What factors should you take into consideration when choosing a mobile solution for your (wordpress.org) site? Don’t know where to start? You’re in luck: I have compiled a mini-report benchmarking 12 popular mobile solutions that could be applied to your WP site (some of them were developed especially for the platform, others are more widely applicable).The solutions are compared for costs, technology, and many other factors. In the report you will find tables with benchmark information for these and other factors for all mobile solutions as well as comments below each table. Read this post with a summary in the form of seven questions you should ask yourself before going mobile and some quick answers and/or download the report. Learn more>>
Recently a debate has been sparked about the impact of personalized filtering algorithms on the search results different individuals will get from seemingly universal search engines such as Google, Bing etc. The argument made is that these personalized algorithms learn from our online search behaviour and will increasingly modify results to better cater to our preferences, significantly changing overall search results per individual. If all search engines do this, the argument goes, then in the end, all of us are each trapped in a particular information bubble determined by what the filter algorithms perceive as our preferences. What if we add the effects of social and local to those of personalized algorithms to search? Read more…
I recently visited the IDC Cloud Conference in Amsterdam to get an overview of some of the major trends in cloud computing and it’s impact on enterprise IT. What is cloudcomputing? What impact does it have on my organization, processes and products? What do Amazon S3, Google Apps, Salesforce.com, Box.net, Microsoft 365, Sharepoint, Shopify and LinkedIn have in common? What are Saas, Paas? Iaas? Multi Tennant server environments? Virtualization? Why should I care? What risks and opportunities are involved? In the article below you will find some answers.
Recent surveys by Forrester and ComScore can teach us interesting things about the usage and worldwide distribution of social media. Forrester has mapped age, country and gender across seven types of social media users they’ve defined. ComScore has mapped social media penetration in world wide markets. Find out more: what social media user type are you? What types are dominant in your market or demographic?
New economic opportunities are often associated with technological innovation and market deregulation, at least in the last few decades. But how does one compete in these markets without large funds or unique technological capabilities, as most small business owners must? Understanding the fundamental risks and opportunities beneath market deregulatory models and accessing lowcost technological means such as open source software and social media, could be the start of your own unique answer to those questions. Learn more…
Choosing an online shopping cart can be quite difficult because there are so many variables to consider such as SEO, security, social media readiness, media integration options, integration with your real business processes and bookkeeping, taxes, shipping, payment options and more. In addition you can choose a self hosted option or opt for a system that is hosted on the servers of the shopping cart vendor. Learn more…
Want to get serious about using Twitter to market your services? Need to measure how much impact a topic has on Twitter? Or just curious about your Twitter “performance” or someone elses? Good news: there are lots of analytics tool you can use to measure topics, followers, retweets and more. Some of them even provide you with free useful tools and widgets to integrate into your site or blog.
Are social media revolutionary engines? Are the Egyptian protests a Facebook Revolution? Is this why the internet was shut down in Egypt? I decided to investigate this claim by the mass media and gather some statistics on social media usage by Egyptians on the topic of the protests from within Egypt in the last week.
One way of approaching product- and business development is watching technological trends such as: Social Media, Green Technology, Tablet PC’s, Mobile Apps and “The Internet of Things” that offer the promise of new markets opening up. How do you integrate these technology trends…
Why limit your use of Skype to the time you spend behind your PC? With these simple steps you can enjoy access to your contactlists, calls and chat on your desktop phone and mobile with your PC turned off. If you use Skype for business networking, you’ll find some suggestions as well. Learn more…
Google’s Agenda is to push cloud-computing and make their Chrome browser a platform from which you use all your productivity and other apps. In this article you will find a way to build a communications and office dashboard in less then 10 minutes by simply adding a number of powerful free apps form the Google Chrome App Store. Are you ready to embrace Google’s vision? Find out by giving it a try..
The new technologies emerging everyday from the world of web 2.0 markets are placing new demands on governments, businesses and individuals. Great opportunities and potential threats require new skills to deal with the constantly increasing “Openness”. Freedoms and responsibilities closely associated with an ever increasing transparency force people from all walks of life including business to come to grips with a new ethos as the accomplishments of the winner and runner up of Time Magazine’s Person Of The Year in 2010 illustrate.Are you ready for the new “Openness”?
