Anyone who has been on FaceBook for a while will know that one of the most successful app-game onthe giant social networking site has been Farmville. But as popular as Farmville has been, the reality today is that many people hardly know where the food they eat comes from.

This is especially so when you consider the growing transition from majority rural nations to majorityurban. The concept of how and where the food was grown and processed before it ended up on storeshelves seems far removed for the typical urban dweller. This knowledge gap and distant reality does not serve the best interests of the future of humanity as faras food security and eco-sustainable agriculture is concerned. The UK’s single largest farm land owner-administrator, the National Trust, has embarked on an experiment that seeks to change all that that.

Dubbed My-Farm.org.uk, it is an online project that seeks to enlighten people about farming and food production via a participatory approach that incorporates a real farm. Participants are engaged in all key decisions around the farm in Cambridgeshire, on Wimpole estate which is administered by UK’s NationalTrust.

At the core of each My-Farm.org.uk decision is the monthly voting. At the beginning of each month, theMy-Farm.org.uk community is asked a series of questions regarding the farm such as which crops toplant or what type of animals to keep. The questions are originated by a full time farm manager. There is also a community manager whoserves as the eyes and the ears of the participants on site. The community manager uses webcams, blogposts, photos and videos to keep users informed about the goings on.

A team of experts are on hand to provide project participants with any additional information they need to make their voting decision. The vote is then conducted and the winning option implemented on thefarm. The analysis and discussion before and after the voting is a powerful way of keeping participants fully engaged in the process. National Trust is targeting 10,000 participants for the Wimpole farm. If more people request to join beyond this number, National Trust will take that as a sign of the project’s viability and will create a new farm from the 250,000 hectares in the UK that are under its custody.

Each participant on My-Farm.org.uk is required to pay a 30 sterling pound subscription fee. All the income earned from the subscription fees is used in the project to finance staff costs and cover the expenses that must be incurred if the farm is to continue running. And it is on the number of subscriptions that the My-Farm.org.uk project will succeed or fail. Unless theproject can attract at least 6,500 subscriptions, the money raised will not be adequate to keep the farm running and will force National Trust to refund all subscribers.

Related articles

• FarmVille Comes to Life! Real Farm in UK Run By Internet Vote (video) (singularityhub.com)
• MyFarm takes “cow clicking” into the real world (gamification.co)
• FarmVille Comes to Life as MyFarm (weinterrupt.com)
• “National Trust’s MyFarm – Farmville Goes Real” and related posts (geeknewscentral.com)
• FarmVille Inspires Real Life Farming Experiment (mashable.com)

For students preparing to join college and that have received their admission letters, the initial excitement is usually tinged with a fear of the unknown. Having already established a circle of friends in high school, they will in many respects have to make new acquaintances in college.

The discovery process will be a mixture of successes and disappointments before they eventually find people they can relate to. What if students could start to connect with each other way before they join the institution?

Thanks to the internet, that is not just a possibility but a reality. Inigral’s Schools Facebook App enables educational institutions to have a private network that facilitates the development of acquaintances and interaction between students.

For a student, joining School Apps starts after they receive confirmation on their admission. They will get an email from School Apps to join the college’s private and branded network. This invitation is strictly limited to admitted students. Since many people will not always act on the first such email, School Apps will send regular reminders to ensure as many students join the network as possible.

Students that join the network are required to complete a number of basic steps providing some information about themselves that will assist them better fit into the community and attract like-minded members. Of the information they provide, none is more important than their interests as this is what will attract people that like what they like.

Schools App – The Student Perspective from Inigral Inc. on Vimeo.

What do schools and colleges stand to gain from School Apps? First, colleges that use School Apps have shown a much higher percentage (as much as 94%) of transitions from admission to actual enrolment than the average. Second, colleges that use School Apps have on average seen 3 times more members than their own Facebook Groups or Fan pages.

Even though the Schools App primarily targets future students (i.e. have been admitted but are waiting for the opening date) there is no restriction on current students continuing to use the app to interact and make new friends. With 3 of the 5 major reasons students drop out of school being social, School Apps can keep existing students continuously engaged and still be the focal point for the establishment of new friendships on large college campuses.

