Saturday, February 11, 2012

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Corporations And Now Government?

Steve Jobs while presenting the iPad in San Fr...Image via WikipediaRIM is in trouble. Their flagship BlackBerry is in serious trouble. The iOS assault is total.

BusinessWeek: U.S. Air Force May Buy 18,000 Apple IPad2s for Flight Crews

Steve Jobs stayed true to the consumer. That is how he started his career. That is how he ended his career. But now the iPhone and the iPad together are going places that Steve Jobs studiously avoided. He disliked the idea of having to sell to this one CIO person who would decide on behalf of hundreds and perhaps thousands of people working in that company. Instead he preferred to go straight to the consumer.

That still has not changed. It is not the CIOs of the world that are making these decisions. Those Apple loving consumers, guess what, many of them work for these companies. Ends up many of them also work for government.

And RIM is being pushed off the cliff.

If 90% Of The People Start Voting

A stylized representation of a red flag, usefu...Image via WikipediaA Facebook Supported Online Parliament

These blog posts probably belong at my other Barackface blog, but never mind.

I was thinking, if Facebook were to manage to create an online parliament for an entire country, the percentage of people voting might shoot into the sky. The average in mature democracies right now is 50% I think. I can see that going up to an unheard of 90%.

It is like in Nepal there was a democracy movement in 1990. And it was successful. Nepal became a multi-party democracy. Before that it was a monarchy that called itself a no party democracy. As in, there was a parliament. What else do you need to be a democracy, right?

Anyways, there was now democracy. But then the communists came out of the woodworks. The most ultra among them called for a boycotting of the "bourgeois" election. 60% of the people voted. Those communists then claimed that means 40% of the people sided with them! Go figure.

But then I just had to share that relevant story.

A Facebook Supported Online Parliament


I just came across this interesting idea on TechCrunch.

Jon Evans: Is Facebook Finally Going To Do Something Interesting?

An online parliament would be nice. The administrator would invite people or keep the voter pool open. The online parliament would allow for the holding of elections and subsequent debates.

Say I run an organization that has 500 members. I would use the Facebook Online Parliament to get all members to join, and then to hold elections, and to hold subsequent debates. The debate of course would include the organization's budget.

The election process has the nomination process. Say there are five offices and 30 people running for each of them. The organization should have the option to hold a run off election between the top two vote getters.

I think it would be fun. It would be great. It would make some serious noise if Facebook were to make it possible to do this at large scales. How about being able to do it for an organization with 10,000 members? Or a country with half a million people? Or, god forbid, a country with 50 million people? The election commission of the country would have to put together an official list saying these Facebook members are voting citizens. That would be a challenge, but a much lesser challenge than is the putting together of the current offline voter lists. They leave out too many people in the first place.

This would be huge.

This is not Facebook Groups. The Facebook Online Parliament would be a whole different ball game, a different magnitude altogether.

I hope they nail this by the next F8 Conference.

This online parliament would be great for democratic organizations where each person is one vote. Something different would have to be built for corporate organizations. Facebook should go ahead and built that too.

Buy Asana. Integrate it into Facebook. Add features.

Friday, February 10, 2012

Have Started Playing CityVille


I am a pretty accomplished farmer at Farmville on Facebook. But then I have not been active in months. I have played Angry Birds on Google+. But today I decided to play CityVille on the Google+ platform. It is fun.

I had managed to never spend a dime on Farmville. Cityville cost me 10 bucks on the first day. I am like, I can't wait, let's go get some energy. That was five bucks. Before you know I had put down another five bucks for a few thousand coins.

The Zynga business model works.

I am in mind to go back to growing my city only organically, as they say in tech startup world. Act lean.

I see me spending a few minutes every day to slowly build my city.

Farmville Farmer's Market: My Idea
Played Farmville After Long Months
Farmville Has Not Been Loading For Me
Farmville's Got Competition

Now This Is What I Call A Blog Post

KickstarterKickstarter (Photo credit: Laughing Squid)There are blog posts and there are blog posts. Check out this blog post by the phenomenon by the name of Kickstarter.
There are crazy days and then there are days like yesterday. Kickstarter has experienced some frantic hours but nothing like what happened in the 24-hour span between Wednesday at 6:54pm and Thursday at 6:44pm. Two million-dollar projects, a major political speech involving Kickstarter, an amazing band launching a project for a comeback 20 years in the making... the list goes on. Here's a minute-by-minute breakdown of the day's events.
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HTML5


Wikipedia: HTML5
the fifth revision of the HTML standard (created in 1990 and standardized as HTML4 as of 1997) ...... core aims have been to improve the language with support for the latest multimedia while keeping it easily readable by humans and consistently understood by computers and devices (web browsers, parsers, etc.). HTML5 is intended to subsume not only HTML 4, but XHTML 1 and DOM Level 2 HTML as well ..... introduces markup and application programming interfaces (APIs) for complex web applications ...... Many features of HTML5 have been built with the consideration of being able to run on low-powered devices such as smartphones and tablets. In December 2011 research firm Strategy Analytics forecast sales of HTML5 compatible phones will top 1 billion in 2013. ...... new video, audio and canvas elements, as well as the integration of Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) content that replaces the uses of generic object tags ........ new elements, such as section, article, header and nav, are designed to enrich the semantic content of documents ...... The W3C is developing a comprehensive test suite to achieve broad interoperability for the full specification by 2014, which is now the target date for Recommendation. ..... advancing HTML5 to Recommendation provides the entire Web ecosystem with a stable, tested, interoperable standard. ...... Ian Hickson of Google is the editor of HTML5. ...... Some deprecated elements from HTML 4.01 have been dropped, including purely presentational elements such as font and center, whose effects are achieved using Cascading Style Sheets. There is also a renewed emphasis on the importance of DOM scripting (e.g., JavaScript) in Web behavior. ......... In addition to specifying markup, HTML5 specifies scripting application programming interfaces (APIs) ...... The canvas element for immediate mode 2D drawing. ..... Timed media playback ..... Offline Web Applications ..... Document editing ...... Drag-and-drop .... Cross-document messaging ..... Browser history management .... MIME type and protocol handler registration ..... Microdata .... Web Storage, a key-value pair storage framework that provides behaviour similar to Cookies but with larger storage capacity and improved API. ..... Geolocation .... HTML5 alone cannot provide animation within web pages. Either JavaScript or CSS3 is necessary for animating HTML elements. ..... XHTML5 is the XML serialization of HTML5. .... XHTML5 requires XML's strict, well-formed syntax. ...... September 2011, 34 of the world's top 100 Web sites were using HTML5 ..... As of 1 April 2011, this logo is official. ..... The W3C then said the logo "represents HTML5, the cornerstone for modern Web applications".