Power of the People

A move for privacy in the Facebook community has forced Facebook to capitulate to user pressure. They have now added an opt-in button so that users can decide whether their purchases may be blathered across Facebook in a move towards harnessing the tremendous user base for advertising.

Kudos to Facebook for buckling to the pressure and to Overstock.com who abandoned the 'Beacon' feature until Facebook added the 'opt-in button'. Read the Washington Post's story...

Bill Gates has expressed concern in an interview that the US is not producing enough qualified computer engineers-you would think this would be a call for more outsourcing, except that I know that India, one of the worlds' great outsourcers, is also facing the same shortage...
From the Seattle Times.

Stop those boring Power Point Presentations

Stop boring us, from Core 77 blog

If you are frequently called upon to create Power Point Presentations, click through, this post is for you.

It's that time of year again - when the Forbes Billionaire list is released. (Not that long ago, I remember when it was the Millionaire List).

"Of note, when speaking about the Indian billionaires on the list:
In aggregate, their wealth surged to $351 billion, a bit more than double last year's $170 billion, making India's 40 by far the wealthiest such group of all in Asia. The four richest Indians are worth an astonishing $180 billion. Together the foursome are worth more than the forty richest Chinese combined..."

Ok, the website looks kind of cheesy, but if you wanted to add any audio welcome message on your site, this Audio Generator seems to make it easy for you to add.

The fastest Asian computer-made in India

Tata announces that the supercomputer it built at Pune factory has been named as the forth faster in the world, and the fastest in Asia.

The rankings were announced last night during the prestigious SC 2007 Conference held last night in the USA.

This is the first time that India has made it to the top 10.
Tata's supercomputer

A faster easier way to share photos-FINALLY!

Link to story in Wired
Eye-Fi has produced a 2-GB SD memory card mated with a Wi-Fi chip. You can sync the card to a hard drive or Wi-Fi network, then plug into a digital camera and click away. Photos are routed to either the hard drive or to one of 17 photo vendors - Facebook, Flickr, etc. The card's software handles scaling and compression while privacy settings at the individual sites allow you to filter what gets published.

Another pearl of wisdom from Seth Godin about tailoring your site to fit the visitor's needs...

If you own a web page, you really owe it to yourself and to your users to pay attention to state.

Don't treat everyone the same. First time visitors want something different than repeaters. Loyal customers want to see something different from the masses.

Get your IT person to show you how to divide the world into states. Then start from scratch and make a different experience for everyone.

[PS years ago, at Yoyodyne, we had a wannabe competitor who kept stealing our ideas. We programmed the site to recognize traffic from their site and put up all sorts of fake announcements and stuff, just to throw them off. You can get really specific if you want!]

Social Networking, India style

From the NYTimes:

Using social networking to connect poor laborers with prospective employees In India, Poverty Inspires Technology Workers to Altruism

Niche TV- I am famous...

I like this step-by-step article from SEOmoz.org on using video to get you and your product known.

A useful thought from Seth Godin for sales/marketing/development teams
" I can't afford it"." That's not true.

At least it's not true almost all the time. Very few of your prospects literally can't afford it. What they are really trying to say is, "it's not worth it." As in, it's not worth reprioritizing my life, not worth the risk, not worth what I'll have to give up to get this, not worth being in debt for.

One response to repeated cries of "I can't afford it" is to lower your prices. A better response is to tell a better, more accurate story, and to tell it to the right people. The best response is to make something worth paying for."

Having trouble thinking of the right analogy to drive your point home? No more lame examples, use this handy website Size of Wales to find the right comparison.

Vinay -Analogy King- this is a site you could have done yourself.

I am test-driving the new social web browser Flock, voted by TechCrunch as one of the top 40 most innovative new products.

Buy an SEO Tshirt

Intro on website:

With all the brains, talent, and creativity that make up the SEO world, it surprised us that no one had risen up and given the industry some t-shirt love. Maybe everyone is too busy watching results pages, gaming the engines, or generating serious online funds. All we know is sometimes an industry just needs some t-shirts.

That's where we come in...

Syncronising your office documents with Google docs

clipped from www.techcrunch.com One of the biggest drawbacks to working with Webtop productivity applications such as Google Docs or Buzzword is that they force you to work simultaneously in two different worlds: the online world and the desktop world. You can upload your desktop documents one at a time to these services, and they convert them for you into a Web-based document, but there is no easy way to bulk upload your docs. And syncing between the two worlds is more trouble than it is worth A new service called DocSyncer hopes to fix all that. DocSyncer is going to launch an invite-only beta in a few weeks (TechCrunch readers can sign up here to get first dibs). It uploads all of your Microsoft Office documents (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) from your desktop to Google Docs and then keeps them in sync. Whenever you make a change on your desktop, the change is automatically reflected in the corresponding file on Google Docs, and on DocSyncer.com.

Download free version for Mind Mapping from Freemind

Link to: The Website Marketing Mind Map although it claims to make it look easy, probably needs a bit more distillation, but definitely a useful guide.

Right brain vs left brain thinkers

Follow this link to take a very quick and simple quiz and see which side of your brain dominates your thinking process. You may be surprised, I was!

Adobe's new real time collaboration services

clipped from news.yahoo.com Adobe Systems Inc. is preparing two hosted services that will allow developers to add real-time collaboration capabilities, including voice over IP, to RIAs (rich Internet applications). The company demonstrated the services-- code-named Pacifica and CoCoMo-- at its Adobe MAX 2007 user conference in Chicago Tuesday.

FriendFeed -social networking aggregator

FriendFeed as reported in TechCrunch

There has been an absolute flood of tech news. Lost somewhere in the shuffle is the private beta launch of a new startup, founded by four ex-Googlers, called FriendFeed. And while it may not get a lot of attention today, keep an eye on them. I have a feeling it will be a very popular service.

It’s a simple product that, like a ton of sleepy competitors (see Spokeo, ProfileLinker, MyLifeBrand and the more recent Fuser) is trying to help people organize user data stored across a myriad of social networks.

But unlike those competitors, FriendFeed’s simple approach may the way to win. Instead of layering another social network on top of all of the ones you already belong to, FriendFeed is taking the year old Facebook News Feed idea, which may be the single most important feature contributing to the success of Facebook Platform, and opening it up to all social networks.