The NeceMoon Album | Volume 1 (Softcore)
Author: Necemon Yai
Date: 2018-04-23T23:00:00+00:00
Description: The NeceMoon Album Technologies and Strategies to Keep Moving Forward By Necemon Yai Volume 1: Moon Light (Softcore) In this volume: Chapter 1: Strategy and Tactics Chapter 2: Digital Marketing and Web Visualisation Chapter 3: Corporate Worlds and Emerging Markets Chapter 4: Quick Wins, Tricks and Tips Chapter 5: Transition - Extra Thoughts and Sharp Fantasy Featuring Ahou The African Chick, Antoine Mian, Cyriac Gbogou, Edith Brou, Israel Yoroba, Jean Luc Houedanou, Jean-Patrick Ehouman, Karen Kakou, Monty Oum, Nanda Seye, Nnenna Nwakanma, Olivier Madiba, Vanessa Lecosson and Yehni Djidji TheA
Publisher: Evasium

The NeceMoon Album

Technologies and Strategies to Keep Moving Forward

By Necemon Yai

First edition

Published by Evasium ®

April 2018

London, UK

TheAlbum.NeceMoon.com

The contents of this file are protected under the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

License
This file is free to distribute and give away to as many people as you would like.
I only ask that you do not sell it or publish the content onto any website.
If you use any quotes from this document, give me credit and link to the original file.
If you write a book and I quote you, I will give you credit and links too.

© Necemon Yai
necemon@gmail.com
www.necemonyai.com

All Rights Reserved.

Version 1.0.7.235

To the ones I lost, to the ones I got back

For each one that gets lost, ten get laid back

Table of Contents

Introduction      7

For All Practical Purposes      10

Volume 1: Moon Light (Softcore)      11

Chapter 1: Strategy and Tactics      12

Words to Live By (by Monty Oum)      13

Monty Oum or the Bruce Lee of Digital Arts      14

The 5 Most Terrific Motivation Tips (From Monty Oum The Artistic Genius)      19

Losing Your Arm (by Jean-Patrick Ehouman)      21

On reading books and self-education: My Essentials      23

On reading books and self-education, My Essentials (Part 2)      26

Becoming Your Own Boss: 7 Lessons Learned On The Spot (by Yehni Djidji)      34

[Interview] In The Bubble of Yehni Djidji: "I offer educational entertainment and life-changing experiences to children"      36

What will you do in life?      38

11 Personality Traits Of Successful Entrepreneurs (by Jean-Patrick Ehouman)      39

5 Team Management Insights From Sebastian Marshall      42

5 Attitudes Without Which You Will Have Trouble Reaching Your Goals (by Jean-Patrick Ehouman)      43

Just think about it: 50 ideas to live by      45

Breaking Through Pebble : from Mediocrity to Excellence (by Karen Kakou)      50

[Interview] In The Bubble Of Karen Kakou: "my parents never knew their ways to successful careers, I had to figure everything out by myself"      54

10 Business And Management Skills To Own And Be Productive (by Vanessa Lecosson)      56

Chapter 2: Digital Marketing and Web Visualisation      59

A Quick Guide For New Bloggers      60

What (un)motivates us When We Run a Blog (by Jean-Patrick Ehouman)      62

10 Marketing Tips For Promoting Your Next Blog Post (by Vanessa Lecosson)      63

Facebook Profile vs Facebook Page: What To Choose? (by Israel Yoroba)      66

It's All About The Selfie (by Nanda Seye)      68

Confidential: Social Networks And Me (by Yehni Djidji)      72

You Have The Right To Publish Whatever You Want Online (by Jean Luc Houedanou)      74

Caution! Cultivate Your Digital Identity Now! (by Edith Brou)      76

Job On The Web : How Not To Get Hired (by Israel Yoroba)      78

[Interview] In The Bubble Of Israel Yoroba: "I am president, elite serial entrepreneur, veteran blog trotter, catalyst for change in our generation"      80

Did You Just Say Crowdfunding? (by Nanda Seye)      83

[Interview] In The Bubble Of Nanda Seye: "it was essential to be very strategic and organised in order to reach the defined objectives"      85

Exploring Some Advanced Visualisation Techniques      88

Data Visualisation : Thematic Maps VS Bubble Charts      97

A Practical Guide On Open Data From The World Bank (by Cyriac Gbogou)      100

Educational Uses Of Internet Content Curation (by Antoine Mian)      102

Marketing For Programmers (or what I learned from my marketing classes)      103

Web Citizen And Media Coverage: Yes, But... (by Cyriac Gbogou)      110

Chapter 3: Corporate Worlds and Emerging Markets      112

Starting a New Job: 12 Tips for a Brilliant Outset      113

Your First Job is Like Your First Girlfriend      116

5 ‘Good Reasons’ For Which You Will Not Be Hired (by Nnenna Nwakanma)      120

GE FAQ : 3 months in the Cyber Pearl      122

5 lessons I learned from my internship at General Electric      124

12 Years Of A Dream Challenging Reality (by Olivier Madiba)      125

[Interview] In The Bubble Of Olivier Madiba: "my goal is to reach my maximum human potential and to help others to do the same"      133

The Paradox Of Teachers In Africa : Rare And Yet Poorly Paid (by Antoine Mian)      135

Gamification: 5 Peculiar Concepts That African Schools Could Actually Use      136

Africa: ICT in Education for Entrepreneurship and Employability (by Antoine Mian)      141

4 important revelations that could certainly accelerate the educational revolution in Africa      143

Africa, Cradle Of Humanity And Entrepreneurs (by Antoine Mian)      147

[Interview] In The Bubble Of Antoine Mian: "if one is not passionate, they miss out on life"      149

HELP! They Are Going To Steal My Project!!! (by Nnenna Nwakanma)      151

Chapter 4: Quick Wins, Tricks and Tips      152

Where to Find Free Quality Audio Books?      153

Convert Video Files With VLC (by Jean Luc Houedanou)      156

[Interview] In The Bubble Of Jean Luc Houedanou: "a fleet of drones that prevent theft and abuse"      159

FFmpeg, The Fastest Way To Edit a Video File (in 5 seconds or less)      161

Getting started with Metro Studio (or how to benefit from the largest collection of Metro-style icons for free)      163

Instant Messaging For Your Website : Have it the Giant Way      167

Chapter 5: Transition - Extra Thoughts and Sharp Fantasy      168

The Effects of Accelerated Evolution and Information Overloading: did you know?      169

Eponymous Laws For Tech Strategists      170

Success, A Reward To Enjoy In The Shadows (by Ahou The African Chick)      172

[Interview] In The Bubble Of Ahou The African Chick: "I like to go beyond my limits, I like to be curious and try new things"      174

The General Assumption of Security      177

World Wide Worries      178

The Golf Ball Effect      179

Just 2 Things      180

Games for Everyone      181

Final Reminder      182

Conclusion      183

Share The Album with Your Mates      184

Introduction

About The NeceMoon Album: what is this all about?

The NeceMoon™ is a Blog about Technology and Strategy. The Album is The Best-Of, a compilation of the most popular articles on The NeceMoon™.

The main objective of The NeceMoon™ is to share tips and insights on a sensible range of topics, in order to let others learn from my mistakes and successes, and hopefully to make things easier for the next person.
The main objective of The Album is to promote an optimal access to that content. The Blog format does not always do justice to techno-strategic content. Originally, Blogs were designed in a journalistic spirit and are more suitable to chronological events and (more or less trivial) discussions around daily news. Even if the usefulness and the importance of an analysis persist in time, it becomes almost impossible to find and difficult to consult, as more articles keep stacking.
That is why the best articles have been cherry-picked, reviewed and arranged in a logical order that better matches the layout of a book. The Album is free of charge.

The NeceMoon™ can be accessed from NeceMoon.com (or necemonyai.com/blog)
The NeceMoon™ Album can be downloaded in various file formats, in full from TheAlbum.NeceMoon.com (or necemonyai.com/Blog/page/The-Album.aspx). The available formats are PDF, EPUB, MOBI/AZW3/KF8 (Amazon Kindle) and MP3. Furthermore, the various chapters and volumes can be downloaded independently/separately, according to your interests.

About the Author: who is Necemon Yai?

I am a Software Development Engineer extensively involved in Microsoft .NET technologies. Full time developer. Part time digital artist, strategist, essayist and entreprenerd. I majored in computer science from NIIT, Christ University and Swansea University (Master of Engineering, Computing).
At the time of publishing this, I have worked for a Europe leading E-Commerce company, a major UK financial group, the General Electric global corporation and a few tech start-ups that you probably never heard of.
Over the past decade or so, I have been running The NeceMoon blog, where I describe my experiences, my observations and my reflexions. I mostly talk about Technology and Strategy. Here I share my most popular articles.

About the Contributors: who is in your War Council?

I invited the best writers in my network to include some contributions in this book, especially some of their most relevant insights in terms of Technology and Strategy. These top authors are, Ahou The African Chick, Antoine Mian, Cyriac Gbogou, Darren Mart, Edith Brou, Holty Sow, Israel Yoroba, Jean Luc Houedanou, Jean-Patrick Ehouman, Karen Kakou, Monty Oum, Nanda Seye, Nnenna Nwakanma, Olivier Madiba, Vanessa Lecosson and Yehni Djidji.
Along with their respective writings, you can find links to their own web pages. In addition, most of these contributors introduce themselves and provide you with some tactics in our exclusive interviews that you will also find in this book.

About You, Dear Reader: who is this book for? What’s in for you?

In The Album, there are 9 chapters organised in 2 volumes. Each chapter deals with a specific topic. You don’t have to read everything. If you are interested (to one extend or another) in one or more of these topics, you would possibly appreciate the related chapter(s):

Volume 1: Moon Light (softcore)
Chapter 1: Strategy and Tactics
Chapter 2: Digital Marketing and Web Visualisation
Chapter 3: Corporate Worlds and Emerging Markets
Chapter 4: Quick Wins, Tricks and Tips
Chapter 5: Transition - Extra Thoughts and Sharp Fantasy

Volume 2: Full Moon (hardcore)
Chapter 6: Software Development and Engineering
Chapter 7: C# .NET Programming
Chapter 8: Epic Prototypes, Classic Projects, Historic Genre
Chapter 9: Research and Case Studies

If you want to, you can download and read only the chapter(s) and volume(s) that you are interested in. Several file formats are available on TheAlbum.NeceMoon.com
(or necemonyai.com/blog/page/The-Album.aspx)
All the Web links in this document are working, feel very welcome to click on them.

For All Practical Purposes

The NeceMoon Album, Volume 1

This document contains the Volume 1 of The Album. It includes 5 chapters. If you care, 4 additional chapters are available in the Volume 2. Depending on your interests, you may download, (re-)read or share any of the various chapters and volumes independently/separately. The PDF, EPUB, MOBI/AZW3/KF8 (Amazon Kindle) and MP3 formats are available.

To get them, just click on any of the links you like below or go to TheAlbum.NeceMoon.com
(or necemonyai.com/Blog/page/The-Album.aspx)

The NeceMoon Album (complete)

Volume 1: Moon Light (softcore)

Chapter 1: Strategy and Tactics

Chapter 2: Digital Marketing and Web Visualisation

Chapter 3: Corporate Worlds and Emerging Markets

Chapter 4: Quick Wins, Tricks and Tips

Chapter 5: Transition - Extra Thoughts and Sharp Fantasy

Volume 2: Full Moon (hardcore)

Chapter 6: Software Development and Engineering

Chapter 7: C# .NET Programming

Chapter 8: Epic Prototypes, Classic Projects, Historic Genre

Chapter 9: Research and Case Studies

The Album is available in French as well at Album.NeceMoon.com
(or necemonyai.com/Blog/page/L-Album.aspx)

Volume 1

Volume 1

Moon Light

(Softcore)

In this volume:

Chapter 1: Strategy and Tactics

Chapter 2: Digital Marketing and Web Visualisation

Chapter 3: Corporate Worlds and Emerging Markets

Chapter 4: Quick Wins, Tricks and Tips

Chapter 5: Transition - Extra Thoughts and Sharp Fantasy

Featuring Ahou The African Chick, Antoine Mian, Cyriac Gbogou, Edith Brou,
Israel Yoroba, Jean Luc Houedanou, Jean-Patrick Ehouman, Karen Kakou,
Monty Oum, Nanda Seye, Nnenna Nwakanma, Olivier Madiba,
Vanessa Lecosson and Yehni Djidji

Chapter 1

Strategy and Tactics

Strategy and Tactics

Featuring Jean-Patrick Ehouman, Karen Kakou, Monty Oum,
Vanessa Lecosson and Yehni Djidji

Words to Live By

By Monty Oum

I continually hope that someday I'll get a chance to pass on everything I've learned. There hardly seems a moment considering living by my words only means having absolutely no time to say them. So at least I can take a moment in slight to utter in passing.

Never let anyone tell you that something is impossible.

I lived by that when it sparked in me the possibility of achieving something despite everyone telling me it being impossible otherwise. People have always told me it's impossible, that it's been tried. If you know what I'm talking about then you’re already on your way. What I will say to you, ignore those who've been defeated by what they call "experience." Keep going and don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

I know this might sound familiar even, never give up etc. But it's how I live my life even currently as there still are more "experienced" people who will criticize that I'm doing it wrong. It's the human spirit that will keep us alive. This rings true to the events of my life, when I started Haloid. I didn't do it because I wanted to get a job in games, or that I wanted to become famous, or what have you. I did it because I knew it could be done, and that the road to finishing it was imperfect and difficult. What finishing it yielded me was only more steps on the path to pushing forward in what I believed in.

My life lacks much, I'm broke, my car is in horrible shape, my apartment is a mess, I spend 3 days in a row at the office regularly and sleep on the couch only when I need to. I'm helplessly antisocial. I see my girlfriend 3 times a year.

I come from an impoverished family of Cambodian civil war refugees. It’s been a long journey between being so incredibly poor that I didn't have paper to draw on when I was little, to where I am now. It wouldn't have happened if I didn't dive headfirst and take a risk, and continually risk it all to keep going forward... Heh, success? They thought it was impossible.

What is the greatest reward for living in such difficulty?

I hope you see it someday too, because the world looks very different, when you're pushing yourself every second you've got.

Monty Oum or the Bruce Lee of Digital Arts

By Necemon

There are some people who are willing to sacrifice almost everything, including their time, resources, sometimes even their social life, their sleep and some "normal" pleasures of life. All of that, in order to work hard and focus on their vocation, to improve things or try and make their world a slightly better place. Your grandparents had a word for that: Saints. Today we refer to them as Entreprenerds.

We lost one of the top soldiers. An Internet Legend and amazing artist has left us. Monty Oum was an American digital artist known for his crossover fighting videos such as Dead Fantasy and RWBY. He was, among other things, a self-taught 3D animator, whose education was mostly observational.

Most geeks first became aware of Oum after he released the crazy fighting mashup Haloid, using characters from the video games Halo and Metroid. A part time dreamer production:

The video caused a buzz in the gaming industry, and Monty joined Namco Bandai, where he worked on the video game Afro Samurai. He was also responsible for some of the most awesome Web Animation around, most of which relied on Rule of Cool. Millions of people enjoyed his web series "RWBY" (Ruby - Red White Black Yellow).

He chose being Awesome as a career and beyond his artistic skills, he was the man who never slowed down, who always wanted his life to be efficient, quick and as productive as possible. In the industry, Mister Oum’s dedication was legendary. Monty Oum, also known as the Bruce Lee of Digital Arts, was just one of those people that was ferocious about the need to create, thus that great combination: an amazing creative ability and the drive to put it to use. Monty was the personification of motivation and determination.

Can you match this resolve? If so, then you will Succeed.

Personally, I have been following his work since the Road. I admired him for working so hard and being so passionate about what he created.

So much potential, but gone by age 33, following a sudden allergic reaction. That's the kind of stories that remind us how transient, fleeting and ephemeral life is. Sometimes we work extensively, getting into (large) projects... But everything may collapse all of sudden, due to a small accident, a simple medical error or some allergy coming out of nowhere...

Philosophically, it's a pretty important concept: to stay aware of the end which is inevitable. Living in the Borderlands at times, if not all the time. Here, "Borderlands" is a reference to the Bushido concept of meditating on your own death: realising that you will die at some point, and living your life accepting that. Bushido (the way of the warrior) is the code of moral principles that Japanese samurais had to observe and that inspired the code of honor of disciplines such as aikido, judo, jujitsu and karate. But in its purest form, Bushido requires the respect of danger and death from its practitioners, so that they can effectively assess and deal with the present moment in relation to their own death.

To this extent, we could have concluded with the cliché stating that life is short and that we must enjoy every moment. The problem is that there is some complexity in the proposition "enjoying the moment", given the widely divergent interpretations. What is a chore for some people can be a real pleasure for others. And vice versa, which is a distraction for some may be boring for others. The main thing is to do what you love. Have you ever been so intensely absorbed in a creative activity, so that when you get disconnected, you feel that getting back to it would be more exciting than proceeding with "normal" distractions? Some of us execute like crazy because there is no alternative.
Workaholic? Please. That’s sounds like something lazy people would say. When you are emotionally engaged by passion or for a cause, you tend to explore ambitious perspectives without regret, no matter what might happen next.

A lot of life lessons could be learned from this man, but the most important is probably how indomitable the human spirit is. If you endeavor to achieve, it will happen given enough resolve. It may not be immediate, and often your greater dreams is something you will not achieve within your own lifetime. The effort you put forth to anything transcends yourself, for there is no futility even in death.

Monty Oum may have left us, but he leaves behind many great works and inspiration.

The 5 Most Terrific Motivation Tips (From Monty Oum The Artistic Genius)

By Necemon

Monty Oum was the Bruce Lee of Digital Arts. That was the man who never slowed down, who always wanted his artistic life to be efficient, quick and as productive as possible. He was literally a personification of motivation and determination, here are some of his best lines:

Time stops for no one and I have no time to stop.

*****

If you are looking to surpass your current self, then be prepared to sacrifice part of who you are and don't look back.

*****

Which software to use? It's not the tools you use, it's how you use them. I guess the best tip for beginners would be to really just start and do it. Keep moving forward...

*****

The World looks very different, when you push yourself every second you've got.

*****

Can you match my resolve? If so then you will Succeed. I believe that the human spirit is indomitable. If you endeavor to achieve, it will happen given enough resolve. It may not be immediate, and often your greater dreams is something you will not achieve within your own lifetime. The effort you put forth to anything transcends yourself, for there is no futility even in death.

Losing Your Arm

By Jean-Patrick Ehouman

One of the hidden differences between outstanding Success Stories and the average Joe stories, lies in a huge sacrifice. This is also referred to as "losing an arm". This is indeed about some irreversible loss and the pain endured at the time of execution would be unbearable for most of us.

You will not find a single person who has accomplished a monumental work without giving up something generally considered very precious. In many cases, they decided to "lose an arm" in order to make their dreams come true. They ultimately accepted a physical or emotional pain that most of us would not have accepted. Sometimes they put up with it over several years.

When a teenager decides to become a sports professional or a music/movie star, he makes the implicit decision to "set aside" certain teenage distractions in order to reach his goal. You may have heard of Tiger Wood's long hours of training as a child. Encouraged by his parents, whatever the weather, he agreed to train on Sundays (days off for his competitors). Some may find it strange or insane to play golf in the rain, but that was not the case for the Wood family. Others may say that it is useless to rehearse Rap lyrics 15 hours a day without leaving home for several weeks. That was not the opinion of best-selling musician Jay-Z when he was still a teenager. For ordinary people, it would sound even more awkward to try the same chemical or mechanical experiment more than a thousand times, with only a minor modification in the process at each test iteration. That would be without taking into account the drive of Thomas Edison who indulged in it with pleasure during most of his life.

Achievement therefore has a price that only committed individuals can assess, understand and accept. At any moment in life, a woman can decide to do something remarkable. Open the Guiness Book of Records and you will see things as incredible as the people who accomplished them.

Only you can decide to "lose your arm" to achieve a dream. Whether it be notoriety, money, charisma, you will never reach the highest level without sacrificing something precious. A coach, a mentor, a teacher cannot do much for you in that respect, his contribution could not go beyond a permanent reminder of your commitment.

The good news is that very few people are willing to put aside what they view as precious. This gives you the opportunity to go further than others without worrying about real competition. Since at some point, it will be necessary to "lose an arm", and at that point, almost everyone drops out. If you agree to proceed, there is no reason why you would not reach the top.

On reading books and self-education: My Essentials

By Necemon, 2012

There is a lot of great skills you get from school/university lectures, no doubt. But on the other hand, for some specific and practical "super powers" you want to acquire or enhance, you have no other choice but teach yourself. The potential reasons are legion. That could happen by mere interest or if you want to deepen your knowledge in one of your subjects. Or maybe for the sake of personal projects, say learning some essential life skill they don’t teach you in class. So yes, when college doesn't prepare you for life battles, you have to coach yourself.

Anyway, I am not here to complain about any education system. I am writing this post because I would like to share the best and most useful books I went through, as I have been reading a lot lately. I read on a variety of fields and for each of them I am suggesting the top books (according to my humble opinion).

Here we go:

Productivity and Organisation

Being productive implies being effective, deliver what you promise, go from talk to action: in short, being real.  It's not always straightforward to be so concrete. It takes some will power and some organisation. It's a vital skill to have so that your dreams don't remain just dreams. So that your dreams come true:

Getting Things Done (by David Allen): Probably the best book on organisation. It teaches you how to free your mind, how to manage all your "stuff" and how to make efficient choices about your projects.

How to Make a Complete Map of Every Thought You Think (by Lion kimbro): As the title suggests, this book is about how to make a complete map of everything you think for as long as you like. If you do the things described in this book, your thoughts will be clearer to you than they have ever been before. You will see things you have never seen before. It may feel like, for the first time in your life, you really have a clear idea of what kind of thoughts are going through your mind.

Marketing and Business

Learning about marketing is important, even for software developers. Actually, it's important no matter what you want to do in life, whether you want to run a business or work for an existing company. It helps you understand people and deal with them.

Foundations of Marketing (By Jobber and Fahy): That book would be a great way to start off, assuming you don't know anything about marketing. It's easy to understand and it teaches the basic concepts through concrete examples.

Influence : The Psychology of Persuasion (by Robert Cialdini): This book discusses the weapons of influence from a psychological point of view. Among other things, it explains the main factors that cause one person to say yes to another person, as well as real life examples.

Breakthrough Advertising (by Eugene Schwartz): Basically about copywriting (or how to sell with a few written words). What makes this one excellent is, it teaches how to identify the desires of the customers and write headlines and ads that trigger a reaction, as they present solutions to their needs.

I Will Teach You To Be Rich (by Ramit Sethi): Not just another boring finance book. Not only is this book informative, it is fun and includes practical tips that would help you master your finances and possibly make more money.

User eXperience

UX is basically the way users feel about your product or service. It highlights valuable aspects of human-computer interaction. Whatever you build, UX is not a choice. This stuff matters, it affects the success (or failure) of your product. Bad design and bad experience happen.

Mobile Interaction Design (by Matt Jones): this book reveals how mobiles have the potential to be key building blocks in this new digitally augmented world, and how careful innovations in that field could change the world, bringing pleasure and helping businesses.

