Date A Man Who Lives His Dreams.

Date a man who dreams



Date a man who doesn’t spend his money on drink, or clothes, or video games, but saves what he has to go on adventures and pursue his dreams. He might have problems dealing with everyday things but no-one sees the possibilities life holds like he does. This is a man who is ready for anything, who will drop everything on a moment’s notice to run away and get lost somewhere with you or show up unannounced to whisk you away on some crazy adventure. Date a man who sees the world in millions of colours, who has his head in the clouds and his feet on the ground.
Date a man who hasn’t got the money to spoil you or shower you with gifts but finds a way to do it anyway. You can trust that he’ll find a way to touch your heart and make you feel special in new ways. He knows that words and gifts aren’t what matters. Every time he gives you something or writes to you he is giving you a piece of his soul. And every time you give him something or write to him he will truly treasure it and understand the effort you put in to choosing the gift, the words, or even making it yourself.

An Ideal Office Culture For Travelling Entreprenuers

A nomadic entrepreneur, Amir Wald, 33, is the founder of Colnect.com, a unique platform for collectors available in 60 languages and currently visited by over 333,000 people a month. 

 It all started a little more than a year ago in my dull home city. I was selling my apartment and moving my things. When people asked where I was going to, I answered, “everywhere”. Surprised, they wondered “what about your start-up?”. I pointed to my backpack, “Colnect is coming with me, right here”. I ventured out into the world with a laptop, a smart phone, four Colnect T-shirts in four different colors, a box full of advertisement fliers that resemble dollar bills enough to make them a popular attraction almost anywhere on the planet and a puppet frog named Frognector. To date, I have been through 13 countries, camping around Iceland, hitchhiking through continental Europe, seeing the Orthodox Jewish New Year celebrations in Ukraine and shortly after attending Israel’s much less orthodox naked festival, staying in desert caves in Jordan, lying on the beaches of Goa in south India, settling for a while in the Tibetan refuge city in the mountains of north India and drinking fresh coconuts in Thailand. All the while running my start-up. My name is Amir Wald and I am an entrepreneur. Colnect is a unique website for collectors, available in 60 languages, that I built and am continuing to push forward. From any place that has an Internet connection, I keep managing hundreds of volunteers who help make Colnect the greatly needed service it is for the hundreds of thousands of people visiting it each month.

The Traveling Office

Every month, week or day my office door opens to a completely new place. The globe turns a bit, grinding beneath the floor tiles and comes to a screeching halt. The office room itself changes in the process as well, but what the heck, as long as it has a decent bathroom. This time the office door opens to a quiet green village in the mountains of Northern Laos, infested with plenty of unreasonably fairytale-like big butterflies. My breakfast is a fresh pineapple shake. My lunch and dinner are in a restaurant that is actually the bamboo home of a sweet elderly Laotian couple that put a big English menu on their door. They seem to really enjoy feeding me giant sizzling dishes. No coworker chatter, just laughing Laotians drinking Beer-Lao and the occasional Western tourists. No credit cards accepted here. Some of the chairs are replaced by pillows and hammocks. Although at the bottom of the mountain, it feels like the top of the world.

Various Ways to Grow Professional Contacts On LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a massive social networking tool; it is the Facebook for professionals. On LinkedIn you can create a professional profile, connect with colleagues, friends, associates and even potential employers and employees. It’s an excellent way to find a professional niche, discover new audiences, join groups, generate ideas and explore new opportunities.
With so many users on LinkedIn, it can be quite a daunting task attempting to stand out and build a network with other serious professionals. Following are a few ideas to get you started.

Make Time

Think of LinkedIn like a blog: you not only have to have something for people to read, you have to have something new. Try to update your profile a few times a day and make sure you comment on and share other updates.
Unlike Facebook, LinkedIn members only check in a few times a week, so it’s important that you have something new to share whenever someone looks at your profile. Doing this shows that you are serious and dedicated to building your network and connecting with other professionals.

Make Connections

Another easy way to build your network is to build your network. But make sure that the connections you make are worthwhile. Don’t accept a connection simply because you need one more to break a hundred. Spend time finding and making connections with individuals that can actually help or teach you. Be sure to connect with local professionals first.

Time it Right

You can make as many connections, comments and updates as you want, but you should do it at the right time to truly capitalize on the capabilities of LinkedIn. A majority of members are on during the afternoon, so plan your activities during this time to make sure that you can receive maximum exposure.
That being said, each industry has different peak hours. Experiment with different times and record the amount of exposure you receive and patterns that you notice. A fishermen must rise with the fish, and a hunter must hunt when their prey is in season.

