis with another housemate; there is no witty comparison or fun snappy one-liner i can come up with about these two.

[the above remains true-- i just watched a bit more severance yesterday! there was a massive cliffhanger just where i stopped, but the tone of the show is so Much that i actually was glad for the break. don't get me wrong-- i love how stylized it all is, still, i love the aesthetic and all the visual and verbal details that build up to mad-men-esque 60s office culture-horror, it's fantastic. getting that little extra moment with dichen lachman's character and hearing her talk about her experience was...gutting... but my favorite character continues to be devon.]

[playing]

[triumphant return to both dnd campaigns in the past week or so! it hasn't been entirely my fault that neither group met for most of the past six weeks, but i didn't help. campaign B had our one-year anniversary on sunday! one of the players went really overboard and commissioned a bunch of beautiful cards and badges and coins for us and our characters' little secret organization!! we broke the dm's screen door briefly and saw how big her baby has gotten!! we cried over @dimir-charmer's wedding dress! we successfully escaped the wild west!]

[making]

[didn't even draft this section. i thing i had just fixed...something, but who remembers what. pro cooking tip, leftover tortilla soup can become poor grad student shakshuka so easily. two eggs + in a pan + simmer = profit]

[working on]

[aforementioned cover letter for a course instructorship for next fall is due tomorrow. technically there are two i could be going for, both of which have definite pros and cons, but i'm pouring all this time and angst into one and just kinda forgot about the other? also i'm grading for two different classes, figuring out how to have sooo many tabs open at the same time and how to juggle spreadsheets+answer key+word+ pdf reader all at the same time. oh for the days of paper submissions, you know? last but not least, i am desultorily staring at the manuscript + outline for my conference paper for next month (less than a month now! fuck!) for like an hour a day, and making very little practical progress on it. so.

[bigyack-com]

China Is Tracking Travelers From Hubei

Text this number to tell the Chinese authorities everywhere you’ve been recently.

To combat the spread of the coronavirus, Chinese officials are using a combination of technology and policing to track movements of citizens who may have visited Hubei Province. Mobile phone owners in China get their service from one of three state-run telecommunications firms, which this week introduced a feature for subscribers to send text messages to a hotline that generates a list of provinces they have recently visited. That has created a new way for the authorities to see where citizens have traveled. At a high-speed rail station in the eastern city of Yiwu on Tuesday, officials in hazmat suits demanded that passengers send the text messages and then show their location information to the authorities before being permitted to leave the station. Those who had passed through Hubei were unlikely to be allowed entry. Other cities were taking similar measures. Companies in China generally shy away from sharing location data with the local authorities, over fears it could be leaked or sold. And there were some signs that the companies were uncomfortable with the new rule. China Mobile cautioned that the data should be used cautiously, because it indicates where the phone has been, not its owner. It also doesn’t differentiate between people who briefly passed through a province and those who spent significant time there.

A mass roundup in central China has been expanded.

Top officials in Beijing on Thursday expanded their mass roundup of sick or possibly infected people beyond Wuhan, the city at the center of the outbreak, to include other cities in Hubei Province that have been hit hard by the crisis, according to the state-run CCTV broadcaster. The move comes even amid reports that the mass quarantines in Wuhan have been marked by instances of chaos and disorganization, deepening anxiety and frustration in a city already on edge from a prolonged lockdown. Last week, the government ordered officials in Wuhan to “round up everyone who should be rounded up,” as part of a “wartime” campaign to contain the outbreak. In the rush to carry out the edict, officials are haphazardly rounding up sick patients, in some cases separating them from their families and placing them in the makeshift medical facilities, sometimes without providing the medicine or support they need. Deng Chao, 30, has been in government-imposed quarantine in a Wuhan hotel room for nearly a week. In a telephone interview, he said that although doctors had told him he almost certainly had the coronavirus, he hadn’t yet received the official results from the test that he needed to be admitted to a hospital. In the meantime, he was getting progressively sicker and finding it more difficult to breathe. He said that several security guards had been stationed at the entrance to his hotel to prevent patients from escaping and that there were no doctors or medicine available. “This is really like a prison,” he said angrily. “Send me to a hospital, please, I need treatment,“ he said, in between bouts of coughing. “There is no one to take care of us here.”

The number of cases in Hubei jumped again with the use of new diagnostic methods.

