It’s a quiet day at the office.
The sounds of the keyboards a clicking away and you can hear the hum of appliances and the buzzing of fluorescent lighting throughout the room. It’s kind of nice, but also kind of eerie. Then a voice is heard that cuts the silence like a knife.
“Do you mind if I put on some music?”
What’s your reaction when a co-worker suggests this? Do you agree that the place is too quiet and needs some sound, or do you immediately nix the idea in favor of silence?
Playing music at work is no big deal for some, but it’s a major distraction for others. Certain businesses have established policies about playing music in the workplace. Some don’t allow it, some allow it in small amounts or at a low volume, and others have top-of-the-line sound systems that pipe music throughout their whole facility (I’ve seen this in many manufacturing facilities. The music gives workers’ ears a break and provides a more pleasant alternative to the constant buzz, hum, or grind of machinery). Workplaces that play music in common areas lean toward classical, jazz, easy listening, or middle-of-the-road rock. Most offices have that one person who wants to crank up the hard rock for everyone to “enjoy”, but there is that respect factor to consider.
But is music a necessity or nuisance? Does it help or hinder productivity?
It’s an individual choice.
We sometimes take music in the workplace for granted, but just think of how much longer that doctor’s appointment would take if they didn’t have that soothing “muzak” playing. I’m one of those people who can’t stand long stretches of quiet. I listen to music on my way to work. I’ve listened to music in some way, shape, or form at every job I’ve had – even bringing in my own CDs to play on the computer if I had to. It’s just easier for me to stay on task if there’s a song playing in the background; it makes the day go much faster.
Setting the mood
Depending on your profession, you might find music to be more of a necessity than others. Certain professions lend themselves to quieter environments—those that involve number crunching, measuring, or any other type of precise task come to mind. If your job requires total concentration or undivided attention for the majority of the time, you’re probably better suited to a quiet atmosphere.
But others thrive on sound—namely, the creative field. Artists, designers, interior decorators, or writers, often use music to set the tone for the day. I know creatives of all kinds who have based their own work on a song or musician. But music can be a great motivator for anyone, no matter what the field. Some of us like to play songs that put us in a certain frame of mind that can provide that extra boost to get through a long-lingering or time-consuming project.
I’m in an office for most of my workday, and although it’s not a wildly creative environment, just playing music helps to put me in a better mood. Though I have busy times when I’m on the road or running to various meetings, most of the time I’m at my computer, and it gets a little tedious if there’s nothing but silence all day. I go to my list of standbys—those musicians I can listen to almost any time of day, no matter what I’m working on. My usual staples for my 9-5 job include Bruce Springsteen, Peter Gabriel, Sarah McLachlan, and Dar Williams. Writing needs a different, mellower playlist—usually jazz, folk, or new age. I use music to keep me motivated at the office just as I use it to relax and get into the “zone” for writing.
Sounds of silence
But I can also respect those who need complete silence in order to be productive. My boyfriend is one of them. As he works on papers for grad school, I respectfully plug in my iPod and we’re both happy. There are times when I don’t mind the quiet but if I know I’ll be in one place, such as my desk or in the car for a long time, I make sure that I have some music handy.
Tuesday, December 21, 2010
Monday, December 20, 2010
How to Make Facebook Fan Count in Text in Your blog
Adding a Facebook Like Button on your website or blog is perhaps one of the easiest and most effective way to get more fans and earn more likes. If you have hundreds, thousand or perhaps tens of thousand of fans, it might be a good idea to publish a fan count. Fan count displays in numeric text total fans your Facebook page has, or rather, how many have liked your page.
The technique is simple and very similar to displaying Google feedcount in text. The only difference is – we will be using Facebook’s API. In this post, we want to show you how it can be done so you can add them into your WordPress blog or PHP powered website. Load up your favorite code editor, here we go.
Step 1 – Get API Key, Application Secret & Page ID
These are the three mandatory information you’ll need to get things started.
API Key and Application Secret
Sign in to your Facebook and click on Developer‘s link on the site bar. (If you don’t have a Developer’s account, you will have to sign up for one first)
Click "Set Up New Application". Enter any application name, agree to the Facebook terms and click "Create Application". Note: We are not going to create a real application, but we’ll need to go through these processes to get a API Key and Application Secret.
On the next page, you should be able to see your personal API Key and Application Secret. Copy it down somewhere or leave the browser window open.
Page ID
Page ID is the ID of your Facebook Fan Page. If you don’t have a Facebook Fan page, you’ll have to first create one. To get the ID of your Fan page, click edit page, and look for your ID (numbers) at the end of the URL – http://www.facebook.com/pages/edit/?id=XXXXXXXXX
Step 2 – Get Facebook.php
You’ll also need the Facebook API PHP SDK file called Facebook.php. Download it, and place it in the root of your folder. Learn more about Facebook PHP SDK.
Step 3 – Display Fancount
To show off your fancount, place the following code in your php file,
view plaincopy to clipboardprint?
require_once('facebook.php');
$facebook = new Facebook(array(
'appId' => 'app_id',
'secret' => 'secret_key',
'cookie' => true,
));
$result = $facebook->api(array(
'method' => 'fql.query',
'query' => 'select fan_count from page where page_id = page_id;'
));
$fb_fans = $result[0]['fan_count'];
?>
And then you will want to edit the codes to change the following:
Line 4 – Replace app_id with your Facebook Application ID.
Line 5 – Replace secret_key with Secret.
Line 10 – Replace the last page_id with your Facebook Fanpage ID.
Please refer to Step 1 on how to get app_id, secret_key and page_id.
To display the fancount, insert this following code anywhere in the page:
view plaincopy to clipboardprint?
That’s all. Style your fancount and make it attractive. See a working example on Psdeluxe‘s top right corner.
The technique is simple and very similar to displaying Google feedcount in text. The only difference is – we will be using Facebook’s API. In this post, we want to show you how it can be done so you can add them into your WordPress blog or PHP powered website. Load up your favorite code editor, here we go.
Step 1 – Get API Key, Application Secret & Page ID
These are the three mandatory information you’ll need to get things started.
API Key and Application Secret
Sign in to your Facebook and click on Developer‘s link on the site bar. (If you don’t have a Developer’s account, you will have to sign up for one first)
Click "Set Up New Application". Enter any application name, agree to the Facebook terms and click "Create Application". Note: We are not going to create a real application, but we’ll need to go through these processes to get a API Key and Application Secret.
On the next page, you should be able to see your personal API Key and Application Secret. Copy it down somewhere or leave the browser window open.
Page ID
Page ID is the ID of your Facebook Fan Page. If you don’t have a Facebook Fan page, you’ll have to first create one. To get the ID of your Fan page, click edit page, and look for your ID (numbers) at the end of the URL – http://www.facebook.com/pages/edit/?id=XXXXXXXXX
Step 2 – Get Facebook.php
You’ll also need the Facebook API PHP SDK file called Facebook.php. Download it, and place it in the root of your folder. Learn more about Facebook PHP SDK.
Step 3 – Display Fancount
To show off your fancount, place the following code in your php file,
view plaincopy to clipboardprint?
require_once('facebook.php');
$facebook = new Facebook(array(
'appId' => 'app_id',
'secret' => 'secret_key',
'cookie' => true,
));
$result = $facebook->api(array(
'method' => 'fql.query',
'query' => 'select fan_count from page where page_id = page_id;'
));
$fb_fans = $result[0]['fan_count'];
?>
And then you will want to edit the codes to change the following:
Line 4 – Replace app_id with your Facebook Application ID.
Line 5 – Replace secret_key with Secret.
Line 10 – Replace the last page_id with your Facebook Fanpage ID.
Please refer to Step 1 on how to get app_id, secret_key and page_id.
To display the fancount, insert this following code anywhere in the page:
view plaincopy to clipboardprint?
That’s all. Style your fancount and make it attractive. See a working example on Psdeluxe‘s top right corner.
Sunday, November 21, 2010
40 People Who Changed the Internet
Having a great idea is one thing. Turning that idea into a booming company through innovation and execution is what that matters most. Here, these are the people who have the biggest impact on the direction of the web: past, present, and future. They changed the internet and revolutionized the way we lead our lives today. Just imagine the world without internet. You can’t because it has become our daily life.
Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn
Father of the Internet.
The Father of Internet Vint Cerf, together with Bob Kahn created the TCP/IP suite of communication protocols. a language used by computers to talk to each other in a network. Vint Cerf once said that the internet is just a mirror of the population and spam is a side effect of a free service.
