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francispisani

Egypt's Entrepreneurs Look Beyond the Revolution - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Six months after an uprising led by people like her ousted Hosni Mubarak and overturned the established order of the Arab world, Ms. Mehairy has joined the ranks of Egypt’s newest business class: the entrepreneurs of the revolution. Instead of leaving Egypt as she had planned, she is staying to nurture a start-up called SuperMama, an Arabic-language Web site for women that has 10 local employees.
  • “Everyone is worried about what will happen next,” said Marwan Roushdy, 20, a student at the American University of Cairo who is developing an app called Inkezny to locate hospitals anywhere in the world. The name means “rescue me” in Arabic.
  • Mohamed Rafea, 30, and his cousin Ali Rafea, 23, are also optimistic. They along with three other young relatives co-founded Bey2ollak, an app that lets users warn each other about congested traffic routes. “We are lucky that we don’t need the support of anything except good wattage, as opposed to manufacturing goods or opening a store. Those kinds of businesses need the support of the government,” Ali Rafea explained.
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  • Like many in their cohort, Mohammed and Ali Rafea, who won one of the internships at iContact, are trying to solve some of Egypt’s problems through technology — and hope to turn a profit in the process. After the revolution, they said, Egyptians were turning to Bey2ollak to pass along information about the safety of the roads. “We added a new status to say that a road is a danger zone and there are protests and thugs,” Mohamed Rafea said.
  • and Sawari Ventures, a Cairo-based venture capital firm,
  • Ahmed el-Alfi, the founder Sawari Ventures,
  • Seeing the potential in Egypt, Mr. Alfi left Southern California in 2006 to move to Cairo. “Most of my friends questioned my sanity for making that move,” Mr. Alfi said. “But I was very encouraged by what I saw.”
  • “These entrepreneurs are thinking big and globally, and they are creating Web apps that you could see in Dumbo or Palo Alto,” he said, referring to the neighborhood in Brooklyn. “They are building companies and products that can be very influential. I would invest 30, 40 or 50 thousand dollars in these young entrepreneurs.”
  • As Mr. Gerber, one of the American delegates, put it: “We were just so amazed by the business acumen we found in Egypt.”
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    Six months after an uprising led by people like her ousted Hosni Mubarak and overturned the established order of the Arab world, Ms. Mehairy has joined the ranks of Egypt's newest business class: the entrepreneurs of the revolution. Instead of leaving Egypt as she had planned, she is staying to nurture a start-up called SuperMama, an Arabic-language Web site for women that has 10 local employees.
francispisani

Kundavi - A global hub for creativity and innovation in Los Cabos, Mexico - 0 views

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    Kundavi is building a global hub for creativity and innovation in Los Cabos, Mexico.
francispisani

Social Media Gurus, Real Work and Diversity - 0 views

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    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.
francispisani

The next 20 A-listers | - 0 views

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    I'd like to take a moment and recognize 20 people who I believe to be the PR and digital A-listers of tomorrow. Granted, there are a number of others I could have added to this list, but this was just intended to be a start.
francispisani

Top 20 Social Media Experts | Socialnomics - 0 views

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    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.
francispisani

Social Media All-Stars | ClickZ - 0 views

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    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.
francispisani

Crowdmapping Arab Spring: Next Social Media Breakthrough? - War On Terror News - 0 views

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    International Network of Crisis Mappers
francispisani

Crisis Mappers Net - THE INTERNATIONAL NETWORK OF CRISIS MAPPERS - 0 views

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    The International Network of Crisis Mappers is the largest and most active international community of experts, practitioners, policymakers, technologists, researchers, journalists, scholars, hackers and skilled volunteers engaged at the intersection between humanitarian crises, technology and crisis mapping. The Crisis Mappers Network was launched by 100 Crisis Mappers at the first International Conference on Crisis Mapping in 2009. As the world's premier crisis mapping hub, the Network catalyzes communication and collaboration between and among crisis mappers with the purpose of advancing the study and application of crisis mapping worldwide. 
francispisani

