National Day of Civic Hacking will be unique to each city depending on that area’s specific needs. It might take the form of a block party, hackathon, brigade meetup - or something completely different. The goal of this year’s National Day of Civic Hacking is to get at least one city in all 50 states and territories to participate. Even the White House has pledged to get in on the action.

Read more about the whole event on the Hack for Change website. And if you don’t see your hometown on the list of participating cities, then get involved and sign up. Here’s a list of the event occurring in Ripple-supported cities:

As a content creator working for a b2b IT service provider, my schedule is a bit more flexible than say one of the guys on the Support Team. It’s their job to solve problems for our clients, most of which maintain a 9-5 schedule. So, Support tends to work those hours, though they’re certainly able to do the things they need to anytime with some simple communication. And, like myself, they can do most of what they do from anywhere including the office, their home or a park bench (provided they have a long enough extension cord).

I’m a late riser. More accurately I’m a night owl, but also a fanatical worker. Once I’m in the groove, I can write, edit, and design for hours on end, day or night. My fiancee is accustomed to seeing me in front of my laptop typing away well after midnight with just a pitcher of water on the desk and my dog by my feet. But there’s a certain stigma attached to waking up at any hour after 9 AM and tackling work late at night. At other companies I’d likely be branded “lazy” and “not a team player”.. no matter how great my work is, or whether it’s completed on time. That doesn’t make any sense to me, and thankfully Ripple sees it the same way. I can, and often do the majority of my content creation and other tasks from home. I usually go into the office a few times a month for meetings, to connect with coworkers, and when I need to force one of my fellow Ripplers to get on camera for another video.

But the perks of working from home are just half of my ROWE experience. The real joy I feel comes from being trusted to do my work wherever and whenever I want to, so long as I get the job done. It’s amazing how just being treated like an adult and not a presumed thief has affected how I feel about the work I do and the people with whom I work. It’s a great feeling and a true motivator to say the least.

It’s possible that ROWE might not work for every company, everywhere in the world. But here’s my general advice to skeptics: Since results are what really matter, let the focus be on them alone. If you’ve hired the right people to get those results and given them the right tools to get their jobs done, they’ll thrive both personally and professionally like never before.

 1. World Time Buddy

Who couldn’t use another buddy, right? Well, how about one that let’s you know what time it is, no matter where your other buddies are located? That’s what the World Time Buddy does. So, you’ll know exactly how late it is in South Asia before inviting your friends in Bangladesh to a Google Hangout. Oh, and this is one buddy that won’t ask you to help them move into a new place or pick them up from the airport. How’s that for a selfless friend? Thanks, WTB.

 2. The Matboard

The Matboard is a social bookmarking hub which aims to enable users to explore, share, and inspire creative work via visual content and social media sharing. So, it’s like a Pinterest that’s geared for creative professionals. You can even use its location filter to search through work produced in your area, which makes it a pretty good resource for those looking to find a creative as well. Oh, and if that doesn’t strike your fancy, well, at least there’s some nice content to click through.

3. Shopkick

Yes, another shopping rewards app.. only this one is easy to use, has no applications to fill out, and there’s no purchase required or fee for use. You just need a smartphone and the app to instantly earn “kicks” which are basically points that you can redeem at places like Starbucks or save them up for larger ticket items from places like Tiffany & Co, Nike, etc. Can’t hurt, right? You can even tie Shopkick to your VISA and/or MC creditcard and rack up more kicks each time you use them.

So, those are our selections for the month of May. We hope you find them to be useful, or at least worth a minute of your time investigating. We’ll have another round of favorite websites next month. If you have some that you think we should mention, please comment below with the url. Thanks!

Located in The Metropolitan warehouses, Freeside is the largest markerspace in the the southeast. We’re talking 6,000 sq/ft, featuring 3D printers, an electronics lab, a classroom, workshop, media lab, two auto bays, a ton of co-working areas and Ripple Free WiFi throughout the building.