Tim Berners-Lee
Inventor of WWW.
Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. He wrote the first web client and server and designed a way to create links, or hypertext, amid different pieces of online information. He now maintains standards for the web and continues to refine its design as a director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
Ray Tomlinson
Father of Email.
Programmer Ray Tomlinson, the Father of Email made it possible to exchange messages between machines in diverse locations; between universities, across continents, and oceans. He came up with the “@” symbol format for e-mail addresses. Today, more than a billion people around the world type @ sign every day.
Michael Hart
The birth of eBooks.
Michael Hart started the birth of eBooks and breaks down the bars of ignorance and illiteracy. He created the Project Gutenberg and was considered world’s first electronic library that changed the way we read. The collection includes public domain works and copyrighted works with express permission.
Gary Thuerk
The first Email spam.
Spamming is an old marketing technique. Gary Thuerk, sent his first mass e-mailing to customers over the Arpanet for Digital’s new T-series of VAX systems. What he didn’t realize at the time was that he had sent the world’s first spam.
Scott Fahlman
The first emoticon.
Scott Fahlman is credited with originating the first ASCII-based smiley emoticon, which he thought would help to distinguish between posts that should be taken humorously and those of a more serious nature. Now, everybody uses them in messenger programs, chat rooms, and e-mail.
Marc Andreessen
Netscape Navigator. (wikipedia)
Marc Andreessen revolutionized Internet navigation. He came up with first widely used Web browser called Mosaic which was later commercialised as the Netscape Navigator. Marc Andreessen is also co-founder and chairman of Ning and an investor in several startups including Digg, Plazes, and Twitter.
Jarkko Oikarinen
Internet Relay Chat, IRC. (wikipedia)
Jarkko Oikarinen developed the first real-time online chat tool in Finland known as Internet Relay Chat. IRC’s fame took off in 1991. When Iraq invaded Kuwait and radio and TV signals were shut down, thanks to IRC though up-to-date information was able to be distribute.
Robert Tappan Morris
First Worm Virus.
The concept of a worm virus is unique compare to the conventional hacking. Instead of getting into a network themselves, they send a small program they have coded to do the job. From this concept, Robert Tappan Morris created the Morris Worm. It’s one of the very first worm viruses to be sent out over the internet that inadvertently caused many thousands of dollars worth of damage and “loss of productivity” when it was released in the late 80s.
David Bohnett
Geocities. (wikipedia)
David Bohnett founded GeoCities in 1994, together with John Rezner. It grew to become the largest community on the Internet. He pioneered and championed the concept of providing free home pages to everyone on the web. The company shut down the service on October 27, 2009.
Ward Cunningham
The first Wiki.
American programmer Ward Cunningham developed the first wiki as a way to let people collaborate, create and edit online pages together. Cunningham named the wiki after the Hawaiian word for “quick.”
Sabeer Bhatia
Hotmail. (wikipedia)
Sabeer Bhatia founded Hotmail in which the uppercase letters spelling out HTML-the language used to write the base of a webpage. He got in the news when he sold the free e-mailing service , Hotmail to Microsoft for $400 million. He was awarded the “Entrepreneur of the Year” by Draper Fisher Jurvertson in 1998 and was noted by TIME as one of the “People to Watch” in international business in 2002. His most exciting acquisition of 2009 was Jaxtyr which he believes is set to overtake Skype in terms of free global calling.
Matt Drudge
The Drudge Report. (wikipedia)
Matt Drudge started the news aggregation website The Drudge Report. It gained popularity when he was the first outlet to break the news that later became the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin
Google. (wikipedia)
Larry Page and Sergey Brin changed the way we search and use the Internet. They worked as a seamless team at the top of the search giant. Their company grew rapidly every year since it began. Page and Brin started with their own funds, but the site quickly outgrew their own existing resources. They later obtain private investments through Stanford. Larry Page, Sergey Brin and their company Google, continue to favor engineering over business.
Bill Gates
Microsoft. (wikipedia)
Bill Gates founded the software company called “Micro-Soft”. a combination of “microcomputer software.” Later on, Bill Gates developed a new GUI (Graphical User Interface) for a disk operating system. He called this new style Windows. He has all but accomplished his famous mission statement, to put “a computer on every desk and in every home”. at least in developed countries.
Steve Jobs
Apple. (wikipedia)
Steve Jobs innovative idea of a personal computer led him into revolutionizing the computer hardware and software industry. The Apple founder changed the way we work, play and communicate. He made simple and uncluttered web design stylish. The story of Apple and Steve Jobs is about determination, creative genius, pursuit of innovation with passion and purpose.
David Filo and Jerry Yang
Yahoo. (wikipedia)
David Filo and Jerry Yang started Yahoo! as a pastime and evolved into a universal brand that has changed the way people communicate with each other, find and access information and purchase things. The name Yahoo! is an acronym for “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle,” but Filo and Yang insist they selected the name because they liked the general definition of a yahoo: “rude, unsophisticated, uncouth.”
Brad Fitzpatrick
LiveJournal. (wikipedia)
Brad Fitzpatrick created LiveJournal, one of the earliest blogging platforms. He is seen on the Internet under the nickname bradfitz. He is also the author of a variety of free software projects such as memcached, used on LiveJournal, Facebook and YouTube. LiveJournal continues today as an online community where people can share updates on their lives via diaries and blogs. Members connect by creating a “friends list” that links to their pals’ recent entries.
Shawn Fanning
Napster. (wikipedia)
Shawn Fanning developed Napster, a peer-to-peer file-sharing program designed to let music fans find and trade music. Users put whatever files they were willing to share with others into special directories on their hard drives. The service had more than 25 million users at its peak in 2001, and was shut down after a series of high-profile lawsuits, not before helping to spark the digital music revolution now dominated by Apple. Napster has since been rebranded and acquired by Roxio.
Peter Thiel
Paypal. (wikipedia)
Peter Thiel is one of many Web luminaries associated with PayPal. PayPal had enabled people to transfer money to each other instantly. PayPal began giving a small group of developers access to its code, allowing them to work with its super-sophisticated transaction framework. Peter Thiel cofounded PayPal at age 31 and sold it to eBay four years later for $1.5 billion.
Pierre Morad Omidyar
Ebay. (wikipedia)
Pierre Omidyar set up an online marketplace that brought buyers and sellers together as never before, and pioneered the concept of quantifying the trustworthiness of an anonymous user. In building his auction empire, Omidyar counted on the power of the individual. Omidyar’s greatest strength is his insight into human nature. He understood that people would buy just about anything. one man’s junk is, in fact, another’s treasure.
Jimmy Wales
Wikipedia. (wikipedia)
Jimmy Wales founded the world’s largest encyclopaedia which carries articles that can easily be edited by anyone who can access the website. It was launched in 2001 and is currently the most popular general reference work on the Internet.
Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake.
Flickr. (wikipedia)
Photosharing website has become a part of everyday online life for millions of people. Stewart Butterfield, who with his wife Caterina Fake created Flickr that was born out of an online multi-player game that seemed to sum up everything the Web 2.0 people were trying to do. Flickr came along with an idea that you no longer had an album. Instead, you had a photo stream. Yahoo later on acquired Flickr in 2005.
Jonathan Abrams
Friendster. (wikipedia)
Jonathan Abrams built Friendster, together with Cris Emmanuel, offering many tools to help members find dates. He took the idea from Match.com. It’s the first social network to hit the big time and go mainstream. Members create profiles listing favorite movies and books (and dating status) and link up to friends, who linked to their friends, and so on.
Niklas Zennstrom
Skype. (wikipedia)
Niklas Zennstrom co-founded the fastest growing communications trend in history called Skype. It offered consumers worldwide a free software for making superior-quality calls using their computer and expanded its offering for Linux, MAC & PC and mobile/ handheld devices.
Bram Cohen
Bit Torrent. (wikipedia)
If Napster started the first generation of file sharing , Bram Cohen changed the face of file sharing by developing BitTorrent which has a massive following of users almost instantly. It uses the Golden Rule principle: the faster you upload, the faster you are allowed to download. BitTorrent breaks up files into many little portions, and as soon as a user has a piece, they instantly start uploading that part to other users. So almost everybody who is sharing a given file is simultaneously uploading and downloading pieces of the same file.
