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Shareworthy articles and content syndicated from other sites. These aren’t things I’ve written or necessarily endorse, for the record.

The Internet Crushes The Work/Life Boundary

Broadband connections, mobile devices, and collaboration tools make employees productive from any location. Your employees know this already: Forrester's survey of more than 5,000 information workers in five countries reveals that half of the information workforce works online from home, and one in five does on the go. They also live online using the Internet for personal purposes at work (especially your senior staff). But surprise! Employees give that time back by working online the same number of hours at home, where Facebook and YouTube and email and web meetings blend into a happy work/life balance. As a content and collaboration (C&C) professional, your conclusion should be that it's time to champion the cause of your company's work anywhere future and carry the technology banner to achieve it.

Get Your Designs Started with Moodboards

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Moodboards rock my socks. They help bridge the gap between client expectations and a designer’s vision for a project. Before even getting started with a designer, most clients have some concept of what they want their site or app to look like and it’s my job as designer to understand what that concept is. That doesn’t mean I ever blindly follow visual direction from a client since it is very much my job to help drive creative choices, but it is critical to understand where the client is coming from. That’s where moodboards come in.

The purpose of a moodboard is to start a conversation about the visual direction of a project before fully investing in a design. By hinting at style, colors, imagery, typography and other design elements through a collage of snippets, I start to get a feel for what a client’s design preferences are. Understanding the client’s vision helps me get started with the visuals, guide our future conversations about visual direction and ultimately design the best possible site or app possible.

What does a moodboard look like? A moodboard can be an organized collection of design elements:

It can be a mess of inspiration that captures a direction:

It can even be just screencaps of sites that hint at a style:

I often pull moodboard pieces from my design inspiration collection in Evernote, run them together with some quick typographic and color elements and leave it at that. It’s not supposed to be over-designed, it’s supposed to start a conversation, so keep it quick and dirty.Image Credit

Scan a QR Code & Save Your Place on the Restaurant Wait List

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

Name: WalkIN

Quick Pitch: Take the wait list with you and get notifications when your table is ready.

Genius Idea: Scan QR codes to save your place on multiple wait lists.

Proving that nine guys can successfully launch a startup in 48 hours on a bus, WalkIN is walking away from SXSW Interactive a big winner. The now one-week-old startup, which lets users save their places on restaurant wait lists by scanning a QR code at the door, shared the top prize in the StartupBus grand finale and is on its way to becoming a legitimate company.

The WalkIN experience is straightforward. Consumers use an iPhone or Android app to scan a QR code to reserve their place on the wait list. Merchants manage the queue via an iOS or HTML5 app, adjust wait times and manually add new guests to the list.

The first version of WalkIN launched at SXSW is QR code-only, but the founders now realize they need to add an SMS option to the service to reach all consumers.

The StartupBus environment helped make WalkIN a winning idea, says co-founder Bhavin Shah. “It was magic that was occurring,” he says. Team members naturally gravitated towards each other and worked harmoniously, circumstances that helped the nine guys evolve their ideas rapidly, beating out their competitors across the six-bus fleet.

Those excited by WalkIN’s promise to keep their place in the line should temper their enthusiasm for a more few weeks. Being just days old, WalkIN ins’t accessible to consumers just yet, though Shah explains that this will soon change. The startup is already talking to a handful of restaurants in New York, San Francisco and Sydney who are interested in testing the service in the coming weeks.

WalkIN’s idea is not entirely new, and there’s a smattering of competition in the virtual line space. But, with other startups such as Textaurant securing funding and no clear standout that owns the local merchant side of the equation, there’s plenty of opportunity here.

The young startup has fielded investment offers of its own, but has turned them down. WalkIN is going through a transition phase, according to Shah. Its unusual origins mean that team members must individually determine whether they want to peruse this full-time or keep their day jobs, he says.

Still, the startup is ready to graduate from the hyper-accelerator format of the StartupBus to a real-world environment. The team’s first order of business is to add new features, get merchants signed on and improve the overall user experience of the apps.

Series Supported by Microsoft BizSpark

Microsoft BizSpark

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark, a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.

More About: bizspark, spark-of-genius, startup, walkin

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