Participate in Groups

Whenever you join a group, make sure that you are an active participant. This is not only a great way to gain knowledge and find new opportunities, but to make new connections as well when you make comments and participate in conversations.

Add Value

What you share on LinkedIn is your personal brand. If you share valuable information, then you present yourself as a professional, an authority in your industry. Not everything you post has to be of your own creation, you can share news, articles and other posts as well. Bringing value brings new connections when members realize you have worthwhile information to share.

Refer

If you are a member of other social media websites, be sure you have a link to your LinkedIn profile. When writing and responding to business e-mails, add a link to your LinkedIn profile in your e-mail signature. This opens up several new opportunities to build your network.

Use Facebook

While Facebook may be used more for friends and old high school classmates, it can actually serve as a good tool to build your network on LinkedIn. Join and participate in Facebook groups related to your profession. Whenever someone sends you a friend request, inform them that your Facebook account is personal, but your LinkedIn account is for your professional life. Rather than looking at LinkedIn and Facebook as an either/or deal, look at them as one massive tool with multiple uses.
Get the most out of your LinkedIn experience by following these easy tips. Ask yourself how you can apply real work networking strategies to social media, and how you can create new networking opportunities suited for online interaction.
Jennifer Carrigan wrote this article on behalf of Promotional Pencils, where you can get custom pencils to advertise your business.

Steve Jobs Best Quotes

This post originally ran on Aug. 24, after Steve Jobs stepped down as CEO of Apple. It has been updated to reflect the news of his death.

Steve Jobs, one of the fathers of the personal computing era and the founder of Apple, died  at the age of 56. Although he will be remembered for ushering in fundamental changes in the way people interact with technology, he has also been known for his ability to turn a phrase – and a knack for taking complicated ideas and making them easy to understand. Below, a compendium of some of the best Steve Jobs quotes.




On Technology

“It takes these very simple-minded instructions—‘Go fetch a number, add it to this number, put the result there, perceive if it’s greater than this other number’––but executes them at a rate of, let’s say, 1,000,000 per second. At 1,000,000 per second, the results appear to be magic.” [Playboy, Feb. 1, 1985]

***

“The problem is I’m older now, I’m 40 years old, and this stuff doesn’t change the world. It really doesn’t.
“I’m sorry, it’s true. Having children really changes your view on these things. We’re born, we live for a brief instant, and we die. It’s been happening for a long time. Technology is not changing it much — if at all.
“These technologies can make life easier, can let us touch people we might not otherwise. You may have a child with a birth defect and be able to get in touch with other parents and support groups, get medical information, the latest experimental drugs. These things can profoundly influence life. I’m not downplaying that.
“But it’s a disservice to constantly put things in this radical new light — that it’s going to change everything. Things don’t have to change the world to be important.” [Wired, February 1996]

***

“I think it’s brought the world a lot closer together, and will continue to do that. There are downsides to everything; there are unintended consequences to everything. The most corrosive piece of technology that I’ve ever seen is called television — but then, again, television, at its best, is magnificent.” [Rolling Stone, Dec. 3, 2003]

On Design

“We think the Mac will sell zillions, but we didn’t build the Mac for anybody else. We built it for ourselves. We were the group of people who were going to judge whether it was great or not. We weren’t going to go out and do market research. We just wanted to build the best thing we could build.
When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.” [Playboy, Feb. 1, 1985]

***

Entrepreneurship Choice & Endurance

Robert Kiyosaki "Employment is a short term solution to a long term problem."

Starting a business is just like a 42KM Marathon. In order for an entrepreneur to succeed in business, they must master the art of ENDURANCE!



Photo Courtesy of telegraph.co.uk

So what made me decide to choose Entrepreneurship

Asset – I have come to learnt that building a business is the smartest thing i have ever done because am building an asset in which I can transfer to my family.
Ownership – When building a business, I own everything I build under my company. However, an employee can work hard in building something in which they can’t never own. The worst thing is that the job can’t be pass or transferred to the family or children, but in business one can do that.
Control – The economy at the moment in the world is not favourable. Every time i read the newspaper, I tend to see retrenchment or downsizing in corporation. An employee can get fired at any time. Today we have Merges and Acquisitions when another company buys another company. So you could be a great employee but the Company which buys your Company can fire you.

