Three Reasons You Need To Adopt A Millennial Mindset Regardless Of Your Age

With more generations now working side by side at the office, it’s become common for older employees to experience a somewhat uncomfortable reality: answering to a younger boss.

One third of US workers say their boss is younger than they are – and for fifteen percent that’s by at least ten years – according to a recent study done by CareerBuilder, which surveyed more than 6,000 people.

“It’s not uncommon to see 30-year-olds managing 50-year-olds,” saidRosemary Haefner, Vice President of Human Resources at CareerBuilder.

It’s been well documented that this dynamic can lead to workplace tension, a phenomenon I discussed in a recent blog post.

But a key way to prevent that generational tension was highlighted by a quiz created by the Pew Research Center. The quiz, called “How Millennial Are You?” asks 14 questions to determine whether respondents, regardless of age, have what I call a Millennial Mindset, meaning just because you may be a Digital Immigrant (born after 1977) you need to become a Digital Native in your thinking.    

And considering the power of millennial thinking in avoiding workplace tension got me thinking about other ways tapping into the Millennial psyche is crucial to our careers.  Here are three:

1. Millennials are not only our current and future employees (and bosses) but they are our current and future customers.  Understanding their personal views will only help us thrive in our businesses.
2. Millennials will be roughly 50% of the USA workforce in 2020 and 75% of the global workforce by 2030. The sheer size of this demographic segment will force organizations to re-think many of their policies and practices such as delivery of training & development, (think mobile and social) vacation time (unlimited and a focus on performance not face time in the office) and commitment to global job rotations early in one’s career.
3. Millennial preferences using the latest social technologies and innovation platforms to communicate and collaborate on-the-job.. For example one of the findings of the Future Workplace Multiple Generations @ Work Survey of 1,189 knowledge workers and 150 managers found that Millennials value the opportunity to share their ideas and creativity at work. In fact, the ability of an employer to provide on-going opportunities to share openly and collaborate came up as the fourth most frequently mentioned criteria for seeking a best of breed employer after; workplace flexibility, compensation and career progression.

If you take Pew’s quiz, you may be surprised where you rank. During a recent presentation, I told my audience that whoever scored higher than my score of 84 could receive a free copy of my book, The 2020 Workplace. To my surprise I gave away about 5 books that day, all to bona fide Baby Boomers!

So let’s see where you fit. According to Pew quiz, if you want adopt a  Millennial Mindset, here are some areas to consider:

Play social games on the Internet or on your mobile device, instead of watching television. Forty-three percent of Millennials don’t watch even an hour of television each day, according to Pew’s study, because they prefer these activities.

Build “social” into your life.  Millennials often take to the keypad to type out texts to their buddies, Facebook status updates to their extended friend groups, and tweets to the entire Internet. The average Millennial sends around 20 texts per day, while 41% of adults overall don’t send text messages at all, Pew found.

Re-think “HOW” you communicate with friends, family and colleagues.  Often this means dumping your Landline (a real Millennial may not even know what this refers to)  and relying solely on a smartphone. Forty-one percent of Millenials have abandoned landlines in favor of keeping just a mobile phone. (Many of them even sleep with them.) And the Google office in New York City has actually done away with desk phones in each cubicle admitting most of their employees live on their mobile phones.

Be open to change and accepting of diversity. To be a millennial, you can’t be too right or left – but somewhere in the middle. Skin color, religion and personal preferences just aren’t that important to Millennials. In their views about interracial dating, Pew’s report says, “Millennials are the most open to change of any generations.” To be a millennial, ditch your prejudices.

Be constantly open to new career opportunities. According to Future Workplace Multi-Generation Survey of 1189 knowledge workers, Millennials, 91% of Millennials expect to stay in a job for less than three years, according to the Future Workplace “Multiple Generations @ Work” survey of 1,189 employees and 150 managers. This compares with the most recent data the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, which reports that the median time workers are with their current employer is 4.6 years.

All of us need to adopt a Millennial mindset, regardless of when we were born. Why? In order to thrive in the workplace of the future we need to be agile, digitally literate, use the latest social technologies and above all, be open to people of all cultures, since our workforce of the future will be increasingly multi-cultural, age diverse and global.

(Jeanne Meister, the author is officially a Baby Boomer, acts like Generation X, but secretly wants to be a Millennial. Her 24year-old daughter took the quiz and scored  “78” 6 points below her Baby Boomer MOM, who scored ”84” without any tattoos or body piercings.)

