jueves, septiembre 03, 2009

5 consejos para "evangelistas" varados.


9:00 AM Friday August 28, 2009
5 Tips for Stranded Evangelists
by Alexandra Samuel


"I don't think my boss really gets this project. I mean, he still thinks social media is all about marketing! And I'm so tired of fighting to do it right."

This is the hymn of the Stranded Evangelist: the person who is taking a company or organization into new territory, territory that makes other people (especially the ones in charge) incredibly uncomfortable.

As a social media consultant, I've worked with lots of these stranded evangelists who had the insight to see that online community and social media were the way of the future, and the nerve to advocate for that kind of innovation.

Stranded evangelists exist at the frontier of any kind of innovation or new field. It's an uncomfortable role. The stranded evangelist spends a lot of time arguing, a lot of time building a case, and a lot of time feeling like the company and the bosses don't understand what's important.

Still every stranded evangelist I've worked with has gone on to incredible success in their organization.

They've won huge promotions or bigger jobs with better companies because while their organizations may go along grudgingly, they go along.

Successful organizations are driven by just these kinds of innovators: the people who see around the next curve, and are willing to push the organization in that direction.



Whether you're pushing for social media or for a completely different kind of business innovation, social media can help you take the stranded evangelist's path to success. Here's how:

  1. Look ahead of the curve. If you're relying on print publications to keep up-to-date in your field, you're guaranteed to be 3-6 months behind. Track the keywords for your field in delicious and keep an eye on the pages and blog posts that are being frequently bookmarked. Find the top bloggers--the people whose ideas are too edgy to make it into the mainstream quite yet--and read them regularly. Participate in webinars geared to top thinkers in your field. Follow twitterers who are posting innovative ideas and links. Cast a wide net until you find the smart, challenging voices that inspire you to think in new ways.
  2. Don't tell people what they want to hear. Most of us spend a lot of time telling people what they want to hear--in meetings, in conversation, and on our blogs or tweets. But real innovators aren't afraid to stick their necks out and say or tweet what they really think. Use your own blog, LinkedIn page or tweets to increase your comfort saying the unexpected (or the unwelcome) and to build your skill at diplomatic dissent. Practice (respectful, sensitive) truth-telling in personal conversations online as a way of building your courage for professional truth-telling offline.
  3. Follow your heart. If you try to think your way to the leading edge, you're doomed. The volume of ideas and information online makes it virtually impossible to sift and analyze your way to the very best of the best. There always will be a new new thing, and in my experience, searching for the bleeding edge is just a recipe for blood loss. We jumped into Second Life the way we've seen others jump into social media ("gotta get me some social media!") and ended up spending thousands of dollars on a software project that never saw the light of day. We've done much better since we stopped worrying about what "web 3.0" might turn out to be, and focused on innovating where we're passionate: social media. Follow your passions and instincts, and you'll naturally be drawn to the areas of innovation that suit you.
  4. Get un-stranded. You may be the only one in your company who "gets it", but that doesn't mean you're alone. Look for the people in your industry or field who are blogging or twittering about the kinds of innovation you're advocating. Comment on their blog posts, or better yet, write your own blog post in response. Retweet their innovative ideas or respond by twittering your own.
  5. Hire a buddy. You wouldn't swim alone; you don't need to evangelize alone, either. Dig into that network for an employee, consultant or colleague who can back you up when it's time to make your case. LinkedIn and Twitter are both great places to discover people in (or outside) your organization who will help build the case for innovation.

It takes insight, courage and diplomacy to be a stranded evangelist for any kind of innovation. Just remember: today's stranded evangelist is tomorrow's visionary and respected leader.