Chinese officials reported Friday that a surge in new infections was continuing, though not as markedly as the day before, when the number of people confirmed to have the virus in Hubei Province skyrocketed by 14,840 cases. That set a new daily record, but it came after the authorities changed the diagnostic criteria for counting new cases. Updated Feb. 10, 2020 What is a Coronavirus? It is a novel virus named for the crown-like spikes that protrude from its surface. The coronavirus can infect both animals and people, and can cause a range of respiratory illnesses from the common cold to more dangerous conditions like Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS. How contagious is the virus? According to preliminary research, it seems moderately infectious, similar to SARS, and is possibly transmitted through the air. Scientists have estimated that each infected person could spread it to somewhere between 1.5 and 3.5 people without effective containment measures. How worried should I be? While the virus is a serious public health concern, the risk to most people outside China remains very low, and seasonal flu is a more immediate threat. Who is working to contain the virus? World Health Organization officials have praised China’s aggressive response to the virus by closing transportation, schools and markets. This week, a team of experts from the W.H.O. arrived in Beijing to offer assistance. What if I’m traveling? The United States and Australia are temporarily denying entry to noncitizens who recently traveled to China and several airlines have canceled flights. How do I keep myself and others safe? Washing your hands frequently is the most important thing you can do, along with staying at home when you’re sick. On Friday, using the same counting method, Hubei officials disclosed about 4,800 new cases and 116 additional deaths. Nationally, the virus has infected almost 60,000 people and killed more than 1,300. The jump in new cases puts extra pressure on the government to treat thousands of patients, many of whom are in mass quarantine centers or in isolation facilities. The sudden uptick is a result of the government taking into account cases diagnosed in clinical settings, including with the use of CT scans, not just those confirmed with specialized testing kits. After the sudden change, epidemiologists warned that the true picture of the epidemic is muddled. Health experts said the change in reporting was meant to provide a more accurate view of the transmissibility of the virus. The new criteria is intended to give doctors broader discretion to diagnose patients, and more crucially, isolate patients to quickly treat them.

Japan has confirmed its first death from the virus.

For a moment on Thursday, it seemed as if there might be some good news from the Diamond Princess, the cruise ship being held in the port of Yokohama in Japan, when the authorities said they would release some passengers to shore to finish their quarantine. Instead, Japanese health officials announced the first death from the virus in the country, of a woman in her 80s. It was third death from the virus outside mainland China. The woman had no record of travel there. Officials also announced 44 new confirmed cases of infection on the ship, raising the total to 218. Although some passengers will be released early, the pool of those eligible for offshore quarantine is quite narrow: guests 80 or older who have existing medical conditions or are stuck in cabins without windows or balconies. On Thursday, another cruise ship, the Westerdam, which had been denied permission to stop in Japan, Guam, Taiwan and the Philippines despite having no diagnoses of coronavirus, was able to dock in Cambodia.

The travel industry in Asia has been upended.

The outbreak is upending travel plans in the Asia-Pacific region well into the spring. ForwardKeys, a Spanish company that says it analyzes 17 million booking transactions a day, reported Thursday that the number of flights booked out of China for March and April is about 56 percent lower than at the same point last year. China’s neighbors are starting to pull back, too. As of Feb. 9, such bookings out of other countries in the Asia-Pacific region were down about 11 percent year over year, excluding trips to mainland China and Hong Kong, which are depressed by travel restrictions and fears over the outbreak. For the cruise industry in particular, the coronavirus is a public-relations nightmare. The world has looked on as 3,600 passengers and crew members have been quarantined on the Diamond Princess in Yokohama. “The longer ships like the Diamond Princess stay in the press, the more people who have never taken a cruise before think of cruising as a less than ideal vacation,” said James Hardiman, the managing director of equity research for Wedbush Securities, who follows the industry.

For the first time in a decade, global oil demand is expected to fall.

The coronavirus outbreak is expected to result in a drop in global oil demand over the first three months of 2020, the first quarterly drop in more than 10 years. The International Energy Agency’s report of oil demand, released Thursday, projects a drop of about 435,000 barrels a day over the January-March period — or roughly one-half of 1 percent — compared with the quarter in 2019. Even with its usual sober language, the agency painted a gloomy picture of the Chinese economy and the broad impact of the outbreak on energy consumption. In the early stages of the emergency, the agency estimated, China’s domestic air travel fell by 50 percent, while its international air travel fell by an 70 percent If the epidemic “can be brought under control” in the second quarter, the agency said, the economy will gradually “come back to normal.”

The arts world, too, is feeling the squeeze.