Any internet business that runs for 3 years can in many ways be considered successful. School Apps celebrates its 3rd year in August 2011. Already, School Apps has graduated into Facebook’s exclusive 50-strong club of app developers known as the Preferred Developer Program. Members of the Preferred Developer Program have privileged access to Facebook’s management and engineering teams and so have an inside view of upcoming changes.

While School Apps definitely presents something more than Facebook Groups and Fan pages, Inigral’s greatest challenge will continue to be convincing more schools of this unique value proposition.

Related articles

• Social Media Strategery (steveradick.com)
• New Facebook App Tells College Applicants What Their Chances Are (textually.org)
• Facebook and College Admissions (q-ontech.blogspot.com)
• What Do Selective Colleges Look for in an Applicant? (education.com)
• “Facebook Class” Made Stanford Students Millionaires (good.is)

The active involvement of information technology in education has mainly focused on the development of digital books (called eBooks) and the creation of internet based learning portals (known as e-learning platforms). Quest2Learn believes there is a lot more that technology can do in improving the learning environment.

And so at its core, Quest2learn is a learning model that is built around the framework used on modern gaming environments. The current curriculum focuses on students in the 6th to the 12th grade.

The rationale for the Quest2learn model is simple. Games by their very nature are based on predefined rules that players must progressively master in order to advance ever further into the game. Players in a game take on an identity that they then use to make strategic decisions, solve complicated problems, seek out knowledge, factor the views of other players and obtain regular feedback.

Quest2learn mirrors these gaming building blocks by creating an environment for students to ‘assume’ the identities and character of mathematicians, explorers, writers, historians and evolutionary biologists. The students do this as they move through a challenge-based and dynamic curriculum.

That said, Quest2learn is quick to emphasize that it is not a learning institution where the curriculum is composed of commercial computer games. Rather, the school uses the principles of gaming to create an in depth, engaging learning platform that is game like.

The use of games as well as other forms of digital media resonates with 21st century lifestyle where systems are at the core of almost all day to day processes. Familiarising students with the nature, complexity and benefits of systems better prepares them to ‘plug in’ when the venture into the real world.

Quest2learn does not lose sight of one of the primary goals of learning – academic excellence. Each student has clearly defined, realistic but ambitious goals and expectations they are expected to aim for and live by. There is an apprenticeship and intern model to create a smooth transition to college and career opportunities. From the 8th grade, students begin to engage and interact with subject matter experts.

There is no doubt that the role technology plays in the classroom will only increase with the coming years. Quest2learn has chosen a unique and well thought out approach that uses techniques that today’s children will find familiar and comfortable thanks to the influence of video games.

As with any teaching technique, the system can only be truly judged based on the performance and integration of the students in the real world. This ‘unknown’ is one of the biggest obstacles Quest2learn must overcome. Another challenge for this teaching model will be the difficulty in convincing parents that the curriculum is really not game-centred but game-principled.

But even if parents get clarity on the Quest2learn program, the fear of their children being predisposed to gaming addiction (as irrational as that may be) may serve to keep some away from this curriculum for now.

Silk is a dutch Start up who won the Start up Rally organised by the Next Web. Like many apps out there their aim is to make us more efficient and more productive than we are with our current tools. Every single bit of information can be found on the web but it often happens that it’s not in the format we would like it to be, or simply it would require a long process to sort and analyse the Raw Data.

Silk aims to help us find content quicker in a ready to use format and while enabling us to create richer content. They provide a few features that are linked to semantic technology.

the first feature is related to search. Silk manages to gather content from many webpages in order to provide concise answers in different format. The exemple they illustrate is with great websites like Wikipedia or CrunchBase where you can find a lot a valuable information but if you had to had more complexe question or questions missing some key information it will be difficult to quickly end up with the correct result.

For exemple if you want to search the average age of Start-up Founders in between 2000-2010 you would have to go through hundreds of pages writing down the data in excel…a nightmare. What silk does is to understand complexe question with more than one variable in order to be able to index a website like CrunchBase and provide you with tidy graphs and statistics that are ready to use in seconds.

