Casual Friday: A Celebration of "Fridays"

Since this isn't just any ordinary Friday, but the sacred Friday before a holiday Friday, we thought we'd celebrate Fridays. If you'd like to take a sip of your adult beverage of choice every time we say "Friday", that might be fun. According to the Interwebs, Casual Friday has been around since 1965 as "Aloha Friday", when employers in Hawaii would allow their employees to wear "Aloha Shirts" on the last business day of the week a few months out of the year. Word spread to California and eventually it became known as "Casual Friday".

The only thing we love more than Friday is pop culture. And pop culture, as you know, loves Friday. Friday Night Lights. SNL wannabe Fridays. The Cure's Friday I'm in Love. His Girl Friday. Below you'll find some of our favorite video clips about Friday.

T.G.I.F.

Casual Friday: Everything Ebook

Just like last week’s post about all things concerning green autos, this one features a site that is all things ebook.  If you want to keep on the front lines of the ebook market, then bookmark TeleRead.  This site is packed with blog posts of qualitative industry-related insights and kernels of interesting market news. For example, you can read about efforts to further monetize the ebook market with soundtracks in the Ereader Tab, glimpse into the various international ebook industries through the Around The World tab, and find out the scoop on the latest legal brouhaha in the Copyright tab.  Happy reading!

Casual Friday: Swanson Vs. Food

Much like Tammy, the Pawnee Library Director, we librarians at bizologie have a soft spot for Ron Swanson. And what better way to start our weekend than with Swanson Vs. Food. You had us at "meat tornado", Ron.

Casual Friday: Making You Mirthful- Part Two

TGIF again!  Now for the resolution of the comic cliffhanger from last Friday's installment of business themed comics.  Here's another series of five excellent suspects.  Bring on the PowerPoint fodder! 6.  Fat Cats by Charlie Podrebarac

7.  Joe Vanilla by Mark Litzler

8.  Retail by Norm Feuti

9.  Working Daze by John Zakour & Scott Roberts

10.  Working It Out by Charlos Gary

This one's from Retail:

Casual Friday: Making You Mirthful- Part One

TGIF!  Because I’m in such an effervescent mood, I wanted to incite rampant mass happiness (Ok, maybe just a snicker or two) with business-themed comics!  Here are the links to five terrific titles to get you through the work day.  Stay tuned for the second installment coming next Friday. 1.  9 to 5 by Harley Schwadron

2.  Bottomliners by Eric and Bill Teitelbaum

3.  Business Casual by Joe Combs

4.  Dilbert by Scott Adams

5.  Farcus by David Waisglass & Gordon Coulthart

This one's from Business Casual:

Casual Friday: Decide

Are you in the market for a new TV, laptop, or camera but can't decide if this is the right time to buy? Will a new bigger, badder, lighter, faster model be coming out tomorrow? Is this really the lowest price or will the price fall next week? With these tough questions looming, it can be hard to decide when to buy. These are big purchases that we tend to keep around for a few years. Gain the confidence you need to decide when and what to buy using Decide. Decide uses fancy models to predict product releases. The predict future product releases "by matching hundreds of thousands of devices to their model lineages and applying advanced machine learning and text mining algorithms." Their price predictions will save you a ton of money by looking at billions of price movements in over 40 distinct factors. Use their mobile site in the store as you shop or set up alerts so you'll know exactly when to pull the trigger on that big purchase.

Right now there are only 3 categories, but you can vote on categories you would like to see added.

Casual Friday: Plantable "Comic Books"

Happy Friday, Everyone! Planning to spend any time gardening this weekend? Or maybe reading comic books? Now you can do both with these cool, plantable "comic books". They come in two Superhero flavors: The Gardener & April Showers ("She makes it rain flowers"). A little more plant than comic book, The Gardener is filled with herb seeds and April Showers is filled with wildflower seeds. Perhaps not the most efficient way to start a garden but they seem like a fun gift for the comic book loving gardener in your life.

