Category: Web

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Business Internet Philosophy Self Development Technology Web

Intuition and Instinct are the New Tools of the Excessive Information Age

It has been quite some time since we’ve been living in the information age. We have already quite matured in the web 2.0 and online social network age. I’m sure you’ve heard so many times that we are just bombarded with information from everywhere. I call it the “excessive information age”. All of us are now more than ever so easily influenced by everything and everyone around us from all sorts of social media, and at the same time we are getting confused by all this noise.

It is almost inevitable that we will have to evolve. We are pushing limits of our social and logical cognition. If you really think about it, the situation almost requires quick judgement and adaptation. Stability almost seems nowhere to be seen, and for thousands of years in our evolution, stability is the one thing that we have experienced and adapted to. Our environment(by this I mean our day-to-day activities, by which I mean interaction online and interaction with computers in general) is changing at such a rapid pace that our minds are getting pushed to this quick form of adaptation. Cultures all around the world seem to be blending too. So what we learned while growing up might not necessarily be very useful when interacting when we start encountering people from different races and cultures around the globe. But we are learning and evolving now more or less a single unit.

What does all this mean. Well if you go to the theory of evolution and natural selection, this is what I think is bound to happen. Success in this time and age depends on quick, rapid yet correct action. You can either make it or break it in a few actions, sometimes in a matter of weeks, and crazily sometimes even in a matter of days.

What is needed in this age is not a 1000 hours of research to make a decision, as some people do when chosing a product, a service, a house, or a job. What is required in this age of excessive information is intuition and instinct to make a correct judgement and to be able to do it quick AND TAKE ACTION, at the same time being aware of  the risk of burning out too quickly. We are seeing instant successes – it no longer takes decades to reach a level that most people dream about, it takes a few years and sometimes just a few months, or in some extreme cases just a day, or well… just a single video of less than 5 minutes on this thing called ‘YouTube'(I’m sure you’ve heard of it)

I don’t see all of this as luck. I see all of this as evolution. People who might seem like they don’t have the slightest clue about what they are doing are becoming instant success. It is my belief (and please don’t sue me for this) that these people are instinctively driven to behave in a certain way, or to act a certain way.These individuals who posses this instincts to act in a quick and correct way will become successful, and to some ‘intelligent’ hard working people this may seem very scarey, because you no longer need to get a degree, or a Phd to get ahead in life(actually who am I kidding, that never was the case anyway).

What am I saying here? I’m saying, natural selection will take place because conditions have changed and the rules that applied in the past for success (and ultimately survival) don’t apply now. With these changes in the conditions in our ‘environment’ natural selection will pick out the new winners, who are instinctively driven by and towards quick correct actions.

 

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Internet Software Technology Web

#CIRA 2010

I attended the annual CIRA(Canadian Internet Registration Authority) annual general meeting. There were two brilliant keynote speakers Terry O’Reilly – radio host of CBC’s O’Reilly and The Age of Persuasion, Mitch Joel – Social Media expert and author of Six Pixels of Separation. There was a panel of “Architects of the Internet”, which had some of the most brilliant and pioneers in the field and they discussed the origins and the future of the Internet.

Paul Vixie – Internet Systems Consortium(ISC). He is the primary author of BINDv8, has been contributing to Internet protocols and UNIX systems since the 1980s. He has developed tools like, sends, rtty, cron etc…

John Demco – Webnames.ca. John is basically the God Father of “.ca”. He helped create the .CA domain in 1987 and was its initial registrar, and chairing the CA Domain Committee until 2000. He has also been responsible for chairing and managing a number of academic and research networks.

Chris O’Neil – Google Canada. Chris leads Google’s operations in Canada as Country Director for Google Canada. He is focused on building Google’s brand and driving innovation to help fuel growth for Canadian Business.

Byron Holland – President and CEO of CIRA.

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Business Internet Marketting Software Technology Web

Get mobile but dont throw your laptop away

Everyone everywhere is getting mobile – actually this statement is so 2000. What I should be saying is everyone is mobile and everyone is connected everywhere every time, and the fact is even that this is so 2006.

The question that I am trying to answer is – should we be throwing away our desktops and laptops and go completely mobile with cell phones and tablets like the iPad?

Definitely throw away your desktop. If you just bought one, then keep it to store your media and then when it’s time to throw it away, throw it away.

Laptops – keep those because they won’t be going away anytime soon. The iPad isn’t really a netbook killer yet and netbooks simply put are not notebooks. There are a lot of things that the iPad doesn’t have. Like a web cam, less computing power and etc etc. We’ve heard all about the iPad haven’t we?

Even this blog was posted from my phone, and I am not talking about using a web browser on my phone. I’m actually using a wordpress app on my iPhone to draft and post. I can approve, disapprove and delete comments directly from this app.

