Video In Paper Magazines? Wow

August 21, 2009 by Leave a Comment

While just idly surfing, I came across this:

The first-ever video advertisement will be published in a traditional paper magazine in September.

The video-in-print ads will appear in select copies of the US show business title Entertainment Weekly.

The slim-line screens – around the size of a mobile phone display – also have rechargeable batteries.

The chip technology used to store the video – described as similar to that used in singing greeting cards – is activated when the page is turned.

~BBC

Daily Prophet anyone? I cannot wait to get my hands on one of these magazines. What about you?

Filed Under: Miscellaneous

What If Shit Happened?

August 19, 2009 by 5 Comments

What if you lost your job today? No, really. What if you actually lost your job today? I am asking you. No, I’m begging you, to think for just a moment about this. What would you do? Are you going to go out and look for another job at another similar company? I bet you’re smart enough to have an back-up plan. Alas, most people would be completely lost if they lost their jobs today.

Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong – Murphy’s law.

I am always inspired when I read “Why We’re Broke and How To Fix It” by Naomi Dunford. In that article, she describes a small town in Ontario, Canada where the area’s largest employer closed down one day.

Here’s what Naomi says, “Recently, in a small town in Ontario, the area’s largest employer closed its doors. Most of the town, trained only in the art and science of making canned soup, found themselves out of work. A few thousand soup makers live in a town where nobody wants to pay them to make soup. Now all of them are going to try to find a way to apply their skill sets to other employers in the area. The competition is fierce, and their mortgages are on the line. Except there are no other major employers in the area.”

Can you imagine that? What would you do if you woke up one morning to find that not only had you lost your job, but your whole industry and area of specialisation disappeared overnight? I know, I know..you live in a big town and you’re trained in X or Y which is always in demand. Blah.

How much time do you spend worrying about your immediate boss’ job security? Do you invest a lot of time worrying about his happiness and fulfillment at work? Well, guess what? He spends the same exact amount of time worrying about you, your happiness and your job security. This is hard to swallow for many people – we grew up dreaming of ‘dream’ jobs and long careers. I’m sorry but the world changed.

Seth Godin puts it best, “As long as you work for someone else, you have no job security. As long as your company is public, your future is in the hands of others – people who are likely not as smart as you are. And as long as you follow the instructions of others, you won’t be fulfilling your destiny or really, truly making a difference in the way people live and work.”

Stop doing something that is risky, crazy, and that you don’t understand (your current job is all three). Stop working for The Man and start building something that people will remember.

Filed Under: Make Money Tagged With:

Like Chapaa’s New Haircut

August 18, 2009 by 6 Comments

The Like Chapaa site has today, just now, undergone a design overhaul – everything is spanking new. Why?

I loved the previous design – it was just beautiful! Sadly, though, one too many readers complained that the site was a tad bit too slow. So what did we do? We love you, readers, so much that we went ahead and did the site over. Now things should load faster for everyone.

We hope you like it, it is for you.

Filed Under: Miscellaneous

You are not a Zombie. Are you?

August 16, 2009 by 2 Comments

Last year, I launched a little website called Kikulacho. Goodness, I was in love with this site – I wanted to do everything just right with it. I read all the books on successful websites and learnt all the tricks that the “gurus” out there had published. I had done my homework and I was determined to make the site work. So on a cold October morning, I launched my baby and got ready to watch it grow into an absolute authority of a site.

I was doing everything that I was supposed to do so it was a big shock to learn that I was not getting the success that all the books and gurus had promised. What was I doing wrong? Nothing. Yet, a few months later I abandoned the project for other things. It was really really painful to let my baby die and I still haven’t gotten over it ( :p ). I think about Kikulacho now and then. What went wrong? I was being a zombie.

Many times, we do the same things everyone else does and expect to find success doing them. In fact, we expect to do be more successful than those other people.

How many people do you know who play it “safe”? After high school, they go to college and take a safe, easy college that lots of other people take too. Afterwards, they strive to find a nice job somewhere and strive to blend in to the company’s culture. They do what they’re told and try maintain a low profile – it feels safe. They just want to keep their jobs and get that regular salary. Month after month. Year after year.

