Open up your mind and say, ahh...

The X-Z chair, by the Croatian-Austrian design collective Numen/For Use, has extendable flaps for keeping the sun and sand at bay.

With Memorial Day around the corner, and summer only a few skips behind, it’s time to head to the beach for a refreshing day of blistering sunburns and sand in every conceivable nook and orifice. Whoo hoo! Don’t get us wrong. We love the beach. We just hate what it does to our stuff and skin. Luckily, there’s furniture–yes, furniture–that can tackle both problems at once.

The X-Z chair, by the Croatian-Austrian design collective Numen/For Use, features a pair of cleverly placed fabric flaps that can transform into beach-day workhorses. One extends beneath the chair and has pockets for storing your sunblock and magazines and whatever else usually gets caked in sand. The other swings out above the chair, creating an instant sun shade. The chair’s X-shaped Acacia wood frame pulls both flaps taut so they don’t cave in around you. But you can also collapse the frame into a Y (maybe they should’ve named it the X-Y-Z chair) to make the shade retract.

Images courtesy of Numen/For Use

I’m a self-confessed entrepreneur with all the trappings of bootstrapping, scaling grand ideas, and being an early adopter. And I am also a big believer–in interns.

Internship programs have gotten a lot of flack of late. They are not free labor. They shouldn’t be treated as such, and quite frankly, they aren’t anyway. Management is time, which equals money. ”Returns” (people seeking second careers) and interns can be an amazing, long-term asset to your company. They can save you thousands or even millions of dollars.

We have more than 10 returnships and internships at UniversalGiving, and we’ve found it to be a very positive experience. It’s our goal to provide them a great work environment, ownership, management guidance and a positive atmosphere. We also achieve many of our goals through them. It turns out to be very productive for both.

First, interns are not about age or recent grads. These days, people are soul-searching. We’re talking about forty- and fiftysomethings wanting to find a way to contribute with impact, and ideally meaning, at your company. We call these “returnships.” Some are not sure what they want to do and would like to try out a new skill. Others are trying out our industry. Some simply need a kind, structured, productive environment while seeking employment. Some just need a break.

Our solution: We give them all great experience and put them right to work. Even if they eventually decide it is not for them, they have learned a lot, and we have benefited. We organize the tasks so that they build to our goals. Those who move past “Level 1″ of marketing research, for example, might be advanced to handling marketing partnerships. In essence, whether it is employees, interns, or volunteers, good management and proper delegation per each skill level is essential.

Yet what’s really critical is that often our interns are a feeder to employment: They might “graduate” to consultant and then to employee. We see this often, and it’s mutually determining the following: Is this a good “professional marriage”?

It allows both parties to see if the skills fit, and if the values fit. Someone could be talented yet not enjoy our culture, or we might not feel alignment. Rather than try to determine a good fit by interviews (and some people are great at interviewing, but not necessarily great for the job), we both get practical experience working together.

If you aren’t convinced interns are the way to go, or you think they are too much time, you might want to rethink. The cost of a wrong hire can be thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of dollars. You’ve spent the time training, then there is a vacuum in your organization when they go. You’ve spent 3, 4, 6 months of your employees’ time (= expensive) getting someone up to speed. Then your employees need to get someone new up to speed. But first, they have to begin the rehiring process, again. More money. More time. More weight on the organization.

And don’t forget the morale cost. This is where it is most heavy on the team, and we have to be considerate of our people. We should respect the energy and investment of their time.

To spell it out, the typical costs of recruiting and hiring, according to GradStaff, are:

$5,700 – $8,900: Average amount to recruit for an entry-level position

$1,000 – $1,500: Average amount to train a new employee

$5,700 – $8,900: Cost of second recruitment round

$1,000 – $1,500: Cost of second training round

The total morale cost depends on how many people were affected, but suffice it to say it’s significant.

So contribute to the bottom line by cultivating returnships and internships as part of your team. Grow these contributors, embrace them, and help them succeed. Within a matter of weeks, they can be inspired and reach their goals, while also making a measurable impact on your work. For proof’s sake, our top two leaders started out in “returnships.” They were seasoned executives returning to a new career path, and are now fully on staff.

Statistics Source: GradStaff

Image: Flickr user Blip ou Bruno Veloso

In a move that should surprise no one but make many developers happy, Facebook today announced a marketplace for finding apps called the App Center. “The App Center will become the new, central place to find great apps like Draw Something, Pinterest, Spotify, Battle Pirates, Viddy, and Bubble Witch Saga,” writes Facebook engineer Aaron Brady on the company’s Developer Blog. The Center will also include a mobile version, which Brady says is designed to increase the number of mobile apps that use the social network.

The new hub, which will open in the next few weeks, will organize apps by user ratings, an important change from the current “like” system which can favor apps with huge marketing budgets. App makers will also get a dashboard for tracking how people are rating their apps.

Paid apps are also on the way. Until now, Facebook apps have been free, and developers who wanted to make money did so through in-app purchases. The new App Center will feature all apps that meet its guidelines, and developers can sign up for the beta test program from the announcement page.

Mobile apps that promote photo and video sharing are eating up more of consumers’ time and representing a threat to YouTube‘s dominance, according to a new study.

Flurry Analytics tracked 180,000 apps from October 2011 to March 2012 and found an 89% jump in minutes spent on photo and video apps. Next on the list was music, productivity, social networking and entertainment. Consumers spent 87 minutes a month using such apps — including Viddy and Socialcam — in October and 231 minutes in March, according to Flurry. From July to March, meanwhile, time spent rose 166%. (The research did not include stats from Instagram, and Flurry doesn’t break out figures for photo-sharing vs. video-sharing apps.)

Researchers then compared those figures to YouTube’s. What did they find? YouTube still has a big lead, although the video apps are making inroads. Consumers spent 425 minutes, on average, on YouTube in March, which is far ahead of the time spent on mobile photo and video-sharing apps. However, YouTube’s time spent average fell from 472 minutes the month before.

A blog post from Flurry expands on this phenomenon:

“While mobile app video consumption grew more than online consumption, the gap in usage at the end of 2011 was still meaningful. During 2012, however, is where things get interesting. As online video consumption dropped by 10%, mobile video app consumption increased by another 52%.

While it cannot be concluded that mobile video apps are cannibalizing YouTube, the shift in time spent between these two platforms appears to be a signal of disruption. Think of it this way: With every mobile video you share of friends, family, vacations, parties and weddings, you are likely loading another bullet in the chamber for Web 3.0. For YouTube, it appears they need to run, outrun your gun.”

For Flurry, this is just the latest sign of the web’s transition from the social media-dominated era of Web 2.0 to the mobile-first period of Web 3.0. The research company found last June that for the first time consumers were spending more time on mobile apps than on the web. That data supported a hypothesis from Wired in August 2010 declared that “The Web is Dead,” pointing to a shift in consumer usage of the web to apps.

A Google rep says YouTube doesn’t see much of a threat from mobile devices: “Developers bringing more video applications to the Web is good thing for consumers.” The rep pointed out that YouTube has more than 3,000 partners using its open API to upload hundreds of thousands of videos every day. Mobile playbacks on YouTube have tripled in the last year to more than 500 million views a day and every minute over three hours of video is uploaded to YouTube from mobile devices. Says the rep: “We continue to invest in this area and developers can expect more improvements in the months ahead.”