Movie releases have been canceled in China and symphony tours suspended. A major art fair in Hong Kong was called off. And spring art auctions half a world away in New York have been postponed because well-heeled Chinese buyers may find it difficult to travel to them. As China struggles to get the epidemic under control, the country is essentially closed for business to the global arts economy, exposing the sector to deep financial uncertainty. China was the third-biggest art market in the world in 2018, according to last year’s Art Basel and UBS Global Art Market Report. But last week, Art Basel Hong Kong, an annual art fair scheduled for mid-March, was canceled. “It’s the center of the artistic universe for a week, and it leads to other things during the year,” said Ben Brown, a gallery owner. China is also critical for the movie business. Releases of “Jojo Rabbit” and “Dolittle” — a box-office bomb in the United States that desperately needs foreign sales — are among those postponed in China so far.

The U.S. reported its 15th case after a person under quarantine tested positive.

The Centers for Disease Control said Thursday that a person under quarantine at a military base in San Antonio had tested positive for the virus, bringing the number of confirmed coronavirus patients in the United States to 15. The person, who was not identified, arrived at the base last week on a State Department-chartered flight and is now being treated in isolation at a hospital. The patient is the third person under quarantine to test positive; two people at a base in San Diego were also confirmed to have the virus. The C.D.C. said that there would most likely be more cases over the next few days and weeks. More than 600 people who left Wuhan after the outbreak began remain under quarantine at military bases in the United States.

China ousted a provincial leader at the center of the outbreak.

China’s leader, Xi Jinping, on Thursday summarily fired two top Communist Party officials from Hubei Province, exacting political punishment for the regional government’s handling of the crisis. The reshuffling of the party leadership in the province, and its capital, Wuhan, reflected an aggressive effort by Mr. Xi to contain not only the political and economic damage of the epidemic but also any simmering public anger among millions of people locked down now for more than three weeks. Jiang Chaoliang, the party secretary of Hubei Province, is the highest-ranking official to lose his job over the handling of the outbreak.The party also ousted Ma Guoqiang, the top official in Wuhan. . The decision to install new officials underscored the challenge the epidemic has created for Mr. Xi and for his ambitions as the country’s most powerful leader since Mao Zedong. Wu Qiang, an independent political analyst in Beijing, said, “To cope with a crisis that may become more serious in the future, the first thing that they need is highly loyal people.”

A second citizen-journalist in Wuhan has disappeared.

A video blogger in the city of Wuhan who had been documenting conditions at overcrowded hospitals at the heart of the outbreak has disappeared, raising concerns among his supporters that he may have been detained by the authorities. The blogger, Fang Bin, is the second citizen journalist in the city to have gone missing in a week after criticizing the government’s response to the coronavirus epidemic. Mr. Fang began posting videos from hospitals in Wuhan on YouTube last month, including one that showed a pile of body bags in a minibus. In early February, Mr. Fang said he had been briefly detained and questioned. A few days later, he filmed an exchange he had with strangers who showed up at his apartment claiming to bring him food. Mr. Fang’s last video, posted on Sunday, was a message written on a piece of paper: “All citizens resist, hand power back to the people.” Last week, Chen Qiushi, a citizen-journalist and lawyer in Wuhan who recorded the plight of patients and the shortage of hospital supplies, vanished, according to his friends.

South Korea quarantined hundreds of soldiers who visited China.

About 740 South Korean soldiers were under quarantine on Thursday as the country’s military tried to prevent an outbreak of the coronavirus among its ranks. The quarantined soldiers included those who have visited mainland China, Hong Kong or Macau in recent weeks, and those who have been in close contact with relatives or others who have been to China or tested positive for the virus. South Korea keeps a 600,000-strong army as a bulwark against the threat from North Korea. Most of these soldiers live in communal barracks. So far, no South Korean soldier has tested positive. The rest of the country has reported 28 confirmed cases, and no deaths. North Korea has said it was also taking measures against the virus but has not released any official figures. Reporting and research was contributed by Gillian Wong, Chris Buckley, Sui-Lee Wee, Steven Lee Myers, Keith Bradsher, Austin Ramzy, Choe Sang-Hun, Amber Wang, Zoe Mou, Albee Zhang, Yiwei Wang, Claire Fu, Amy Qin, Elaine Yu, Makiko Inoue, Hisako Ueno, Eimi Yamamitsu, Motoko Rich, Megan Specia, Stanley Reed, Elizabeth A. Harris, Tariro Mzezewa, Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, Paul Mozur, Niraj Chokshi, Raymond Zhong and Tariro Mzezewai. Read the full article

[theconservativebrief]

It’s Giving Tuesday, and people picking out charities want to know: Is this charity making good use of the money it gets?

