Infotrade

Facebook's tentacular reach across the internet was accelerated by its 'like' button, which now seems a ubiquitous part of the browsing experience from news and blogs to corporate and retail sites. By late April, the like button had been added to 250,000 sites outside Facebook, feeding information back to the site on the activity and preferences of its 650+ million users. Though third-party buttons have been around for years (Digg this! Wordpress that!), the scale and recognition of Facebook's like button hasn't escaped the notice of Twitter and Google, and both are introducing rival (or perhaps complementary) buttons this week. Twitter's new follow button on the CNET site Twitter announced its 'follow' button last night with 50 sites already plugged in, including Huffington Post and the Wall Street Journal. The follow button sits next to a named Twitter user, and lets the reader start following that account on Twitter with one click. The Twitter accoun...

May 31, 2011 Productivity, as any entrepreneur can attest to, is one of the most important issues that a company has to deal with. Productivity is what gets things done, and when things get done, companies make more money. But what happens if you have some employees that are just, well, slow? Don’t worry; it’s a common problem, and one that has a solution. Addressing the issue Here’s the dealio—we may all have to deal with having a slow employee or three at times, but there is something you can do about it (and no, I’m not suggesting replacing the person with someone faster). I’m talking about taking that person that you thought highly enough to hire and motivating them to work faster and produce more. Here are the secrets to getting slow employees working faster: 1. Limit their options When you give an employee less choices on how to proceed, the easier it is for that person to proceed. If you only give one option, you have more of a dictatorship. This can actually cause an employee ...

If you haven’t stumbled upon Intel’s  Museum of Me  yet, you really need to give it a go. A showcase of everything that’s brilliant and creepy about the social Web, it hooks into your Facebook account to build a museum… of you. Within seconds of authorising your account, you’ll be taken on a video tour of the museum, which has rooms dedicated to your life, your friends, places you’ve been, things you’ve liked and even a huge screen displaying words from your status updates. It’s incredibly impressive, although it’s fair to say that if it were real it would be an incredibly boring exhibit for anyone but yourself. Yet according to the video the public are happily touring your life – instant ego boost! Here’s a video of the generic experience – now go try it with your life pasted on. I guarantee it will leave you feeling… strange.

In modern workplaces, the chances are you will perform your daily duties from behind a desk. Gone are the days of conversations by the water-cooler, that’s been replaced by email and instant messaging. In fact any task that required you to get up from your desk has likely been stopped in the interest of reducing the time spent away from your computer. With all that time spent at a computer, your body isn’t getting the chance it needs to shake out those muscular aches and pains but it also doesn’t have the opportunity to burn off calories that have been added whilst you snacked at your computer. Nothing beats getting up from your desk and stretching those legs, but if you have to spend an inordinate amount of time at a computer and need ways to stay healthy whilst doing so, we have you covered. 1. Drink Plenty Of Water Drinking water will not only ensure the body is hydrated, it also contains no calories and, if drunk shortly before a meal, could  reduce t...

The challenge for the Chief Marketing Officer is to create marketing and brand building that is both exceptional and efficient in the face of country, product, and functional silos. To study that problem, I interviewed more than 40 CMOs and asked about silo issues and what works to address those issues and reported the results in the book  Spanning Silos: The New CMO Imperative . One finding was that autonomous silos are simply no longer viable. They inhibit brilliant silo-spanning marketing, cross-silo offerings, brand consistency over products and markets, disciplined organization-wide marketing resource allocation, and the development of marketing excellence centers for capabilities such as social media or events. The surprising finding was that the solution — with exceptions linked to crisis situations — was not centralization and standardization, which too often led to either ineffective efforts or a total flame-out. The solution, rather, is much more likely to be based on re...

FriendFeed  has been standing by itself since it was  acquired by Facebook in August 2009 and naturally it has lost the users’ interest once it had. Now there is one country supporting globally. And this country is, yes you are right, Turkey . Facebook had stated that it acquired FriendFeed as an investment in its human sources, and both FriendFeed’s founders and Facebook CEO Bret Taylor had said that Facebook would not make any improvements to FriendFeed. Webrazzi’s guest author, Nazım Kaya did an interview with Bret Taylor, who stated that he has read our articles on FriendFeed. You can click  this link  to read Nazım Kaya’s interview with Bret Taylor done in October. As I have just said, FriendFeed, once one of the most popular services in social media, is now running out of steam, and the only country which is still keeping it alive and having nearly all of the traffic by itself is Turkey. Turkish Internet users continue to enjoy FriendFeed despite Twitter’s pop...

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A recent survey by Harvard professor Robert Epstein found that 25% of our happiness hinges on how well we're able to manage stress. The next logical question is, of course, how best can we reduce our stress? Epstein's study, which he presented last month at the Western Psychological Association meeting in Los Angeles, was intended to help answer that question. It involved 3,000 participants in the U.S. and 29 other countries, who responded to an online questionnaire. Participants' stress-management skills were gauged by asking them to rate their level of agreement with 28 items, such as "I frequently use breathing techniques to help me relax." The volunteers were also asked about how happy they were and how successful they were in their personal and professional lives. The stress management technique that worked best, according to the survey: planning. In other words, "fighting stress before it even starts, planning things rather than letting them happen,...

Stock exchange to launch new platform in partnership with EMC, VMware. The Big Board operator is heading to the "cloud." NYSE Euronext plans to announce on Wednesday a new partnership with EMC Corp. and VMware Inc. that will allow financial institutions direct access to NYSE's services through the fast-growing technology trend known as cloud computing. This will allow Wall Street firms that elect to utilize the platform to use NYSE Technologies' servers for tools like historical market data and analytics, which previously were stored on the firms' own networks. The new feature, dubbed Capital Markets Community Platform, is intended to aggregate exchanges, broker dealers and buy-side participants. Customers who have already signed up prior to the platform's launch, expected Wednesday, include Pico Quantitative Trading, a division of Goldman Sachs Group that specializes in high frequency trading, as well as hedge fund Millennium Partners. "We'r...

Cisco's local unit also reports 96.5% growth in mobile broadband connections. Fixed-line broadband connections in Chile grew 8.1% on the year in 2010 to 1.84 million connections, the local unit of Cisco Systems Inc. said Tuesday. Additionally, mobile broadband connections, a product introduced in the past few years into the local market, surged 96.5% on the year to 1.02 million, Cisco reported. Cisco's broadband survey, which covers several countries in the region, found that Chile has a 10.8% rate of broadband penetration per hundred inhabitants, falling behind Argentina, with 11.7%, and Uruguay, with 12.3%. The report attributed the low penetration of broadband services to the slow adoption of this technology in rural and low-income segments of the Chilean population, as broadband services are still relatively expensive when compared with those in other countries. "The cost of this technology is still inhibiting its growth and general access," said Cisco ...

To be the "X of China" is a coveted position, in a country that has seen  explosive Internet growth --450 million online today, more than the entire U.S. population. There's Renren, for instance,  the Facebook of China , and Weibo,  the Chinese Twitter . In the wake of  LinkedIn's barn-burning IPO , though, a question comes to mind: Who will be the LinkedIn of China? The answer to that question could have a huge impact on LinkedIn's future--like whether it lives or dies. Let's explore why. Online professional networking in China is a slightly different game than friending and tweeting, it turns out. The original Facebook and Twitter have been banned in China, blocked by the censors standing guard atop the Great Firewall. But LinkedIn, unique among the major social networks, has so far been allowed to operate in the Middle Kingdom. In other words, while Facebook can't be the Facebook of China, there's a fighting chance for LinkedIn to become the Linked...