Group items tagged

Africans are active participants in the social media industry, here are a few examples: Motribe - This South African company enables you to create your own mobile social network with speed and ease and offers you great social tools to power your mobile social network MXit - A South Africa-based mobile social network. Over 27 million registered users, adding over 40,000 every day. Check out this cool infographic about MXit Adloopz - An innovative Nigerian startup that puts a social twist to advertising on the internet Personera - Personera lets you create custom artifacts from your content on social networking sites like Facebook Nikohapa - A Kenyan startup that offers Foursquare-like checkins made simple and that reward you with discounts for checking in to partner stores Ushahidi - Crowdsources information using multiple channels including social networking platforms like Twitter  Swift River - An Ushahidi project that adds super data processing to data coming from sources of unstructured information such as a twitter feed Zoopy - Another South African company that focuses on mobile video ForgetMeNot Africa: bridges the huge gap between the internet and mobile messaging worlds allowing any mobile phone to send and receive email and chat message on any carriers network. Quirk eMarketing - A digital marketing agency that also helps companies make use of social media for great results. Quirk has also spawned other cool companies in social media such as BrandsEye that creates great tools for online reputation management and crowdsourcing company IdeaBounty. And as far as group buying is concerned, Groupon has inspired many an African groupon clone. There are numerous African companies playing in this area - Rupu and Zetu in Kenya, DealDey in Nigeria, and a whole lot of others in South Africa

The only real problem touching on diversity I see in the "social media space" is this: About four dozen assholes in the US and Canada making up an imaginary social media "industry," who suddenly realized a week ago that with all the navel-gazing and ego projection fueling their "thought leadership," they have mostly managed to cater to people who conveniently look and sound just like them. Wow. How did THAT happen? By the by, if they ever manage to pull their heads out of their asses long enough to get some oxygen back into their brains, they will either meet or remember having met - among hundreds of thousands of other social media users who are not pre-midlife crisis white dudes - Rohit Bhargava, Maz Nadjm, Jeremiah Owyang, Gabrielle Laine Peters, Karima Catherine Goudiam, Bonin Bough, Liva Judic, Monika Melsha, Guy Kawasaki, Chris Penn, Danielle Lewis, Peter Kim, Charlene Li, CD, Hajj Flemings, and many, many, MANY more who, last time I checked, contributed more to the social media world than all of their "white" social media guru blog posts combined, and managed to do so while being other than strictly caucasian.

The 2011 Singapore General Elections was a water-shed event in Singapore's political history. Not because for the first time ever, an opposition party (the Workers' Party or WP) managed to secure a Group Representative Constituency (GRC) from the PAP. Nor was it because the PAP's popular vote had fallen from 67 percent in 2007 to 60.1 percent. Rather, it was a result of Singapore's political landscape being dramatically altered with the advent of social media and the Internet. The Internet and Social Media sparked a new way of thinking for Singapore, especially in the political arena. While older Singaporeans relied on state controlled media agencies for their news and information, the Internet opened up a source of independent information that could not be tightly regulated or controlled  as  traditional media platforms. Singapore's World Press Freedom Index ranking is a dismal 136th out of 178 countries (assessed by Reporters Without Borders) and 151st out of 196 countries according to the Freedom of the Press 2010 Global Rankings report. As Singaporeans began to seek alternative viewpoints that were not expressed in the local media, websites like The Temasek Review and The Online Citizen cropped up. These sites gained popularity and support for publishing articles that were critical of the local government for the first time.

I had some fun this week in my ClickZ column by highlighting the best in brightest in the social media field.  You can find the detailed article here: Social Media All-Stars As the title showcases I selected 10 Social Media All-Stars for each team.

