Comunite

• Crowdsourcing – the future?

Next-generation enterprises looking to drive efficiency and innovation have recently been able to tap into online communities to offload work. For the first time since outsourcing became prevalent in the 90s — making it easier to move tasks out to partners that could do something better or more cheaply than you could — businesses now have a new, potent, and often far cheaper option thanks to the Web.

Frequently referred to as crowdsourcing, and a darling of the Web 2.0 industry, it has recently come of age as the tools and marketplaces for on-demand work capacity on the network have expanded far beyond the early volunteer communities that originally proved out the concepts. These pioneers, which include the world of open source software and online services such as YouTube and Threadless, get most of their value from a large group of people or community through the simple use of an open invitation.

Mobile Apps Race 

Betty Penny has had a long-standing love affair with technology and an appetite for apps. She says business owners who aren’t taking advantage of apps to reach customers through their smartphones are missing out on a golden opportunity. “It’s a must. It’s where websites were,” says the Port Perry entrepreneur, who has more than 15 years of Internet technology and executive management experience. “This is how to communicate with the next generation.”

CMS, a solution for the not for profit sector

If your organization has been considering the use of open source software, a Content Management System (CMS) may be the place to start. CMSs are software tools that allow non-technical users to update the text, images and documents on a website without having to learn to use HTML code. Using a Web browser or a desktop software package, users access, edit and upload content changes to a website using the familiar text editing commands found in software like MS Word. At Comunite we can help you setting it up. More than one third of nonprofit organizations reported the use of open CMSs. What are you waiting for?

• Mobile Technology: One Core Lesson, Many Possible Solutions

Over half of people in poor countries, including a quarter of those over the age of 14 in Afghanistan, use mobile phones. Given the ever-increasing proliferation of mobile technology and the range of opportunities that it is unleashing for the world’s poor, how will it engage even more people in commerce, allowing them to solve their own problems? In what ways will it continue to be a democratizing force? What new possibilities will it create? And, perhaps most importantly, how can we apply a core lesson from mobile technology to think differently about empowering the poor?