Today we had a productive day. We met the Minister of Trade and her Chiefs.
Here you have some photos: the toilet in the floor of the Minister (they have no water and no electricity, only own generators), the Ministry of Trade Building and stairs, the bullet hole in the glass in the Minister’s meeting room… and a beer in the best spot we found in Monrovia, all in our UNDP 4×4.
Sunday. We had the day free after a meeting with our local guy here. We did plan the week and then Francis took us with his crappy car to have a tour around the city.
What can I say about it. It is a post conflict zone. The few big buildings that are still standing are all burned and destroyed. There are visible signs for war everywhere. Poverty is everywhere.
This is the poorest country I ever visited. I can not complain of not having hot water or no choice for food.
Judge for yourselves:
Here I am, in Monrovia, in the Corina Hotel. A 5 stars hotel… I’m joking. There are no 5 stars hotels here. This in fact a place with clean sheets, and free wifi. That is good enough.
The flight was long. Flying economy within Africa and in a 5 or 6 hours trip, with stop over in Accra is not the same as flighting in Europe.
Anyway, we had no problems to get into the country. We had no visa but we had a letter from the Minister so we just got it.
I would like to post pictures but it takes like ages to upload. I will try to put at least one.
Well, today is Saturday. It is a long weekend here. Monday is holiday. We work though. Tomorrow we might go to the beach but the weather is not that nice. It is cloudy. Not too hot.
I will write again tomorrow. I try to upload a photo that I took in the airport.
Nairobi. I am posting this from Monrovia in Liberia because I had no internet in Nairobi.
I arrived on Thursday, pretty late at night. There was a guy waiting for me. I had no problems to get into the country without visa with the Laisser-Passer.
The hotel was a bit crappy but OK.
On Friday when I woke up I went and have breakfast. Owen and Isaac came around 9am when we left to the Export Promotion Council. We had meetings all day. Eventually Mr Matanga (responsible for EPC) took us for lunch to the Intercontinental Hotel, then we went to the ministry of Trade.
I remembered I had been there before when I came for the WTO meeting. We met the PS (Prime Secretary) of the Ministry of Trade. Simone (a colleague from the the ITC) was also meeting the PS for the Ethical Fashion project.
We exposed our methodology and we are in. They want us to starts asap. The earliest we can start is September. They did not want to create a new body to oversee the process of the National Export Strategy development. The task will be managed by EPC which has a 50% representation of the private sector.
Anyway, I don’t want to go into work details. I had no chance to see Nairobi. Work only. Until late.
As an anecdote, I would say that in London there was a group of people with a guide. The guide was traveling with them from London, and yeap, they were also traveling in Business… they were going for a safari… nice!
Well, here I am at gate B37 Terminal 5 in London Heathrow airport. This time on my first trip/mission with the ITC, that I joined 2 weeks ago.
I am now using my iPhone and we are ready to board.
I will be arriving to Nairobi late at night and tomorrow I will be meeting a couple of colleagues. We have a pretty busy agenda for Friday. On Saturday we’ll be flying to Monrovia (Liberia) where we will spend 8 days.
Now I am boarding. Next post from Africa ;)
Less than two months ago, Google dropped a spectacular surprise upon the world: Google Wave. The communication tool aspires to redefine not only email, but the entire web.
Well, in the last two months, Google and third-party developers have been hard at work testing out the system, fixing the kinks, and building some amazing extensions (which we discussed in-depth previously). Still, only a handful of people, almost all developers, have access. That’s about to change soon though: on September 30th, Google will start sending out about 100,000 invites for the next version of Google Wave.
Google made the big revelation in a blog post on the Google Wave developer’s blog. The post is part of an update on the Google Wave Hackathon, which allows developers to come to the Googleplex and work with the Google Wave API to build extensions such as Wave in WordPress, a bot that allows you to easily place Waves in WordPress posts.
It looks as if the testing in the Google Wave sandbox is going well though – it opened up the sandbox to 6,000 new developers and up to 20,000 more will get access before the end of August. But this pales in comparison to the 100,000 users that will get access on starting September 30th.
According to Google, at that point Google Wave will appear on Wave.Google.com, instead of the Wave Sandbox. They will help further test for bugs, provide feedback, and play with apps. Google intends to invite groups of users, so the invites may not come out all at once.
While the down economy continues to hurt funding to our schools, more and more teachers are looking to web-based services to help educate their students. Whether it’s through open resource projects like CK-12, virtual classrooms like those in Second Life, or through therepurposing of tools like Twitter, millions of teachers are finding innovative resources to engage their students. If you’re a teacher, here are seven great tools to get you started.
1. Scitable: Geared towards advanced high school and college science students, Nature Education launched Scitable to provide free online access to more than 180 overviews of key scientific and genetics concepts. The tool consists of a 220-article content library (often cited from members of the Nature Publishing group, more than 200 virtual classrooms set up by teachers across the globe, and a mentor network of experts poised to answer student questions. Educators and students can upload their own content for exploration and discussion, while the content library provides a number of articles accepted as valid sources at the university level.