Press On (by Harold Thimbleby): Provides many ways of thinking clearly about the design of interactive devices and about interaction programming. The emphasis throughout is on making better interfaces.

Digital Arts

Simply put, digital arts are computer-aided artistic works. For this selection, I focus on visual arts.

How To Cheat In Photoshop (by Steve Caplin): A goldmine of practical and useful tips, tricks and step-by-step walkthroughs introducing you to the art of creating photo-realistic montages.

Digital Character Painting Using Photoshop (by Don Seegmiller): a complete book on digital illustration and painting. It covers such theoretical topics as how to get ideas and how to get them out so that others may see them. Then it deals with artistic fundamentals that will help you take your ideas to the next step, drawing and painting. Finally, it provides a series of tutorials that show how to handle different issues when you draw and paint.

Online Games

Yes, as a virtual worlds enthusiast, I had to come up with that selection too :-)

Networking and Online Games : Understanding and Engineering Multiplayer Internet Games / Multiplayer Game Programming : those 2 books would teach you the history of online gaming as well as the basic concepts and some technical aspects to be considered.

Developing online games, an insider's guide (by Mulligan and Patrovsky): This one provides insight into designing, developing and managing online games. This is where you learn from the top two online game developers through the real-world successes and mistakes not known to others. There are Case studies from 10+ industry leaders.

Designing Virtual Worlds (by Richard Bartle): while the previous book discusses broadly online games development, this one focus on virtual worlds. This is a book for people who design virtual worlds. Because of this, it's also a book for people who implement, operate, study, or play virtual worlds. Because of this, it's also a book for people interested in entertainment, education, creativity, art, society, culture, philosophy, space, architecture, psychology, identity, language, economics, government, theology, drama, literature, or cognition. Virtual worlds are of the future. If you want to create or understand that future, this is the book for you.

C# Web Programming

We are getting very specific here. There are lots of technology/programming books out there, but I am going to focus here on what I know best: C#.NET Web development.

ASP.NET 3.5 For Dummies (by Ken Cox): if you want to start off quickly and just begin to create your own websites/web apps within days, this is the book to pick. For an immediate immersion in ASP.NET and the Visual Web Developer environment.

Pro C# 2008 and the .NET 3.5 Platform (by Andrew Troelsen): Well, now that you have made a few apps, as you move forward and it gets confusing at times, you realise that this .NET Framework is really wide. This is the book that give you an overall view on the technology from the philosophy of .NET through the core C# programming constructs, the advanced C# programming constructs and web and desktop user interfaces, among other things. It even goes through more obscure concepts such as shared assemblies, delegates, late binding, workflow foundation, COM interoperability, etc. In short, a very complete book.

ASP.NET 3.5 Social Network (by Andrew Siemers): after you grab the key concepts and play around with the technology through a few projects, maybe you would want to launch an actual product, something that people could use. The way to go about that is probably to see how experts do it, for instance, how they build discussion boards, membership systems or blogs. Better yet, this book will teach you how to build a complete ASP.NET social network from start to finish.

Building a Web 2.0 Portal with ASP.NET 3.5 (by Omar Zabir): This one is definitely the pièce de résistance. This book not only teaches how to build a State-of-the-Art Ajax website using ASP.NET, LINQ, advanced ajax concepts, Windows WorkFlow and other cutting-edge Microsoft technologies; it also shows how to solve real life production challenges such as deployment, hosting, performance optimisation, scalability, caching, security, monitoring, etc.

That's it for now...

On reading books and self-education, My Essentials (Part 2)

By Necemon, 2015

A couple of years back I shared my reading list and wrote about the books I found most interesting. But then, after that, I have been reading some more over the past few months, here are my recent favorites:

1. Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality - by LessWrong

A "parallel universe" Harry Potter fiction written by Eliezer Yudkowsky (A.K.A. LessWrong), an AI researcher, writer and decision theorist at the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence. The fan fiction story illustrates topics in cognitive science and rationality, recasting the original story in an attempt to explain Harry's wizardry through the scientific method.

Petunia Evans has married an Oxford biochemistry professor and young genius Harry grows up fascinated by science and technology. When he finds out that he is a wizard, he tries to apply scientific principles to his study of magic, with sometimes surprising results.  With magic now seemingly a proven reality, Harry now takes his place at Hogwarts, armed with Enlightenment ideals and the experimental spirit.

The text contains many clues: obvious clues, not-so-obvious clues and truly obscure hints. This is a rationalist story; its mysteries are solvable, and meant to be solved. All science mentioned is real science.

The fanfiction is known for possibly being the most reviewed Harry Potter fanfiction, with over 20,000 reviews on Fanfiction.net as of July, 2013.

Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling owns Harry Potter, and no one owns the methods of rationality.

2. Influencer (The power to change anything) - by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, David Maxfield, Ron McMillan and Al Switzler

Leading is hard. And the only thing harder than leading a team towards a common vision – provided you are able to unite it in the first place – is leading a team through change. Change is harder.

There is no magic formula for managing change, but the book "Influencer: The Power to Change Anything"provides a great framework.

The authors first point out what does not work: talking. You can’t explain logically to people why they must change their behaviors and expect anything to happen. Peoples' behaviors are tuned to what they believe is in their best self interests. Unless you can change that belief, you have little chance of changing their behaviors.

Influence is about changing hearts, minds, and behavior to produce meaningful, sustainable results.

In short, don’t waste time on how to create change until you’ve clarified what you want, why you want it, and when you want it. The book explains how to clarifying measurable results, find vital behaviors, and use a strategic, varied approach to influence individuals and groups.

3. The Undefeated Mind: On the Science of Constructing an Indestructible Self - by Alex Lickerman

A book about how to surmount the challenges that life throws our way. It’s a powerful book that helps you cultivate your inner strength to face hard times with a fearless heart. It’s more than a book. It’s a set of tools for life.

The tools in this book help you stand strong when tested.  The key, according to Dr. Lickerman, is turning adversity into wisdom.  It’s that wisdom that helps you develop your resilience and achieve indestructible peace.

It’s also a beautiful blend of ancient wisdom and modern science, offering a set of guidelines not for solving problems but for establishing a life state that makes all problems solvable, and dramatically increase your ability to withstand adversity.

It doesn't just happen automatically, and it takes practice. Extraordinary people may be born, but they can also be made.

4. Who is pulling your strings? (how to break the cycle of manipulation and regain control) - by Harriet Braiker

In "Who's Pulling Your Strings?", Dr. Harriet B. Braiker exposes the most common methods of manipulators, and with the help of self-assessment quizzes, action plans, and how-to exercises, she helps you recognize, end and avoid the manipulative cycle (for good) through lots of straight-forward techniques.

5. The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment - by Ekhart Tolle

A guide stressing the importance of living in the present moment and avoiding thoughts of the past or future. The author writes that an individual should be aware of their "present moment" instead of losing themselves in worry and anxiety about the past or future.

According to the book, only the present moment is important, and both an individual's past and future is created by their thoughts. The author maintains that people's insistence that they have control of their life is an illusion that only brings pain. The book also describes methods of relaxation and meditation to aid readers in anchoring themselves in the present. These suggestions include slowing down life by avoiding multi-tasking, spending time in nature, and letting go of worries about the future.

Although the journey is challenging, Eckhart Tolle uses simple language and an easy question and answer format to guide you.

6. I was blind but now I see - by James Altucher

James Altucher is one of my favorite bloggers. In this book he attempts two things. First, he tries to create some awareness about a wide variety of issues that we tend to take for granted/as normal without actually considering why, using clear cut arguments and mentioning alternatives to make his points.

Secondly, the author describes how to deal with the awareness and to get the confidence/strength to do things in your own way. Funny, brutally honest and thought-provoking.

7. Shut up, stop whining and get a life - by Larry Winget

This is not your typical self-help book. This book won't make you feel good about yourself and that's a good thing. If you are hoping to improve yourself with a bunch of feel-good mantras, then this book is NOT for you. But if you are ready to get up and really change your life, then Larry Winget is your man. Larry (A.K.A. the Pitbull of Personal Development) is direct, caustic, and controversial. His tough-love approach boils success down to a simple formula: your life failures are your own freaking fault, and if you shut up, stop whining, and take action, your life will get better.

8. The 50th Law - by 50 Cent and Robert Greene

Pop culture and hip hop icon 50 Cent joins forces with Robert Greene, bestselling author, to write collaboratively a bible for success in life and work based on a single principle: fear nothing.

They came up with The 50th Law, a New York Times bestselling book on strategy and fearlessness.

The book is a semi-autobiographical account detailing 50 Cent's rise as both a young urban hustler and as an up-and-coming musician with lessons and anecdotes from historical figures such as Abraham Lincoln, Sun Tzu, Socrates, Napoleon, Malcolm X, and James Baldwin.

9. The Millionnaire Mind - by Thomas Stanley

The Millionaire Mind draws from the author's research of America's affluent to examine the ideas, beliefs and practices of the segment of the financial elite that use little or no consumer credit.

The book analyzes the common environmental and lifestyle factors that preceded and resulted in this researched segment's ability to accumulate wealth, by exploring the attitudes and skills that enabled these millionaires to build and maintain their fortunes.

10. How to live on 24 hours a day - by Arnold Bennett

Time is a very funny thing; everyone gets the same amount per day. No one receives either more or less than you receive. It's not possible to go the store and buy time. But time is the inexplicable raw material of everything. With it, all is possible; without it, nothing is possible.

The author states that time is the most precious of commodities. He said that many books have been written on how to live on a certain amount of money each day, but he adds that the old adage "time is money" understates the matter, as time can often produce money, but money cannot produce more time. Time is extremely limited, and Bennett urged others to make the best of the time remaining in their lives.

How to Live on 24 Hours a Day offers practical advice on how one might live (as opposed to just existing) within the confines of 24 hours a day. A classic piece on self improvement teaching you to live to the fullest.

11. The Power of Habit (Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business) - by Charles Duhigg

Habits can save us or ruin us in a thousand ways; in fact, these "automatic responses" affect every arena of our lives.

In The Power of Habit, Pulitzer Prize–winning business reporter Charles Duhigg explores the science behind habit creation and reformation. He takes us to the thrilling edge of scientific discoveries that explain why habits exist and how they can be changed.

At its core, The Power of Habit contains a sensible argument: The key is understanding how habits work.

12. On Writing, a Memoir of the Craft - by Stephen King

On Writing is part biography and part how-to. Stephen King (world best-selling author of contemporary horror, supernatural fiction, suspense, science fiction, and fantasy) writes about his childhood and young adulthood, relating stories that made him the writer he has become. Stephen King then moves into the mechanics of writing, offering advice and insight into a successful career that has worked so well for him but remains distant for thousands of others.

13. Principles - by Ray Dalio

Principles is like a modern day meditation guide aimed at personal, professional and career development.

Ray Dalio, self-made multi-billionaire, details the purpose and importance of having principles in general, his most fundamental life principles that apply to everything he does, and his management principles.

14. Introduction to Metaphysics - by Henri Bergson

A thought provoking essay about the concept of reality by Henri Bergson. For Bergson, reality occurs not in a series of discrete states but as a process similar to that described by process philosophy or the Greek philosopher Heraclitus. Reality is fluid and cannot be completely understood through reductionistic analysis, which he said "implies that we go around an object", gaining knowledge from various perspectives which are relative. Instead, reality can be grasped absolutely only through intuition, which Bergson expressed as "entering into" the object.

This is a difficult book but his ideas about time and the value of immediate experience are definitely worthwhile.

That's it.

Becoming Your Own Boss: 7 Lessons Learned On The Spot

By Yehni Djidji

A few months ago, I left my job in order to become my own boss. Well, that's what I thought. But I could learn a few lessons from this experience that I would like to share.

1. Fun working

When you do a job you love, it turns out that you do not really work. You have fun while learning and making money.

2. Varied activities, balanced intellect

I no longer need to mechanically repeat the same gestures, or to work on the same project all day long. I can help someone start a magazine while working on a movie script, writing articles for a radio and tweaking a short story. Of course, it's important to be very organized. I'm still looking for the secret.

3. Guaranteed savings

Some people have a salary that seems huge but they spend most of it on transportation, communication and food in the workplace. If you work at home, you won't spend any money on transport except for value-added appointments and you will simply eat the homemade meal of the day... if you are disciplined. Additionally, the informal side of the start-up activity saves you a lot of taxes. You have to make the most of this phase, and save as much as possible, and formalize the activity quickly because there are opportunities that you cannot seize when you are not legally constituted.

4. Master of your time and space

You can arrange your schedules to be available for your family while carrying out your activities. You do not have to worry about rush-hour traffic anymore and waste precious time wondering if the slowdown is due to an accident or to the movements of an official convoy. At home, in a restaurant, at the beach, you can work everywhere. I do not advise people to work exclusively from home and I will explain why a little further.

5. Did you say "No More Boss"?

If you thought you could actually become your own boss, think again. Your customers are your new bosses. Some will even make you regret leaving your job. Each of them has their demands, their constraints, their inappropriate language sometimes. But this will allow you to discover some other sides of entrepreneurial life.

6. Be aware and beware of weight gain

In order to work from home you have to be disciplined. Otherwise, you will be tempted to gulp the fridge contents by snacking excessively. True story.

7. Knowing how to set limits

You must be able to explain to the family that staying in front of a computer does not mean that you are sitting idle. They must comprehend that you may be in the house without being available. Otherwise you will be involved in a parade of servants coming to request various things that they normally handle well when you are not around. And yet, that does not even take the children into account. I cannot work with my son around. He will knock on the door of my room until I open it. For those with children who are still too young to understand that you may need some quiet time, it may be better to go out.

[Interview] In The Bubble of Yehni Djidji: "I offer educational entertainment and life-changing experiences to children"

1. Quick (but effective) introduction of the personage and her achievements?

I am Rosine Kakou Ano. Graduated in Communication, Marketing and Management. I have been operating under the pseudonym "Yehni Djidji" since 2008, which was the year when I launched my blog. I am the founder of a literary agency called Livresque that helps those who wish to publish a book throughout the process, organises events about literature and offers educational entertainment to children.

2. What are the values that better define you?

Piety: the fear of God is the hallmark of men of value. This gives them integrity, loyalty and honesty.
Responsibility: It comes along with maturity and allows to respect and completely fulfill the commitments made to others and to oneself. It is a quality that lots of people are sorely lacking.
Empathy and liberality: To love one's neighbor, to be able to put oneself in their shoes, to understand their burden and help them to relieve themselves.

3. What are your main goals in life?

Books helped me to strengthen myself and to launch my career. Therefore, I am actively striving to put them back at the heart of habitudes so that the maximum of people can enjoy their benefits. Additionally, our continent has great stories and I like to participate in relating them to the world through increasingly varied formats.

4. What tools and techniques do you use to accomplish things efficiently?

I am an Internet addict who tries to moderate her indulgence, even though it is difficult, since it's also my work environment. My favorite gadgets are my computer and my phone.

5. Any recommendations for your juniors?

I recommend my coloring book with traditional outfits drawings for children aged 3 to 6, and why not more if there's a fit. There's no maximum age for coloring. I also encourage them to commit to appreciating books, not just as learning tools, but as daily companions too. That would be a life-changing experience.

6. What is the best way to contact you?

The best way to contact me is by email (yehnidjidji@gmail.com), and then through social networks.

What will you do in life?

By Necemon

This goes to those who haven't decided yet what they are going to do in life.

It's important to start thinking about it now, no matter how old you are. You better start early because it takes time, effort and dedication to improve one's skills and to reach goals. The earlier you start, the more time you have to mess up (and you will probably mess up on the way).

To decide about what to do, there are basically 3 things you need to consider:

- what you love, what you are passionate about.

- what your talents are, what you are naturally good at, but the skills you acquired on the way matter too.

- what value you can create, what you can do that people will pay you for.

Now, it's generally easy to come up with what you love most. However, I noticed that many people have issues combining that with their strengths and the value they can create. If that's also your case, you can try the following.

Let's consider your phone book. In that, you got a friend for pretty much anything. When your computer is screwed up, you know which friend to call. When you feel depressed, there is that one friend, you call to cheer you up. When you want to hang out in town, you also know whom to contact. Well, we can come up with many similar examples, but the point is, you are also a contact to your friends. So ask yourself, what is it that they contact you to help them for? That may gave you a clue of what you are good at and how you can help others.

Wishing you all the best,

Necemon

11 Personality Traits Of Successful Entrepreneurs

By Jean-Patrick Ehouman

I spend a good deal of my time trying to understand what is unusual about successful start-ups founders and product creators, that is, what is special about their way of doing things. Hence we can infer some attitudes and "design patterns" that are often found among these people. Here is a (non-exhaustive) list of traits that I have noticed in these people. Of course, some entrepreneurs succeed without these traits.

Curiosity

They read a lot and do not hesitate to ask questions for things that may seem trivial at first. They have a thirst for knowledge. They want to understand what could have led to a given success or failure. They are also constantly looking for things that will motivate and retain their best employees.

The ability to collaborate

Those who know how to delegate and build strong relationships with their employees are more likely to come up with solutions or products that meet the real needs of their customers.

Spending as little as possible

When it comes to successful entrepreneurs, as the saying goes: "an entrepreneurial adventure should tends to create money and not to lose it". That is why they always look for ways to avoid digging into their pockets whenever possible. By choosing goods exchanges over purchases for example, they always find ingenious means to acquire the resources they need without having to reduce their funds.

Fulfilment

Doing something that they love and that makes them happy is essential for these entrepreneurs. They like to have total control of their income. They also derive enormous satisfaction from the fact that they create value-added products, services and/or concepts.

Planning maniacs

From their perspective, everything must be planned. Whether it be short-term actions or those to be implemented in the medium and long term, they take the time to write a plan with a fairly high level of detail. This allows them to have an effective guideline and to be able to adjust their strategy at any time through daily monitoring.

Power users (for those who have access to technology)

The best entrepreneurs do not hesitate to invest in high quality websites while taking the time to set up internal management and communication tools. They are keen to spend on boosting those core assets.

Giving back to the community

In addition to their commercial activities, successful entrepreneurs often act in favor of the community. They are involved in charity work or they simply initiate projects to help others.

Man of Action

They try to differentiate themselves from their competitors at all times by being proactive and taking the lead. They take risks that the average Joe would consider insane. Also, they do not view mistakes as a fatality. On the contrary, they use those lessons to set up new strategies and therefore to increase their chances of succeeding at their next attempts.

Hyper motivated

Finally, successful entrepreneurs are people with extraordinary motivation. When it looks like they are hitting rock bottom, they surprisingly bounce back and come up with new ideas that they implement with tremendous determination and unshakeable confidence.

A constant and objective self-evaluation

They remain honest with themselves even when it comes to self-assessment. So they make every effort to correct their imperfections. They are always willing to challenge themselves and their unproven tactics. For example, if an employee fails to complete a task, they would assume that it is mainly because they picked the wrong man for the job.

They manage to make the most of the competencies in their network, they keep learning relevant "best practices" and "design patterns" from their competitors and colleagues.

5 Team Management Insights From Sebastian Marshall

By Necemon

There are already tons of good insights available on Sebastian's website. However, having a one-to-one discussion with him was very useful to discuss specific challenges relevant to some ongoing projects. Through that conversation, Sebastian gave concrete, actionable pieces of advice on project management, recruitment and teamwork:

1. It's better, faster and cheaper to work with people who are already motivated instead of investing in motivating people who are not. The key is to find people that are passionate about the project field(s).

2. For a given field, a good way to find passion-driven individuals is to connect with relevant lecturers, tutors and other educators. Those field experts are likely to mentor interested juniors looking to earn experience through projects/internships.

3. With respect to the people working with you, don't give them an abstract description of the project. Be specific in your explanation with a detailed description and ideally have something concrete already working to show.

4. Don’t give them an abstract definition of their mission either. Have very specific tasks for them to do.

5. Time estimates, milestones and regular catch-ups help to keep the project on a good track.

5 Attitudes Without Which You Will Have Trouble Reaching Your Goals

By Jean-Patrick Ehouman

You probably made resolutions at the beginning of the year. Whether you have achieved your goals or not, there is no need to feel sorry for yourself. You still have time to comply with these resolutions. But you would still have trouble getting there if you don't adopt the appropriate mindsets. In my view, these are 5 attitudes that remain paramount when it comes to raising to the next level:

1. Staying honest with yourself

To acquire a know-how, a skill, a recognition, etc., it takes time and a lot of practice. At first, you will have to acknowledge that you do not know much about how things work. As long as you don't accept the fact that you do not have the required abilities (yet), you will keep an invalid perception of reality. Don't be fooled by the flattering comments or the admiring amateurs. Get closer to knowledgeable people who are way ahead of you and who are willing to mentor you.

2. Starting with the basics

Competition generally tends to highlight different levels of proficiency, and each level has its specific features. Those of the lowest level remain the most important ones, as they constitute the basis of your skills. You will need to take the time to master these basics.

3. Asking questions

There is no such thing as a dumb question. The best approach is to record the answers on the medium of your choice. However, I can assure you that your brain is not the place where you should record them. You must have a (paper or electronic) notebook where you will mark everything that will be useful for your evolution. This will ensure that you won't need to ask the same questions several times. Asking the same question twice to the same person is like giving them a motive to stop answering your questions. It would be unfortunate to lose people who have agreed to mentor you.

4. Accepting criticism

This will always bring you back to point 1. Only by accepting criticism will you be able to identify your weak points in order to overcome them.

5. Working hard, paying attention to details

If you only believe in innate ability, you are doomed. I don't know much about academic studies relating to human abilities, however my field experience strengthens my conviction that the most important factor for success is hard work. And in order to move forward through work, you need to pay close attention to details.

Just think about it: 50 ideas to live by

By Necemon

1. Just Keep Moving Forward.

2. K.I.S.S. (Keep It Simple & Smart) and H.U.G. (Have Utilitarian Goals)

3. The best way to meet opportunities is probably to start by being an opportunity yourself.

4. The best way to reach your goals is to help those you need to reach theirs.

5. Motivation is what gets you started, habit is what keeps you going.

6. Yesterday you said tomorrow. Just do it.

7. The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.

8. There’s a difference between knowing the path and walking the path.

9. This is 10% luck, 20% skill, 15% concentrated power of will, 5% pleasure, 50% pain.

10. The more you sweat in training, the less you bleed in battle. The harder you are on yourself, the easier life will be on you.

11. Fake it until you make it.

12. It is our choices that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.

13. The World looks very different, when you push yourself every second you've got.

14. If you are looking to surpass your current self, then be prepared to sacrifice part of who you are and don't look back.

15. That which is important is rarely urgent, and that which is urgent is rarely important.

16. Parkinson’s Law: Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.

17. A journey of a thousand miles just starts with one step.

18. The difference between theory and practice is smaller in theory than in practice.

19. Those who try to do something and fail are infinitely better than those who try to do nothing and succeed.

20. No matter how many mistakes you make or how slow you progress. You’re still way ahead of everyone who isn’t trying.

21. A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for

22. Your Dream is not what you see in sleep, it's the thing which doesn't let you sleep.

23. There's no traffic jam when going the extra mile

24. Vague Plans Provoke Vague Results. You have to name it before you can claim it.

25. When nothing is sure, everything is possible.

26. If you're going through hell, keep going.

27. People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care about them.

28. To be realistic is to find rational ways for wonderful achievements

29. If you want to look successful, maybe you should actually become successful. Nothing looks more successful than success.

