Essentially he argues that people who work with their brains, rather than performing manual tasks, are often de-motivated by excess reward, and that the main purpose of financial reward is to eliminate money as a concern (pay enough, but not too much). What really motivates people like developers, designers and project managers is:

• Autonomy – deciding how to meet their goals
• Mastery – getting better at something they care about and
• Purpose – doing things for a great reason, not just profit

Watch the video, and hear the author explain it himself.

Buy it here:

I watched the webcast that announced the release. There are some interesting new features, which I’ll summarise in this article.

Gift registry

There is a gift registry in the latest release that allows shoppers to create gift lists (a bit like wishlists) and then distribute them to their contacts. As items are bought from the list, they are removed from it, and they are all allocated the same shipping address, so they can be shipped to the owner of the list. This looks like great functionality for weddings and such like. We’ll be evaluating it properly soon, as some of our clients will definitely be interested in it.

Recurring purchases

Using Paypal, customers can now set up recurring purchases of items they want delivering every month, for example. We have a client who wants to offer a monthly delivery of one of their products to customers throughout the year, and this is perfect for them. The fact that it’s tied to Paypal may be an issue for some, but once again it’s something that will help many retailers.

Enhanced search

Varien made Solr an option for search in version 1.8 of Enterprise Edition. They’ve enhanced the search in the latest version with the option to have suggestions appear as searches are being typed in, and with auto-correction of mis-spellings in search terms.

Pod1 tends to implement Enterprise Edition with Fact-finder, a merchandisable eCommerce search solution that is comparable to Omniture Merchandising, Fred Hopper or Endeca, so it’s unlikely we’ll be implementing Solr for any of our clients soon, but it’s great that Varien are working with one of the leading open source search solutions, rather than trying to create a solution themselves: search is an often over-looked area of complexity in eCommerce, and it’s a good thing to get specialist help with.

Magento Connect

Magento Connect is now available in Enterprise Edition. Until now, if you wanted to install a Magento extension in Magento Enterprise you had to do it manually, which is a fairly complex task, best left to developers. Site owners can now browse and install extensions that have been developed to work with Magento Enterprise, in the same way they could with the Community Edition. We expect to see lots of development in this space: one example is that we’ll soon launch a version of our Sagepay extension that will be installable in Magento Enterprise using Magento Connect.

Full Page Caching

Varien have enhanced Magento Enterprise Edition’s full page caching so it will work with pages that contain dynamic content: the dynamic content will be generated on demand, while the static content is cached. They expect this enhancement to significantly improve site performance once again.

Payment Bridge and PCI Compliance

The last (and largest) enhancement I’m highlighting is the implementation of the Magento Payment Bridge, which is a step towards achieving PCI compliance for retailers. This is a very complex area. I’ve spoken to Varien about their intentions with the payment bridge, and I’m consulting with other industry experts as well, to formulate a clear position for our clients, but the key points I’ve identified so far are:

• Using Magento Enterprise Edition 1.9 isn’t going to ensure you’re PCI compliant: Magento itself no longer handles payments if you’re using the Payment Bridge, but you still have infrastructure and process work to do to achieve compliance.
• The Payment Bridge encapsulates all the payment functionality for payment systems that Varien have integrated it with, and at present that list is very short: none of the payment systems Pod1′s UK clients use has been integrated yet. Third parties can’t integrate other payment systems with the Payment Bridge.
• Retailers can still use other payment extensions, such as our Sagepay extension, and can still achieve PCI compliance through that route.

I’m preparing a presentation on this subject for our Magento Developers’ Meet-up tomorrow, and I’ll share that through the blog later this week.

Conclusion

Varien have come out with another very interesting and useful upgrade to Enterprise Edition. Some of its features are very useful to our clients, and we’ll be implementing them over the coming months. The PCI situation remains complex, and we’re continuing to provide advice to our clients on an individual basis.

Not always, apparently.

Google have launched a tool that will anyone (anyone, not just developers) to build applications for the Android mobile phone platform.

All the details are here.

It looks like a very powerful tool: I’ve signed up for access, which is being rolled out incrementally by Google as it’s a Beta program.

Surely anyone participating in the Pilsner Urquell Challenge will surely experience a temporary but measurable drop in their IQ. Is that the idea?

This isn’t really a surprise, or shouldn’t be. Several manufacturers have embraced Android, and there are some great handsets available now (or coming soon) which will appeal to anyone who isn’t Apple-addicted.

All the details here and here.

I went to a lecture yesterday given by the excellent and entertaining Yorick Wilks, in which he explained the concept and evolution of companions – digital agents that accompany humans through their lives, helping them and improving the quality of their lives.

The project he described combines face recognition in photography, speech recognition and natural language parsing, some very clever artificial intelligence and the ability to mine the rich data of the Internet (Wikipedia, your Facebook account, all manner of data from the semantic web) and gives it a user interface that a person can converse with. Example applications might include teaching the software about your photo library so it can reminisce with you, researching for you on the Internet, even telling you about things it thinks you would find interesting.

I’m over-simplifying the science part here (it’s advanced and the lecture wasn’t meant to be deep, he said) but it seems to me combining all these technologies and data sources, and giving them an interface people are comfortable speaking to is a pretty exciting development. It’s the combination of several advanced technologies into one application, and the use of that software to learn over an extended period so it can adapt and improve over time that I find interesting.

Prof Wilks points out that some people are already creating digital avatars of themselves for posterity, and suggested a well-trained companion could answer questions about your life after you’ve passed on, help you remember things if you start forgetting them, and the project specifically looked at how companions could help the elderly live happier lives.

What I want to understand is whether I could start sending my companion to meetings in my place any time soon, or at least responding to my emails.

I’m now eager to find other expressions I can include in my emails that suggest I have attached something. Do phrases like “here’s the file” or “please find enclosed” also trigger the code?

How many “and here’s the email again, only with the attachment this time” emails will this clever bit of software eliminate?