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RIG consultant organising boat party for charity

One of RIG’s consultants, Paul Higgins, will be DJing at a boat party on the Thames in London on Friday 17th September to raise money for the charity, Accounting for Africa.

The aim is to raise £20,000 that will enable the purchase of a water truck and storage tanks to distribute water to the villages within the Lubilini community of Swaziland from the nearest city centre. Some of the funds will be used to repair existing water pumps. Work will also be done with the community to develop the roles and responsibilities for collection and distribution of the water, and maintenance of the truck and the pumps to make sure that the project is sustainable.

We decided to make all this happen and raise the funds by throwing a party on a boat…

All the money raised will go directly to the Lubulini community. The team will fund their own participation and involvement in the project.

Some 75% of the population are employed in subsistence farming and the country has the lowest documented life expectancy in Africa – on average 32 years through the combined effect of lack of water, land degradation, increased poverty, and HIV/AIDS. The government offers free water and fuel in city centres but clean water is not yet a right in Swaziland because the government lacks the resources to transport it. Right now, the Lubilini community obtains its water from a dirty stream that they have to share with livestock. People in this community average about just a pint of unclean drinking water each day.

Tickets are £15 and they are only available through this page: www.justgiving.com/all4oneboatparty

Posted by Paul Higgins on September 1, 2010 at 3:08 pm in Blog, Uncategorized | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackback (0)

         

The concept of social networking has to fade into the background

I attended this event yesterday on the rise of social media and supporting technologies. It featured a variety of speakers with both B2C and B2B backgrounds, including some CEOs of technology firms which place social networking firmly at the heart of their products.

“Use the power of social networks!” was the single answer given by each presenter in turn to his or her preferred business question, such as ‘how can I find out what my customers really think about my new product?’ and ‘how can I get my employees more excited about my business?’, as the audience members knowingly applauded and congratulated themselves on being part of this new movement.

A few years ago you could make a big deal out of the fact that your new web-based technology solves an existing problem better and more cheaply than the incumbent solution because it was SaaS. Now, start-ups would rarely even consider developing software that was not web-based. The line ‘SaaS platform’ has been relegated from the first page to the last page of corporate presentations. It is now so common that I barely have to mention that SaaS stands for Software as a Service.

As entrepreneurs realise that more and more business problems can be addressed better by incorporating some sort of social networking methodology into a solution, I expect that the concept of social networking itself will fade into the background.

Just as a lot of very successful businesses have sprung up in all sorts of industries by using a SaaS infrastructure to compete on price and on flexibility, there will be plenty of people looking at existing SaaS solutions across business functions and asking themselves, ‘Would this process be more effective if the people involved could communicate more easily with each other?’ (To which the answer will usually be ‘yes.’)

So the challenge the social media savvy entrepreneur faces is to judge when she can switch from saying ‘this solution is all about social networking’ to ‘this solution is all about cost-saving/effectiveness/efficiency (and, obviously, it uses social networking methodology).’

Posted by Paul Higgins on July 29, 2010 at 4:06 pm in Blog, Uncategorized | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackback (0)

         

What has been interesting in 2009?

I used this site to create a ‘word cloud’ of everything from this blog in 2009. Hopefully if these topics interest you then you’ll continue to follow the blog next year.

Posted by Paul Higgins on December 11, 2009 at 12:58 pm in Blog, Uncategorized | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackback (0)