The second feature is content tagging, which we know is very valuable for search engine optimisation but equally important for the readers experience. While writing your document Silk will can the content using complexe semantic technology enabling you to tag relevant information on the fly, this information will only be relevant links but also graphs or statistics.

Silk is now in private beta stage you can request a trial on their website today: http://www.silkapp.com/. How do you think such technology will impact on your day to day business?

The first contact an employer has with it’s candidates is through a short screening of  their CV, the time spend per CV is usually around 10 seconds. And most people are eliminated because they just don’t show the correct and relevant information for the specific job. Ideally you should write a cover letter and a CV personalized for each job opportunity but it’s often unrealistic and people end up by spamming the same cv around. This is even more important for candidates with CVs of multiple pages, different work experience must be linked  to different jobs descriptions. res

Résunate attempts to tackle this problem by using keywords in job description to detect which experiences are more relevant. First it indexes a word format recent CV or your Linkedin account to classify your education and work experience. Then you will need to tweak  the information to make sure everyfield is correct. After that Résunate will generate on the fly a CV, you can just different templates and print it or save it asa PDF.

This is pretty basic and all the CV generators can do these tasks. Where Résunate add value is that by simply copy pasting the Job description it will in a few seconds generate a appropriate CV. Changing a time consuming task into and easy 2 click process.

To conclude , after giving it a try, you can see it’s in its early stages. Few Templates are available and the platform is not totally fluid but my end product (pdf CV) was totally usable. I certainly think that with richer template offers and maybe negotiation with job listing website this can be a successful platform. Give it a try on www.resunate.com

But the huge size of the social media user base has created a new problem – too much ‘noise’. Businesses with a presence on major social networks end up inundating their fans and followers with numerous updates and posts that are irrelevant and that some of their audience will have no interest in. Short of manually creating multiple profiles, there is virtually no room for businesses with a Facebook or Twitter profile for instance to vary the audience with each new update.

Hyperweek.net provides a platform for today’s major brands that empowers brands to have much greater control and flexibility in defining their own social network than is possible on current social networking platforms. The flexibility in sharing makes Hyperweek.net ideal for business networks that are publishing oriented. In Hyperweek.net, a brand can have multiple groups within its social media space each serving a specific purpose.

A single brand can create multiple communities ranging from groups limited to employees of a specific department in the organisation, to complex collaborative groups that include employees, select clients, subject matter experts and a number of third party service providers. Hyperweek.net refers to these two types of groups as enterprise networks and public networks respectively.

Public networks will find application when businesses are looking at ways of gauging or improving customer facing processes such as sales, marketing, customer service, quality of support and public relations. Though referred to as ‘public’, Hyperweek.net public networks remove the broadcast element of Twitter and the compartmentalisation inherent in Facebook by allowing the business to clearly define who the information is shared with.

Communication is limited to select interest groups depending on brand goals. For instance, certain key customers can be sounded for feedback on the potential reception of an advertisement campaign before it goes out to the wider public. Changes can then be made before the advertisement is released.

Enterprise networks are restricted to employees or departments. Hyperweek.net enterprise networks encourage teamwork, candid conversation on plans & strategy, knowledge sharing and rich creativity. Enterprise networks can be the originator and distributor of concepts that go viral within the organization.

For years, human resource experts have known that the formation and cohesion of informal and formal groups within an organisation are at the heart of energising and driving organisations to meeting their objectives. Through Hyperweek.net, employees can join and form formal or informal groups, gather and share news, pictures and videos in real time.

Hyperweek.net has great promise but faces a number of challenges. One of these is that the business case and benefit is not clearly articulated on its website. A short video would be a great way to briefly show what advantages the platform delivers.

Second, some businesses will not see the value of setting up a new platform for internal employee communication & interaction whereas this can be achieved using existing tools such as email and shared network folders (though not to the same level as Hyperweek.net).

As organisations move to cut costs, they are doing less and less advertisement of their job openings and relying more on headhuntng and networking to get the most suitable candidate for the job. For job seekers to know of the existence of such vacancies, they must proactively use different means to network.

But knowing an insider is not just important for non-advertised positions – it is just as important for publicly advertised positions. Job seekers that have a contact within the organisation will be privy to more information than applicants than have no such contact thus increasing their chances of getting hired.