So readers, can you exhibit a Millennial mindset or do you find it a struggle? If you do, has it helped you at work? Let’s be social and share!

Jeanne Meister

A millennial mindset will determine the future of businesses

SAMIR DHIR

Being ‘millennial’ may be more a way of life than just a buzzword

The term millennials is a misnomer. The general tendency to think of millennials as teenagers is flawed as millennials are born after 1980.

A majority of the millennial customers with purchasing power have exploded and brought to the market an entirely new set of expectations. With their dependence on social media to get and share information and flair for technology, they are redefining the paradigms for every industry.

Their consumption of services is led by peer reviews on social networks, advice from friends groups on instant messaging (IM) platforms and smartphone apps. If they do not like a particular service or product, they will immediately share their experiences over social, IM platforms using their smartphones.

Likewise, they can also become endorsers for a brand if engaged in the right way.

Businesses need to learn and transform to address the needs of these future world citizens lest the ‘mobile-first generation’ finds them conventional, non-engaging and static.

Transformations

Take, for instance, the way news is consumed by this generation in the digital age. The influx of smartphones and tablets have meant people now watch news on the go and not wait to reach home and switch on the television. Another industry which has been transforming itself in line with the millennials’ expectations is the banking sector.

Banks are working hard to provide the same level of services and experience on their mobile site as their physical branch. They do not expect these young professionals to actually visit their home branch often. These traits should provide insights into how companies or marketers should respond and communicate to them. Millennials seek instant gratification and recognition and this is something recruiters too need to keep in mind during campus and lateral hires for millennials. They are willing to give their loyalty to someone who can fulfill their quest for new challenges. They show meta cultural ease i.e., they are comfortable with people from different backgrounds, culture and ethnicity, want to be able to give back through their work and have a good network of friends at work — an average of 220 plus friends.

Businesses need to integrate these millennial traits in their outreach strategies. One way of doing this would be to recognise, reward and encourage these traits. Across sectors and verticals, companies need to learn from millennials and then formulate their marketing strategies accordingly.

Business landscape

Startups like Flipkart and Ola Cabs with a millennial attitude are constantly forcing change in the market. These start-ups are creating new e-tailing and aggregation business models challenging the way conventional businesses have engaged and delivered their offerings. What sets these start-ups apart is the agility and entrepreneurial spirit.

Agility gives them the power to challenge the large corporates, grow faster than the industry, innovate and disrupt the conventional way of doing things. Large traditional companies engaged in large format retail, consumer durables and taxi services are losing market share and customer imagination as they could not quickly adapt to the changing demands of the millennial customers.

Also, it has been our experience that individuals that behave like entrepreneurs within a company are the star performers who come up with original ideas and continuously innovate.

IT services and product companies now not just recognise but also reward their millennial employees for innovation, in terms of funding and implementing these ideas for their customers. All this again brings to the fore that we need to adopt a millennial mindset, regardless of when we were born.

The new market entrants are rapidly changing consumer preferences. Therefore, in order to remain competitive and retain customers, we must be able to fully leverage the potential of social media. Therefore, being ‘millennial’ may be more a way of life rather than just a buzzword.

The writer is EVP and Head of India Operations, Virtusa, an IT services company

NASA Confirms Earth Will Experience 6 Days of Total Darkness in December 2014!

WORLDWIDE - NASA has confirmed that the Earth will experience 6 days of almost complete darkness and will happen from the dates Tuesday the 16 – Monday the 22 in December. The world will remain, during these three days, without sunlight due to a solar storm, which will cause dust and space debris to become plentiful and thus, block 90% sunlight.

This is the head of NASA Charles Bolden who made the announcement and asked everyone to remain calm. This will be the product of a solar storm, the largest in the last 250 years for a period of 216 hours total. Reporters interviewed a few people to hear what they had to say about the situation with Michael Hearns responding “We gonna be purgin my n*gga, six days of darkness means six days of turnin up fam”.

Despite the six days of darkness soon to come, officials say that the earth will not experience any major problems, since six days of darkness is nowhere near enough to cause major damage to anything. “We will solely rely on artificial light for the six days, which is not a problem at all”, says NASA scientist Earl Godoy. Visit our website daily for more shocking news!

