HOW TO: Create a World-Class Online Community for Your Business

Name the companies that set the standards for social media use in business. Nothing coming to mind immediately? Me neither. Telligent, an enterprise collaboration software company, believes that some day the same answer will immediately occur to both of us. "We think that if you give [leaders in corporate social media use] a little more time, you won't even have to do research," says Cecilia Edwards, Telligent's senior director of strategy. Edwards and Telligent CTO Rob Howard are releasing a white paper today that delineates what these standard-setting communities of the future will look like. 1. Don't pour resources into creating an online community without defining what business objectives you want it to accomplish. 2. Howard and Edwards found that a personal touch was an important factor in an online community's success. 3. Like guests arriving to a dinner party, successful online communities make sure to welcome their new members adequately. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

‘Artificial leaf’ moves closer to reality An important step toward realizing the dream of an inexpensive and simple “artificial leaf,” a device to harness solar energy by splitting water molecules, has been accomplished by two separate teams of researchers at MIT. Both teams produced devices that combine a standard silicon solar cell with a catalyst developed three years ago by professor Daniel Nocera. When submerged in water and exposed to sunlight, the devices cause bubbles of oxygen to separate out of the water. The next step to producing a full, usable artificial leaf, explains Nocera, the Henry Dreyfus Professor of Energy and professor of chemistry, will be to integrate the final ingredient: an additional catalyst to bubble out the water’s hydrogen atoms. The reports by the two teams were published in the journals Energy & Environmental Science on May 12, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on June 6. Putting it together Portable power?

Privacy and Security Fanatic: Microsoft’s automated Future Home, what can go wrong? Most folks love to try out new apps, yet what if those location-aware apps were not for your phone but instead for your home? Would you trust apps to control your home, turn the lights off and on, control the thermostat, or unlock your front door? Smart homes have not really taken off, mostly due to costs and complications to implement futuristic automation. Yet during a tour of the Microsoft Home of the Future, there was talk of these futuristic innovations eventually coming down in cost, just as smart devices did, so this type of futuristic home would be common. A team at Microsoft Research conducted a study of 31 people across 14 households who have futuristic automated homes before publishing a paper called, Home Automation in the Wild: Challenges and Opportunities [PDF]. Home owners were classified into two groups: 1) Do-it-yourselfers (DIY) who have installed automation themselves and 2) Outsourced households who have outsourced the installation and management to professionals.