Networking - there are rules!

Since I left Uni, I am focusing on meeting other people. This is quite out of my comfort zone, as this means I have to talk to other people about topics I am not familiar with.
I have joined several networking groups and met definitely interesting people. But I also had the opportunity to the the Do's and Don't's at networking events. First I want to thank Jennie Gorman, she is definitely one of the trendsetter here in Brisbane when it comes to professional networking skills. I just met her once or twice, but she is the One!

Do's:

• Be present
• Be interested
• Smile
• Be professional/Be prepared
• Follow Up and Refer

Don't's:

• Give business card without being asked
• Think it is all about you and your business
• Look around when someone is talking to you

This list is just a rough guideline. That are the things I came across in the last couple of weeks. And I surely need to work on myself. Also, every networking event is different, I guess by intention. Some are breakfasts or lunches .. and some are just a come together. Personally I find it difficult to have a meal and network at the same time. On the other side I can understand that is for most people the best time to interrupt their daily work flow.

How to find the networking events? One of the best resources is meetup.com ... just in here Brisbane we have over 200 meetup groups. Surprisingly for me, facebook became a very good resource for events. And yes, you will meet and greet the same persons, but most likely there will always be someone new.

Have fun networking!

Join the revolution

You can't Believe in bHIP until You Believe in Yourself – Terry LaCore

Chemical Free Kids

Yesterday I was lucky enough to have been invited to a very interesting presentation by Dr Sarah Lantz. Dr Edward Kachab .. and herself published a book to provide the information for parents interested in the health of their kids. (see Chemical free kids)

During the presentation it became clear that we are confronted with the following facts:

• People don't want to get out of their comfort zone
• People believe what their parents taught them
• People want to avoid pain and gain pleasure (Marketing strategy)
• People are lazy (I guess that's what we learn in physics as any particle is permanently trying to be in the lowest state of energy)
• People seem to be not interested in what they do to their bodies regarding food, cosmetics, cleaning products etc.   ... is it really so hard to look up in the internet and read some information? 
• People love the immediate effect and they don't see the longterm effect of chemicals in their body, mostly accumulated over time
• Australia is too far behind to ban toxic chemicals, when they are banned in all other western countries. Why?

We need to create more awareness of

• misleading labelling
• what is actually labelled
• tricks used when labelled
• the real toxicity of chemicals (in understandable terms)
• food sold in supermarket doesn't mean it is good for you

And how do we create this awareness?

• Teach the women and you teach a whole family!
• Teach toxicity at Universities and High Schools

After the presentation I got the opportunity to have a chat with Sarah. We discovered plenty of common things.

• The interest and challenges with raw food adventure.
• Why do people don't think like we do :o) (my favourite one!)
• The natural "love" of writing a PhD thesis

 Will definitely have a closer look at Sarah's blog and her book.

Join the revolution

You can't Believe in bHIP until You Believe in Yourself – Terry LaCore

Did you see some motivation?

To get things done most people need motivation. But where can you find motivation? It quickly comes to the question, why am I doing this? What's the point?

Next challenge is to stay motivated. What drives us?

Most likely there is no answer for all of us. Everyone is driven differently, luckily. And you really need to find it yourself, no one can do this for you. Most of the people wait until motivation is given to them and then they wonder why they can't stick to it ... because it is not their own personal purpose or reason to get moving.

Find the reason why you are here. Why have you been given the chance to live here on earth? And don't accept the answer to your first why ... keep digging. You will be surprised.

why I stopped using Lite'n'Easy

For a couple of months I was on the 1500kcal program from Lite'n'Easy and loved it. However, the dinners started to pile up in my freezer, which is not a big one. Instead I was eating more fruits and salads for the end of the day. Personally the big meal of the day was always lunch time, so I was struggling to eat the warm meals for dinner. This is not any critics on the dinners themselves ... I even laud for them, as for frozen meals they are pretty good and tasty. I am German, I know what I am talking about ;o)

Maybe I felt like a change again (oh yes, again) trying something else, what not everyone does. I got a bit inspired by Steve Pavlina who turned to raw food last year, I think. Thus, I increased my raw vegan food level over the last couple of weeks to a degree that I can say now, I am 80% raw. Yes, no cooked meal and most of the products are organic. I highly value organic food for several reasons anyway.