Copyright © 2009 Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation.
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COPYRIGHT © 2008 DePapaya.com
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martes, julio 21, 2009

SIG-Soluciones = mapas + información


Julio 20, 2009
Soluciones = mapas + información
Guillermo Santos Calderón

OPINION


Mapfront Manager y Mapfront Triplog productos/servicios SIG por Geinsys/DePapaya

En el sector de la tecnología, muchas veces se pasan por alto innovaciones muy importantes, que por su propia naturaleza se ven como especializadas o de nicho, cuando no lo son. Eso era lo que creía sobre todo lo que tenía que ver con la cartografía y elementos relacionados. En mi caso, lo único que tenía que ver con ellos eran los mapas y los GPS o sistemas de posicionamiento global.

En un evento celebrado la semana pasada en San Diego (California), organizado por la empresa ESRI, líder en el mundo en el tema de GIS -sistemas de información geográfica- y representado en Colombia por Procálculo Prosis, pude apreciar cómo se puede administrar mucho mejor la información siempre y cuando se encuentre ubicada sobre mapas.

Imagínense un mapa de Colombia al que se le sobrepone la capa de información de niños de bajos recursos con dificultades para ir al colegio y luego se le agrega la capa de escuelas públicas ubicadas en el territorio nacional. Inmediatamente, y sin mucho esfuerzo, se podría saber si los colegios estatales se encuentran ubicados cerca de esa población y cuánto se podrían demorar los niños en llegar a la más cercana. Si sobre esas capas de información se le agrega la de servicios de transporte y la de carreteras, se podría saber muy claramente si para poder asistir a clases existen posibilidades de transporte o si toca caminar por la selva o cruzando por cables entre montes, como se ha confirmado que se hace en algunos sitios.

Con este ejemplo sólo pretendo ilustrar los beneficios que la tecnología SIG -sistemas de información geográficos- le puede traer al país. Un mejor ordenamiento territorial, tema en el que el Instituto Geográfico Agustín Codazzi está trabajando intensamente y con éxito, una mejor visualización de la información ubicada sobre mapas y cuya relación, al verla visualmente en los sitios en los que está ocurriendo, permite que se tomen mejores decisiones, son apenas unos pocos beneficios de esta tecnología. ¿Qué tal ofrecer por Internet mapas de las principales ciudades de Colombia en los que se puedan ver los sitios de mayor criminalidad junto con los CAI más cercanos?

Este es, sin duda, un tema que requiere un mayor espacio para explicarlo bien. Sin embargo, es importante que se abran los ojos para visualizar las inmensas posibilidades que se obtienen al usar sistemas de información geográficos para la toma de decisiones. Al fin y al cabo, información es algo sobre un hecho que sucede en algún sitio, y poderla ver sobre un mapa es lo ideal ver lo que está pasando.

guisan@eltiempo.com.co


COPYRIGHT © 2008 CASA EDITORIAL EL TIEMPO S.A.
Prohibida su reproducción total o parcial, así como su traducción a cualquier idioma sin autorización escrita de su titular.
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lunes, julio 06, 2009

Nuevo Router WiFi Dlink DIR-685. Tan completo cómo enloquecedor.

State of the Art
A Router So Complete, and Vexing
By DAVID POGUE
Published: July 1, 2009

Stuart Goldenberg

Even before someone coined the term "mashup," mashups were popular in the technology world. Some are made in heaven, and are now standard pairings: clock+radio, refrigerator+freezer, cellphone+camera.

Others are still on the early-adopter fringe: TV+Internet, camera+Internet, fridge+Internet.

This month, D-Link, the networking equipment company, will offer a mashup that nobody's ever tried before: wireless router + home backup hard drive + digital picture frame. That, in a nutshell, is the D-Link DIR-685 ($300 list price).

The 685's heart is in the right place. Its inventors have noticed that our high-tech homes are becoming cluttered with network-related gadgets and their associated cable creep. As long as people are going to buy all these different network gadgets, D-Link figures, why not combine them into one?

It's the right idea. Unfortunately, D-Link is the wrong company to make it a reality.

