Welcome!

This section will introduce new technologies, concepts, educational or cool things i discover about the Internet and in the technology space.

Designed for the layman not the technocrat.

Rich Internet Applications

Or RIA, if you want to know the industry term for them, are springing up everywhere... it's the new standard of websites.

The most exciting find i have come across recently is a website service called Yourminis which is simply superb.

It is a free service that allows you to have rich, exciting, customised browser start pages that you can build from a HUGE variety of drag and drop widgets. You can configure up to 16 pages per account, so you could have one for your daily routines, a blogging page, social network page, research page etc. etc.

I use them extensively and they allow you to organise yourself like never before. You don't need to have any knowledge of html or  any web coding... you just select a widget from the palette and drag it where you want it to be, re-size it, colour it, make it more transparent or even re-skin it if you like.

You have notepads, todo lists, bookmarks, RSS feeds, clocks, generic video players, social network profiles, photo displays or slide shows, background images, web cam viewers... i can go on and on... best you have a look for yourself.

Here is an example page to look at because you can also share your pages too.

Web 2.0 & Data mashup Pipes

This service is hot and this type of application is a good example of what we will see a lot more of on the net in the near future.

Yahoo's description of their new pipes service:

"What Is Pipes?

Pipes is a hosted service that lets you remix feeds and create new data mashups in a visual programming environment. The name of the service pays tribute to Unix pipes, which let programmers do astonishingly clever things by making it easy to chain simple utilities together on the command line."

Visit Yahoo Pipes it is a very cool service that you may want to embrace.

Now, for example you can have one RSS News Feed aggregating all the news subjects from mulitiple sources that you are interested in... this is just one example of what you can do.

Getting Rich off Those Who Work for Free

Read this interesting article from TIME by Justin Fox which talks of the 'gift economy' which overlaps with open-source and the new crowdsource identity... the new way of doing business.

Quote from the article: "one of the most interesting questions in business has become how much work people will do for free...."

Also this is also a very good free read:
The Wealth of Networks - How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom by Yochai Benkler, Yale University Press

"the economic benefits of "peer production" of software and other information products--from journalism to scientific research to videos of people mixing Mentos and Diet Coke.

So what is crowdsourcing

The IT industry is renowned for creating new buzz words... what does crowdsourcing mean?

Well, simply put, it means harvesting the wisdom of the crowd to assist a company in getting new ideas for doing business, system developements (like opensource), marketing, coding, brainstorming... basically anything and everything that people can do in the processes of business and indeed other projects like writing books, composing music etc etc.

iF you are interested then visit this blog which focuses on crowdsourcing and the resources around the net to go futher into it.

Here is another good reference to crowdsourcing... BNET.

Cambrian House Update

Cambrian House, the innovative crowdsourcing company based in Alberta, Canada, has now introduced a $10,000 prize award of seed financing for the winners of their IdeaWarz tournaments which they regularly run every few weeks.

The objective of Cambrian House is to be the definitive platform for crowdsourcing or as one of the community members put it, to be the "ebay of crowdsourcing" and the way that they are going about it, i think they are well on their way to achieve this goal. They have attracted a community of sharp, vibrant, creative, informed and excellent minds, from all areas of disciplines, techies, artists, journalists, marketeers, business people, ideas people that are , as i am, convinced that this model is the way of the future for developments and allows the everyday man in the street to realise their dreams of success... it is more than opensource with money.

Here is part of the entry from their blog in regard to the new prize awards... to read the complete article go here

So you want to be rich too?

Stupid question... of course you do!

Well, if you have some neat software or web ideas that would translate into big earnings and you don't have the money, time or expertise to accomplish them on your own... well, this is the place to go to CambrianHouse.

Check it out, these guys have some neat ideas of their own and so does the community supporting them.

They can take your genius idea and turn it into reality. Its called CrowdSource... go there and find out how you could be the next Bill Gates, Google, My Space or YouTube!

Intro!