For my birthday I invested into myself and ordered a blender to dig into the smoothies world. Don't mix it up with the smoothies you get from some juicing franchises, my smoothies don't contain any yogurt and ice cream (animal products). It is a steep learning curve, but I am loving it. I ordered the blender from Raw-Pleasure here in Australia. Jenny and her team are wonderful people. In my big parcel I also received a book about green smoothies. This book inspired me even further to go even more green than raw food can be. It is a bit of a challenge to get kale here in Australia, but will find some one day.

Any differences? Oh yes, I lost 7 kilos this year already. I can't really go more further down, otherwise I won't be myself anymore. I have a pretty good night sleep and I normally don't need an afternoon nap, except when the seminars at Uni are really boring. ;o) I am still experimenting and some green smoothies are quite a challenge, but then I add some Agave syrup and all is good.

P.S. Getting my thesis done .. the last days now

Online publishing economics - another idea for Web 3.0

Everyone can become an entrepreneur and earn money on the net. Web 3.0 can make this possible. My latest sneak into web 3.0 lead me to Klatscher. The idea of 'online publishing economics' from Johannes Bhakdi.

Johannes and his team believe that everyone can become an entrepreneur. The current situation with web 2.0 is that everyone is participating on creating content, but 99% of that people make $1 and less from it. Two of the most famous blogger that have made it are Leo Babauta with his Zen Habits blog and Steve Pavlina with his deep insights into almost everything.

The Klatscher platform could provide optimal conditions to actually make a living out of your own creativity.

Klatcher allows you to publish online and reach millions of people instantly by automatically connecting you and your content to the entire social web. It offers you everything you need to look good, get traffic and earn money within less than 5 minutes. - Johannes Bhakdi

Klatscher is just not one of these other networks. I think it has much more potential and is definitely one step towards Web 3.0, however you define it.

I am sure I haven't discovered all features of Klatscher yet, but this will come.

There is one hesitation for me: to do the actual writing. It is not (is it?) that I am writing up my thesis right now, that I have some kind of allergy against writing. There must be a barrier between my mind and the paper, it just doesn't want to go out (yet).

As Johannes mentioned in his presentation, if you are providing quality information, you should benefit from it. And all material on Klatscher is available for a small affordable price and everyone is happy. The idea might not be new, but Klatscher found another approach to make it happen.

Web 3.0 - how it might work

If two different people each perform an Internet search with the same keywords using the same service, they receive different results determined by their individual profiles.

How come? This feature is one of plenty other ideas behind Web 3.0. The browser will turn into your personal assistant. It knows what you like and what you dislike and based on that it will do the searches, individual to any person.

All the predictions made about how Web 3.0 could become the next generation of the 'www'. I guess the predictions were made since Tim O'Reilly introduced the term 'Web 2.0' in 2004. The following terms appear all in relation to Web 3.0:

• Web3D - the virtual world, SecondLife - like, Avatar
• Semantic Network
• Artificial Intelligence
• Software Agent
• new internet infrastructure
• distributed computing
• web as the main media delivery system
• advanced collaboration tools
  

Every single feature is worth a single blog entry (so come back soon!). However, most of the articles I've found today were created at least 2 years ago, though 2007. There were many attempts to set up an appropriate Wikipedia article about Web 3.0 .. but to date .. none available. (web 3.0 wikipedia link)

Air cooling system in the Data Centre [Credit: The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute]

We see distributed computing already happening in the so called 'cloud computing' area, ranging from Google Docs to DropBox. I am quite an advocate of cloud computing, as I don't like carrying around plenty of binders. But distributed computing is so much more. It allows the web to become a giant brain capable of analyzing data and extrapolating new ideas.

For enterprises, Web 3.0 will be the change from a website to a webservice. The interaction between customer and business will be much more intense. The customer service will be much more systematized and automatized, but at the same time the business can focus more on the customer and provide more service and support.

Fasten Your Seatbells .. FAST ... it is Warp Drive

Warp drive is a FTL (faster-than-light) propulsion system used in many science fiction works. Fiction? No way, there is real science done with it. The physicist Jia Liu at New York University just proposed his idea for a spacecraft powered by dark matter in August this year. Spaceships as they are right now can't go very far, because they need fuel to actually come back, and this is quite limited in a spaceship's tank. Liu gives an example of an engine that uses the products of a dark matter annihilation.

The acceleration is proportional to the velocity, which makes the velocity increase exponentially with time in non-relativistic region. - Liu et al.

In a central black hole in the galactic center the density of dark matter can be that big enough to speed up a spaceship close to the speed of light.