By most indications, people care an awful lot about whether the charities they give to do any good. Surveys of donors have found that they look for seals of approval from “watchdog” charity evaluators like Charity Navigator and GuideStar. One analysis took advantage of the fact that Charity Navigator’s ratings fluctuate from year to year to study the effects of a change in rating — and they found that donations seem to change when ratings do.

So yes, donors care whether their money is doing any good. Unfortunately, donors are often stuck relying on poor evaluation methods. One common metric is particularly bad: overhead. Overhead measures what percentage of a nonprofit’s spending goes to administrative expenses instead of going directly to beneficiaries.

For a long time, overhead has been considered a key metric in evaluations of nonprofits. It was prominently featured in Charity Navigator’s ratings of nonprofits and in the public conversation about what makes a charity good or bad.

Charity Navigator has since changed its tune on overhead, but the idea that how much a program spends on staff and administrative costs is a good metric for its effectiveness nonetheless persists. Consumer Reports’ guide to giving last year talks entirely about overhead, and never about impact. Other charity evaluators still use overhead metrics.

And donors still care about it. The recent effort by major charity evaluators to walk back from their previous use of the overhead metric “clearly didn’t work,” Nonprofit Quarterly concluded this September. A survey this February found that some 60 percent of donors were concerned that charities overspent on administrative expenses (though they mostly didn’t know how much the charities they favored spent, and were okay with supporting charities with more overhead than ideal).

It’s easy to see where the obsession with overhead came from. If you aren’t in a position to evaluate whether a charity is getting results, you are often at least in a position to evaluate whether it’s spending its money on the cause at all, or just spending it on perpetuating itself.

But the focus on overhead has come at a great cost to the charity world. On the whole, it’s a pretty bad way of approaching the question we really care about — whether a charity is doing any good.

When charities have to focus on keeping overhead low, they often do worse work. They try to cut costs on staff, which can mean employees end up burned out or underqualified to begin with. These charities might not put resources into measuring whether their programs work, which often requires much more administration. They might not fundraise as much as they need for their financial health.

Everyone who tracks overhead calculates it a little differently. It’s unclear which staff hires are administrative expenses and which are program expenses spent on delivering results. Some evaluators have argued that training expenses shouldn’t be counted, but others have observed that “investments in training, planning, evaluation, and internal systems” get counted as overhead. Either way, nonprofits focused on reducing overhead often skimp on these practices — and that makes them less effective.

Nonprofits pay less than the private sector, and that has definite costs for their programs and employees. Underpaid employees can lead to higher turnover, which can be exceptionally expensive for a business as it requires the business to more frequently deal with the expense of running a hiring process, making a hire, and training them. And lower salaries mean nonprofits can’t always attract the most qualified candidates for their roles.

If a nonprofit is understaffed, overworking its existing staff, or failing to hire qualified people, it will probably be significantly worse at provision of services. In an article in the Stanford Social Innovation Review, consultants in the nonprofit space describe working with companies who, in the name of reducing overhead, had “nonfunctioning computers, staff members who lacked the training needed for their positions, and, in one instance, furniture so old and beaten down that the movers refused to move it.”

The article stated that “The effects of such limited overhead investment are felt far beyond the office: nonfunctioning computers cannot track program outcomes and show what is working and what is not; poorly trained staff cannot deliver quality services to beneficiaries.”

Another point worth considering is that not all charities are created equal. If a charity has complex operations requirements and needs a highly skilled staff to coordinate its work, it may have high “overhead.” This wouldn’t tell you much about whether it was efficiently run, though, much less about whether it was having an impact on the world.

On the flip side, some charities manage very low overhead precisely because they’re not doing any followthrough or any complex operations. A charity that just mails people books without any followup to check if they’re reading the books will have lower overhead than a charity that mails books, engages with recipients, recommends them additional educational resources, and collects data on its own operations. The latter charity might have higher overhead — but might also be offering a much more meaningful service.

Charities that are just getting off the ground often have much higher overhead, as they don’t have an established network for fundraising and need to spend more to get the word out, recruit and hire staff, and establish their operations. These charities are often among those where additional money makes the biggest difference (as it can be make-or-break for the survival of the organization), but will typically score poorly on overhead measures.