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Casual Friday: Live Purchasing

In case you needed another way to spend your free time, here’s one interesting way: live purchasing.  The Zappos.com website has a Real-Time Order Map that it dubbed Mappos, which allows you to see what individuals (kept anonymous of course) are ordering in real time all over the country.  You gaze at a map of the U.S. as images of merchandise, pointing to an originating city, pop up on the screen for several seconds before winking out.  If you feel so inclined, you can even vote thumbs up/down on the merchandise that was purchased, though Zappos doesn’t detail how that feedback is used.  Not only is Mappos addictive to watch, but it arguably exemplifies the oldest selling ploy in the book, aka, “Everyone’s doing it.” They are not the only company to have employed technology to track live purchasing.  In an excellent Vogue article from the June 2010 issue called “High Clicks,” Sarah Mower interviewed Natalie Massenet, the founder of swanky luxury clothing etailer Net-a-Porter, a company which also tracked live purchasing behind the scenes, and presumably still does today.  Mower had the following to say about Net-a-Porter's live purchasing system:

“…The whole office is wired for sound and video. Everyone in the company here, in New York, and the distribution centers can see what's selling, when, where, what the turnover is. Go look at the screens.  They're mesmerizing.

Positioned in the sight lines of every desk, they display a visual of Google Earth, and every time someone makes a purchase, a Net-a-Porter bag pops up on the location. On the screen above, the shopper's order is pictured, along with how much she spent, where she lives, and a running tally of the day's takings. It's 11:00 A.M. London time now, and someone in Yekaterinburg, Russia, is buying towering $1,200 Fendi shoes. In NYC where it's 6:00 A.M. a woman drops $3,600 on Isabel Marant. A pair of $1,290 Bottega Veneta sandals is being ordered up in Athens (though the country's nearly bankrupt); a plunging, multicolored $600 Melissa Odabash swimsuit is going to soccer-wife country in Altrincham, Manchester.”

Needless to say, it seems that live purchasing could serve multiple functions, acting also as an ongoing morale-booster for employees who sell and process merchandise.  It will be interesting to see the extent to which this trend catches on and evolves in the future.

Casual Friday: Career Voyeurism

How about a field trip of sorts?  We have all wondered what it would be like to have a career different from our own, so what follows is a list of confessions, that is,  a list of book titles all starting with Confessions of.  They give us insider perspectives into professions that may be very different from our own, and at the sake of sounding like a salesperson, it’s fascinating to read the life lessons that others have derived from their own unique first-hand experiences. This compilation represents an interesting slice of real no-fiction-here lives, though it is by no means 100% complete.  ISBNs are included should you want to locate a title for yourself.  And now, in no particular order:

•    …A Street Addict- 9780743224888 ("Street" in this case refers to Wall Street.) •    …A Serial Entrepreneur- 9780787987329 •    …A Public Speaker- 9780596801991 •    …A Municipal Bond Salesman- 0471771740 •    …A Radical Industrialist- 9780312543495 •    …An Event Planner- 0470160187 •    …A Record Producer- 0879308745 •    …A Master Jewel Thief- 0375508392 •    …A Video Vixen- 9780060892487 •    …An Economic Hitman- 9780452287082 •    …A Prairie Bitch- 9780061962141 •    …A Subprime Lender- 9780470402191 •    …An Advertising Man- 1904915019

P.S.  I can vouch that the Master Jewel Thief and Event Planner titles are fun reads.

Casual Friday: We Wish We Could Go Back To College

Graduation season is upon us and we wish all of our bizologie readers who are graduating good luck! We remember what it feels like to finish up that last paper and breathe a sigh of relief that you've taken your final test. But if it's been a while since you've graduated, you might be reminiscing about meals plans, walks through the quad and dorm room life. Let's let the cast of Avenue Q remind us what college is all about. Happy Friday, y'all!