30. You're basically unstoppable if you've got the right model and you execute like crazy.

31. Life remains the same until the pain of remaining the same becomes greater than the pain of change.

32. Extreme Programming is based on 5 core values : Communication, Simplicity, Feedback, Courage and Respect.

33. Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can't lose. When everything is alright, you feel invincible, that's when things get dangerous. Everything is alright... Until it's not.

34. You are not lost, you are locationally challenged.

35. Plan your work and work your plan.

36. The way out is through.

37. Murphy's Law

Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong (at the worst possible time)

Most ideas look great on paper. But by the time events go from A all the way through the alphabet to Z, you see who rules when it comes to getting something from the theoretical stage to the practical stage: it's Murphy's Law.

No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy. Hope for the best, be ready for the worst.

38. Pareto's Law : for many events, about 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.

39. Information is difference that makes a difference.

40. The guy who is controlling his emotions is going to win.

41. If you don't write your own rules, someone else will. And the results won't be pleasant.

42. Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.

43. Hesitation is always easy, rarely useful.

44. First, just start. Start somewhere. Start anywhere. Start with SomeOne. Start with AnyOne. Start with no one. Start with Something. Start with Anything. Start with Nothing. Just start.

45. Worrying is a waste of time; it doesn't change anything, it just messes with your mind and steals your happiness.

46. Time stops for no one and I have no time to stop.

47. Knowing others is intelligence; knowing yourself is true wisdom. Mastering others is strength; mastering yourself is true power.

48. The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.

49. When you compete against everyone else, no one wants to help you. When you compete against yourself, everyone wants to help you.

50. All of us can certainly afford to know more than we already do. Information has never been more abundant or more easily accessible.

Breaking Through Pebble: from Mediocrity to Excellence

By Karen Kakou

How Do You Shift from a Restricted Mindset to Thinking Excellence for Greater Success?

In this briefing, I share a few tactics from my personal experience of exiting the realm of mediocrity to a mindset of excellence that leads me toward success. I also discuss some observations and principles that have been helpful in acquiring knowledge and acting on it.

1. Being aware that greater opportunity is available to you and you are permitted to own it.

In my last year of high school, I remember being invited to "Laureat", a government merit event where the political leaders were rewarding the students who earned the highest grades during a sort of award reception. I received my award in "facultative subjects", subjects like music and secondary languages. I was never aware of such program. But when receiving my award, I just felt that, if only I knew, I would have studied with a specific mission and who knows what the results might have been? Maybe I would have gotten an award each year in some other relevant subjects! Or maybe not... I was a Queen of Overthinking. I used to think too much to the point of getting overwhelmed by the little things because I also wanted things to be so perfect. I quickly learned that no one will know what I have in mind, what I can offer if I do not present it at all, because no one can read my mind or see through me for my potential. Others can only observe my actions and my results, so I need to get out and do it, then refine it as I go with the input I get.

2. Once aware of your chance, it takes discipline to seize it.

Many have ideas, know the direction to get to where they dream of being, but very few act on it. It  is not easy. It takes discipline. The best way to get it done is to get started with it. I love to tell myself these two things, I have them written everywhere in my house: "Do it!" and "Do it anyways". "Do it!" forces me out of bed, go to the gym, get things started especially when I hate the idea of doing it. "Do it anyways" gets me to get things started and follow up until completion, even when I am in doubt.

So, for me, the number one thing that contributed to my success in reaching the best version of myself has definitely been discipline. That is, doing the right thing at the right time, remaining consistent and persistent through it, paying attention to detail, planning and doing anything that keeps you in an orderly, preparative state of mind to recognize the opportunities that will lead you to success. I came from a rough background in which the best future people could have dreamed for me was the hope I someday find a good husband who will treat me right. But the little girl I was already had bigger dreams, bigger ideas for her future than the usual expectations. I wanted to be successful, I wanted my work to have an impact on society, I wanted to feel fulfilled and feel like I leveraged every bit of my potential. But I had to figure out how to get there for myself as I did not have a model to look up to, someone to guide me, nor the financial means to facilitate the process. Discipline has been the key attribute that took me from an impoverished environment and mindset, where the best future that was laid out for me was to potentially become just a good wife and to be grateful to have enough to eat, to now be self-fulfilled. Today with discipline, I was able to leverage my intellectual talent and have the career I knew I could, I was also able to improve my perspective on life heading toward being the person I know I can be, and have it all which I set my mind to in a way that is balanced.

One main discipline skill for me has been planning. I would write out my objectives, what I felt I needed to get accomplished that would lead me to success someday, and then break it down to the day-to-day tasks to do. Living on a schedule, pushed me to get into action because I wanted to check the boxes, it brought clarity into what opportunity is available to me, and helped me seek for more. If it wasn’t for the discipline of planning, I would not have been able to go to school, earn good grades, while working many jobs to sustain, and staying alert to what was happening around me to advance my career, given all the work restrictions applied to a foreign student in the USA. I planned for everything, today planning has become like a part of me and it helped me multitask/swich-task and be prepared, which led me to the management role I currently hold.

Two tools I use to remain organized and disciplined are a planner and Microsoft OneNote:

- I use the Franklin Covey planner but I would recommend you use any planner that works for you. It’s important to write down what you would like to achieve, then break it down to smaller objectives and plan your daily activities accordingly. Writing down your objectives is the best way to measure your productivity level, improve and possibly address anything that may be holding you back.

- Then I use OneNote to stay more organized, to classify and retain everything that is important to me. And we are talking about the list of books I am writing, my career planning, my economic budget, my recipes etc. I see it as a very big planner that has unlimited pages, you can write down and plan whatever you would like. As an example, I inserted below a screenshot of my OneNote Files to give you an overview of what could be done with that tool but you should explore it for yourself, it is pretty awesome.

3. Continuous Improvement: getting in Kaizen Mode

Getting things done is not a one-off task. You have to keep doing things and doing them better; thus you need to continually improve.

Kaizen is the Japanese word for continuous improvement. In business, Kaizen refers to activities that continuously improve all functions and processes. To me, the Kaizen process applies in every aspect of life. When you can define what you want, put your plans into action and are disciplined through the process, you can analyze your progress and keep on learning new and better ways to achieve your objectives. Adopting this mentality will give you a greater sense of control on what happens to you.

My biggest tools to continually improve has been reading, listening to podcasts and audio books while driving, interacting with individuals who seek growth as well and keep on educating myself. For instance, soon after finishing my Industrial Engineering degree, I started a data analysis course online. But another big aspect of continuous improvement is that your only competition is the measure of your own capacity. When you are focused on getting better and being the greatest you can be, you do not have the time to compare yourself to others if not only but to learn from their ways. In continuous improvement, the focus is your growth and your attention should be on the process that will eventually lead to result. This eliminates unnecessary pressure that could stop you from getting into action. I remember feeling at times pressured by the external ‘noises’ to settle for less and not try to achieve as much ambition as I intended to because they seemed unrealistic. When I wanted to be an Engineer, they advised to be grateful if I can get an assistant job somewhere which can enable me to pay for my bills. When I wanted to pursue a higher education abroad, they laughed. But because I was fixated on my growth and not the immediate result, I kept on pushing through which allowed for my increased in knowledge which resulted in increase in opportunities.

4. The Road to Success may be a lonely road. Get ready to cope.

You may hear a lot about the inventors and geniuses that were very depressive individuals, and you may wonder why when they seem to have figured out everything there is to know. That is because continually focusing solely on yours books, your invention, your computer could isolate yourself from the rest of the world. It's also worth keeping in mind that few people act on their ideas, work on growth and achieve self-actualization. Therefore the crowd whom a committed person could relate to and connect with is generally quite limited. That state of seclusion can be hard on the mind. In order to succeed while maintaining a healthy balance, it helps to join or interact with (groups of) like-minded individuals, and to assist them occasionally with your skills or knowledge. While in school, I was involved in a lot of professional organizations and clubs, I became the president of some of them, which helped me build good networks. Later, these networks opened opportunities such as being a commencement speaker at the university, becoming a recruitment partner with a school, being the face of many campaigns and publications, etc. Networking doesn't have to be a waste of time or a distraction.

I hope this note comes as a reinforcement towards the path you envision for yourself.

[Interview] In The Bubble Of Karen Kakou: "my parents never knew their ways to successful careers, I had to figure everything out by myself"

1. Quick (but effective) introduction of the personage and her achievements?

I am Karen A. Kakou. I am an Industrial Engineering graduate from the University of Wisconsin in the USA. Currently I work as a Manager in a renowned food manufacturing company, where I get to apply my analytical, continuous improvement and people management skills on a daily basis. My strength throughout my career has been to always seek the next thing to learn. I am a hungry for anything books and new knowledge. With my background - my mom never gone to college, my father barely knowing the ways around for a successful career, and no one to guide me in general, I had to figure everything out for myself. This may be the reason why I have always been thirsty for more to learn. This helped me in defying what the expected future for me was - a passable future, to strive for a more excellent future in which I live up to my potential. Today I could not be any happier because I am living the path of what was meant for me, and I never settled.

2. What are your main goals in life?

To be the best of me. Although it’s a very abstract response, it is what one must seek. Saying I want to become the Manager of so and so as a main goal is limiting. Once you reach that goal, what’s next?! Hence, my main goal in life is to live up to my greatest potential. In doing so, I know I have the potential to become a CEO of a company someday, I also have the potential to live happy and healthy, so I am going to work toward being in that position and living that life. It’s a holistic approach and a vision that incite continuous growth.

3. What tools and techniques do you use to accomplish things efficiently?

My favorite tool is Microsoft OneNote. It saved my life! Everything for me is organization. I know I can get a lot done but if I do not plan well and prioritize, nothing will be done and I could get overwhelmed. OneNote helps me be very organized. It is my brain poured out on a screen page- I have written down my books draft, my objectives, my investment planning, my entrepreneurial ideas, even my grocery list. All is well classified and locked with a password.

4. Any recommendations for your juniors?

You got to check my website karenkakou.com, of course (lol). I share everything I have learned throughout my life’s journey, which I think would be a great source of inspiration and motivation for anyone who strive to be great. Then you got to keep reading and learning from the greatest.  A few reads I would recommend are as follow: Malcom Gladwell’s books, any books of Napoleon Hill, any major CEOs biography such as Elon Musk, Jeffrey Bezos, Steve Jobs’. "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" and "In, But Not Of" are some other great ones. I also like to listen to the Tim Ferriss podcast as well as watch videos from Mindvalley Academy.

5. What is the best way to contact you?

You can contact me through my website: karenkakou.com
Or by email: kkakouwebsite@gmail.com

10 Business And Management Skills To Own And Be Productive

By Vanessa Lecosson

Management skills tend to play a very important part in business.

It is thanks to these skills that company directors can assign, assess and stay aware of the work completed by their teams.

They decide, implement actions and take control of each situation. Their skills and roles should necessarily match their career ambitions.

In this article, I suggest 10 skills in Business and Management to own in order to be productive and to be considered as a good Manager.

1. Define your top priorities

Listing your daily tasks can be a pretty effective way to improve your productivity. Focus on what's important by regularly marking and sorting the tasks that are more valuable than others.

It is essential to assess which tasks should be completed first.

2. Manage time as required

Starting early is one of the secrets that business leaders use to accomplish multiple tasks in the day. They focus on the "now" and avoid postponing.

Another thing about good managers is that they understand the importance of short, effective breaks.

3. Know when to say "no" and when to say "yes"

What makes people say "yes" instead of "no" is the fear of losing an opportunity. In some cases, they say "yes" just to avoid seeming rude, so that they could be viewed as caring individuals.

Everyone has priorities in life. There is no harm in saying "no" to things you do not want to do or things that you are not interested in.

4. Always start with the end in mind

Get into the habit of having a clear picture of the goals you want to achieve within a day, a week, a month, etc. You must have a plan before you commit to any project or task.

This will keep you motivated and focused on the most important parts.

Effective and timely strategies can lead to successful achievement of goals. It is important that you keep in mind that nothing will come to you unless you start making things happen. One action always leads to another. And it is the consistent succession of actions that lead to results.

5. Keep learning and improving

Knowledge is drawn from everywhere. It is not only learned in the classroom, but is acquired through personal experiences as well.

One of the secrets used by many business leaders and business men and women is that they are constantly looking for hobbies that will allow them to learn/discover something new.

They are open to exploration and to those things that will allow them to grow mentally, physically and intellectually.

6. The efficient allocation of resources

In business vocabulary, the allocation of resources is an economics concept which relates to the use of scarce resources, particularly the factors of production (labor, capital, raw materials) to satisfy the population's consumption needs in the short and long term. Resource management is used to get timely results and to optimize day-to-day productivity.

7. Use the right tools to stay productive

Appropriate tools will allow you to improve your productivity level and maximize your efficiency in the job. Mobile phones, although often criticized, can obviously be very important tools for communicating with team members, co-workers, etc.

Some tools such as emails, conversation groups on some social networks (public/private) can help to fill the gaps related to communication within a company.

With the rise of new communication technologies, productivity applications are very useful and a powerful help for businesses. Mastering them will not only help you keep track of your agenda, but also increase your level of productivity.

8. Living in The “Now”

Business leaders renowned for their productivity focus on things they have yet to achieve. But they always take breaks to enjoy life and the present moment.

9. Dealing with the unexpected

Unforeseen events may spring from nowhere, at any moment and surprise anyone. Business leaders and managers are always prepared for the worst. And that's why they are always ready to respond quickly to any situation.

10. Staying organised

Just like beauty, organization skills come from within. They will take root in you before outsiders may notice. Organized people know how to keep things in order. They are often in the habit of taking notes and making lists.

Chapter 2

Digital Marketing
and Web Visualisation

Digital Marketing and Web Visualisation

Featuring Antoine Mian, Cyriac Gbogou, Edith Brou,
Israel Yoroba, Jean Luc Houedanou, Jean-Patrick Ehouman,
Nanda Seye, Vanessa Lecosson and Yehni Djidji

A Quick Guide For New Bloggers

By Necemon

A new online "friend" was recently asking me: "What should be done to get a more lively blog or social media page? I mean, more visits, more likes; how to have some attractive blog and online profiles."

That question comes back from times to times. I don't particularly see myself as an expert in blogging or in social media marketing, but if I were to briefly sum up my humble opinion on the matter, that would be in 3 words: education, production and promotion.

1. Education
I couldn't detail everything you actually needs to know within 5 minutes, because there are lots and lots of elements that come into play. You must therefore continually be learning, checking out the best blogs that discuss blogging, social media, copy writing, online marketing. Subscribe to them, read them as much as you can. Also reach out to those who are doing well in those areas, ask questions. They may not be able to teach you everything in a minute, so you could keep in touch and keep learning, observe their methods, take their feedback on what you're doing.

2. Production
Write often, regularly write, write on topics that interest your readers and yourself. Writing regularly is a matter of discipline, writing interesting content is more about experience (it may take several tries). There again, you can do some research on what people like to read and get inspired by experts. But be careful not to copy them verbatim, you are trying to come up with something new, rather than publishing again what already exists.

3. Promotion
Keep your social media pages updated, complete and professional, preferably with a graphic identity.
Find some people who are interested in what you have to say or write. Every time you write a new article, let them know through e-mail or their favorite online platform, take their feedback into account, to improve. Also, keep networking with other bloggers and writers in your niche. Establishing some good relationships could help when it comes to sharing content and other exchanges of services.

What (un)motivates us When We Run a Blog

By Jean-Patrick Ehouman

Let's start with the dark part of this post. When you decide to start running a blog, you are likely to fail before the end of the first three months. It is not easy to write, and moreover, to write things that interest others. Professional life and personal constraints (family, schedule, etc.) are often the first causes of slacking. In the same vein, one can also note the useless pressures and deadlines that we impose upon ourselves. For example, some may start by committing to writing at least one article every day at a given time. This is not really necessary because you need a minimum degree of inspiration to write. And when you don't have it, you should have a way to get it.

In 2005, when I was in my last year of study, I had created a personal site (to present what I do) and profile pages on sites dealing with technical topics related to the development of web applications. Since then, I have tried to keep several blogs (often in collaboration with other people). But it's only since starting this latest blog that I've been able to find the rhythm, the motivation, the desire to publish despite the lack of inspiration.

This article you are reading right now derives from the fact that I did not have a specific topic but I wanted to see a new post on this blog. Hence, it's only natural that to start talking about what prevents or motivates us to write. As a result, I find myself looking on the web for elements that can help me fill-up this ticket. That's how I came across a 7-points list written by Jamie Wallace of "Live to Write - Write to Live". This list is intended to help cultivate real habits to keep a blog:

1. Find the time to write, otherwise create this time

2. Have an end goal

3. Avoid saying "I should..."

4. Start small. For example with notes of a few dozen words at a reasonable pace. or big tickets fairly spaced in time

5. Stay consistent

6. Measure progress and welcome it

7. Have fun

If you are lacking inspiration for your next article, you can simply complete the list above with two or three sentences per point. As for me, I would say "talk about what you love" because there are always people who like the same thing and it is therefore a great way to make good contacts.

10 Marketing Tips For Promoting Your Next Blog Post

By Vanessa Lecosson

You have created your blog a few months ago. You regularly produce content to supply the "few readers you have" but that doesn't seem to be enough.

Your numbers are hardly increasing and you don't know how to boost your web traffic. The few Facebook and Twitter ads that you buy to promote your publications don't really help and you do not know what to do.

Today I would like to suggest 10 tips that will help you to better promote your next blog post and develop your audience.

1. Share your article to your contacts via email

This should be one of the essential practices that you must take into consideration right away.

Once your article is ready, do not hesitate to share it with your contacts by email.

The goal is not to annoy them with long boring messages, but to stay brief and close to them. Summarize your article, add a few links towards your blog and the article in question, insert an illustrative image and you're done.

Do not forget also that the goal is to grow your traffic, and it also means proximity to your readers. So make sure you include custom formulas in your email, this could serve you well.

Some tools to help you manage your email addresses and send your different articles:
- MailChimp
- MailJet

2. Share your article on your social networks

Sending emails is good, but your article will have even more visibility if you also share it on your social networks (Facebook, Twitter, etc.).

To that end, tools like Hootsuite, Buffer, Tweetdeck can be useful. You just have to schedule the publication of your article on these tools and let them share your content on your social pages.

3. Social bookmaking

Use social bookmaking sites like Digg, Diigo, Reddit, Delicious etc to allow your readers to record and share the link of your article with a more or less wide/relevant audience.

4. Reviewing discussion forums and communities

Do not hesitate to join online discussion groups, including Facebook, Google plus and LinkedIn and share your article. This will allow you to have more readers and to see the traffic of your blog grow as you take part in group activities.

5. Using curation sites

Sites such as Scoop.It, Storify, are good places to search for ideas but also to share content. Utilize it you from time to time, they can get very useful.

6. Identify/Tag the influencers

How would you feel if a blogger mentioned you in an article? Good?

Well, it's the same thing that happens if you mention influencers in your posts from time to time.

Every time you produce an article and quote an influencer inside, share your production with them. Send them an email, mention them on Facebook or Google+ or mention them in a tweet. Some of them will return the favor!

7. Find some fellow bloggers who can help you

There are some bloggers out there that, from time to time, reach out to their peers in order to gather a wider audience. Once a week or once a month, they are willing to share content from other blogs with their readers so that other sources of information benefit their audience. You can try to get in touch with them and offer to publish your recent article on their blog. There will certainly be a counterpart, because everyone is trying to be more visible but it's worth a try.

8. Reuse your old publications

Old articles can still be used to produce new content. Turn them into video or infographics, why not? A video can have more impact than an infographic, that can itself have more impact than an article to your readers. Do not hesitate to play the game by transforming your old publications into new productions.

9. A bit of advertising never hurt

Some paid ads published over a period of time will always strengthen your actions. Set a monthly budget for your items.

10. Guest-posts

This kind of campaign is not always easy, but when a blog gives you this opportunity, it is better to seize it. It is clear that they will (certainly) enforce a topic, or ask you to produce an article taking into account their given criteria, but once the article shared on his blog, you will be benefiting from exposure to their audience.

Most of us bloggers do not give more time to the promotion of our productions than to their creation. This is one of the reasons why our articles are not very visible.

I hope these tips will help you, as they have helped me, to spend as much time marketing your articles as writing them. Over time, more promotion techniques will become available, so stay up-to-date.

Knowledge cannot all be acquired in one day... Good luck!

Facebook Profile vs Facebook Page: What To Choose?

By Israel Yoroba

Exactly one year ago, I tried an experiment. I disabled my personal Facebook account and kept only my Page to mark my presence on this network. The objective was to analyse the "pros" and "cons" of choosing one or the other. Here I give you some of those points.

Actually, I created my Facebook page because I had reached the 5000 friends limit. But, over time, I wanted to position "Israel Yoroba" as a brand. It was therefore necessary to communicate on a "professional page". There was then a distinction in my communication approaches. My personal information was on my personal profile and my professional activities were on my page.

Saving time

Closing my profile allowed me to win, on average, 4 to 5 hours a day. When you have 5000 friends, you navigate between the information that appears in your newsfeed, the notifications of the groups to which you belong, or the update notifications of posts that you commented on, the chats, etc.

With my Page, none of this happens anymore. I do not have a newsfeed, I rarely comment on other people's profiles (except when I'm mentioned) and chat is more moderate. So I have a lot more time to stay focused on my work. Because, let's face it, Facebook can easily become a "weapon of mass distraction".

News

For a journalist and someone who is watching the news, I miss out on scoops or interesting information (fortunately, my communication staff brief me on the most relevant parts). To have only one page is to lose sight of what is being said elsewhere. It is a kind of self-sufficiency that makes you "blind" and even a little "narcissistic" not to say "selfish". Because your communication is one-sided. You can publish, but you cannot see what others are doing on their wall or in groups. I admit that it's a bit frustrating, especially when you belong to many communities on Facebook.

Visibility

The Facebook policy for pages is designed so that your posts are not instantly visible to your subscribers (43,000 of them, in my case). The conversion rate in terms of commitment remains relatively low (less than 3% on average in my case). Their goal is to encourage you to pay for advertisement in order to highlight the publication (and by extension, your page too).

On a profile, however, a publication is immediately shared on the news feed of all your friends. You benefit from a faster and much more consistent commitment (between 15 and 20, or even up to 40% on average).

Positioning

Being on a page is like being a "public figure" (in my case). This requires much more rigor in the publications. Typing mistakes that may go unnoticed into a personal account are less tolerated on a page. I often get poked every time I let one out.

Communicating on a Page requires planning. Every weekend, I update my editorial calendar. I know what I will publish from the beginning of the week and what could be put on weekends. By following the local/international news and according to my activities.

I am surrounded by a team that works with me to succeed. Because despite all the experience I have, it's almost impossible to manage your own page. Rest assured, I am the only one who accesses it. I personally respond to messages and comments.

Upstream, I have my calendar validated. Each post is re-read by at least one person before being published. Unlike a profile where I can publish any way depending on my mood, my page respects a publication quota. No more than 3 publications per day (with few exceptions).

What's the key point to keep in mind?

From this 12-month experience, I conclude that for an individual, a Page is only necessary when there is something to sell. The question does not arise for products, services, companies, institutions, associations...