2. Edutopia: The George Lucas Educational Foundation launched Edutopia in the hopes of creating educational best practices for multimedia in the classroom. The site includes online polls, curated blogs, assessment tools and a dedicated magazine for educators at the K-12 levels. The 2009 Webby Award winning site’s best content is in its library of high-production videos for teachers and educators.
3. LearnHub: LearnHub is a network where members can create their own communities, share lessons, chat, create tests and tutor each other online at no cost. Schools create their own virtual classrooms where students complete assignments, play games and share photos and text. One of the great features of this site is that the site’s report generator allows teachers to track users’ progress. While the content is not as in-depth as Scitable’s, this is a good site for standardized test preparation and basic K-12 education exercises. For more examples of test preparation sites, see our RWW list of resources.
4. Moodle: Moodle is a free open-source course management platform designed to help teachers create better online resources. Microsoft Education Labs recently announced a new Live@edu plug-in for Moodle. Now in addition to providing lesson plan, assignment and quiz-making tools for teachers, schools also gain access to Outlook Live for e-mail, Office Live Workspace for document sharing, Windows Messenger for chat and Windows Live SkyDrive for 25 GB of storage. This tool is slightly more advanced than some of the others in the industry, but it does offer a number of scalable solutions.
5. Edmodo: Edmodo is a private micro-blogging service for schools that allows teachers to edit privacy options within their virtual classrooms. Educators generate a join code and students log-in to chat, link to files, share notes and check their collective calendars for upcoming exams, quizzes and Pro-D days. While some of the other tools we’ve presented offer an open-access learning environment, this invite-only service offers students the chance to utilize web-based multimedia tools while allowing teachers to control an online discussion’s security.
6. YouTube Edu: YouTube Edu allows students and educators to access lectures from leading educators across the country. For example, Yale and Brandeis University professors upload their lessons for public enjoyment. One of the most popular Channels is the National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning – a collaboration launched by the Indian Institutes of Technology and Science in Bangalore.
7. ESL Video: ESL Video allows language educators to create quizzes from virtually any video on the internet. From here they can embed their quizzes into their classroom sites or redirect students to the ESL Video domain. Teachers tailor their video quizzes to specific learning units or create simple vocabulary quizzes like the one I made below using YouTube videos. While this tool may not be as sophisticated as some of the above services, its merit comes from the fact that teachers can incorporate pop culture products into their lesson plans with very little effort. Judging by the fact that the below Miley Cyrus video has more than 92 million YouTube views, teachers may be able to harness this tool to ignite a love of learning.
Pixl brings you advanced online image and photo editing tools, just choose your flavor, jump in and start creating!
Pixlr is the creator of online cloud-based image tools. Today they have two applications in their suite, one they call Pixlr Editor and the other is Pixlr Express. They are built in Flash and you need to have a Flash plug in (get flash) to get it to work.
You’re crammed into a tiny space with several other people, spending an average of thirty seconds staring at either the floor or the wall. That’s what makes elevator advertisements and art so brilliant – people have little choice but to look. Marketers and artists have taken advantage of this very captive audience in some brilliant ways, from creating optical illusions with stickers to transforming the space into an apartment or even a disco club.
Anyone who’s afraid of heights might think twice about riding in this elevator, which seems to reveal a shocking view of a city far below the riders’ feet. But this is no glass elevator located at a dizzying distance above the ground – it’s just a large sticker affixed to the floor. The ad was created for a Swiss skydiving school, giving people a taste of what you experience when leaping from an airplane.
A girl waiting for an elevator got quite a surprise when the door opened to reveal a lively miniature disco club, complete with afros, polyester suits and a shimmering, spinning disco ball. It’s all the work of prankster Rémi Gaillard, who has been called “the French equivalent to Johnny Knoxville.”
Would you even step foot into this elevator if it appeared to have no floor, especially considering that a sign at the entrance cautions users that the elevator is still under construction? If you were brave enough to walk inside you’d find that it’s actually a cleverly designed paint job that gives the illusion of a bottomless elevator shaft underfoot.
Another form of elevator advertising uses an image displayed on the outer doors that reveals something new when the doors are opened, as in this example where a man’s chest is opened to reveal his insides. This ad was made for the Body Worlds 2 Exhibit, a traveling exhibition of preserved human bodies and body parts.
Could you live in a space this small? A Dutch art student transformed an elevator into a living space complete with table, coffee maker, lights, books, shelves and a clock. She spent an entire day there, eating, relaxing, reading and working. Anyone who called for the elevator throughout the day was surprised to find the cozy ‘apartment’ and its nonchalant occupant.