First, the good news: once you get the 685 set up, it works very well indeed. It broadcasts your Internet connection wirelessly — a fast, strong Wi-Fi signal (802.11n). This single router turned my entire house into a Wi-Fi hot spot, thanks to its ability to blast through floors and walls. I was even getting three bars of signal (out of a possible four) all the way upstairs.

Every conceivable home router feature is on this machine's configuration screens: port forwarding, Application Rules, individual Web site blocking, a sophisticated firewall, UPnP, Multicast Streams, Wake on LAN, users and groups, network access lists, scheduled lockouts, logs, security formats like WPA and WEP, remote management and much, much more. (And no, I'm not going to define those. If you're among the geeks D-Link is apparently courting with this router, you know perfectly well what those things are.)

But you can get a much less expensive router with those features. The 685's selling point is that it has some unique tricks up its sleeve.

One of them is a tiny (3.2 inch) color screen. It's useful for inspecting the router's settings, but it can also display dozens of Internet information widgets: weather, New York Times headlines, stocks, sports scores, stocks, Twitter posts and — delightfully — photos from your Flickr or Facebook accounts. It's as if your router is now a Chumby, if you remember that desktop gadget.

(Too bad you can't make the screen show you exactly what other people in the house or office are downloading or reading online. Now that would be an interesting feature.)

The 685's case is so attractive (its antennas are concealed inside), and its widget feature is so cool that you might be tempted to set the thing on your desk and glance at its parade of Internet info-bits throughout the day. Unfortunately, nobody will do that; this thing has a really, really loud fan. If you're close enough to the router to see your photos and widgets, you're also close enough to be driven mad by its jet-engine whirring. Bedroom placement is out of the question.

The 685 also has a slot on the side for a hard drive, which is not included. That's O.K.; that way, you can buy your own hard drive online, in the capacity you desire. (Shop for a "2.5-inch SATA" hard drive.) Once you click it into place, the router's screen offers you the chance to format the hard drive, and you're off and running.

Why would you want a hard drive in your Wi-Fi base station? Because now it's a NAS drive (network-attached storage), which is geek-speak for "a hard drive that every computer in the house can access at once, wirelessly."

For example, the whole family can use it as a backup hard drive. You can use it as a central storage repository for files that everybody needs — including, intriguingly, your whole family's iTunes music collection. That's right: put your iTunes folder on this drive, and now all computers can play whatever music is in it. The router's name shows up at the left side of the iTunes window as if it's an iPod, which is very cool.

You can even teach the 685 to download BitTorrent files in your absence. That's right, software pirates, you can have it download huge TV and movie files even while you and your laptop are out of the house. You have to know the Web address of the file you want, and you have to paste that into the router's extremely technical configuration pages in your Web browser. But once you do that, you can go away, confident that the downloaded files will be on the D-Link's hard drive when you return.

The cherry on top is a feature called SharePort. It lets you connect a U.S.B. scanner, hard drive or printer — and once you do, any Mac or PC on the wireless network can use it.

All of this is great, right? So what's the problem?

User-friendliness is the problem. Frankly, you'd have better luck figuring out how to fly the Space Shuttle.




The frustration begins with the bright orange sticker that's been slapped across the network jacks on the back. The sticker says "STOP — Do not proceed until you've run the setup software CD."

What's wrong with that? Three things. First, it's directing you to work through a multistep, complex, user-hostile procedure — wiring the D-Link router to a PC that already has a wired Internet connection, then running the pointlessly protracted installation software — that's actually unnecessary. The router works just by plugging it into power and your modem.

Second, the setup software CD works only on Windows — no Macs or Linux, thank you. D-Link doesn't mention this limitation on the box, on the setup sheet or even on the CD itself.

Third, when you finally try to remove the orange sticker, it shreds, leaving gummy residue and paper fragments precisely where they shouldn't be: in the Ethernet jacks.