What do you plan to do during these six days of darkness? Tweet ‘#6DaysOfDarkness‘ including your plan for these six days!

Data Normalization - Is It Still Relevant In A World of NOSQL?

Some years ago, I wrote an article for this magazine entitled "SQL by Design: Why You Need Database Normalization". At that time, NoSQL databases were a tiny percentage of the installations, and relational ruled the land.

Today the landscape has changed, and we have relational database management systems like SQL Server sharing the spotlight with variations of the NoSQL technology. So, I thought we could revisit the original reasons for normalizing data and see if they're still relevant.

Assumptions: when you normalize a database, you're targeting the following goals:
- arranging data into logical groupings such that each group describes a small part of the whole;
- minimizing the amount of duplicate data stored in a database;
- organizing the data such that, when you modify it, you make the change in only one place;
- building a database in which you can access and manipulate the data quickly and efficiently without compromising the integrity of the data in storage.

The original article contended that "Data normalization is primarily important in the transactional, or online transactional processing (OLTP), database world, in which data modifications (e.g., inserts, updates, deletes) occur rapidly and randomly throughout the stored data." It then went on to point out that data warehouses, which often contain volumes of denormalized and precalculated/summarized data, often ignore the rules of data normalization.

To the data warehouse model we can add many of the current installations of NoSQL databases -- databases that are engineered to capture semi-structured data, from data sources over which quality we have little if any control, which data meaning can actually shift over time. It seems to me that if we want to be able to integrate NoSQL data into our own highly transactional, well-defined, conventionally-normalized financial data, for instance, then yes -- we need to understand the NoSQL data, its meaning, where it came from, its quality, its integrity. Well, if we want accurate answers, that is, we need to know.

Are you thinking that the NoSQL installation at your shop is a stand-alone system which is being mined as the data is gathered, and that nothing else will ever be done with it? Good luck with that idea! If IT history has shown us nothing else, it's clear that data is being used and reused in ways that were never imagined when the collection systems were put in place.

If you're working in a hybrid (SQL plus NoSQL) environment, I believe that the highly-structured SQL data is your stake in the ground; it'll give you the basis on which to build additional knowledge and marketing expertise when integrated correctly with the NoSQL data that's being collected in concert with it. And that's why I think you still need to normalize your (SQL) data.

Got other ideas? Let's hear them!

Read the original article "SQL by Design: Why You Need Database Normalization" athttp://sqlmag.com/database-performance-tuning/sql-design-why-you-need-database-normalization

(Almost) Everything We Think About Managing Millennials is Wrong. Here's Why.

Today’s workplace should look more like a jazz band (yes, that’s a pic of me) rather than a Dilbert-style bureaucracy that looks more like a dysfunctional marching band. As Dilbert pointed out (in the best selling management book of all time) our approach to talent management is deeply flawed.

But meaningful change is beginning to happen. The digital revolution is enabling new models of collaboration that lead to better innovation and higher performance. A new generation of young workers (The Millennials or The Net Generation as I’ve called them) is entering the workforce and bringing a new culture. And the new business environment demands something better. This requires a rethinking of talent management.

The current model of talent management is recruit, train, manage, retain and evaluate the performance of employees. In the future smart companies won’t do any of this. Work will look more like a jazz ensemble where hierarchy is replaced by creativity, sense-and-respond, peer-to-peer, collaboration, empowerment and improvisation.

1. Don’t Recruit: Initiate Relationships and Engage The Best Talent.

In the old model of human resources, potential new hires were solicited using one-way broadcast advertising methods, such as newspaper classified ads. Today advertising to attract young people is a waste of time and money. Companies can use social media to influence this generation about their company and get to know them.

Old-style job interviews were much like interrogations in which potential employees were grilled on their strengths and weaknesses, knowledge and skills, sometimes being asked to perform tests that are terrible predictors of effectiveness. This approach should be completely revised. Employers who seek to identify, attract, and hire the best talent should see the process as a dialogue.

And starting early, even in high school, companies can use challenges, projects, part-time jobs, internships, summer employment, and the like to get to know the best and brightest. When it’s time to hire them there is no “recruiting” to be done, as you have already engaged the people who you want. It’s simply a boundary change, where you bring your collaborator inside the boundaries of your firm.

2. Don’t Train: Create Work-Learning Environments.

Working and learning in the knowledge economy are basically the same thing. What are you doing right now reading this book? Working or learning?