Thinking about curation in the enterprise - confused of calcutta - 0 views

  • Content may be considered king, but distribution has always been the hand that rocked that particular cradle and ruled that throne.
  • curation. The SOP of curation, to paraphrase Rosenbaum, is Selection Organisation and Presentation. Curation is about human beings adding their passion to the filtering process, in order to select what should be experienced, put the selections into some cohesive order and then to make those selections accessible to the relevant audience.
  • Esther Dyson, whose writings about the future of search have been at the back of my mind all through my thinking about this. In Curation Nation, Esther quotes Bill Gates as saying (at a private dinner) “The future of search is verbs”. She then goes on to explain that “when people search…they are looking for action, not information….they want to find something in order to do something”. If you get the chance, you should read Esther’s writings on the future of search, just google it. In fact there may still be a YouTube video summarising her views
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  • Information flows in the enterprise should always enhance the ability of participants to do the right thing in the right place at the right time. Which lets me segue neatly into the crux of this post, curation in the enterprise. Every enterprise has its own variant of curator, people who help decide who sees what, when, and in what shape. Information overload is everywhere, the Shirkyian filter failure is everywhere, and into the valley ride the usual six hundred, theirs not to reason why. So in order to understand how enterprise curation should take place, it’s worth looking at some extreme forms of enterprise curation as practises today. There appear to be four main forms: The Signal Booster The Spreadsheet Jock The Soulmate The Sidler
  • The Signal Booster obtains power by PowerPoint, thinks in bullet points, rarely knows more than what’s on the slide. Acts as a mediation layer between those that do and those that decide.
  • The Spreadsheet Jock believes there’s safety in numbers, that firms can be managed by algorithmic trading. Runs the risk of past-predicting-the-future
  • The Soulmate is a crony of the powers-that-be, using that association to derive second-order power, and has an unusual effect: an inadvertent tendency to ensure that anything the CEO doesn’t want to hear doesn’t make it to the CEO.
  • The Sidler is a rare beast, someone who can only thrive in the rarefied environment of “briefing” cultures. They are often seen alongside the CEO, whispering in their ears, advising and commenting on the status of things they aren’t involved in. Sidlers are chameleons, sometimes boosting signals, sometimes driving spreadsheets, sometimes being soul mates. But always sidling.
  • All these are extreme forms of enterprise curator, responsible for deciding what information is accessible, to whom, when, and in what shape.
  • And all these are fundamentally inefficient models of curation in the enterprise,
  • Linus’s Law (“given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow”) plays out very well in any community that is built to scale. So every staff member is empowered to solve problems. Every trading partner. Every customer.
  • In large hierarchical organisations, some form of summarising and filtering takes place in all information flows, from top to bottom as well as from bottom to top.
  • A web rather than a chain, the social enterprise is somewhere where everything and everyone is a node on the network.
  • Everyone’s not just a curator… Everyone’s not just a designer… Everyone tries out products and services, and provides active feedback.
  • This ability for two-way communication means that conversations take place without any loss of detail. The need for summarising is reduced, since the cost of hanging on to the detail is low.
  • Drilling into the detail was historically complex for reasons other than just the cost of doing so, or for that matter the distance expressed as the number of levels in the organisation, the divisional silos, and so on. We had the added complexity of security systems that did not differentiate between systems of engagement and systems of record, and as a consequence didn’t know how to handle entitlement safely and securely. Good social enterprise implementations solve that elegantly.
  • It’s not enough to have access to the information, that still doesn’t solve the overload problem. So we need access to expertise.
  • Find the people that are acknowledged rather than asserted experts, experts because of what they do rather than who they are.
  • As we move from the Hit Culture to the Long Tail of problem solving, we need more and more experts, “long tail experts”
  • The promise of the social enterprise is a remarkable promise.
  • Networked non hierarchical models. Involving everyone: staff, partners, customers. Two-way communications. Easy access to domain expertise. In an environment where aggregation takes place without any loss of accuracy or of the source data, where you can “follow an order or a complaint, safely, securely, efficiently, effectively”.
  • I’ve come to realise that the Social Enterprise is to traditional software what Skype is to traditional telephony, what Paypal and Square are to traditional payments. Quick and effective. Riding over the top of existing infrastructural investments. Focused on simplifying the customer experience, eradicating traditional frictions, reducing the distance between the customer and the firm. Engaging with the customer rather than with the back office.
Marc Botte

Bodies hanging from bridge in Mexico are warning to social media users - CNN.com - 0 views

  • Social media users who denounce drug cartel activities along the Mexican border received a brutal warning this week: Two mangled bodies hanging like cuts of meat from a pedestrian bridge.
francispisani

