Courtesy HeartMath

The Inner Balance app coaches you through breathing exercises designed to reduce stress.

In a classic “Seinfeld” episode, George’s father adopts what’s supposed to be a stress-reduction technique. Except that, instead of reciting it softly to himself, he bellows to the rafters: “Serenity now!”

The Inner Balance Trainer is a $99 device from a company called HeartMath that’s supposed to help achieve the same goal without the bellowing.

After you download the free Inner Balance app, you clip the sensor to your earlobe and connect it to the dock connector of your iPad, iPhone or iPod touch. (IPhone 5 and fourth-generation iPad users will need an adapter to use it with Apple’s new Lightning connector.)

The app then coaches you through breathing exercises designed to reduce stress, while recording data from the sensor on how you’re doing.

One screen features a brightly colored circle that pulses at the pace you’re supposed to breathe. Another has a soothing photo of a waterfall that you can replace with one of your own. You can also select music from your collection to accompany your sessions. I decided on the Beatles’ “Across the Universe,” which seemed appropriately New Age-y.

It turns out that, according to the Inner Balance, I’m sort of a whiz at “coherence” — the synchronization of heart, brain and nervous system that’s the centerpiece of HeartMath’s stress-reduction approach. Or at least, I’m a whiz at “Quick Coherence,” at the lowest level.

As you progress with your training — sessions can be as brief as three minutes, though five to 10 minutes somehow seemed more appropriate — you can ratchet up the level of difficulty. At the end of each session, you get a report on how you did, including an overall score as measured in “coherence points.”

You can even post the results of your training to Twitter and Facebook, so you can have coherence contests with your friends. Sort of like competing to see who can yell “Serenity now!” the loudest.

Original post is Inner Balance Promises Stress Relief for IPhoners: Rich Jaroslovsky by Tech Blog.

Photograph by David Paul Morris/Bloomberg

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff carefully curates his company’s image.

Salesforce.com, which makes software to help businesses hone their sales and marketing campaigns, is taking a red pen to its own corporate messaging. For the past couple of years, Chief Executive Officer Marc Benioff has been pitching prospective customers on becoming “social enterprises,” capitalizing on the buzz around social networking.

In an interview, Benioff revealed his company’s new tagline: “customer companies.” After withdrawing a trademark application for the old brand last year, Benioff plans to formally introduce “customer companies” at a Feb. 26 event at New York’s Waldorf Astoria hotel. The presentation, which he previewed during an interview at his home in San Francisco this month, will include a smattering of everything that’s hot in tech: Facebook, Twitter, iPads, “big data,” self-driving cars and the Nest thermostat.

After waiting upstairs in a dedicated holding room, where staff, business partners and reporters sit by a fireplace before being ushered downstairs, I met Benioff seated at a vast conference table. He proudly showed a prototype application for the iPhone meant to show how companies that run Salesforce’s software can better collaborate to reach their buyers.

“We are our customers’ customer platform,” Benioff said. “That’s not where Oracle or Microsoft or SAP have focused.”

Benioff, who founded Salesforce in 1999 and has built it into world’s fifth-most valuable software company, is known for trash-talking his opponents — especially those top three, worth a combined $498 billion.

Salesforce is the second-best performing company in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index by return and outlook, according to the Bloomberg Businessweek 50 ranking.

But the company’s long-touted “social enterprise” concept wasn’t winning many fans, Peter Goldmacher, an analyst at Cowen and Co., said in a Jan. 24 research note. It’s against the backdrop that Salesforce is making changes to how it sells the strategy.

The “social” component has been a big part of Salesforce’s pitch to businesses. Benioff said he’s spent about $1 billion acquiring software makers that help companies place ads and communicate with users of their products through social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter. Yet the biggest such deal, for Buddy Media, hasn’t met Salesforce’s projections, said Brent Thill, an analyst at UBS. “They’ve been pretty up front that the Buddy deal didn’t work out,” he said.

Not so, said Benioff. “I feel good about the acquisition, and I feel good about the direction with marketing,” he said. “We want to build a strong marketing product line but mostly through acquisition. That’s different than how we built sales and service, which was organically. We can go faster by buying.”

And Salesforce plans to keep buying, Benioff said. “The most important thing for us is we continue to buy these No. 1 companies. Buddy was a No. 1 player. Radian 6 was a No. 1 player. We are building a $1 billion marketing business — that’s our No. 1 goal.”

Salesforce is also getting ready to ramp up its efforts in task management. A new app, which Benioff plans to show off at the company’s Dreamforce conference in November, incorporates functions from its Work.com service, Workday’s HR and financial applications, and expense-report tools from Concur Technologies, as well as to-do lists and file-sharing features. “All of that needs to be right in here,” Benioff said while showing a prototype of the app.