Singapore is one of the most "evolved" social media markets around the world, according to market research firm Firefly Millward Brown. The global study, which was conducted in 15 countries between October and December last year,

"The conditions under which our armed forces conduct operations are rapidly changing with the spread of blogs, social networking sites, and media-sharing technology, and further accelerated by the proliferation of mobile technology," writes Darpa in the SMISC announcement document. "Changes to the nature of conflict resulting from the use of social media are likely to be as profound as those resulting from previous communications revolutions. The effective use of social media has the potential to help the armed forces better understand the environment in which it operates and to allow more agile use of information in support of operations."

This list is comprised of people who are the luminaries and pioneers of the social media frontier. I plan to do this periodically and by no means do I feel I will get this 100 percent correct the first time, so please let me know your thoughts -- be social! Do I personally know some of these folks? Yes -- so voice your opinion where you feel there is bias and we will adjust accordingly moving forward. These are in reverse alphabetical order.

Social media such as Facebook and Twitter have played a major role in motivating some of the demonstrators in the run-up to the rally, which went ahead despite a police ban and lockdown imposed on sprawling Kuala Lumpur on the eve of the July 9 protest. The demonstration organizer, Bersih 2.0 -- a coalition of 63 NGOs (non-government organizations) that wants changes such as updated electoral rolls and a longer election campaign period -- has its own Facebook page, attracting a similar number of "likes" as the page urging Najib to step down, with 190,000+ fans at the time of this posting. The latest notable update is another petition, requesting 100,000 backers for a Bersih 3.0 -- although organization head Ambiga Sreenavasan has said she does not foresee any similar protests in the immediate future.

In the years since the first social networks went online, the disruption had spread to government, creating shifts in power structures as large as those enabled by the introduction of the printing press centuries ago. "Connection technologies, including social media, tend to devolve power from the nation state and large institutions to individuals and small institutions," said Alec J. Ross, senior innovation advisor to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in an interview. "Nothing demonstrated that more than the power to publish and distribute at great scale by historically disempowered individuals with inexpensive devices."

In looking at the world around, us, the shift that is the most apparent to many is the pace of technological change, with in the order of 100-fold increases in processing power, storage efficiency, and fixed and mobile bandwidth over the last decade. However I believe that the degree of social change over the last decade has been at least as much as that of technological change, if not more, across countries, cultures, and contexts. On the face of it, much of this social change has been driven by technology. The freer flow of information, enablement of expression and participation, ability to connect across boundaries, and rise of powerful open source technologies have helped to shape new values. Openness, transparency, authenticity, participation, opportunity are values that stem from the technologies that have dominated the last decade. Yet it could rather be that our shifting social values (or perhaps our underlying values that have long been yearning for expression) are shaping the technologies we develop.

nstant messenger applications remain the most commonly used social media in Mexico, in part due to the easy portability of the software, according to Andy Atkins-Krüger's recent WebCertain Search and Social Report 2010. Twitter and Facebook are gaining in popularity, however, with about 50 percent of online users are now active on Facebook as well. Internet access is limited to just over 25 percent of the Mexican population, so the potential for growth in this largely untapped market makes it a popular target for newer social media sites.

Technology has empowered all sides in this skirmish: the rioters, the vigilantes, the government and even the ordinary citizens eager to help. But it has empowered all of them to different degrees. As the British police, armed with the latest facial-recognition technology, go through the footage captured by their numerous closed-circuit TV cameras and study chat transcripts and geolocation data, they are likely to identify many of the culprits. Authoritarian states are monitoring these developments closely. Chinese state media, for one, blamed the riots on a lack of Chinese-style controls over social media. Such regimes are eager to see what kind of precedents will be set by Western officials as they wrestle with these evolving technologies. They hope for at least partial vindication of their own repressive policies.

The We Love Wool campaign, with its Facebook and Twitter pages, up to Tuesday this week had more than 14,000 followers since it began on June 1. Decked out in his grey wool sweater, Adrian is among more than 70 woollen garment wearers who have clicked on www.fashionbyfeelings.com to upload his "look" as part of a competition to win Sydney airfares, accommodation, a $3000 gift card and other prizes.