Speed and Function

06/02/2023

🎧 Top 5 Headsets for Business, under $200
(not sponsored by anyone)

If you’re like many of those in my company, you or your employees spend a lot of time in public places, like coffee shops, cafes, or even noisy home offices. And you spend most of your days plugged into calls.

I have very sensitive ears, and so I need great headsets to filter out noise around me and to clean up the noise coming in. We’ve been able to test a few dozen headset brands in real world settings, using them over Zoom, Google Meet, Skype, and phone-to-phone calls.

Some, like the Apple Airpods Pro, greatly underdeliver for the price. We’ve found that the company Jabra produces the highest quality headsets for the best price.

For Bluetooth connections, our Top 5 are:

1. Jabra Evolve 65e ($200)
2. Jabra Evolve 75e ($165)
3. Jabra Elite 65e. ($150)
4. Apple Airpods Pro ($200)
5. Plantronics Voyager 6200UC ($175)

And for the wired:
Jabra Evolve 2 40

What do you think? Do you have a headset you love? Why?

05/19/2023

In the beginning, we built simple and educational games. But within ten years, we’d developed a staff training simulator for one of the biggest airlines on the market.

The reason we were able to do it was we learned to master two vital things: scale and complexity. With these two skill sets under our belt, the sky has been the limit for our e-Learning projects.

Read more about our approach in this article: bit.ly/438ngQo

05/04/2023

When the war started in Ukraine, Speed & Function knew we had to act to support our Ukrainian staff immediately, and we did.

Over $100,000 was spent to help 55 team members and their families evacuate from the active combat zones to 13 European countries.

But it wasn’t only about financial help.

The Developmental Sprint®, a powerful developmental technology that can help someone make very difficult decisions much easier, was indispensable in helping some staff members make seemingly impossible choices – to leave their homes for safety or to stay with what they know and love.

Read more in this story by Alex Ost, one of Speed & Function’s engineers here: https://bit.ly/42pIMQ9

04/28/2023

Robert Kegan, a Harvard psychology professor and an expert in adult development, is one of the people inspiring our unique approach to business.

"The single biggest way to impact an organization is to focus on leadership development. There is almost no limit to the potential of an organization that recruits good people, raises them up as leaders, and continually develops them." - he said.

What does human development have to do with business? A lot, it turns out.

Being what's called a Deliberately Developmental Organization helps us to better understand not only ourselves but the world around us. We get insight not just into what we think, but how we think. This, in turn, means better service, better outcomes for our clients, and greater employee engagement.

04/25/2023

See the second part of Stephan Protsak's presentation at , where we shared with the community an approach for MediaWiki Auth Experiment — a year-long experiment where we explored the possibility of replacing Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia’s existing authentication and authorization system with a third-party identity management system.

See Part 1 here: https://lnkd.in/gj-atcGW

04/24/2023

Stephan Protsak from our team presented at , where we shared with the community an approach for MediaWiki Auth Experiment. This was a year-long experiment where we explored the possibility of replacing ’s existing authentication and authorization system with a third-party identity management system.

We would like to extend our appreciation to everyone who attended and supported us at the event. Collaborating with other knowledge management innovators is a key part of our mission to make an impact. We look forward to continuing this work and sharing our insights with the community.

04/19/2023

“One of our first two clients was Time for Three, a trio of violinists. Our second big project was a s*x therapy portal, the first one of its kind at the time.”

Read the story of Speed & Function as told by co-founders Nick Gluzdov and Irina Abramson - in an age of marketing spin, this interview is a refreshing blast of honesty, with challenges and celebrations, small wins and epic fails — a story about going from Zero to One. https://bit.ly/43IZ7AZ

04/14/2023

See you at the ! Our CEO Nick Gluzdov will be attending the conference in Austin next week - let’s connect and meet!

The conference brings together , users, and organizations of "enterprise MediaWiki" from around the world.

EMWCon page: https://lnkd.in/dfGtz5rq

Videos from EMWCon: https://lnkd.in/dcaNZnun

04/13/2023

S&F CEO Nick Gluzdov shares the benefits becoming a DDO brings, things like self-driven employees and collaborative (not transactional) relationships with clients in his latest conversation with Bernadette Wesley, Associate Partner at Frændi. This time Nick gives advice for aspiring DDOs.

04/04/2023

Usual hiring has got us to the era of tech-lay-offs. Is hiring in a different way a solution to it?

"Our most effective partners are people who come to IT from other professions. They have a broad perspective, can assess situations from unusual angles, and envision unconventional solutions."

Read more about the Deliberately Developmental approach to hiring in this interview with Anna Krigan, our HR Department Director.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/observe-what-majority-does-do-opposite-how-we-find

Our clients are B-corp companies with a global mission: to change society and the world. To work with such clients, employees must share similar values.

03/31/2023

This was a great stepping stone on our way to becoming the e-learning experts we are now. In 2014, we helped Vanguard to build a simple yet effective gamified tool to help their clients make better informed financial decisions.

Can you think of the ways gamification can help you lure your clients? We’ll be happy to help you make it happen.

03/28/2023

Gender equality in tech has been a struggle, but tech company Speed & Function is 40% female. This is in part because we're what's known as a DDO -- a Deliberately Developmental Organization. And a fun fact: we have 6 Annas working for us!



See part of our happy team in this picture from S&F's Ukrainian office.