Virtual social 3D World

Today, I take a look on SecondLife and its competitors.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SecondLife

I notice 2 things related to business in this article:

"In September 2008, over 15 million accounts were registered" => this is a good community and good place for business.

 

"In 2007, Brazil became the first country to have its own independently-run portal to Second Life, operated by an intermediary—although the actual Second Life grid accessed through the Brazilian portal is the same as that used by the rest of the worldwide customer base" => Localizaiton is one of trends in SecondLife

 

Below is  the list of competitor with SecondLife:

• Active Worlds
• Croquet
• Dotsoul
• Entropia Universe
• OLIVE Platform
• There
• Virtual Object System

 

Virtual social 3D World is one of trends in the future and going to be a rich land for business. Why don't we start something with it from now?

Open source collaborative working solutions

My girl friend is working in a perfume company (an inter-continent company). The CEO of this company wanted to find a solution to help his workers work in a collaborative environment with highest efficiency. They also need a Customer relationship management system to keep track of their customers information and their business goal. He asked the IT staff to do it.
As the result, they choose 2 software: Highrise for CRM and TeamworkLive for collaborative working system.

I do not have any idea about their choosing. However, I asked myself: what are alternative open source solutions for these needs. Actually, I am interested in collaborative working model. For a long time ago, I've had an idea about creating a software solution for collaborative working, but I do not have enough time to research carefully about this idea at that time.
In this topic, I only show you some open source solutions for collaborative working model that are available on Internet. I haven't had a detail look on these solutions. I hope you can. If you have more helpful information about these solutions or other solutions, please share to me also.

MindQuarry :
Mindquarry is an Open Source collaborative software platform for file sharing (documents, images, media files, etc.), task and project management, team collaboration and Wiki editing that meshes simplicity and functionality. As a result, knowledge workers are able to connect with team members and share information from wherever they are, effectively improving team-work and increasing productivity within the company.

Teamwork

Teamwork is a proven, reliable and friendly web based software solution for managing work and communication in any field. Groupware and project management features are used in an integrated environment, from which you can coordinate and manage hundreds of projects at once. It offers us some cool features for: Project management, Issues tracking, Document managing, Work logging, Smart features (shared calendar, prioritize assignment, ...)
Teamwork has an open source version (written on Java, Database independent). I downloaded it but not deployed yet. I will update you if I have any more information.

Dimdim:
Dimdim is the leading provider of open source web meeting software.
Dimdim is a free web conferencing service where you can share your desktop, show slides, collaborate, chat, talk and broadcast via webcam with absolutely no download required for attendees. It also offers us an open source version. We can customize it as our real needs.

kablink

A single Integrated Collaboration Environment that establishes a collaborative group workspace of people, teams, functions, tasks and content all working together to drive effective teamwork to the next level.

Kaplink is built from Java with Hibernate, Liferay portal and use Lucene as the Full text search solution behind.

If you have any other open source solutions for this, please share to me!
My slogan: Share to get more. I like this.

livemocha - a success story of social network + e-learning

Recently, social network is emerging as a new trend. You can see a lot of social networks over the world: MySpace, Facebook, ... They appear like stars after Big Bang. Each social network has its mission in the real world (not only on Internet). The strength of social network is its community. When you have a big community, that means you have a big chance to get more money!

Actually, social network is only a type of model (a social model on Internet). If you can find a good idea to apply into a social network, that means you created a new model. For a long time, I tried my best to do that (invent new thing with social network). When researching, I found some of my "new" ideas exists in the real world. One of them is: combine social network with e-learning.

This type of social network appear recently. I strongly believe that this is a good model for e-learning. One of success web site applied this model is:

http://www.livemocha.com

The idea behind is very simple: "learning new language by friends over the world".
It creates a big community who wants to learn language by communication directly.

I found a very interesting analyzing in the CEO's blog of livemocha

Based on various research reports that I have seen, this is a market that is well over $20 billion in size with over 350 million people all over the globe learning a variety of different languages. In many countries, people can double their income by learning English because they can get more attractive jobs in industry. And the need has become even stronger given increasing trends towards globalization, immigration and travel.

Currently, Livemocha secures $6 million in funding led by Maveron.
Do you think this idea is interesting?

Usability error of Microsoft in setup project with VS 2005

In the past, one developer of my team has a problem with Visual Studio 2005 setup project. He wants to change the Product name in setup project but he can not find any place to do this. He also search on Internet but there is no good solution.
One day, I found the secret behind this story :). Actually, this is a usability bug of Microsoft. Let me show you what this bug is.


First, user right clicks and chooses Property of the setup project - he/she can not see anything related to the Product name, or information of what he/she needs to setup.





How he/she have to do now?
The answer is: please select the setup project in Solution Explorer. After that, click into the Property tab. Remember this carefully!











Microsoft Product manager, please tell me how many user knows this trick?

What wordpress.com must be improved?

I am a SEO consultant. The first thing I like in wordpress.com is: it has some advantages may help me get a page with high Google page rank. However, there’ re a lot of things that wordpress.com need to be improved more if they want to attract more users.

I’ve read a comparison between wordpress.com and blogger of Google. You can find it here http://pulsed.blogspot.com/2007/07/blogger-wordpress-chart.html

From this article, we can see that WordPress limits a lot of things that a blogger needs to improve his site for SEO.

I do not want to repeat all things in above entry here. I just want to add some additional points and press some strong factors (in my opinion):

1. Should allow user can customize meta tags of a specific page (description, keyword, …). It is necessary for SEO

2. Should allow user post JS script or adding embed tags. I know that is risk because some hackers may make use of that to do some Cross site scripting hacks. However, why blogger allow that? It makes user feel more convenient.

3. Should allow user customize the HTML structure of the template. That help user can create creative theme page and SEO friendly whenever they need.

All of professional bloggers need their page must be SEO friendly and easy to customize. If wordpress can not improve these feature, it will be only a shadow beside the Google giant.

Wait and see what they will do in the future? who knows?