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Win an Amazon Kindle

Twitter users: here's your chance to win an Amazon Kindle, courtesy of Alacra Street Pulse.

Alacra Street Pulse aggregates comments from traditional analysts and the alternative media to answer the question: What do key opinion leader have to say about Company X today? There’s a free, ad-supported version of Alacra Street Pulse available at http://pulse.alacra.com. A Professional version, available for license, includes advanced search capabilities, email alerting, information sharing and other features for professional users.

Entering the contest is simple:

First, follow AlacraPulse on Twitter.

Second, just retweet the following message from your Twitter account:
RT @AlacraPulse Win a Kindle! Alacra Pulse: See what opinion leaders say about your favorite companies: http://bit.ly/TContest

A winner will be drawn randomly among those who complete both of these steps.

The contest kicks off Monday, July 27 and ends midnight August 2. Full contest details are available at http://pulse.alacra.com/contest.

Paul Graham on Meetings

Paul Graham, a partner in the unique venture fund / start-up incubator Y Combinator, has a terrific post up about meetings titled Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule.

One reason programmers dislike meetings so much is that they're on a different type of schedule from other people. Meetings cost them more.

There are two types of schedule, which I'll call the manager's schedule and the maker's schedule. The manager's schedule is for bosses. It's embodied in the traditional appointment book, with each day cut into one hour intervals. You can block off several hours for a single task if you need to, but by default you change what you're doing every hour.

Like almost all of Paul's post, this one goes on brilliantly and it's a must read for anyone who works regularly with developers. 

A great prequel to Paul's post is a 37 Signals post which is now 3 years old, which I refer to often:  There's No Such Thing as a One Hour Meeting.

It’s no mystery that we’re meeting averse, but here’s another reason why we think meetings are toxic: There’s no such thing as the one-hour meeting.

If you’re going to schedule a meeting that lasts one hour and invite 10 people to attend then it’s a ten-hour meeting, not a one-hour meeting. You are trading 10 hours of productivity for one hour of meeting time. And it’s probably more like 15 hours since there are mental switching costs associated with stopping what you’re doing, going somewhere else to do something else, and then resuming what you were doing before.

The key takeaway is that there are opportunity costs associated with everything, and the opportunity costs associated with meetings are frequently underestimated, often to a significant degree.

Alacra Pulse Adds Twitter, Social Bookmarking Integration

Alacra Pulse has just added two new social media features to help users more easily share critical information with peers:

Tweet This allows users to share their favorite Alacra Pulse stories on Twitter. By clicking the Tweet This button, a draft “tweet” is automatically created, including a short snippet from the specific business event. The user may edit the tweet before posting to their Twitter account.

Tweet This has an added twist: integration with the popular StockTwits service. If you are a StockTwits participant, your tweets will automatically be assigned the “$ ticker” for the company the Pulse event is describing, so your tweet will automatically flow through to StockTwits. StockTwits is a Twitter-based community of more than 70,000 active traders. To join, you can simply follow @StockTwits. There’s more information on the StockTwits page.

Share This is a plugin that allows users to automatically post stories to social media applications like Facebook or LinkedIn, as well as social bookmarking applications including Digg, Delicious, Stumble Upon and others. With a single click, users can post a story to any of more than fifty different social media applications

Alacra Pulse is gaining a strong following among users of business and financial information.

For more information on Alacra Pulse, visit our free version at http://pulse.alacra.com or visit the Pulse product site to learn more about Alacra Pulse Professional, which includes support for watchlists, email alerts, advanced search and other key features.

To stay on top of the latest business events, follow Alacra Pulse on Twitter.