Developing a website or service that enables web 2.0 social interactions and caters to mobile devices and other preferences of your audience can be either difficult or easy. Before you start off on a development rampage it is probably smart to make a few strategic choices that can save you time and money in the long run. These are some of them.
A VoiP PBX has many advantages to offer a small business. First of all VoiP calls are cheaper and in many cases free. But that’s not all. If you never want to miss a call, communicate from your mobile, desk phones and from softphones and applications, while making a professional impression over all channels, a VoiP PBX is a relatively cheap way to achieve this integration. Learn more about the many professional options VoiP PBX’s have to offer.
Professionals create a lot of specialized information that is locked within the organization and inaccesible to others. This could be much more of an asset then is currently the case for many organizations. Some suggestions and practical guidelines on unlocking the power of this knowledge for commercial purposes.
Android is a popular and fast-growing platform for web 2.0 enabled smartphones. Surprisingly: different smartphones and devices have different versions of Android pre-installed.Want to know which version is on your smartphone or want to install Android on your old Windows Mobile 6 phone? Learn more…
Is Mark Zuckerberg an evil genius? Is Facebook the defining entity of our times? There has been much talk about “The Facebook Generation” and the evil mastermind behind it. If the movie “The Social Network” is a true story then we can all rest easy: Facebook was just a mediocre idea executed to perfection and backed by the right people at the right time and initiated by a driven perfectionist.
Skype 5.0 is out of Beta and offers some great new functionality to manage your contacts, make (video) conference calls, group chats and keep abreast of your friend’s activity on Facebook. Where the Beta seemed somewhat unstable, the full version works like a charm. Learn more…
New Digg keeps annoying. Where we earlier reported they deleted your content with the transition to new Digg, we now find them auto-posting in your name. Determining for you which stories you Digg.
Five awesome social media plugins for your WordPress blog. If you have a WordPress.Org blog you have a choice of hundreds of thousands of plugins. Some of them work, some of them don’t, some are great, others are…crap. Read the reviews for some great Social Media Plugins or list your own favorites in the comment section.
Microsoft seems to be opening up to third party Social Media in a big way. With Outlook 2010 you can integrate Social Media account information for your contacts in new and exciting ways. When you open an email for example social media account info associated with the sender is displayed and you can befriend them straight from Outlook.This functionality is even backwards compatible with Outlook 2003 and 2007.
In order to activate this functionality for your Outlook installation you have to do 2 things…
One of the more innovative new features at Xing is called “The Mobile Handshake”. They also added powerful search and sort functionality, outlook integration, more (advanced) mobile features, share buttons and a toolbar. It is a thorough overhaul and offers great value for money if compared to some of the other larger social networks. But apart from the “Mobile Handshake” it seems Xing is not taking any big risks as in trying to be on the forefront of technology.
You probably have a Skype subscription or use some other VoiP (Voice Over IP) service. Now you have another alternative:Google Voice For GMail and Google Chat!It may very well be that this step by Google is a sign that the VoiP market for consumers is now maturing and will replace the landline and mobile infrastructures in the next few years. More cheap VoiP devices will be developed and cost of usage may be lowered even more dramatically. This will give home users and small businesses similar opportunities as have been around in the corporate market for years.Is it time to ditch your landline? Maybe (not). Learn more…
The problem with Google Wave is not so much on the technological side as it is in the distribution model.This month Google said it will drop the experimental service Google Wave.”Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked,” said Google senior vice president Urs Holzle in a blog post.Clearly Google Wave offers a promising combination of technologies, allowing you to chat, share, bookmark and collaborate in all kinds of other ways in a single stream of activity.Had Google taken a more open approach to the product’s introduction with many more third party plugins and options, more along the lines of Twitter’s business model, I think the product might have been a success.
Googling the term you’re after is just not enough. If you want to know where you stand in terms of brand awareness compared to the competition, you’d better have some tools to make it easier for you.Find some in depth search tools in this article. Multi-site trackers, tools to measure Twitter and Facebook activity as well as tools for bloggers. Learn more about them and try them yourself: they’re all free.
