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Smart Cities

In this decade, technology forward, smart cities evolved to come close to the futures we were presented in Science Fiction. With advancements in technology and the availability of data and tools to city leadership and management teams, we are living in an era of technology leveraged to better constituents’ lives by empowering public services to better predict and respond. 

Cities with governments that leverage this technology are often referred to as “Smart Cities”, but there isn’t a formal definition in order to qualify. Cities that do get categorized as a “Smart City” are typically an urban area that utilizes data collection and analysis, Information of Things (IoT), and information and communications technologies to better the lives of, and deliver services to, their population.

 

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Automating Meetup Event Management and Promotion with Integromat, GSheets, and PhantomBuster

In our highly digitized industry, we often hunger for offline interactions with other people. Here in Los Angeles, there is no shortage of events and entertainment, but the work behind the scenes to grow and scale a community is no small feat. At Facet Interactive, we’ve employed the use of various technologies and tools to automate the process of hosting and managing meetups.

Every two weeks, we host the South Bay Tech Happy Hour. To keep our audience up to date and engaged, we...

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Hiring Automation: Post-Interview Reference Checks

In a previous blog post, we detailed how we automate the pre-interview portion of our hiring process. Before continuing here, make sure you read through the pre-interview automation first as the post-interview automation builds on that. 

After the applicant answers our pre-interview questions with our chatbot, the next phase is a phone interview. Nothing to automate further here, we simply look to validate the information we’ve collected already in our previous automation and get a feel for the candidate’s personality and experience. The stories candidates tell us will later be validated with the reference check process, which brings us here today. 

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Work Productivity & Energy Management - What We Lose Thinking About Time

“Have you considered better time management?” 

A hateful curse, often proffered when we’re “too busy”, “too behind”, too, too, too—

It’s not a poor observation. Time is our life’s currency. The one thing that we have to spend in almost any way we want, day in and day out. 

But time management doesn’t make you more productive. There is no recipe to chop up 24 hours 40 different ways to inch towards the 400 things you want to achieve in your lifetime. 

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Checklist Journaling to Maximize Daily Productivity

Whereas the minimalism and empty space of a journal creates a canvas for expression, the structure and satisfaction of a checkbox completed creates a sense of accomplishment. 

We use different mediums for different outcomes in our daily lives and our work. Between the blank sheet of a notebook or journal, and a well-structured daily checklist — we somehow find balance between the organic, spontaneous, and oh-shit-that’s-due-today nature of our lives. 

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Drupal 6 Security - Everything Business Owners Need to Know

As of August 24th 2019, Drupal 6 has been in Long-Term Support (LTS) for 3.5 years. That’s right, three and a half YEARS years since Drupal 6 End-of-Life (EOL), and we’re still talking about it.

If you’re here you might be asking yourself:

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Pitfalls of Performance Marketing or Revenue Share Marketing

I’m proud to say that we’re one of the few consultancies to provide Revenue Share agreements across marketing and sales campaigns with our clients. In an agency world of Pay Per Lead (PPL) and payment based on a percentage of Paid Advertising Budget, we’ve succeeded in often negotiating and aligning interests with our customers and partners around mutually beneficial outcomes. 

I’m equally ashamed to say that we’ve had more than our fair share of poor investments. Poor investments in companies, clients, and partners that we failed to properly assess and set up for success. 

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Hiring Automation: Pre-interview with HubSpot Chatbot

Scaling our hiring pipeline as a core team of 2 consultant-owners has had it’s challenges. We went through the transition from go-with-your-gut hiring to a repeated-and-true hiring practice a few years ago. The critical learning for us was the data. We needed to ask all hires the same questions so we could learn about who they were without getting bogged down managing our talent pipeline. 

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Building Digital Support Teams in Higher Education

Digital Transformation is often written about for its impact on an organization. Especially in higher education, there is a monumental effort placed by many teams across multiple departments to evolve digital systems and best practices. The goal for any institution is always simple in nature: deliver on technology’s original promise—to get a multiple of work done with fewer resources. We often dress up this promise to be more complicated in our efforts to coordinate, project confidence, and (sometimes) coerce others to get in line with this transformation. 

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City Intelligence: Navigating Digital Transformation to become a Smart City

The city of the future will not be defined by success or growth while resources are abundant, but instead will be defined by the way intelligent, risk-mitigating decisions are made to maximize delivery of critical city services.

To make intelligent decisions about complex City systems and services, you need data. And not just census data or statistics. You need the inner workings of the city’s operations. The metadata and messy, non-normalized data from all of your various applications, services, and systems. 

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