Casual Friday: Google Chrome Ads

Everyone get your Kleenex ready, Google just launched it's Chrome TV ad campaign - their biggest offline campaign ever - and the first two ads are real tearjerkers.  There is a tactical reason for all that emotion. As explained in the New York Times article, Google wants to appeal to users who are not interested in the technical benefits, but just want to see see what they can do with Chrome. The Dear Sophie ad shows a father creating an online scrapbook for his daughter in Gmail by sending her notes, photos from Picasa,  Google mapping their first house, and videos of dance classes and birthday parties. The It Gets Better ad , first aired this week during Glee, shows people using Chrome’s toolbar to record videos for the Dan Savage project of the same name to encourage gay teenagers that they can make it through the tough times.  How can you not tear up during these ads? Makes me want to switch to Chrome right now, so I guess it's working!

Casual Friday: The Swanson Pyramid of Greatness

Happy Friday, Everyone! If you're a Parks & Recreation fan like us, then you already know that Ron Swanson can always be counted on for sound advice. A life coach if we ever saw one. In the video below, Ron introduces us to the "Swanson Pyramid of Greatness". You might want to bookmark it for those times when you need a little motivational pick-me-up. Happy Weekend and don't forget: Fish for sport only; fishmeat is practically a vegetable.

Casual Friday: A Google a Day!

A Google a Day is the new game from Google. It's trivia with a search twist. You aren't expected to know the answer, you have to Google for the answer. The cool thing is that the answer can't be found with just one search - that would be way too easy. The answer can only be found by answering one piece of the puzzle and then using that information to lead you to another piece of puzzle until you finally find the answer. You know, like real research! Don't worry about spoilers, Google thinks of everything. You play the game on a day old archived version of Google called Deja Google. They describe it as "a wormhole inspired time machine that searches the Internet as it existed before the game began."

This could be a great teaching tool or just for fun because we like solving puzzles! Take a break today and check it out.

Casual Friday: Career Advice from Your Favorite TV Shows

Once in a while,  we at bizologie are called upon to give career advice. So today we thought we'd gather a few tips from some of our favorite career men and women. Below you'll find everything from resume tips to salary negotiations to presentation tips. And here you'll find some helpful advice from everyone's favorite career gal, Joan Holloway, on workplace attire. And remember "no crying in the breakroom. That's what your apartment is for." Happy Friday, y'all!

Casual Friday: Amazon Appstore for Android

The Amazon Appstore for Android opened this week . The new store allows Android users to view apps online before they buy online and it offers Amazon's recommender service. But the really exciting news is that you can get Angry Birds Rio free for a limited time and they offer paid app for free app each day. If you spending some time today perusing the site, do be careful. TechCrunch is reporting just how easy Amazon makes it to buy these apps. If you have one-click set up in Amazon it's automatic for Appstore for Android and one-click in the wrong place could get you an app that you didn't want and you only have 15 minutes to get a refund. Let us know if you find a new favorite Android app and we'll feature it next week.

Casual Friday: Google Recipes

Google recently launched Recipe View and while it's not quite perfect yet, it seems like it will be a nice way to search. You simply search for a food, ingredient or holiday and then click "Recipes" on the left side of the page. This limits your search to only recipe sites so you won't search for hamburgers and get an article about hamburgers or a restaurant site. Once you've got your list of recipes, you can limit by number of calories or preparation time.  I also like that you can limit by ingredient, so if I want to make a birthday cake for a friend who hates coconut, I can limit my search to cakes without coconut. One thing to be aware of, especially if you run a food blog (or like food blog recipes), is that you need special coding on your site to make sure you're listed in Recipe View. You can find instructions here.

Casual Friday: Austin Margaritas in Google Fusion Tables

Amy Rushing, Metadata Librarian extraordinaire,  shows bizologie how to put Google Fusion Tables to good use. Amy has spent two years testing margaritas around Austin and rating them. Using Google Fusion she has given us Margarita Ratings: Austin, Texas - a map of restaurants and their margarita rating. You can see her rating scale in the File>About section of the Table. With Google Fusion you can create charts, graphs, and all sorts of different visualizations including maps. And, you don't have to be a metadata librarian to do it. It's easy. To create a map, make a spreadsheet with the data in Excel or Google Docs. One of the columns has to be address with zip code to map the locations. Amy used HTML code to create to the stars and fractions for her ratings. Then just import the spreadsheet into Google Fusion.

