From writing too long to peppering your message with emoticons, elevate your IMs to the next level with these texting power tips.

To keep up with changes in technology or customers’ needs, companies are pushing more decision making down to their employees. Employees need to have better information and better connections with coworkers and the company vision.

— Adam Pisoni, co-founder and CTO of Yammer.

Yammer originally allowed employees to chat and share ideas quickly, but since launching in 2008 it has evolved into a Facebook-like experience with the added ability to store, share and co-edit documents. More than 5 million corporateemployees, 85 percent of which are at Fortune 500 companies, reportedly use Yammer. That success drove Microsoft to pay $1.2 billion last year to acquire the private, social network, with ambitions to roll Yammer features into Microsoft’s SharePoint 2013 and Office 365 applications.

Just prior to moving into new offices next door to Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco, Yammer co-founder and CTO Adam Pisoni sat down to talk about why empowering employees is central to his product and company culture, and essential for any business that wants to thrive in today’s fast-paced, technology-driven world.

Collaboration vs. Competition: How to Drive Innovation

Behind the making of the first tablet — Razer Edge — designed to meet the demands of PC gamers.

18 Questions to ask before buying a new mobile phone.

Email and other online account information is tougher to hack if you follow these password checkup tips.

One-hundred miles east of Silicon Valley in a former tattoo parlor, members of the second-largest hackerspace in California are hoping to make a different kind of mark by advancing technology innovation in the state capital, a region known for government, clean tech and sustainable tech, but not high tech.

We are changing the world by providing community resources for education, innovation and creation. It’s all very exciting. This whole thing is like catching a big, old tsunami and saying, ‘Wow, this is huge,’ and you need to stay on. It’s scary, it’s awesome. And there’s nothing else like it in the [Sacramento] Valley.

— Eric Ullrich, a co-founder of Hacker Lab in Sacramento. 

 

Hackerspaces a Breeding Ground for Start-Ups, Entrepreneurs

Construction at Intel’s massive D1X computer chip development fab in Hillsboro, Ore is a multi-billion dollar facility expected to be the first 14nm factory in the world. Putting cutting edge manufacturing in the U.S. manufacturing, Intel has invested billions of dollars at this site over the past several years where the company’s leading- edge silicon R&D teams define and develop the recipes for manufacturing Intel chips in other production factories around the world. Construction is expected to continue with yet another expansion targeted to support the company’s 450mm wafer technology.

I am an applied mathematician by training and an engineer by genetics, following in my father’s and two grandfathers’ footsteps.

— Karl Kempf, Intel Fellow and director of decision engineering, Intel Architecture Group

Kempf is Intel’s Math Master who fires up exotic mathematical models to figure out all kinds of stuff — such as where product engineers can do us the most good, or how to manage the valuable IP blocks in system-on-a-chip (SoC) products. And Kempf helps figure out — often amidst hundreds of competing ideas — where budget dollars would best be spent.

When I first started working with the end customers, like HP and Compaq before the merger, they thought Intel was very arrogant. They did not like us much at all, but they had to do business with us. Now, they look at us as a business partner. When Intel started taking a ‘we’ approach and working with customers as a team. Once both sides began opening up and sharing information, we were able to help each other make better business decisions.

— Intel customer business analyst Margaret Jesus, interviewed in Intel Career Reaches Back to Different Era

“Bob came to me and said, ‘How about we start a new company? My first reaction was no, I like it here. Then a couple of months later he came back and said, ‘Now that I’m leaving, how would you like to start a new company?’ It put a whole different light on the thing.”

— Gordon Moore, in a new PBS documentary “American Experience: Silicon Valley” talking about Robert Noyce who encouraged Moore to leave their first start up Fairchild Semiconductor to co-found Intel Corporation

The PBS documentary looks at how a group of young transistor tweakers turned what was once futile farmland into what today is a thriving technology innovation center of the world. Here’s a look at what Intel co-founder Gordon Moore says in the documentary, set to premiere February 5:

Silicon Valley Before the Startup