Musing about sharing and social in business To paraphrase Peter Drucker, the primary purpose of a business is to create customers, people who are able and willing to part with their money to buy goods and services from you. To paraphrase Ronald Coase, the primary purpose of a firm is to reduce business transaction costs, principally the costs of information, search, contracting and enforcement. Words like “sharing” and “social” are often treated as fluffy and ephemeral and Utopian and otherworldly, dismissed as being too pinko-lefty-tree-hugger to make business sense. Which begs the question. What makes business sense? In this context, I think it’s reasonable to assert that anything that helps businesses to create customers and/or to reduce transaction costs is worth doing, “makes business sense”. So any debate about the value of “sharing” and of “social” in the enterprise needs to consider these things. Social networks reduce transaction costs in a number of ways. Sharing also reduces transaction costs in a number of ways.
Mallguide Infinity- A stunning theme for conky | Ubuntu, LinuxMint & Fedora Conky is a free, light-weight system monitor for X, that displays any information on your desktop. There are many nice themes available for Conky that can display clock, CPU usage, RAM usage, swap, disk, net and more, Infinity is one of these themes built using lua and provide a great look to your desktop. In this post I will show you how to install Infinity Conky theme in Ubuntu (tested in Ubuntu 12.10 ‘Quantal Quetzal’, Ubuntu 13.04 ‘Raring Ringtail’), LinuxMint and Fedora. Installation instructions of Infinity Theme for Conky: 1- Install Conky - For Ubuntu and LinuxMint: sudo apt-get install conky-all - Fedora: yum install conky 2- Download and extract the Infinity tar file, remember that you need to install rar and unrar to be able to extract the file, run this command to install some useful extraction tools: sudo apt-get install unace unrar zip unzip p7zip-full p7zip-rar sharutils rar uudeview mpack lha arj cabextract file-roller $chmod a+x ~/.conky/startconky.sh $sh ~/.conky/startconky.sh
Best Practices: Applying Social Business Challenges To Social Business Maturity Models Early Adopters Cross Through Five Phases Of Social Business Maturity Interviews with over 100 early adopters of social business (i.e. social crm, E2.0, social media marketing, etc.) reveal 5 phases of social business maturity (see Figure 1): Discovery. A few individuals begin the process of discovering new tools. Individuals identify consumer tech innovations that impact enterprise business processes. Experimentation. Figure 1. Key Challenges Align With Social Business Maturity Phases As organizations face challenges in adoption, leaders face key challenges that align with Social Business Maturity (see Figure 2). Discerning hype from reality. Figure 2. 10 Key Challenges Align With Social Business Maturity (right click to view full image) The Bottom Line: Early Adopters Can Anticipate Challenges By Social Business Maturity Model The final findings will be released in a Constellation Research report on the State of Social Business available to clients and selected members of the media. Reprints
Facebook Usage in South Africa – March 2011 | Social Media Blog Welcome to our new series of monthly Facebook statistics in South Africa. This article provides you with the latest user numbers for Facebook in South Africa. 2 week ago, Marc Cowan, Head of Emerging Market at Facebook, gave a presentation in Cape Town on the social change. On March the 3rd, 2011, Facebook counted 3.761.160 active users in South Africa. Most users (64 %) are between 18 and 34 years old. Next month, we will compare the new statistics with the numbers of March to record the development of Facebook population in South Africa. What people are looking for: social media officers contact nmbers in south africa | Support this website and buy your amazon stuff via this link .
New cool list of Linux must-have programs Update: A new, up-to-date collection is available. Please take a look! It's been approximately two years since I've written the first article, A (cool) list of Linux tools. The article proved quite popular with my audience, as it allowed Linux users, new converts in particular, a quick taste of some of the more useful programs available for Linux platforms, across a range of categories. Since, a lot has changed. Two years is a long time. Changes from the last time Like the last time, the programs will be sorted by categories. Games I will not be listing games here. Users' recommendations Likewise, there's a users' recommendation sub-section, so you can send me your suggestions and ideas. Table of Contents: Backup software File backup software Unison Unison is a simple, lightweight backup program. TimeVault TimeVault is a snapshot software, which, when activated will create copies of all files and folders that change, retained a detailed archive of all revisions. Imaging software CloneZilla Firefox
Making Business Sense of Social Media and Social Networking – Twitter For Business Yesterday evening, my time, I attended a rather interesting webcast with Sandy Carter, IBM’s Worldwide Sales Vice President, IBM Social Business, Collaboration, and Lotus Sales and Evangelism, along with Jeremiah Owyang, Industry Analyst at Altimeter Group, on the topic of Why Be Social?. It surely was quite an interesting event and, if you would be interested, you can catch up with the tweet stream by checking out the #sbweb hash tag; a copy of the slides both Sandy and Jeremiah used can be downloaded over here as well. Amongst some of the very insightful ideas shared throughout that one hour webcast was a reflection on how little most businesses seem to be spending nowadays (And not just money!) on providing education on making use of all of these social software tools, which I found rather intriguing, because it looks like we are bound to repeat the very same mistakes we did back then when something called email, or Instant Messaging, for that matter! first came about.