Maasai Girl Jubilant Graduation runs Canada Media, Plus a Special & Most Valuable Gift in the Maasai Cultural Coffers for Ryerson University President.

TERIANO LESANCHA’S,22,  dream was to get an education, something that was elusive to many girls in her village in Kajiado. She, however, got more than she ever dreamt of, writes HELLEN MISEDA
University graduation is a big deal in Kenya and it calls for pomp and celebration with the media always present to capture the memorable moment. Jubilant jubilee 
This is not the case abroad and a graduation day is just like any other day. The media rarely show up for unless there is something extraordinary going on.

But on June 6, one simple Maasai girl managed to make graduation a big deal in Canada, capturing the attention of the local press and the university community.

On that day, big names like Toronto Star, CTV News and CBC News camped at the Ryerson University grounds to capture this inspiring story that sounded like a nicely written movie script.
Toronto Star ran the story on their front page on June 2 demonstrating how smitten the Canadian media was by this fascinating Maasai story.
So what is this big story that wowed the Canadian media so much that they gave it prominence and acres of space?
I came to learn of this beautiful story while on a three-week tour of Canadian universities sponsored by the Canadian High Commission in Kenya. Ryerson University was one of the institutions we toured and it was during the tour that I bumped into the Teriano tale.
This 22-year-old Maasai girl had a big dream when she was growing up in a little known village in Kajiado — she wanted to get an education and use it to build a meaningful life.
That ‘crazy dream’, as Teriano called it, seemed like it would never come true, considering that few in her poor village could even read or write.
Coming from a place where girl-child education is not valued, Teriano wanted to show her people that educating a girl was a worthy investment.
When she completed her secondary education and excelled with flying colours in 2008, she was lucky to get a sponsor who was willing to finance her education in one of the top universities in Canada — Ryerson University.
Teriano was a typical naive Maasai girl who had never even stepped in a big city like Nairobi. Now you can imagine the shock that met her when she landed at the Toronto Airport and into the fast-moving city.

Africa Awards for Entrepreneurship (AAE) 11 October 2012. Will You Be Next?

CHRIS KIRUBI TO JUDGE 2012 AFRICA AWARDS FOR ENTREPRENEURSHIP,

The African Leadership Network , Africa's premier network of new generation leaders, announced the judging panel of the prestigious 2012 Africa Awards for Entrepreneurship (AAE) . The panel is made up of 5 of Africa's leading entrepreneurs and business executives with illustrious records in building businesses and promoting entrepreneurship. They represent 4 African regions and collectively, bring more than 150 years of senior-level business experience and unrivalled business knowledge in Africa.

The members of the judging panel, whose profiles are attached, are:
1. Chris Kirubi , Serial Entrepreneur and Investor – Kenya
2. Ahmed Heikal , Founder and Chairman, Citadel Capital – Egypt
3. Divine Ndhlukula , Founder & CEO, Securico & Grand Prize Winner, AAE 2011 - Zimbabwe
4. Adedotun Sulaiman , Founder & Chairman, Arian Capital Management - Nigeria
5. Yvonne Ike , CEO, West Africa, Renaissance Group - Nigeria

Commenting on the announcement, Mr Fred Swaniker CEO of the African Leadership Network (ALN), said: "We are thrilled by their acceptance to serve as judges for the 2012 AAE and we commend their exemplary contribution to inspiring the next generation of entrepreneurs in Africa. The Africa Awards for Entrepreneurship are a powerful and prestigious platform to spotlight the best of the best among Africa's entrepreneurs."

The awards were previously owned and coordinated by the Legatum Group and are this year being managed by the African Leadership Network. The Awards Gala Ceremony will be held on 11 October 2012, in Accra, Ghana at the African Leadership Network's flagship yearly event, the ALN Annual Gathering. The awards will have four categories:

• Lifetime Achievement Award to be bestowed on a remarkable senior and iconic African business leader that has left an enduring legacy of decades of entrepreneurial success in Africa.
• Transformational Business Award to be awarded to an outstanding African entrepreneur who has built a company with revenues greater than USD 50 million.
• Outstanding Mature Business Award for a remarkable African entrepreneur with a business that has made revenues between USD 5 million – USD 50 million.
• Outstanding Small and Growing Business Award to be given to a stellar African entrepreneur with a business that has revenues between USD 500,000 and USD 5 million.

