The most social companies

Social Media have become a really important part of our lives, we use different social networks all along the day and we use it also while we are in our jobs. NetProspex Social 50 is a ranking of top corporations in America and it’s employees usage of the social networks. NetProspex Social 50 rates the activity of usage of social networks of 100.000 business contact records from their database plus information provided to them by Rapleaf a social data provider.

The top ten of the ranking:

The first company of the ranking is Microsoft with the better score in the list, followed by eBay for a long distance (306 points of Microsoft vs 208 points of eBay). The activity of the employees of this companies was analyzed in the following social networks:

- Facebook

- Linkedin

- Twitter

- MySpace

- Friendster

- Flickr

- LiveJournal

- Hi5

- Flixter

NetProspex has also prepared a Twitter ranking too, and the winner is Microsoft again, this Twitter ranking analyzes the number of followers, the number following, as well as the number of tweets. The social network most used by employees of companies according to NetProspex data is Linkedin it’s used by more than the 30% of the employees of these companies, followed by Facebook used by more than the 10% of the employees of these companies.

Social networks are important tools that can help employees of any company to do their jobs in a better way, this new reality of instant connections can make us more productive and agile, the Social Media revolution is going to change the way we work and we communicate with each other and it is important that all employees of all companies know how to correctly use these powerful tools.

What we want from technology?

We create technology to fit our needs, wants and desires. We have been developing technology since we appeared on earth, our first big technology discovery was the wheel and since then we haven’t stopped creating and developing new technologies to meet our needs.

Technology of our days has nothing in common with that primitive technology that was developed to help us with primary tasks, in the past we need to resolve problems like hunting faster or making fire. Nowadays our needs are more sophisticated, Siri’s recent release is a perfect example of how our wants, desires and needs are becoming very complex. Siri was born to change the way we interact with mobile devices, it’s a technology that makes the mobile experience better, and helps humans to make a better use of the mobile devices. Siri is also helping blind people to improve their use of mobile technology.

Technology is the engine of big and powerful industries, but it’s also the heart of amazing projects that help people with their lives. We develop new technologies to help ourselves and to have a better life. GPS, Smartphones, and Social Networks, makes us a kind of super-humans, with skills such as communicating with others in seconds, finding everything we want wherever it is or being available to everyone everywhere we go.

This interesting features are making our world a better place, we have to use this technological knowledge to make things that could help other humans to improve their quality of life and to make our wold a fairer place to live. Technology of our days is designed around how people naturally do things, so it’s really easy to know how something works. This interesting fact make us think that the future will be a really amazing place where technology will serve us.

Oink: Rate it all!

Kevin Rose is a really active Internet entrepreneur, he is the co-founder of Revision3, Pownce, Digg and Milk. Milk, his latest creation is a company focused on creating mobile applications. The first application designed by Milk is Oink a really intereseting application where you don’t rate places, you rate the things inside.

The community around Oink is growing very fast and a lot of investors are interested on Milk’s projects. Recently Google Ventures has invested $1.5 million in a seed round.

In the next video you can see Erick Schonfeld from Techcrunch interviewing Kevin Rose and testing Oink with Kevin in Milk’s headquarters in San Francisco.

OpenSource E-commerce Solutions

There are on the Internet a lot of e-commerce solutions from different providers, nowadays a lot of people want to start it’s own e-commerce project, OpenSource solutions are a great opportunity to start and learn the rules of e-commerce. In this post we want to show you a few OpenSource e-commerce platforms for your online store.

Magento

Recently acquired by eBay, Magento is the world’s fastest growing e-commerce platform. Magento has really cool features and it’s used by important online retailers to empower their stores. It has two editions, Enterprise Edition which you have to pay for and Community Edition that is free and a really interesting option for your own online store. Magento is probably the most robust opensource e-commerce platform available on the Internet.

