Play Farmville on Facebook to enhance your business management skills
I have been on Facebook for a long time and have been an active social networker. One of the best ways to network is to get involved into playing games on the social networking sites. Being in strategic role I tend to indulge myself strategy games. I generally like games developed by Zynga as they specialize in creating games on social networking sites. FarmVille is yet another “strategic” game where players can manager virtual farm by planting, growing and harvesting virtual crops.
Since its launch in June 2009, FarmVille has become the most popular game application on Facebook with 56.1 million active users in October 2009. Source Wikipedia.
Why this game is so famous:
- Everyone can relate to farming
- Everyone has basic knowledge about agriculture
- It’s not like normal role play gaming that gets over at that instant
- Game can be played over period of time
- Creates an environment of healthy competition
Graduates searching for a job in the current market scenario
The job market is tough and it’s even tougher for fresh graduates to get suitable jobs in the current market. Normally this leads to frustration and depression and most of the students blame it on recession and how bad their luck is.
However there are few students like David Rowe of Cambridge. A law student who got tired of send resumes to companies and searching for jobs via job boards decided to innovate. David Rowe’s idea was to wear a suit and hang a sandwich board around his neck to market himself hoping that someone will notice his talent and give him a job.
University graduate David Rowe walks in London. Photo: REUTERS
“David Rowe, who has built up £20,000 worth of debts since leaving university, said he had sent out hundreds of CVs and offered to work for free but could not find a job.
The 24-year-old history graduate decided he would pound the streets round the Fleet Street area past law firms and investment-banks in a suit with the sandwich board round his neck”. Source Telegraph.co.uk
Lessons that one must learn from David’s innovative attempt
- Accept that the job market is though
- Nothing is going to happen overnight
- Stop cribbing and start doing
- Don’t just get frustrated and depressed with the lack of calls from employers; find innovative ways to approach your target market.
- Think of yourself as a product and identify your target market and find multiple ways to reach your audience
- Prepare yourself very well – you will get one shot make the most of it.
- Have patience
- Cheer for the fact that recession is about to end and very soon things will be back to normal
The moral of the story is that when things are not going the right way, it’s time to be proactive and be prepared to march forward with persistence.
A must read for job seekers in current economy
I came across a useful post which gives a list of must read presentations for a job seeker. Applicant.com has compiled a list of 7 presentations from SlideShare.
The first thing to hit during recession was hiring and recruitment and the first thing will pick up would be the same. Economy is already showing signs of recovery and that can be seen in the news that companies across the globe have started hiring or are at least positive to recruit anytime soon. The timing of this post seems to be just perfect and I would like to share this useful piece of information with all job seekers and in as many ways as possible. This is a must read for people seeking jobs in the current market.
1. Effective job interviewing from both sides of the desk by Andy Lester
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Read the rest of this entry »
Now money can buy friends, followers, connections, fans on social media sites
I always thought Money can help you buy materialistic things but certainly not family and friends. Today I came 
across a company that helps you do just that and I was really amazed to learn that now you can buy friends. With the advent of social media and everyone is trying to establish their brand online and wants to be present across social media sites and the first notion is to get maximum followers, friends, connections, whatever you want to call it. The base idea to generate lot of contacts which supposedly are interested in your products or services and you can use these contacts to create a marketing exercise around this data. Since everyone is feeling the heat and really don’t have a success formula to create a database (so called fans and followers) of people across social media sites there comes this company uSocial who wants to capitalize on this need and make their millions ;-)
Services offered by uSocial
Regular services
- Front page services – basically getting on first page of dig, yahoo buzz and other social media bookmarking sites
- Press release distribution – the same old thing
Interesting Services
Now these are the services where money can buy you friends and followers
- Facebook marketing service
- Buy Facebook friends – how to increase Facebook friends
- Buy Facebook fans – how to increase Facebook fans
Recruitment post recession – Hiring upswing round the corner, are you prepared?
The buzz across the world is that the recession is coming to an end and the worst is probably over. You will see this sentiment being reflected amongst most of the people you talk to. All the major news items across the globe carry 
headlines like “the worst is over” and testimony to this fact is a recent article by MSNBC stated that
“government said the nation’s unemployment rate unexpectedly fell in July for the first time in 15 months and that employers cut fewer jobs“
The unemployment rate has dropped in US for the first time. The reason I am quoting the US market as this is where it all started and the recovery will start from here as well.
The important question is that are you as a person involved in recruitment learnt your lessons from the recession? Each one of us faced several recruitment related challenges during the recession life cycle and since it hit us without any notice we had no option but to be reactive. Most of us thought the best was to beat recession was to cut cost and there are few who took proactive actions and identified innovative ways to tackle the recession period.
I am writing this to urge everyone to look back at what has happened in the last 6 to 8 months and formulate a recruitment strategy so that you are well prepared for the hiring upswing.
