Tag Archives: Google

Why is LinkedIn the most popular social media platform for Fortune 500 CEOs?

Social Media, Technology, , , ,

Only 32% of the F500 CEOs have some form of social media presence(LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Google+). Of these, LinkedIn is not only the most popular(140 CEOs are on LinkedIn), but also added more number of CEOs to its list compared to the previous year. This is based on the annual study by CEO.com and DOMO. The picture below is self-explanatory.

This prompted a very interesting question from a friend and industry colleague – “28% of Fortune 500 CEOs have ‘presence’ on LinkedIn. But, why shun other social media platforms (Tw, FB, G+ etc.)? “

My take on this was “Serious business discussions, professional networking and idea sharing happen mostly in LinkedIn. Facebook is strictly for personal networking(at least for me). Twitter is too noisy, and it is very difficult to cut through the clutter. G+ is promising(and it has been that way for some time), but does not have critical mass.. For me, LinkedIn wins hands down when it comes to work related stuff. Perhaps most CEOs feel the same?”.

The report had this to say about LinkedIn “The way CEOs are using LinkedIn is changing, and that is partl ydue to the “Influencer” program on LinkedIn Today, which has CEOs lining up to be seen as part of this prestigious club of experts. Here are four Fortune 500 CEOs who rank as LinkedIn Influencers – Meg Whitman, Jamie Dimon, Jeff Immelt, John Donahoe. “

Which social media platform do you prefer?

PS: The study can be downloaded here.

Of “Cloud brainstorming” and the falling of language barriers

Business, Language, Technology, , , , , ,

Twitter is rapidly changing the way we communicate, and different people use it in different ways. A few days back, as I was going through the some tweets, I was quite impressed by the way Anand Mahindra (Managing Director of Mahindra&Mahindra and an MBA from Harvard) was using it.

Anand was participating in a CEO conference and asked twitterers to send him some ideas regarding some plausible and implausible developments in business over the next decade. He got several ideas which prompted him to say “Prolific&excellent inputs fr which I’m grateful…It’s ‘cloud’ brainstorming lk cloud computing.Will retweet some….” (I  like the expression “cloud brainstorming“)

One plausible idea that he retweeted was “barriers fall completely using real-time translators revolutionizing 1-to-1 commerce”. This caught my attention, as language translation is part of my daily life and fired up my imagination. Image what would happen if I could talk in my mother-tongue to anyone, anywhere in the world.

I lived in a multi-lingual atmosphere in India till a few years back, but technology was not available for real-time translation(RTT) at that time. Even though I had seen my East Asian classmates in US using the translators to aid their studies, my most interesting personal RTT experience came during my apartment hunting days in Shanghai.

During my apartment search,for some reason, my non-Chinese friend accompanied me to a property agent. My friend knew only basic Mandarin, and we were getting stuck at several points, unable to communicate our thoughts. We even tried sign language with limited success. Fortunately,the property agent  was very internet-savy. She quickly typed something on her computer and then pointed to the screen. We realised that she was using Google translator to communicate with us. Even though many of the translations were hilarious, from the context of the situation we could understand what she wanted to tell us. Once I understood that, I typed in my response in English and used the tool to translate to Mandarin – Real-Time Translation at it’s best.

Currently I am in a German speaking environment and I use some of the online translators daily – Yahoo Babel Fish, Google translate. But the difficulty is that I have to type in each word in these translators.  This cannot be avoided while reading a German book, but hated it when I had to copy and paste whole webpages to one of these translators. That was till I learned about the features in Google tool bar.

What Google tool bar does is to automatically translate the entire webpage to the desired language. This comes in very handy when I have to get some information from a German website that doesn’t have an English version. Take an example of the official Switzerland Weather website – http://www.meteosuisse.admin.ch/web/de/wetter/detailprognose.html . If you are on a German page and have a Google Tool bar, the toolbar will ask you which language you would like to translate it to. There are several languages available, including Hindi, Chinese and Greek. Google Tool Bar

In fact, Google’s subsidiary YouTube is also using this tool for translating the titles and descriptions of videos. Even though the translation is not perfect, I believe that it is rapidly evolving.

This brings us back to the idea that came out of “Cloud brainstorming” – will language barriers fall? I believe that it has already started falling and if technology can be developed for Real-time voice translation, the “linguistic barriers” will one day be completely demolished. The same way internet demolished the “information barriers“. The implications of this will be enormous. What do you think?

PS: Will someone design a face mask that prevents “Swine Flu” and also do voice translation?

R.I.P, Email?

Technology, , , , , , ,

Over the past few weeks, I started to notice something unusual. I haven’t been getting much emails in my inbox(gmail and yahoo) from my friends. Most of the emails I got were newsletters or alerts related to some payments.Soon I realised that this has been the case for quite a long time. Did it mean that, in this era of constant connectivity, I was rarely communicating with anyone? That didn’t sound right.

As I pondered over this, I realised that my friends and I rarely use emails anymore, but communicate through other means – google talk, Yahoo and Facebook chat, Orkut scraps and Facebook wall posts, Linkedin and Facebook messaging, not to forget Twitter. Does it all mean that the dominiant era of personal emails is over? Is the email, which was such a novelty only 10 years back, already facing obsolescence?

Wall Street Journal(WSJ) thinks so. In a recent article, WSJ declares that ” Email has had a good run as king of communications. But its reign is over. ” The article talks about the easier and faster means of communication and how these are impacting email. It also compares the communication by “emails” and that by Google “Wave“. The article asks the question whether the faster means of communication is saving us time. It ends like this –

” You can argue that because we have more ways to send more messages, we spend more time doing it. That may make us more productive, but it may not. We get lured into wasting time, telling our bosses we are looking into something, instead of just doing it, for example. And we will no doubt waste time communicating stuff that isn’t meaningful, maybe at the expense of more meaningful communication. Such as, say, talking to somebody in person.” How true!!!

So, will we soon see the death of personal emails? Will we one day say “Email, the dinosaur”? Quite possible.

PS: I came across this media count that shows the dynamism of the social web.

Googling and Doodling

Technology, , ,

As I opened YouTube today, it’s logo caught my attention. It said – “YouTube 1BN – 1 billion views per day”. Clearly, YouTube has learned something from it’s parent, Google – the art of doodling.

Does your doodle look like this?
Does your doodle look like this?

For those puzzled by the word “doodling”, here is the wiki definition “A  doodle is a type of sketch, an unfocused drawing made while a person’s attention is otherwise occupied”. This is the type of drawing that almost all of us usually do when we are attending a class or a meeting, but too bored to pay attention.

Google has been using doodles since 2000 for a variety of occasions like Valentines day, Cricket World Cup 2007, Fifa World Cup, among others. This definitely adds to the fun-quotient of google search. Google takes doodling seriously, and as I learned today, it even organises a competition for K-12 students to come up with new Google Doodles. And these smart kids come up with impressive doodles(You can see some of them by clicking here).

One of Google’s recent doodles was the face of Gandhi to celebrate his 140th birth anniversary. And the latest doodle was that of a Barcode to commemorate the 57th anniversary of the barcode. Both these doodles got widespread media attention and helped make Google page look fresh.  What will be next doodle from Google? Have to wait and wait.  

Coming back to YouTube,  it will be interesting to see how it goes about doodling in the future. Again, have to wait and see.

PS: Some older interesting Google doodles can be found here.

Update: Aman Sharma(http://twitter.com/amancool5) pointed out that “Google barcode didn’t resemble one, it actually was one!”

Image credit : http://www.flickr.com/photos/sixmilliondollardan/ / CC BY 2.0

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