Pages

Wednesday, July 18, 2012

Reddit: A Cultural Force

Reddit Sticker
Reddit Sticker (Photo credit: cambodia4kidsorg)
Reddit has emerged a cultural force of sorts. It is an open source community, whereas Digg was more of a Windows community.

Why Did Reddit Succeed Where Digg Failed?

Reddit is more engaged. The primary thing you do on Reddit is you comment. Reddit is not a technological marvel. The tech part is fairly simple. Their innovation has been at the community level. They have managed to reimagine what an online community is. Going light weight goes a long way, it seems like.
One of the first teams, for instance, wanted to develop a way for people to order fast food by text message. Graham steered the founders away from that idea, and they ended up creating the social news site Reddit
Enhanced by Zemanta

Google Fingerprints All Over The Map

Gmail SMS: Big Deal

English: mobile phone text message
English: mobile phone text message (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Google launches Gmail SMS, letting users in Africa send and receive emails by text message

This should be global. And it should apply to more services beyond email. And it should go beyond Google. SMS is a key sub category within mobile. Just like web services have been figuring out how to go mobile, they need to figure out how to go SMS.
Enhanced by Zemanta

Visionaries

Historic Microsoft photo of Paul Allen (left) ...
Historic Microsoft photo of Paul Allen (left) and Bill Gates (respectively) on October 19, 1981 surrounded by PCs after signing a major contract with IBM to develop software for its upcoming PC line. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Large companies can only find real Visionaries by looking for people who have been right more than once, and never right because they rode somebody else’s wave. Having found one of these rare unicorns, Visionaries are often completely at odds with the skillset needed to survive in large organizations. They are not politically savvy (or don’t care). They do not do well in meetings. They do not crave gigantic staffs to manage. They will not suck up at the expense of doing something they know is wrong, or even a little bit less right. They are prickly and uncompromising. Yet, you must not only find them, you must prop them up and make them successful despite all the antibodies the entrenched burocracies at Microsoft and Yahoo will generate to try to expel them. It’s not going to be fun, but the alternative is a continuing slide into irrelevance at the hands of the Visionaries in other companies. That’s even less fun and you’ve had a taste of what that’s all about.
Source: SmoothSpan
Enhanced by Zemanta

MM



Why Marissa Mayer may not be a good fit for Yahoo
Steve Ballmer and Marissa Mayer Face the Same Problems at Microsoft and Yahoo
Unsolicited advice for Marissa Mayer
The Truth About Marissa Mayer: She Has Two Contrasting Reputations

Tuesday, July 17, 2012

FoxConn Style Outsourcing

Deutsch: Foxconn Logo
Deutsch: Foxconn Logo (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
When companies like Apple outsource production, they send it off to FoxConn that employs people who do great work for cheap. But what does FoxConn do when it decides to outsource? Looks like there is a plan.

Migrant Workers in China Face Competition from Robots
Foxconn, which employs nearly one million low-wage workers to hand-assemble electronic gadgets for Apple, Nintendo, Intel, Dell, Nokia, Microsoft, Samsung, and Sony..... the Taiwan-based manufacturing giant would add up to one million industrial robots to its assembly lines inside of three years
Enhanced by Zemanta