Around the Office is a weekly group blog that shows what the Kobayashi Online team has found interesting, funny, poignant, or otherwise notable over the past week.

After relative freedom from the prying eyes of advertisers, Daveed found out that Apple has made it tricky for iPhone users to escape being tracked with its latest mobile operating system update. According to a Business Insider article, targeting can be turned off by users, but it’s buried in menus and far from straightforward. Given the amount of personal information technologies can collect, some say companies should be more upfront.

In yet another insight into the “Millennial” generation, Caroline was interested to learn how Millennials shop. According to a CNN article, brands and marketers no longer have the taste-making power they once had because tech-savy young people are creating their own, personal shopping experiences. Far from nullifying the meaning of brand entirely, companies must now build brands with which Millennials identify – and this means voice and social agenda.

David is always impressed with a great website image slider. This happened when he visited the Seattle’s Streetcar website and saw a slide on the homepage with a nice “Ken Burns” effect (a technique director Ken Burns uses where the camera pans and zooms in and out on still images). The Streetcar site uses the jQuery Wow Slider plugin, but we’re partial to the WordPress slider and gallery plugin Slide Deck when we want to add this dynamic element to the sites we build.

Roberto knows that well-built websites should be easily found by search engines. The Web Developer’s SEO Cheat Sheet helps provide developers some key points for building search engine optimized sites from the ground up.