Traveling the universe on the back of black holes (Image:George Marks/Kauko Helavuo/Stone/Getty)

If dark matter can move starships that would also be a great opportunity to finally have another source of alternative energy. Louis Crane published his ideas how to use an artificial black hole as a power source. Applying quantum gravity effects and things are not impossible anymore.

Very exciting times ahead. Just think about that dark matter is obviously abundant throughout the universe.

"A dark matter rocket would pick up its fuel en route," says Liu.

Again, nothing is impossible. We can reach the stars, because we have the physics to do it.

How to become more social?

In the view of Karl Marx human beings are intrinsically, necessarily and by definition social beings who - beyond being "gregarious creatures" - cannot survive and meet their needs other than through social co-operation and association. (taken from wikipedia)

Interesting. Would Mark Zuckerberg (founder of facebook)  agree do that statement? I don't know.

Personally I am not a person who is looking for the crowd of people. I am happy on my own or maybe up to 4-5 people. But that's it. Communication happens on several levels and with the internet the opportunities grow almost monthly. Face to face talk is not my strength and I am working on it. However, I don't hesitate to post or tweet my current status to thousands of people or to publish my profile. Does that mean now I am getting more social?

Photo Courtesy by Markus Brosch

Phrases containing the word 'social' are becoming buzz phrases.
Let's take social entrepreneur. My understanding of it is not more business talk. It is more giving back to community.

A social entrepreneur is someone who recognizes a social problem and uses entrepreneurial principles to organize, create, and manage a venture to make social change. - wikipedia

 So, what does social marketing means then? It is also known as social media marketing which then makes already more sense.

... a term that describes use of social networks, online communities, blogs, wikis or any other online collaborative media for marketing, sales, public relations and customer service. - wikipedia

Let's be a social entrepreneur and do more social media marketing. When we can make a social change by using facebook, twitter and blog ... nothing can stop us. Look at the number. Just use it wisely and in a smart way.

I achieved my goal for 2009 ... I am not antisocial anymore ... I have almost 2000 friends in facebook :o)

Meeting like minded people - Fusioneon

Photo courtesy by Markus Brosch 

What a day again! Half of the day I spent at Uni to work on my introduction chapter for the thesis. It is not the most fun, but it has to be done. I already got very helpful feedback .. actually all 26 pages have at least one comment or mark on them ;) Thanks Andrea! So I think I am on a pretty good trip right now. I see the light at the end of the tunnel and hope it is not only a train :D

It was also a day where I had to remind myself that it is not worth it to compare yourself with others. I tend to do this quite often and it is not really helpful if you want to achieve something and you actually want to enjoy the journey and the result. We are all on our own journey in life and you can't compare apples with pears ... completely different history.

I spent lunch time with a group of women. I am not that social, but I am getting there. Thanks to Cat Matson, who organised that, there is now a group of around 15 business women having an awesome time. The fusion event is a lot of fun and good food. I am always impressed about all the different business ideas coming up. The passion that some people have is amazing. When they talk about their business their eyes are sparkling. They love what they do! That is so important for me as well. This is also one goal for me ... to be excited to get up every morning and do the whole day what you love. That sounds like paradise to me.

So yes, I met really interesting people and I am looking forward to create really good working relationships. It is all quite a steep learning curve for me ... but I am enjoy it.

MITs for Sunday done

Very efficient Sunday. I actually spend almost 4 hours on my thesis chapter. After I've learned that I 'germanize' the English, I started to doubt about my english skills. Anyway, no time to start some self-doubts. Things have to be done, espacially when you don't like them. Step by step. I reached the state that I will print this chapter tomorrow and do some offline reading. Maybe I'll find a victim who can proofread it for me.

The rest of the day I spent with some daily stuff I do, but also did some work on a website. Although I thought I am not such a design guru, I spend most of the time with Gimp ... amazing tool. (open source version of Photoshop) I guess Photoshop has similar features and power, but currently I am much quicker on Gimp, especially with a Mac ;o)

Working with websites you can't ignore css - cascading style sheets. I don't think I work with them in the most efficient way, but so far not too bad. I love the Add-on in Firefox, called Firebug (surprise, surprise). It allows you to see immediately the changes when you tweek on your css file. Yes, on live websites as well. That includes a big learning curve ... loving it.

The website I am working on is not online yet, so no link, sorry. However, exciting projects ahead and they won't have to do all with websites.