Reid Hoffman
LinkedIn. (wikipedia)
Reid Hoffman, a former executive vice president at PayPal, created LinkedIn as a professional social network allowing registered users to maintain a list of contact details of people they know and trust in business. Members can search for jobs, trade resumes, find new hires and keep up with the competition.
Matt Mullenweg
WordPress. (wikipedia)
Matt Mullenweg founded the world’s most used open source blogging and the greatest boon to freedom of expression known as WordPress. Some of the most popular websites run on WordPress are Techcrunch, Huffingtonpost, Mashable and more.
Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim
Youtube. (wikipedia)
Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim met as early employees at PayPal. They later started the internet’s most popular video-sharing site YouTube which is broadcasting more than 100 million short videos daily on myriad subjects. When creating YouTube, the three divided work based on skills: Chad Hurley designed the site’s interface and logo. Steve Chen and Jawed Karim divide technical duties making the site work. They later split management tasks, based on strengths and interests: Chad Hurley became CEO; Steve Chen, Chief Technology Officer. A year and a half later, Google acquired YouTube for a deal worth $1.65 billion in stock.
Craig Newmark
Craigslist. (wikipedia)
Craig Newmark started a site that dramatically altered the classified advertising universe called Craiglist. It was an object of fear for newspapers who felt threatened by the free-for-all classified advertising site. It began as an e-mail list for Newmark’s friends in the Bay Area. Since then, it has grown into an online database for classified ads for those seeking everything from housing to romance.
Julian Assange
WikiLeaks. (wikipedia)
Julian Assange founded a website dedicated to publishing classified documents stolen from around the world. He designed an advanced software for the Wikileaks shielding the identities of the thieves who steal these documents by completely erasing their identities before spreading the stolen documents to servers ‘all over the world’. As a result, no one can trace who’s given him what or when. The site depicts itself as the “uncensorable Wikipedia for untraceable mass document leaking and analysis” and has developed to be regarded as the most extensive and safest stage for whistleblowers to leak to.
Dick Costolo
FeedBurner. (wikipedia)
People generally check their preferred sites every now and then to see if there’s anything new. FeedBurner founder Dick Costolo created a news aggregator that automatically downloads an update that is visible in the places that interest you. An RSS feed, short for Really Simple Syndication, delivers those latest bits of media from their creator’s website to your computer. FeedBurner was later acquired by Google in 2007. Currently, Dick Costolo is Twitter’s Chief Operating Officer making twitter the next generation RSS.
Mark Zuckerberg
Facebook. (wikipedia)
Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook to help students in universities keep in touch with friends. The “status update” started its rebirth in Facebook, where user after user tell their extended network of trusted friends what they’re doing. They also show off photos, upload videos, chat, make friends, meet old ones, join causes, groups, have fun and throw virtual sheep at one another. The site, which is believed to have 500 million registered users worldwide, has only four remaining countries left to conquer: Russia, Japan, China and Korea, according to Zuckerberg. Facebook is now twice as huge as Rupert Murdoch’s MySpace.
Jack Dorsey
Twitter. (wikipedia)
Jack Dorsey created Twitter to allow friends and family know what he was doing. The world’s fastest-growing communications medium let users broadcast their thoughts in 140 characters or less and repost someone else’s informative or amusing message to their own Twitter followers by Retweeting. No one thought people would want to follow strangers, or that celebrities would use Twitter to tell fans of their activities, or that businesses would use Twitter to announce discounts or launch new products.
Bonus: 3 More…
Christopher Poole
4chan message board. (wikipedia)
Christopher Poole, known online as “Moot,” started a message board called 4chan where people are free to be wrong. Unlike most web forums, 4chan does not have a registration system, allowing users to post anonymously. Moot believes in the value of multiple identities, including anonymity, in contrast to the merge of online and real-world identities occurring on Facebook and many other social networking sites.
Joshua Schachter
Delicious. (wikipedia)
Del.icio.us is a more sophisticated multiuser version of Muxway, wherein his first implementation of tags. Joshua Schachter began del.icio.us as a way for people to store and share their favorite Web-browsing bookmarks online. Instead of organizing them himself, or even creating a standard taxonomy of categories, Schachter used something called user tagging-people simply labeled the bookmarks by any name they wanted, and eventually the group as a whole effectively voted on them by either adopting those tags themselves or rejecting them. And now del.icio.us has been gobbled up by Yahoo, which hopes to extend the tagging principle to all sorts of its services.
Jeff Bezos
Amazon. (wikipedia)
Jeff Bezos founded the world’s biggest online store known as Amazon, which was originally named Cadabra Inc. He made online shopping faster and more personal than a trip to the local store. The company now introduced Kindle allowing readers to download books and other written materials and read them on this handheld device.
(bellefoong)
Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn
Father of the Internet.
The Father of Internet Vint Cerf, together with Bob Kahn created the TCP/IP suite of communication protocols. a language used by computers to talk to each other in a network. Vint Cerf once said that the internet is just a mirror of the population and spam is a side effect of a free service.
Tim Berners-Lee
Inventor of WWW.
Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. He wrote the first web client and server and designed a way to create links, or hypertext, amid different pieces of online information. He now maintains standards for the web and continues to refine its design as a director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
Ray Tomlinson
Father of Email.
Programmer Ray Tomlinson, the Father of Email made it possible to exchange messages between machines in diverse locations; between universities, across continents, and oceans. He came up with the “@” symbol format for e-mail addresses. Today, more than a billion people around the world type @ sign every day.
Michael Hart
The birth of eBooks.
Michael Hart started the birth of eBooks and breaks down the bars of ignorance and illiteracy. He created the Project Gutenberg and was considered world’s first electronic library that changed the way we read. The collection includes public domain works and copyrighted works with express permission.
Gary Thuerk
The first Email spam.
Spamming is an old marketing technique. Gary Thuerk, sent his first mass e-mailing to customers over the Arpanet for Digital’s new T-series of VAX systems. What he didn’t realize at the time was that he had sent the world’s first spam.
Scott Fahlman
The first emoticon.
Scott Fahlman is credited with originating the first ASCII-based smiley emoticon, which he thought would help to distinguish between posts that should be taken humorously and those of a more serious nature. Now, everybody uses them in messenger programs, chat rooms, and e-mail.
Marc Andreessen
Netscape Navigator. (wikipedia)
Marc Andreessen revolutionized Internet navigation. He came up with first widely used Web browser called Mosaic which was later commercialised as the Netscape Navigator. Marc Andreessen is also co-founder and chairman of Ning and an investor in several startups including Digg, Plazes, and Twitter.
Jarkko Oikarinen
Internet Relay Chat, IRC. (wikipedia)
Jarkko Oikarinen developed the first real-time online chat tool in Finland known as Internet Relay Chat. IRC’s fame took off in 1991. When Iraq invaded Kuwait and radio and TV signals were shut down, thanks to IRC though up-to-date information was able to be distribute.
Robert Tappan Morris
First Worm Virus.
The concept of a worm virus is unique compare to the conventional hacking. Instead of getting into a network themselves, they send a small program they have coded to do the job. From this concept, Robert Tappan Morris created the Morris Worm. It’s one of the very first worm viruses to be sent out over the internet that inadvertently caused many thousands of dollars worth of damage and “loss of productivity” when it was released in the late 80s.
David Bohnett
Geocities. (wikipedia)
David Bohnett founded GeoCities in 1994, together with John Rezner. It grew to become the largest community on the Internet. He pioneered and championed the concept of providing free home pages to everyone on the web. The company shut down the service on October 27, 2009.
Ward Cunningham
The first Wiki.
American programmer Ward Cunningham developed the first wiki as a way to let people collaborate, create and edit online pages together. Cunningham named the wiki after the Hawaiian word for “quick.”
Sabeer Bhatia
Hotmail. (wikipedia)
Sabeer Bhatia founded Hotmail in which the uppercase letters spelling out HTML-the language used to write the base of a webpage. He got in the news when he sold the free e-mailing service , Hotmail to Microsoft for $400 million. He was awarded the “Entrepreneur of the Year” by Draper Fisher Jurvertson in 1998 and was noted by TIME as one of the “People to Watch” in international business in 2002. His most exciting acquisition of 2009 was Jaxtyr which he believes is set to overtake Skype in terms of free global calling.
Matt Drudge
The Drudge Report. (wikipedia)
Matt Drudge started the news aggregation website The Drudge Report. It gained popularity when he was the first outlet to break the news that later became the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin
Google. (wikipedia)
Larry Page and Sergey Brin changed the way we search and use the Internet. They worked as a seamless team at the top of the search giant. Their company grew rapidly every year since it began. Page and Brin started with their own funds, but the site quickly outgrew their own existing resources. They later obtain private investments through Stanford. Larry Page, Sergey Brin and their company Google, continue to favor engineering over business.