Google Wave As we announced in August 2010, we are not continuing active development of Google Wave as a stand-alone product. Google Wave will be shut down in April 2012. This page details the implication of the turn down process for Google Wave. Stage 1: Google Wave is read-only -- January 31, 2012 In this stage, you will no longer be able to create or edit waves. Robots that try to write to a wave will stop functioning. During this time, you will continue to be able to export your waves using the existing PDF export feature. If you want to continue using Wave, there is an open source project called Walkaround that includes an experimental feature to import all your waves from Google. Make Linux faster and lighter With just a few tweaks, your Linux box can be lighter, sprightlier and quicker than ever before. Read on for the best ways to speed up your boot sequence, optimise KDE and Gnome, and get better performance from your favourite apps. We've also got some top tips from our favourite free software gurus... Gone are the days when you could make a cup of tea and drink it in the time it takes your computer's operating system to boot (with one notable exception). On that basis, you might think that your Linux machines are already performing at the fastest possible speed, right? Sadly, this is not always the case. With just a few tweaks and some experimentation, your Linux system can realise your machine's untapped potential. The great strength of everyone's favourite free OS is that it can be customised from the ground up, so Linux is the ideal tool to tailor to your needs. Make Linux boot faster Remove the timeout timeout=3 Once you've found it, change the value to zero. Improve disk performance
The Seven Needs of Real-Time Curators I keep hearing people throw around the word “curation” at various conferences, most recently at SXSW. The thing is most of the time when I dig into what they are saying they usually have no clue about what curation really is or how it could be applied to the real-time world. So, over the past few months I’ve been talking to tons of entrepreneurs about the tools that curators actually need and I’ve identified seven things. But NONE of the real time tools/systems like Google Buzz, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, give curators the tools that they need to do their work efficiently. As you read these things they were ordered (curated) in this order for a reason. This is a guide for how we can build “info molecules” that have a lot more value than the atomic world we live in now. Thousands of these atoms flow across our screens in tools like Seesmic, Google Reader, Tweetdeck, Tweetie, Simply Tweet, Twitroid, etc. A curator is an information chemist. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 1. 1.
Linux System Administration Basics This document presents a collection of common issues and useful tips for Linux system administration. Whether you're new to system administration or have been maintaining systems for some time, we hope these tips are helpful regardless of your background or choice in Linux distributions. These tips cover some of the basic steps and issues encountered during the beginning of system configuration. We provide a general getting started guide for your convenience if you're new to Linode and basic Linux system administration. Additionally, you may find some of our other core Linux guides useful. Set the Hostname Please follow our instructions for setting your hostname. hostname hostname -f The first command should show your short hostname, and the second should show your fully qualified domain name (FQDN). Set the Timezone When setting the timezone of your server, it may be best to set it to the timezone of the bulk of your users. By default, Linode base installs are set to Eastern Standard Time.
Content Strategy: Exploring Content Curation Tools Content curation has been getting a lot of attention recently. We’ve covered what it is, why it’s valuable and offered best practices on how to curate content on your own. Yet, if management systems can be designed to manage content, why not build one to curate content? More than RSS feeds or topical searches, there are a few products that aim to help professionals gather content from around the web that’s relevant to them. Not only does this help keep track of it all, it makes it easier to collect and share with others — making it ideal for starting conversations and improving customer experience. Curating content is a great way to show the relevance of specific topics within an industry and it’s also a great way to establish trust with your audience. Scoop.it Launched in Beta in late 2010, Scoop.it plays both boomarklet and curator. The Scoop.it site showcases the most popular topics and the top curators, allowing for a curation community to be formed. Paper.li Curata Useful article?
The best Linux distro of 2012! As promised in this week's Open Ballot (and thanks for your fantastic contributions), here's our own distro contest from issue 162 of Linux Format magazine. Our annual distro competition is as close to a tradition as we get here at LXF Towers. We do it because we love distributions – we love their variety and the way that so much changes over the course of a year. If you want to see what conclusions we came to last year, for example, check out our previous feature, The best Linux distro of 2011. But if we restricted our comparisons to the same old dominant stalwarts, our yearly parade of victors would look more like political oscillation than a reflection of Linux distribution development. Which is why this year we wanted to do something different... Old hands vs newcomers Gnome desktops compete for dominance when we pit Fedora against Sabayon, and we test the best of KDE by looking at both Mageia 2 and Rosa – two related distros that have yet to make their mark. Round One Spit and polish
What are the best content curation tools for daily use