Technology As Innovator

A. What happened, basically

Chip did a very nice coverage with her immediate post Twitter SaiGon 1st Gathering. Thanks a lot Chip, it wouldn’t never have been successful without you.

B. What happened in details

The detailed agenda included the normal information exchange and 3 main sections as listed below:

B. 1. E-Learner Platform 2.0

Two students, Mat and Hung, and starting to build their grand program on teaching children on an E-Learning environment which emphasizes Openness and Cost-saving and takes advantages of Web 2.0

Hung’s presentation immediately inspired many interesting debates. Apart from popular arguments on technology, costs and practicability of the tools, what impressed me most was that we brought the Willingness for Alternative Solutions on the table. We didn’t stop at the fad of new tools, we touched the heart of a Mindset issue.

For now, to avoid repeating Hung’s words duplicating Hung’s contents, I invite you to CLICK HERE to see their slide show for the program.

B. 2. BarCamp Saigon

“BarCamp is an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos and interaction from participants.”

So why would you want to join the BarCamp in Saigon:

1. If you’re a geek, you know what you do
2. If you’re in the technology field, this is a chance for you to meet with people with similar interests love
3. It’s a learning opportunity
4. It’s not only for networking. It’s open and honest
5. It’s a chance for you to see, hear, touch and talk about new things fresh right out of people’s head
6. If you’re an analyst, come over here to this information goldmine
7. Even if you’re not in technology, you might want to come here and share the problems you have in your jobs and maybe someone with a technical expertise can help with a solution you’ve never thought of
8. Start-ups, meet people here!
9. Venture capitalists, all geek faces around the region are here
10. Please feel free to add your point here or with a comment below

Please simply put the date in your calendar: 15/11/2008

B. 3. Mentioning some web services

Google, Navigos’ Caravat and Yahoo! Portal clone Timnhanh. Only quickly through though; we didn’t dig deep down on each.

B. 4. An investment opportunity

…on technology, blogging and media… something that’s never been done in Vietnam.

You don’t want to miss the next part. I know you don’t want to miss the next gathering. Please CLICK HERE to subscribe, you’ll never miss the next good things.

C. My Key Observations

Obviously, the topics don’t want to go away from my mind so easily. There are some few things I’ve observed from our gathering that I’d like to share:

C. 1. CommunicatioN first, then media

The gathering is an evidence of “CommunicatioN, not CommunicationS“. Technology (Twitter) serves as a platform to build and strengthen the human quality of communicatioN.

C. 2. Synergistic power

Unlike networking functions I had previously attended/organized, the gathering was full of positive, creative and synergistic energy, thanks to the burning passion and rich ideas from each attendant.

In other words, it was networking not for the sake of sheer networking. It happens when the good comes first, rather than the goods come first.

How do you agree with me?

C. 3. The internet is so full & rich has it fully reached the users?

This exclamation came from N., a non-tech-savvy professional: “The internet is so rich. I only have a Facebook and a LinkedIn”. This brought 2 thoughts up on me:

1. It reminds me of “Way of a Scientist” that I was thinking hard on one year ago.

We (solution providers) want to keep users from the complexity of technology.

2. It’s a good excuse for me to bring this statistics on the table: 58% of people don’t know what social networking is.

How about Vietnamese users? What is the percentage do you think? I believe that analyzing my following suggestions would be useful:

1. The opportunities of expressing via more traditional channels. This should help justifying the love for blogging in many Vietnamese users
2. The willingness to look for alternatives. This should help explaining Yahoo! 360’s huge success in Vietnam
3. The amount of time an average Vietnamese spend on online activities as compared to their peers in some other countries such as US or Japan. This should help reasoning the growth of social networks.
4. Physical distance between Vietnamese mutual connection. This might help with analyzing micro-blogging.

C. 4. Globalization

Kevin gave us a compliment “This is the first time we mid expats and Vietnamese that works!” Thanks Kevin, I don’t know about others, but if I am to name one thing that pushes me on, it would be my conviction in being a “Global Villager”.

Hold your breath…

…the next event is coming soon…

1. 360plus started off in April 26, 2008.
2. Reaction was very weak. None, yes, none, of my 360 friends moved to 360plus. Even the non-tech users lost their confidence in Yahoo! products. When they saw the buggy 360plus, they even backed off farther.
3. Later on we learned that 360plus Vietnam was the product for Vietnam. What was meant to replace 360 is Yahoo! Universal Profile.
4. With no old friend on 360plus, I made friends with some a few new people though. However, it was neither an information goldmine nor a communication platform I was looking for. The community there was filled with spams, unthoughtful and inconsiderate bloats from younger users, despite some very nice efforts to guide the new users. I lost my patience after around 500 entries.
5. I tried to come up with around 20 suggestions for features for the 360plus team before quitting nevertheless.
6. Not until early September did they introduce a data migration tool from 360 to 360plus. What flabbergasted me was that the tool looks like it bases on public RSS feed from 360 to import to 360plus, which means the 360plus team has limited access to the 360 global database. Where is inter-department collaboration inside Yahoo!?
7. But I’m sorry it was too late I was not even trying the tool out. I have backed up entries I want to keep to my Window Live Spaces blog, manually.
8. Many of my friends on 360 have moved to Facebook.
9. Will 360plus Vietnam hit the 2 million cap that 360 did in Vietnam?

