Ctrl-Alt-Del Design, Gates –>Blames IBM – vía @mashable

Bill Gates said that a convoluted login screen was a big design flaw for Windows, but he’s not taking credit for it.

The Microsoft co-founder revealed in a speech at a Harvard University fundraiser that forcing users to use the control-alt-delete key combination to log into their PCs was a mistake — one made by IBM, the designers of the reboot combination. Gates went on to explain that the multiple-key command — often called the three-finger salute — was created by David Bradley, an engineer who worked on the original IBM design.

Fun Video: William H. Gates III COL ’77, LLD ’07 Q&A The Harvard Campaign Launch Continuar leyendo «Ctrl-Alt-Del Design, Gates –>Blames IBM – vía @mashable»

Sobre la importancia de aprender a programar computadoras (y dónde hacerlo gratis) // @FacundoArena – alternaria.tv

Hoy, la organización Code.org publicó este video en el que Bill Gates, Mark Zukerberg y otros grandes exponentes nos cuentan por que aprender a programar es importante:

Me parece una excelente campaña de generación de conciencia y difusión de una oportunidad única para miles de personas en todo el mundo, porque nunca es tarde para aprender a programar. Ahora bien… ¿por dónde empezar?

Más info y artículo completo

Exitosas empresas nacieron en el garaje

Algunas de las firmas más importantes del mundo se originaron en el fondo de un hogar y lograron expandirse a niveles insospechados. Conozca cuáles son

Por

Comenzaron en un garaje y crecieron hasta cruzar las fonteras de sus países.

De hecho, se convirtieron en grandes negocios que actualmente son inmensas fábricas donde se define parte de la economía global.

En la actualidad las utilidades de esas compañías, según Eurobrands, superan los u$s344 mil millones, cifra que sacaría de apuros a cientos de empresas en crisis.

Según informa Dinero.com, ellas son:

1. Apple
Comenzó en el garaje de la casa de Steve Jobs a mediados de los años 70s.

El padre de Steve, Paul Jobs, tuvo que sacar sus herramientas para que su hijo pudiera trabajar con Stephen Wozniak en el diseño de los primeros aparatos de Apple.

Actualmente es la empresa más valiosa del mundo y cuesta u$s130 mil millones.

Continuar leyendo «Exitosas empresas nacieron en el garaje»

Creative Advertising

By: Jackie Ta | broadwavestudios.com

Man’s mind, stretched by a new idea, never goes back to its original dimensions – Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

There’s a global challenge of complexity due to changes in technology and a cultural shift to connectivity. Customers want a more creative and innovative solution. Show them your company is on the cutting edge of creativity. Differentiate your brand from the others by creating an advertisement that’s worthy of talks, tweets, and followings.

If you’re passionate about it, people will read that in your ads. Show that you are an “actionary”. Craft your ads to evoke emotions and memories. When you evoke emotions, people are more likely to remember. If you have an ad that you want the public takes notice, then consider the following when crafting your ads:

Be memorable. Make your ads unforgettable whether it’s making the persons in your ad to have a lilt in their accent, a hitch in their walk, a tilt in their head, or a hook in their message. Make it unique. Boring ads are rarely remembered and when they are, it usually becomes a victim of mockery. This is not the kind of lasting impression that you want to make. Instead, think more in terms of campaigns such as Nike’s Just Do It and Got Milk. They’re one of the most memorable campaigns of the 80’s and 90’s, and people nowadays still remember them. Campaigns become successful when they are memorable. Continuar leyendo «Creative Advertising»

The Battle Between Content and Design

Back (waay back) in 1996, Bill Gates wrote an article titled “Content is King“. The piece was prescient in many ways:

“But the broad opportunities for most companies involve supplying information or entertainment. No company is too small to participate.”

I love this line:

“If people are to be expected to put up with turning on a computer to read a screen, they must be rewarded with deep and extremely up-to-date information that they can explore at will. They need to have audio, and possibly video.”

How right you were Mr. Gates. We get it all and we never turn those darn computers off now. This was before Google (Google, Inc. launched in 1998), so he couldn’t know to what extent content would matter from a data and search perspective. What he did know was that the Internet would be a business game changer that had the potential to level the playing field. So long as we would “put up” with turning on our computers…

Great content keeps us coming back for more. We share it. We comment on it. It gets crawled and ranked. It keeps us company and it makes us smarter.