Bill Gates
Microsoft. (wikipedia)
Bill Gates founded the software company called “Micro-Soft”. a combination of “microcomputer software.” Later on, Bill Gates developed a new GUI (Graphical User Interface) for a disk operating system. He called this new style Windows. He has all but accomplished his famous mission statement, to put “a computer on every desk and in every home”. at least in developed countries.
Steve Jobs
Apple. (wikipedia)
Steve Jobs innovative idea of a personal computer led him into revolutionizing the computer hardware and software industry. The Apple founder changed the way we work, play and communicate. He made simple and uncluttered web design stylish. The story of Apple and Steve Jobs is about determination, creative genius, pursuit of innovation with passion and purpose.
David Filo and Jerry Yang
Yahoo. (wikipedia)
David Filo and Jerry Yang started Yahoo! as a pastime and evolved into a universal brand that has changed the way people communicate with each other, find and access information and purchase things. The name Yahoo! is an acronym for “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle,” but Filo and Yang insist they selected the name because they liked the general definition of a yahoo: “rude, unsophisticated, uncouth.”
Brad Fitzpatrick
LiveJournal. (wikipedia)
Brad Fitzpatrick created LiveJournal, one of the earliest blogging platforms. He is seen on the Internet under the nickname bradfitz. He is also the author of a variety of free software projects such as memcached, used on LiveJournal, Facebook and YouTube. LiveJournal continues today as an online community where people can share updates on their lives via diaries and blogs. Members connect by creating a “friends list” that links to their pals’ recent entries.
Shawn Fanning
Napster. (wikipedia)
Shawn Fanning developed Napster, a peer-to-peer file-sharing program designed to let music fans find and trade music. Users put whatever files they were willing to share with others into special directories on their hard drives. The service had more than 25 million users at its peak in 2001, and was shut down after a series of high-profile lawsuits, not before helping to spark the digital music revolution now dominated by Apple. Napster has since been rebranded and acquired by Roxio.
Peter Thiel
Paypal. (wikipedia)
Peter Thiel is one of many Web luminaries associated with PayPal. PayPal had enabled people to transfer money to each other instantly. PayPal began giving a small group of developers access to its code, allowing them to work with its super-sophisticated transaction framework. Peter Thiel cofounded PayPal at age 31 and sold it to eBay four years later for $1.5 billion.
Pierre Morad Omidyar
Ebay. (wikipedia)
Pierre Omidyar set up an online marketplace that brought buyers and sellers together as never before, and pioneered the concept of quantifying the trustworthiness of an anonymous user. In building his auction empire, Omidyar counted on the power of the individual. Omidyar’s greatest strength is his insight into human nature. He understood that people would buy just about anything. one man’s junk is, in fact, another’s treasure.
Jimmy Wales
Wikipedia. (wikipedia)
Jimmy Wales founded the world’s largest encyclopaedia which carries articles that can easily be edited by anyone who can access the website. It was launched in 2001 and is currently the most popular general reference work on the Internet.
Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake.
Flickr. (wikipedia)
Photosharing website has become a part of everyday online life for millions of people. Stewart Butterfield, who with his wife Caterina Fake created Flickr that was born out of an online multi-player game that seemed to sum up everything the Web 2.0 people were trying to do. Flickr came along with an idea that you no longer had an album. Instead, you had a photo stream. Yahoo later on acquired Flickr in 2005.
Jonathan Abrams
Friendster. (wikipedia)
Jonathan Abrams built Friendster, together with Cris Emmanuel, offering many tools to help members find dates. He took the idea from Match.com. It’s the first social network to hit the big time and go mainstream. Members create profiles listing favorite movies and books (and dating status) and link up to friends, who linked to their friends, and so on.
Niklas Zennstrom
Skype. (wikipedia)
Niklas Zennstrom co-founded the fastest growing communications trend in history called Skype. It offered consumers worldwide a free software for making superior-quality calls using their computer and expanded its offering for Linux, MAC & PC and mobile/ handheld devices.
Bram Cohen
Bit Torrent. (wikipedia)
If Napster started the first generation of file sharing , Bram Cohen changed the face of file sharing by developing BitTorrent which has a massive following of users almost instantly. It uses the Golden Rule principle: the faster you upload, the faster you are allowed to download. BitTorrent breaks up files into many little portions, and as soon as a user has a piece, they instantly start uploading that part to other users. So almost everybody who is sharing a given file is simultaneously uploading and downloading pieces of the same file.
Reid Hoffman
LinkedIn. (wikipedia)
Reid Hoffman, a former executive vice president at PayPal, created LinkedIn as a professional social network allowing registered users to maintain a list of contact details of people they know and trust in business. Members can search for jobs, trade resumes, find new hires and keep up with the competition.
Matt Mullenweg
WordPress. (wikipedia)
Matt Mullenweg founded the world’s most used open source blogging and the greatest boon to freedom of expression known as WordPress. Some of the most popular websites run on WordPress are Techcrunch, Huffingtonpost, Mashable and more.
Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim
Youtube. (wikipedia)
Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim met as early employees at PayPal. They later started the internet’s most popular video-sharing site YouTube which is broadcasting more than 100 million short videos daily on myriad subjects. When creating YouTube, the three divided work based on skills: Chad Hurley designed the site’s interface and logo. Steve Chen and Jawed Karim divide technical duties making the site work. They later split management tasks, based on strengths and interests: Chad Hurley became CEO; Steve Chen, Chief Technology Officer. A year and a half later, Google acquired YouTube for a deal worth $1.65 billion in stock.
Craig Newmark
Craigslist. (wikipedia)
Craig Newmark started a site that dramatically altered the classified advertising universe called Craiglist. It was an object of fear for newspapers who felt threatened by the free-for-all classified advertising site. It began as an e-mail list for Newmark’s friends in the Bay Area. Since then, it has grown into an online database for classified ads for those seeking everything from housing to romance.
Julian Assange
WikiLeaks. (wikipedia)
Julian Assange founded a website dedicated to publishing classified documents stolen from around the world. He designed an advanced software for the Wikileaks shielding the identities of the thieves who steal these documents by completely erasing their identities before spreading the stolen documents to servers ‘all over the world’. As a result, no one can trace who’s given him what or when. The site depicts itself as the “uncensorable Wikipedia for untraceable mass document leaking and analysis” and has developed to be regarded as the most extensive and safest stage for whistleblowers to leak to.
Dick Costolo
FeedBurner. (wikipedia)
People generally check their preferred sites every now and then to see if there’s anything new. FeedBurner founder Dick Costolo created a news aggregator that automatically downloads an update that is visible in the places that interest you. An RSS feed, short for Really Simple Syndication, delivers those latest bits of media from their creator’s website to your computer. FeedBurner was later acquired by Google in 2007. Currently, Dick Costolo is Twitter’s Chief Operating Officer making twitter the next generation RSS.
Mark Zuckerberg
Facebook. (wikipedia)
Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook to help students in universities keep in touch with friends. The “status update” started its rebirth in Facebook, where user after user tell their extended network of trusted friends what they’re doing. They also show off photos, upload videos, chat, make friends, meet old ones, join causes, groups, have fun and throw virtual sheep at one another. The site, which is believed to have 500 million registered users worldwide, has only four remaining countries left to conquer: Russia, Japan, China and Korea, according to Zuckerberg. Facebook is now twice as huge as Rupert Murdoch’s MySpace.
Jack Dorsey
Twitter. (wikipedia)
Jack Dorsey created Twitter to allow friends and family know what he was doing. The world’s fastest-growing communications medium let users broadcast their thoughts in 140 characters or less and repost someone else’s informative or amusing message to their own Twitter followers by Retweeting. No one thought people would want to follow strangers, or that celebrities would use Twitter to tell fans of their activities, or that businesses would use Twitter to announce discounts or launch new products.
Bonus: 3 More…
Christopher Poole
4chan message board. (wikipedia)
Christopher Poole, known online as “Moot,” started a message board called 4chan where people are free to be wrong. Unlike most web forums, 4chan does not have a registration system, allowing users to post anonymously. Moot believes in the value of multiple identities, including anonymity, in contrast to the merge of online and real-world identities occurring on Facebook and many other social networking sites.
