We’re getting excited about the imminent release of our new website design. Here’s a little sneak peak at what it’s looking like.
“It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.”
- Albert Einstein
It’s getting harder to validate some information on the web so I don’t know if this was actually said by Einstein. Either way, I like the quote. After spending a few minutes trying to find out if he actually said it, I found another one he might have said. I think it’s particularly apt for developing products and services.
“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex… It takes a touch of genius – and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.”
- Albert Einstein
Google has released its annual retrospective of the world events through the lens of search terms - Google Zeitgiest 2010. You can get the global view or find out about your regional trends. In Australia, there’s some interesting search terms with “facebook” and “youtube” the two top search terms. Who needs bookmarks when you can just Google what you want? Weirdly enough, the third most popular search term was “google”. I wonder what this means? Are people really googling for google to get to google to google something?
Unsuprisingly Julia Gillard, who after her Prime Ministerial coup earlier in the year comes in as the third most popular person search. What’s interesting is that she comes in behind behind Andy Irons and Justin Beiber. What does that say about Australia? We’re a country of surfing teeny boppers?
For some fun, take a look at Google Zeitgeist 2010.
This message came across my desk yesterday. It’s another example of the realisation that the raw data within an organisation has the opportunity for greater value with many minds thinking about how it can be put to use. Taking advantage of the Internet to bring those minds together.
The World Bank has released some of the country specific data it holds for consumption across the web. They’ve even created a competition to for the most interesting use of that information in a web application.
Maybe you’ve got a great idea of how to use these data sets? Visualisation? Economic analysis? Trend identification? Development opportunity identification? Remember, you don’t need to be a programmer to do this. You can outsource application development very easliy using eLance, Guru, oDesk and many other places on the web.
See the details of the competition below.
The World Bank launched its Open Data Initiative in April, 2010. This initiative made an array of data sets, including the World Development Indicators, Africa Development Indicators, and Millennium Development Goal Indicators – free for all.The World Bank Group is actively working to make its operations and its research more open, transparent and accountable. This includes a range of reforms that enable free access to data that had either previously not been available or available only to paying subscribers. In a speech on September 29, 2010 at Georgetown University, World Bank President, Robert B. Zoellick described the new Open Data, Open Knowledge, and Open Solutions initiative, as a fundamentally new way of searching for development solutions, in a networked development architecture, where none dominates and all can play a part. Through this initiative, the Bank is supplementing its ”elite retail” model of economic research, which had economists focusing on specific issues and then writing papers, with a “wholesale” and networked model, that gives outsiders the data, research and software to reach their own findings.
The Apps for Development Competition
First Prize – $US15,000The Apps for Development Competition aims to bring together the best ideas from both the software developer and the development practitioner communities to create innovative apps using World Bank data.
The Competition challenges participants to develop software applications related to one or more of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Submissions may be any kind of software application, be it for the web, a personal computer, a mobile handheld device, console, SMS, or any software platform broadly available to the public. The only other requirement is that the proposed application use one or more datasets from the World Bank Data Catalog available at data.worldbank.org.
Applications submitted to the Competition should address at least one of the following objectives:
- Raise awareness of at least one of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), or
- Contribute to progress toward meeting one of the MDGs by 2015.
Applications which best satisfy the competition criteria will receive cash prizes and the opportunity to have their apps featured on the World Bank Open Data website. Competition participants are encouraged to also use other relevant indicators and datasets, and to be creative in exploring approaches for realizing the goals.
Please find more information on how to enter at:
http://appsfordevelopment.challengepost.com/
After the recent article on the critical nature of a Domain Name to your business, I thought it might be worthwhile giving a quick introduction to registering a domain name for your business.
A domain name is the cornerstone of any online strategy for your business. It gives you an address to call your own in a changing online world. In this howto guide we’ll look at how you can register your own company domain name and throw in a few tips for good measure.
As a quick recap, a domain name is a name to help people to easily remember Internet addresses. If you’ve ever visited www.google.com or www.facebook.com then you’ve used a name. Both are domain names as like www.onezeroone.com.au. These names are far easier to remember than the string of numbers that are used by the supporting Internet systems.
