Talking Book – At a glance!
This is in reality a very simple record-and-play audio device – manufactured for durability, Talking Book is designed for people with zero literacy and who still have not experienced the fruits of electricity. This portable device is utilized in the rural Africa to disseminate knowledge and current information in a very reliable and simplistic way. In Africa, where good transportation has still a long way to go, Talking Book is a splendid tool for teachers who complement their lessons with student-friendly interactive applications and audio books.

The philanthropists and field representatives procure Talking Books and record information about agriculture, health and education in their local languages and dialect. This stored information is then systematically permeated to every possible region which is willing to participate in the program – This program is always associated with an accompanying demonstration so that even a housewife / mother / grandmother can use it with ease.

Transforming life at birth!
Literacy Bridge is deeply involved in the maternity and maternal health programs in Africa – Talking Books are distributed freely to pregnant and young mothers as part of this program.

According to the Literacy Book founder -
“The devices will be loaded with health behavior messages created in collaboration with Ghana Health Service and UNICEF; and will include agriculture messages to help mothers identify and improve their production of crops that are most nutritious for children under five years of age. Simple messages, like hand-washing with soap and proper sowing of seeds, will result in behavior changes that are life-saving and life-changing. The project will show an extreme degree of transparency around the program costs to demonstrate to the world just how cost-effective the Talking Book is at improving health outcomes in a way that no organization has done before.“

Take a look at how Talking Book is helping the most impoverished rural families in creating a safer, healthier and a more educated society and next generation of African citizens…

Afri-Tech Johannesburg Summit (22th – 24th March, 2011) is a sincere attempt to create a mass scale awareness about the ‘synergy between the scientific community and the people of Africa’. This summit will witness the congregation of some of the most pioneering minds in the areas of Healthcare, Science & Technology, Education, Finance and Digital solutions – under one platform. We will need to churn out more innovations like Talking Book – which will work in favor of the African upliftment.

Travel and tourism industry is no exception. It has judged human liking for unusual and unexplored, and has introduced many niche tourism concepts within the last few years. Niche tourism is growing as the fastest sector within the travel and tourism industry. Common travelers are looking for variety of niche tourism concepts as big cities, museums, beaches, hotels, et al are done to death and people are looking for travel and tourism that will not only relax them but also amuse their minds.

Home-stays: This concept is fast catching up to cater to the tourists who want to stay away from the hustle-bustle of the big hotels and spend an innocuous stay. Home-stays offer all the comforts of a hotel and allow you to be yourself without being bothered with the artificial mannerism. Moreover you get the real feel of the culture of the place you visit.

Camping: Hitherto, camping was the favorite of trekkers and mountaineers. Now it has donned a new avatar to provide complete comfort even for a family stay. Family camping at the mountain peaks and in deep jungles is turning out to be a perfect way to get you lost, for the better.

Sports tourism: This existed since quite a long time; however now it is complete with travel, stay and ticket package with additional tit-bits thrown in. It has done away with sports fans’ separate worries for arranging tours, compromising with stay and then fighting for tickets.

Agricultural tourism: Modern city life has left us deprived of real rural feel and understanding about how the food we eat is produced. To understand the agrarian and rural life on which the altar of modernism is erected, more people are exploring how a rural and agricultural life is.

Ancestry tourism: Global cultural conundrum has taken us away from our birthplace and culture. However, the urge to explore our roots lie dormant within us. Ancestral tourism helps us to explore our origins and get up-close with our own culture.

Hobby tourism: No hobby is localized. There is thread running underneath that connects you to other hobby-mates and places that will enrich you with deep understanding about your hobby. Tourism industry is glad to meet your needs.

Creating a craze

The industry is getting flooded with many innovative ideas to instigate tourists to experience what they wished for till now. These niche concepts are catching the fancy of tourists who travel with family and average budget. They prefer to let loose during the vacations instead of falling into the systematic stay at hotels. They are not willing to let the artificial facades of hospitality spoil their fun.

Most of these concepts are run by small or medium sized tour operators. The increasing popularity of niche tourism is projected to cause a dent in the earnings from leisure travelers of major operators. Either the big operators will have to divert efforts towards niche tourism or restricted themselves to business tourism.