Comment on the announcement, Divine Ndhlukula, a member of the judging panel, and the Overall winner for the Awards last year, said:

"With the African Leadership Network taking the lead in the management and hosting of the awards, the awards should serve as a focal point for recognising and rallying the next generation of entrepreneurs in Africa. In its sixth year now, it is essential to see more African women entrepreneurs recognised for their achievements and I encourage people to nominate outstanding women entrepreneurs for the Awards."

The competition for the Awards opened 5 weeks ago and runs until 31 August 2012.

Masai Mara Wildlife Migration update 2012

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The African Tech-Hub Boom

From Kenya to Madagascar: The African tech-hub boom

Viewpoint by Erik Hersman Technologist, blogger, co-founder of Ushahidi

Where the magic happens: iHub in Kenya is just one of several technology centres across Africa

There's a buzz, a palpable energy, running through the corridors of Africa's capitals and urban areas, and much of it revolves around tech.

What happens when smartphones outsell computers four to one, and 50% of a continent's population is below the age of 20?

Continue reading the main story

• Special Report: The Technology of Business
• African start-ups make location pay its way
• Africa's journey to space takes off
• Business at the tip of Africa’s fingers
• Using apps to mend our streets
• Quest for the online water-cooler moment
• Research gives India its big boost

You have a technology-literate mobile generation unlike any that has come before.

This week finds me in Botswana.
I've talked to a couple of start-up entrepreneurs - Pule Mmolotsi, who is testing out an Oyster-like card for public transportation in the country, and Katy Digovich, who is creating apps for the Ministry of Health.
They represent what I continue to see across the continent - a new generation trying new ideas and taking to technology.
African governments aren't fast or savvy enough to build the infrastructure needed to support this type of entrepreneurial tech activity.
Academic institutions are woefully behind in teaching skills for computer science and design.
So where do people like Pule and Katy go? What mechanisms support their start-ups and connect them to capital, businesses and their peers?
Incubators and accelerators If you had asked that question two years ago, the answer would have been: "Very little."
But in the past two years there has been an interesting phenomenon in Africa - the proliferation of tech hubs and incubators.

Kenya, Truly the Cradle of Mankind

Cradle of Mankind

• Kenya has the largest number of fossil human remains appr. 1000 individuals than any other country in Africa.
• Kenya has the oldest human remains going back to 7 million year old from Turgen Hills, Baringo (oldest in Ethiopia = 4.5 million years ; S.Africa ca 3 million years, Tanzania = 2 million years.
• Kenya has some of the most complete skeletons e.g Turkana Boy (1.6 Million years), which provided a great wealth of information regarding early human physiology than anywhere in the world.
• Kenya is endowed with many prehistory sites scattered all along the Rift Valley (north to south) and western Kenya.

10 Guidelines For Naming A business Brand/Company To Suit Your Culture

In order to creative an effective product you need to position yor brand name in order to distinguish yourself in the market.  Below are 10 general guidelines for naming brands or companies.

1. Real Words: Usually real words that have an alternate meaning other than their actual definition.  Sometimes the word is misspelled or in another language.  Examples: Apple, Amazon

2. Compounds: Two words put together to form one word.  Examples: Facebook, Firefox FedEx

3. Phrases: Similar to compounds, but do not follow the same guidelines.  They are often longer and more natural sounding.  Examples: StumbleUpon, LinkedIn, SecondLife.

4. Blends: Two different words blended together to form one.  Typically the consumer can still tell what the word is although it uses two different prose.  Examples: Microsoft, Wikipedia, Skype.

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Return To The Forest Documentary

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Happy World Elephant Day, 12th August.

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“RETURN TO THE FOREST” 

Announcing the World Premiere of the Return To the Forest documentary Narrated by William Shatner

“Return to the Forest” is the heartfelt story of the Elephant Reintroduction Foundation and its mission to return captive Asian elephants back to the wild in Thailand. August 12, 2012 is the inaugural World Elephant Day supported by the Elephant Reintroduction Foundation, a Royal initiative of Her Majesty Queen Sirikit of Thailand. Many elephant organizations around the world are joining this initiative to bring awareness to the plight of Asian and African elephants. worldelephantday, Return To The Forest.

Above All You Must Believe.

“A warrior feeds his body well, he trains it, works on it. Where he lacks knowledge, he studies. But above all, he must believe. He must believe in his strength of will, of purpose, of heart and soul.” - David Gemmell -

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