If you do a search for the term Content is King you will get more than 1 billion results. Guess a lot of people really believe that statement. If you do a search for the term Design is King, you also get more than 1 billion results. If you are a fan of Game of Thrones, you will see the irony inherent in the number of kings running around here.

Continuar leyendo «The Battle Between Content and Design»

Forbes nombró a Steve Ballmer como el peor CEO entre las empresas públicas de EE.UU.

ieco.clarin.com

Para la revista, el CEO de Microsoft es el que menos merece su sueldo: «Sacó a Microsoft de los nichos de mayor crecimiento y rentabilidad en el sector tecnológico». Los gerentes de Cisco y de General Electric tampoco aprobaron el test.

Según la revista Forbes, el CEO de Microsoft, Steve Ballmer, es el que menos merece su sueldo entre las grandes empresas estadounidenses de capital público: «Sacó a Microsoft de los nichos de mayor crecimiento y rentabilidad en el sector tecnológico (música móvil, dispositivos móviles y tabletas). Mientras lo hacía sacrificó el crecimiento y los beneficios de su empresa y del ecosistema, en el que figuran empresas como Dell, Hewlett Packard y hasta Nokia». Continuar leyendo «Forbes nombró a Steve Ballmer como el peor CEO entre las empresas públicas de EE.UU.»

Diez desafíos de desarrollo personal en un mundo globalizado

Via Scoop.it – human being in – perfección

Por José Manuel Vecino

Las tendencias y modas gerenciales, (que se aprovecharon del esnobismo directivo) comenzaron a declinar como opción de mejoramiento en la productividad. De autores como Deming y Goldratt, pasando por Drucker, Tom Peters, Goleman Senge, Porter hasta prahalad y Hamel, Kaplan y Norton y una pléyade de profesores, investigadores y gurús de la administración que llevaron a la cumbre teorías, modelos y herramientas gerenciales como TQM, CRM, BSC, COACHING, MENTORING, OCÉANO AZUL, E-LEARNING (y toda la familia e-).

Amén de los cientos de títulos de mejoramiento empresarial como “Si no está roto rómpalo”, “Quién se llevó mi queso”, “Negocios en la base de la pirámide” etc… vamos pasando ahora a los nuevos protagonistas que recorren los pasillos de las organizaciones; son los nuevos vientos fundados más en los éxitos autobiográficos (Steve Jobs, Branson, Bill Gates, Dell, Trump, etc) que en experiencias colectivas producto de estudios juiciosos pero poco inspiradores.

Via manuelgross.bligoo.com

Para Fortune, Steve Jobs es “El empresario más grande de nuestro tiempo” – FayerWayer

El conteo se basó en el impacto social y económico que cambió la visión, inspiración, innovación y el desempeño de las empresas a través del tiempo, como lo fue en su tiempo NeXT y posteriormente, la adquisición de Pixar. Aunque se le acusó por ser abusivo o mezquino, para Fortune, Steve Jobs es el empresario por excelencia de nuestra generación por ser “visionario, inspirador, brillante y vivo”.

Via Scoop.it – human being in – perfección

En un conteo realizado por la revista Fortune, Steve Jobs, el fallecido co-fundador de Apple fue declarado como “El empresario más grande de nuestro tiempo”. Esta designación se debió a que Jobs tuvo ese instinto para crear productos que hicieron la diferencia frente a sus competidores, ya que no era algo intestinal, sino como él decía “conectar los puntos”.
El conteo se basó en el impacto social y económico que cambió la visión, inspiración, innovación y el desempeño de las empresas a través del tiempo, como lo fue en su tiempo NeXT y posteriormente, la adquisición de Pixar. Aunque se le acusó por ser abusivo o mezquino, para Fortune, Steve Jobs es el empresario por excelencia de nuestra generación por ser “visionario, inspirador, brillante y vivo”.

Esta es la lista completa de Fortune… Continuar leyendo «Para Fortune, Steve Jobs es “El empresario más grande de nuestro tiempo” – FayerWayer»

3 Ways to be the Architect of Your Own Life

Your vision can literally serve as your blueprint for the future. Your ability to walk into the life that you crave depends on the future you see. That’s because anything exceptional that you attempt is often birthed with a vision. It’s the vision that inspires hope when the struggle gets too hard and when calamity becomes all too familiar. That’s why it’s important to not bankrupt your future with a limited vision. It’s hard to move forward confidently without having a good idea of where you are going. Powerful motivator Zig Ziglar always says if you aim for nothing, you’ll hit the mark every time.