Adopting means other than conferences has many disadvantages like messages getting lost in transition, distortions in understanding motives, failure in direct feedback collection, etc. Above all, establishing contact individually with widely spread team members can become a cumbersome process. Conferences overcome all these disadvantages and saves time and energy by allowance of addressing concentrated congregation at one time.

Though business houses are preferring webinars and online conferences, the utility and importance of traditional conferences is not yet ruled out. However, with environmental awareness and corporate social responsibility coming to a mainstay, adoption of green conferences that are a saver on carbon footprint is the need of the hour and earth.

How to design a green conference?

• Paperless invitations: Gone are the days of printed invitations. Printouts are finding their place in the pages of history. Lightening fast emails, newsletters and SMS are a norm. They save paper, consume less energy and utilize already existing mediums to travel across, thereby leaving no carbon footprints of their own.
• Grouped gatherings: Instead of arranging a big conference at a place that demands delegates to travel all across; regrouping and arranging three to four regional conferences will save on carbon footprint in terms of fossil fuel consumption per head.
• On site accommodation: If the conference period is long enough to require delegates to stay overnight or for a couple of days; then arrange accommodation as close as possible to the conference venue to avoid travelling by gas guzzling vehicles. Otherwise, arrange for mass transports like buses to covey to the venue.
• Open venue: Conferences held outdoors in a daytime will do away with artificial illumination and ventilation, and incur minimal electricity consumption. In case indoors are a must, look out for a venue that has plenty of windows or glass panels to allow for natural light and ventilation.
• Electronic material: Kill your urge to distribute printed booklets, leaflets, brochures, etc. Send them via email in advance or after the event. Do not distribute CDs either. They contribute to e-waste after loading onto PCs.
• Platter matter: How about offering altogether vegan menu with organic ingredients cooked with bio-fuels? It may not please your guests but certainly will please our planet.
• Don’t stick to plastic: Your conference should be a no plastic zone. Don’t supply water in plastic bottles, eatables wrapped in plastic or use-and-throw plastic plates. If you must, then ensure that these land up in recycle bin.

It’s the matter of getting started with the first conference. Initiate delegates to propose green ideas and soon it will be a norm greener than expected.

Not many people would disagree that journalists and news publishers should be paid for their work. However, the advertisement supported model is not generating enough revenue to sustain the conventional news gathering infrastructure.

If you know the basics of Economics, then you would know that if ad-space (supply, in economic terms) is blasting on every social networking site, then without a similar increase in advertisers (demand, in economic terms) the price will drop down drastically. Considering this, we can only hope that a new model will soon come up. Some newspapers have taken initiatives to issue e-books instead of print versions as prospective models for the future.

Wall Street Journal editor, Robert Thompson, has mentioned in an article that some websites can be best described as lice in the intestines of the internet. He also says that readers have been socialized in a wrong way and that search engines like Google have profited from that wrong perception. He strongly feels that much of the content on the internet should be free.

Today, significant parts of the stories we see on social networks, blogs and tweets, have originated from the traditional media. While this does not mean that the bloggers don’t provide original news content and commentary, the question is: If we need to pay more for news content that we used to get for free, then will it negatively impact the quantity or quality of social media discussions around those news items?

Time will definitely provide an answer sooner than we think.

The mind reading technology is one such technology that will make our lives (social media lives) very easy. Controlling an interface without using your fine motor skills will have huge implications for human computer communication. Imagine being able to tweet what you are thinking without having to pick up your phone, key in your message and hit send. Also, by just thinking ‘Facebook’ your screen will show a summary of your friend’s action stream.

How the system works?

The new mind-reading system works by displaying letters on the computer screen that flickers one at a time. When a person thinks of a letter, and then that letter flickers on the screen, brain waves propel a signal to the computer that it identifies. While this form of communication is at a very experimental phase and is also quite slow, it does work for sending short messages such as tweets for Twitter. Twitter messages are restricted to only 140 character limits, and you really have to think hard about what you want to say. However, with mind reading technology thinking is all that you would require.