Because on a personal account, you can also decide to make more professional publications. By setting rules, limits, and adopting a strategy.

It's All About The Selfie

By Nanda Seye

The Selfie. Everyone knows everything about it... Or do they? How was it born? Where does it come from? Here I decided to dedicate an article to the Selfie story. I, a good disciple of the Web Lord, took a geeky pilgrim to write this article and preach the Good News of Technology to you, my dear readers...

So what is a Selfie?

Have you ever photographed yourself with your smartphone? Your webcam? In front of a mirror? If so, you have already done a selfie. A Selfie (or self-portrait) is a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone and shared on social networks. Nowadays there is a growing trend towards group selfies, often effectively supported by selfie sticks.

Some of the milestones of the Selfie

Everyone thinks they know everything about the Selfie, but how many know its actual history? Here are some important dates in the Selfie evolution:

1839: first appearance of the selfie technique
Robert Cornelius (1809-1893) took the first selfie in history. This chemist (and fan of photography) took a self-portrait in front of the family shop in Philadelphia using a daguerreotype (a photographic process involving silver plate created by the French photographer Louis Daguerre).

1920: first group selfie
Five photographers (Uncle Joe Byron, Pirie MacDonald, Colonel Marceau, Pop Core, Ben Falk) of the Byron Company (a photo studio in Manhattan) snap a picture of themselves on the roof of Studio Marceau in December 1920.

1964-1965: best-selling record: A self-portrait by Andy Warhol, which sold in New York at the May Post-War and Contemporary evening sale in Christie's, fetched $38.4 million.

2002: the word "selfie" is used for the first time
The word Selfie appeared for the first time in September 2002 on an Australian online forum; a young man explained that he took a picture of himself to show the consequences of a fall down the stairs while he was drunk.

2004: The first #Selfie hashtag appeared on the Flickr site in 2004

2012: Rise of the selfie

2013: The word "Selfie" was added in the Oxford English Dictionary right between selfhood and selfish.

2014: "Selfie" was selected as Word of the Year at the 10th Word Festival in Nièvres where nearly 98,000 Internet users voted

2015: The word "Selfie" was added in Le Petit Robert 2015, along with "Hashtag"

Confidential: Social Networks And Me

By Yehni Djidji

A few years ago, I could easily spend hours sitting in front of the computer, watching photos on Facebook or on Hi5. That's right, if people publish their photos, the whole point is that we can watch those indeed.

Sometimes I went on profiles of people I didn't even know! When I was asked what I was doing, I used to answer: I look at people's prosperity! Actually, I was a little envious!

I have so many projects running through my mind, so many dreams still unrealised, that sometimes I have these "down" periods, when I feel that everyone is happier than me and that I am running late! Not specifically late with regard to others, but mostly late on the vision that I have for myself!

I envied those who were able to reach some of my dreams and who don't always realise that they are privileged! I also envied these people who enjoyed their youth in the fast lane because, stuck in my perpetual "school-house-sleep" routine, I might not have had any interesting story to share with my children!

But at least, it's fortunate that I happen to be the prime confidant among my connexions. Therefore, for lack of better insight, I would still have the experience of others as a reference point!

And then one day I realised that no one ever photographs their bad times!

Who's ever taken a picture of themselves crying and posted it on Facebook? During a funeral, upon hearing sad news: break-up, failure, dismissal? Who's ever created a Facebook album with a title such as "Pictures of my Failure", where we would see their despondency upon the announcement of the unfortunate event, their parents in the process of scolding them, and why not, marks cards showing their poor grades? If you've ever seen anything like this on a social networking site, please send me the address!

I understood that the pictures I saw were just tiny moments in a lifetime! And I have plenty of happy moments too! We all have those!

More importantly, I understood that people immortalize these moments because they would like those to last for eternity even if they are fully aware that it is impossible !! Also, there is no point in moping around !!! If lamentations were a way of achieving dreams, we would know about it!

Hence, now when I have my down times, I wear make-up, I dress up chic and I shoot very beautiful photographs! Lol!

Stay blessed!

You Have The Right To Publish Whatever You Want Online

By Jean Luc Houedanou

Dear teenagers and young adults who have been shocked by this article, and who did not fail to let me know, I owe you an apology.

Indeed, I wrote without considering the two absolute truths of social networks, namely:

1. In front of a (webcam, smartphone, video) camera connected to the Internet (or not), you may expose yourself (literally or figuratively).

The results can range from the topless picture (with a duck face, optionally) to the sextape - for the boldest among them, not to mention the full disclosure of the finest details of their personal life.

But hey, the most important thing is to get "likes", "retweets" and "+1s".

I know that some of you have fallen into the illusion that their degree of self-exposure (in every sense of the word) is proportional to their acceptance in one or more social circles.

Anyway, I cannot understand it, but it's your life and you may do what you want. Yes, I am among those who think that, in theory, everyone is free to do what they want in their spare time.

It goes without saying that you can publish whatever you want on the social networks associated with your name.

As a Web Consultant, I could explain to you that before hiring or recruiting you, employers will track your online activities on Google. But I guess you would reply: "Anyway, I would be a (web/social) entrepreneur. To hell with the bosses". Then you would be forgetting that working under the orders of a boss is a good way to acquire personal discipline – i.e. getting up in the morning, arriving on time, learning management by objectives and results, learning to save money - which separates professional entrepreneurs from the rest, but I'd digress.

I could tell you that common sense would compel any sensible person to avoid leaving compromising traces on the Internet. But it seems that the trend these days is to thoroughly reveal every nook and cranny of one's life on the Internet.

I therefore prefer to let you live in your wonderful world, where all actions are inconsequential. Especially when you take into account the second absolute truth of the web:

2. You know all your virtual friends and you can easily distinguish between your real friends, all of the jealous folks, and the perverts, or other individuals in need of thrills and sensational actions, as well as the bloggers/youtubers/scavengers looking for a buzz to promote their web platforms.

Well, I know it may be surprising, but all those people you have never met, and who subscribe to content updates that you publish here and there on the web might not be all trustworthy.

Indeed, many of the people described above are particularly inclined to share the privacy of others via Facebook, Bluetooth, unauthorized DVDs and any other means available.

But, you're not worried about that, since you personally know every single one of your 1,200 followers on Twitter and 3,400 friends on Facebook, right? It's not like any of them could publish your twerk video on some shady websites, obviously...

So, dear teens and young adults living in a wonderful world where you can put everything and absolutely anything online for any reason, such as:

To draw attention to oneself,

To please a boyfriend/girlfriend,

Or, and I quote, "It's my body, my private life and I do whatever I want."

Do as you wish.

Do not listen to this grumpy old blogger... He does not even have any friends on Facebook.

And then it's not like the reality will eventually come and bite you once you turn 25 and you would spend your days erasing any detrimental content that might affect you, while you would then be interested in LinkedIn and Viadeo.

Until then, I wish you all a good time on the Internet.

Caution! Cultivate Your Digital Identity Now!

By Edith Brou

Did you know that you have a digital identity? Well, yes, you do. You don't have to request it from any legal authority (for now, at least). It already exists and it can either elevate you or harm you. How? Because from the day when you connected to the Internet, and filled out a profile by registering your first and last names, posted photos or opened an electronic mailbox, your Identity was self-built without your knowledge. And it gets updated with each of your actions on your keyboard.

You can no longer go unnoticed because you are certainly "referenced", that is, by typing your name and surname, I may find you on the first page of the Google Search results. You therefore benefit from the natural referencing of this search engine (see SEO : Search Engine Optimisation).

However, there are tools much more sophisticated that allow you, by simply right clicking the mouse, to know in seconds, all the public and private information you have dropped over the years on ''the Web''.

In the worst cases, those we have taken their digital identities lightly (this amounts to misplacing their physical identity card), found themselves in very uncomfortable situations. For instance, it happened to that employee who got fired within a few months because his boss caught him happily smoking a big ''joint'' on his Facebook profile.

In the coming years, be aware that, to access some sites, your digital identity will be scrutinized, and for recruiters, it will be a very good way to have access to the profile of a potential candidate within a few seconds.

So now is the time to cultivate your digital identity, and take care of it to avoid a very bad harvest.

Job On The Web : How Not To Get Hired

By Israel Yoroba

Yesterday I posted an urgent advertisement to recruit a multitasking and bilingual intern. The required skills were:

- To know how to write and speak English.

- To know the Web environment and social networks.

- To be curious and to be available immediately.

Within 10 hours, I received 65 applications by e-mail or via my Facebook page and profile. I received very good profiles. I will not talk about those.
I will focus on those who have been systematically rejected, since many of them were disqualified because they haven't realised that social networks are now a place where recruiters are "stalking" too. And if you dream of getting hired for an Internet job, here is what you must avoid doing:

- Not respecting the instructions of the announcement

Reply in comment while the instructions clearly state: "Contact me Inbox". The candidate who responds in the comments shows that, either he did not understand the instructions, or he does not care! The employer may want to discuss the finer details directly with the relevant candidates. He wishes to answer their specific questions, hence why the offer itself deliberately lacks precision.

- Replying to the offer with abbreviations

I have seen all kinds of things. I read it all. Here is a good selection: "Im up 4 da internship" or "Mornin its fr the job". But wait, there is worse: "hey gimme more info re: ur stuff".

Editorial quality is required. By sending SMS messages, you indicate that, even without pressure, you are not able to write a sentence correctly.

I also browsed Facebook profiles. What a catastrophe. Abbreviations, posts littered with spelling mistakes. One or two typing mistakes are okay! But when it's all over the place, the case gets hopeless.

- Being away from the Internet

Working on the Web obviously involves being on the Web. Some of the Facebook profiles (or Twitter accounts) haven't presented any activity for 6 months or more.

- Leaving inappropriate traces

On some of the profiles, I saw some awkward links and/or comments (girls with suggestive poses/clothes, people (almost) naked, videos of people being beheaded, etc..., others unknowingly (?) click on pornographic links and this is displayed on their profiles.

- The latecomers

Several candidates asked me inbox how to apply. I asked them to write a few lines of (their) motivation in English. Some of them replied later on the same night. As for the others... I'm still waiting.

I said it at the beginning. It should not be forgotten that our activity on the Internet (and specifically social networks) is scrutinized by employers. The CV and the cover letter are not enough anymore. The recruiter will check who you are, what you read, what you write. How you react. How soon. If you want to work, especially on the Web, do not make these mistakes.

[Interview] In The Bubble Of Israel Yoroba: "I am president, elite serial entrepreneur, veteran blog trotter, catalyst for change in our generation"

1. Quick (but effective) introduction of the personage and his achievements?

My name is Israel GUEBO. Better known as Israel Yoroba. I am a Media Expert and Coach, and specialist in social networks. I am also President of the Génération Innovante association. Furthermore, I am a member of the Bureau of the Network of Online Press Professionals of Ivory Coast, I am in charge of training and self-regulation.

I am a journalist by training and profession, graduated from the Superior School of Journalism of Lille, France.

From my experiences, I keep the most important ones. I trained the press service of the office of the president of the National Assembly, the communication department of the Presidency of the Republic and worked as coordinator of the digital communication for the Ministry of Youth.

From Print to Radio and Web, I have just over 10 years of experience with International Media. For 6 years (2008-2013), I had been a correspondent in Abidjan for the Web editorial of the French channel TV5. As such, I covered the 2008 US elections, the 2010 presidential elections and the subsequent military-political crisis in The Ivory Coast.

Between 2014 and 2017, I was chief editor of the "Studio Mozaik" Radio School, and later Head of the Hemisphère Media Production Office. That is the company that provides correspondence for TF1 in Africa and for France 24 in some countries of West and Central Africa.

For a decade, I have traveled around Francophone Africa to train state institutions. In Togo, Benin, Burundi, Gabon, Guinea... I train Senators and Members of Parliaments for the use of new media in institutional communication. This is taking place as part of the Noria program, initiated by the Francophone Parliamentary Assembly (APF), an institution for which I am a consultant.

I was also a web editor for the France 24 blog. In 2011, I did a brief stint at Radio France Internationale (RFI) on the program "L'atelier des médias". What I was most reknown for was the "Avenues", these local information sites with a presence in several African countries. Besides the Avenues, I launched, in 2013, the first Web Radio of information in Ivory Coast: Class FM (www.classe.fm).

All this earned me several distinctions: Best French Speaking Blogger in 2008 in Bonn, Germany. Best Blog of West African Journalist in 2009 in Dakar, Senegal. Harubuntu Awards Winner in 2011 in Brussels, Belgium. Francophonie  35<35 Prizewinner in the Blog category and Media Innovation Laureate in 2016 in Abidjan, these are the many distinctions obtained by the renowned Ivorian "Blog Trotter".

I saw my name in the Top 4 Most Promising Young People of Ivory Coast in 2016. This ranking was carried out by the Association of Lobbying and Public Affairs Councils of Ivory Coast (ACLAP-CI). In 2017, I created and supervised a media enterprise that won the second prize for the best Ivorian digital press company.

I am also the author of two books: "La Vie Comme Elle Va" (Life As It Goes, Balafons Edition, 2013), a chronicle that describes day-to-day life in the Ivory Coast, and "Compagnie Caïman" (Caiman Company), a novel published by Livresque Edition in October 2016.

2. What are your main goals in life?

My main goal is to be a catalyst for change in our generation. It sounds very idealistic, and maybe even utopian when we look at how our countries are evolving. But I remain convinced that each of us, one way or another, can bring his brick to build a different world, a generation with new values. And therefore, I do my best to teach and raise awareness around me. I believe in the power of sharing. It is the best weapon of development.

3. What tools and techniques do you use to accomplish things efficiently?

My first tools are my diary and my notepad. These are essential to better organise myself. Plus, I don't have to rely on electricity while using them. Every morning, I list everything I have to do on a page of my notebook. E-mails to send, phone calls to make, appointments (as scheduled on my diary), tasks to complete. Then I cross them out as they are done. At the end of the day, whatever has not been done is postponed to the next page. It's an effective monitoring tool.

Then there are all the Google Drive Apps, to work effectively remotely with my team.

Last but not least, to communicate, there's nothing like Social Media. First my blog (which is being enhanced), then Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are my main communication tools.

4. Any recommendations for your juniors?

First advice, keep reading. Sometimes it may sound like a trivial expression. But nope. It's important to read, read a lot. Not just on the internet, but read books, magazines, newspapers. This develops our intellectual faculties, and our culture.

Further, it's great to use search engines thoroughly. Google, in particular. This is an incredible opportunity for our generation. With this tool, you can learn anything.

Finally, my last advice is an attitude in life, it's about remaining humble. Because life is unpredictable, and today's victories must not be considered as final, but they should be a source of motivation to achieve a little more.

5. What is the best way to contact you?

The best way is by mail (isyoroba@gmail.com). I read them all the time. Then, the comments sections on my blog. On social networks, I respond to specific messages. However messages starting like "yo", "sup", "baby", etc. will remain unanswered (lol)!

Did You Just Say Crowdfunding?

By Nanda Seye

During the month of August, I was helping out the TechOfAfrica team with the organization of an afropreneur afterwork event in Abidjan. So I was talking with a friend about that session, I was explaining that the purpose was to present the Afropreneur project and to promote the related crowdfunding campaign. But, as soon as I mentioned the word "Crowdfunding", my friend immediately shifted to a shocked face.

"Huh? What's that, Nanda? Some of your geeky stuff again?", she asked.

And then, I realised that what may seem obvious for some of us is not always that clear for others. This situation is amplified by the fact that many are not particularly comfortable with the language of Shakespeare. So I wrote this little article just to clear things up for everyone. Happy reading.

So what is crowdfunding?

Crowdfunding is a collective financing practice that is executed via the Internet to help start-up projects. It connects project leaders and Internet users who want to invest in these projects.

Oh, is it? But how does it work?

It's simple, the operation can be summarized in three entities:

Project Managers <-> Web Platforms <-> Internet Users (Investors)

A. Project leader or startup:

You may have a project that is important to you, that you want to achieve. Instead of turning to the banks for funding, you can opt for a platform dedicated to this matter, where you would submit all the project details. This allows you to:

- Give visibility to your project

- Receive donations/loans

- Find potential partners/sponsors

B. Web Platforms:

These are websites dedicated to this purpose, on which one can run a fundraising campaign for their project. There are 4 types of platforms:

Donation platforms: the user (i.e. the investor) provides financial support to the project without receiving any reward.

Platforms with counterpart in kind: the user receives a consideration in kind

Loan platforms: Internet users grant a loan to project leaders

Direct investment platforms: Internet users invest directly in the capital of a company by acquiring a stake in the project or by becoming co-producers. In exchange, they earn the right to acquire financial counterparties in case of commercial success of the project.

In order to sustain themselves, the platforms keep a commission of 5 to 10% on the amounts collected.

Hey, that's interesting, but what are the platforms?

There are quite a few platforms, some of the most popular are:

- KissKissBankBank

- Kickstarter

- Ulule

- Indiegogo

C. The Web user:

This is the one who is interested in the project and decides to offer you some donations or loans, you may refer to him as your "Angel" investor (no pun intended lol).

That's all folks, I hope the concept of crowdfunding is now clear for you, and that you too can impress your friends lol and use it for your own projects.

One last piece of advice: a successful crowdfunding campaign involves choosing a platform that is in line with your project, a good presentation of the project and, above all, an excellent marketing strategy. Good luck.

[Interview] In The Bubble Of Nanda Seye: "it was essential to be very strategic and organised in order to reach the defined objectives"

1. Quick (but effective) introduction of the personage and her achievements?

I am Nanda SEYE, Ivorian, in charge of private sector programs in a training firm. I am completing a training in Computer Engineering Option Networks and Systems in a school in Ivory Coast. I have experience in Digital Marketing, Project Management and Computer Network Administration. Also, I have a blog on ICT. What sets this blog apart is the fact that it educates and informs on ICT topics through humour. Hired as a Community Manager by a coworking space from 2013 to 2014, I managed to bring together the different ICT communities around this space and to organize several events that helped in establishing the reputation of the company. This was my greatest accomplishment because JokkoLabs was the first collaborative space in that country; the concept was therefore unknown to the public. It was essential to be very strategic and organised in order to reach the defined objectives.

2. What are your main goals currently?

II have always had a particular interest in project management. So my goal is, God willing, to pass several certifications in this area, including the PMP (Project Management Professional).

Besides that, I plan to produce a Comic Strip because I really like the world of Comics. So I'm currently working on a comic book project that will later be derived into animated videos and video games adaptations. For this purpose, I currently work with a caricaturist and a graphic designer. After releasing this comic book, I will be keen to collaborate with folks specialising in video game development, in 2D/3D videos and other videos to carry out this project. Specifically, people who somewhat share values such as respect, surpassing oneself, perseverance, humility, simplicity, rigor, creativity, professionalism and, most importantly, humor.

3. What tools and techniques do you use to accomplish things efficiently?

My favorite software:
- Project management : Ms Project, GanttProject:
- Digital: Hootsuite, Photoshop, LikeAlyser, Giphy, Canva, Bitly, Social Bakers, MailChimp, Social Shakers, Google Adwords, Google Analytics

4. Any recommendations for your juniors?

Websites :
- gestiondeprojet.pm
- abilways-digital.com
- openclassrooms.com
- 1min30.com
- webmarketing-com.com

Blogs :
- jeysmacademie.net
- blogdumoderateur.com

Books :

Religious:
- Good morning, Holy Spirit: Benny Hinn
- Understanding the Divine Direction: David Oyedepo
- The hippopotamus in the garden: how to hear the voice of God in the 21st century: Alain Bouffartigues

Personal development :
- The alchemist: Paulo Coelho
- Think and Grow Rich: Napoleon Hill
- Attitude Is Everything: 10 Life-Changing Steps to Turning Attitude Into Action: Keith Harrell
- The Power of Positive Thinking: Norman Pearl
- The Leader In You - How to Win Friends, Influence People and Succeed in a Changing World: Dale Canergie

Digital Marketing :
- The marketing plan - digital communication: Denis Pommeray
- The art of the digital war: Caroline Faillet

Project management
- Project planning technique: Gilles Valet
- The project manager's toolbox: Jérôme Maes and François Debois

Life tips (quotes):

David (The Bible)
Psalm 146: Do not rely on influential people: they are only men, they are unable to save. As soon as they blow their last breath, as soon as they return to the ground, their projects are buried with them. Blessed is the one whose help is the God of Jacob, who puts his hope in the Eternal God.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
- Do not go where the path may lead. Go where there is no path and leave a trace

Abraham Lincoln

- The best way to predict your future is to create it
- Always keep in mind that your decision to succeed is more important than anything else
- You can fool a few people all the time; You can fool everyone for a while. But you can not deceive everyone all the time.

5. What is the best way to contact you?

I would say, via my Facebook profile: Nanda SEYE

Exploring Some Advanced Visualisation Techniques

By Necemon

This study is about the production and the description of some advanced visualization charts related to the higher education in South West Wales. Some actual data had been made available to complete this task and the objective is to get some meaningful and interesting insight about the data.

The data files are from a Management Information Officer in the Statistics Unit in conjunction with the Planning and Strategic Projects Unit (PSPU), both at Swansea University.

The tool used is IBM Many Eyes. It’s a web service that lets user upload data sets and can turn them into various visualizations. There were a lot of choices but only advanced visualization types (especially maps) had been highly recommended rather than basic charts. Further, graphs that show rises and falls over time had to be avoided as the provided data was not time oriented. So the five visualization types demonstrated here are block histograms, bubble charts, maps, matrix charts and tree maps.

1.     Wales Map

Maps are really intuitive when it comes to show a comparison based on the location. In Many Eyes, the Wales map is slightly inaccurate but it allows us to get an interesting overview of the most popular regions where people go to study.

The following maps show the most frequented areas for each field of studies for the full time undergraduate students in Wales. The original data was dividing students according to their institutions. However, for the sake of mapping, those institutions had to be aggregated according to the respective cities they belong to. The darker an area is, the more it’s frequented for that field of study and inversely, the lighter a region is, the less it’s frequented. This doesn’t apply to the gray area, which represent the zone for which we don’t have any data.

Now let’s consider a particular case, the field of computer science. We can clearly see that Swansea is one of the most popular destinations to study computer sciences in Wales. However, when we consider all the subjects together, Cardiff appears to be the most popular choice overall.

2.     Matrix Charts

Matrix Charts are typically used typically used to display multidimensional data in a grid. It’s very useful when we have many criteria to describe the same data, for example we use matrix charts to describe students based on the subjects they are studying, their institutions and whether they are undergraduates or postgraduates. Our grid down here offers a single row with 2 discs: UG and PG and within each disc, we can see the proportion of each subject relatively to others.  The first result that strikes is that there are much more undergraduate students than postgraduates students.

Another obvious result is that there is a wide range of subjects studied in Wales.

Below we see that Nursing (9.89%) and Psychology(5.6%) seem to be quite popular among undergraduates in Swansea university whereas Computer Science only represents 0.96%.

The matrix chart below represent almost the same data but only at the South West Wales level.

3.     Treemaps

Treemapping is a method for displaying tree-structured data by using nested rectangles. Treemaps display hierarchical (tree-structured) data as a set of nested rectangles. Each branch of the tree is given a rectangle, which is then tiled with smaller rectangles representing sub-branches (Wikipedia definition). For our purposes, we use treemaps to visually compare the differences in number of students among areas of studies at the full time postgraduate taught level. We subdivide the students in the fields of studies according to their origin (UK, EU, Non-EU). The diagram obtained gives us some interesting insight.