None of the above are new arguments. In 2013, Charity Navigator, GuideStar, and the Better Business Bureau’s Wise Giving Alliance all signed an open letter calling for less focus on overhead. “The percent of charity expenses that go to administrative and fundraising costs—commonly referred to as ‘overhead’—is a poor measure of a charity’s performance,” the letter says. It continued:

In fact, many charities should spend more on overhead. Overhead costs include important investments charities make to improve their work: investments in training, planning, evaluation, and internal systems— as well as their efforts to raise money so they can operate their programs. These expenses allow a charity to sustain itself (the way a family has to pay the electric bill) or to improve itself (the way a family might invest in college tuition).

Top charity watchdog Charity Watch pushed back, arguing that effectiveness is too hard to measure, so evaluators should stick to overhead. Their own A to F ratings for charities come entirely from overhead and fundraising efficiency. And even when other charity raters have tried to come up with better metrics, overhead has continued to get a lot of airtime.

Consumer Reports still used overhead in its guide last year even though two of the organizations it talks about, Charity Navigator and the Wise Giving Alliance, were signatories to that anti-overhead letter, and are shifting toward holistic approaches that consider more than just administrative costs.

The problem is that a charity’s true value — how much good it does — is exceptionally hard to measure. Charity Watch argues, “an adequate evaluation of the multiple, diverse charitable programs of this number of charities would require expertise, manpower, and financial resources far beyond those of any existing charity monitoring organization.” They’re partially right. GiveWell is the most rigorous evaluator of charity effectiveness, but they are not able to evaluate thousands of charities and focus their efforts on only the most promising ones.

The problem is that, while donors care about doing good, they’re largely not that informed and they have a healthy distrust of complicated, invisible calculations that are hard to understand. Overhead is simple to grasp, it makes sense, and it feels related to charitable effectiveness.

Replacing it with metrics that are more honest but more complicated and uncertain is going to take some time. But we can start by rejecting metrics that are unhelpful for charities and not all that meaningful for us.

Sign up for the Future Perfect newsletter. Twice a week, you’ll get a roundup of ideas and solutions for tackling our biggest challenges: improving public health, decreasing human and animal suffering, easing catastrophic risks, and — to put it simply — getting better at doing good.

Original Source -> One of the most used criteria for judging a charity is also one of the worst

via The Conservative Brief

[seanmeverett]

Why These 100 Mission-Driven Companies Will Win [Part 2 of 2]

Discover something new that might improve your own life

I. Setting the Stage

In Part 1, we covered a small selection of mission-driven companies across beverages, food, shelter, apparel, and services, including business, banking, money, insurance and the real-world.

Their teams and their products take a different approach to the world which results in not just differentiation for their brands in consumer’s minds, but also in what we believe is bigger financial upside.

Big things have small beginnings, indeed.

“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”

~Winston Churchill

VII. Hardware

Samsung: What started as a focus in TVs and appliances has moved onto the cutting edge of consumer tech with novel VR experiences. They’ve been on a tear lately. I live near their flagship experential store in the Meatpacking area of Manhattan, which had a line around the block over the weekend with a matte black truck out front. Say what you will about the industrial design battle with Apple, but one thing they definitely do better is experiential. Apple doesn’t do a lick of it and it’s where the consumer branding world is headed.

Awair: You know that invisible thing you can’t live without? The thing you don’t ever notice until it’s gone? Yah, we’re talking about the air we breath. It’s kind of important and stuff. This team built a cool wooden box that analyzes the quality of the air across 5 dimensions, gives you a score and recommendations for fixing it. Bonus points for working in tandem with Nest, Awair.

Remarkable: It’s a tablet that’s meant to feel like paper. Whether you’re reading, sketching or taking notes, the point is paper. And yes, it does come with a hardware pencil. That’s why they, and we, call it reMarkable.

Google Hardware: They spend the most marketing effort with their hardware products, as you might expect, since the search engine markets itself at this point. If you’re looking for VR, Nest, and inexpensive Chromebooks, this is where Google really shines, as well as with their scalable services.

Mevo: A beautifully done hardware product, Mevo by Livestream gives you a full production studio in your pocket. It works in tandem with your mobile phone so you can pan, zoom, and record live events straight to your website and, get this, Facebook Live. Nice work, y’all.

Insta 360: If you want to record 360-degree video so people can put themselves in your Virtual Reality shoes, then you’re going to need a camera. Insta360 is a leader in the space, with a Nano version that descretely slips into your pocket and clips onto the top of your iPhone or an Air version for your Android phone. Whatever you phone you choose, this might be the right choice when it’s Go Time.

Mayfield Robotics: Humanizing Tech is something we can get behind, especially when it means adding positive human behaviors to a little friendly home robot called Kuri. Mayfield Robotics made this little guy to be your home videographer, capturing your favorite moments you would have lost otherwise, and even has a touch sensor on its head to respond to human touch as well as your voice.