InTheDoor.com is a new social job searching service that presents a list of currently hiring organisations where one’s Facebook connections work. By providing this information, InTheDoor.com makes it easier for job seekers to prioritize applications to organisations where a Facebook connection already works. To access the service, all one needs to do is to sign into InTheDoor.com with their Facebook account and InTheDoor.com does the rest.

InTheDoor.com uploads data from major searchable job sites such as Indeed.com then runs the jobs against the companies’ that one’s friends have indicated they work in. Where the listing is large, it allows the service user to search for job opportunities by city.

It also provides a count of Facebook friends that are presently employed by each organisation. With these connections, one can know which friend to talk to for information on a certain organisation before they apply for the job.



“But don’t certain major sites such as LinkedIn already provide this sort of service in some form?” some may ask. Not quite. LinkedIn for instance has some shortcomings with the main one being the fewer number of active users when compared to Facebook.

LinkedIn has millions of users – but its user numbers pale in comparison to Facebook. Virtually everyone that has a LinkedIn profile has a Facebook profile – but the reverse does not hold true. InTheDoor.com taps into the vast number of Facebook connections to create more opportunities than would be available through LinkedIn.

The launch of InTheDoor.com could not have come at a better time. Facebook now has close to 650 million users and counting. This is a phenomenal figure given that the total number of internet users worldwide currently stands at slightly more than 2 billion. InTheDoor.com has fixed its eye on leveraging this massive user base.

At present, InTheDoor.com scans through the user’s direct Facebook connections. However, plans are in the works to incorporate a friends-of-friends search. If implemented, this will result in many more results.

InTheDoor.com has to contend with a number of challenges. First is that it is best suited for Facebook users that have a substantial number of connections – the persons currently using the service have an average of 400 connections each.

A second hurdle for the service is the fact that not every Facebook user indicates their place of work on their profile since this is not a mandatory field during Facebook account creation.

Related articles

• Find a Job Using Facebook with InTheDoor (lockergnome.com)
• LinkedIn Announces Facebook-Like Tentacles For the Web (wired.com)
• LinkedIn unveils its social newspaper LinkedIn Today (venturebeat.com)
• LinkedIn wants to connect to the Web with new plugins (venturebeat.com)
• LinkedIn reaches 100 million users, but how many are coming back? (venturebeat.com)

Over the last 10 or 15 years, the term corporate social responsibility (CSR) has gained traction worldwide as an integral part of the responsible business’ strategy. However, the growth of CSR has inadvertently created the impression that activities to make the world a better place are difficult or near impossible to monetize.

Of course, nothing could be further from fact – there are numerous business that are solely involved in social activities and are returning a profit from doing so. 33needs.com is an online crowd funding website that connects social entrepreneurs with investors.

33needs.com serves as a platform (the only one of its kind) for ordinary people to invest in social enterprises and reap financial and emotional reward. The emotional reward is in knowing that one has contributed to making a difference somewhere in the world.

Financial reward is in ‘Impact Points’ awarded by 33needs.com that can be redeemed in any one of a network of ‘Impact Partners’ around the world. There are 6 classes of social enterprises that the 33needs.com helps organise funding for.

• Health – Businesses that provide products and services that help people live healthier and longer lives.
• Sustainable food – Enterprises that use sustainable farming and processing practices to make more food available to meet the need of the world’s burgeoning population.
• Opportunity – Businesses that equip men and women with the skills necessary to provide for their households.
• Planet – Entrepreneurs whose goal is to ensure a cleaner world.
• Education – Individuals or institutions that create the environment for more people to access a good education.
• Community – Enterprises that work towards the protection and preservation of unique but endangered cultures.

The social entrepreneur must indicate a specific target amount that they would like to raise. The funds are only released to the entrepreneur if the contributions from investors reach the target amount. If the total amount invested does not reach the target figure, the investors get a full refund of their money.

The rationale for refunding investments when they fall short is to ensure the entrepreneur has all the cash they need to achieve the goals they had outlined. This is good for investors as it reduces the likelihood of failed enterprises or projects.

