Participate! circle Plus Real Time on Google Plus
Celebrate the Internet for 24 Hours on April 6th
April 6, 2012 By
Chat about #InternetForGood anytime.
The Internet is not only a great way to be entertained and a great way to learn. It also can unite people to make differences in lives. The first Kivathon was in March 2007 and the VoIP Users Conference started that same month.
Sign up for a FREE $25 to loan through Kiva.org
Since 2007, we’ve done nearly 400 VUC weekly conferences and the VUC Kiva lending team has made over $10,000 in loans. To celebrate both Kiva and our own VUC starting its sixth year, we’re planning a big 24-hour celebration with audio and video via Google Hangouts.
We’ll be playing the songs of Google Plus musicians and a few of them will stop by and play live too. We’ll be showing some of the great artwork and photography from Google Plus. We’ll be talking to people who make the Internet what is, both technically and content-wise. But mostly, we’ll be celebrating the Internet as a tool for good.
We Care Solar
April 5, 2012 By
About 300,000 health facilities in the developing world do not have access to reliable electricity
A lantern provided the only light at the Kofan Gayan Hospital's maternity ward in Zaria, Nigeria, before the arrival of the solar suitcase.
WE CARE Solar http://wecaresolar.org promotes safe motherhood and reduces maternal mortality in developing regions by providing health workers with reliable lighting, mobile communication, and blood bank refrigeration using solar electricity.
thx +Keith Petersen #InternetForGood
The Water Project
April 4, 2012 By
Nearly one billion people have no access to clean, safe water
The dirty water they do have makes them sick. It robs children of hope. But it doesn't have to be that way. #InternetForGood can help provide safe water for people half way across the world.
Kiva Fellows Program
April 4, 2012 By
The Kiva Fellow is an unpaid, volunteer position designed to increase Kiva’s impact and to offer participants a unique insider experience
Read about it. The deadline to apply is May 13th.
#InternetForGood
Since 2007, the Kiva Fellows Program has offered over 400 individuals a rare opportunity to put their skills to work in support of global microfinance. Applicants chosen for the program serve as Kiva&…
Kiva has grown a lot since 2007, but their mission is still the same
April 4, 2012 By
Kiva has grown a lot since 2007, but their mission is still the same
✓ Connecting people through lending to alleviate poverty
✓ Leveraging the internet and a worldwide network of microfinance institutions
✓ Individuals can lend as little as $25 to help create opportunity around the world
Meet Joe Roberts March 29 at 10 AM EDT
March 26, 2012 By
Joe Roberts, aka 1winedude hangs out with us live on Google Plus.
We talked about how he got into wine, then moved on to wine & food matches, emotions, grapes, regions and the meaning of life.
Musicians’ Online Visibility
January 2, 2011 By
Internet visibility.
Talent, musicianship, soul, creativity… whatever it is you want to put out there, it has to be visible on the Internet. As I look around at all my creative and talented friends, I see that very few of them are able to easily point to their work on social networks like Twitter and Facebook or even in an email. Here are a couple on concrete free suggestions to fix that. If you read what follows, there’s no excuse for not having a significant online presence.
Your tunes.
Youtube is huge, but unless you have video or a good with slide show-type presentations, it won’t be your best vector to point people to. If you’re a little geeky, you can find a free player to put on a site, like this one. However, I think the best way to go is to stick to your music and find a site that shows it off best. I have used two sites I think are excellent: AudioMicro.com and Soundcloud.com. My current favorite is Soundcloud because it has some cool extra features. For example, people can comment at a specific spot in your song. It’s social so you can actually discover new music and have other creatives discover yours. Let’s say for a moment that you take my advice and join Soundcloud.com free.
Soundcloud
After joining and adding some profile info, you’ll upload a few tunes. Each song has a lot of potential info like exact tempo, key, genre and license. You can choose from a restrictive license to “do whatever you want”. I like to use the creative commons license that specifies credit for use, but who knows if people respect that? You have to realize that there’s a huge amount of music out there and by putting it online, you’re giving some of it away.
Posterous
One dead easy way to put stuff out as an artist is Posterous.com. All you do is join the site, choose a setup and publish. You can publish by sending an email to an address they furnish. The impressive part is that if you send an email with an mp3 song attached, Posterous will publish the text of your email and add a player for the tune automatically. The site I refer to above, http://sugarcane-harris.com is on Posterous is shown.
Posterous will also automatically publish a little gallery of photos you post. If you are a performing band or artist and have gigs and photos of those, this a great way to go, it’s easy and still free. Most importantly, you do not need to pay someone to help you because anyone, even drummers, can use these sites.
There are a lot of free ways to be present online, including Facebook – which I personally abhor – but also Tumblr, WordPress.org and a zillion others for the more or less geeky.
Summing up
If I had one piece of advice, it would be this: go join Soundcloud.com, put up about three songs. That whole thing will take you about 15 minutes, cost nothing and require an average IQ. If you want to go further, get a Posterous site and post stuff there. You can post a link on Facebook to a single tune on Soundcloud.com.
30 Million+ Wine Labels in Circulation Use AVIN code
December 14, 2010 By
To find out more about the AVIN please visit http://AVIN.cc
The AVIN code is a unique technology that solves an enormous challenge facing the wine industry, clean data. Andre Ribeirinho, of the website Adegga.com, has been working for 3 years to create an open standard for wine information and has recently achieved the milestone of having 30 million wine bottles labeled with the AVIN.
Like an ISBN for books, each vintage of every wine is assigned a unique number that consists of 13 digits preceded by the letters AVIN (ex: AVIN6452997073019), which includes various data points including wine name, region and varietals. This unique code is currently free for wineries to register and is guaranteed for life. The key benefit to using the AVIN is that there is no longer need to dispute the wine’s origin, spelling of the winery name or various other key factors.
“The AVIN is poised to change the wine world as the ISBN did the publishing world. Ask any book publisher whether they can survive without the ISBN. I highly doubt that you’ll find many people believing they could” says founder Andre Ribeirinho.
By becoming a central repository for information, AVIN helps to address internal wine trade issues as well as having customer marketing benefits. Over 25,000 different wines from around 7,500 wineries have already had an AVIN registered.
Wine retailers, importers, writers and also competition organizers can resolve numerous inventory queries by confirming wine details against the single information source.
The AVIN also has consumer marketing benefits. Wineries can print matrix barcode on the labels to create a dynamic and interactive wine buying experience. For example QRCodes permit smart phones to scan and extract information from the wine label itself, displaying this information on the customer’s phone but also with the possibility to link to awards, articles and stockists.
“Wine buying has always been a confusing process for the consumer. Today with the AVIN and QRCode technologies consumers can access information about the wine they are thinking about buying without having to guess” explains Andre.
The AVIN is currently setting up a Board of Directors to both manage the project and ensure the data remains free and accessible to all users into the future. Currently, any winery can head to http://www.avin.cc/ to create an AVIN code for their wine within minutes. For developers and individuals interested in using the AVIN in their wine related businesses, go here: http://www.avin.cc/api-documentation/ for more information.
“We believed that the AVIN would prove to be a good tool to make it easier for our customers and consumers to search/ to find online information about our wines, in this age of information.” Carrie Jorgenson – Cortes de Cima Winery
