Unfortunate, but frankly no one has yet figured out how to actually solve the governance problem.
Heard of a US based startup recently, working on making perishable consumer goods in the third world more resilient in order to make up for the lack of a cold chain (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_chain) in those poor countries. However the lack of a cold chain is another symptom of a deeper problem, yet applying another band-aid is so much more satisfying!
The author touches on a problematic issue that most developed nations tend to ignore.
Poverty and under development isn’t due to a lack of resources; it is merely the end result of a complete lack of responsible governance and institutions.
The absence of responsible governance and institutions cannot somehow be offset by directly interacting with individuals (peasants, out of work folks, women in need, etc.. ) who are basically desperate for any help right now, not long term solutions which may impact their nation as a whole.
It’s easier for NGOs to create all sorts of dependencies by handing over tools and practices to small communitities here and there and tell the world how incredibly successful they’ve been. As soon as the funds dry up or the particular NGO moves on to another project or country, all progress stops.
Fix the governance and build solid institutions that are capable of establishing and enforcing the rules of the road and the goals that need to be met and you’ll finally have a map to real and sustainable development.
Reasoning - Businessinsider.com, buzzfeed.com & huffingtonpost.com are loaded with aggregated content. Not all of it is great, often it is old news or a meme from 3 months ago.
But, every piece of content is carefully designed and crafted to produce as many clicks as possible. It's laughable at times how headlines are rewritten and sexed up to get you to click.
As soon as you realized that it's the same article you read 2 weeks ago on nytimes.com but with better images, a nice interactive chart and a youtube video you might feel bad for a second or two but the damage is done - product sold.
Too much noise on the homepage - yes we know you produce 25,000 articles everyday but we can't read all of it in 2 minutes - Make it easier to scan - my eyes should
not be going left - right and up - down constantly.
2) HEADLINES -
Please make them more interesting - more to the point - shorter - Tell us what the article is really about - A/B test them live.
3) VIDEOS
More videos - not one-offs but branded segments with style and character and good production value - with an actual point of view or focus not some bland summary like "Ok this is what happened today in Washington ..." - we can get that anywhere.
The folks at theverge.com do a good job of that - please copy, adapt & iterate.
4) SECTIONS: Books,Music,TV,Restaurants
You can read a great book review on nytimes.com but you can't download a sample or add it to "Book to read later" list, or take any meaningful action on that book - fix it.
Same deal for movies, restaurants or TV shows. I'd suggest some integration with Netflix/Amazon/iTunes/Google/Spotify.
5) TRAVEL -
Again, great read but all you can do is save a link to that article for your next vacation -- not good enough.
Suggestion - mobile service/app/map integration that keeps track of those favorite reviews and notifies you, the next time you walk into that restaurant so you'll know
what not order.
6) What do I want to read next ?
Articles read + (Netflix info + Amazon info + Spotify info + Other services/purchases) = ???
If you can data-mined at least some of that you could have a good enough answer most of the time.
7) KILL THE PAYWALL
For the overwhelming majority of users this is a big NO. As an added bonus to a Netflix or Amazon Prime subscription ... maybe.
Pretty hard to believe that this is the best that the KDE Visual Design Team - http://vdesign.kde.org/index.html could come up with. Are they even trying hard enough ? This is 2014, the post PC era and they are delivering something that looks like windows 95. UX innovation == O. Boring, lame.
Window 8 was clearly a mess but at least Microsoft is trying something.
I'm not sure this is a mere corporate holiday, it sounds like; in addition to company stuff (reviews/headcount) real long term strategic decisions get made/debated in these top 100 gatherings.
Do we know if there are really 100 attendees to this meeting ? If that's indeed the case, is it unusual to have that many people within a company capable of influencing things ? Any other examples in the corporate world ?
A Redis only system is very interesting but are you doing any kind of replication or clustering and would you recommend it as a main datastore for mission critical user data (accounts, profile, purchased...) ?
Yahoo doesn't have what it takes to become a content company.
Mayer and the management have not really defined what that even means to them. They are aggregators, they borrow data, they do not create it.
Unless Yahoo plans on becoming a actual Journalistic organization, like the New York Times,Bloomberg, ABCNews or USA Today they cannot claim to be a content company.
Yahoo needs to pick, Technology or Content. Apple, Google, Microsoft and even Facebook have already decided. They distribute a lot of content but they are firmly in the technology business and there isn't much confusion about that.
Real linux or not, putting out a mobile OS platform is a considerably ambitious and expensive enterprise. Let's not even address user adoption at this point.
A "geek" friendly phone will always conflict with the need for decent market adoption. Ubuntu on the desktop is "awesome" but according to current market adoption numbers, no one cares.
Any new mobile OS needs to at least match or exceed Android or WP 8 and demonstrate the capacity for breaking new technical grounds in (AI,voice recognition,location & commerce). It's a tall order. I applaud the folks at Jolia for trying but from the look of it, they're not there yet.
ITC Conversation's podcasts have had an enormous influence on my career. Started listening to them in grad school (CS Major).
In the early days IT Conversations was pretty focused on big Technology topics (software design, security...) with signature podcast from Steve McConnell (Code Complete) & of course the original Gillmor Gang.
Then, sadly, the network began covering too many things. It was no longer about anything in particular. In any case they did set the trend and a whole lot of folks did learn from them.
I would consider adding more description blurbs for this app.
$19.99 is definitely too expensive. It is a niche app and I'm guessing it took you a couple months to build but that kind of pricing may not work on the app store for such an app.I'd drop the price to at most $9.99 or even $5.99. Marketing, marketing. Getting noticed after a few weeks in the app store is always a problem. I hope Apple can come up with better ways for developers to market their apps.
Sales do spike up the first few weeks while your app is on the first or second page of its respective category. Good pricing will get you more downloads. Good luck
Simple, been there before. I call it the "Four Step" career turn.
- First pick a language you like, that could land you the kind of job you want and STICK to it.
- Second, practice, write a few complete apps
- Try to get any type of "paid" work that involved coding in that particular language... I recommend consulting...freelance.
- Now you have a credible portfolio, finding a pretty serious Software engineering position in ur desired domain should no longer be a problem.
The whole process should take about year or less. And no you're not in a hole. If you know ur stuff u'll get noticed. Besides an addition to ur new knowledge u'll have 4 year of SAP ...nothing to sneeze at. For some companies that may just be the perfect mix. Personal bias (I recomend PHP)