Joshua Schachter
Delicious. (wikipedia)
Del.icio.us is a more sophisticated multiuser version of Muxway, wherein his first implementation of tags. Joshua Schachter began del.icio.us as a way for people to store and share their favorite Web-browsing bookmarks online. Instead of organizing them himself, or even creating a standard taxonomy of categories, Schachter used something called user tagging-people simply labeled the bookmarks by any name they wanted, and eventually the group as a whole effectively voted on them by either adopting those tags themselves or rejecting them. And now del.icio.us has been gobbled up by Yahoo, which hopes to extend the tagging principle to all sorts of its services.
Jeff Bezos
Amazon. (wikipedia)
Jeff Bezos founded the world’s biggest online store known as Amazon, which was originally named Cadabra Inc. He made online shopping faster and more personal than a trip to the local store. The company now introduced Kindle allowing readers to download books and other written materials and read them on this handheld device.
(bellefoong)
50 Keywords That Can Ruin Your Resume
If you are looking for a job change and are aiming to write an eye-catching resume, this may surprise you. Some keywords or buzzwords you use in your CV could actually ruin your chances of getting that dream job.
Why?
According to Karen Burns, the author of the illustrated career advice book The Amazing Adventures of Working Girl: Real-Life Career Advice You Can Actually Use, these words are simply “vague”. It makes your resume look like everyone elses.
She advises:
You want your resume to stand out. The best way to sell yourself is to show, don’t tell. Explain your accomplishments rather than spouting them off in trite ways. So check your resume for these boilerplate words and phrases. If you find them, replace them–or at the very least, elaborate upon them — with real-life, specific examples.
So when making your resume, keep the following words out of the scene.
1. Team player
2. Detailed-oriented
3. Proven track record of success
4. Experienced
5. Excellent communication skills
6. Leadership skills
7. Go-to person
8. Managed cross-functional teams
9. Exceptional organizational skills
10. Self-starter
11. Results-oriented professional
12. Bottom-line orientated
13. Works well with customers
14. Strong negotiation skills
15. Goal-oriented
16. People-person
17. Dynamic
18. Innovative
19. Proven ability
20. Top-flight
21. Motivated
22. Bottom-line focused
23. Responsible for
24. Assisted with
25. Skilled problem solver
26. Accustomed to fast-paced environments
27. Strong work ethic
28. Works well with all levels of staff
29. Met (or exceeded) expectations
30. Savvy business professional
31. Strong presentation skills
32. Looking for a challenging opportunity
33. Cutting-edge
34. Multi-tasker
35. Proactive
36. Seasoned professional
37. Perfectionist
38. Highly skilled
39. Functioned as
40. Duties included
41. Actions encompassed
42. Best-in-class
43. Strategic thinker
44. Trustworthy
45. Flexible
46. Works well under pressure
47. Quick learner
48. Partnered with others
49. Results-focused
50. Out-of-the-box thinker
To read my posts, click here.
Why?
According to Karen Burns, the author of the illustrated career advice book The Amazing Adventures of Working Girl: Real-Life Career Advice You Can Actually Use, these words are simply “vague”. It makes your resume look like everyone elses.
She advises:
You want your resume to stand out. The best way to sell yourself is to show, don’t tell. Explain your accomplishments rather than spouting them off in trite ways. So check your resume for these boilerplate words and phrases. If you find them, replace them–or at the very least, elaborate upon them — with real-life, specific examples.
So when making your resume, keep the following words out of the scene.
1. Team player
2. Detailed-oriented
3. Proven track record of success
4. Experienced
5. Excellent communication skills
6. Leadership skills
7. Go-to person
8. Managed cross-functional teams
9. Exceptional organizational skills
10. Self-starter
11. Results-oriented professional
12. Bottom-line orientated
13. Works well with customers
14. Strong negotiation skills
15. Goal-oriented
16. People-person
17. Dynamic
18. Innovative
19. Proven ability
20. Top-flight
21. Motivated
22. Bottom-line focused
23. Responsible for
24. Assisted with
25. Skilled problem solver
26. Accustomed to fast-paced environments
27. Strong work ethic
28. Works well with all levels of staff
29. Met (or exceeded) expectations
30. Savvy business professional
31. Strong presentation skills
32. Looking for a challenging opportunity
33. Cutting-edge
34. Multi-tasker
35. Proactive
36. Seasoned professional
37. Perfectionist
38. Highly skilled
39. Functioned as
40. Duties included
41. Actions encompassed
42. Best-in-class
43. Strategic thinker
44. Trustworthy
45. Flexible
46. Works well under pressure
47. Quick learner
48. Partnered with others
49. Results-focused
50. Out-of-the-box thinker
To read my posts, click here.
Sunday, November 14, 2010
New Report Highlights Administration’s Support for Women and Families
At the beginning of this Administration, the President tasked Vice President Biden with chairing the Middle Class Task Force to identify and push through measures to help get middle-class families back on their feet.
From day one, the Middle Class Task Force has focused on supporting women in all of the work they do – as caregivers to our nation’s children and the elderly, as leaders in business and increasingly as co-breadwinners in households across the country. With more women entering and remaining in the workforce and more households than ever dependent on two incomes, this work is critical to helping middle-class families regain and maintain their financial security.
Yesterday the National Economic Council released a report, Jobs and Economic Security for America’s Women, which provided even more evidence for why this work is critically important.
The report lays out that in almost two-thirds of families women are either the primary or co-breadwinner in their household. Many women are sole breadwinners. As of December 2009, 2.1 million women whose husbands were unemployed were working as the sole breadwinners for their families. An additional 6.1 million women are single mothers and the sole breadwinners for their families.
As women’s income and employment gains increasing importance in family budgets, their other roles do not disappear. Women are still playing substantial roles as caregivers to their children, parents and family members with disabilities. That means it is more important than ever to support women as they seek to balance these responsibilities.
The report highlights some of the initiatives the Middle Class Task Force championed in the 2011 Budget to provide families with more options as they try to navigate this increasingly delicate juggling act. These aren’t just women’s issues; they are issues of vital importance to every family’s economic security.
Some of our 2011 Budget Proposals:
A near-doubling of the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit for middle-class families. This would result in a $900 increase in the maximum credit available to many middle class families.
$100 million for the Caregiver Initiative at the Department of Health and Human Services, which would help an additional 200,000 caregivers better balance their responsibilities and support one million additional hours of adult day care and three million rides to critical daily activities, taking the strain off women and their families.
$50 million for the State Paid Leave Fund at the Department of Labor, which will provide competitive grants to help cover start-up costs for states that choose to launch paid leave programs.
These are just some of the Administration’s efforts to support women and the middle-class families they support as they seek to regain their footing. To read the report and learn more about the Administration’s efforts to support women and middle-class families, click here.
From day one, the Middle Class Task Force has focused on supporting women in all of the work they do – as caregivers to our nation’s children and the elderly, as leaders in business and increasingly as co-breadwinners in households across the country. With more women entering and remaining in the workforce and more households than ever dependent on two incomes, this work is critical to helping middle-class families regain and maintain their financial security.
Yesterday the National Economic Council released a report, Jobs and Economic Security for America’s Women, which provided even more evidence for why this work is critically important.
The report lays out that in almost two-thirds of families women are either the primary or co-breadwinner in their household. Many women are sole breadwinners. As of December 2009, 2.1 million women whose husbands were unemployed were working as the sole breadwinners for their families. An additional 6.1 million women are single mothers and the sole breadwinners for their families.
As women’s income and employment gains increasing importance in family budgets, their other roles do not disappear. Women are still playing substantial roles as caregivers to their children, parents and family members with disabilities. That means it is more important than ever to support women as they seek to balance these responsibilities.
The report highlights some of the initiatives the Middle Class Task Force championed in the 2011 Budget to provide families with more options as they try to navigate this increasingly delicate juggling act. These aren’t just women’s issues; they are issues of vital importance to every family’s economic security.
Some of our 2011 Budget Proposals:
A near-doubling of the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit for middle-class families. This would result in a $900 increase in the maximum credit available to many middle class families.
$100 million for the Caregiver Initiative at the Department of Health and Human Services, which would help an additional 200,000 caregivers better balance their responsibilities and support one million additional hours of adult day care and three million rides to critical daily activities, taking the strain off women and their families.
$50 million for the State Paid Leave Fund at the Department of Labor, which will provide competitive grants to help cover start-up costs for states that choose to launch paid leave programs.