Recruitment Scenario during recession
Companies
- Slow down in business lead to slow down and in certain cases freeze on recruitments
- Cost cutting led to loss of jobs for millions of people worldwide
- Delay in hiring due to uncertainty in the market.
- Restructuring of various departments to stay competitive
- Forced Mergers and acquisition led to loss of jobs
- Companies recruiting during recession wanted the best resource at the lowest salary package
Recruitment agencies
- Loss of contracts / contracts not extended – leading to fewer clients
- Lack of requirements led to job salary cuts and job cuts
- No possibility of fresh engagement
- Rising bench cost of companies in temp and contract staffing
- Agencies with higher dependence on a particular sector faced were not able to spread the risk
Do you have a social media policy for your organization
I am a firm believer of using social media to aid organizational productivity and I always advocate and encourage use of various social media applications like blogs, networking sites, wiki’s within my organization. Past couple of months I have been analyzing time spent by my employees on these social networking sites and measuring its effectiveness against increase in productivity or against generating / facilitating business. The analysis was based on social media and its direct impact on productivity. Though the over results are positive but there were some areas of concerns that I would like to highlight in this article. My analysis pointed out that in certain cases there was a high percentage of unproductive time spent on these sites which lead to loss in productivity. I am not sure if there should be a clear cut policy that restricts the usage of social media sites or should one adopt an evolutionary process by making the employees realize the good and bad of it and treat it accordingly. My analysis was I have conducted
Areas of concern:
- Excessive time spent networking sites: leads to loss of focus and loss of time. These activities include chatting with friends, updating social profiles of sites like Facebook , MySpace and other such sites and not really focusing on work realted interactions.
- High usage of bandwidth: people upload pictures, presentations, videos purely for purpose to add fun element in their social media adventure which leads to high usage of bandwidth and time.
- Public image of the company: people will have to be very careful about what they say about your company, the projects that they work on and the team that they are involved in as this can really damage your reputation. This is the most important as the internet world consists of your potential clients and employees
- Viral effect: once someone gets a message/ pictures they keep involving the rest of the employees and the viral keeps on viraling leading to again loss of time
twitcam and camtweet to offer live video streaming on twitter
twitcam – developed by Livestream and camtweet – developed by Justin.TV are utilities where anyone using their twitter login details can start streaming live to its followers, create live chat rooms and archive each streaming event. 
This is not a ground breaking technological neither it’s an innovative concept. To me it’s smart thinking and right timing on part of both companies to take advantage of their expertise and applying to the critical mass of twitter. There is virtually no difference between twitcam and camtweet.
Twitter is certainly one of the most successful social media concepts to hit the web recently and is growing exponentially. The more I hear about twitter’s success the more I am made to believe that micro blogging platforms will soon take over from the current main stream communication avenues like emails and blogs. There are a lot of smart people out there who have jumped on the early innovators band wagon and developed some really cool applications around twitter and hopefully with that would have developed a business model around it as well. The idea of developing applications and concepts around twitter is to target real time conversations and thereby making highly effective marketing campaigns.
There are many applications/utilities built around twitter and are doing reasonably well. The reason twitcam and camtweet needs a special mention is because I feel they surely are a game changer. Services like these are likely to take tweeting to a whole new level both at personal as well as corporate marketing and relationship building exercise.
How to install IntenseDebate on wordpress 2.7.1
IntenseDebate – super charge your commenting system
I installed IntenseDebate to offer highly interactive commenting system to the readers of GigaThoughts. As always it 
started with a lot of research, which led to final two competitors to choose from – IntenseDebate and Disqus. After testing both commenting system on local machine for a week, I finally chose IntenseDebate primarily because it’s an Automatic company and for those who are not aware they are the same guys behind wordpress and more so IntenseDebate offers all the features that are offered by Disqus. I have been using it since a week on the live site and I am really thrilled with interactivity it can offer to the readers. I would recommend using IntenseDebate to everyone who wishes to offer a better user experience to their readers.
Errors, issues, problems and fixes while installing IntenseDebate on Wordpress 2.7.1
Like a lot of people who tried installing IntenseDebate I was faced with several issues and it wasn’t a smooth installation process. But persistence and the urge to offer better usability to the readers i was able to find solutions of each one and hence I wish to share my experience so that other people can benefit from it and I am sure it can help ease their installation issues.
Error 1: “Login failed. Please check your credentials and try again” Login Failure while accessing ID via wordpress admin once the plugin is activated. This is the first error which most people would face and it blocks the further installation and synching process.