Admittedly, not all people lack ambition. Some people start out with these BIG ideas and amazing energy but life knocks all that out of them, slowly. StartupKenya puts it best in this story of law school:

“You see when you join law school, you feel like you are on top of the world. Heck, you must be one of the brightest minds in the land to get admitted, and law is usually chosen by pretty ambitious students. It is not uncommon to find 99% of the 1st year law school class with dreams of grandeur. Speaker of the National Assembly, Special-Rapporteur at the UN, President of the Republic, Chief Justice, Attorney General, Celebrated Trial Lawyer. The list is endless and only limited by the effort taken to actually establish the seniority of the position. As the semester progresses and you ferociously consume case law, volumes of law books, and professors’ lectures, your ambitions are even more amplified. You gauge your progress by the number of questions you ask, and how many cases you can remember, sometimes how many House of Lords quotes you can recite verbatim.

However by the time your first year results are in, and for the first time in your life you get a C or worse, you realize that your goals might be a tad bit ambitious. Instead of the best lawyer in the world, you mentally settle for best lawyer in Kenya. A few more grades and your expectations of achievement drop to best lawyer in your firm. The curve which had only been going up now starts leveling off. By mid of second year after a string of horrifyingly bad grades you are looking at being best lawyer in your office… “

Success is difficult to achieve. How do you do it?

Since you were in class 2, schools and society have been teaching you to be just another cog in the machine that is out economy; to do what you are told, to stand in straight lines; to get the work done. We have been trained to be cogs in a vast system, workers in a finely tuned factory. Just look at our robot-making 844 system, or our universities. Universities are supposed to be places of research & innovation but ours are just an extension of high school.

The problem is that someone changed the rules and being a cog is no longer an option. It is essentially impossible to be successful by doing something that is described and measured by someone else.

Kikulacho did not succeed because I was trying to do it exactly how people elsewhere had done their own sites. The road to success is different for every one. Do your own thing; be different; make your own rules.

Photo by Eric Ingrum.

Filed Under: Miscellaneous Tagged With:

Here is a Method That is Helping Job-Seekers to Get Jobs

August 14, 2009 by 2 Comments

When looking for work online or elsewhere, it is sometimes very difficult to demonstrate what you can do to potential employers. You don’t really have anything tangible to sell and convincing clients to pay can be hard – they may even resort to asking you to do the work and then “if” it is good they will pay you. How can you change this? Use a portfolio. A portfolio is key in making potential employers feel secure and confident about you.

The use of portfolios is actually an old practice – for years artists, designers, journalists, teachers etc have used portfolios while job hunting. Only recently has this practice caught on with every other job hunter.

What is a portfolio? “It is a job-hunting tool that you develop that gives employers a complete picture of who you are – your experience, your education, your accomplishments, your skill sets – and what you have the potential to become – much more than just a cover letter and CV/resume can provide. You can use your career portfolio in job interviews to showcase a point, to illustrate the depth of your skills and experience, to show off previous work and accomplishments, or to use as a tool to get a second interview.” – QuintCareers

Basically, a portfolio goes beyond a CV/Resume in giving out information about you to potential employers. Here are some things that are usually included in a good portfolio.

All you need to know about using portfolios.

When looking for jobs online, it is crucial to have an online portfolio – someone where you can point potential clients to to showcase your stuff. Think about it. Your potential client is probably on the other side of the world and knows nothing about you or your skill set. You need to introduce him to you and then show off your great qualities. A portfolio does just that! The people over at Nickel Pro have been working online a long time – they know what works and what doesn’t. And they have an offer where they set up portfolios on the cheap.

Filed Under: Make Money, Online Jobs Tagged With:

Web Squared – web 2.0 all grown up

August 13, 2009 by Leave a Comment

Web 2.0 has been all the rage for a number of years now. Coined by O’Reilly media almost six years ago, web 2.0 is a philosophy describing what works optimally on the internet. The key principle of web 2.0 is collective intelligence: the fact that on the internet, you cannot ignore the users and have to respect them as equals when creating websites. web 2.0 thinking is what largely led to a death of all those ugly yellow pop-ups, pop-unders and other attention grabbers. Web 2.0 sites are easy on the eyes and designed to be very usable.

Well, guess what? Web 2.0 evolved into web squared. Basically, web squared is the rise of REAL. What do I mean?