These are just some of the Administration’s efforts to support women and the middle-class families they support as they seek to regain their footing. To read the report and learn more about the Administration’s efforts to support women and middle-class families, click here.
Thursday, September 16, 2010
President Obama on Small Business Jobs & Tax Cuts: "We Don't Have Time for Any More Games"
Having just emerged from a Cabinet meeting focused on getting every agency doing all they can to help America create jobs, the President zeroed in on two major fights for the middle class.
The first was the long-overdue breaking of the Republican blockade against help for small business -- for which he thanked the two Republican Senators who stepped up and abandoned their party's parliamentary gimmicks. The second was the ongoing attempt by Republicans in Congress to hold middle class tax cuts hostage to additional, excessive tax cuts for the very wealthiest Americans.
And while I am grateful for this progress, it should not have taken this long to pass this bill. At a time when small business owners are still struggling to make payroll and they’re still holding off hiring, we put together a plan that would give them some tax relief and make it easier for them to take out loans. It’s a bill that’s paid for. It won’t add a dime to the deficit. It’s a bill that was written by both Democrats and Republicans.
Right now, we could decide to extend tax relief for the middle class. Right now, we could decide that every American household would receive a tax cut on the first $250,000 of their income.
But once again, the leaders across the aisle are saying no. They want to hold these middle-class tax cuts hostage until they get an additional tax cut for the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans.
We simply can’t afford that. It would mean borrowing $700 billion in order to fund these tax cuts for the very wealthiest Americans -- $700 billion to give a tax cut worth an average of $100,000 to millionaires and billionaires. And it’s a tax cut economists say would do little to add momentum to our economy.
Now, I just don’t believe this makes any sense. Even as we debate whether it’s wise to spend $700 billion on tax breaks for the wealthy, doesn’t it make sense for us to move forward with the tax cuts that we all agree on? We should be able to extend right now middle-class tax relief on the first $250,000 of income -- which, by the way, 97 percent of Americans make less than $250,000 a year. So right off the bat, 97 percent of all Americans would get tax relief on all their income. People who are making more than $250,000 a year, say, you’re making half a million dollars, you’d still get tax relief on half your income.
And everybody agrees that this makes sense. Middle-class families need this relief. These are the Americans who saw their wages and incomes flat-line over the last decade, who’ve seen the costs of everything from health care to college tuition skyrocket and who have been hardest hit by this recession.
Extending these tax cuts is right. It is just. It will help our economy because middle-class folks are the folks who are most likely to actually spend this tax relief -- for a new computer for the kids or for maybe some home improvement.
And if the other party continues to hold these tax cuts hostage, these are the same families who will suffer the most when their taxes go up next year. And if we can’t get an agreement with Republicans, that's what will happen.
So we don't have time for any more games. I understand there’s an election coming up. But the American people didn't send us here to just think about our jobs; they sent us here to think about theirs. They sent us here to think about their lives and their children’s lives, and to be responsible, and to be serious about the challenges we face as a nation.
That's what members of both parties have now done with the small business jobs bill. And I hope we can work together to do the same thing on middle-class tax relief in the weeks to come.
The first was the long-overdue breaking of the Republican blockade against help for small business -- for which he thanked the two Republican Senators who stepped up and abandoned their party's parliamentary gimmicks. The second was the ongoing attempt by Republicans in Congress to hold middle class tax cuts hostage to additional, excessive tax cuts for the very wealthiest Americans.
And while I am grateful for this progress, it should not have taken this long to pass this bill. At a time when small business owners are still struggling to make payroll and they’re still holding off hiring, we put together a plan that would give them some tax relief and make it easier for them to take out loans. It’s a bill that’s paid for. It won’t add a dime to the deficit. It’s a bill that was written by both Democrats and Republicans.
Right now, we could decide to extend tax relief for the middle class. Right now, we could decide that every American household would receive a tax cut on the first $250,000 of their income.
But once again, the leaders across the aisle are saying no. They want to hold these middle-class tax cuts hostage until they get an additional tax cut for the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans.
We simply can’t afford that. It would mean borrowing $700 billion in order to fund these tax cuts for the very wealthiest Americans -- $700 billion to give a tax cut worth an average of $100,000 to millionaires and billionaires. And it’s a tax cut economists say would do little to add momentum to our economy.
Now, I just don’t believe this makes any sense. Even as we debate whether it’s wise to spend $700 billion on tax breaks for the wealthy, doesn’t it make sense for us to move forward with the tax cuts that we all agree on? We should be able to extend right now middle-class tax relief on the first $250,000 of income -- which, by the way, 97 percent of Americans make less than $250,000 a year. So right off the bat, 97 percent of all Americans would get tax relief on all their income. People who are making more than $250,000 a year, say, you’re making half a million dollars, you’d still get tax relief on half your income.
And everybody agrees that this makes sense. Middle-class families need this relief. These are the Americans who saw their wages and incomes flat-line over the last decade, who’ve seen the costs of everything from health care to college tuition skyrocket and who have been hardest hit by this recession.
Extending these tax cuts is right. It is just. It will help our economy because middle-class folks are the folks who are most likely to actually spend this tax relief -- for a new computer for the kids or for maybe some home improvement.
And if the other party continues to hold these tax cuts hostage, these are the same families who will suffer the most when their taxes go up next year. And if we can’t get an agreement with Republicans, that's what will happen.
So we don't have time for any more games. I understand there’s an election coming up. But the American people didn't send us here to just think about our jobs; they sent us here to think about theirs. They sent us here to think about their lives and their children’s lives, and to be responsible, and to be serious about the challenges we face as a nation.
That's what members of both parties have now done with the small business jobs bill. And I hope we can work together to do the same thing on middle-class tax relief in the weeks to come.
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
Revitalizing American Manufacturing
Some people think our economy can run on white collar and service jobs alone, but they are wrong. We can and must make high quality products in America. We are on the verge of a new Industrial Revolution and I believe it will revolve around the greatest untapped opportunity of our time, clean energy. China and Europe see this opportunity and they are already moving aggressively to be at the forefront of it. It is time for America to get into the clean energy race and play to win -- and that is exactly what A123 Systems is doing in Michigan.
At a difficult time for America’s workers and businesses, A123 Systems is leading the way to a brighter future. It is building factories in Livonia, Romulus, and Brownstown. It has already has hired 200 local workers since last August and it expects to hire more than 3,000 people by 2012. Today marks an important milestone for A123 Systems, as they open largest lithium-ion automotive battery production facility in North America. This will help make sure the cars of the future are built right here in America.
This particular project is important because it has managed to link innovation in America to manufacturing in America, an essential connection that has been neglected in recent years.
We are – and have long been – the world leader in innovation. To give just a few examples from the last century: we created the laser, the solar cell, the transistor, and GPS technology. Historically, we’ve also been a powerhouse in manufacturing. But where are high tech products made today? They are largely manufactured in Asia.
With A123 Systems, the private sector, government and academia have all worked together to reverse that trend.
President Obama recognized that earlier today in a call he placed to the employees of A123 systems, lauding them for being the “first American factory to start high-volume production of advanced vehicle batteries.”
This is noteworthy because as he stated “just a few years ago American businesses could only make 2 percent of the world’s advanced batteries for hybrids and electric vehicles.” But thanks to the work being done at companies like A123 Systems and funding from the Recovery Act we’re poised “to get up to 40 percent of the world’s capacity” by 2015.
Instead of watching a technology be discovered here and then shipped overseas, we fought to keep it here. And we are winning.
In the weeks ahead, more American battery manufacturing plants will be coming online thanks in large part to the Recovery Act, which funded a healthy competition among 9 battery makers, 11 battery suppliers, and 10 component makers. These new factories are already driving down battery costs faster than anyone thought – which means more car sales, more jobs, and less dependence on foreign oil.
The Department of Energy has long been charged with accelerating energy innovation in America. But in this Administration, we are taking things one step further – we are making that critical link between innovation and manufacturing.
A123 Systems is a perfect example of what’s possible when the private sector, government, and academia work together.
At a difficult time for America’s workers and businesses, A123 Systems is leading the way to a brighter future. It is building factories in Livonia, Romulus, and Brownstown. It has already has hired 200 local workers since last August and it expects to hire more than 3,000 people by 2012. Today marks an important milestone for A123 Systems, as they open largest lithium-ion automotive battery production facility in North America. This will help make sure the cars of the future are built right here in America.