So rather than sending off employees to separate training and educational activities, why not use the new media to increase the learning component of their work? Rather than training them, engage them in rich working-learning environments for life-long learning.

At my company our “training” strategy is three words: “Everyone must blog.” In doing so everyone learns how to research, write well, defend his or her ideas, and collaborate and engage with the world.

The Net Generation in particular will respond well if mentored and coached to contribute to corporate policies, strategy, and business performance. Thus, employers must use creativity and flexibility when organizing the first few months of work to expose the new employees to various leaders, work situations, and work content. Greater transparency, exposure to, and interactivity with, the broader organization during this initiation phase will lead to a win-win outcome. Companies that make the effort will benefit from less turnover, shorter ramp-up speeds, higher levels of engagement, and earlier and greater returns on their investments in employees.

How could your company increase the learning component of work?

3. Don’t Manage: Collaborate.

The Dilbertian enterprise is divided into the governors and the governed. At the top is the supreme governor and at the bottom the permanently governed. In between are those that alternate. These bureaucracies are slow. Employees are supervised and isolated in silos where knowledge is not shared.

Increasingly traditional approaches to supervision and management are not effective. Good managers build teams and engage employees through distributing authority, power, and accountability. A growing number of firms are decentralizing their decision-making function, communicating in a peer-to-peer fashion, and embracing new technologies that empower employees to communicate easily and openly with people inside and outside the firm. In doing so, they are creating a new corporate meritocracy that is sweeping away the hierarchical silos in its path and connecting internal teams to a wealth of external networks.

Collaboration is a two-way street. Work styles, workflow models, workday and workplace parameters, career paths, and professional development offerings should be examined and potentially retooled by organizations to maximize fit with the generational mix of employees.

How could your company move from a supervision model to one of true collaboration?

4. Don’t Retain: Evolve Lasting Relationships.

In today’s volatile work environment you can’t retain talent like you retain fluids.

Talent doesn’t need to be inside the boundaries of your enterprise. The Internet drops transaction and collaboration costs and companies can find uniquely qualified minds to create value anywhere. This opens a new world of relationships between talent and firms. Using the analogy of the university’s alumni network, companies should think of employees as a web of contacts. They should be perceived as networks, with a wealth of knowledge about the company’s inner workings, which possess the opportunity to add great value, even after leaving the company. Social networking, communities of practice, and other Web platforms allow employees and ex-employees alike to exchange resources and disseminate information. Net-Generation employees will embrace this kind of thinking as it comes naturally to them, having grown up on online communities such as Facebook.

Some of my best talent is not inside the boundaries of my company. How could your company become a network rather than a fortress for talent?

5. Don’t Do Annual Reviews: Improve Performance Real-time

If you’re a manager, you may have noticed that your twenty-something employees need plenty of feedback. It’s part of their mind-set, and is honed by a lifetime of immersion in interactive digital technologies. This has had a profound effect on the Net Generation’s mental habits and their way of doing things. They’ve grown up to expect two-way conversation, not lectures from a parent, teacher, or employer. They’re used to constant and quick feedback from friends about everything—their homework, a new gadget, and now, their job.

The annual performance appraisal, in which the boss tells the underling how he or she rates against corporate objectives, makes little sense for young employees. It’s often a one-way “appraisal”—boss to employee—that usually downplays the employee’s wishes and desires. It happens once a year—long after the performance took place. It rewards or punishes individual performance—not the collaboration that the new workforce treasures. It’s more about compensation and promotions than about improving performance.

So how do you give feedback to a generation that has an insatiable desire for it? How do you do it in a way that makes sense to people under 30?

There are new software packages, such as Work.com, that offer tools to enable real-time feedback. Instead of waiting an entire year to find out what managers think of them, employees can send out a quick (50 words or less) question to people they trust—a manager, a co-worker sitting in the meeting, even a client, or a supplier. Baby Boomers like me still wonder whether software like this will make our e-mail inboxes overflow with requests for “advice.” But I think managers will stop complaining once they see that employees are using this information to quickly improve their performance.

This is the second piece written for LinkedIn based on The Digital Economy, 20th Anniversary Edition by Don Tapscott, released October 24, 2014.