It goes on. For example, the Quick Start sheet instructs you to connect a cable to the router's WAN port — but that port is not identified anywhere. There are five identical featureless and unlabeled Ethernet jacks on the router. Which one's the WAN port? Let's play Ethernet roulette!

Above all — and this is the mind-blowing part — D-Link is selling this very complex piece of consumer technology without a single word of instructions for the features that make it unique.

Those cool features like sharing a hard drive, sharing an iTunes library, downloading BitTorrent, connecting a U.S.B. scanner or printer that all computers can share? There's not a single syllable about them in the user guide.

The user guide is a PDF document on the CD — you don't get a printed book, of course — so what would it have cost D-Link to write up these features?

D-Link's PR person suggested that the elusive instructions might be on the company's Web site. (They weren't.) In the end, it took a D-Link product manager a day to figure out how to work these features himself and supply me with the instructions. He says that he'll have them posted on D-Link's Web site by the time the 685 goes on sale. (Caution: They entail mucking around in the router's advanced HTML-based configuration pages. Technophobes need not apply.)

Isn't it amazing that, after all these years, it still hasn't dawned on companies like D-Link that simplicity sells? They still don't get it: spending a little money up front —on hardware design, streamlined software, better manuals — would save a fortune in tech-support calls and store returns.

Not that D-Link is spending much on tech support anyway; my call was answered by clueless agents in a call center who gave me incorrect instructions. And reaching them involves the silliest phone menu in existence. After you dial the technical support phone number listed on the Quick Start guide, the options begin: "For priority VARs, press 9..."

In short, D-Link has gone to the considerable expense of inventing, designing and marketing a smart machine that could save a lot of people a lot of cost and complexity — and then hobbled it by making it much too cryptic and technical for 90 percent of its potential audience.

The DIR-685, in other words, is a very cool mashup — but at the moment, it's also a bit mashed up.


E-mail: pogue@nytimes.com


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viernes, julio 03, 2009

Firefox 3.5 ya está listo !!

June 30, 2009
Firefox 3.5 Is Live and Downloadable
by Michael Muchmore


After four beta versions and three release candidates, Firefox 3.5 has finally been released into the world as the latest version of the second most popular Web browser on the planet. The new version brings a private browsing mode, faster JavaScript performance, and support for emerging HTML 5 standards such as plug-in-free video and audio playing.

Users can download the new version of Firefoxfor Windows, Mac OS, and Linux in more than 70 languages from www.getfirefox.com.

"So much is happening on the Web right now, it's a great time for browsers. Firefox 3.5 brings together the most innovative Web technologies and delivers them in the most complete and powerful modern browser," said John Lilly, chief executive of Mozilla, in a statement.

Mozilla's Mike Beltzner, who leads the Firefox team, expects the new release to bring the total number of Firefox downloads over 1 billion for all versions.

The browser also includes new technology that will allow users to tell sites their location, which will let sites deliver relevant information, for example, about nearby eateries and businesses. The features uses Google Location Services, which obtains your whereabouts using a database of WiFi access points and other known IP addresses.

Though JavaScript performance is more than twice as fast with the browser's new TraceMonkey engine, it still trails Chrome on benchmark tests performed by PCMag.com. The new video and audio support make use of the Ogg Vorbis and Ogg Theora open source codecs, but these are yet to be adopted by the Web's governing body, the W3C, as official standards.

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viernes, junio 26, 2009

Las diez preguntas que todo Agente de cambio debe responder.

1:43 PM Thursday June 18, 2009
The 10 Questions Every Change Agent Must Answer
Bill Taylor
Practically Radical


As leaders, we have no control over how fast markets grow or how wisely banks lend. But we do control our own mindsets and "animal spirits"— the phrase coined by John Maynard Keynes in the depth of the Great Depression. If all you've got is a spreadsheet filled with red ink and dire forecasts, it's easy to be paralyzed by fear and resistant to change. But if you can summon some leadership nerve, then hard times can be a great time to separate yourself from the pack and build advantages for years to come.