  1. Sites like twitter, friendfeed and even facebook, to some extent, introduce a real time aspect to the internet. ou don’t have to wait until it is available on Google – you can get news on twitter as it happens. The real-time internet is here, or almost here.
  2. The internet of things. Nowadays, all sorts of devices are connected to and interact with the internet. From RFID tags to take wine cellars online to security lights that work off the internet to internet fridges – you name it, it is connected to the internet. You no longer interact with just people on the internet – there are ‘things’ too. The real world meets the internet.

What does this mean for you and I? There is a shift towards real time, and the internet of things. If you are a developer, entrepreneur, inventor, marketer, etc, you should be paying attention.

Filed Under: Miscellaneous Tagged With: ,

Jobs za Monday. Get yours now!

August 10, 2009 by 1 Comment

More Freelance Jobs

Write about Kenyan music – KenTunes, the premier Kenyan only music downloads store, is seeking to recruit a blogger for our online newsletter. We are seeking an experienced writer/blogger with great writing skills, an outgoing personality, sound judgment, professional demeanor and a good understanding of the Kenyan music industry.

Skilled travel writer required – 300 words per day.

Funny/informative writers needed – Bloggers Needed! Content Creation for New Site. We are a web start-up, focused on user-generated content, with elements of social networking and a whole lot of cutting-edge technology. Now that we are an open, public, site we need to have a daily roster of compelling content so we can market our new site and show people the true breadth of what it can do.

Freelance illustrator for flash games – Hi there.I’m the owner of www.poshdressup.com and I’m looking for a graphic designer to help me create dressup games and girl games in general.

Blogger needed – Jobacle.com, a popular career advice blog and podcast, seeks fresh bloggers who can work autonomously. We’re all for collaboration, but we need a self-starter who can be assigned a project or just as easily come up with their own and then write!

Looking for OLPC writers – If you have regular Internet access, fancy yourself a writer, or at least a blogger, and are familiar with the OLPC project, its history, promise, and the passionate emotion it brings out in people, please email a writing sample on an OLPC topic of your choice. Bonus points for a text file with content HTML coded in the OLPC News format for immediate publication via MovableType.

Web development and design – Nurses World Publications (NWP) is seeking professional end-to-end services for the design, engineering and development of an enterprise level, blended-model website utilizing the full complement of Web 2.0 technology. This new website is an outgrowth of Nurses World Magazine, a four-color glossy publication in circulation throughout California from 2003 to 2008.

Write about your perfect day – I am writing a book. It is a book with stories of about 50 peoples “Perfect Day”. Please submit a story with as much detail as possible about what your “Perfect Day” would look like. If it includes yachts and boats, then by all means write it. If you perfect day is your wedding day, then write it. Tell me what it looks like, smells like, and tastes like. Really let me feel the energy of what that day means to you. You could use your imagination or tell me about a day that already happened in your life. You do not have to be a writer, so tell all of your friends and family to submit their “Perfect Day” also. You just have to be passionate about what you are writing!

Freelance designers – I’m looking to hire WordPress designers who can deliver quality WordPress designs for Personal Blogs with standard SMO (Social Media Optimization) features, twitter widget, flickr widget and threaded comments.

Professional writers – We are looking for individuals / writers (non-commercial services) that have strong creative thinking and writing skills. The individual will be responsible for writing on any given topics that we give them or they will be required to research various topics on any given subject. Most of the sites we work with / own are sites in the finance market we are looking for someone with strong insurance related background experience or at least someone that can catch on very fast. If you are an excellent writer and strong creative thinker then this should not be a problem for you what so ever.

Freelance logo designer – I have just a budget of $50 for a logo design for an online forum. If you do well on this first one I’ll be more than happy to give you a second and third one as well. I’m looking for a logo designer who has an eye for what looks good in a logo.

Freelance writers – Looking for articles of 250 to 500 words in length on subjects related to how homeowners can save money, cut costs and reduce expenses around the house, in their day to day expenses (e.g. shopping, banking, paying for residential services, car related, etc.) The target audience is the suburban homeonwer/apartment dweller. Articles must have money-saving theme and be helpful, informative and current. A list of topic areas is available upon request.

Finally, Some Hot Freelance Jobs


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Filed Under: Online Jobs Tagged With: , , ,