For example, we notice that a lot of non- Europeans comes to the UK for business and administrative studies. Further, for most of the subjects, the number of non – Europeans exceeds the number of other EU students.

What we observed at the UK level is quite similar to what we see when we consider the Wales only. However the colours tend to imply that the percentage of international students is less in Wales.

4.     Bubble Charts

Bubble Charts are another intuitive and atheistically pleasing to visualize “who is studying what”. Here again we are studying the full time master students.

The figure below confirms the wide proportion of Non EU students in South West Wales. And here again we see they are highly represented in Business and Administrative studies. Anyways, Business and Administrative studies apparently represent the most popular field of study.

The two following Bubble Charts display the cases of Cardiff and Swansea. The trend is quite the same with the rest of the South West Wales but we can notice that compared to Cardiff, Swansea presents a smaller proportion of Business and Administrative Studies students. However, in Swansea, Engineering and Computer Science are quite more popular than in Cardiff.

5.     Block Histograms

A block histogram lets you see the distribution of numeric values in a data set. The x-axis is divided into "bins" that correspond to value ranges. Each item in the data set is drawn as a rectangular block, and the blocks are piled into the bins to show how many values in each range. (Many Eyes definition)

The figure down here shows the populations of full time undergraduate students based on their institutions. It clearly comes out that Swansea University is by far the favourite destination for studying French with more than 120 students. All the other institutions only have less than 10 students for the French Language.

We then observe a comparison between full time UG and part time UG students (again based on their institutions). The first thing that comes out of those visualizations is that are much more full time students than part time students (which makes sense). Further, while Swansea University seems to be quite popular among full time students, the population of part time students is pretty much equally spread among the institutions.

Data Visualisation : Thematic Maps VS Bubble Charts

By Necemon

This is a comparative study of two particular types of visualization techniques in detail.

We chose to study the map-based visualization and the bubble charts because they had been the most fascinating visualizations throughout this study. We are going to compare those two types on many factors.

Defining the visualizations

A thematic map is a type of map or chart especially designed to show a particular theme connected with a specific geographic area. These maps can portray physical, social, political, cultural, economic, sociological, agricultural, or any other aspects of a city, state, region, nation or continent.

An example of map is shown below. It shows the repartition of undergraduate students studying creative arts and design in Wales.

A bubble chart is a type of chart where each plotted entity is defined in terms of three distinct numeric parameters. Bubble charts can facilitate the understanding of the social, economical, medical, and other scientific relationships.

An example of bubble chart is shown below. It shows the repartition of master students, in the whole UK, according to their fields of study and origins.

Expression of the information

Both visualizations can convey the information pretty well to the viewer but the map based visualization is limited to spatial patterns. As mentioned above, it can be used to describe data related to places (cities, states, regions, nations or continents). On the other side, bubble charts can convey information of any nature. Further, they can convey many different kind of information at a time.

Discovery of deviation, hierarchy, relationship and association

The maps show well the relationships between places and the association among regions. They are also good for comparing 2 places based on a specific criterion.

The bubble charts are good for comparison too since they allow to show many different things at a time. Further, the circles can contain inside them some more data. This nesting can help understanding hierarchy when it occurs.

Depiction of data at different scales

Bubble charts are especially useful for data sets with dozens to hundreds of values, or with values that differ by several orders of magnitude. They can legibly show data values that differ by a ratio of 100,000, and can display hundreds of individual values at once (according to many eyes).

However the maps are not always efficient to display huge and/or complex data. The problem is that some regions on the map can be very small and they just don’t fit to add some complexity or some advanced charts. It’s true that we can zoom, but if regions are too far apart from others, zooming somewhere make us miss another important part of the data. We can then say that maps don’t really provide much level of details.

Ease of use and understanding

Maps are really intuitive, easy to learn, to use and to understand, even to lay persons. Actually we had been using maps for ages, at primary school during the geography lectures for example.

Bubbles charts on the other hand are quite unusual to lay persons. Further, they can quite confusing and difficult to understand when they contain a lot of data.

Look and feel

Both the visualizations are atheistically pleasing to visualize, especially when we use colours to demonstrate the differences between two categories. We can also use bubbles on maps, and the sizes of the bubbles make obvious which part of the map is the bigger, greater, etc.

Conclusion

Thematic maps are great tools that communicate the information well to everyone. However they only apply in a context of space. Further, they hardly deal with complex data.

On the other hand, bubble charts are a bit more difficult to handle but they are really powerful, they can handle any kind of data whatever the scales.

And also some data may not be displayed properly if not spelled as in the map.

So maps are good to represent simple and spatial data whereas bubble charts are better for representing the most compound data.

A Practical Guide On Open Data From The World Bank

By Cyriac Gbogou

If you have ever checked the weather online, used the navigation function of your smartphone to find an on-duty pharmacy, or calculated the road expenses of your municipality, they you have already used "Open" Public Data. But maybe you didn't know it... For a long time, it was difficult (or even impossible) to access this information from the public authorities.

This concept was born from the belief that the huge amount of information systematically collected by public administrations should be accessible to all citizens. In the late 2000s, states and their various services began to grant access to these resources to a greater number of users. The first government open data policies were introduced in 2009. Currently, more than 250 national and local governments, nearly 50 developed/developing countries, and institutions such as the World Bank and the United Nations have launched initiatives to release the data, and these are growing every year.

Data is considered "open" if everyone can use, reuse and redistribute it freely, free of charge, for any purpose and without restrictions. Many data sets are published on government websites, but most of them are only meant to be viewed in isolation, and are not reusable for other purposes. Open data must be reusable, that is, downloadable in an open, software-readable format, and users must be legally permitted to reuse it.

The availability of large-scale, easy-to-use data offers significant benefits: it can help streamline public services, foster economic opportunities, encourage innovation, improve public safety, and reduce poverty. As the benefits of open data reach an ever-increasing audience and more effective uses are being invented, governments and institutions around the world are eager to launch new Open Data programs or develop existing initiatives. It will take time to fully understand the complexity and enormous potential of open access to data, which is inseparable from the free license environment. But Open Data is still in its infancy, and best practices and communities are just beginning to emerge.

About this Handbook

As developing countries, as well as a growing number of other entities and organizations, embrace the Open Data technology revolution, the World Bank has designed this handbook to support their efforts. Based on online tools and knowledge, this guide gives them the advice they need to create their own strategies and platforms for accessing public data.

One way to look at Open Data initiatives is to view them from the economic point of view of supply and demand: data sets are goods; the data users are consumers, they are the ones who generate the demand for data; and government agencies and other data sources produce the offer. This vision is the focus of this guide and of the approach it proposes to structure an open data initiative.

In addition to this introduction, the practical guide includes seven sections:

1. What you need to know: A brief presentation of the key aspects of the openness of public data and its uses, illustrated by examples of initiatives at different levels; This section is for everyone, especially inexperienced users or those discovering Open Data.

2. First Milestones: Overview of the tools governments need to undertake an open data initiative; this section will be particularly useful for managers, coordinators and teams of administrations in charge of Open Data.

3. Technology Options: Synthesis of key technical questions regarding the development of an open data catalog; this section is specifically intended for IT specialists.

4. Demand and Public Engagement: How to create communities of data users and promote culture and data literacy among local, national and regional actors? How to advance Open Data concepts by soliciting partnerships and the media in particular? These issues will be of particular interest to public bodies, civil society organizations, technologists and journalists.

5. Data supply and quality: How to manage datasets, locate data and ensure their quality, relevance and accuracy? This section is specifically for those who produce these data.

6. Readiness Assessment Tool: Presentation of the methodological tool developed by the World Bank to diagnose the actions that governments must take in a given country or community to launch an Open Data Initiative. This section will be particularly useful for public officials who are committed to opening the data but do not know where to start.

7. Technical Assistance and Funding: An overview of the main technical assistance and financing resources provided by the World Bank and other organizations. This section is primarily intended for the public authorities of developing countries.

Educational Uses Of Internet Content Curation

By Antoine Mian

As a marketing tool, how can "Content Marketing" be used as teaching tool in higher education? We tried to provide an answer to this concern by exploring François Arnal works.

"Curator" is a term used in museums. It refers to the person who chooses artworks for an exhibition, the curator is called upon to make a choice, a comment and an introduction of some existing works. He is the link between the artist (or the cultural heritage) and the public. He is an expert. The curator on the Internet, after defining the topics of his technological watch, may choose to work from a curation platform allowing him to automatically or manually harvest, filter, editorialise and share some online content.

Web 2.0, which now amounts to an audience of more than one billion people, influences our didactic practices. What is changing today in didactic postures is the virtual presence of a student on the web who, in addition to having a teacher, can interact with millions of people for free. This situation forces us to move from a one-way pedagogy to a participatory and contributory pedagogy. Indeed, through social networks, we even end up into situations where a student get in touch with people having a high level of expertise. The teacher should therefore recycle "Web-marketing" strategies in order to build a digital didactic strategy that allows the acquisition, and above all, the sharing of information and knowledge.

Thus, if curation tools are originally intended for businesses and the general public, digital monitoring tools can nevertheless be used by teachers and learners.

The dual objective for the teacher is, on one hand, to thoroughly understand social networks, access to information and digital identity design, and on the other hand, to gain access to information, and therefore to knowledge.

A first step may be for the teacher to acquire these tools and to make them available to his students through an effective and operational digital environment.

A second milestone is reached when students access the digital tool not as mere consumers, but as producers of knowledge. The student becomes an actor. And curation allows them, among other things, to learn and control the flow of information, to classify them, to package them and to offer them to others in a sharing community and in a context of mutual exchanges. His interest in this theme makes him an 'expert' in the field of information sharing or in a specific area of knowledge.

Through an elaborate content strategy that allows the student to search for information, to grasp it, to modulate it and to relay it while issuing a critical opinion; the age of vertical knowledge (from the teacher above, to the student below) is replaced by another mode of cognitive transmission: horizontal or reticular. It's a horizontal transmission because the hierarchy is shaken up. The student may then teach the teacher; or he may lecture, learn from, and interact with other students.

Marketing For Programmers (or what I learned from my marketing classes)

By Necemon

I had to take a marketing class in my last year. At first, I didn't see the point for a software developer to learn those things, but then I realised that it's very important. I am sharing here, the key points I am keeping, regarding how marketing applies to the software business. I hope this note would be of some interest to both (aspiring) programmers and marketers.

Now there is a lot that could be said on that topic, here I just try to stick to the key points, and as it’s still a lot of information, I would rather not send it all at once. Instead I would spread that as small blog articles.

Let's first define "Marketing". It can be defined in many ways but it's basically the achievement of corporate goals through meeting and exceeding customer needs better than the competition. Indeed, the marketing concept is a philosophy of business that puts the customer and customer satisfaction at the center of things.

Why should developers care about it? Because they also want to make money! Software is also a business and if you don't have customers, you don't have a business. Further, the marketer and the developer have surprisingly a lot in common. For example, one of the main challenges faced by the marketer is to be able to anticipate the next need, and to deliver a response to it. That's also a key challenge in the software industry, turning innovation into business. That's what made Microsoft, Apple, Google and Facebook so successful : coming up with the right product at the right time in response to people demand (an huge demand that competitors didn't clearly see yet).

It has been observed that companies which perform best are the ones that are marketing oriented: they aim to create a superior CUSTOMER VALUE in order to attract and retain customers. Customer Value: it's critical here. Customer value depends on how the customer perceives the benefits of an offering and the sacrifice that is associated with its purchase:

Customer value = perceived benefits - perceived sacrifice

Perceived benefit can be derived from the product (simple, fast, easy to use), the associated service(customer support, documentation) and the image of the company (Apple, Microsoft, Google)
Perceived sacrifice is the total cost associated with buying the product. This consists not just of the monetary cost, but also the time and energy involved in the purchase (download time, quality of the payment system).
Again, the key to marketing success is to exceed the value offered by competitors. But marketing is not just a concept. In the coming part, we will see how it can be applied through concrete actions. The ideas we are going to discuss include the following:

1. Reaction to the global and local marketing environment
2. Understanding the customer behaviour
3. Research and Information systems
4. Market segmentation and targeting
5. Branding
6. Communication techniques

1. React to the global and local marketing environment (on marketing for programmers)

By Necemon

Whether you are an independent developer or a company, you can't just do your own thing and make programs that you find cool. You have to consider the microenvironment and the macroenvironment in which you operate, to adapt and take advantages of emerging opportunities and to minimize potential threats.

Your microenvironment consists of actors that affect your ability to produce effectively in your chosen markets. Those actors are the suppliers, who build and maintain software, products and technologies that you use yourself (For example, Microsoft makes and maintain .NET and Visual Studio). There are also the distributors, and these days, the software distribution happens mostly online, on your website, on your partners websites or on marketplaces (like the Android market place). Some other important actors in your microenvironment are your customers (users and companies that buy or use your applications) and your competitors (other developers, products and websites that target the same customers).

Your macroenvironment consists of broader forces that affect not only your company but also the other actors in your microenvironment. These forces are largely uncontrollable. If we consider the economic forces for example, due to the effect of supply and demand, things such as national economic growth, inflation and unemployment can affect your sales. When money people make less money, they are less likely to buy your apps. There are also the social forces such as world population, the change in the age distribution and the change in household composition. Moreover, cultural forces may have implications for the way in which business is conducted. For example, it has been observed that some types of products and services are considered offensive or banned in some eastern countries, like China where Facebook and Google face some censorship issues.

There are some other factors in the macroeconomic environment such as technological forces and political and legal forces, which, in our context, ensure compliance with local and global IT laws, regarding patents and copyrights for example.

Last but not least, the physical forces: it is mainly environmental issues and natural disasters, such as if some random hurricane suddenly came up in the area where your servers are located, blowing them up and incidently making you lose your data and your customers. Unfortunately, as I mentioned before, the macroenvironment factors are mostly uncontrollable. However, it's important to monitor the risks and be prepared to react.

2. Understanding the customer behaviour (on marketing for programmers)

By Necemon

It’s mostly about how people spend their money, that is to say: who buys, how they buy and what the selection criteria are.

Who buys? And more importantly, who is important in the buying decision? That’s not always the same, the person making the purchase is often different from the person who will use the product. Both may be different from the person with the power and the financial authority to make the ultimate choice of the product purchase (parents?). And of course, there may be some other persons influencing the outcome of the decision or even trying to impose their choice criteria on the decision. As you see, there may be many actors that you would need to convince that your solution is the right one.

How do they buy? The way organisations buy things is radically different from the way users (as individuals) purchase. Allow me to focus on consumers. It generally starts with the identification of a need  or a problem. Then the user will do some information search and try to find a solution. They might of course come across many solutions that they would evaluate and select the one they judge as best.

But how do they know, which one is the best? What are the choice criteria? Well, the criteria are various:

Technical criteria are related to the performance of the product or service (reliability, durability, performance, convenience, etc.)

Economic criteria concern the cost aspects of purchase (price, running costs, value for money, etc.)

Social criteria concern the impact that the purchase makes on the person’s perceived relationships with others, and the influence of social norms on the person.

Personal criteria concern how the product relates to the individual psychologically, given that emotions are an important part of decision-making for the customer (for example, some prefer a product just for love for a brand).

Wow, that’s quite a lot of information to process, isn’t it? Wait, to process it, you need to have that information in the first place. Before even understanding what they want, you need to know what they want, so you need to know your users, how do you do that? Through some more or less advanced research, hence the next point : Research and Information systems.

3. Research and Information Systems (on marketing for programmers)

By Necemon

Marketing research is extremely important. Companies that are really marketing oriented recognize that they need to always be in touch with what's happening in the market (and so should you). Customer needs are constantly changing, often in ways that are very subtle. If we consider the history of computing, where we went from huge machines, to smaller ones, reaching the home personal computer; and from disconnect machines to the need to connect them as a network and then to the Internet. There were then so many resources online that there was a need to sort them(as Yahoo did), and them to search through them (as Google did). More recently, there were a need to take the physical life social experience online (as Facebook did) and now we can feel that the people need is to take the internet everywhere they go, and we are slowly going mobile.

Many technological revolutions happen accidentally but most of them are the results of relevant research and observation. On the Internet, there are many (cheap) ways a programmer can find out what people want:

Internet surveys: usually managed by email or by a specialised web service like Survey Monkey.

Website traffic analysis: Measurements of the areas of the site most frequently visited, which products are purchased and the payment method used.

Marketing databases: Inviting users to create accounts on your service, deriving profiles by gathering relevant information about those users. Therefore knowing your users and their needs better.

Prototype testing: simply to make some users test the basic version of the application before it is completed, to see if they get the idea and if they like it, what they like about it, what they don't.

4. Market segmentation and targeting (on marketing for programmers)

By Necemon

Marketing segmentation is the identification of individuals and organizations with similar characteristics that have important implications for determining marketing strategy. Therefore, market segmentation involves the division of a diversified market into a number of smaller submarkets that have common features.

Consumer segmentation can be based on many factors:

Behavioural: benefit sought, purchase occasion, etc. for example: almost everyone use Microsoft Windows but people don't make the same use of it. Therefore, Microsoft came up with many flavors and the customer can pick one according to their need : Home Edition, Professional Edition, Enterprise Edition, etc.

Psychographic: lifestyle, personality, age, etc., for example: Children have become a very important market as they are spending an increasing amount of time on the internet. As we can observe, Disney which is one of the biggest sellers for children, has created a web-based video game called Virtual Magic Kingdom, in an effort to stay relevant in the market.

Profile: demographic, geographic,etc. At a very basic level, markets can be segmented on the basis of country, region or city. Also, it's obvious that the language you use may change according to the country you target.

Once the market segments have been identified, the next important activity is the selection of target markets. Target marketing refers to the choice of specific segments to serve. Suppose you make a social network site, you should first target a specific niche. An example could be to create a site for French speakers, aged 25-35, who like to draw.

5. Branding (on marketing for programmers)

By Necemon

What's the difference between products and brands? A product may be anything that has the ability to meet customer needs whereas branding is the process in which companies distinguish their product offerings from competition.

The benefits of brands:

Company value, because the financial value of companies can be greatly enhanced by the possession of strong brands.

Consumer preference and loyalty: strong brand names can surely have positive effects on consumer perceptions and preferences. If we consider fan boys, like the Apple fan boys, who purchase nothing but what comes from Apple (Mac, iPod, iPhone, iPad, etc.). Most of the time, their choice depends more on the brand than on the actual devices quality.

Barrier to competition: the impact of the strong, positive perceptions held by consumers about top brands means it's difficult for new brands to compete. For example, Google has become notorious as the best search engine on the Internet. Even if a competitor like DuckDuckGo, Microsoft Bing or Yahoo (or you) come up with better algorithms, most of the online users would probably still use Google, as they got the Google brand on their mind.

High profits: Strong, marketing-leading brands are rarely the cheapest (Here again, think different, I mean, think Apple).

A good brand name should evoke positive associations and be easy to pronounce and remember (Yahoo, Bing, Color...). Also, it should not infringe an existing brand name and it should be distinctive (Google, Nintendo...).

Another piece of advice about internet branding, make sure the ".com" is gettable (as in www.yourbrand.com). When I say gettable, I mean that it's either available for you to get it first, or someone else owns it and is ready to sell it to you for a reasonable price.

6. Communication Techniques (on marketing for programmers)

By Necemon

The promotional mix, which is the overall range of techniques available to the marketer, comprises many elements but I am going to focus here on Internet marketing: products distribution, information and promotional benefits to consumers and businesses through internet technologies. Internet promotion is very convenient for a developer on a low budget (global reach at relatively low cost, metrics, dialogue with users, avoiding the necessity for intermediary salespeople...). The main ways to go about it include:

Online advertising: advertising your products by posting links and banners across the web, on your partners websites or through ad networks like Google Adwords.

Search engine optimization: maximizing your chances of being found by search engines (most importantly Google) and be showed among the very first results. There are many methods that helps, like mentioning relevant keywords in your page text and meta data. Also, getting popular by getting people to mention your product online and link to it.

Social media: the use of social network sites and blogs to get in direct contact and interact with your customers and potential customers

This ends our series of articles on "marketing for programmers". There is a lot to say on this topic, but I wanted to stick to some key points related to the software industry. If you are already a black belt ninja marketer type, you would probably find most of those notes boring, sorry about that, but please let me know the important things that I missed here. Anyway, those notes were mostly a summary of things I wish I would know earlier. If you are a white belt, new to marketing and want to know more, you should check out "Foundations of Marketing" by David Jobber and John Fahy.

Thanks for reading.

Web Citizen And Media Coverage: Yes, But...

By Cyriac Gbogou

These days, with the advent of social networks and blogs, every citizen yearns for information as mentioned in Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which says:

"Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers."

By virtue of this right, some citizens may sometimes tend to disseminate information without respecting certain rules of journalism that we will recall later.

It's worth indicating that elections are a time:

- to assess the state of the country at all levels (health, education, safety, etc.)

- to evaluate what changed and what didn't since the last election

- to monitor public opinion

- to review the promises that candidates had been making

In the run-up to elections, it goes without saying that we citizens, like the journalists whose job it is, must be very responsible in our dissemination of information.

Here are some rules to follow:

- To inform

- To explain

- To be reasonable and, above all, neutral

- To be independent and honest

- To be accurate and to verify any information before releasing it

To this we can add : to act as watchmen (watchdogs, lol)

During that period a lot of rumors, propaganda and false information circulate.

So how do you know whether what you see online is true?

Here are some tools to debunk the myths and manipulations.

share.america.gov/is-what-youre-seeing-online-true
verificationhandbook.com/book

In summary, freedom of expression has some rules that every web citizen must respect.

Chapter 3

Corporate Worlds
and Emerging Markets

Corporate Worlds and Emerging Markets

Featuring Antoine Mian, Nnenna Nwakanma and Olivier Madiba

Starting a New Job: 12 Tips for a Brilliant Outset

By Necemon

1. Right from the start, look for quick wins, and do your best to achieve them. You have to find something you can do as soon as possible to show some quick positive results. This will lower the pressure you feel and help you get more confident. Also, it is important to secure these early wins because they help to build your momentum and establish your credibility. But make sure you know how your new company defines a win. Whenever possible, it is also important to choose a victory that will be important to your boss.

2. Behave as if you are still being interviewed
Different workplaces have different practices when it comes to probationary periods. Some use this time to provide you with extra training and support from a mentor, and, of course, to ensure you’re up to the job. Think of your first few weeks as an extended interview. Show up every day thinking you need to prove you deserved to be hired. You'll work harder, work smarter, won’t take anything for granted, and in a short time you will confirm your level.

3. Start demonstrating and documenting what you promised on your resume
Whatever you sold them during the interview, your mission is to demonstrate that you are really going to do it. For example, if you said you were a computer security expert, first check that their website has no basic vulnerabilities. And take notes on your accomplishments, your main contributions, and the positive comments you receive. This information will be useful during future performance reviews and salary negotiations.