Yoono offers some great tools to stay upto date and know what your friends are upto on several social sites and IM’s. It also gives you a powerful capability to multi-post updates to these platforms. There is a desktop app, a browser addon and an IPhone app available. It’s a free service so give it a try.
Digg have recently updated their site with some great new functionality, making it a more complete platform. All of this is great ofcourse but unfortunately it seems they have discontinued the Diggs/History of Digg members.
With so many Social Media out there: create accounts for the right reasons. These twelve ultra short reviews give you the main capabilities and drawbacks of each site in a few sentences each and links to an instant network and relevant tools.Part III in a series.
With so many Social Media out there: create accounts for the right reasons. These twelve ultra short reviews give you the main capabilities and drawbacks of each site in a few sentences each and links to an instant network and relevant tools.
In this post you’ll find a dozen very short reviews of Social Media networks and tools: their advantages over other networks and capabilities that you may be looking for. You can immediately see an example of this by following the links in each review. If you are looking for an instant network on each site: feel free to join our groups on each of them to find other Social Media Explorers.
Having a company blog makes a lot of sense. Wordpress.com offers a lot of value for a free blogging service but as soon as you need any functionality beyond the considerable free resources to give your blog some professional appeal, you have to pay a fee or there are limitations in place.Installing Wordpress.org is a simple process which only takes a few minutes. Adding functionality and customizing can be quite time-consuming. There are some implications to choices you make during the process which you may not anticipate. This blog could be of help to you to make the right decision between Wordpress.com and Wordpress.org.
Networking is supposed to be fun but with the growing number of Social Networks and profiles we have to keep up to date, the commercialization of platforms and the huge amounts of spam and other uninteresting or even damaging crap we are bombarded with: is it still…fun?
By taking control of our online data and having access to it in a single place we could:
Work more effectively and more organized
See the true commercial potential of our network and benefit from it
Have more fun networking because we have more time to socialize instead of agonize
Since we all spend so much time using and enjoying Social Media, I would like to give those of you that haven’t seen it yet a tip: www.flock.com has enhanced it’s browser for optimum social media usage.
Blogging can be a very fulfilling activity: but what’s the point of laughing out loud at our own wit when no one else reads our posts? The sad reality of many blogs is that they are not read at all. So much for your hard work…
Now SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is an industry for a reason: it’s too boring and complicated for anyone to be interested in pursuing it seriously except SEO experts and nerds. So let’s look for a quick and easy fix for mere mortals!
Widgets can be an excellent way to create some attention online for yourself, your site, your products or your services. Even if you’re not a skilled programmer or otherwise gifted nerd or guru of the web, widgets can help you get your message across because they are spread by others creating a viral distribution. But where can you find easy and effective tools to create and distribute them? Here are some examples we made with a great service that could have you create effective widgets in no time at all. Not inspired? Check out the hundreds of widgets on our free network…
Internet in general and Social Media in particular hold the promise of a sense of frictionless and effortless movement through a world without obstacles between you and your success: but are they? Here are some easy shortcuts to avoid financial, social and technological obstacles and turn them to your advantage.
Every sales person could tell you that a client gives of signals and that those who know how to play into them could sell a refrigerator to an eskimo. But: do you really want to sell fridges to eskimos? Wouldn’t you rather control which precise audiences you target? A well defined target audience could be the solid basis of your organization’s success. But it doesn’t stop there…What about Social Media?
Customer Focus: solution or problem in times of crisis. As organizations brace themselves in economically hard times it seems a good moment to evaluate the benefits and risks of the Customer Centric machinery they have put- or have neglected to put into place: What is the potential of a Customer Focus approach in times of crisis: what risks are involved. Which measures and values should we adopt to make such a strategy pan out under the current conditions? Versatilty, flexibility and originality appear to be at the basis of some striking and inspiring successes even in an economic crisis.
What are decisive factors in the success or failure of an unknown brand? All of us have had to make the decision wether or not to buy a service by an unknown brand: what are our motives in doing so or not? What causes the sudden rise of an unknown brand such as easyjet? If you’re wondering how to successfully launch an unknown brand yourself or want to look more explicitly at your own buying behaviour as a consumer of services: read the Unknown Brand Poll. Our small panel of highly trained professionals might give you some insight in your own (sub)conscious decisionmaking and in the ever changing commercial landscape around us.
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