Need to Know - Small Business Technology: January 4, 2012

What Job Seekers Need to Know in Today’s Digital Market - Well written piece on the increasing importance of social media when seeking employment and employees. Pay attention to the paragrapgh below the "Your Social Media Profiles Are as Important as Your Resume (If Not More Important)" subheading as it tells you where and what you need to do.

10 Predictions for Work and Economics in 2012 - You only need to know is this one: "...ever more people will enter the mall with a SmartPhone, browse, feel the fabric and so on, scan desired items into their phone, find the cheapest price on the Net, and, in one click, have it delivered to their home."

Photos Are The New Killer App - That's been my experience recently as I snap photos of recipes, future gifts, and steps in using office equipment with my smartphone. Gist of the short article: if you want to make money developing a killer app, something adding value using photos is the direction to go.

How To Repair Virus-Infected PC When Windows Fails To Boot Up [Guide] - Good illustreated web-based guide on using non-Windows operating systems to boot up and recover your PC. Ubuntu and SARDU featured.

The Year in Education: Seven Innovations Changing the Way the World Learns - OK, its not directly related to small business or technology, but you need to know what happening in how people are learning things. Click "next" in the upper right corner of each image to advance the slide show. I liked 7/9 on learning creativity.

5 Ways to Use Google+ to Improve Your Search Engine Optimization - High quality online guide on how to tweak your Google+ pages boost your websites search ranking. You are free to ignore and not actually implement any of these. Remember - survival is not mandatory.

Mobile Payments and Commerce Set For Breakthrough - Short easy-to-read summary of marketing data on mobile payments and m-commerce. You don't have to be an expert, but you should have a idea of what's happening in this area.

Top 20 Mobile Productivity Apps of 2011 - List of 10 top apps for each Android and iOS devices.

Google’s Android Training Initiative – Will it boost mLearning? - Short overview of Google's new Android  classes to help developers build better Android apps using best practices. Includes a link to the Android Training Initiative site.

Teenage Mutant Incident Commanders

It's articles like this that give me hope for the survival of our nation. Some one at the Rocky Mountain School of Expeditionary Learning (RMSEL) in Colorado thought outside the box and taught the Incident Command System (ICS) to students. Usually, only overly stodgy adults, like school principals and teachers, learn about Incident Command. Not kids! Here's some of what happened:

In a scenario worthy of professional envy, the team managed to shepherd hundreds of their fellow students, Kindergarten through 11th grade, off the school grounds to a nearby park. They even identified a missing fourth grader who had been “locked” in a lab two minutes into the exercise. Everyone was back in school within 13 minutes.

Read Disaster Research 546 — May 6, 2010 for the full article.

Creative Thinking: Homemade Flying Hovercraft

As someone who sometimes wanders through department stores and often envisions different and novel uses for everyday products (a fun creative thinking exercise), the following video struck a sympathetic chord. A fellow in New Zealand supersized the creative thinking practice to a full-sized off-the-shelf hovercraft and thought: "What if I put wings on this?" Watch his amazing video:



He plans to sell his new invention for about $13,000.

So, continuing along this line of creative thinking, what other existing off-the-shelf produts could be sold at higher cost by the addition of a value-added enhancement?

For example, why do not all cell phones and notebook computers not contain a global positioning system (GPS) receiver? Seems a no brainer to me, as it did to the designers of the LG Incite phone.