Prestashop

“The french Magento”. This e-commerce platform is really well known in Europe, a project made in France that is helping a lot of merchants to have their e-commerce project online. It’s easy to install and to configure, in a few steps you can start selling your products on the Internet. It’s recommended for beginners but it has professional features too.

osCommerce

The most popular e-commerce platform. osCommerce is absolutely free under the GNU General Public License. The platform has a big community of developers behind who have created a lot of add-ons to personalize the platform. With osCommerce is really easy to have your online store working.

VirtueMart

VirtueMart is a really interesting platform for those who have worked with Joomla. This platform needs Joomla to work and has nice features for customers and for merchants. An easy way to start your e-commerce site.

This OpenSource solutions can help you to start an online business, when your store grow up you can order a customized platform to meet your needs.

Nice animated infographic

The guys from CNET UK have prepared a nice beautiful animated infographic where we can watch the iPhone’s history. What innovations have been developed to create the iPhone? A lot of people and a lot of technology developement was necessary to create the iPhone and this video is a trip to discover the elements that contributed to the iPhone becoming what it is today.

Really nice tribute to Steve Jobs

Social Commerce

The new step on the e-commerce stage is the Social Commerce, as eBay CEO John Donahoe said: “We’ll see more change in how consumers shop and pay in the next three years than we’ve seen in the last 15 years”. The revolution is arriving to our lives, eBay and Facebook have established a new partnership to empower Social Commerce.

We're starting to see a few integration projects of e-commerce in social networks as Facebook, this integrations are not the future of social commerce but are the beginning of it, social commerce will be a new reality in which our electronic life will be enhanced by the shopping experience, everything we want at the moment we want, fast and easy for everybody. Buying the same clothes that your friend is wearing in the latest photo that he uploaded to Facebook, or buying the book your friend read, will be a reality in a few months or years.

The partnership between Facebook and eBay includes the integration of Facebook’s Open Graph into eBay Magento and GSI global commerce platforms. This partnership gives third party developers a bigger voice in the development of social commerce. The social commerce experience will not be owned alone by Facebook, this are great news for the e-commerce developers community, the opportunities are just beginning for everybody, nothing is done and everyone can contribute to this new reality.

Social Commerce is considered by a few as the next bubble on the Internet, but others consider it the next revolution, is time to contribute, to develop new applications, to offer to the people new buying experiences. E-commerce was considered a few years ago as something that was just for geeks, today everybody is buying food, clothes or technology on the Internet and e-commerce stores like Amazon are bigger than telecommunication companies, and this e-commerce projects continues growing year by year with a growth rate that is impossible to reach for other business

New risks for companies

Thanks to a recent survey, PricewaterhouseCoopers has detected that social networks and mobile devices are the most important new risks for the company’s information security. Companies have to adapt their security strategies to a new reality that comes in a difficult economic time, this complicates the possibility to develope quick and effective strategies to improve security

To conduct the survey PWC have interviewed more than 9600 executives responsible for security and technology, someof the most interesting is that for example 57% of respondents did not have a security strategy on Social Media or mobile gadgets, in Spain this percentage rises to 62.5% quite remarkable percentage considering the penetration in Spain of social networks and mobile gadgets.

On the other hand 54% of respondents believe that cloud computing is improving security systems, this is an interesting fact that reflects the favorable reception that is taking the cloud in the business.

Organized attacks known as Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) are one of the most important emerging risks, these attacks target international organizations systems, they attack systems vulnerabilities and seriously damage the computer systems of large and important organizations. Overall (72%) respondents trust in their security systems, and a half of the respondents estimate that the budget on security will be increased on their companies in the next twelve months.

Companies are facing hard times, the information leakage risk is increasing due to staff cutbacks and low cost strategies, this facts makes it difficult to achieve desired security objectives for companies.

Security systems have to be adapted to this new reality, a lot of people in the staff of different companies are using social networks, the messages sent by them contain professional and personal information and this messages can cause an impact on the company reputation or can damage the security of the company, a new reality has born and companies must be prepared for it.