Stop by on a Tuesday night to see what it’s all about, and consider becoming a member. The monthly rate is just 80 bucks ($40 for starving tech students), which includes a bunch of benefits like 24/7 access to the building, dedicated storage space, members-only wifi access points, etc. Even if you’re not sure you wanna join up, the open house nights are a great way to meet collaborators, creatives, and some really smart people doing some really cool things.

We’ll be sporting ‘Start IT Up’ shirts most Fridays, and handing them out to fellow members as we run into them. So, yeah. We’re stoked to be part of it all. If you’re an ATV’er and won’t be able to attend this week’s Free Lunch Friday, then come say “Hey” to the Ripple team in Suite 310 and grab a shirt. Don’t cost nothin’.

The most important aspect of a Results-Only Work Environment is the emphasis on personal responsibility. In traditional workplaces, the focus might be on how often someone’s in the office, or how many billable hours they submit to their clients. But being in the office and sending out statements doesn’t have anything to do with the actual work being done. The focus should be on the results of their work.

Managers in traditional workplaces assume that if they don’t physically see their employees planted in their seats for a solid 8 hours, then they’re probably not doing their jobs. In a ROWE company, everyone is trusted to get their work done wherever, however, and whenever they need to. They’re judged solely on the work they do and the results they get, nothing more.

Fearing that their employees can’t be trusted, business owners and managers have put in place an extensive system of rules and regulations to police them. Keep in mind, these people have been hired by the same company and management that doesn’t trust them to do their jobs without being surveilled. What does this say about the people they’ve hired? And perhaps more importantly, what does this say about the company doing the hiring?

What it all boils down to is this: Good employees want the freedom to do their jobs and meet their deadlines without having to play office politics. After all, they were hired for the work they can do, not how long they can sit at a desk. As Liz Ryan recently wrote in Bloomberg Businessweek:

If we value talent, we’ll start dismantling the lumbering Godzilla of controls and policies that hampers creativity in virtually every organization, and we’ll start trusting ourselves to hire people we trust. Then our jobs will get easier and the energy at work will improve dramatically.

Indeed. It’s time companies start treating their people with the same trust and respect they give their clients and customers. We give Ripplers the freedom to kick ass by allowing them to decide where and when to work. The whole concept of a results-only environment might be a little intimidating to bosses used to the traditional management mentality of keeping people productive by keeping an eye on them. But if you can’t trust your people to use their own judgement, then you’ve probably hired the wrong people.

Key advantages to having a flexible workforce:

• Attract the best: Today’s best and brightest workers are not chaining themselves to a 9 to 5 desk job. They know better, quite frankly. Companies that allow and encourage workers to telecommute will quickly find themselves with a better talent pool to choose from. Giving your employees the freedom to work when and where they want to not only brings in the best, but will change the focus from how often their in the office to the results of their efforts. People who aren’t self-motivated won’t last long in a results-only environment, and you wouldn’t want them working for you anyway.

• Discover new innovations: The human brain needs time to roam, to create and to innovate. The traditional office environment can often limit innovation rather than encourage it whereas a mobile work force can seek out inspiration where it exists. Don’t get us wrong, Ripplers love to be in the office with each other but sometimes the chatter of a coffeehouse or the comforts of home can be a welcome change of pace for the mind.

• Increase productivity: Happy employees are productive employees. And happy employees, more often than not, have a more fulfilling work and life balance than those who report to an office each weekday for a scheduled amount of hours. If results are truly all that matter in business, why would where and at what time the work is done matter? If it’s stellar stuff and completed on time, everyone should be happy. And of course there’s no penalty for those for want to work the normal M-F / 9-5 schedule, just the flexibility to pick up their kids a little early if they have to.

• Reduce costs: A significant advantage to having a mobile workforce is the reduced cost of maintaining a physical location that houses all your employees. Instead of spending precious capital on heating, furnishing and maintaining an office for people who can do their jobs from anywhere, you can invest more in projects and initiatives instead. Moving fully or partially to the cloud will also help to reduce overhead normally spent on the procurement and maintenance of in-house servers and related hardware.