Design firm Ogilvy Beijing of China created this ad for Maxwell House as a ’shot of adrenaline’ – when the doors opened, sleepy people in an office building were shocked awake, providing an effect that the designers figured mimics the effects of drinking a cup of coffee. The ad reportedly caused a commotion on the morning of its launch as surprised office workers crowded the lobby. It drew a crowd from people in neighboring buildings for the next week.
Oreo has branded itself as ‘milk’s favorite cookie’, and this ad plays up that tagline to a T, pairing a sticker of a glass on the outside of a glass elevator enclosure with a cookie sticker on the elevator itself. Watching one of the sugary confections slowly descend into a gigantic glass of milk as the elevator reached the ground undoubtedly had onlookers salivating.
It’s a nightmare scenario for anyone who’s self-conscious about their weight: a door that’s too small to fit through. The Fitness Company, based in Germany, created this ad in the hopes that it would nudge people into joining their gyms to get slimmer.
If gyms are successful at goading people into getting fit, eventually they’ll be strong enough to pry open elevator doors with nothing but the amazingly powerful muscles in their arms. At least, that’s what this ad by Gold’s Gym seems to promise with its leathery, barrel-thighed bodybuilder.
Painted paper lanterns by artist Yura Adams are perfectly displayed in an empty elevator shaft in this art installation at the John Davis Gallery in Hudson, New York.
Jelly Tots Sweets made elevator rides a lot more fun for kids and adults alike with this ‘experiential elevator’ ad, which transformed the entire elevator into an aquarium – including the outside doors.
next floor from dotdotdot on Vimeo.
Elevators are just a quick way to get from point A to point B, which are usually just a few floors apart. An art installation at the Design/Art Fair in Verona, Italy challenged that notion, transforming the elevator into the mode of transport for an interactive dream journey, going from one fantastical world to the next.
Do you want to skip the stairs badly enough to invade a girl’s privacy by stepping or sitting on her bed while she sleeps? This installation by Ruth Pringle forced users to make that decision, placing a double bed in an elevator along with bedding and a girl in pajamas. The project aimed to remind people of voyeurism, vulnerability and “the power within everyone to harm others”.
Sometimes, you’ve just got to give in to chaos and randomness. That’s the idea behind the ‘random lift button’, installed by artist Chris Speed in two elevators in Portland Square at the University of Plymouth in England. When you press the button, you end up on a random floor where you can meet people and experience things that you wouldn’t otherwise have experienced had you skipped that floor and simply gone to your original destination.
The Ars Electronica Center in Linz, Austria is a center for electronic arts often referred to as the ‘Museum of the Future’. Fascinating technology is incorporated into every aspect of the building, including the elevators, where screens on the floor and/or walls provide an interactive experience. The floor screen simulates a virtual space underneath the elevator inhabited by ’sonic particles’ that multiply as the elevator rises. The wall screen shows the progression of evolution moving forward as the elevator rises and backward as it goes down.
Yammer is a tool for making companies and organizations more productive through the exchange of short frequent answers to one simple question: ‘What are you working on?’
As employees answer that question, a feed is created in one central location enabling co-workers to discuss ideas, post news, ask questions, and share links and other information. Yammer also serves as a company directory in which every employee has a profile and as a knowledge base where past conversations can be easily accessed and referenced.
Anyone in a company can start their Yammer network and begin inviting colleagues. The privacy of each network is ensured by limiting access to those with a valid company email address. Information is never shared with third parties.
The basic Yammer service is free. Companies can pay to claim and administer their networks.
Yammer was founded by former executives and early employees of PayPal, eGroups, eBay, and Tribe. It is backed by venture capital firms Founders Fund and Charles River Ventures.
We have all worked at companies and understand the needs of companies to share information within a private network. We built the solution that we would want to use ourselves.
Google’s updates surrounding location are now coming fast and furious. Just a few days ago it added location to Google Maps for the Chrome and Firefox browsers. Today, it brings location
to the mobile web on the iPhone.
If you have the new iPhone 3.0 software and go to Google’s homepage in Safari, you’ll notice a new message below the search box that reads, “New! Try My Location to find restaurants, shops and bars near you!” If you click on the My Location link, the iPhone will pop open a dialogue asking if it’s okay for Safari to use the device’s location services to locate you. If you opt-in, you’ll see a new blue dot below the search box with your location next to it. Do a search, and it will return local results.
The fact that mobile Safari can access location is a huge feature. It’s what’s going to allowGoogle Latitude, Google’s location-based social network, to work on the device without a native app, as we described a few months ago. Something else that is potentially interesting about this is that Safari, like some of the other native iPhone apps, can apparently run in the background. Now, I’m not sure if it can still access location services while it’s running in the background, but that could be very interesting for something like Latitude.
And accessing functionality like location in the browser seems to tie in well with Google’s ultimate goal of having the web be the platform of choice.
For many people, such a feature will bring up privacy concerns. Here’s what Google has to say about that:
As always, your privacy is one of our top concerns. Google won’t use your location in search unless you explicitly opt in. And you can always disable the feature from Preferences at the bottom of the homepage.
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