Solution 1:
- First try and reset the plugin by downloading the cleared.php and do the following:
Please use these instructions:
1. Uninstall and remove the IntenseDebate plugin
2. Install, activate the clearID.php plugin
3. Uninstall it.
4. Install the latest version of the plugin and activate it. - Step 2 is to change your username and password on the ID website and try installing the plugin again and try again. Make sure your password does not contain any special character like #$% as that will not work
- Step 3 is to check missing Blog Title, while accepting the username and password ID check if the blog has a valid blog title if not it will reject the request. So if you don’t have a title you need to have one but this will lead to the text appearing above your logo in the header. You need to reduce the font size in the theme CSS to 0 so for the application the title will still be there but it not be visible on your site.
RBI makes it mandatory for banks to provide additional authentication for online shopping
According to a new ruling, the Reserve bank of India -RBI has made it mandatory for all banks issuing credit and debit cards to provide additional authentication information over and above what is visible on the card. To prevent fraud and to make online shopping safer, the RBI has made it mandatory, from 1st August onwards, for all online 
transactions to have increased security via registering each and every card with its respective merchant. This means that every time you make an online transaction you will have to enter this additional password given by the merchant. This is commonly known as VBV – Verified by Visa or MSC – MasterCard SecureCode
I bank with HDFC and I can vouch that they already have certain systems like NetSafe which generates a code which can be used only one time, along with that there is virtual keyboard that enhances the security if you are using a public computer. I am sure other major Indian private sector banks Like ICICI and Kotak would also have such systems in place. This new ruling will add an entirely new dimension to online security and as per the directive issued by the RBI on February 18, also mandates a system of online alerts to the cardholder for all ‘card not present’ transactions that exceed Rs 5,000. The circular adds that banks would be penalised for non-adherence to the directive under the Payment and Settlement Systems Act 2007.
How will VBV /MSC work:
Once your card is activated with the Verified by Visa / Master Secure service, your card number will be recognized whenever you make an electronic payment. After you provide your credit card details online, you will be redirected to your issuer website and then required to specify your Verified by Visa / Master Secure authentication details. Your identity will be verified, and the transaction will be completed. Based on the authentication provided by your issuer, the transaction will be processed & you will get a confirmation. View the demo of how VBV/MSC work
How can you get VBV or MSC password:
- HDFC Bank
- ICICI Bank
- Citibank
- HSBC Bank
- Standard Chartered
- Deutsche Bank
- State Bank of India
- Axis Bank
- ABN Amro
With successful implementation of this enhanced security system people can breathe easy while swiping their credit cards at various establishments like restaurants, petrol pumps and areas like grocery stores without any fear as credit number, expiry date and CVV number will not be enough to make fraudulent transactions online.
Nandan Nilekani and Congress initiate unique identification card project
On 26th June 2009 times of India carried the headlines “Infy boss to join the government as a cabinet minister.” I am proud of Nandan Nilekani for taking a though call (quitting Infosys) and Congress government 
making him cabinet minister. Such events are very rare in the Indian context as we don’t see many corporate leaders leave their ivory tower and get into a government job to help shape the future of India. In this case the government has taken the lead and have shown their willingness to embrace the professionalism and expertise brought in by the corporate leader thereby creating an opportunity to co-exist and work towards a better tomorrow. Successful execution of this project will mean more and more corporate leader will be able to work closely with the government and act as a change agent.
The UIC project
Unique Identification Card project will ensure that every Indian will have a unique smart card which will act as their identification proof. This is a highly ambitious Rs 150000 Cr project which will include details like Name, sex, address, marital status, photo, identification mark and finger biometrics of every Indian. More details on unique identification project.
The national ID card project (popularly called UID project) is expected to provide an impetus to the domestic demand for IT products and solutions. A billion smart cards for a billion population means a multi-billion dollar business opportunity for domestic IT companies. Some estimates suggest that the project will create at least 100,000 additional jobs in the country in the next three years. The government had earmarked Rs 100 crore in the interim budget to kick start the UID project. The entire ID card project is estimated to be in the range of around Rs 1.5 lakh crore, with the first phase – which will cover ultra urban, urban, and semi-urban populations – offering an Rs 6,500 crore business opportunity.
According to the plan, govt proposes to issue a unique identification number to all citizens by 2011. The Unique Identification Authority of India shall own and operate the unique identification number database and also look after its updation and maintenance on an ongoing basis. In the beginning, the UID number will be assigned based on the National Population Register or electoral rolls. Photographs and biometric data will be added to make the identification foolproof. (Source Indiatimes.com)
The Scheme was introduced in early part of 2003 but the government has been delaying it all this while and i am glad and confident that this time around the project would be complete on time. Can’t wait to get my smart card.
== Update == 27th August 2009
E-birth certificates likely with Nilekani’s help
A birth certificate at the click of a mouse? It’s quite likely. The health ministry has started brainstorming with Nandan Nilekani -
the man tasked with India’s unique identification project – to produce e-health cards and birth certificates for newborns. Source Economic Times