When I need to go somewhere and I don’t know where it is, I don’t even bother checking. I get in my car, look it up the gps on my IPhone and I’m off.

I don’t carry a watch on me, I use my phone(likes millions do these days), I don’t keep alarm clock – got a phone. And remember those daily planners, those little books they used to carry back in the days – ya you don’t even need that anymore, and if you are still carrying those – shame on you!

Get a smart phone!!

Even shopping had been made easy. Some of the major stores have their own apps for phone like the iphone and you can browse their entire catalog.

Just about to head into a meeting, so I’ll just wrap it up here, but stay stunned!

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Internet Software Technology Web

Technology Overload

As much as I love technology and especially the internet, I think we are starting to push its threshold. The internet was supposed to make life easier, and for some time it did, but now it seems more and more things are popping up and we’ve begun to push limits.

Especially starting with Web 2.0 and the online social network craze,  it almost seems we are racing against time. Everything is super fast, super connected and super “oh my God, get me out of here”.

Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, Youtube, and what not. All these networks were meant to keep us connected and get us closer, but on one end it seems that we all are getting so close we’re overlapping onto each other and invading all kinds of spaces that we can think of. And on the other hand our ‘online’ world instead of making the world smaller is becoming so huge that we don’t know who’s who and what’s where anymore.

Google just launched Google Buzz – I thought it was going to be Google Wave that was going go to be the next big thing. Another online social networking feature but this time added to Gmail. This means more networks, more feeds, more updates, more people that I don’t know adding me and trying to be my friend so that they can send me mass pokes, and walls and updates about things that I don’t care about.

Again, as I said, don’t get me wrong I love technology and I love the Internet, but it’s just getting too much. EVERYONE is on Twitter or Facebook to say the least. People want to get ‘connected’ to everyone it seems. How can people have 500 friends? How can they tweet so much? I bet if you send a friend request to a 100 most random people on Facebook, 80 of them will add you the very same day; the other 20 might add you in the following days or if not, then they don’t use their facebook account anymore.

Even I started an online social networking site called kesario.com few months back. It’s not working as well as I thought it would. I wanted to come up with solutions, and the more I spend time studying the trends the more I’m realizing that something drastic is about to happen on the Internet.

What made me think was this. Yesterday I launched the site wordsthatmatter.net for Valentine’s Day. It was a crazy idea that I had and thought it would be very interesting. Anyway, to market this site, I decided to use all these social networks. There were so many people who just kept accepting my friend requests, and following me on twitter. I opened an account specially for that site so no one really knows me, yet everyone kept adding me as a friend and following my tweets.

People on facebook and twitter are already using it to do mass marketing, and now Google Buzz. There are SO MANY of these now. Yes I know, even my site kesario.com is one of them. Sooner or later we are going to reach a threshold and the weaker ones will get eliminated (yes I know, my site is also amongst the weaker ones).

I was thinking we need a new dimension to all this – a network to manage all these networks, and there are a few out there already, but today I realized that that is only patching up the problem we are about to face. This Web 2.0 and social media/network bubble has started to reach its threshold and I predict that sooner or later it will burst.

I will write another post to say what I mean by this Web 2.0 bubble bursting because this article is getting too long and it becomes difficult with the constraint of time we have in this super fast world that we live in.

Categories
Business Marketting Technology Web

Collaborators of Success

Who are Customers? Have you heard of the saying, ‘Customers are always right”? Why does this saying have a huge importance in business? Well, customers are the people who pay for the products or services that you produce or provide. It is their money that ultimately fuels the growth of any business.

Customers and businesses are really two sides of the same coin. I even dare to take it one step further. Customers really are partners in business and collaborators of success.

Leaving out customers in important decisions of business is like tossing one wheel out of your 4×4 while going up the hill. The law of nature is that what does not grow gets eliminated. Businesses must grow and customers are becoming more and more important.

I am not a master businessman(not yet) and I have no degree in business. The closest I come is having 2 courses in economics and 1 in administrative studies and I am self employed. But what I am is an observer and I am observing that businesses are moving away from shareholder’s game to a stakeholders game. Although this shift has been happening for quite a long time now, there are few businesses that have taken this game to heart and these are the ones that truly seem to be pulling away from and ahead of the rest.

Ultimately everyone is playing their part. The workers are playing their part, the businessmen are playing theirs and customers are playing their part. The world is becoming smaller and smaller by the minute. A product or service is no longer made or provided by one party or even one part of the world. Collaboration is in a big part the soul of progress in our world today. What’s really making it happen is technology – the Internet to be very specific and to be even more specific – Web 2.0!

If the parties involved in providing products and services are working together, then why not take things a little further. Why not let the customers or the end users play a big role in  it as well. Because ultimately this work, whether it be some product or a service, is for the customers. Make customers your partners in business and collaborators of your success!