That night, Benioff flew to Palm Springs, California, to lay out the year’s plans to his top 600 managers. Despite a change to the company’s pitch, the rest of the strategy should be familiar, he said.

“This is not like some big strategic leap from where we were,” he said. “If you want to know where we’re going to be in five years, it’s going to be more of this. It’s not going to be something radically different.”

Original post is Salesforce CEO Benioff Tries Out Some New Material by Tech Blog.

Photograph courtesy of Ideo

Attendees of Ideo's sanitation hackathon collaborated on tools for highlighting Ghana's open defecation issues.

During a hackathon last week at the San Francisco offices of design firm Ideo, there were laptops, whiteboards, pizza and beer. Oh, and photos of feces on the walls.

The 40 software developers who attended the Hack Sanitation event were tasked with building Web tools for highlighting the toilet troubles of Ghana. In the West African country, 19 percent of people defecated openly in 2010 due to a lack of access to bathroom facilities, according to a study by the World Health Organization and UNICEF.

To drive the point home, Ideo’s walls were decorated with scenic photos from Ghana showing streets and beaches littered with plastic bags full of excrement.

Ideo.org, a nonprofit spin-off of the design studio known for its work with Apple and Research in Motion, started focusing on Ghana’s fecal problem after Jocelyn Wyatt, the organization’s executive director, took a trip to the city of Kumasi two years ago. She was taken aback by the sight of feces “all over the streets,” she recalled.

Last year, the organization tapped the design experts at Ideo to develop a cheap toilet that could be installed in homes there. The pilot program, in which professionals empty the canisters three times a week, began with 100 families in March. That project eventually led to the two-day hackathon, where volunteers were asked to brainstorm and build prototype software to raise awareness of the health risks associated with open defecation.

“We were so into it at that point that we wanted to keep making progress,” Wyatt said. “Hackathons create a level of excitement that drives continued engagement.”

In the technology world, Ideo isn’t alone in tackling this issue. Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates held a toilet fair in August to showcase the developments in third-world sanitation funded by his foundation. He gave first prize to the inventors of a solar-powered toilet.

Ken Guzik,  a user-experience engineer at VMware, said he attended Ideo’s event because he was inspired by Gates’s recent initiative. His group at the hackathon developed a service for sending free text messages from a mobile phone about where open defecation takes place. This crowd-sourced data could give people a better understanding of how prevalent the problem is.

Another group created a Facebook application that could post statistics about where public poop can be found, along with pictures. A third group built the infrastructure to tie it all together, as well as a website that maps the information.

When the day finally came to an end, Robin Bigio, Ideo.org’s senior designer, gave each person a parting gift: a roll of toilet paper.

Original post is Flush With Ideas: Hackathon Tackles Ghana’s Toilet Troubles by Tech Blog.

But Julie Larson-Green, who just yesterday was put in charge of all software and hardware for Windows, wasn’t nervous about the product’s debut at the D conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, California. She had been working on Windows 8 since the summer of 2009, and her team had tested the top-secret program enough to feel “confident but not cavalier,” she said in an interview last month.

No, Larson-Green was worried about whether the prototype tablet she was using for the first time ever to show off Windows 8 would even work. Even calling it a tablet at that point would have been generous. The device had a plexiglass touch-screen (the same one that later became the screen for Microsoft’s Surface tablet) with wires coming out of it. It was held together with duct tape.

Larson-Green, a frequent Microsoft presenter who said she is still always nervous about going on stage, wasn’t sure anything would happen when she swiped her finger across the screen. The device was still early in development and the company didn’t have any real hardware.

It was a minor miracle that the device even made it to Southern California, past airport security. Too fragile to be shipped, or even put into luggage, the task of transporting the kludged-together tablet fell to Jensen Harris, a trusted lieutenant of Larson-Green’s. The two spend so much time together that they finish each other’s sentences. Put them in different rooms and ask a series of questions and you will get the same answers, like a software engineer version of “The Newlywed Game,” Larson-Green said.

Harris spent the flight with the device positioned between his legs to make sure it arrived in one piece. The sight of a large man with his knees already pressed against the seat in front of him holding something with wires poking out of it earned Harris some “very questionable looks” from other passengers, he said. All the while, Harris sat there thinking, “I’ve got the future of Microsoft between my legs,” he said.

Now it’s Larson-Green who has the future of Windows in her hands.

Original post is What Made Microsoft’s New Windows Boss Really Nervous by Tech Blog.