4. Understand your goals
In the first few weeks, make sure you understand why you were hired and what your goals are for the coming months. This can help guide your efforts in the coming weeks.
Work with your boss. Schedule a meeting with your boss as soon as possible and tell him that you would like to produce an exceptional job. Ask him: "How can I help you? What can I do to exceed your expectations?" Use this initial meeting to establish what success would look like in the first period. It is possible to start a new job without knowing precisely the objectives that directors expect, but it is wise to enquire, while taking into account one's strengths and limitations.

5. Write your knowledge base
Setting good habits and getting organized from the start will make your life easier down the line, especially since a lot of new information is coming your way. Do not rely on your memory to retain everything in the long run. Create a new file from the software you would feel most comfortable with from the first day and use it as a journal for the large amount of information that you will certainly receive at the beginning, which will increase over time, and which will certainly become useful to gather your observations, your ideas and questions. Adds keywords to facilitate future searches. Organizes information by sections, subject, areas of activity, think about "how to use this information in the future" or "why would I look for it?". Describe what each division does, which is responsible for what, the acronyms used within the company. Draw processes and hierarchical diagrams. Soon it will be your working documentation, a bit like a wiki of everything you know about your work and the related subjects.

6. Get to know your team
After surviving the first day in your new position, your next task is to make sure you become a valuable member of the team. Try to find out how long each team member has been in the business, what they do, what positions they have occupied, where they have worked in the past and what is the hierarchy. You should approach these questions subtly, trying to slip them into a general conversation rather than throwing a ton of questions at them at once.
Take the initiative to introduce yourself. If the pace of work is accelerated, they probably won't have time to come to you. Start with your team, the people you work with directly. It is also in their interest that you take a good start, since your work will directly affect theirs.

7. Manage expectations
Essentially, what to avoid is to create too many expectations. Be realistic about what you could achieve, especially in the first few months. Do not expect constructive comments to come to you spontaneously. Sometimes people do not communicate expectations clearly (you have to ask directly, clarify, ask again).

8. Trust yourself to execute and develop the new skills you need
It's easy to feel overwhelmed when you start a new job, and you might be worried about not functioning as expected. But remember this: those who hired you knew what they were doing. They want you and only you: remember that they have specifically picked you among many other candidates. Your approach may be different, but the company could change and grow richer, it's ok to bring in your special skills and attributes.
To help you start to acquire more skills in your new role, create a learning plan by listing the skills you will need for this position and identifying any improvements that may be required. Learning these new skills should be your goal during your first few months.
Find people to help, volunteer to help in an area where you would like to improve. Do not hesitate to ask for help. If you do not know how or where find the information you need, you might lose time if you look for it yourself. Get in touch with the colleague or team that specializes in that area.

9. Study the strategy behind your efforts
Consider your current tasks as a piece in a puzzle you have to solve and build, with your team. Think about how you could take advantage of your current responsibilities. Think about the skills you could learn, the visibility you could acquire, the contacts you could create. Every task, every project and every job can lead to other opportunities.

10. Find a way to differentiate yourself
Works hard to be known for something specific (specialist of a technology or domain). Could you be known as the one who answers the fastest or who is always ready to offer help?
Choose a valuable mission that truly benefits the company and other employees, and strive to excel at this mission.
It is important to be seen doing these things. Do not hide your talents and contributions, and remember that business is not a place for false modesty.

11. Reinforce your connections on social networks
Once you're officially in the role, it's important to update your title on your own social media platforms and start following your new company and colleagues. When you meet new people, reinforce relationships by finding them on Twitter or LinkedIn.
Stay in touch with your former colleagues. This may seem contradictory, but the first week of a new job is the perfect time to contact colleagues from your previous companies. Get back to them and ask for recommendations on LinkedIn. The best time to get referrals is when you are not looking for work.

12. Never forget why you were hired : to help advance the goals and mission of the company.
What is your job, really? Your job is to make your boss’s job easier, to help your boss succeed. Always keep this in mind, even if it is not written in the job description. It is possible to achieve both your goals and those of the company, that's what you should do.
See your boss as a person you help, not as someone who tells you what to do. The more you help them achieve their goals, the more you will be valued. Moreover, you will see that it is easier to work hard when you know that you are helping someone (rather than obeying him). And you'll enjoy your work even more. It's much more fun and rewarding to help than to comply with the instructions.

Your First Job is Like Your First Girlfriend

By Necemon

Several of my readers have expressed some anxiety when it comes to getting their first chance. Many think they are hopeless, as they have never done it before. By not having certain socio-emotional skills and languages on their "psychological resume", they feel like they have an obvious flaw, as if applying for a job were like asking someone out.

Given their lack of experience, others worry that their first opportunity will be a complete failure because they wouldn’t know how to handle it.

So let's talk about that first time.

Your first one

The one in which you dive deep without really knowing what to expect, the one that blends happiness and apprehension at once. The only problem is, the odds that your first connection is also going to be your last one are pretty slim. Right, nobody likes to think about their project being temporary. Beginning by telling yourself from the start that you will end up splitting up, that's not very romantic. But again, pretending that it's not a possibility doesn’t do you any good either.

Don't take it the wrong way, I'm not saying you should start each project with the idea that it is doomed to failure. Quite the opposite, you should enter it with the idea that you will appreciate every moment. You will enjoy a lot, you will learn a lot and it will make you stronger. So yes, your first experience may not be the last one, but it's not something you have to fear. Appreciate it for what it is, enjoy every instant.

Your first break up

Okay, the first experience probably will probably not be the last one, but how do you know when it's time to move out?

If you ask this question to 10 people, you will get 10 different answers. For some people, it's after 3 to 5 years. There is no single answer that applies to all cases, but there is a great deal of research showing that there are a few key signs that signal it's time to move.

One of the hardest parts of life is discerning the pointless attempts from the decisive struggles, deciding whether to walk away (adapting to reality) or to try harder (and when insisting, to what extent that would be reasonable). It is a silent battle. No one understands how you really feel.

But if it ends, the separation does not cancel out the good things that have happened. On the contrary, everything you learned during that first experiment could help you prepare the next one. Growing up is sometimes a painful process but you become more confident and more experienced.

Getting ready for changes

Meeting and spending days with a person or team for weeks, months, years.
Seeing them and exchanging with her almost every day, sharing, and evolving together on common projects.
Seeing them more often than your own friends, more often than your own family (especially if you live far from your hometown).
And then, just stop seeing them. Overnight. This is the change.

You will need to get out of your comfort zone and out of your routines. Adaptation, the ability to become accustomed to new environments, and to new conditions with speed and ease, it is not just an important skill, it is essential.

Moving on to something better

You would not be able to reproduce this first experiment in the same way, you should not expect to find the same thing elsewhere. You have to be open to new experiences and new people. Do not be so stuck in the past to the point of not appreciating the present. You were lucky to have meet that interesting opportunity, but it does not mean that there would not be other opportunities equally interesting, and why not, even more interesting, if you open yourself to the idea of studying them.

You cannot recreate that first connection exactly, but you can find much better.

Begin by acknowledging that there is nothing special about the first one. It is true that it was a wonderful time and you discovered many things, but people tend to romanticize, to idealize, even to glorify the first time they experience something. There is probably nothing special about your first experience beyond the fact that it was the first one. Remember that you are biologically wired to place your first experiences on a pedestal. You certainly do not want to let this mentality to get in the way of enjoying the present.
There is a good chance that you will remember this so-called first experience in a somewhat exaggerated manner. As a result, this may lead you to some inappropriate comparisons. Comparison causes conflict. Conflict causes anxiety. Anxiety causes fear. Fear prevents you from thinking. There is no intelligence where there is fear.

Learning experience : getting stronger

Instead of seeing the first times as perfect situations, view them in terms of experience, it was practice to some extent. Analyze and value what you have learned about yourself, about others, about your abilities, your affinities and your ambitions.

Your first job is like your first girlfriend

The similarities of the contexts are indisputable. On the other hand, there are also some differences. Let us explore these differences before separating. Let us emphasize the case of employment, or it is easy to imagine everything that can go wrong during the transition. There are 2 fundamental questions that you want to ask yourself before you leave.

Did you learn all that you could ?
Before you leave a job, consider the set of skills you would like to present to a future employer. Works long enough to show that you have evolved through concrete achievements. Depending on the industry and the type of work you are doing, it may be possible to standout, to demonstrate your skills and the successful execution of a few projects. In any case, it is always better if you can present or describe a strong track record to those who are likely to recruit you.

Did you sign your next contract ?
The key recommendation is not to leave a position until you have the next one lined up. It is important to have the safety net of a new position because you never know how long it will take to find something that really suits you. Moreover, it is harder to find a job when you are unemployed than when you are employed.

Getting far away from here...

Everyone ends up leaving their first job, whether it happens after 2 months or after 40 years. However, certain steps must be taken in order to leave properly and professionally, in order not to burn any bridges.

When checking out:
- Schedule, negotiate your handover and final dates
- Organize your projects, documents, and other files for other people to use easily.

Keep positive relationships with them until you leave. You'll probably need their recommendations.

Staying in touch. Your former employer and your co-workers are now members of your professional network, so make sure you stay connected with them, for example on LinkedIn or Twitter.

To conclude, we can't stop students and yuppies from thinking of themselves as the stars of history, but we can remind them that the early contacts constitute the first chapters, not the final chapters. Your first love, the one you must protect at all costs, is yourself. You do what you think is best for yourself, and if it doesn't work, you say "never mind, at least I would have tried."

5 "Good Reasons" For Which You Will Not Be Hired

By Nnenna Nwakanma

I have been wanting to put these thoughts down since end of 2011. Quick story, I am running a training for West Africa and also doing some recruitments. For one post, I was interviewing candidates in the morning, and for the other position, interviews were in the afternoon. So I had a full day of people trying to convince me and the panel I was heading that they were the right persons for the right tasks!! Then 7 PM rolls round and I am back in my hotel room, trying to ease off. And someone knocks.

"Madam, I see you have been interviewing people, please can you also interview me"? First, I am shocked, then insulted, and really offended. But my "other brain" says: "Cool down and get to the bottom of this".

So I feign interest and I ask: "Please what is your name, what is your academic qualification, what are your skills, and what kind of job are you looking for?"

That was the beginning of a long story. Let's cut it short and make it simple. ALL the reasons the gentleman gave me for which he should have been considered are "good reasons" for which nobody ever gets hired.

Most common reason: I need a job.

Okay, so YOU need a job. The NEED is yours. Here is the summary. Your problem is not my problem. That you need a job is your issue not mine. There are millions of people saying the same. I get such lines at least 5 times a week. It may seem a bit callous, but your need is yours, not mine. That you need a job is no reason to hire you.

Reason 2: I need more money.

Quick answer. "Same here". I need more money. In fact, as an employer, I most probably need more money than you do. My social, economic, fiscal, and life responsibilities certainly outweigh yours. So in terms of cash needs, mine is greater than yours. Give me a break.

Reason 3: I am not enjoying my job, I need excitement, enjoyment, adventure.

Seriously? Go start your own stuff then! Do what you like. Choose when to wake up, only do stuff that are exciting. Never accept an assignment unless there is adventure attached to it! Nobody will hire you to make you happy. They will hire you to work. Sorry, but your employer's interest comes first.

Reason 4: There is no future in this country. I need an escape.

And you think I am stupid? If I started off like you, do you think you will be here asking for me to hire you? It was because I believed in a future, and I committed to making the then-present better, that you are coming up to me and thinking I will be the one to offer you a better future. You are not looking for work, you are looking for escape. Odds are, when I invest in you, you will either jump ship at the first sign of difficulty or disappear once you find another escape. I am looking for someone to solve problems with, build, construct and ensure a better present and promising future. I do not provide platforms for escapists.

Reason 5: I like you. You are such a wonderful person. I want you to be my boss.

Over the bar!! Because I change planes, gave a tip, I speak with respect and I keep to time. Or maybe because of the dressing or the "fashionable" things you see around me. You most probably saw me after or off work. It is a mirage. You need to work by me to see the "entrepreneur" me. I work long hours, do reports that run into 100s of pages. I lose sleep. I stretch myself!! You better wake up!!

*****

So you are asking, "what are the good reasons" for which I can be hired. I will be brief.

Every employer is looking to solve a problem. I will hire you if you can provide a solution or can work towards providing the solution

If you, by your own skills, will bring me more benefits than I am currently getting. If you can make me richer, you are welcome

If you are resourceful person. Someone who is willing to research into solutions, make trials, accept failures and help colleagues do better

If you have a skillset or knowledge or capacity that I do not have

If your network is larger, more promising and more interesting than mine.

*****

Conclusion, nobody will hire you because of you. I hire because of me. So next time you come knocking...

Think of me, not you.

GE FAQ : 3 months in the Cyber Pearl

By Necemon

What is GE?

General Electric is a USA based multi-national company, where I worked as an intern over this summer. This 100+ years old corporation operates in more than 180 countries with more than 300,000 employees. GE's broad range of products are from jet engines to power generation equipment, financial services to media content. The unit I have been working for was GE Energy.

How did that happen?

I heard about this internship through the International Development Office of my University. Among other things, they help students to find international academic and job experience. I got selected based on my resume and an interview which went pretty well. I briefly explained the technologies I was into and the kind of projects I had been working on.

The office was located in a state-of-the-art IT Park, known as the Cyber Pearl. I was about to start my first corporate project. It felt like I was getting in the IT industry for the first time. Kind of. After long hours of lonely coding from my student room, I was now in an actual work environment. It was somewhat different but I was ready. Technically there was not much else I could do because I didn’t really know what my task would be. I just knew it would be exciting.

What exactly were we doing over there?

I can’t disclose actual details about the project I had been working on but I would say that it has been a chance to improve my problem solving skills. I could sum it up in two words: "Fun Learning". Even though the technology context may have been an advantage from the start, it's quite clear that this internship involved a much wider range of skills throughout the project, including effective project management, time management, corporate culture and team collaboration, to name a few. I was learning and improving through my assigned tasks, and (perhaps more importantly) through my team feedback. Plus it was a pleasant experience because my teammates kept encouraging me to tackle ambitious tasks. it was challenging in a good way.

So... To make a long story short, what was the point?

As a wise man used to say, it's quite hard to learn swimming just from reading a book about it, there are some Truths that one doesn't easily perceive in a classroom setting, or while coding alone. It's been convenient to interact with brilliant professionals from the engineering industry, to learn from their experience and advice, and definitely, to explore the reality of large scale projects.

5 lessons I learned from my internship at General Electric

By Necemon

This article is a follow up to my previous article on my internship at General Electric. It’s just a short note to sum up some important things I learnt.

1.       Theory learnt in class is actually applied in the industry: there are some things that you learn in university you will probably never use again but other things you will use every day of your life. At the beginning I was like, who cares if the 7 layers of the OSI model are the application, the presentation, etc.? And who care about normalising the databases until it is in Boyce-Codd normal form? Actually a lot of people take those things very seriously.

2.       Documentation is important. I used to see it as a time consuming process that was barely worth doing. Now I understand how it increases teamwork efficiency.

3.       Technical skills are not the only thing that matter. Actually a lot of other things matter in the workplace like the business focus, the interpersonal skills, etc. But this experience made me realize the need to emphasise on personal skills like self-confidence and emotional resilience (coping with pressure and quickly bouncing back from setbacks).

4.       Follow the instructions. The discipline of doing what is useful and required, instead what sounds cool.

5.       Secrecy is the first law of magic. That one is pretty straight forward. The team work remains in the team. The corporate information should not be disclosed outside of the organisation.

12 Years Of A Dream Challenging Reality

By Olivier Madiba

To be realistic is to find a rational way to achieve a magnificent goal.

PS: This is neither a biography, nor a success story. This is just the testimony of an African entrepreneur for those who can inspired by it, here or elsewhere.

The Triggers

We are in the 1997 - 2001 era, the golden years of PlayStation 1, and I play two games that will change my life.

Yes, Final Fantasy 7 and Metal Gear Solid 1. Two outlets of a shy and insecure adolescent's life (like most geeks of that generation). Two games that made me dream, wonder, travel (in my head). And more importantly, two games that made me say this sentence "One day, I want people to feel that way because of me. I want to see people holding game controllers, shouting, laughing, feeling strong, frustrated and happy because of something I would have created".

We are in 2003, I am 17 and I just graduated from high school. I join the University of Yaoundé 1, and cybercafés are fashionable in Cameroon. I want to get into computer science, hoping that one day I could go and work for Ubisoft or Square Enix in order to achieve the perfect RPG. I start to read on the Internet about how to make a video game and I frenziedly start scribbling my first game design notes.

February 2004: I post on JeuxVideo.com that I will build the perfect RPG someday:

jeuxvideo.com/forums/1-31-8247500-1-0-1-0-0.htm

Obviously, people laugh at me, not out of malice, but out of "realism". As you can see on the discussion forum, on that day, I challenged the whole world.

Playing with the cards we have, instead of crying the ones we don't have

I join Oniro, an online French community of amateur developers and I relentlessly read all the tutorials. Cybercafés consume around 2,000 CFA francs ($3/$4) out of the 5,000 CFA francs ($9/$10) that I am sent weekly as pocket money. I have never eaten so much bread with chocolate before (100FCFA bread, 50FCFA chocolate).

2005, I fail (many of) my classes in college and I have less course material to study during the repeated years. I work on Aurion so as not to get depressed and not to think about my life of non-stop school and personal failures.

I post adverts around the Yaoundé city centre stating that I'm looking for people who want to make video games. People think that I must be under the influence of some very powerful hallucinogens, but let me proceed in my delusion.

From 2004 to 2008, I live the worst years of my life. Non-stop school failures in a mind-numbing educational system. I realize that my parents do not have enough money for me to study one day out of the country (death of the naive Ubisoft dream). Besides, they have so much trouble paying for these college classes that I keep failing. Every day, I can feel the specter of poverty that is narrowing around me.

This is also the period when I leave my bubble and I enter the sphere of collective negativity. I spend my days complaining (and listening to people complaining) about the lack of job opportunities for new graduates, about the ethnic conspiracies, about the social injustice, about the neocolonization that nip any hope in the bud, etc. In short... There's nothing else to say, my life was ruined before it even started.

2008, I owe my wake-up call to two things:

- (1) When you are a student in Cameroon, you certainly have a "back-up" uncle who helps you out with 10,000 FCFA or 15,000 FCFA when you are at your worst. One day when I went to see him he kept me waiting from 8AM to 5PM in his office (I had not eaten since the previous day) and gave me 2000 FCFA. Instead of getting upset, I instantly understood the symbolism, he was showing me how he struggled to earn money and how his life was not easy. That day I told myself, "I no longer want to be just a consumer"

- (2) I spend one week of holidays with a friend whose father "succeeded". And while I used to tell myself that everything is about luck, connections, good schools (in other words, the national mantra of laziness and defeatism), I observe how this man lives. He gets up at 6am, works until 10pm even on Saturdays. On Sundays, he rests but keeps reading about his line of business. This man trains continuously to stay motivated and ambitious. I then have another epiphany: I have to train to become like that."

I dust off my AURION project. It will be my motivation to learn to be excellent even if I can't live from it, it will keep my mind active. This time I fix my beginner's mistakes by starting to write a complete scenario and design specifications before getting into "programming and other details". I also decided to delve into how to program your game from scratch (or almost) in order to no longer face the limitations of amateurish engines.

From that period, 2008 to 2010, I had created a local tech startup : MADIA (starting from nothing, with college friends who were stuck like me). I have gained experience in people management, business management, accounting and computer graphics. 2010-2011, MADIA is running out of gas. We are struggling to keep the company afloat. No initial investment (therefore, no working capital), some customers paying with a minimum of 6 months delay (since they are being paid with some 3 years delay themselves), public contracts randomly cancelled, and a micro-finance agency that closed down while still holding our savings in early 2010. I also went through some great family and social pressures that urged me to try and find a job as a civil officer, or some similarly stable condition. I wouldn't mind, but I don't the credentials required by big corporations.

Psychologically, I could only survive this period of huge frustration because I was working on Aurion from 9:00 pm to 1:00 am every day when I am back to my small room on a hill in Biyemassi.

Mid-2012: I read an article about video game budgets. A studio which blew $4million into their "employee entertainment department". The budget of "small" games which requires anything between 4 and 5 million, just to be completed in basic conditions. The achievements of independent games, download sales, Kickstarter success stories. I tell myself that I can build a prototype with Aurion, and then ask people on Kickstarter to support me in making a semi-professional game.

I do a simple calculation on Excel to visualise what it would cost me to open a studio with 20 people in this country with ideal conditions. And I realize that, even if we hike all the costs, we would hardly need $1.5million to operate for 2 years, even if we include a $500,000 advertising budget.

At this time, I'm so broke, still living off my parents' money, that is 10,000 FCFA (15 €/20$) that my mother send me every week. I just want to be funded for 1 year to make a game demo, that would not be market-ready, but it would show a huge narrative and technical potential. I want 2 million FCFA (€3000 / $3650).

I have been neglecting the management of my company, which is stuck in Cameroon's heavy and slow system. I start to leave the office earlier to go home and work on Aurion. Obviously, no one understands me, and the pressures increase. I want to put forward a playable prototype ready to go on kickstarter by December 2012. I registered on the platform since March and I always saw the "Post your project" button, without ever clicking on it.

The prototype that demonstrates my game is pretty much ready. So I get on Kickstarter on December 19, 2012 to start testing the form interface in order to submit my project, and then... Existential punch in my face...

Because I am connected from Cameroon, I am not allowed to post my project on Kickstarter... Huge disillusionment, extreme disappointment, once again the world shows me that I was born in a country that is destined to non-stop failure. However I will spend Christmas with peace of mind, I did my very best, I do not regret anything.

From that moment, I start requesting funds all over the place. Online, I message Diaspora friends, aunts, uncles and project supporters, asking them to help as they can, whether it be with €15, €50, etc. I write the business plan (version 0) of Kiro'o Games within a week of frenetic writing. All my dreaming years blend on paper. I'm considering a budget for a small amateur team of 6 people with computers and survival wages for 1 year. I am looking for 12 million FCFA (21000$, 18000€).

Nobody really brings any concrete contribution. There were just micro-donations (which were very much appreciated indeed, they didn't have to) but no real investments. Some people didn't want to simply donate, they would have preferred to invest and own shares of the "real" game later.

A night of inspiration and intense reflection on how to go beyond this stage. How to escape from this feeling of labyrinth involving a scheduled and inevitable failure. We have foreseen that we need to evolve, without being afraid of responsibility and higher risk in order to succeed. After all, we wanted to play in the international league, so we had to think like international conquerors. I reviewed all my calculations and redesigned the entire investment system.

The Crowdfunding Equity of Kiro'o Games was born, a unique financial model in the business world, unmatched in Africa so far. Almost an economic "accident" according to some observers. It was a fusion of the Wall Street principles and the Bamileke tontine system of Cameroon. We added a legal process with certified e-mail validation.

Investors were still skeptical. People want to see visual prototypes, period. The usual Ouroboros, the snake that bites its tail. We want investments in order to do a job and we have to do that same job in order to have the investments. How to make professional graphics without paying a team? Without even the right equipment to draw correctly? In a country where there are not even "decent part-time jobs" that could help us survive (most of us were still living off parental funding)

August 2013: we are coming out of a few months of silence. Everyone was already saying that it was yet another dead idea in the bud. National legends even began to say that we might have planned to rip people off.

The next phase sounded like a melody of interactions, from August to September every week, every day we fed the Web with our visual models. We have written to the press around the world.