Angola and Portugal: Role reversal | The Economist - 0 views

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    Vying with Nigeria to be Africa's largest producer of crude oil, Angola is awash with Chinese credit to the tune of $14.5 billion. The IMF reckons its GDP will grow by 7.8% this year and 10.5% next. Portuguese building companies such as Teixeira Duarte, Soares de Costa and Mota Engil have been switching from the home market to Angola's. Portuguese banks dominate Luanda's financial sector. But the tables may be turning. Now Angolan state and private investors are eyeing Portugal. Angola's Banco BIC, part-owned by Isabel dos Santos, the eldest daughter of Angola's president of 32 years, José Eduardo dos Santos, is to buy Portugal's Banco Português de Negócios (BPN) for $58m, a fifth of the original asking price of $260m. The IMF made the sale of BPN a condition for Portugal to get its recent bail-out of $113 billion.
francispisani

The Strange Case of Mexico's 'Twitter Terrorists' - FishbowlLA - 0 views

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    Maria de Jesus Bravo Pagola, a well-known 57-year-old Mexican journalist and radio commentator, is currently sitting in a Coatepec jail along with 47-year-old math teacher Gilberto Martinez Vera. Their alleged crime? Tweeting incorrect information about potential August 25 school terrorist attacks in the Veracruz area that authorities claim were the trigger for mass hysteria and several dozen car accidents.
francispisani

Veracruz panic started before 'terrorist' tweets, reports say - latimes.com - 0 views

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    Cracks are appearing in the case against the Twitter users in Mexico accused of terrorism for spreading rumors of an attack. Local reports and claims suggest that the "panic" that spread over rumors of child abductions at school campuses started at least two hours before the online messages that could put a man and woman behind bars for 30 years.
francispisani

Veracruz proposes lesser charges for Twitter terrorism suspects - latimes.com - 0 views

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    The state of Veracruz in Mexico wants to change its penal code to apply a lower charge against the jailed Twitter and Facebook users accused of terrorism for spreading unconfirmed rumors of an attack on local schools (link in Spanish). A proposed change in Veracruz's laws would permit the government to punish the two social-networking users now behind bars, but for a lesser offense of "disruption of public order," rather than the original charges of terrorism and sabotage. Those charges carry a maximum sentence of 30 years.
francispisani

Modificarán Código Penal en Veracruz; podrían tuiteros obtener su libertad - 0 views

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    Xalapa.- En Veracruz se modificará el Código Penal y la perturbación del orden público será un delito menor, por lo que Gilberto Martínez Vera y María de Jesús Bravo Pagola, acusados de terrorismo por infundir miedo, temor y zozobra el pasado 25 de agosto a través de mentiras en las redes sociales, podrían salir bajo fianza de inmediato, aseguró el Secretario de Gobierno Gerardo Buganza Salmerón.   En conferencia de prensa, dijo que el gobernador Javier Duarte de Ochoa envió al Congreso del Estado una iniciativa de ley para incluir un artículo en el Código Penal y castigar la perturbación del orden público con una sanción menor a la de "terrorismo", consignada en el artículo 311.
Marc Botte

Le rôle des réseaux sociaux sur le Printemps arabe se chiffre | L'Atelier: Di... - 0 views

  • Le rôle des réseaux sociaux sur le Printemps arabe se chiffre En analysant les tweets, échanges, blogs et vidéos échangés sur le web pendant cette période, il est possible de valider de manière empirique l'influence des sites collaboratifs sur les bouleversements qui se sont produits.
Marc Botte

Google launches YouTube in Kenya - 0 views

  • Google launched YouTube in Kenya today. Through Youtube.co.ke, Kenyans would be able to discover and view local content as well as instantly view the most popular videos in Kenya whenever they visit the domain
Marc Botte

Tunisie : Une carte en ligne collaborative pour surveiller les élections · Gl... - 0 views

  • L'Instance  Supérieure Indépendante pour les Élections en Tunisie a mis en place une carte collaborative en ligne pour surveiller le déroulement du scrutin en Tunisie, en français et en arabe. Les citoyens tunisiens sont encouragés à signaler les irrégularités dont ils peuvent être témoins durant le scrutin qui a lieu aujourd'hui 23 octobre en Tunisie. La carte est également accessible depuis la  page d'accueil de l'Instance des élections.
Marc Botte

Ils vendent les fruits de leur pêche avant même d'atteindre le port grâce à T... - 0 views

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    L'association de pêche de Tobu, Yuichi-kai, et la société Fuud
francispisani

AltCity | AltCity media / tech / social impact collaboration space - 0 views

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    ((from another story)) Ali Ghamloush, is leading a citizen journalism effort in Beirut, Lebanon. He co-founded AltCity, a social venture aimed at expanding access to tools, resources and spaces for independent publishers, activists and tech entrepreneurs
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