Don Tapscott is the author of 15 books and rated by Thinkers50 as one of the top five living business thinkers in the world. He also plays keyboards in the band Men in Suits. On Twitter @dtapscott.

Top Photo: Daniel Ehrenworth, MiddlePhoto: Teddy James / Flickr and LinkedIn

The Biggest Career Killer of All Time: The Performance Review

“Jenny … One other thing that I wanted to mention. You need to be aware of the time that you come in to the office. We usually get to the office before nine a.m., and I’ve noticed that sometimes you come in five or ten minutes late. It’s okay to come in late sometimes because we all have those days, but you should really get to the office before nine. It’s not a huge deal, but something I just wanted to let you know. You are still doing a great job, and I appreciate your work.”

Do you know who was giving Jenny this advice?

Her manager.

And do you know when she gave Jenny this advice?

During her annual performance review.

Do you know where this was happening?

At Starbucks.

Her manager is giving her the results of her year-end performance in a public coffee shop. I know, because I was sitting at the table next to them as an innocent bystander.

What do you think Jenny is thinking right now while her manager is telling her this?

I don’t know, but I’ll take a guess. It’s probably something like this:

“Whoa! Whoa here! When I joined the company you told me that it didn’t matter what time I come to work as long as I get my work done! And now I’m being dinged because I show up to work five minutes late? You do realize I show up late because I’m up at seven answering emails for an hour before I get ready to come to work, and my train doesn’t get here until nine! And wait a minute here! You’re telling me this in a public coffee shop? Ugh, I hate this job with a passion. Seriously, I’d do anything to end my misery right now.”

Sound familiar?

If Jenny’s manager isn’t even smart enough to conduct her performance review in a private place, why should Jenny suffer?

What else did Jenny’s manager say about her? Does it really matter? Do you really think Jenny remembers any of the good stuff that was said about her? All she remembers is how she has to change her entire morning just so she can “get to work on time.”

I don’t know Jenny, but I would guess that the next six months went something like this:

• Month 1: Gets up at 7:00 a.m. Only answers emails for thirty minutes. Gets to work on time
• Month 2: Gets up at 7:30 am. Doesn’t answer emails in the morning anymore. Gets to work on time.
• Month 3: Gets up at 7:30 a.m. Hits the snooze button and really gets up at 8:00 a.m. Gets to work ten minutes late. Takes the back door so her manager won’t notice.
• Month 4: Gets up at 8:00 a.m. Sends her manager random emails during her commute so her boss thinks she is working. Gets to work 15 minutes late. Takes longer lunch breaks.
• Month 5: Gets up at 9:00 a.m. Works remotely more often.
• Month 6: “I really need a job. I can’t do this anymore.”

Six months of lost potential because of one stupid comment about showing up to work on time.

What’s the solution to performance reviews?

Fortunately, there are a few companies that recognize this issue.

“Adobe ended performance reviews in 2012, after the employer noticed greater employee turnover after the annual reviews. In an interview with Human Resource Executive, Donna Morris, Senior Vice president of People Resources at Adobe, says that the reviews were an outdated process and made people feel like they were labeled.”

The problem is that most companies won’t be adopting this policy any time soon. So it’s up to you as an employee to be proactive.

Here’s what I do as an employee and consultant:

Schedule regular check-ins. I go out of my way to get feedback from my manager every two weeks. I put this on my client manager’s calendar as a recurring event.

Subject: “Bi-Weekly Checkup – Manage Expectations”

Hi Jane – Let’s use this 30-minute meeting to discuss my performance and overall status of my projects. This will help me keep you updated as well as to understand how I can manage your expectations.

I NEVER wait for feedback. I always actively push for open feedback. Since I pursue this activity, I receive feedback that I would never get in a more formalized approach.

During the meeting I ask the following questions:

• “How are you doing?”
• “Here’s my latest status…”
• “Is there anything I should be doing better?”
• “How can I help you?"

I am someone who gives performance reviews. How can I give constructive negative feedback without ruining someone’s day?

Harvard Business review has a great article that covers this question in great detail.

My favorite excerpt is this:

If you’re delivering some particularly hard-to-hear news, consider giving the person the rest of the afternoon off. Studies have shown that top performers are especially vulnerable to major setbacks. Show compassion not by softening the blow with false praise, but by giving bad news straight and then offering some breathing room.

Long story short -- You are going to ruin their day. If you deliver it properly, they will come back the next day without a sour taste in their mouth. You want to help their career, not kill it.