This particular project is important because it has managed to link innovation in America to manufacturing in America, an essential connection that has been neglected in recent years.
We are – and have long been – the world leader in innovation. To give just a few examples from the last century: we created the laser, the solar cell, the transistor, and GPS technology. Historically, we’ve also been a powerhouse in manufacturing. But where are high tech products made today? They are largely manufactured in Asia.
With A123 Systems, the private sector, government and academia have all worked together to reverse that trend.
President Obama recognized that earlier today in a call he placed to the employees of A123 systems, lauding them for being the “first American factory to start high-volume production of advanced vehicle batteries.”
This is noteworthy because as he stated “just a few years ago American businesses could only make 2 percent of the world’s advanced batteries for hybrids and electric vehicles.” But thanks to the work being done at companies like A123 Systems and funding from the Recovery Act we’re poised “to get up to 40 percent of the world’s capacity” by 2015.
Instead of watching a technology be discovered here and then shipped overseas, we fought to keep it here. And we are winning.
In the weeks ahead, more American battery manufacturing plants will be coming online thanks in large part to the Recovery Act, which funded a healthy competition among 9 battery makers, 11 battery suppliers, and 10 component makers. These new factories are already driving down battery costs faster than anyone thought – which means more car sales, more jobs, and less dependence on foreign oil.
The Department of Energy has long been charged with accelerating energy innovation in America. But in this Administration, we are taking things one step further – we are making that critical link between innovation and manufacturing.
A123 Systems is a perfect example of what’s possible when the private sector, government, and academia work together.
Monday, September 13, 2010
Yahoo Mail to get a Revamped User Interface Soon
Yahoo is all set to revive its mail service with a new interface and features under a project currently dubbed Minty. Revamping its mail service is an active step to address the drop in the number of users and to improve the performance of the interface. The Wall Street Journal reported that Yahoo will introduce iPad and Android friendly interfaces of its mail service after juicing up the performance. So we can expect Yahoo Mail to move entirely to HTML5 interface for running faster on Apple's iOS and Google's Android platform.
In U.S., Yahoo is still the number one email service that rests above Google's Gmail and Microsoft's Hotmail combined together. However, comScore figures, as quoted by The Wall Street Journal state that Yahoo suffered a 7 percent year-on-year drop in users compared to Hotmail's 3 percent YoY growth and Gmail's 22 percent growth. Clearly, Yahoo did have to make an attempt to retain users.
Last year, Yahoo spruced up the web mail interface by adding more social features and also the mobile mail interface. But post Minty interface refresh, Yahoo account holders would be able to enjoy tighter integration of popular social networks like Facebook and Twitter. Apart from that, the entire interface would be made lighter to be usable on slow or weaker Internet Connections.
We can expect faster and more social Yahoo Mail interface post refresh. The company did not mention how long will it take to implement this new interface for general public usage. Be ready for surprise anytime soon.
In U.S., Yahoo is still the number one email service that rests above Google's Gmail and Microsoft's Hotmail combined together. However, comScore figures, as quoted by The Wall Street Journal state that Yahoo suffered a 7 percent year-on-year drop in users compared to Hotmail's 3 percent YoY growth and Gmail's 22 percent growth. Clearly, Yahoo did have to make an attempt to retain users.
Last year, Yahoo spruced up the web mail interface by adding more social features and also the mobile mail interface. But post Minty interface refresh, Yahoo account holders would be able to enjoy tighter integration of popular social networks like Facebook and Twitter. Apart from that, the entire interface would be made lighter to be usable on slow or weaker Internet Connections.
We can expect faster and more social Yahoo Mail interface post refresh. The company did not mention how long will it take to implement this new interface for general public usage. Be ready for surprise anytime soon.
Saturday, September 11, 2010
How Hackers Work
Thanks to the media, the word "hacker" has gotten a bad reputation. The word summons up thoughts of malicious computer users finding new ways to harass people, defraud corporations, steal information and maybe even destroy the economy or start a war by infiltrating military computer systems. While there's no denying that there are hackers out there with bad intentions, they make up only a small percentage of the hacker community.
The term computer hacker first showed up in the mid-1960s. A hacker was a programmer -- someone who hacked out computer code. Hackers were visionaries who could see new ways to use computers, creating programs that no one else could conceive. They were the pioneers of the computer industry, building everything from small applications to operating systems. In this sense, people like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were all hackers -- they saw the potential of what computers could do and created ways to achieve that potential.
A unifying trait among these hackers was a strong sense of curiosity, sometimes bordering on obsession. These hackers prided themselves on not only their ability to create new programs, but also to learn how other programs and systems worked. When a program had a bug -- a section of bad code that prevented the program from working properly -- hackers would often create and distribute small sections of code called patches to fix the problem. Some managed to land a job that leveraged their skills, getting paid for what they'd happily do for free.
As computers evolved, computer engineers began to network individual machines together into a system. Soon, the term hacker had a new meaning -- a person using computers to explore a network to which he or she didn't belong. Usually hackers didn't have any malicious intent. They just wanted to know how computer networks worked and saw any barrier between them and that knowledge as a challenge.
In fact, that's still the case today. While there are plenty of stories about malicious hackers sabotaging computer systems, infiltrating networks and spreading computer viruses, most hackers are just curious -- they want to know all the intricacies of the computer world. Some use their knowledge to help corporations and governments construct better security measures. Others might use their skills for more unethical endeavors.
In this article, we'll explore common techniques hackers use to infiltrate systems. We'll examine hacker culture and the various kinds of hackers as well as learn about famous hackers, some of whom have run afoul of the law.
The term computer hacker first showed up in the mid-1960s. A hacker was a programmer -- someone who hacked out computer code. Hackers were visionaries who could see new ways to use computers, creating programs that no one else could conceive. They were the pioneers of the computer industry, building everything from small applications to operating systems. In this sense, people like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were all hackers -- they saw the potential of what computers could do and created ways to achieve that potential.
A unifying trait among these hackers was a strong sense of curiosity, sometimes bordering on obsession. These hackers prided themselves on not only their ability to create new programs, but also to learn how other programs and systems worked. When a program had a bug -- a section of bad code that prevented the program from working properly -- hackers would often create and distribute small sections of code called patches to fix the problem. Some managed to land a job that leveraged their skills, getting paid for what they'd happily do for free.
As computers evolved, computer engineers began to network individual machines together into a system. Soon, the term hacker had a new meaning -- a person using computers to explore a network to which he or she didn't belong. Usually hackers didn't have any malicious intent. They just wanted to know how computer networks worked and saw any barrier between them and that knowledge as a challenge.
In fact, that's still the case today. While there are plenty of stories about malicious hackers sabotaging computer systems, infiltrating networks and spreading computer viruses, most hackers are just curious -- they want to know all the intricacies of the computer world. Some use their knowledge to help corporations and governments construct better security measures. Others might use their skills for more unethical endeavors.
In this article, we'll explore common techniques hackers use to infiltrate systems. We'll examine hacker culture and the various kinds of hackers as well as learn about famous hackers, some of whom have run afoul of the law.
Wednesday, September 8, 2010
MTS launches smart phones in Bihar
Patna, Sep 8 (PTI) Mobile telephony services company MTS today launched a range of internet enabled smart phones for the trendy and techonolgy oriented new generation subscribers, especially the college going and young professionals. The smart phones are among the most competitive and fully loaded devices which will set a benchmark in the industry with 3G capabilities, Vsevolod Rozanov, President and CEO of Sistema Shyam Teleservices Limited, which owns MTS, told reporters here. All MTS Smart phones are available with bundled offers aimed at providing complete package to its customers. They have been designed to suit the young and net savvy professional's requirements through a wide variety of offerings at a highly competitive prices ranging from Rs 4,999. M K Sachdeva, chief operating officer, Bihar circle, SSTL, said MTS smart phones devices offering voice and data packaged together at affordable prices and with the inaugural offer of 20GB free download will help the subscribers to get on to an entirely new digitally connected world. SSTL is a joint venture between Sistema of Russia and Shyam group of India. Sistema is the majority shareholder in this joint venture with a 74 per cent equity share. The Shyam group holds 23.5 per cent stake and the remaining 2.5 per cent is publicly held. SSTL has been allocated spectrum to provide mobile telephony services in all the 22 cricles across the country, Sachdeva said.
Friday, August 13, 2010
Career Journal: Why Employees Quit
India’s booming labor market puts it in an enviable position.
