Gilt launches Gilt Taste beta. Love the idea. I’ve bought a few food products from Gilt in the past and it worked out well. Will definitely be giving this a try. Love their merchandising and offers. Gilt quickly becoming my other shopping place after Amazon.

Amazing debut for Linked-In today. The noise around valuations and a tech-bubble doesn’t really reflect the work this team has put into building an amazing brand. These guys put in the hard yards. TechCrunch says it well:

… these are all my observations after ten years of interviewing him about LinkedIn, watching him shake his head at the unfairness of the hype cycle and keep slogging away at building LinkedIn regardless. Hoffman should be the role model for entrepreneurs star-struck by the seeming glamour and ease of Silicon Valley’s consumer Internet world. He’s the living incarnation of the reality of the Valley: It may be easier than ever to start a product, but building a company is just as hard as its ever been.

As for the brain-dead commentators wondering if LinkedIn’s IPO represents a bubble, somewhere Hoffman has to be laughing and shaking his head again. What part of spending a decade of building a business with more than 100 million users that no one hyped, that represents one of the few large-scale working examples of a freemium business model screams “BUBBLE” to you people? These are the same people that said Google was wildly overvalued when it priced at under $100 a share.

Great post from Tony over at The MIX. Key points for taking back your attention include:

1. Let your deepest values become a more powerful guide to your behaviors
   What do you truly stand for? How do you want to behave, no matter what? Keep those commitments front and center through your days, both as a source of energy and direction for your behaviors.
2. Build deliberate practices
   Set up ritualized behaviors you do at specific times until they become automatic. For example, begin by doing the most important thing first in the morning, uninterrupted, for 60 to 90 minutes. Make the start time and the stop time inviolable, so you know exactly how long you’re going to have to stay the course.
3. Create "precommitments" to minimize temptation
   Our capacity for self-control gets depleted every time we exercise it. Turn off your email entirely at certain times during the day. Consider working at times on a laptop that isn’t hooked up to the Internet. Do this for the same reason you should remove alluring foods from your shelves (or avoid all-you-can-eat buffets) when you’re on a diet.
4. Start small
   Attention operates like a muscle. Subject it to stress–but not too much stress–and over time your attention will get stronger. What’s your current limit for truly focused concentration? Build it up in increments. And don’t go past 90 minutes without a break.

Great post from Tony over at The MIX. Key points for taking back your attention include:

1. Let your deepest values become a more powerful guide to your behaviors
   What do you truly stand for? How do you want to behave, no matter what? Keep those commitments front and center through your days, both as a source of energy and direction for your behaviors.
2. Build deliberate practices
   Set up ritualized behaviors you do at specific times until they become automatic. For example, begin by doing the most important thing first in the morning, uninterrupted, for 60 to 90 minutes. Make the start time and the stop time inviolable, so you know exactly how long you’re going to have to stay the course.
3. Create “precommitments” to minimize temptation
   Our capacity for self-control gets depleted every time we exercise it. Turn off your email entirely at certain times during the day. Consider working at times on a laptop that isn’t hooked up to the Internet. Do this for the same reason you should remove alluring foods from your shelves (or avoid all-you-can-eat buffets) when you’re on a diet.
4. Start small
   Attention operates like a muscle. Subject it to stress–but not too much stress–and over time your attention will get stronger. What’s your current limit for truly focused concentration? Build it up in increments. And don’t go past 90 minutes without a break.

Jennifer over at the New York Times has a neat story on navigating with social media. Has some commentary from me…

“I have lived on the road for most of my life,” said Andy Lark, 42, chief marketing officer for Dell’s business unit worldwide, who travels almost every week and internationally every three weeks and uses many different social tools. “They make people more accessible, places more accessible and all the possibilities of travel so much more exciting. And it is as much about devices, like smartphones and wireless networks, as it is about social networks.”

Mr. Lark said traveling for business could be a lonely experience and social media tools had helped change that. “We’ve gone from a world where everyone sits on the plane and doesn’t talk to one another and then heads to a hotel room, where it can be hard to understand what to do next. Suddenly, you are plugged into your own networks and you are getting tips and recommendations. Everyone becomes a navigator for you.”

He recalled that on a trip to Hong Kong, he checked into Foursquare to discover that two old friends from San Francisco were visiting at the same time; they were able to get together for a drink. During a recent trip to India, he arrived around 4 a.m. at the Leela Palace hotel in Bangalore, and checked into Foursquare, thinking his wife would be the only one to see what he described as a cheeky comment, wondering where he might find a decent cup of coffee in the predawn darkness. To his surprise, he got an immediate response, recommending a nearby coffee bar. It was from a Dell customer, up early to play golf, someone he had never met in person who had seen his coffee question pop up in his LinkedIn account. It turned out that Mr. Lark had linked his social accounts so one post appeared in multiple places.

“Foursquare had distributed my post automatically to LinkedIn,” said Mr. Lark, who connects all of his personal networks from Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare. “These social networks, in and of themselves, have value but there is more value by linking them to each other. ”

He has taken his quest for a perfect cup of coffee to Twitter, as well. While in Melbourne, Australia, he recently asked his followers for recommendations and included a simple hash tag, #coffee. This meant his Twitter update appeared in a stream beyond his personal network, one that was followed by people who shared a keen interest in coffee. “I got a response from someone I didn’t know with a recommendation of an amazing coffee bar with cold-filtered coffee,” he said. “I never would have known about it unless I had used the hash tag. There is a lot of social good in the social world. And a hash tag unlocks some of that goodness.”

For business travelers, Mr. Lark said that he thought that social media was not only a way of keeping up with what was going on during your travels, but was also useful in letting people know at home where you were and what you were doing. “With a young family, checking in, using Foursquare, my wife knows where I am,” he said. ‘It is a great way of staying in touch.”