We also set up a standard e-mail for investment request, a video that tells our story and explains : "here is what we did with inadequate resources, imagine how far we will go with normal means".

Mid-August 2013, we confidently launch a funding campaign on Indiegogo. We are energized by less impressive games that have raised huge sums. We rely on our history, our potential, our journey. After all, video games and computers were born in garages. Players of our time will want to be part of this story.

The magic will not work. As far as most gamers are concerned, we are too amateurish and are probably a gang of African crooks on the internet (akin to the infamous Nigerian Prince scams). Epic fail with just 2% fund raising on Indiegogo.

I experience some humiliating moments on gamers forums, where we are accused of spamming communities, not to mention a mailing list bug, when we accidently emailed 15,000 American and European folks and got insulted continuously for a week. We had to disable the mailbox for this to stop (lol).

This experience makes us realize that the "la la land" video game "era is over. The Internet begins to slide on its dirtiest side: trolling. Our morale takes a hit, but we are already used to smashing walls. We will come back again when we are ready.

September 2013: An article in the "Le Monde" newspaper will baffle the most skeptical bystanders. This follows a first article in the video game section of their online edition. Concrete transactions and funding increase a bit.

The newspaper wants me to explain our business model beyond the game and they seem to appreciate our ingenuity. We earn a second publication in their Economics and Enterprise section. Stock purchases are increasing, reaching new heights, but the milestone of 100 shares sold is still unreachable.

Kiro'o Games office opens on December 2, 2013. That event drives an Internet Buzz. A 10-year epic journey has just ended. A success showing how we pushed the limits of our society to earn the right to be what we chose.

This was the beginning of another challenge: to actually complete the game. But we had our first happy Christmas for 10 years.

June 2014 - October 2014: We managed to set up our own game engine, the challenge is more complex than expected but it's all arranged and we see the game run for real. We publish pictures of the game and we have positive feedback, however the project's popularity has raised expectations. The "small" game that was planned initially must know fulfill these expectations, without falling into the traps of infinite improvements. We reassess the game specifications to increase the development time and improve the engine.

November 2014 - December 2014: The videos of the game are published online with concrete content. We show what has been done through a video that generates a buzz, the reactions are beyond our expectations. This also brings exposure to the international specialized press. We get our profiles on the biggest video games sites.

January 2015 - February 2015: For the Video Game press to be interested in the game and for gamers to support us, we can't just rely on videos. There is still this doubt that this startup living its first game does not know what it is doing. There is always this suspicion floating in the comments below the news. The game must pass an ultimate test that will seal or sweep our fate: it must be played.

The demo is distributed to the specialized press and it's an intense moment. The live sessions are raining, the test previews are 80% positive. They acknowledge that, even though we are not perfect, we do provide the essential factors: those who play have fun and are intrigued by history.

August 2015 - September 2015: The realisation of the game continues, the story progresses well, we do internal tests and the testers are "shaken up" by the scenarios. The gameplay is full of surprises, even for us. We discover new possibilities every day.

This memo ends here for now. Our entrepreneur life goes on, our minds are bursting with great plans and projects. Some exciting, frustrating, exhilarating battles to be fought in the future. Defeats, victories, even betrayals, new alliances, in one word: Life. Whatever happens, I just know we'll do as usual: finding our way.

[Interview] In The Bubble Of Olivier Madiba: "my goal is to reach my maximum human potential and to help others to do the same"

1. Quick (but effective) introduction of the personage and his achievements?

I am MADIBA Olivier, 32 years old Cameroonian. I have a Bachelor Degree in Computer Science obtained at the University of Yaoundé 1. I launched 2 startups (MADIA and KIROO).

I am currently CEO / Game Designer / Scriptwriter / Programmer at Kiroo which is the first video game studio in Cameroon.

2. What are your main goals in life?

My goal is to reach my maximum human potential in this life and to help others to do the same. I recruit those who want to improve things and who love the trip more than the destination.

3. What tools and techniques do you use to accomplish things efficiently?

I use a lot of software like Word / Excel actually, I spend my time writing and doing simulations. I also like to use paper and my pen to constantly draw what I think, it makes understanding easier.

4. Any recommendations for your juniors?

I would recommend going to www.kiroorebuntu.com, where I have compiled all my project management experience.

In terms of good reads, here are my favorite books:
- Warrior's Manual of Light
- Conversation with God (3 volumes)
- Shoe Dog (Biography of the founder of Nike)
- Creativity (Memory of the founder of Pixar)

5. What is the best way to contact you?

The best thing is to tweet something on my Twitter @madibaOlivier. I can't reply to everyone, but I read everything.

The Paradox Of Teachers In Africa : Rare And Yet Poorly Paid

By Antoine Mian

There is a quote that says "Everything that is rare is expensive". In sub-Saharan Africa, in that "Everything", it seems that we must include Everything but the teaching profession.

Indeed, the shortage of teachers that affects the whole world in general is particularly more pronounced in sub-Saharan Africa. If we stick to the quote, this situation should have had the effect of raising the salary of teachers to attract as many people as possible in the profession. But no! On the contrary, it appears to be driving teachers' salaries down. In The Ivory Coast for example, in the schools, you can find benevolent teachers and volunteer teachers alongside state civil service teachers.

Often recruited by local communities and/or by NGOs, benevolent teachers with extremely low salaries (often less than 15000fcfa [$30/€23] per month according to a Regional Director of Education) hold classes, usually in rural areas. Alongside benevolent teachers, there are those who are called volunteers. To cope with the serious shortage of secondary school teachers, the Ministry of National Education and Technical Education recruited 3,000 of those in 2012. Paid at 100,000 CFA ($200/€150) per month, these volunteer teachers have held classes alongside colleagues often paid three or four times more.

Based on discussions we had with members of the Cabinet and the General Inspection of the Ministry of Education, it turns out that the good success rates on Ivory Coast examinations this year (33.58% in High School, 40.17% in Middle School and 67.03% in Primary School) are largely due to the presence of these benevolent and volunteer teachers. It is therefore clear that these two categories of teachers are important for the quality of education. However, while all of them strongly agree on their importance in the education system, they are less confident about their future. Indeed, when we start addressing the question of their future, everyone goes quiet, especially volunteer teachers.

With such a low salary and an uncertain future, how can we keep these teachers in their positions, whether they are benevolent or volunteers?

The situation in The Ivory Coast reappears identically throughout the Subregion. Thus, the main cause of teacher shortage in Saharan Africa seems to be related to the inability of education systems to retain them in the post. Indeed, quality education requires quality teachers while retaining quality teachers is another challenge in the education system. In sub-Saharan Africa, the job of teaching "on the field" is often neglected for the sake of juicy positions in ministerial offices, central government or private corporations.

If we want strong educational systems in our countries that strive to emergence, it becomes imperative to look into the motivation of teachers through a revaluation of the profession. Indeed, if Africa wants to build a good education system, it must invest in teachers by way of quality training, respecting their professionalism, rewarding and recognizing those who are effective and efficient and improving their morale and motivation.

Gamification: 5 Peculiar Concepts That African Schools Could Actually Use

By Necemon

Gamification is the transfer of game mechanics to other fields, especially websites, learning situations, work contexts or social networks. The objective is to increase the acceptability and the use of these applications by relying on our human predisposition to entertainment.

This design technique allows people to adopt certain behaviors, usually some behaviors that could be considered irrelevant or things they would not normally do: filling out a questionnaire, buying a product, watching advertisements or, as in our current instance: assimilating knowledge.

Therefore, by applying these video-game-inspired techniques to a classroom context, most courses can become much more interesting:

1. Progressive evaluation system

What's that?

Let's admit that the education system in Africa is currently rather demotivational.

From the beginning of the school year, and starting the first homework, the ambitious student sees himself with a perfect score of 20 out of 20, but from there, the only possible direction is the reduction of his points, depending on his mistakes. If he is really brilliant, he could stay close to the average of 20, otherwise in general his average score drops with each of his mistakes.

There is a sort of feedback loop that encourages failure: when you have a bad grade, you feel less motivated to study, so you study less, so you have more bad grades, and so on. Basically, the more you fail, the more you fail.

However, in games, we learn that progress encourages progress and that the desire to be effective is a much stronger motivator than the fear of failure.

Hence we could assess the students performance just as in video games, so that any given assignment would have an XP (Experience Points) value, and if all the students start with 0xp, and they earn points as and when they find answers, complete homework/quizzes, and progress from level to level.

In this case, each assignment or exam appears to be a reward, rather than a discouraging punishment.

Why is it cool?

It's a lot more fun to win things than to lose things. Plus, this methodology never leads students to a point where they feel that they have to give up.

The good news is that you do not even have to change how average grades are calculated. It is still the same total number of points, to be divided by the same number of tests.

For example, if there are 5 homework out of 20, that's 100 points. Instead of starting from 100 points and losing points with mistakes, we move to a perspective where each starter has 0 points, and depending on his performance at each test, he earns a few points: +10, +5, + 15, etc. Thus the pupil only goes up and not down.

2. Global bonus

What's that?

To extend the evaluation system described above, one can even add global bonuses, for example if one of the students reaches 200 points, the whole class gets a bonus of 10 points. Or if 5 students reach 100 points, the whole class gets + 2xp or a chocolate cake.

Why is it cool?

This kind of reward system encourages solidarity among students and encourages the best students to help their classmates.

3. Power to Impact

What's that?

One of the big challenges in the education system is about taking care of children who do not feel that their actions are relevant to their own lives. To feel that you have an impact, means to feel that you control your own destiny, and that your choices make a difference.

Students who do not feel this impact tend to believe that they have no control over their parents' choices about their education. Without this feeling of impact, it is almost impossible to feel motivated. Instead of making decisions about the future, one merely undergoes the events of life without having long-term goals.

The more you feel that you have the power to impact in your life, the harder you work, the more you are keen to engage in more ambitious tasks.

Why is it cool?

In fact, people with this sense of power are more resilient in the face of external forces outside their control that are disturbing their plans. They adapt more easily, overcome obstacles and proceed towards their goals.

So how to amplify this sense of power? Through games, obviously. Games that instill the idea that you control the future. In games, the cycle between choice and results is usually much shorter than in real life (and also much better indicated).

In games, the player tries something, he fails; he tries something else, he fails again, he continues to make new decisions until he succeeds.

Games teach that different choices have different outcomes and that everyone controls the choices they make. The philosophical implication is that life is not simply a series of things that just happen to you.

4. External motivators

What's that?

In Africa, in general, there are not enough teachers and not enough hours of classes a day to teach children everything they need to know. That's why we need children to stay interested and continue to learn voluntarily, even after leaving the classroom.

There is a solution that costs virtually nothing: alternate reality games.

An Alternate Reality Game (ARG) is a multi-media game that deliberately blurs experiences perceived within and out of the game.

Immersive fictions that blur the boundaries between the real and imaginary world, they unfold both online and in real life, they spread through all channels: treasure hunts in the city, texting, posters, e-mails, websites etc.
(Marie Lechner - Libération)

More than a riddle game, ARGs are essentially a new way of telling stories. These are fictions that are played in real life, instead of being confined to the pages of a book or the images of a screen. Players can see the plot hatch and expand in real time. It's a much richer and fun interactive experience.
(Adrian Hon - Puppetmaster)

Basically, it is the encounter between a large-scale treasure hunt, implying the interactive unfolding of a story, and a community of players (or students, in this case).

Why is it cool?

We can use the information we want students to learn as keys to unlock more and more games. And while looking for this information, they will necessarily learn many other things at the same time. And if it's really interesting, they could even meet after school to continue the treasure hunt.

5. Unexpected connections

What's that?

The previous game is good but it requires a lot of preparation time for anyone who wants to arrange it properly... For those who want something simpler, there is a research game which is about choosing 2 unrelated interesting concepts, and find the connection between them.

For example: Africa and Deep Learning.

Each player finds a series of links that lead from one theme to another.

The game works well with Wikipedia. It's not just about scanning links, but they should also describe the connection between these links. All successful students earn experience points but the winner is the one who makes the connection using the fewest possible links, he obviously gets bonus points.

Why is it cool?

This exercise encourages curiosity and allows students to come across information that they would not have explored otherwise.

Also, encouraging them to take the shortest path is giving them the motivation to go back to information, to think about it, to explore new directions that derive from this information.

But more importantly, this exercise leads them to study the connection between information, that is, how ideas are related, which is a vital skill, even for adults, it is important to contextualize knowledge and to understand the importance of certain topics that do not interest them directly.

So for our example, if we want to find the relationship between Africa and Deep Learning:

Africa => Evolution => Artificial Intelligence => Deep Learning

Try to beat that...

Africa: ICT in Education for Entrepreneurship and Employability

By Antoine Mian

While facing the problem of youth employability, African countries today strive to improve the quality in their education systems by using ICTs. One of the lessons learned from the case studies in relevant countries shows that the integration of ICT in Education can be beneficial, not only in terms of Education, but also in terms of Entrepreneurship and Employability.

In Lebanon, the use of digital tablets in the educational system has enabled the creation of a digital ecosystem for the production of mobile terminals and educational content.

In Portugal too, the implementation of an ICT plan for education has led to the creation of local companies in the field of computer manufacturing, as well as in the creation and production of digital educational content. This state of affairs has created jobs and economic growth in the country.

The examples of Lebanon and Portugal are not isolated. In most Latin American countries, such as Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela, Uruguay and Paraguay, computers and digital educational content used in the education system are produced locally. In some African countries such as Morocco, Tunisia and Kenya, ICT integration in education has led to job creation around content production.

The main advantage of such a policy is that it stimulates an absolute enthusiasm of all social groups around the integration of ICT in education. As a matter of fact, this policy encourages local entrepreneurship, which leads to the development of a digital ecosystem and the creation of jobs. It also makes it possible to constitute a critical mass of local human resources for the maintenance of the equipment, which plays a fundamental role in ensuring sustainability.

It is therefore indisputable that the policy of integrating ICTs into education in Africa, if it is well conducted, will not only have an impact on education systems. It will also have impacts on the economy through business creation and on the social life through job creation. Therefore, as the vice president of Intel said, a good policy of integration of ICT in education, beyond the aim on Education should have a focus on Entrepreneurship and Employability.

4 important revelations that could certainly accelerate the educational revolution in Africa

By Necemon

When we talk about academic training, a fashionable expression is to say that the established education system is defective - the current system is not defective, it is built in a great way. It's just that we do not need it anymore, it's obsolete. - Sugata Mitra

Ok, I cannot speak for everyone, but based on what I could see in West Africa and South Asia, here are some hypotheses to consider:

1. The accumulation of data in the head is often unnecessary

It is often about attending classes all day, every day and memorizing a lot of data. Students are often forced to absorb information, on the assumption that they might need it some day. The truth is, they may never need most of it.

There are some people who can quite easily stay seated still and take notes for 8 hours each day, and then 2 weeks later, they can recite everything they have written and memorized. But there is also this huge population of very talented people who cannot learn that way, especially since any relevant information is easily accessible if they ever need it...

As Sugata Mitra explains, you do not need to memorize anything. You can find the information when you need it. The role of the teacher is especially to guide the young minds to the right questions, not to give the answers, since the answers are everywhere.

2. Information is everywhere, just be connected

You just have to be connected, your brain can accept/give remote contributions. It is a fact that the value of your ideas is limited when you are isolated but there is one great hope: wherever I go, even if it is in a remote village or in the middle of the savannah, the very first thing that I ask or check is, do I have that little bandwidth that could give me some GPRS connection or something equivalent? And in the middle of jungles, I see that sometimes it says "connected". And then I know that everything I say can go everywhere and work exactly the same way. It's just a matter of time...

Lois Mbugua, Customer Project Manager at Ericsson Kenya, says connectivity is about opening up to the world. By connecting a village, students can communicate with other students and teachers around the world.

Her colleague Margaret Kositany adds that education used to be limited to what the teacher could tell the students, and the teacher was relying on a few text books. But now students have access to a lot more information.

In fact there is a very big difference between access to information and school. They used to be the same thing, now the information is available online for everyone.

A great example of this would be Coursera, a digital company offering open and massive online courses. According to Daphne Koller, co-founder, the idea is to enable the best universities in the world to put their courses online, so that anyone with an internet connection can benefit from having free access to a great education.

Coursera provides courses in computer science, social sciences, mathematics, statistics, economics, finance and many more. More than 200 courses are currently available.

Since the information is available to anyone connected, it means that if we give access to 10-12 years old children, they will acquire the knowledge if they want - as Seth Godin could deduce.

It would not work so well for topics that they are not interested in because...

3. It is much easier to learn when one is involved in activities that they enjoy

What I liked most about education in the West is freedom, students being free to choose the subjects they prefer and to leave out the options they do not like. There are very few restrictions, as long as one can earn enough credits through their selected courses.

The biggest advantage is that students are motivated to work, since they do what they really want to, as opposed to some systems where students are obligated to take on all the subjects on the curriculum, whether they like those or not. Being forced to learn things that do not interest them, they will probably forget those after the exams anyway.

Furthermore, researches show that those who find the answer themselves retain it better than those who are told the answer. What schools should do ideally is to give children the motivation to get involved, to create an environment where children, driven by their curiosity, solve interesting problems, instead of simply memorizing answers to the problems that have already been solved.

This may seem unrealistic with regard to some traditional systems but...

4. It's not because certain things were done in a certain way in the past that we should allow this to continue.

The origins of traditional education come from the military to a large extent. They needed identical people, soldiers, administrators, etc. So they produced such a system. When the industrial revolution happened, they wanted identical people too in order to meet certain standards in factories and assembly lines.

So if we look at school that way, we note the fact that we process 30 or even 40 kids at a time, in a batch just like in a factory, while trying to maintain a common evolution for the whole group, often with the effect half of the class finds the classes too difficult while the other half gets bored.

And if you fail an exam, what do you do? We hold you back and we re-process you, it all matches the way a factory works. This methodology was really useful in the traditional context, but we don't have a shortage of factory workers anymore (on the contrary, unemployment rates have increased in some industries).

We take all these children and we force them to try to adapt to this really complex bureaucracy, but actually it is the system that should adapt to them!

When a kid doesn't conform to the system, he is pressured to fit into the system, as if there was something wrong with him. But in reality, the system is here for the kids, not the other way around...

Maybe things will change in the near future, maybe not. In any case, nobody says that it will be easy. There will be challenges, but revolutions destroy the perfect to enable the impossible.

Africa, Cradle Of Humanity And Entrepreneurs

By Antoine Mian

In addition to being the cradle of humanity, Africa is becoming the cradle of entrepreneurs. As a matter of fact, when it comes to the world rankings of the countries with the largest number of entrepreneurs, Africa plays the leading role!

While entrepreneurs in the United Kingdom and the United States are associated with start-ups, in some other countries, especially in Africa, entrepreneurship for freelancers is more of a necessity than a dream. Indeed, when there are not enough jobs available like in many African countries, you have to create their own opportunities.

Approved Index, a UK-based research network has just ranked countries with the largest number of entrepreneurs. This number is calculated as the percentage of the adult population that owns or co-owns a new business and has paid wages for three months or more. This study shows that countries with the largest number of entrepreneurs are going through a commercial revolution.

Approved's ranAfrica: ICT in Education for Entrepreneurship and Employabilityh 13.7% of the population, Angola 6th with 12.4% of its population and Botswana 8th with 11.1% of its population.

Note that in this ranking, Great Britain is 37th with 4.6% and the USA 41th with 4.3% of the population that are entrepreneurs.

Click here for the ranking of the 9 countries with the most entrepreneurs in the world.

[Interview] In The Bubble Of Antoine Mian: "if one is not passionate, they miss out on life"

1. Quick (but effective) introduction of the personage and his achievements?

Bi Sehi Antoine MIAN, I am a teacher-researcher in ICT. Currently Assistant Director of Techno Pedagogy at the Virtual University of Ivory Coast. From my experiences as Ivorian Web actor and blogger, I was able to integrate social media as Teaching Units into the educational model of the Virtual University of Ivory Coast.

2. What are the values that better define you?

My main value is the consideration that I must always have for the human person. Man is at the heart of all my actions. Whether it be educational or social actions, I place the Human Being at the center.

3. What tools and techniques do you use to accomplish things efficiently?

I work extensively on free software. I do it because I view myself as a demonstrator. Through me, teachers and actors in the education system must realise that, with open solutions, many problems can be solved in the context of ICT integration.

4. Any recommendations for your juniors?

Life advice: to be passionate about what one does. Because if one is not passionate, they miss out on life. Never stop learning and opening up to others, it costs nothing but it can provide a lot. Everything that one does must aim at the development of the human person. This must be put at the center of everyday concerns.

5. What is the best way to contact you?

Facebook, I would say.

HELP! They Are Going To Steal My Project!!!

By Nnenna Nwakanma

Lately, I have been interacting with some major project leaders.

1. These are people who are confident about their projects.

2. They generally avoid discussing these projects with others, for fear of having their ideas stolen.

3. But they still needed a trustworthy advisor... And finally they decided that it would be Nnenna.

After some "maximum security clearance" considerations and "highly classified" discussions, I noticed:

1. Most of these project leaders are amateurs.

2. Most of these projects have not yet been properly detailed/documented.

3. The leaders in question are not able to pitch their projects clearly within 5 to 10 minutes.

4. These project leaders want a face-to-face meeting with me. They think I can boost their chances...

5. It seems that the environment in which they want to operate is unknown to them, for the most part.

6. Those who know a bit about the environment have less than 2 years experience.

7. 80% of these projects tend to view their country as the whole world.

8. I noticed a glaring lack of feasibility study. They rarely take into account the parties that are already on the field. I have not seen any competition strategy.

9. These project leaders lack relevant connections.

10. Half of these projects are illusions.

Chapter 4

Quick Wins, Tricks and Tips

Quick Wins, Tricks and Tips

Featuring Jean Luc Houedanou

Where to Find Free Quality Audio Books?

By Necemon

An audiobook (or talking book) is a recording of a text being read.

Your relationship with "reading" is modified by the use of hearing, instead of sight which is traditionally attached to printing. Technological advances (mostly in terms of recording and sound reproduction), availability of new features and many other advantages (saving time, more mobility, less physical storage space, experience sharing, listening pleasure, literacy learning, etc.) contribute to the considerable growth of the audio book in recent years.

Simple to use, the audiobook attracts different age and socio-professional categories, often for different purposes, sometimes for opposite reasons: only solution for some categories of disabled people (visually impaired for example), reading comfort for the elderly , mobility and new training experience for younger people, saving time for the productivity geeks (can be used while commuting or doing other physical tasks), listening pleasure and user-friendliness...

If you are looking for free audiobooks to download, here are some websites I can suggest for your listening pleasure.

Librivox
Free public domain audiobooks. More than 10 000 audiobooks available, read by volunteers from all over the world.

Project Gutenberg
The oldest digital library (established in 1971).

Open Culture
900 free audio books from one the best cultural and educational media on the web.

Thought Audio
Free audio books for a selection of classic literature and philosophy titles.

Learn Out Loud
Your destination for audio learning. Thousands of the best free audiobooks online.

Digital Book
Browse thousands of free audiobooks. Either download entire audiobooks to listen offline or use their simple online audio player to listen directly in the browser.

Loyal Books
Free Public Domain Audiobooks Downloads. About 40 genres.

