Learning about: The Operating System of Money

Posted by lemiffe in Business, Economy, Learning, Technology on Dec 22nd, 2009 | 0 comments

What is the operating system of money? Why are the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer? When did all of this start?

Douglas Rushkoff answers these questions in a powerfully simple way:

Once upon a time, before the middle ages, we had an abundance-based currency. Everyone lived happily, you were issued vouchers based on how much grain you harvested, and those vouchers could in turn be used to pay for things. It was based on abundance… In contrast to our scarcity-based currency model of today.

The monetary system we use today was created so that rich people could stay rich by being rich rather than doing anything.

We live in an economy where the sustainance of the economy itself depends on growth at the rate of interest.

Where do you get the extra money? You’ll have to borrow that too.

Corporations? They were created to support this economic system as well.

This was the value of our currency right through the industrial age. This is the system still in use today. It is an outdated system, one that must be ruled out.

Why and how did this happen?

The following video by Rushkoff explains this in 15 minutes, why the system is broken and how must we change things to create a better economic system.

Via poortaste

Unproductive? Stressed out? This might help…

Posted by lemiffe in Business, Communication, Life on Nov 25th, 2009 | 0 comments

How can you be more productive at home and at work, while ridding yourself of unnecessary stress? These are a few tips I have found along the way:

Pending matters (personal or work) tend to stick to your brain through the day, even though you are not focusing on them. They are like a cancer that cuts off productivity, just like a person who is going through divorce or difficult times will have trouble coping with work and friends, this holds with any kind of personal activities that have been left pending.

• If you take email seriously, divide it into “personal” and “work” folders. Attend to personal mail before leaving to work each morning, or at night before going to bed.
• Write down task lists (Use Google Calendar, Outlook, Google Tasks or even pen and paper) and divide them into days. You can’t do everything in a day, so be realistic. Try to do everything that is personal at home, and everything that is work related at the office.
• When you don’t accomplish a pending task, don’t leave it “hanging”. Set it for a later time (after work maybe?) and remove it from the “overdue” list. If it was something urgent you couldn’t accomplish and it involves someone else, let that person know (email? phone?) immediately that it will take you another day to finish it.
• While at work, be sure to have your pending activities listed appropiately and go through them in order, remember you can’t do everything at once and it will only stress you out thinking about how much you have to do, specially when you have a deadline.
• If you read personal email at work, try to archive (or store) personal emails that arrive, and mark in your calendar that you must attend to those emails when you get home. If it is something urgent, reply at once that you will attend to the issue at a later time.

By following these steps, hopefully you will be able to clear your mind at work and start to focus on what you have to do, not what you had to do and didn’t do, nor what you have pending and might have to do later. Everything at its time.

Now get to work!

Social Media Revolution… A fad or to stay?

Posted by lemiffe in Business, Marketing on Sep 30th, 2009 | 4 comments

I was a bit skeptical of all the attention placed on Social Media when it started booming not long ago. I wasn’t sure if it was something that’s going to stay, or if it is just a fad that’s going to fade. The following video was something I found on Steve Farnsworth’s Digital Marketing Mercenary Blog.

Steve Writes “A challenge for most senior marketing professionals who cut their teeth any time before, say, last year has been to fully grasp the impact of social media on how they perform their job. The new many-to-many communications model forces everyone to re-imagine their tools, role, and strategies.”

On September 23rd The Silicon Valley Brand Forum held an event on the impact of social media on branding. The morning opened with this viral video that uses powerful statistics and visuals to hammer home that this is not your dad’s Internet.

So is Social Media here to stay? Or is it just a fad? What is your take on this?

Social Media and Marketing… Where are we?

Posted by lemiffe in Business, Communication, Marketing on Sep 29th, 2009 | 0 comments

Where are we today regarding Social Media and Marketing?

Advances in Social Media are changing the way we market our products, services, or ourselves. It’s not all about *the logo* any more, it’s not about what your company represents, it’s about what your customers represent to you, it’s about how will your customers benefit from your service, and how can you learn from their experiences to build up on your products, and deliver better service.

One platform isn’t the future. One platform isn’t even better than another. A platform is a tool, and us marketers must know how to use these tools to reach our customers, without aimlessly devoting everything towards one specific platform. Today it might be Twitter and Facebook, tomorrow Google Wave, and the next day who knows, but we must always keep in mind that it’s the person that makes the platform useful, not the platform that makes the person useful.

Chris Brogan is an expert. I don’t usually call someone an expert unless I really mean it. He recently gave a speech at New Media Atlanta (which I obviously did not attend to), and he just posted the video capture for the whole speech on his blog. If you have a spare hour I recommend you give it a good listen.

So what are your thoughts about Social Media? Where do we go from here?

Return on Investment For Dummies

Posted by lemiffe in Business on Sep 20th, 2009 | 0 comments

I am not an expert in business (yet) however I have always been baffled by the term ROI without knowing exactly how to calculate it or what it means. By any means if you notice a mistake in any formula or calculation, feel free to point it out in the comments section.

Return on Investment is the ratio of money gained or lost on an investment relative to the amount of money invested. It is usually presented as a percentage.

Example:

Johnny likes drinking water, but his faucet only delivers grayish-looking water, so he buys bottled water. Each 1.5 litre bottle costs him 1.00 GBP. He buys 4 bottles per week. Every month he approximately buys 16 bottles which means he spends 16 GBP per month or 192 GBP per year on bottled water.

The ROI yield is often expressed as Yield = (Return – Initial Investment) / Initial Investment.

In this case we have Yield = (0 – 192) / 192 which gives us a loss of 100% for a 1 year period.

Let’s suppose that the PUR FM-9400 water filtering system costs 21.50 GBP. As each water bottle costs 1 GBP, we can derive that for the cost of 21.5 bottles of water we could buy a filtration system. (21.5 litres / 16 litres per month) = 1.3438 months to obtain our return on investment.

Conclusion:

(1 GBP * 16 Bottles per Month) * 1.3438 Months = 21.5 GBP

Yield = (Final – Initial) / Initial
Yield = (21.5 – 21.5) / 21.5
Yield = 0%

So we have reached a conclusion. To obtain a return of investment equal to the initial amount invested we must invest 21.5 GBP, and after approximately 42 days we will have saved the exact amount we invested in the equipment, furthermore leading to profit obtained by not spending on any more purified water bottles.