How can I accept negative feedback without ruining my career?

I'm sure plenty of books have been written about this exact topic, so I really can't do this question any justice.

Here is what I do when I receive negative feedback:

1. Get temporarily hurt. Yes, I have feelings.
2. Understand WHY I received the negative feedback. I'll ask questions to the person providing the feedback to provide specific examples that back up the negative comments.
3. Understand more about the person who gave me the negative feedback. A lot of times I will receive feedback from someone I know isn't true, but I will still try to understand why that particular person gave me that feedback.
4. Take action to fix it.
5. Go back to being normal.

I have a 24 hour rule. From the moment I receive negative feedback in my career or life, I have 24 hours to go back to normal even if the negative feedback was unjustified. This has helped me come back stronger.

-------------------------

PLEASE follow me or add me on LinkedIn.

I am the author of the book Fire Me I Beg You.

If you want to learn how to quit your job and win at life, join my free Summer of Quitting Course. You also get the first chapter of my book for free.

If you want me to speak at your company or next event, please e-mail me at robbie@firemeibegyou.com

If you or your company needs help with something and you think I can help, email me at robbie@firemeibegyou.com

If you don't want me to speak at your next event, or think I can help you or your company - You can still email me. I'll take any positive and negative feedback you have to offer. Just know that in 24 hours, it will be like it never happened.

If you don't want to email me, leave a nice comment below. I also accept miserable mean comments as well. Those are my favorite.

W3C Declares HTML5 Standard Complete

More than four years ago, Steve Jobs declared war on Flash and heralded HTML5 as the way to go. You could be forgiven if you thought the HTML5 standard — the follow-up to 1997’s HTML 4 — has long been set in stone, given that developers, browser vendors and the press have been talking about it for years now. In reality, however, HTML5 was still in flux — until today. The W3C today published its Recommendation of HTML5 — the final version of the standard after years of adding features and making changes to it.

As a user, you won’t notice any changes. Chances are your browser already supports most HTML5 features like the 

“Today we think nothing of watching video and audio natively in the browser, and nothing of running a browser on a phone,” said Tim Berners-Lee, the W3C director, in a statement today. “We expect to be able to share photos, shop, read the news, and look up information anywhere on any device. Though they remain invisible to most users, HTML5 and the Open Web Platform are driving these growing user expectations.”

As Paul Cotton, the W3C HTML working group co-chair and Partner Group Manager at Microsoft Open Technologies told me earlier this week, he believes that the main achievements of HTML5 are that it “defines the set of interoperable HTML5 features that web developers can depend on in building their web sites.”

Any non-interoperable features the group discussed were moved to HTML 5.1 (including the controversial idea of adding support for some kinds of digital rights management right into the standard). HTML 5.1 may be released as early as next year, and the Working Group will continue to work on those features that were excluded from HTML5.

Of all the many new features in HTML5, Cotton believes that “the single most important feature of HTML5 is probably the

At some point in the standardization process, it looked like it would take as long as 2020 to get to a final recommendation. Thanks to the W3C’s “Plan 2014,” we have a final version today. As Cotton told me, though, he also believes that this was the biggest compromise the different stakeholders agreed to.

“As part of ‘plan 2014′ we also encouraged the Working Group to permit work on some controversial items to proceed on their own path in parallel to HTML5 as ‘extension specs,'” he told me. “In fact some of these extension specs were separately developed (i.e. Ruby and elements) and were folded back into HTML5 before its completion, and others like ‘long description’ are on their way to completion as separate W3C Recommendations.”

Cotton notes that the challenge for organizations like the W3C and HTML Working Group will be to keep up with the evolving environment of doing open standards and to respond to these changes.

“For example, the tools that developers use to do their day jobs today i.e. GitHub, social media, etc. are much different than five years ago, and if we want future work of the HTML Working Group to engage web developers then we need to evolve as that environment changes,” Cotton says.

Similarly, the W3C today notes in its press release that the next version of the standard needs to focus on a number of core “application foundations” like tools for security and privacy, device interactions, application lifecycle, media and real-time communications and services around the social web, payments and annotations. All of these are meant to make it easier for developers to support the web platform.

With the final recommendation for HTML5 done, the W3C will now immediately start fixing bugs, but most importantly, it’ll work on HTML 5.1.