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Jumpstart Your 2012 Business Brain

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Jumpstart Your 2012 Business Brain
Written by Gregg Dourgarian, December 24, 2011

When golf season ended here in Minnesota back around November 1, I signed up with Adam Paulson, the well-regarded fitness coach at the nearby Snap Fitness center, who quickly had me replace my near daily 1600-calorie-kill golf rounds with his regiment of core workouts and nutrition reboot. I’ve since lost two inches of belly fat and moved from the bottom 25% to the top 50% in flexibility and am determined to bring that same renewal to my businesses in 2012. I have a few ideas for that and thought I should share some of them: Crowdsourcing When I look around at companies that are just killing it – Amazon, LinkedIn, Google – one thing stands out that they do that I want to jumpstart in 2012 and that is crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing. You’ve heard of it, right? Maybe not. I’m astounded that a lot of very seasoned business people I know never have.

Crowdsourcing is a way of doing business that taps into the collective intelligence of the public at large to create something great. Think Amazon reviews. LinkedIn groups. Google adword bidding. In the coming weeks I’ll be sharing one of my crowdsourcing initiatives, but I’d like to challenge you recruiters and staffing businesses out there to think of ways crowdsourcing can change your business. You have gold mines of information about jobs, training, skills, candidates, and your community. How can you translate that into something great for your community which also builds a great business process? Want more clarification on crowdsourcing? Take a look at my next item on nutrition and how crowdsourcing changed my whole perspective on the software business. Nutrition Nutrition, my trainer Paul says, is 70% of the battle. And when I look at the income statement for Tempworks Staffing Software, one number on the expense side stands out like no other, healthcare! Holy big red number Batman. Paul has me tracking every single thing I eat and drink and being a software guy I evaluated a dozen online tools. Quite a few stood out with great user interfaces that worked on devices from my desktop to my Android to my iPad, and going in I thought user interface was the make or break for these services. I was wrong. Instead it was crowdsourcing.

Crowdsourcing, for nutrition? Yes. The secret to the nutrition tracking service I settled on, MyFitnessPal.com, lies not with the software but with the ongoing contributions by fellow MyFitnessPal members of foods they eat and their estimated portions and calories. If a member makes a good entry, it gets voted up. A bad one gets voted down. Big deal? Yes, it’s a big deal because figuring out calories associated with a wide range of food and quantities is hard for a non-foodies like me, and when MyFitnessPal tells me that one cup of risotto (please whisper the final ‘o’) with porcini mushrooms sans fromage is 350 calories that makes life simple for me. And easy software will beat hard software any day of the week. HTML5 and the Cloud No discussion of 2012 and business is complete without a mention of HTML5, the latest standard for the software that is the web. I’ve written a lot about HTML5 on the Tempworks blog and here on Staffing Talk, but this time I’m going to make it fun. Give Mugeda a try. Mugeda lets you create animations – cartoons, ads, games – entirely in HTML5. No Flash. No Silverlight. No plugin. Just straight HTML5 that will run on any modern browser on any device from your desktop to your tablet. It’s easy, even a art-class flunky like me did one. Even if you don’t like the result, just think how cool you’ll be at holiday parties. When others are talking about Kim Kardashian, you’ll be the one gal talking about the cloud based animations you’ve been doing in HTML5.

Summary
Looking around at companies that are just killing – Amazon, LinkedIn, Google – one thing stands out and that is crowdsourcing.

Description
No discussion of 2012 and business is complete without a mention of HTML5,the latest standard for the software that is the web.Mugeda lets you create animations – cartoons, ads, games–entirely in HTML5. No Flash.No Silverlight.No plugin.Just straight HTML5 that will run on any modern browser on any device from your desktop to your tablet.An interesting tool for nutrition, MyFitnessPal.com, lies not with the software but with the ongoing contributions by fellow MyFitnessPal members of foods they eat and their estimated portions and calories. If a member makes a good entry, it gets voted up. A bad one gets voted down.

Tags: Crowdsorucing, Crowdsource, Mugeda, MyFitnessPal.com, tools

Posted by Benjamin Fossel

Dec 25, 2011 12:03 am GMT Viewed 1277 times

Author: Gregg Dourgarian Source

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Jumpstart Your 2012 Business Brain

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