There are numerous reasons for lack of vision. Sometimes it’s the pain of previous failures that halts our progress. In such cases, we have to remember that missteps bring experience and provide insight; moreover, our survival is a testimony of our resilience. You can experience a do over! Other times we’re blinded by complacency with past successes. However, suppose we had stopped with the telegram or the telephone?

Written by Shawn Watson | pickthebrain.com

Architects are skilled in planning, design, and oversight. Architecture isn’t just limited to the construction of buildings. For example, often visionaries are architects of their generations.
When you look at the leaders of yesterday and today, such as Henry Ford, Bill Gates, and Steve Jobs, they are architects of sorts.

They planned, designed, and oversaw huge transitions that, in many cases, redefined how we function and process reality on a daily basis. Similarly, we can be the architects of our own lives. Here are 3 ways to awaken your inner architect!
Architects Create Vision

Vision is key! Continuar leyendo «3 Ways to be the Architect of Your Own Life»

Billionaire Rankings: Bloomberg Launches Daily List of the World’s Richest People

Most of the news this year, however, appears to be good for the world’s richest — perhaps a sign of a perkier global economy in 2012. Seventeen of the 20 billionaires on the list have added to their net worth year-to-date. The only three losers were Walmart heirs Christy, Jim and Samuel Robson Walton, likely reflecting the fact that Walmart stock has lost ground in 2012.

Charting the wealth of the world’s most outrageously wealthy used to be strictly the purview of Forbes magazine, whose own billionaires list is published each March and is due out later today Wednesday. But this year the magazine has been scooped by the upstart Bloomberg News organization, whose daily list attempts to make the Forbes version obsolete. According to the New York Post, however, Forbes will come out with its own daily rankings later this month.

Bloomberg fired the opening salvo in this war for wealth coverage last winter when it announced it would be producing its own global rich list and was hiring Forbes magazine veteran Matthew Miller to head up the project. Miller spent seven years at Forbes and was the editor of the America-focused Forbes 400, as well as the co-editor of the Forbes World’s Billionaires list.

(MORE: ‘Gordon Gekko’ Joins FBI Battle Against Wall Street Fraud)

One blind spot to Bloomberg’s coverage, however, will be the company’s majority owner and erstwhile CEO, and New York City’s mayor. According to Forbes, Michael Bloomberg is America’s 12th richest man and the world’s 30th. He won’t be appearing in any of Bloomberg News’ coverage, however, as it is the company’s editorial policy not to cover Bloomberg LP.

WALL STREET & MARKETS

By CHRISTOPHER MATTHEWS | http://business.time.com/

BLOOMBERG NEWS

From batting averages to polling numbers, we live in an age of real-time data. Now, thanks to Bloomberg News, you can add billionaires’ net worth to the list of statistics you can look up day to day. Bloomberg News launched its Bloomberg Billionaires Index yesterday, a daily ranking of the world’s 20 wealthiest people. The list will be updated daily based on “market and economic changes and Bloomberg News reporting.” It will also include a yearly and daily accounting of how much these tycoons’ holdings have fluctuated.

Let’s just say these numbers trump whatever you won or lost at the roulette table in Atlantic City, N.J., last weekend. On the day of its launch, the index estimated that the world’s wealthiest man, Mexican telecom magnate Carlos Slim Helú, lost nearly half a billion dollars in the previous 24 hours. The No. 2 richest man, Bill Gates, saw his net worth tumble by $102 million in the same time span. Continuar leyendo «Billionaire Rankings: Bloomberg Launches Daily List of the World’s Richest People»

5 Tips for taking your tech startup from big idea to business success

3. Do your homework
More often than not, real success comes from doing your homework. There’s no use in launching a revolutionary product if your market simply isn’t ready for it. So do your analysis, beta test your product, see who bites, and don’t ever be afraid to put out a free tester. Once the thumbs go up and the market says “yes please”, then you can start selling, and make a very strong case to potential financiers, who can help you to take your business to the next level.

