MobileActive08, a conference about using mobile technology for social action, was held this week in Johannesburg, South Africa. The conference was a 3 day event and covered topics such as: mobile internet usage by low income youth, how mobile advancements are creating new opportunities for news reporting, and ideas around using mobile technology to assist the informal sector and micro enterprises.
In this post I highlight some of the presentations, workshops and outcomes from MobileActive08.
Effective user adoption is the absolute best predictor of enterprise software success. That was one of the key takeaways for me from the OpenAir User Conference this week.
According to a study done by the Sand Hill Group and Neochange, the most critical factor (70% listed it as number 1) for software success and return-on-investment is effective user adoption.
Early this summer we wrote a post titled Why Online Noise is Good For You. It was all about the personal and professional benefits of spending time consuming unfiltered information from the blizzard of sources proliferating daily on the internet. It was a fun post and was responded to with thought provoking replies by readers in the comments section.
We decided to follow up on and reprint that post here on a late Friday afternoon. We're sure many of readers either didn't see it at the time or hadn't yet discovered ReadWriteWeb. Not everyone who did read it agreed with our conclusions, so after the post below we've added some of our favorite pro and con comments from the original, plus a cool personal story from a member of the RWW community. What do you think? Does online noise play a meaningful role in your life?
The Social Media Classroom (SMC) is a new project started by Howard Rheingold which offers an open-source Drupal-based web service to teachers and students for the purpose of introducing social media into the classroom. The service includes tools like forums, blogs, wikis, chat, social bookmarking, RSS, microblogging, widgets, video conferencing, and more. The SMC is more than just a collection of new media tools repurposed for educational use, though. The end goal of the service is to move education away from being a unidirectional delivery of knowledge to become a more collaborative learning process.
According to the latest data from Compete, consumers are slowly warming up to the idea of mobile banking, but this growth is slowed by the fact that most users, even though they already use online tools to interact with their bank, never use their mobile devices to access the Internet. 72% of those who bank online never access the Internet from their mobile devices and only 8% do so more than 20 times per month. Because of this, it it no surprise that only 5% of online bankers use a mobile device to check their bank accounts.
Live video streaming while on the go has always been the domain of relatively high-end smartphones like the Nokia N95. Starting today, however, Qik is also opening up its service to a large number of popular mass market phones from Nokia and Sony, making it one of the first live video streaming service to do so. The Java ME-based application is now available for download from Qik and the company is also enlisting the help of its users for a private alpha test of a few more Nokia phones as well.
For years we've been hearing about the problem of information overload. The situation has become so bad that it's now costing businesses $650 billion per year in wasted productivity, according to a study from Basex released earlier this year. To date, we've seen only a handful of real solutions address this issue although none have been what we would call a "killer app." But now we've come across a new tool we want to try: Gist, a web app for organizing your inbox data. We have to admit this one looks intriguing. But will it do the job?
Amiad Solomon, CEO of Peer39, kicked off the Web 3.0 Conference & Expo in Santa Clara, CA on Thursday with a keynote discussing the Semantic Web and how it relates to advertising. He told the audience that this is one of the key business opportunities in the Web 3.0 era. "I believe the simplest definition of Web 3.0 is the monetization and commercialization of Web 2.0," he said.
To fully appreciate how Web 3.0 can offer better advertising solutions, Solomon suggested that we start by analyzing the Web's transformations since Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau wrote the official proposal for the World Wide Web in 1990.
As more and more Web users gain access to broadband connections, the ability to consume high-definition video becomes an option for more people. But where are they going to access that content?
If a loyal user base - and USA Today - are to be believed, few user-generated video sites compare with Vimeo, a small but well-loved online video site with some of the best HD capabilities around. And after today, Vimeo is highly likely to be serving up more of that HD content, thanks to the release of Vimeo Plus.
Parlez-vous français? No neither do I, apart from the smattering of French I learnt at the beginning of high school. But to cater to our friends in Europe, we've just opened a French language version of ReadWriteWeb. The idea was suggested by Romain Péchard, who approached us about translating our articles into French and also writing unique content about the Europe web scene. Romain and his team have basically taken the ball and rolled with it (prendre le ballon et a roulé avec lui), designing and organizing the new site.
RWW France will be covering the Web 2.0 Expo Berlin 2008 next week and they have tickets to give away if you're one of our European readers.