The accrual purpose for the money will differ for each business. The cash may be for starting up a new business or to expand a going concern. The funds may go towards building a website, increasing inventory, research, marketing etcetera. 33needs.com helps social enterprises address their operational needs so they can focus on delivering their product.

The fact that investors are individuals who are attracted by the cause the social enterprise stands for means the social entrepreneur enjoys support from persons that are passionate about their business. This alone serves as a powerful drive for entrepreneurs to achieve the goals they commit to at the point of sourcing for funding.

While 33needs.com is quickly making a name in the crowd funding arena, its difficult-to-understand and widely-varying reward structure might be an impediment to more investors signing up. However, it has the potential of making headway among persons that would like to make a difference without necessarily expecting anything in return. This is because there is no collateral that the investor can redeem if the social enterprise goes bust.

A sample for the project would be available and fee for the complete project would be applied, a higher fee for exclusivity. This could also enable students to get partnership offers?

What do you think? I would upload mine right now!!

It’a already a common practice but no one has really treated it as a business except some schools which do it for their own benefits.

This kind of relationship with schools and the real world would be very enriching for both parties.

If one could create a business that looks around for project in development or even better failed project (so many are waiting there waiting to be looked at) and then propose them to school. The Company would be a intermediary between the school and the project: handling the info and looking for investements. Profits would be made by the school and the company who would ask for a small percentage if the project was sucessful..

Leaving your money on a savings account is a waste of your money. The amount you can earn depends on the bank you’re using obvisously, but it could amount to 1.5% per year, for instance. Now imagine you live in a country with a yearly rate of inflation higher than 1.5%: you loose purchasing power over time. By simply investing in the Stock Exchange Index (SMI, FTSE, NASDAC, DOWN JONES, etc…), you probably end up better off than by leaving your money on a savings account.

There exist so many profitable opportunities that are not exploited because people don’t know how to invest or never heard about it. Millions, if not billions, of employees (salespersons, customer service, marketing, management, logistics, engineers, maintenance, etc…) who have functionning brains, who are able to understand the basic principles of finance, to count and to use internet, don’t invest  in the stock or bond markets because they are affraid of it. They all believe it is a very risky thing to it. But isn’t it even more risky to leave our money in the hands of people of play with it like in a casino or generate profits from mathematical formulae, ruining the confidence on financial markets, diminishing the value of work and causing many companies to go bankrupt and high levels of unemployment?

I think that selling basic market finance formations to companies would be very profitable for individuals, for the companies themselves and for the global economy. The courses need not be long, but simply explain how to invest, how to evaluate a stock, interprete an article, use an investing platform on internet, what are the risks and opportunities, as well as showing safe ways to invest money.

The employees would end up better off thanks to more independence and more money in their pockets (as long as they invest safely).

The companies would end up with employees who have a better understanding of money (which is the basic goal of a company). It would also create an opportunity to encourage employees to buy their own company’s shares, a sort of financial fordism (Henry Ford encouraged his employees (using higher wages) to buy his cars, here the employees would be encouraged to buy their own company’s shares (buy offering education)), which trully benefits the company, creates a additional feeling of membership, and increases people’s motivation to work hard (Just like CEOs when they are paid with stock options). Also this would be a step ahead from protecting the companies from the mathematical-casino-finance model, where traders don’t pay attention to the business model and viability of the company but rather to the arbitrage trading opportunity they can realize on a 2 hours interval of time.

Finally, this would lead to a more conscious financial system, where THE CROWD would invest in companies they believe in.

I believe such a project should be supported by the government, the companies and its employees. It would be nurtured by the deep fear that arised from the financial crisis.

So how would we distinguish each other if we all have the same knowledge?

First of all, we are different by the way we are raised, relationships, experiences we live and encounters we make. This forms our personality which then has an impact on the decisions we take. Therefore, two employees in the same company who would have the same knowledge would still not take the same decisions, because it would be based on the risk each of them  would be willing to take.

Also, there will still be different opinions with regards to things in life. Everything does not resume itself to facts in this world. In an absolute way, we all have access to all the information and knowledge we want, it’s just that we are not connected 24/7 to Internet! With this new process, we’d be able to google any information we want at any time of the day!