Workplace

Industrial designer Bill Stumpf, best known for as the co-creator of the Aeron ergonomic chair, has died of complications related to abdominal surgery, the New York Times reports. He was 70.

The Aeron chair, designed by Stumpf and Don Chadwick for the Herman Miller furniture company, has a permanent spot in the Museum of Modern Art. Stumpf himself has been honored with this year's National Design Award in the Product Design category. But the Aeron will quite likely be best remembered as an icon of a bygone age--the late-'90s dot-com boom and subsequent bust.

The high-end, futuristic-looking Aeron … Read more

Seth Godin is never shy of controversy. His willingness to speak and write his mind is a primary reason that his "Permission Marketing" made its way to the New York Times Best Seller List.

So it's of little surprise that he has prompted another provocative debate in the blogosphere with a recent post that challenges the need for job interviews: "I've been to thousands of job interviews (thankfully as an interviewer mostly) and I have come to the conclusion that the entire effort is a waste of time. At least half the interview finds the … Read more

The mystery buyer of Web calendaring site Kiko has finally come forward: It's Tucows.

There are always many reasons for such acquisitions, but what made this deal unusual was the way it was handled--by an auction on eBay. Tucows was apparently the real identity behind "powerjoe1998," the moniker used to win Kiko for $258,100 in one of 111 bids.

In a post on Tucows' site, CEO Elliot Noss explained the purchase this way: "While there are a lot of little reasons, I'll cover a few of them in a moment, there is really one … Read more

We're not ashamed to admit our fondness for top-10 lists, as we've noted in this space before. One of our favorite posts, in fact, was the very-meta top 10 of the top 10.

But why stop at just two digits? Project Management Source offers a whopping "101 ways to organize your life."

Granted, life is a pretty big topic, so it's understandable if 10 tips just aren't enough. Still, we can't resist this observation: If one of the main goals is efficiency, shouldn't this list be shorter to save time?

For RadioShack, apparently the best way to deal with employees is not face to face. The electronics retailer this week thought it best to use e-mail to notify about 400 employees at its Fort Worth, Texas, headquarters that they no longer work for the company.

"The work force reduction notification is currently in progress," read an e-mail delivered Tuesday morning. "Unfortunately, your position is one that has been eliminated."

A company representative told the Associated Press that employees were informed that layoff notices would be delivered electronically and that employees were welcome to use the company'… Read more

The mean compensation for an engineer in the U.S. is $103,999, according to the annual salary survey published by EE Times. The figure includes bonuses and overtime. The mean for straight salary was $99,300, up $100 from the year before.

Around 73 percent of U.S. engineers received a pay raise last year. The average pay raise was 4.6 percent, according to the survey.

In Japan, mean compensation was $75,800 while it was $72,000 in Europe.

In India, it was $39,500, up from $38,300 the year before. Eighty-five percent of engineers got … Read more

We felt a little guilty after posting yesterday's item that pointed to " 10 tips on doing nothing at work," so we'll try to make amends.

What you really should be doing, boys and girls, is concentrating on your jobs. To that end, today we offer this advice from Java engineer Dave Cheong, who lists "18 ways to stay focused at work." And to show that we're not just playing around, we'd like to point out that we've always worked hard to help improve your personal productivity.

Take that, slackers.

It's an ignominious step for any company: Listing your business for sale on eBay. Yet that is exactly what Web calendering site Kiko has done, in what appears to be an abrupt end to its high-flying ambitions of only a few months ago.

Kiko had been one of the small companies cited often in fueling the Web 2.0 boom among small businesses with promising technologies. Its precipitous fall has many wondering what happened and whether Kiko is a harbinger for other start-ups.

It's too soon, of course, to say whether the second dot-com bust is already beginning. … Read more

It's not that Blogma advocates subversion in the workplace or anything, honest. We just want to help our readers keep their bosses and co-workers on their toes.

With that in mind, we offer these 10 tips on how to get away with doing nothing at work. The pointers are apparently meant as satire, but we think they could be pretty effective--if we were so inclined to try them, which of course would be wrong.