Student-created SEO Plugin for the FLOSS community

Recently, the open source Piwik community acknowledged the contribution of our student Victor Dibia (MSIN, AIT 2010). Congrats Victor !

Victor created an open source SEO plugin for the Piwik open source web analytics system, in the course of his Independent study titled: “Web Analytics: Application of Google Analytics API in developing a custom Analytics plug-in”, during Spring semester 2010 (with supervisors Prof. Gregory Yovanof and myself). This new Dashboard Widget displays the website's PageRank, Yahoo Backlinks, number of indexes pages, Alexa rank and the domain age, for the website URL recorded in Piwik. Victor's blog provides all the details that you need in order to use this free online tool.

Piwik is an open source real time web analytics software, that can be installed for free on your website or blog (for further details see the online demo via piwik website). The Piwik system, written in PHP and licensed under GPL, aims to be an open source alternative to Google Analytics.

736 ideas 4 a dream

Can we dream the end of poverty and social exclusion ? Can we dream that our ideas will be part of the solution ? Can an EU project consider such a dream? Yes, yes, yes !
It is very interesting to see that such innovative EU projects, do exist. Projects that are about dreams, materialised via open innovation and crowdsourcing principles.
The dream of the "736 ideas 4 a dream project" is to "free" Europe from social exclusion. How they will achieve this? Well, they collect ideas that will help with this task. They have and will continue to organise workshops that will enable them to produce 736 postcards, which will be published as a book and will be presented to the public during the Day of Europe (9/05/2011).
Now, why 736 ideas? The number refers to the number of active members of the European Parliament when the project was launched.
Have a look at the postcards that have been received, they are great !
Further details at the project website.

A Youtube, open, user-generated documentary......that you can join

Ever wondered how different is a single day for different people around the world?
Some are happy and some are sad, some are working and some are on holidays, some see the sea and some the mountains, some are eating and some are starving, some are born and some die exactly the same time of a single day on earth.

Could we see all this? Yes we could, if we employed open, user-generated innovation ! Then we would have (provided of course that everyone had access to technology and information):
"One World, 24 hours, 6 Billion Perspectives" says Ridley Scott.

YouTube is planning to orchestrate such a holistic user-generated experimental documentary called: "Life in A Day".
This will be a global experiment aiming to create a user-generated feature film, shot in a single day, by each and every one. Yes, you can be a star ! On the 24th of July, everyone has 24 hours to capture a fraction of his/her life on camera. This collective content of millions of user-generated videos will then be edited into a documentary that will be produced by Ridley Scott and directed by Kevin Macdonald and will be shown at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival in January.

This is your chance to be part of the 1st global experiment user-generated documentary !

For more information, visit: youtube.com/lifeinaday

R136a1.....the largest ever star !

The discovery of the largest ever star, in the Tarantula Nebula galaxy, was made today !
It's nickname: R136a1 !
R136a1 has been discovered by a British project using the Very Large Telescope in Chile and measured to be several hundred times the mass and several million times the brightness of Sun.
Confused?
Consider this.
If Sun was as large as R136a1, then everything on the surface of Earth would be destroyed ! ......from heat and radiation.

Mobile phones will change our world ....even more

The mobile device constitutes a key component of our multi-channel environment. Acting as a bridge between the physical and virtual world as well as personal space; mobile devices offer endless possibilities both for the individual users and the business actors.
After the explosive growth of social networking via the Internet (i.e., Facebook, MySpace, Orkut), it became obvious that the next phase of this revolution would be mobile social networking. Αs such, what we would consider science fiction a few years ago, is today’s reality - mobile social networks thrive at a social level, while they gain ground in the corporate world. These virtual mobile communities present a market growth opportunity for companies and public institutions that seek to exploit the social interaction and engagement with the user/client/partner/collaborator.
However, do mobile users favor only social networking?
In the past few years we have experienced another social phenomenon, which involves social games (i.e., games of imagination, skill and chance, among others) that are accessible via the Internet from a PC and/or a mobile phone. Games have and continue to be one of the largest and fastest growing categories of mobile content and according to surveys users spend considerable amount of their free time, playing games on their phone.
But is there is a linkage between social networking and mobile gaming?
The "m-Gaming: New User Experience and Market Growth Opportunity" presentation, of Dr. G. Yovanof and myself (presented at the “Industry Days 2010” of the European Lotteries, June 2-4 2010, Barcelona, Spain), provides answers to these issues, while it examines the impact of social networks and games. It describes how the mobile devices have realized the convergence of personal space, with physical and virtual worlds and points out circumstances under which a new generation of games will emerge: “games that could change the world”.

Which is your favorite MBIT 2010 Blog ?

I am sure that you have your preferences ! So fo vote for your favorable MBIT 2010 blog among our four contestants.
Good luck to all our MBIT bloggers ....that did great for one more year :o)

....and we are back !

....after quite some time of not being able to access my blog, now everything seems to be ok!
sorry for any problems caused.

IPR and Innovation, 2nd InnoFORUM workshop

Is there a link between innovation and intellectual property rights (IPR) ?
Yes there is !

..... what type of link? A strategic one !

In today's highly competitive markets, the importance of IPR in promoting innovation and economic performance is critical. Specifically, "IPR regimes affect the diffusion of scientific knowledge, the innovation process and, ultimately, economic performance" (OECD).

Last Friday, the 2nd InnoFORUM Open Workshop took place at Athens Information Technology, covering exactly this thematic area ("IPRs & Innovation"). The workshop covered both macro perspectives of IPR & Innovation (Session 1) as well as the linkage of specific IPR instruments such as Patents (Session 2), Trademarks & Industrial Designs (Session 3) and Copyrights in the digital era (Session 4) with innovation.

Further details about the event can be found at AIT's web site

....soon the event presentations will be uploaded online !

I will keep you posted :o)

...4 new very interesting MBIT blogs !

Four new blogs have recently emerged by MBIT students this year, who emphasise on highy innovative thematic areas such as:

• Open Source, Open Innovation & Intellectual Property Rights

http://open--innovation.blogspot.com/

• Smart-phones

http://mobilesmartphonecom.blogspot.com/

• E-Confidence (social networking and privacy, confidence and trust issues)

http://kyile1970.wordpress.com/

• Marketing for free

http://bigmarketcheapmarketing.blogspot.com/

....enjoy !