So, what do you need to get a domain name registered? Not a lot really. You’ll need:
Registering a domain name is a pretty straightforward, three-step process:
Finding a Domain Name registrar is as simple as searching for “domain name registrar” in your favourite search engine. However, due to the sheer volume of Domain Name registrars on the Internet, picking one can be a little daunting.
The other challenge is finding one with the right price and reputation. Domain Name registration is a commodity business so most registrars are priced very similarly. Picking one with the right price is easy but getting a registrar with a good reputation is another question. There are a few things your can do here to work out if the Domain Name registrar you’ve picked will give you good service:
Some countries, such as the United Kingdom and Australia have registrars (and sometimes registration criteria) specific to their country domains (e.g. .co.uk for the United Kingdom or .com.au for Australia). If you need these domains then you’ll need to register a domain through one of those countries registrars.
Tip – Now, if all that’s a little hard here’s a starting point. You might want to try out “Godaddy.com” for most domain registration types (e.g. .com, .net etc). They’ve been around for a while and are well recognised. For cheap and cheerful Australian domain name registrations you can try “crazydomains.com.au”. I’ve used both of these companies without any problems. I’ve also used a couple of companies where the relationship went sour – Registerfly and eNomCentral (Now Bulkregister). It’s relatively easy to move your domain to another registrar if the need arises but it’s better to prevent in my book.
Before you can register a domain name, you need to find one that’s not taken.
Before we get into finding available domain names, it’s worth touching on the criteria for creating a domain name. A domain name is not case sensitive (i.e. ONEZEROONE.com.au is the same as onezeroone.com.au) and can only consist of any combination letters, numbers and hyphens (i.e. a-z, 0-9, -) up to 253 characters long. In practice, the simpler (and shorter) the domain name the easier it will be to use.
Next, you’ll need to decide on a name. If you’ve already got a business, then you’ll want to get something as close as possible to your company name. If you don’t have a company name it’s possible that your company name may be influenced by the domain names that are available.
Once you have a name in mind (or a few), simply enter the details on your new favourite domain name registrars website to see if it’s available for registration as shown below.
Once you’ve entered a name and searched, you’ll get a page that looks something like the following.
You can run through this process a number of times to work out what the available Domain Name options are.
Tip – To make your Domain Name easier to use day-to-day make sure it meets a few different criteria like being easy to spell, reducing when telling someone over the phone (spell it out loud to check) and limiting numbers (like onezeroone – when said to someone it could be words or numbers and can be confusing – I should practice what I preach!)
Tip – A Domain Name specific to the country(s) that you’re conducting business in hold a better reputation that an generic .com domain (e.g. .com.au for Australia). If possible, you should register your country domain and some other alternatives to your domain name across different country domains e.g. mydomain.com.au (Australia), mydomain.com (US), mydomain.co.uk (United Kingdom) to help protect your domain in as many places as once.
Tip – You should also consider registering domains for any products or trademarks that you hold so as to capture a hold on the domain names relevant to your business.
This is the simple part. Just follow the directions for payment and provide credit card details. Domain names for .com should be in the range of US$10-$20 per year but this varies per provider. The price also varies for localised domain registrations (e.g. .com.au in Australia).
Make sure that you provide accurate contact details. As mentioned in the previous article about the critical nature of domain names to your business, you need make sure the registrar can contact you in times of need (e.g. Domain Name renewal notifications!)
Tip – Make sure you read the subsequent screens through to payment once you’ve picked the domain name(s). Many domain name registrars “Value Add” through the payment process and offer services like email, website hosting and other services that you may inadvertently add to your bill at the end if you’re not observant. Just make sure that you understand what the check boxes are doing in the subsequent payment pages.
Well, hopefully that gives you a good introduction into how to register a domain name for your business. Simple really.
Please feel free leave a comment if you’ve got any questions or any other tips that may help others. Best of luck!