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francispisani

Social Media Around the World: Current Trends and Future Growth - Search Engine Watch (... - 1 views

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    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.
Marc Botte

New York Times, in Collaboration with WNYC Radio, Launches SchoolBook, an Interactive E... - 1 views

  • Web site of news, data and conversation about schools in New York City on September 7
  • Access to SchoolBook will be free and exempt from The Times’s digital subscriptions
francispisani

Sinan Khatib: The key to success in the Middle East? Localization. - TNW Middle East - 0 views

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    Localization of an e-commerce site goes much further than just dealing with customers and payment methods. "In the US, local merchants are unsophisticated, you can't imagine how unsophisticated they are in the third world. With all due respect, it's rough. You're not dealing with the most cutting edge people in the world. They're old school. You have to know the dynamic of the local merchant. Every local merchant has a different psychology - how much can you push and pull, how in touch are they with new modern ways of doing business." Dealing with local merchants has been an educational experience, for all involved. Offerna has been playing a significant role in giving merchants new and dynamic ways of dealing with their customers, and in the process, building a loyal consumer base.
francispisani

Africa's Best Tech Startups: Njorku.com - Mfonobong Nsehe - The Africa Chronicles - Forbes - 0 views

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    Mambe Nanje is the founder of Njorku.com- a fast growing job search engine and aggregator that helps thousands of African job-seekers find employment opportunities in locations nearest to them. It's something like Google, but exclusively for African job seekers. The service went live on in late March, and within four months, Njorku is already attracting more than 5,000 unique users per week, a brilliant performance by Cameroonian standards.
francispisani

Africa Social Networking/Social Media Pulse Check | Afrinnovator - 0 views

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    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
francispisani

Real Change Requires Politics - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Social entrepreneurs see problems much as economists see them: as simple inefficiencies. Sometimes, indeed, inefficiency alone is involved — for example, mushroom growers not having access to discarded coffee grounds. But in many other situations, the problem is politics, which is to say the clashing interests of people.
  • Many social entrepreneurs treat power as something to work around. They can be clearer in articulating what they are for than in stating what they oppose, and why. They often take the holes of the system as a given and do their best to plug the leaks.
  • The avoidance of politics by many social entrepreneurs would not matter if politics abounded in people as bright, sincere and intelligent as they. But it does not. Politics needs their verve and their drive, whether they serve in government itself or pick fights from the outside. It needs their spreadsheets, but it also demands their sense of battle. There is a case to be made for the importance of not being earnest.
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  • Likewise, in poorer countries like India, social entrepreneurs address real needs — bringing solar lamps to villages, teaching women to weave shawls and connecting them to big-city markets. But the elites attracted to such projects are often less interested in combating the underlying structural problems. The villages need solar lamps because the government fails to bring electricity. The women must weave from home because their husbands forbid them to leave. These problems are not inefficiencies in need of smoothing. They are fights in need of picking. But picking fights is rarely the social entrepreneur’s way.
  • http://anand.ly
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    Social entrepreneurs see problems much as economists see them: as simple inefficiencies. Sometimes, indeed, inefficiency alone is involved - for example, mushroom growers not having access to discarded coffee grounds. But in many other situations, the problem is politics, which is to say the clashing interests of people. Many social entrepreneurs treat power as something to work around. They can be clearer in articulating what they are for than in stating what they oppose, and why. They often take the holes of the system as a given and do their best to plug the leaks.
francispisani

One African voice amongst a billion - 0 views

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    She is based in London
francispisani

The democratization of the enterprise - Cloud Computing News - 0 views

  • What do Egypt’s former president, Hosni Mubarak and Lotus Notes have in common? Middle East dictators and enterprise software solutions do not, on the surface, appear to have a lot of shared characteristics. In this case, though, there is a connection.They are both victims of the will of the people.
Marc Botte

A Pékin et à Moscou, le grand soir 2.0 n'est pas pour demain - INTERNET - FRA... - 0 views

  • Les réseaux sociaux ont joué un rôle essentiel dans la mobilisation des populations lors des révolutions arabes. La Chine et la Russie, deux régimes réputés pour leur autoritarisme, auraient pu en ressentir l’onde de choc. Il n’en est rien…
francispisani

Yunus Centre :: 'Social Business': Nobel Peace Prize Winner Muhammad Yunus Promotes New... - 0 views

  • Not quite a for-profit company nor a nonprofit philanthropy institution, a social business is a hybrid in which owners recoup their investment but take no more in dividends. The goal is not to get rich but to provide health care, housing, clean water, nutrition for malnourished children, renewable energy and other goods "in a business way." Yunus said the business model is aimed at "creating a new space without closing down the other sides."
francispisani

CSR is dead, long live social enterprise | Social enterprise network | Guardian Profess... - 0 views