4. Manage your cash-flow
Potential venture capitalist partners are looking for a solid sales track record. This doesn’t just mean more money; it means giving your prospective venture capital investors something to measure ROI against. If you can manage a solid growing flow of sales, then your prospective VC partners are able to feel a lot more secure about your ability to manage and nurture their seed capital.

Professional VC companies have a very strict litmus test on profitability. Most will not accept a loss-to-win ratio of less than 50%, so you really need to be able to show them that your idea has the capacity to go all the way, and that you are the one to take it there.

5. Change your mind-set
In spite of increasing opportunities, going it alone continues to be a frightening prospect, particularly in developing economies.

However, armed with the correct mind-set, and the right amount of hard work, research and planning, there’s nothing stopping you from turning your big idea into big business success.

 By Dave Blakey | http://memeburn.com

Throughout the world, and particularly in emerging market countries, the entrepreneurial landscape remains notoriously difficult to navigate, with an estimated 80% of small businesses failing to sustain themselves for a period of longer than five years.

However, with an increasing percentage of jobs now being directly attributable to small business ventures, financial backers in both private and public sectors are slowly starting to acknowledge the substantial impact of entrepreneurial activity on a nation’s economy.

Yet, in spite the rising global trend towards venture capitalist backing of tech startups, there remain very few such initiatives present in emerging markets. Can this be accredited to unsustainable entrepreneurial ecosystems, or is success simply a mind-set shift away?

Conservative investors
A venture capital investor once told me that, out of ten investments, he expected seven to fail, two to return his investment and one to make a fortune. Those are fairly frightening odds for someone investing large amounts of capital, but even more terrifying for someone looking to leave the security of the job market to launch a start-up business.

What’s more, bankers and financiers are generally not intent on funding ideas that might be perceived as “pie in the sky”, particularly when it comes to the technical and creative industries.

As a result, it’s no wonder that many start-ups end before they even crank up the proverbial engine, the main reason being they couldn’t raise the venture capital financing required to start, or were simply too afraid to try.

1. Reduce your risks… Continuar leyendo «5 Tips for taking your tech startup from big idea to business success»

Meet Bill Gates, the Man Who Changed Open Source Software

A Company That’s At Its Best When Freaking Out

But the road was a long one. In 2006, when Hilf hired Sam Ramji to take over Microsoft’s open source efforts, the company’s relationship to free software was still uneasy. A year later, Brad Smith and Horacio Gutierrez would make those apparent threats to the Linux community in the pages of Fortune. And when Ramji was hired to run open source at Microsoft, as he acknowledged years later, he was a little skeptical of the role — and a little scared.

There were ups, and there were downs. But Ramji’s meeting with Gates meant that the big changes would eventually happen. Not long after the meeting, Microsoft purchased a company called Powerset, a semantic search startup that was among the first companies to run a web service atop Hadoop. After a short hiatus, Microsoft allowed Powerset’s engineers to continue contributing code to the open source project. And for a while, the service continued to run on Hadoop, a means of crunching data across a sea of servers. At some point, the project abandoned the technology and moved the service to Microsoft software, and at least one of the main open source contributors left the company. But Powerset was at least a step in the right direction.

The following year, Ramji and his team prototyped an Amazon-like cloud service using nothing but open source software such as Zend and OpenNebula and Eucalyptus and OpenScale and Hadoop. “We were like the beta squadron,” Ramji remembers. “We were the attack squadron that would come test everybody. We would say: ‘You think you’re ahead? Let us show you what can be done with open source and two weeks of time and some smart Linux guys.”

According to Ramji, the project caused “deep discomfort” among the Microsoft braintrust. The company was already building Azure — then code-named Red Dog — using proprietary technologies. But for Ramji, deep discomfort is a good thing. “Microsoft is at its best when it’s freaking out,” he says. “That’s just it’s mentality. It’s a crisis-oriented company.”

Photo: Anindito Mukherjee/Corbis

The meeting took place a week before Bill Gates retired from Microsoft, and the topic was open source software.

It was the summer of 2008, and for years, the open source community had viewed Microsoft as public enemy number one. Seven years earlier, CEO Steve Ballmer had referred to Linux as a “malignant cancer,” and as recently as the previous summer, Microsoft general counsel Brad Smith and licensing chief Horacio Gutierrez had told Fortune Magazine that Linux violated 235 of its patents, implying that it would soon demand royalties from any big business using the open source OS.