Free Classic Audio Books
Digital Narration for the 21st Century. The downloads are available in mp3 and in m4b formats.

Educational Technology Clearinghouse (Lit2Go)
A free online collection of audiobooks in mp3 format. An abstract, citation, playing time, and word count are given for each of the passages. Many of the passages also have a related reading strategy identified. Each reading passage can also be downloaded as a PDF file.

Many books
About 2000 audiobooks. Browse through the most popular titles, recommendations, or recent reviews.

Youtube
Great content, both in terms of quantity and quality.

If you understand French (or are trying to learn it), you may also want to check these recommendations.

Wishing you a good listening time.

Convert Video Files With VLC

By Jean Luc Houedanou

How to use the best free video converter/encoder available on all platforms, also known as...

VLC. That's right, in addition to being a true Swiss army knife for video playback, VLC has a video-to-video (and audio) conversion functionality that is little known to the general public. Here is the procedure for using it:

- Go to the Media/File menu and select Convert/Stream (on MacOS) or Convert/Save (on Windows)

- In the first field, select the file to convert, then the format/profile of the converted file and finally click Convert/Save/Start.

That's all.

Admittedly, VLC does not allow batch files to be processed and it does not provide conversion presets (Youtube format, iPod format, etc.).

But considering its price, it would be outrageous to ask for more.

[Interview] In The Bubble Of Jean Luc Houedanou: "a fleet of drones that prevent theft and abuse"

1. Quick (but effective) introduction of the personage and his achievements?

Jean Luc Houedanou, currently Head Of Design in a startup called WeDev Group and having 7 years and several months of experience as a web consultant (including CERAP Inades, as well as the Electoral Reform International Services). I have a Masters degree in E-commerce and a diploma in Information and Systems Management, both obtained from the University of Sherbrooke in Canada.

In terms of skills, I am a web integrator and a web design/strategy consultant. I am also involved to some extent in SEO and Training.

My achievements that I am most proud of are related to the field of Training: I have had the opportunity several times to train journalists or media professionals in the use of social networks, a web radio deployment, content creation and blog management. It's a real pleasure to see every person negatively biased towards these technologies who ends up fully embracing them afterwards and even becoming advocates of journalism 2.0.

2. What are your main goals in life?

My goal by the end of 2018 is to write an e-book on WordPress template design and also to launch a podcast on information technology and (my second passion) computer-aided music. I started writing the e-book and regarding the second objective, I am in partnership with a Web TV with adequate equipment. So I am well on the way.

The idea behind these two projects is the same one that motivated my return to The Ivory Coast: to promote a more reasonable and more productive use of information technologies in Africa. There are several problems in Ivory Coast, in Benin (my home country) or in Senegal (my country of birth) which would find a quick solution if young minds of the continent mastered the information technologies better: for example, I have been working for several months with young people who developed WeFly Agri, a plantation management software coupled with a fleet of drones that prevent theft and abuse on plantations and increase productivity.

Africa is a fertile ground for innovation, so I try modestly to plant my seed in that area.

3. What tools and techniques do you use to accomplish things efficiently?

Software: Gimp, Inkscape Sketch, Affinity Designer, Sublime Text, AMPPS, IA Writer, OmmWriter, Firefox Developer Edition, Emmet LiveStyle, FileZilla (a must), iMovie (yes, iMovie, it's a perfectly capable editor) as well as GarageBand

Gadgets: Macbook Pro (for ease of use) and related devices (magic mouse and keyboard). I have an entry-level Android smartphone (Tecno W5 lite) and supplementary, a MyKronoz Zefit3 that I treated myself to for Christmas, in order to remind myself to be less sedentary and do a little more physical exercise.

Technologies: ReactJs, html, jQuery, Gulp and Compass

4. Any recommendations for your juniors?

In terms of podcast - the Daily Tech News Show - www.dailytechnewsshow.com.

5. What is the best way to contact you?

@jlhouedanou, on all social networks, except on Facebook. On that latter social network, my address is facebook.com/bloghouedanou

FFmpeg, The Fastest Way To Edit a Video File (in 5 seconds or less)

By Necemon

What's your problem?

You want to remove or extract a part of a video.

You could download, install and/or buy some advanced editing software which has such feature (like Adobe Premiere Pro), but it takes a lot of time and energy, especially if you are working with several, long videos and the software has to decodes and re-encodes the files every time.

The solution: FFmpeg.

FFmpeg is a complete, cross-platform solution to record, convert and stream audio and video.

Ffmpeg has a simple command that lets you edit the file as you will, almost instantaneously. It also works for audio files.

1. Download the package

=> Windows

=> Mac

=> Linux

2. How to use it ?

Just run the following line from your command prompt
ffmpeg -i InputPath.mp4 -ss 00:10:00 -t 00:00:05 -acodec copy -vcodec copy OutputPath.mp4

Where -i is the path to your file.

-ss is the start position in Hours:Minutes:Seconds

-t is how long a clip you want - again in HH:MM:SS

The acodec and vcodec tells ffmpeg just to copy the file without changing its other audio and video properties.

That's about the fastest you can get it done.

Getting started with Metro Studio (or how to benefit from the largest collection of Metro-style icons for free)

By Necemon

Syncfusion Metro Studio is a tool which provides a collection of over 2500 Metro-style icon templates that can be easily customized to create thousands of unique Metro icons. The icons are available royalty-free and can be used in open source projects as well as commercial applications.

To get started, just download and install MetroStudio from the Syncfusion website. As soon as you do this and run the program, you can see a wide range of icon categories from (mobile) application to data, to education to emoticons, etc.:

You can directly browse the icons files (.svg) through your file browser by clicking on the "Explore Source" button next to the category title. But MetroStudio is not just a browser for a collection of static files, it's also an editor. Actually, an Edit button appears while hovering any icon. By clicking on it, that icon can be customised at will and many properties are editable : dimensions, background shape, background color and icon color to name a few.

Your selected (and customised) icon can be copied to other applications, saved as xaml data or exported as picture (.ico, .jpg, .png, etc.). The collection is therefore suitable for many types of projects, from PowerPoint presentation to software products including WPF apps, Web apps, games, Mobile apps and websites.

With a simple drag-and-drop move toward the bottom-left corner, you can also edit multiple icons at the same time by organising them as a project.

Finally, MetroStudio deals with text styling. Easily customize and export thousands of font characters as regular icons. Input one or more characters directly in the text box or choose from the character map. It is also possible to drag character icons into projects for group customization and export them to the desired formats.

It's a very complete tool and here is where it gets even cooler: the product is worth $499, but you can download it for FREE today at syncfusion.com/downloads/metrostudio

Instant Messaging For Your Website : Have it the Giant Way

By Necemon

You have probably used the in-browser Instant Messaging service of one of the Internet "giants", whether it's Gmail, Msn or Facebook. You know, that small window with your online contacts at the bottom corner, which can be extended into conversations. Wouldn't it be cool if you could have a similar system right into your own website? Well, now you can, that's what the new Mango Chat is all about.

Mango Chat is a small, fast, cross-browser and full-featured chat component which allows you to add chat functionality to your ASP.NET website or web application. It includes features such as high load support, font/color customization, emoticons, and many more! The best thing about Mango Chat is that it's a web control which would integrate in your website as easily as a simple drag and drop.

Mango Chat uses Jquery/Ajax and makes sure that minimum bandwidth and server usage is utilized. It can easily support high volume of users without any degradation in response time. Further it supports multiple options for data store (in memory, XML, SQL Server, etc.). So Mango Chat can help you connect your website members regardless of the data store you use.

And as I mentioned before, it's a component that runs in the bottom right end corner of your website screen (as on Gmail). An obvious advantage is that it doesn't take too much space and let the user make some other operations on the same webpage.

Mango Chat comes with a premium unlimited license with full support for a price of $999. But wait, there is also a basic license that costs only $99.

Go get Mango Chat now at www.mangochat.net

PS: Don't take my word for it. See Mango Chat in action at demo.mangochat.net/testoptions.aspx. You can also download and try a demo version with no time limit at www.mangochat.net/Download.aspx.

Chapter 5

Transition:
Extra Thoughts
and Sharp Fantasy

Transition: Extra Thoughts and Sharp Fantasy

Featuring Ahou The African Chick

The Effects of Accelerated Evolution and Information Overloading: did you know?

By Necemon, 2009

As I am writing this:
There are 255 million websites and 152 million blogs online, 35 hours of video are uploaded to Youtube every single minute, 119 millions tweets are posted every day...
It is estimated that a week's worth of the New York Times contains more information than a person was likely to come across in a life time in the 18th century.
3000 scientific articles are published every day, that's about one every 10 seconds.

My point? There is much more information that is getting produced than one person can possibly absorb. And it just gets bigger and bigger. We are living in exponential times...

Eponymous Laws For Tech Strategists

By Necemon

Parkinson's Law
Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion
In other words, if you have a certain amount of time to complete something, that’s how long it will generally take.

Murphy's Law
Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong (at the worst possible time)
Most ideas look great on paper. But by the time events go from A all the way through the alphabet to Z, you see who rules when it comes to getting something from the theoretical stage to the practical stage : it's Murphy's Law.
No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy. Hope for the best, be ready for the worst.

Murphy's Law for DevOps
If thing can go wrong, it means it already went wrong but you didn't get a notification from the monitoring tool yet.

Moore's Law
The power of computers per unit cost doubles every 24 months.
Because of the nature of this law, anything that an extremely clever programmer can do at one point can be replicated by a merely competent programmer some number of years later.

Hofstadter's Law
It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.

Brook’s Law
Adding manpower to a late tech project makes it later.
The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned.

Kranzberg's law
Technology is neither good nor bad, nor is it neutral.
It's powerful. And it's complicated.

Pareto's Law
For many events, about 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.

Success, A Reward To Enjoy In The Shadows

By Ahou The African Chick

Success has several meanings in the dictionary. It may be about a happy outcome, a job, a sporting event. For a public figure, it may be a favor, a public hearing. It is also about pleasing someone, seducing someone or achieving a desired goal. In all these definitions, one thing is certain anyway, one must work hard to achieve a marked success. But today, success is regarded as the result of practices which are unorthodox, shady or even occult. Anyone who gets successful is systematically accused of having made a deal with the devil.

Nowadays, in many people's mind: "Once someone has been dirty, they can never get the right to become clean". Some (mostly public) people have seen their past resurface and be exposed to public scrutiny. We don't have anything better to do than to draw upon people past history and mistakes, hence giving rise to avalanches of accusations that are all equally wacky.

I wonder if we are no longer allowed to succeed on this earth; if we are bound to die poor and unhappy; if we should remain in a state of failure instead of trying to improve ourselves.

As of today, I, Strella, am neither the daughter nor the protégée of anyone. I have been knocking on every door while hoping for help, but those doors usually remain closed. Nevertheless I persevere and I continue to move forward. I struggle as much as I can. Sometimes, I work without being paid. While I am in the face of adversity, no one shows up, there are no rumors about me, there are no nude pictures or videos of me anywhere.

But tomorrow, when I will start taking off, just a little bit, even my mother (may she rest in peace) will come back to life and will suddenly get some "twin" sisters. I will be everyone's protégée. And they will not stop there at all... Some will go as far as suddenly finding photos or videos exposing my anatomy. This is the part where I am told that I am dating all men in the whole world and that I am the mistress of the president himself. And that my success is due to my village's mascot or to a magic cauldron that I laid at some mystical crossroads. Even though I worked hard to get there. Of such fantasy are ignorant people capable.

When you are going through a tough life, nobody hates on you. They do not even pay any attention to you. You are neither the daughter, nor the protégée, nor the friend of anyone. But look at how some people react towards the success of their peers. They would start hating on you for any reason or for no reason. It's like you started a world war.  They will dig into your history, bring up your past mistakes, tarnish your reputation and wage war against you. It's as if people would like to see you remain in poverty, debauchery and idleness.

If a young girl had been sleeping around with the whole neighborhood, and then decides to settle down, that would provoke a big "international outcry", especially if some guy decides to marry her despite her controversial past.

If a person deprives himself of distractions, works hard and ends up succeeding, some will still remind him that he comes from a modest background or whatnot.

There are people who commit to expressing their arts. In the event that they produce some popular hits, their victory is attributed to their presumed pact with the devil. But when their projects fail to take off, no one would assume that the devil intervened. If a producer or a singer works hard, it makes sense that his music becomes fine. It's that simple. It's possible that some people may resort to the occult sciences, but let's not generalize.

Enumerating people's past mistakes leads nowhere. You better make a proper use of time by working, investing or thinking about a business, so that you will achieve success too.

Not all successes come from the devil, God is good and generous. If a person keeps learning, it's quite normal that they become better. So let's stop worrying about others and let's try to move forward in our own projects, because while you spend your time tracking their flaws, other people evolve, get married, have children, they are happy. While they become independent, you still live with and depend on your parents. Let's appreciate the success of others, because success also comes from God.

At the sight of all this hurly-burly around the success of people, I humbly conclude that it's better to stay in the shadows with your success in order to avoid seeing your past come back and being called names. Therefore, before proclaiming your success and advertising your victories, think of all the collateral damages you could be creating for yourself. That may imply having your origins and your past exposed to the entire world. Choose carefully with whom you want to share your success, or else...

[Interview] In The Bubble Of Ahou The African Chick: "I like to go beyond my limits, I like to be curious and try new things"

1. Quick (but effective) introduction of the personage and her achievements?

My name is Bénédicte Kouakou or, if you wish, Ahou l'Africaine (Ahou The African Chick, my blogger name).

Holding a Master's degree in Judicial Law obtained from the Catholic University of West Africa (UCAO), Ahou is passionate about digital communication and content writing. She worked as a Social Media Manager at YooMee, Bogolan Distribution (for the "Living Together" project) and RCG West Africa where she also worked as Communication and Event Assistant, on content writing and digital strategy development. Hence she has accrued 4 years of professional and corporate experience.

Unsatisfied with her "brief" internship in a law firm, and her 4 years of business experience, Ahou will combine her two passions, which are the Law and Digital Communication, by creating The Blog of Ahou The African Chickin May 2015... I have been fighting for what I wanted. I have not yet fully realized my ambitions so far, but for me, these have been great experiences.

2. What are your main goals in life?

My main goal is to see every African woman getting interested in their Rights, because very often they don't fight enough to claim those and prefer to settle for very little. My other goal is to see more women at school, and getting  involved in areas such as law, medicine, politics and whatnot; i.e. more women who do not restrict themselves. In my view, women are potentially able to do much more, beyond being a wife and a mother.

My project is to organise Masterclasses in order to educate women and teach them about their rights, and also to survey/address their specific legal needs.

I like to go beyond my limits, I like to be curious and try new things. I like loyalty and to stay true to myself. I like to believe in others because we all have talents. I plan to be a recognized blogger, and to participate in debates where Women Rights are a priority, and to make my blog a reference in women's empowerment.

3. What tools and techniques do you use to accomplish things efficiently?

My tool is my computer (I'm thinking of getting another one, most certainly a Mac) because it allows me to write most of my articles, my phone (I have to change it too lool), my mobile Wifi for connection, Canva (for my occasional visuals), a camera (that I would like to have lool)

Google helps me a lot (Google Drive, Gmail, Google Translate, Youtube, etc.)

Social networks (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram) to be closer to my subscribers.

As for my methodology, I have a notebook where I list my pending tasks (along with their related deadlines), which I eliminate as and when they are completed.

4. Any recommendations for your juniors?

My recommendation is to believe in yourself and in what you do. To give oneself the means to realize their dreams.

There is a quote that I like: if life gives you lemons, make fresh lemonade!

My favorite book is the Bible. It is filled with messages of life that lift up the spirits for anyone who needs to refresh themselves. Also, "We are all feminists" of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

I also read websites like Femme d'Influence Magazine, elle.fr, Aufeminin.com, and some other female motivation websites. I follow the blogger Fatou Ndiaye who is a beautiful inspiration, The chronicles of Sapitou, etc. I also listen to Zack Mwekassa. I follow many others, but well, I could not name them all.

I read various legal codes: criminal law, civil law and anything related to Law!

5. What is the best way to contact you?

You can reach me on most of my platforms

Website: www.ahoulafricaine.com

Email: ahoulafricaine@gmail.com

Social networks: Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn : Ahou L'Africaine

The General Assumption of Security

By Necemon

According to some Hacker News folks, the general assumption of computer security is:

- The attacker is smarter than you

- He has a bigger computer

- He knows your own software better than you

- He is after you, specifically.

Well...

World Wide Worries

By Necemon, 2010

Wherever you move on Internet, you are often forced to leave some information about yourself. To access a service, you may be asked to give your real name, phone number, address and so on. They call that required fields. Either you fill the form or you just leave it. But a lot of optional information is also intentionally released by some users.

The current trend is to share private information and photo in an intimate way, with family and friends via social networks. Even some people seem to enjoy displaying this personal data over the public internet.  Nowadays, you can tell your own story to the world, describing your day-to-day activities as it happens (e.g. via Twitter). Some say that it’s fine. It’s also ok if some people get an access (somehow) to your Facebook wall and check your pictures. It seems that if you didn’t do anything wrong, you don’t have anything to hide so it’s ok if people see it.

I don’t know how much of that is true but I observed that on the other side, some people are very careful about what they display over the internet. They never connect to you if they don’t know you in real life or they simply avoid social networks. If they let you access their profile or resume, don’t even think about seeing their phone number or address. You can never find a picture of them anywhere online and when you get a chance to chat with them, they always use some nickname.

And in the middle of those two philosophies, there is the kind of average guy, who is a bit worrying about his privacy but still publish some photos from times to times; he blogs using his real name, accepts friendships from strangers on Facebook or Hi5, probably hoping to become popular someday, or whatever. I guess you see the kind of person...

So who is right? What is the right attitude toward the public Internet? Should we be worrying that a stranger can see our pictures (if so, why)? What is the actual risk of using a real name when interacting online?

UPDATE: a few months after writing this (and after a bit of research), I am starting to figure this one out. There is certainly a risk, exposure is a sort of sacrifice, as long as you know exactly what you lose and what you get, maybe it's ok.

The Golf Ball Effect

By Necemon

What is the Golf Ball Effect?

First, note that small causes can have huge consequences. Butterfly Effect?

When hitting the ball, a difference of a few angles will result in a big difference in the position where the ball will land.

As in a triangle ABC, if a point X is on [AB] and a point Y is on [AC], the further x and y are from A, the bigger is the distance [XY].

Therefore, a minor shift of 2 degrees could drive the ball yet another 10 meters away from the target (or closer to the said target).

That's just a metaphor for the small changes, small factors and small decisions in life that can make a big difference on the long term.

Just 2 Things

By Necemon

When meeting someone, anyone, especially for the very first time or for the few first times, whether it's online or in person, I think there are just 2 essential things to consider:
- The harmony factor : whether the person is friendly or hostile (and to what extent)
- The skill factor : whether the person in strong or weak, that is, in the areas which are relevant to you (and to what extent)

Those 2 critical factors (or the way they are perceived) would determine the direction of the relationship; depending on the context, other parameters may affect the next steps, but the general idea is the following.
If the person is:
- Friendly and strong in your areas of interest: your next move could be to try and figure out how you could collaborate, what you could do together, etc.
- Friendly and weak in those respects: you could then try to figure out how to help them improve and evolve.
- Hostile and strong: this may trigger your defensive system or make you consider being relatively careful, watching out for opportunities while avoiding any crisis.
- Hostile and weak: in many cases, it may be ok to simply ignore them.

Games for Everyone

By Necemon, 2010

We are living a terrific OS wars with the rise of Linux over the last two decades. The big Google is also launching its Google Chrome OS. Microsoft and Apple are far from throwing in the towel with the Windows 7 and Mac OS X respectively. Well, as a wannabe game programmer, I feel it is getting difficult to choose a side. The will to reach the maximum audience could lead to code mainly for windows gamers. But then, there is still a trouble. Let’s talk about a very exciting field of gaming: Multiplayer online gaming. Suppose you build your game client using any Microsoft .net language, say C#. Are you compelled to code your server application in C# as well? I am asking because a C# server app will normally need to be hosted on a C# enabled web server (IIS is all I can’t think of at the moment).

See, the thing is in the game industry, I know they use a lot of Linux servers. But worldwide most of the gamers are running Windows. So I think either they are using the same language on the server and on the client (like C or Java) or there is a sort of conversion. I wonder how that conversion happens (for now, I would bet on web services).

Well, I don’t know how much C# is used in the game industry but how can it be used in collaboration with another language that would make the server app? Anyways which language would be suitable for a game server? Last doubt on this post: is it feasible to build a large scale game server (like a MMORPG) using C#? (I assume this would mean running it on IIS)

UPDATE: It's funny how, about 2 years after writing this post, I naturally got answers to my doubts. Yes, I think I am getting it now. I should probably write about what I found some time. More on that later (maybe).

Final Reminder

Volume 1

Before we conclude, I just thought I would remind you that this document contains the Volume 1 of the Album, and the Volume 2 is also available. You may download, (re-)read or share any of the various chapters and volumes independently/separately, depending on your interests. The PDF, EPUB, MOBI/AZW3/KF8 (Amazon Kindle) and MP3 formats are available.

To get them, just click on any of the links you like below or go to TheAlbum.NeceMoon.com
(or necemonyai.com/Blog/page/The-Album.aspx)

The NeceMoon Album (complete)

Volume 1: Moon Light (softcore)

Chapter 1: Strategy and Tactics

Chapter 2: Digital Marketing and Web Visualisation

Chapter 3: Corporate Worlds and Emerging Markets

Chapter 4: Quick Wins, Tricks and Tips

Chapter 5: Transition - Extra Thoughts and Sharp Fantasy

Volume 2: Full Moon (hardcore)

Chapter 6: Software Development and Engineering

Chapter 7: C# .NET Programming

Chapter 8: Epic Prototypes, Classic Projects, Historic Genre

Chapter 9: Research and Case Studies

The Album is available in French as well at Album.NeceMoon.com
(or necemonyai.com/Blog/page/L-Album.aspx)

Conclusion

This is Good Bye. However, we can stay in touch. Feel very welcome to add me on LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook. If you also have any tools and tactics that help you achieve things efficiently, I would like you to tell me about that. My email address is necemon@gmail.com. You are more than welcome to write to me and report any possible mistake in this document, or to suggest any improvement, or to tell me about your favourite parts. However, if you don’t like The Album, don’t bother writing to me.

Anyways, I wish you all the best for your ongoing and next projects. Thank you for reading. And many thanks to Wikipedia, MSDN, IconFinder and FreeDigitalPhotos for the clarifications and the graphic resources. Special thanks to the Evasium Team. Thanks to all those who contributed, thank you Ahou The African Chick, Antoine Mian, Cyriac Gbogou, Darren Mart, Edith Brou, Holty Sow, Israel Yoroba, Jean Luc Houedanou, Jean-Patrick Ehouman, Karen Kakou, Nanda Seye, Nnenna Nwakanma, Olivier Madiba, Vanessa Lecosson and Yehni Djidji.
Thank you Monty Oum, rest in peace.

Share The Album with Your Mates

Just click on any relevant icon below. It only takes a couple of seconds and it’s free for everyone.
Alternatively, you can share this link on any social media website or email it to your contacts that would benefit from reading it: http://TheAlbum.NeceMoon.com