Giving your people the flexibility to work where and when they want to isn’t a completely new concept, and it’s perhaps not a perfect fit for every company or employee. But for Ripplers, ROWE just makes makes sense. We love the freedom it gives us, and our clients love the results they get.

First let’s flash back to the relatively recent time of netbooks, which some industry analysts think will disappear this year. Netbooks are small, light, inexpensive laptops. Their trouble, in my opinion, is that many of them run a full Windows operating system, and you can install traditional Windows applications on them. But to keep them inexpensive and efficient they use Intel Atom or similar processors, which are really energy efficient and enable long battery life but are roughly 1/5 or less the processing power of a typical modern laptop’s processor. And netbooks typically have less than 4GB of memory, in which Windows struggles to operate. So a netbook can be frustrating to use, because the familiar Windows interface makes you think you are using a real computer until you experience how slow it is.

Jump back to the present, and consider that a typical Chromebook also has an Intel Atom processor and 2GB RAM. But like they did with Android, Google has mashed linux underpinnings with a custom UI and produced a very lean, stable operating system called…wait for it…Chrome OS. And the name is appropriate, because basically what this thing does is launch a Chrome browser. You can add Apps, which are really shortcuts to web-based applications, they don’t download and run locally. That difference by itself makes a Chromebook 60% less frustrating to use than a netbook, it doesn’t feel underpowered because really how much processing power and memory do you need to use a browser?

So is a Chromebook right for your business? Definitely not for everyone. But if your company uses Google Apps, and all of what you do on a regular basis can be done via a browser, then a Chromebook could be perfect. In trying this little Samsung out I realized that probably 85% of what I do on a daily basis is done via the web. And Google has the might and the will to move the world in that direction (replacing local software applications with web apps), as evidenced by Google Docs, Picassa, Hangouts, etc. and the plethora of other web-based applications from other companies.

Chromebooks are especially appealing to companies that already run Google Apps. You can centrally manage your Chromebooks and their apps, and they are inexpensive enough to have a few spares on hand. And with Chrome Sync you can easily switch from one Chromebook to another and have all your saved passwords, autofill info, apps, extensions, bookmarks, and even open tabs (!) go with you. You login to a Chromebook with your Google Apps account (or Gmail for personal use), which means you can control Chromebook access as easily as enabling/disabling Google Apps mailboxes.

So long story short, the answer is no, Chromebooks are not just netbooks with a different name. They are evidence of Google’s vision of a 100% web-based future, a future that might be closer than you think.

Foursquare was the leader of these kind of location-based apps, but has been on the declined popularity-wise for the last four years with a total of just 30 million users. The percentage of active users is unknown, but even with 30 million Foursquare falls way short of mainstream social media sites and apps like Twitter (about 500 million) and Facebook (over 1 billion).

Not to pick on Foursquare, as there are a number of similar location-based services that have or are facing a similar fate: Saga and SCVNGR haven’t really taken off as expected while Foursquare’s biggest competitor, Gowalla, has disappeared. Interestingly enough, new types of location-based gaming apps are, on a smaller scale, building slow but steadily-increasing user bases.

Games like Shadow Cities for iPhone, which came to the US in 2011, use the player’s own city as a kind of game board where they can interact with other local players, form alliances and conquer territories. It’s one step closer to World of Warcraft IRL. Google’s getting in on the location-based gaming trend, too, with their offshoot NianticLabs having released Ingress for Android devices last November. Ingress is currently in closed-beta testing and requires interested users to request an invite.

So, to summarize: Regular check-in apps are dying, and location-based gaming apps are on the rise. Whether or not these new apps will maintain popularity is anyone’s guess. It’s possible you could wake up tomorrow and learn you’ve have slept through the life and death of the latest trend (like I’m hoping to).

The 2011 inaugural expo completely sold out New York’s Lexington Armory with 200 startups and 4,500 attendees, and this second annual NY Tech Day is poised to outstrip last year’s success. Oh, and the best part is that tickets are free. FREE!

If you’re one of our clients based in New York or will be in the area that week, then mark your calendar for the largest tech startup event in the world and register to attend today.