This new form of communication is currently meant to help people who have restricted motor skills, and not lazy social media fanatics! There is also a scope of applying this technology to senses other than vision. In the future, this technology can also help read feelings and complex emotional states. And one day people who cannot otherwise communicate will eventually interact with the outside world.

Whoever said mind reading was impossible are in for a pleasant surprise!

As a customer you might just go through the remaining results, that catches your attention or try on with a new search phrase for a better set of results.

As a more technology savvy user, you might laugh at Google’s search algorithm and wonder what the “Pocket PC Services” has to do with “PPC Service” and carry on.

However, what if you are in the on-line business providing zone? Would you not rub your eyes and get blatantly surprised? You’ll wonder how it could be possible. You would go back and refresh the page, might be several times, and if still you see the Pocket PC Services as a result for PPC services, you certainly would lose faith in the business abilities of the unerring search magnum.

How can Google, the leader in PPC business not understand the impact of losing the search by one competitor, and in this case not even a competitor?
How can the ruler of SEM allow one’s quality score to get affected by such an outrageous activity?

How can the LSA fail like this? Anyone endowed with the technological reasoning would understand that the algorithm can never err. It would under no circumstances deviate like this.

So, is the crawler crawling wrong limbs or is it one more of Google’s evil designs???

Why read, when you can witness? Last year surely has been the year for video marketing. What with more You Tube views than Google’s searches, video marketing is a more lucrative assignment. Finding ways and means to ensure that your video will not be lost in the crowd is what SEO would now be looking for. You do not expect to put together a video and hope it would generate business for you. You sure can add on a welcome video, a virtual tour, or a helpful tutorial video to your website, and use this as a riveting factor to compliment your content and your attractive web design. Expecting your videos to open up vistas all by themselves will require some innovative, creative and fresh approaches, which will now have to be accepted as a new challenge.

How You Make the Most from Your Video Presentation

There are some things to be kept in mind, and, which will come helpful for optimizing your video content to its’ full potential online. You can always be the first, and that definitely amounts to a very good start. Your competitors may just like to follow.

• Embed your videos and share – You will definitely benefit by sharing your videos with an embeddable feature. Whether you are having viral videos, trailers, or informative video clips, embedded videos is an advanced feature, and will come useful in time.
• Make sure to use the best format – There are a number of video formats available for you to choose from.  You can have FLV, MP4, AVI, and others if you want; but, make sure to use the most popular, as this will help you make it easier while editing and viewing.
• Make use of all available accurate tracking tools – What use are these videos if you cannot find out how they help you? Moreover, how would you be able to effectively optimize without understanding an angle that needs to improve upon? You would only be able to better your access and progress by measuring your performance and the impact each video can  create on your online presence.
• Video SEO will come useful – Your video is 53 times more likely to appear on the first page of a search result in comparison to your text pages. Make sure to utilize tags and keywords because these help you make your videos all the more visible.
• Consistency eventually pays – If you are planning on integrating plenty of videos onto your website, see that when put together, they are able to give a very reliable image. Never confuse the visitors or promise them a moon that is not there.

Multi-media content will enhance your capacity to make some deep impact. As it is, we have been using images since a long time to assist our textual content make more sense, so also videos can integrate into design and generate a better sense if and when properly applied.

• You visit a SEO company and it guarantees you a ranking even before analyzing your website. These SEO analysts are either are just interested in extracting money from you and stuffing it in their pocket or they take SEO too lightly. A SEO strategy is different for every website and the optimization strategy depends and changes according to the nature and theme of website.
• Some just fill in the Meta tags with absurd keywords and create spamming. Your website might end up getting banned by Google. Increasing Meta tags list with irrelevant keywords is no SEO technique.
• Some SEO people create doorway pages that are held on another server and then they purchase this traffic to shell out more money from you. Make sure the SEO changes you pay for occur on your website only.

Quality of SEO analysts

• A good SEO analyst is always aware of the fact that the tactics of the search engine algorithms is ever changing and the same old techniques do not work for every website.
• A good SEO will never guarantee results on SERP because anyone who guarantees is sure to be a Charlatan. A good SEO will guarantee that they ill be driving the traffic on your website which will guarantee sales.
• They should be able to tell you exactly what they’re doing, and how much the cost is for various parts of the service.