Addendum

Yahoo! shut down their “social network experiment” Mash just a few days before. Generally people agreed with this decision, Mash was too weak even for a marginal project to last.

The blog craze started in 2004, MySpace came out in 2002. From then till now, Web 2.0 has penetrated deeply into our lives.

You may have heard the buzz: it’s all about communications, exchange information and expressing the ego.

Have you thought of utilizing all those things for learning?

Recently I’ve been very aggressive on the net to see how we can use the applications for learning, and here I am with my key findings:

The requirements

Let’s imagine a very familiar study scenario: you’re assigned into a group to do a research on topic X.

Traditionally, the group would rely on emails, phone calls and IM to communicate and collaborate. Have you found these media difficult to classify your information?

This is how I would use Web 2.0 for learning

1. Search for information with Search EngineS

Obviously, information searching starts with search engines.

I have some hints for this:

1. Don’t just use Google. Try Yahoo! search, Live search, Ask search and other engines. They give different results and thus, relevant information might be found from ones other than Google
2. Try Google on different region settings. google.com/ncr (international version) yields different results from google.com.vn
3. Try different keywords and keyword combination. Also, exploit the operators
4. Also search for images. At least Google, Yahoo! and Live support this. Images are useful for illustrating your ideas and, in some cases, give you additional information.

Watch a slide show on Google services:

Tai Tran's Lab: Technology As Innovator

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2. Ask your questions

Use Q&A service such as LinkedIn Answers to ask questions and receive information from professionals.

Watch a video explaining LinkedIn

3. Make information comes to you with RSS

Normally you go out for information. Think about making information come to you?

Use RSS for this.

Watch a video explaining RSS

For example, if I’m looking for “globalization”, I would take these steps

1. Go to wordpress.com/tags/globalization
2. Get the RSS of this tag
3. Subscribe the RSS into a feed reader like Google Reader

Then check with the feed reader everyday to see if relevant information comes in.

You can also use Yahoo! Pipes to aggregate the feeds. Click here to view videos on Yahoo! Pipes

Try exploring different sources of information you can use this trick.

4. Share links with bookmark-sharing sites

If I encounter useful webpages, I would want to share it with my group mates.

Using email would bury the link under heaps of other information. Sharing through IM stands the risk of losing the message when the program lags.

So I would bookmark the site using del.icio.us and use the function “links for friend” to share the link.

Watch a video explaining del.icio.us

5. Blog your group’s findings on group-blog powered platform

WordPress supports multiple-author. I would want our group members to blog our research everyday on our blog. This is not superficial. It helps us

1. Collect information, thoughts, findings, analysis and intermediate conclusions
2. Track each member’s progress
3. Present to the lecturer our growth

5b. Share micro details

This is optional though. Some information might be very detailed and we want quick sharing methods. I would connect my mobile phone to Twitter and quickly update my thoughts on the way.

Watch a video explaining Twitter

6. Schedule activities with Calendars

Schedule activities such as meetings, field trips with Google Calendar

7. Watch and learn

Go to Youtube, not to entertain, but to learn from podcasters on the topic.

For example, this video is useful to understand Web 2.0

8. Compose Collaboratively

Use Google Docs to compose the documents. This is very convenient in such that

1. No email chain flying around
2. Single repository of document
3. Better version control
4. Many collaborators do the job concurrently

Watch a video explaining Google Docs

9. Build wiki to store develop information knowledge

Wiki is great to understand new concepts and link the information to get the big picture.

Watch a video explaining Wiki

10. Relationship building

Facebook is good to build relationship with your work mates.

11. Publish your research

Publish your research as presentations on slideshare or documents on scribd to share your knowledge engage in discussion on the topic.

12. Consolidate them all into one page

There are just so much!

How’re you gonna navigate around them all?

Well, one solution is to use a homepage service like netvibes to put all these services together.

Why all these?

Too complicated? Well here are the reasons why I would do it this way

1. Better organization of information. No email confusion
2. Exhaustive analysis. You write on the way so no information is missed
3. Better collaboration
4. Man, isn’t it fun?

I know it would be much easier for you just to email. But how much time have you spent searching for information later on? I’d rather spend the time to get things organized first, then make it easier later to focus more on creating contents.

And I’m pretty sure of one thing: just next year, this entry will be outdated because many new services will come out. Semantic web, mobile apps are just a few to predict.

It’s not a fashionable fad or a time-killer, it’s a shift in the way we can be more effective. Do you want to miss the train trend?

Digital Divide

But you know, all these will never happen if digital divide hasn’t been closed.

Technology proficiency and more importantly, community habit is a big gap. I want my team to do so, but other teams may not, so some of my team members may argue “why do we have to!”

With the internet connection speed in Vietnam, using Google Docs et al is insane.

Today, a world that is flat is till a romantic dream for me.

Resources

I’ve already tried out these services. Kindly see mine as example of how things may end up evolve: taitran.com/blog/resources