Let us know if you are inspired to use Google Fusion to map your passion. We'd love to see your masterpiece. And, Amy, we here at bizologie commend you and hope you continue your good work.

Casual Friday: Shoe Shopping

Want to do a little shoe shopping online? Of course there is Zappos and for discount shoes you can check out 6pm.com, but if you are looking for something a little different check out these 2 sites: ShoeDazzle is just the ticket if you are looking to spice up your shoe collection. This is a shoe of the month club and shoes are $40. You answer a short survey with questions about your style, age, who's celebrity closet you'd like to raid, etc. and then a day later ShoeDazzle sends you a personal showroom. The shoes are targeted to your style and picked just for you by celebrity stylists. Kim Kardashian is the co-founder and listed as the Chief Fashion Stylist. I somehow doubt she's in the backroom picking shoes, but there is a long list of stylists. My style was "classic modern" but the first showroom didn't have much I liked, so I had the option of answering a few more questions and getting a new showroom. When you place your first order you become a member. You have the option to opt out each month but you only have  short window of time. Shipping and returns/exchanges are free though. The shoes are inexpensive, fun styles, more appropriate for a night on the town than the office, but it's just the site to get you out of a shoe rut in time for spring. Oh, and did I mention they have handbags and jewelry too?

If your budget is no problem and you are feeling super creative, design your own pair of shoes at Milk & Honey Shoes. The peep toe pumps I designed (see below) were $290 and the flats were $245. Definitely not cheap, but this site would be great for a wedding or special event. Or just have fun and let your inner shoe designer out!

Casual Friday: Move Over Cupcake, It’s Time for Whoopie Pie

If you're up on your current events, then you probably know about the recent bill proposed in the Maine state legislature: LD-71 "An Act to Designate the Whoopie Pie as the State Dessert”. Finally! A political issue we can all believe in. If you're unfamiliar with the Whoopie Pie, Wikipedia defines it as  "an American baked good that may be considered either a cookie, pie, or cake. It is made of two round mound-shaped pieces of chocolate cake, or sometimes pumpkin cake, with a sweet, creamy filling or frosting sandwiched between them."

Now you could venture out to your local bakery in search of Whoopie Pies, but if you're feeling ambitious, there are plenty of great recipes out there. The classic is chocolate cake with a vanilla center and this recipe from Gourmet looks pretty darn near-perfect. Baking skills not up to par? This one uses a mix and I bet you won't get any complaints.

Casual Friday: Flying Chipmunks

If you are spending some time this Friday dreaming of a warm get-away, plan that fantasy trip on Hipmunk . Hipmunk has a great way to view your flight options with a clean, easy to use interface to make searching easy. You can look by airport or by city, calendars are right on the main page and you can limit to a certain airline quickly if you are racking up the frequent flyer miles. You can even filter out the early morning flights, these folks know how I roll. The sort feature is the best though. You can sort by the usual price, stops, and duration, but the great feature is sort by Agony. The Agony sort combines all 3; price, stops, and duration, because sometimes it pays to get there in a timely fashion without 3 layovers. Hipmunk doesn't sell flights, but once you select your flight and it connects you to Orbitz where you can purchase.

Hipmunk, the rising star of startups, just announced last week that they have some new investors -  former Expedia execs Rich Barton, Erik Blachford and Simon Breakwell, along with Ignition Partners, Jim Hornthal of Triporati and Rob Glaser, founder of Real Networks joined in this round of funding and invested $4.2 million in the business. Some of these investors also have interests in Room 77 and Travelpost, so there is some speculation in the blogosphere that these guys might be creating a whole new integrated travel site.

And since I’m on a chipmunk theme, download the Crazy Chipmunks app for iPhone or Android. It is 99¢ and $1.99 respectively. There are 3 games: Crazy Maze (like Bejeweled), Crazy Party (a memory game) and Whack-A-Mole. Who doesn’t love a good game of Whack-A-Mole to while away a Friday afternoon?