Indeed, when it comes to creating the future, the only thing more worrisome than the prospect of too much change may be too little change — especially in an economy where there are too many competitors chasing too few customers with products and services that look too much alike. Now is the time to rethink long-held strategic assumptions inside your company, to challenge decades of conventional wisdom in your industry, and to push yourself to learn, grow, and innovate. As Albert Einstein famously said, "Problems cannot be solved at the same level of awareness that created them." Or, in the spirit of some unknown Texas genius: "If all you ever do is all you've ever done, then all you'll ever get is all you ever got."

It's time to do — and get — something different. Here, then, are ten questions that leaders must ask of themselves and their organizations — questions that speak to the challenges of change at a moment when change is the name of the game. The leaders with the best answers win.

1. Do you see opportunities the competition doesn't see?

IDEO's Tom Kelly likes to quote French novelist Marcel Proust, who famously said, "The real act of discovery consists not in finding new lands but in seeing with new eyes." The most successful companies don't just out-compete their rivals. They redefine the terms of competition by embracing one-of-a-kind ideas in a world of me-too thinking.

2. Do you have new ideas about where to look for new ideas?

One way to look at problems as if you're seeing them for the first time is to look at a wide array of fields for ideas that have been working for a long time. Ideas that are routine in one industry can be revolutionary when they migrate to another industry, especially when they challenge the prevailing assumptions that have come to define so many industries.

3. Are you the most of anything?

You can't be "pretty good" at everything anymore. You have to be the most of something: the most affordable, the most accessible, the most elegant, the most colorful, the most transparent. Companies used to be comfortable in the middle of the road — that's where all the customers were. Today, the middle of the road is the road to ruin. What are you the most of?

4. If your company went out of business tomorrow, who would miss you and why?

I first heard this question from advertising legend Roy Spence, who says he got it from Jim Collins of Good to Great fame. Whatever the original source, the question is as profound as it is simple — and worth taking seriously as a guide to what really matters.

5. Have you figured out how your organization's history can help to shape its future?

Psychologist Jerome Bruner has a pithy way to describe what happens when the best of the old informs the search for the new. The essence of creativity, he argues, is "figuring out how to use what you already know in order to go beyond what you already think." The most creative leaders I've met don't disavow the past. They rediscover and reinterpret what's come before as a way to develop a line of sight into what comes next.

6. Can your customers live without you?

If they can, they probably will. The researchers at Gallup have identified a hierarchy of connections between companies and their customers — from confidence to integrity to pride to passion. To test for passion, Gallup asks a simple question: "Can you imagine a world without this product?" One of the make-or-break challenges for change is to become irreplaceable in the eyes of your customers.

7. Do you treat different customers differently?

If your goal is to become indispensable to your customers, then almost by definition you won't appeal to all customers. In a fickle and fast-changing world, one test of how committed a company is to its most important customers is how fearless it is about ignoring customers who aren't central to its mission. Not all customers are created equal.

8. Are you getting the best contributions from the most people?

It may be lonely at the top, but change is not a game best played by loners. These days, the most powerful contributions come from the most unexpected places — the "hidden genius" inside your company, the "collective genius" of customers, suppliers, and other smart people who surround your company. Tapping this genius requires a new leadership mindset — enough ambition to address tough problems, enough humility to know you don't have all the answers.

9. Are you consistent in your commitment to change?

Pundits love to excoriate companies because they don't have the guts to change. In fact, the problem with many organizations is that all they do is change. They lurch from one consulting firm to the next, from the most recent management fad to the newest. If, as a leader, you want to make deep-seated change, then your priorities and practices have to stay consistent in good times and bad.

10. Are you learning as fast as the world is changing?

I first heard this question from strategy guru Gary Hamel, and it may be the most urgent question facing leaders in every field. In a world that never stops changing, great leaders can never stop learning. How do you push yourself as an individual to keep growing and evolving — so that your company can do the same?
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