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    The explosion in popularity of social enterprises recently is a direct consequence of the inability of existing companies to grasp the new reality that a company's core purpose must be to deliver positive social impact and not to simply minimise negative impacts while ultimately focusing on maximising profit in the short-term. As esteemed Professor at Harvard Business School, Michael E Porter wrote corporations must "create economic value in a way that also creates value for society by addressing its needs and challenges".
francispisani

Repressing the Internet, Western-Style - WSJ.com - 0 views

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    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.
francispisani

Developing Telecoms | Joining the dots in Africa - backhaul investment will capitalise ... - 0 views

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    It's foolish to compare African markets holistically to say Europe or Asia, but in some characteristics - such as the optimal number of operators in a territory to guarantee sufficient competition and economies of scale, it's clear that Africa has far too many operators in many of its countries. Uganda for example has seven operators - from a total market revenue perspective, it's over capacity. Because ARPUs are so low, one of the key things that companies need to do - both within a territory and on a pan-Africa basis - is consolidate some of the back office functionality. For example, inter-continental minutes clearing; it's expensive for a small operator in a country like Uganda, but if you can consolidate that into a group like Zain or MTN, then it makes a lot of sense. It's still early days, and in most of the major markets it can be advantageous to be small, agile and commercial, and to let the consolidation happen at a later date. It can be difficult for large telecoms groups to come into markets like that and effect change that is positive and doesn't impede the process of customer acquisition. DT: So the investment that a larger player would bring to the market is not necessarily the right move for now? MG: Potentially, some of the economies of scale of a larger group - i.e. an operator working at 35% - 40% market shares - or the capabilities that it can bring will be advantageous. However, there are relatively few markets where that's true; South Africa and to a lesser extent Ghana and Kenya all have the foundations of competition established, but in the majority of areas that isn't the case.
francispisani

How technological and social change are feeding on each other in an accelerating spiral... - 0 views

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    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.
francispisani

The Emerging Startup Culture In Cairo Will Blow You Away - 0 views

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    At the end of the week, there was a business competition.The four winning companies were: Bey2ollak - An iPhone app that provides live user-generated reports of traffic conditions on the streets of Cairo. It already has more than 50,000 subscribers and a partnership with Vodafone -- one of the largest mobile phone operators in Egypt. Inkezny (translation: rescue me) - An iPhone app enabling travelers to make emergency calls in any location in the world without having to know the local emergency phone number, as well as seeing GPS directions to and phone numbers for the nearest hospitals  Crowdit - A digital collaborative storytelling platform using real-time pictures, video, and social media reports to reinvent the way stories are told and shared online SuperMama.me - The iVillage of the Middle East, creating a community of mothers designed to connect and empower the women of the Middle East/North Africa region
francispisani

Where Africa and Technology Collide! - WhiteAfrican - 0 views

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    The iHub is Nairobi's nerve center for technology; a place where we can grab coffee, create apps, find funders and build businesses. It's where the community of web and mobile programmers connect with each other, businesses, the government and academia.
francispisani

Video: 'Africans have Facebook account before email address' - TNW - 0 views

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    Silicon Valley is a  great place to be, but I'm increasingly becoming interested in what impact technology is making in emerging markets like countries in Africa. In these markets there are bigger problems to solve than building yet another photo sharing app (think Color). I sat down with  Mbwana Alliy who works with i/o Ventures to help startups think about emerging markets. He describes himself as the bridge between Silicon Valley and the Tanzania/Kenya technology scene.
francispisani

New site shames bad Lebanese drivers - TNW Middle East - 0 views

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    Cheyef7alak takes a name-and-shame them approach to outing irresponsible drivers. Rather than put up with small traffic violations that are run of the mill in Beirut's streets, Cheyef7alak encourages users to snap photos and shoot video as the violation is happening. These then get saved for posterity on the Web for everyone to see.
francispisani

MediaShift . Social Media Plays Major Role in Motivating Malaysian Protesters | PBS - 0 views

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    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.
francispisani

In India, an Official Puts a Webcam in Office - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Little Brother is watching you. Enlarge This Image Sanjit Das for The New York Times Oommen Chandy, the chief minister of Kerala. That is the premise for the webcam that a top government official here has installed in his office, as an anticorruption experiment. Goings-on in his chamber are viewable to the public, 24/7. In an India beset by kickback scandals at the highest reaches of government, and where petty bribes a
  • Little Brother is watching you.
  • That is the premise for the webcam that a top government official here has installed in his office, as an anticorruption experiment. Goings-on in his chamber are viewable to the public, 24/7. In an India beset by kickback scandals at the highest reaches of government, and where petty bribes at police stations and motor vehicle departments are often considered a matter of course, Oommen Chandy is making an online stand.
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  • as with everything captured by the webcam there was no audio
  • “This type of tokenism is also quite useful,”
  • Mr. Abraham said webcams might be a far more powerful tool if installed in police stations, drivers’ licenses offices, welfare agencies and other places where Indians interact with officials who sometimes demand bribes to do routine work. A few agencies around the country have started such surveillance, he said, but most have not.
  • transparency is tedious
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