VIII. Software

Mailchimp: Likely one of the best known email marketing platforms in the world, used by everyone from startups to large companies alike. MailChimp, is where we always start when we’re thinking of creating a new email list and sending out easy, mobile responsive campaigns. They’ve been around a long time and continue to grow like crazy.

Wordpress: Did you know that 25% of all websites on the internet are built on top of the WordPress CMS? Twenty…five…percent. That’s insane. There are billions of websites in the world. That means at least a billion are built on this thing. That’s an install base the size of all iPhones ever sold. If that isn’t enough of a recommendation, I don’t know what is. Strike that. I just went to their site. It’s right on the homepage. Twenty…eight…percent.

Slack: Ah, the good ole email killer. If you’re not careful you might end up being a part of a hundred different Slack channels just like most of us. The pings might drive you crazy if you’re on a dev team, but by now you’ve turned those off. Just clearing the unreads can become a full-time job. But they solved a big problem of what to use for chatting at work when most of us were still scraping by with Campfire. It feels much more personal than email and have to say I love and use the product regularly. Go get you some.

Evernote: It’s been a heck of a product for years. It’s been my notebook of choice across many life moments and businesses, both successful and failed. I counted recently and have thousands of notes. I write down everything, nearly word for word in conference calls so I understand the subtleties from meetings years ago. Evernote’s been the single most valuable tool for my brain, aside from my MacBook, over the course of my career. 18 thumbs. Way up.

Livestream: As mentioned in the Mevo blurb above, Livestream is a killer product with a killer team located in Brooklyn NY. I’ve been to their offices. Video is hard. Real hard. I know, I fixed and rebuilt a VOD and Live streaming platform over 4 years. But these guys and girls make it look easy. From production equipment to live landing pages, to syndication to the social networks. It’s free to start, and easy to scale. Awe inspiring.

FreshBooks: This roundup wouldn’t be complete without some accounting software. And boy if FreshBooks isn’t one of the longtime leaders. Invoices, expenses, time tracking, payments, projects, and the list goes on. Why hire an accountant when you’ve got something this great? Just don’t call them an auditor ;)

Virtual Assistants

X.ai: There’s a few different ways to start an AI startup. But they all have one thing in common: they need lots of examples in order to be as accurate as possible. In this case, the folks at x.ai are using the pervasive meeting-scheduling-over-email problem as a way to teach it human language. Secretary is one of the first jobs AI will replace. I’ve used the product multiple times, it’s pretty great and works like a charm. Give it the ole college try, if you fancy.

Clara: It’s another virtual assistant, only this one was founded by a Forbes 30 Under 30 female. The tech world doesn’t have to be completely filled with dudes. My favorite part of Clara’s website? That they use the movie Contact’s Ellie Arroway to explain how their email scheduling assistant works.

Data

PitchBook: If you’re in the business of startups, M&A, VC or Private Equity long enough, you’ll come across PitchBook’s data. They send out a newsletter about the happenings of recent deals as well as quarterly trends updates on how much deal flow is happening. Their social teams are excellent as well, as I find I’m often conversing with their accounts across Twitter and Medium.

CBInsights: Focused mostly on the startup and tech worlds, CB Insights has one of the greatest newsletters of all time. It comes standard with snark, epic fails, and relevant news to keep our industry humming along. And with a daily sign off of “I love you”, it should keep you happy whilst reading through their great fundamental industry analyses.

Mattermark: They’re all about building target customer lists. Founded by one of the great ones who gets a lot of respect in the industry, Mattermark wants you to focus on the companies and employees who matter most. If coffee’s for closers, then you need the good Glengarry leads to use your BD and sales time wisely. This team can help you out.

VR/AR

8i.com: Probably my most favorite opening homepage lines of all time, 8i “mixes realities with holograms”. I mean, c’mon guys if that doesn’t get you excited, then you’re already asleep. Check out their homepage to see a demo video or download their mobile app to add holograms to your everyday life. Totally tubular, dood.

Magic Leap: No AR list would be complete without this 800-pound gorilla. They’ve raised a boat load of money from the who’s who of Valley VCs and are working to get the first consumer headset that throws holograms into your real-world environment. If they can execute against the vision, this puppy will be big.