Getty Images for the GBC
In one recent survey of 5,371 employers in India, 44% said they were expecting an increase in headcount.
Since the beginning of the year, Indian companies have stepped up their hiring of managers and other professionals. In one recent survey of 5,371 employers in India, 44% said they were expecting an increase in headcount. The Manpower Employment Outlook Survey said that only 2% predicted a decrease. This is in sharp contrast to what’s happening in developed countries like the United States and the United Kingdom, where there is hardly any employment growth.
India’s current position is a win-win for everyone. Job-seekers are happy and organizations are happy because their businesses are growing. There’s just one problem. It’s more challenging than ever before for Indian companies to manage and retain their key talent.
In a buoyant employment market the balance of power tips towards employees. They know there are plenty of opportunities outside their organizations and the ambitious ones are not afraid to scope them out.
This could be good news for companies because it gives them a chance to open their doors to in new talent. However often, in my experience, the back door is also left open and key talent goes wandering.
When speaking to organizations about retaining talent, I often point out the “dark side” of talent. By this, I mean that talented individuals have higher expectations than average performers. If their expectations are not being met, they are more likely to leave the business than the average employee. So, ironically, organizations that are doing a good job of hiring the best talent are often creating another challenge, the retention of that talent.
So what can companies do to try to hold on to their best people during these times? A frequent answer is: “Well, I suppose we could pay them more.”
Certainly, some people are strongly driven by financial rewards. But the size of this group of employees is often vastly overestimated.
Every year, Kenexa surveys thousands of employees around the world through our customers and the Kenexa Research Institute. This data shows that “employee rewards” (pay and benefits) are not consistent drivers of employee loyalty to a company.
Instead, employees rank “recognition from managers” as one of the most important factors that drives their commitment. I think most of us have heard the phrase “People don’t leave jobs, they leave managers.”
Therein lies a big part of the answer for organizations to address the challenge of attrition. You have to train managers to be better managers.
Here are some factors that make employees more committed to their jobs and organizations:
1. When their jobs makes good use of their skills and abilities.
2. When there are clear performance standards which have been communicated to them.
3. When employees get the training they need to perform their jobs effectively.
4. When they are given clear career paths
5. When their managers treat them with dignity and respect.
All these factors are, to a large degree, within control of the employee’s immediate manager or supervisor. Thus, organizations need to equip supervisors with the tools to manage and retain their subordinates successfully.
Some companies organize training courses for upper management but these courses are typically very generic and make the assumption that one management style will work for all employees. Each individual is unique. Managers need to find out what is important to each of their direct employees and adapt their management style accordingly. There are however some common behaviors that all managers should display.
One excellent way to figure out what these behaviors should be, is to learn from your very best managers.
Form a focus group of your high-performing managers and ask them what they do that makes their subordinates so engaged, satisfied and committed to their jobs and the organization. If you can bottle these behaviors and get other managers to use them, then you can go a long way to closing the back door and throwing away the key.
For some managers it comes naturally to proactively manage talent. But others might have to work at it. This does not necessarily require a major overhaul. Simple changes can make all the difference.
Ensure that your managers are doing the following:
1. They should have a personal approach to each employee, treating them as individuals rather than just subordinates.
2. They should frequently ask their subordinates “How can I help you?”
3. They should frequently provide employees feedback and recognition. It could be as simple as a pat on the back of the employee, or saying “job well done.”
4. Let employees know that management is there to support them.
5. They should have ongoing career discussions with their subordinates.
Essentially, the manager should be asking “Is the company meeting the subordinate’s expectations?” Often, to do that, they have to pay attention to the soft, people issues that employees care most about.
Getty Images for the GBC
In one recent survey of 5,371 employers in India, 44% said they were expecting an increase in headcount.
Since the beginning of the year, Indian companies have stepped up their hiring of managers and other professionals. In one recent survey of 5,371 employers in India, 44% said they were expecting an increase in headcount. The Manpower Employment Outlook Survey said that only 2% predicted a decrease. This is in sharp contrast to what’s happening in developed countries like the United States and the United Kingdom, where there is hardly any employment growth.
India’s current position is a win-win for everyone. Job-seekers are happy and organizations are happy because their businesses are growing. There’s just one problem. It’s more challenging than ever before for Indian companies to manage and retain their key talent.
In a buoyant employment market the balance of power tips towards employees. They know there are plenty of opportunities outside their organizations and the ambitious ones are not afraid to scope them out.
This could be good news for companies because it gives them a chance to open their doors to in new talent. However often, in my experience, the back door is also left open and key talent goes wandering.
When speaking to organizations about retaining talent, I often point out the “dark side” of talent. By this, I mean that talented individuals have higher expectations than average performers. If their expectations are not being met, they are more likely to leave the business than the average employee. So, ironically, organizations that are doing a good job of hiring the best talent are often creating another challenge, the retention of that talent.
So what can companies do to try to hold on to their best people during these times? A frequent answer is: “Well, I suppose we could pay them more.”
Certainly, some people are strongly driven by financial rewards. But the size of this group of employees is often vastly overestimated.
Every year, Kenexa surveys thousands of employees around the world through our customers and the Kenexa Research Institute. This data shows that “employee rewards” (pay and benefits) are not consistent drivers of employee loyalty to a company.
Instead, employees rank “recognition from managers” as one of the most important factors that drives their commitment. I think most of us have heard the phrase “People don’t leave jobs, they leave managers.”
Therein lies a big part of the answer for organizations to address the challenge of attrition. You have to train managers to be better managers.
Here are some factors that make employees more committed to their jobs and organizations:
1. When their jobs makes good use of their skills and abilities.
2. When there are clear performance standards which have been communicated to them.
3. When employees get the training they need to perform their jobs effectively.
4. When they are given clear career paths
5. When their managers treat them with dignity and respect.
All these factors are, to a large degree, within control of the employee’s immediate manager or supervisor. Thus, organizations need to equip supervisors with the tools to manage and retain their subordinates successfully.
Some companies organize training courses for upper management but these courses are typically very generic and make the assumption that one management style will work for all employees. Each individual is unique. Managers need to find out what is important to each of their direct employees and adapt their management style accordingly. There are however some common behaviors that all managers should display.
One excellent way to figure out what these behaviors should be, is to learn from your very best managers.
Form a focus group of your high-performing managers and ask them what they do that makes their subordinates so engaged, satisfied and committed to their jobs and the organization. If you can bottle these behaviors and get other managers to use them, then you can go a long way to closing the back door and throwing away the key.
For some managers it comes naturally to proactively manage talent. But others might have to work at it. This does not necessarily require a major overhaul. Simple changes can make all the difference.
Ensure that your managers are doing the following:
1. They should have a personal approach to each employee, treating them as individuals rather than just subordinates.
2. They should frequently ask their subordinates “How can I help you?”
3. They should frequently provide employees feedback and recognition. It could be as simple as a pat on the back of the employee, or saying “job well done.”
4. Let employees know that management is there to support them.
5. They should have ongoing career discussions with their subordinates.
Essentially, the manager should be asking “Is the company meeting the subordinate’s expectations?” Often, to do that, they have to pay attention to the soft, people issues that employees care most about.
Wednesday, August 4, 2010
Social Networking Dominates Our Time Spent Online [STATS]
Social networking now eats up twice as much of our online time as any other activity. According to new stats from Nielsen, sites like Facebook and Twitter now account for 22.7% of time spent on the web; the next closest activity is online games, which make up 10.2%.
The stats also show the degree to which social networking is displacing other forms of communication, with e-mail as a percentage of online time plunging from 11.5% to 8.3% from June 2009 to June 2010. Instant messaging also saw a significant drop in share, with a 15% decline from last year.
However, e-mail use on mobile is still on the rise – from 37.4% to 41.6% — presumably as users continue to migrate to smartphones from feature phones.
Here’s the full breakdown from Nielsen:
Are these trends consistent with your own online usage and the trends you’re seeing elsewhere? Let us know in the comments.
The stats also show the degree to which social networking is displacing other forms of communication, with e-mail as a percentage of online time plunging from 11.5% to 8.3% from June 2009 to June 2010. Instant messaging also saw a significant drop in share, with a 15% decline from last year.
However, e-mail use on mobile is still on the rise – from 37.4% to 41.6% — presumably as users continue to migrate to smartphones from feature phones.
Here’s the full breakdown from Nielsen:
Are these trends consistent with your own online usage and the trends you’re seeing elsewhere? Let us know in the comments.
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