Andrew Hennigan's Blog

When you are looking for a job, an internship, a place in a business school or whatever you are likely to be interviewed through Skype, Google Hangouts, Facetime or other Internet video call apps. Skype interviews save you the time and trouble of travelling. They also broaden the range of opportunities because you can do more interviews with people you couldn't meet face to face. They also have a downside, because most people do not come across so well in a Skype interview as they do face to face. But the good news is that someone who is well prepared can easily outshine their rivals who just sat down at the computer and hoped for the best. Theoretically an interviewer could make allowance for shortcomings in the way you use Skype, but subconsciously they are influenced by the image you project. They might also draw some conclusions about your abilities from the simple observation that you had not prepared for a call. This, they will reason, might mean you are equally carele...

Conspire is a very interesting new networking tool that uses email traffic analysis to determine how strong are the connections between two people. Using this information it can determine the strongest connection path between a user and anyone else. This approach addresses a well-known weakness of the market leader in professional networking, LinkedIn. Though one of your connections might be connected to someone interesting it sometimes happens that they do not really know each other. Some people are careful to only connect with people they know -- I do this myself -- but there are many others who send and accept random connections. Conspire does not rely on self-declared connections, determining from the frequency of contacts, if and how fast the person responds and other factors to measure the strength of a connection. When you sign up for Conspire it asks for access to your Gmail account and analyzes this data using only message headers, so it does not store your message con...

Of all the new iPhone apps I have tried in the last year Talko is probably the one that impressed me the most -- a good idea, well executed, easy to use and actually real-world useful. Talko is the latest brainchild of Ray Ozzie, the person who gave the world Lotus Notes, the de facto standard for collaboration in pre-web days. What the app does is to reinvent the telephone using all the possibilities modern smartphone technology brings that Alexander Graham Bell could never have dreamed of.  You can have one-to-one voice conversations, you can have group calls and you can send spoken recordings to people. You can also switch seamlessly from recording to live and vice-versa. Better still, you can also illustrate your calls by tapping the camera icon as you talk, sharing an image of what you are seeing, and you can tag parts of a call and send them to others. Where Talko will be most useful will be in enhancing the communications of project teams. You just can't beat spoken ...