Open Technologist

Crowdfunding Definition – Music Industry Example

South African singer Verity Price found it hard to get a recording contract in South Africa. As featured on Carte Blanche, music producer Peter Lacey explained that the market for English speaking music in South Africa is less than 500 000 people and this includes international artists. A successful record in South Africa is considered selling 5 000 units. Besides releasing an album there is the added tasks of getting radio stations to play the music and getting retailers to sell the album....

MXit Blackberry

The MXit Blackberry application allows users to send messages at no cost over the BlackBerry Internet Service (BIS) network (Vodacom users). The application can be downloaded from the Blackberry app store or just point your Blackberry's browser to MXit's wap site www.mxit.com/wap. Some the features include: Changing of language within the app Mood and presence is saved and is not lost when log out The chat screen displays the time A template farewell message is can be sent to the...

Crowdsourcing Platforms

A crowdsourcing platform allows a organization to collaborate with a community to provide solutions to a project. When organizations decide on crowdsourcing a project they can either attempt to attract the crowd themselves, creating their own platform in the process, or make use of an existing crowdsourcing platform with an established community. The main difference is that an exisiting platorm will have an established community. Opting to create your own platform will require investment in...

Crowdsourcing Books

Below is a list of great books covering the topic of crowdsourcing. Click on the images for further info.   Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything          Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business       We-Think         Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations      The Art of Community: Building the New Age of Participation (Theory in Practice) ...

MXit PC – Download EVO Instant Messenger

MXit Lifestyle have released a new instant messenger client for the PC. This is in addition to its existing plugin for Pidgin. MXit explains thats it has been specifically designed for the Windows environment making it faster and more efficient. Some of the features include: Finding contacts in a search bar Saving of chats (already a feature in Pidgin) Emoticon support Drag and drop file sharing Facebook status integration multiMX support Audible alerts MXit for PC can be...

Facebook’s Crowdsourcing Translation Reward System

Last year Facebook turned to crowdsourcing to translate Facebook into other languages with great success. Latest statistics provided by Facebook show that over 300,000 people have since participated in the translation process making Facebook available in more than 70 languages. Facebook have now launched a system that rewards translators who will receive special icons when they reach certain milestones in the Translation application in order to highlight recognition. The awards are grouped...

Karen Armstrong’s Charter for Compassion

Last year I blogged about the Charter for Compassion, the TED prize wish of Karen Armstrong. The aim of the Charter for Compassion was to build a peaceful and congruent world by bringing together the voices of people from all religions and highlight that all faiths share the principle of compassion. An open call was made for people from different faiths to contribute to the charter. This open call and collaborative effort drew upon  thousands of people from over 100 countries in a six...

Twitter Blocked – Access Twitter from Work or School

If twitter is blocked from your work or school, there are various ways to circumnavigate the problem. However, clever system administrators always stay ahead and try and play catchup to these workarounds. The latest method I have found makes use of iGoogle and adding a widget called TwitterGadget. It even has integration for Gmail and works perfectly.  As long as the TwitterGadget website is not blocked this method should work. If all else fails try out psiphon which is an Internet...

Post URL to Twitter – Firefox Add-on

Having been a long time Firefox user (and sick of it crashing) I decided to try out Safari out of curiosity.  While I was not that impressed by Safari I was by a extension called safari140. This extension allows the user to post the current article been rendered by the Safari directly to twitter to share with your followers. After switching back to Firefox I could not find a plugin with this functionality. So I decided to write my own Firefox add-on. The add-on allows the user to post the...

Download MXit for Mac and PC – Adium and Pidgin

MXit users can now make use of its services on a Mac and PC. A vast majority of its users make use of the service via mobile phones. MXit Lifestyle have released Adium and Pidgin plugins and can be downloaded. Adium and Pidgin are both multi-platform instant messenger clients. This means that you can chat using other instant messenger services while using MXit at the same time. I have been using the Adium version for the past week and am happy to say it has been working great. The Adium...