IX. Transportation

Rideshare

Uber: If you’re reading this, it’s highly likely that you know of Uber. Though, there are still some people who haven’t. So for the king (or queen, if you’re feeling nasty) of ridesharing, Uber started the on demand trend and has been growing like a weed, making it one of the most valuable and fastest-growing startups in history. If you can find them a consistent source of drivers, you will be in their good graces forever. They have a supply problem, not a demand one. They’ll get it.

Lyft: If you’d like a little more personality whilst you ride than the black and white, why not try a little hot magenta on for size? Lyft, which used to be characterized by the pink mustache on the front of their cars, has since toned it down a bit and is having a bit of a resurgence after a few recent leadership stumbles at Uber. Kudos for the big branding.

Waze: Wouldn’t it be nice if your maps app told you where cops were catching people for speeding so you could slow down, or how to reroute yourself to get around traffic jams, all while it’s happening in real time? Waze is the first and pretty much only social mapping app out there. My former colleagues in an entire office in Atlanta used this app to deal with the horrendous traffic there. Hard to argue with that kind of pervasive benefit.

Ride

Toyota: They invented the Toyota Production System (TPS), which increased the quality of car manufacturing to an unprecendented level decades ago. It was so good, in fact, that they now teach it in business schools everywhere about using a constant improvement culture. You see the same thing happening in software businesses today. But don’t forget, Toyota invented it, not tech.

Tesla: The vision of an all-electric car, a giant touch screen to control everything (no other buttons), that drives itself to your exact location and picks you up. Only Elon Musk has the type of entrepreneurial grit to take on the auto manufacturing industry and actually pull it off. Besides, naming your series of cars, S 3 X means that Tesla Motors comes with a little marketing magic as well.

Fun

Boosted Boards: An electric skateboard that I see all over the place on the streets of NYC. Going 12 miles on a single charge means you can do your daily commute in Manhattan without running out of battery. It can take you up a 25% grade hill, goes up to 22mph (dear lord!), and has a little hand-held remote control. This thing is just plain rad.

OneWheel: Maybe two wheels are too archaic for you. If so, why not reduce your “footprint” to a single wheel. Wait…what? A single wheel? Yes, a single wheel with a board on either side for you to ride in futuristic style. Just don’t call it a hoverboard. The wheel looks like a small car tire, which means you can go far off the concrete streets. Because where we’re going, we don’t need roads.

X. Travel

Locations

AirBnb: Want to live like a local, or hotels all full, or maybe you just need a place for a few weeks or a month? Airbnb is the new friend you’ve been waiting for. You might be a little scared if you’ve never rented or subletted to someone else before, but I can tell you from experience that most people are incredibly genuine and trustworthy. We have yet to have any sort of trust issue or problem.

Hyatt: Here’s what we love about Hyatt. At the top of their homepage right now is a message calling for donations to the Red Cross to help Hurricane Harvey victims. It’s not just about a hotel with them. It’s about a home. Their brand feels safe and comforting. A hard thing to pull off, but kudos to the team.

Starwood: They own almost every major hotel brand you’ve heard of, which is pretty crazy to wrap your mind around. Here’s a few: Ritz-Carlton, Marriot, Townplace, Fairfield, Residence Inn, Courtyard, Aloft, The W Hotel, St Regis, SPG, and Sheraton. If you’ve ever stayed in a hotel, it’s highly likely you’ve stayed with Starwood Hotels & Resorts.

Movement & Booking

Upside Travel: A cool approach to getting from here to there, Upside Travel lets you book your work travel in a package deal to save some coin. Flight + Hotel + Uber.

Hawaiian Airlines: A vacation of dreams, of windy roads, beaches to mountaintops and ten different climates in between, Hawaii is one of those trips on many of our bucket lists. And if you want to really live the life, make sure you travel the official airline of the island. Right now, a roundtrip from North America starts at only $357. We’ll give that a “wow”.

Ride Share Air

Surf Air: Pay a monthly fee and get unlimited flights around the west coast of America from San Diego, Palm Springs, Monterrey, Carlsbad, Lake Tahoe, Napa Valley, LA, SF, etc. From what we can tell, the price starts at around $1000 per month. If you’re paying more than that, you might end up saving both time and money. Just open the app and book.

Jet Smarter: This is one of the bigger on demand flight services. Their instagram marketing is pretty killer. It is a bit more expensive than others but it also goes more places. If you’re spending $25K per year doing business travel, you might actually save your company money if you choose to fly this kind of private airline. Jay-Z is an investor, so if you want to live like HOV, throw your diamonds in the sky.

Net Jets: This group extends the private jet model to fractional ownership, 15/30/60 hour jet cards, and a global destination base across the US and Europe.