But at the same time, Microsoft realized how powerful the free software movement could be, and the company was exploring ways it could make nice with the ever-growing community of developers who used open source. For two years, Sam Ramji had served as head of open source strategy at Microsoft, and every three months, he met with Bill Gates and other execs to show off various open source technologies put together by a small team of Microsoft engineers.

But that afternoon was different. At the invitation of the company’s chief legal minds — Smith and Gutierrez — Ramji sat down with Gates, chief software architect Ray Ozzie, and a few others to discuss whether Microsoft could actually start using open source software. Ramji and Ozzie were on one side of the argument, insisting that Microsoft embrace open source, and Gutierrez offered a legal framework that could make that possible. But other top executives strongly challenged the idea.

Then Bill Gates stood up. Continuar leyendo «Meet Bill Gates, the Man Who Changed Open Source Software»

La regla de las 10.000 horas, ¿puede aprenderse la genialidad?

Algunos creen que los número uno son dotados por naturaleza, gente tocada por la «varita mágica». Pero la explicación real del éxito es menos glamorosa. El genio podría aprenderse en 10.000 horas de entrenamiento…
Por Néstor Gutman

Nuestra sociedad admira a los número uno. Deportistas, actores y CEOs de alto rendimiento se revisten de un brillo inalcanzable para el común de los mortales.

Con frecuencia, justificamos nuestra gris realidad con la frase: «Son unos pocos afortunados, tocados por la varita mágica del talento innato».

Pero, ¿es realmente así? ¿El Olimpo está reservado para una elite de dotados por naturaleza?

Algunas investigaciones recientes señalan que se trata de una idealización. La explicación real del éxito es mucho menor glamorosa. Y, lo mejor, es que todos podemos formar parte de «los elegidos».

http://www.materiabiz.com/

Por Néstor Gutman

Nuestra sociedad admira a los número uno. Deportistas, actores y CEOs de alto rendimiento se revisten de un brillo inalcanzable para el común de los mortales.

Con frecuencia, justificamos nuestra gris realidad con la frase: «Son unos pocos afortunados, tocados por la varita mágica del talento innato».

Pero, ¿es realmente así? ¿El Olimpo está reservado para una elite de dotados por naturaleza?

5 Website Essentials for Most Effective SEO

SEO is an essential tool for the success of your website (unless you’re Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, or Mark Zuckerberg!). Yet while SEO ‘gets them there’, your website has to ‘keep them there’. If your ultimate goal in undertaking an SEO strategy is to make more money for your business, make sure that your site has these five essentials in place while you’re undertaking your SEO campaign!

http://www.webmarketingexperts.com.au

Can we do content like Apple does hardware?

Apple’s example

Apple sells gear that almost everyone wants. Every laptop, phone and other gadget they design has… something that just make folks happy when put their hands on it. No one can say exactly why, but I suspect a lot of it is the fact that their devices are designed and built with a very specific user in mind. They cater to that user, tailor the entire design around her, and then launch the product.

The iPad is a perfect example. I own one, but I usually skip it in favor of my Kindle – I’m more of a hardcore reader. But I’m not the user Apple was thinking about when they designed the iPad. They were thinking about folks who don’t need a full-fledged laptop, want an easier form factor and touchscreen simplicity.

They designed it carefully, released it, and now it sells in quantities that would make Bill Gates jealous.

So, can we do the same thing for content? If we could, it’d be a lot easier to gain rankings, get attention and maybe even get compensated for the stuff we produce.

by ian

A thought that’s been germinating in my head for some time: People want content that does the same thing. If you can produce online content – text, ebooks, video, whatever – that makes folks want to read it the instant they glance at it, you can get a major internet marketing win.

Apple’s example

Apple sells gear that almost everyone wants. Every laptop, phone and other gadget they design has… something that just make folks happy when put their hands on it. No one can say exactly why, but I suspect a lot of it is the fact that their devices are designed and built with a very specific user in mind. They cater to that user, tailor the entire design around her, and then launch the product.

They designed it carefully, released it, and now it sells in quantities that would make Bill Gates jealous.

So, can we do the same thing for content? If we could, it’d be a lot easier to gain rankings, get attention and maybe even get compensated for the stuff we produce. Continuar leyendo «Can we do content like Apple does hardware?»