A Few Important Tips

• A good SEO firm will try to get itself involved in rebuilding of website if it is done. They believe in avoiding the pitfalls like excessive use of Flash, HTML frames or graphics at the early stage because modifying them later on becomes a nuisance and waste of money.
• Make sure you check the references of the SEO Company on your own and check from the owners whether they are driving more traffic and having more sales.
• A really good SEO is no joke. By limiting the budget to less than a thousand dollars, you will be indirectly limiting the creative abilities of the SEO analyst. Pay more to get his focus on your site more. Also by finding some one working on much less pay scale is like finding some one who is willing to take your money for doing nothing.
• It is east to blabber about SEO techniques by reading from book. But when it comes to actual action, no reading helps as SEO environment is ever changing and dynamic. Do not fall for such blabber and research the work done by the SEO Company for other websites.

Search Places for Good SEO Analysts

• Visit the SEO forums. There you will find many companies posing as SEO experts. But the genuine ones will shine out on own.
• Search for SEO related articles found on sites such as Clinks, ISEDB, Search Guild, and Search Day
• You can trust the ones recommended by your friends. But for this you will have to trust your friend first.

Image Credit: Theseonerd.com

CMS programs available today can have a negative effect on the visibility of the website in the Search Engine Result Pages (SERP). This makes CMS without Search Engine Optimization (SEO) abilities a big disaster. The major reason cited is that these programs were not designed keeping the search engines in mind.

Systems now days blabber that they are “search engine ready” or “search engine friendly”. What these blabbers mean is that a programmer can modify the system with add-ons (e.g. the Apache “mod-rewrite” extension) to not damage search engine results too badly. So do not fall blindly for such claims and make sure you inspect every aspect of the system to be sure that your website can be optimized. CMS that has the capability to induct common SEO tasks (human/search engine readable URLs, 301 redirects, Meta tags) directly is required.

I would like to specify some common problems that CMS generated contents face in not being indexed by the search engines:

• Dynamic URLs with query strings

The number of dynamic pages a search engine can index are limited. If at all you use dynamic pages make sure that not every search engine crawl the dynamic and static page. A Dynamic URL like “http://www.yourseite.com/prod.php?id=23485&blt=234” might be skipped by a search engine crawler as too many parameters included might clash with webmaster parameters. Inbound links tend to be less on dynamic URLs as any user prefers static URLs as they are easily understandable.

• Restricted Meta Tags

Due to ever-changing nature of SEO industry, customized Meta tags like Verification Meta tag for Google are in high use. Many CMS do not have access to add such customized Meta tags. This hampers the SEO process as the customized Meta tags have become quite important for search engine crawlers.

• URLs with poor keyword density

Keyword rich URLs play a major role in optimizing your website on search engine pages. Some systems that use static URLs sometimes do not let you create URLs with desired keywords. A query string without sensible keywords hardly lures traffic to your website.

• Using third party SEO tools with most CMS systems is time consuming and repetitive

The user desires to be in one tool to create content and another to analyze it. But in some CMS, it is mandatory to view the pages live from a URL on the web to use SEO tools to optimize the content. In such systems until and unless the content is published SEO cannot come into picture. This makes it highly time consuming.

• Lack of SEO knowledge

Buying a CMS and then hiring SEO professionals to optimize your CMS for SEO needs is wasting lot of time and lot of money. It is better to have a proactive approach to search friendly CMS.

Image Credit: www.trampolinebranding.com

When Twitter requested for the reasons of denial – it was a surprise to them too.

Apparently, many other companies had applied for trademarks of terms which were very similar to ‘tweet’. According to U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) “Other trademark applications by the firms TweetMarks, Cotweet and Tweetphoto, and said there was a “likelihood of confusion.” ”

So, it seems that the followers have overtaken the leader as far as ‘tweet’ is concerned, But Biz Stone, founder of Twitter was far from worried and even appreciated the legion of twitter related firms like TweetDeck, TweetMeme, Tweetie, BackTweets, Tweetboard -who have been instrumental in making ‘Tweet’ a household name….