Miscellaneous

Away: It’s a luggage brand with a personality. They come with stickers, even a Despicable Me Minions version. Described as thoughtful luggage for modern travel, it even comes with simple naming like “Carry-on” and “The Bigger Carry-on” — you know exactly what you’re going to get.

Yeti: What some people may consider a boring business, the founders at Yeti decided they needed a more durable cooler for their fishing and camping trips. It then extended into branded team coolers for tailgates and now into other products like duffel bags. Sturdy enough to sit on, it really does the job.

XI. Entertainment

Video

HBO: The content king for decades, HBO is synonymous with the highest quality entertainment on TV. With their recent introduction of streaming services like HBO Go and HBO Now, you can get your favorite Game of Thrones-style shows on the go or on your mobile apps for a small monthly fee. For that, we say, already subscribed. Just keep those Vice News a-coming!

Netflix: All the movies and TV shows you can watch for less than $10 per month? The original DVD movie service and leader in the online video wars, what can you say about Netflix that hasn’t already been said. We’re faithful subscribers and will continue to be. 100 million other people can’t be wrong.

Amazon Prime: For a small monthly fee you get unlimited free shipping, all the movies, TV shows, music, and books you can consume. Add in photo saving and podcasts, and you’ve got one of the best designed and most valuable subscription products in the technology universe. Their originals are coming too, which means they’ve got a few more tricks up their sleeve than the recent purchase of Whole Foods. Amazon is taking over the whole technological world, it seems.

Books

Holtzbrinck Publishing Group/Macmillan: It’s a publishing institution whose core values center on sharing knowledge and wisdom. With brands like Scientific American and Nature, their dedication to science is hard to understate. We love this organization.

Hachette Book Group: One of the biggest global book publishers, Hachette Book Group pushes out 900 adult books (including 50 to 100 digital only titles), 250 for young readers, and 400 audio books in one single year.

HarperCollins: They’ve been around for over 200 years with operations in 18 countries. In books, a strong foundational history counts for something. In fact, it’s almost everything. Their fiction authors are legendary: Mark Twain, Martin Luther King, J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, H.G. Wells, Agatha Christie, amongst many others.

Penguin Books: What started in 1939 as the vision of a book that cost as little as a pack of cigarettes has now grown into a vast collection of both fiction and non-fiction books across a variety of topics.

Random House: 70,000 digital and 15,000 print books published every year makes Penguin Random House one of the most prolific publishers in all of writing.

Simon & Schuster: From Stephen Colbert and Enemy of the State to Stephen King’s It and Anna Kendrick’s personal actress biography, the range of books published by Simon & Schuster is vast and varied.

XII. Work & Home Tech

AltWork: A standing, sitting, lounging desk contraption that maintains correct posture in four different positions, this company’s product is aimed at helping keep your body healthy while you work at a computer screen all day.

Eero: A tiny home Wi-Fi system that just works. You plug it in and forget about it. Put a few around your home to boost the signal to different rooms. It’s a simple router, so you don’t need a degree from DeVry to understand how it works.

Felix Gray: Staring at our computer and phone screens all day can hurt our eyes. There’s an old 20/20/20 rule where every 20 minutes you’re supposed to look at least 20 feet away for 20 seconds. To help with eye strain and fatigue, the folks at Felix Gray have special lenses worn by employees at some of the biggest, baddest tech companies in the world.

Pilot Pens: Finding the right writing instrument can be tricky. You want one with good ink flow that doesn’t stain the page or break and get on your hands or clothes. You want one that doesn’t cost a lot so it doesn’t matter that Bob from accounting stole it. That’s where Pilot comes in. Inexpensive, good, consistent.

Sonic Internet: Want blazing fast speeds with a better internet/phone bundle and a more human customer service? This team has what you need for gigabit fiber internet and unlimited calling.

Casper: A mattress startup that’s growing like absolutely crazy. People love their product, posting unboxing videos to YouTube because of the creative packaging. They’ve got deals to sell their mattresses in big box retailers now but got their start going Direct to Consumer over the internet. It’s a trend that will continue and this large founding team executed beautifully.

— Sean Everett

We only promote products that we use, love and trust. If you enjoyed this story, please click the 👏 button and share to help others find it! Feel free to leave a comment below.

The Mission publishes stories, videos, and podcasts that make smart people smarter. You can subscribe to get them here.

Why These 100 Mission-Driven Companies Will Win [Part 2 of 2] was originally published in The Mission on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

from Stories by Sean Everett on Medium http://ift.tt/2f4xHPs