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100 Ways to Succeed and Make Money

Posted by on Feb 8, 2008 in Business, Entrepreneurship, Leadership | 0 comments

Tom Peters is always interesting and unconventional. I found his 100 ways to succeed and make money and interesting read. It’s similar to Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People” .Here are some of my favorites:

  • Number #3: Write thank you notes.
  • Number #4: Make the difficult call NOW!
  • Number #6: Make today count — legacy. Similar to my principle of making each moment count.
  • Number #14: Read (and act on) these 3 books. You’ll have to read the manifesto to find out.
  • Number #17: He/She who has the Best Story wins!
  • Number #23: Design means you.
  • Number #29: Get the story! – everyone is important and has a story.
  • Number #33: Out-read ’em.
  • Number #47: Just drill – drill more wells than the next guy.

This is from the first 50 found on ChangeThis.com. I’ll list my favorites from the rest next…

Global South Africans project

Posted by on Jan 24, 2008 in Entrepreneurship, South Africa | 0 comments

The Global South Africans (GSA) project recently launched their website. Quoted from the Welcome page:

GSA is a growing network of talented and successful South Africans who live abroad but still feel deeply attached to the country and want to contribute to the country’s growth and success.The initiative is being spearheaded by the International Marketing Council of South Africa, a public-private partnership dedicated to increasing global support for South Africa’s young democracy and for the continent of which South Africa is a part.There is a supply and a demand side to the GSA project. On the supply side, the idea is to empower network members to contribute in ways that suit their talents and desired level of engagement. On the demand side, we are marketing GSA as resource to South Africans who could benefit from the extraordinary range knowledge and connections the network represents.In coming months, we will be launching a more formal website. In the interim, we will use this blog to talk about how things are progressing, stimulate discussion and linkages and, we hope, generate a growing list of network contributions.A word about that word contributions. GSA isn’t about passing the tin cup. As we hope this blog will elucidate, it’s about knowledge transfer.

SAP HCM Consulting companies

Posted by on Jan 17, 2008 in HCM, SAP | 8 comments

I’ve had numerous requests from business partners for a comprehensive list of SAP HCM consulting companies in the USA. My aim in this post is to give you a comprehensive list — let me know if I missed one.Pure-play SAP HCM companies:

  • EPI-USE: EPI-USE America, based in Atlanta, GA, is my former employer and one of the best SAP HCM consulting companies in the world (ok, my bias). Magnisol represents EPI-USE in Europe. EPI-USE has offices in South Africa (the parent company), Mexico, the UK, and Australia. EPI-USE has some world class complimentary SAP HCM products.
  • Symphony Consulting: Symphony is based in Charlotte, NC and partners with Ariston Consulting to implement full SAP ERP projects. They recently became an SAP Public Services partner.
  • AspireHR: Formerly ERP Solutions is based in Dallas, TX. They provide SAP HCM services and they’ve developed a number of interesting products. I assume AspireHR of the UK is not a related entity. They seem to have a strong relationship with SAP’s development group in Palo Alto.
  • Exaserv: A number of former Arinso employees started Exaserv a couple of years ago. They are based in Atlanta, GA with offices in Luwembourg, Dallas, and Walldorf Germany. They have unique products for HIPPA and Pension plans.
  • Insight Consulting: Insight is based Cincinnati, OH and Insight’s managing partner is on the HR Expert advisory board.
  • Emeritis: Emeritis has operations in the US, Belguim, Thailand, and Brazil. They claim over 200 SAP HR implementations. I don’t think that they have a strong presence in the US anymore.
  • Arinso: Arinso is one of the first and the largest SAP HCM consulting company in the world. Last year Arinso was acquired by UK-based Northgate. Arinso US is based in Atlanta, GA and has 25 offices around the world. In 2006 Arinso acquired OpenHR.
  • Worklogix: Worklogix is a niche SAP HCM consultancy. They are based in Texas, New York and Canada. Their strength is SAP Performance Management. They wrote the book!

Some full service SAP ERP consulting companies have a significant SAP HCM practice. These include:

And then the big boys:

Did I miss one or more? — let me know…Update July 1, 2008: Yes, I did… ROC.Update August 25, 2008: Axon will soon be part of HCL.Update May 1, 2009: ROC Acquires Towers Perrin SAP HCM Practice in North America.

tumblr – My tumblelog http://beyond438.tumblr.com/

Posted by on Jan 9, 2008 in Blogging, Technology | 0 comments

I’m using tumblr.com to blog about interesting web items. These are typically a link with one or two sentences of text. Do you have a tumblelog? How do you use it?

Top posts of 2007 – South Africa’s wealthiest, SolarCity, SAP Business ByDesign and Elon Musk of SpaceX

Posted by on Jan 4, 2008 in Business | 2 comments

Here are the list of the most read post on my blog in 2007:

  1. South Africa’s wealthiest people in 2007 – Most read post by a factor of 5!
  2. Lyndon Rive – Green energy CEO of SolarCity. Nice article in today’s San Francisco Business Times.
  3. SAP’s on demand/SaaS ERP solution, codenamed A1S
  4. Elon Musk of SpaceX
  5. Mark Shuttleworth – Ubuntu founder and first African in space
  6. What color is your personality? – interesting that this one made it so high up.
  7. Laurie Olivier – Venture capitalist
  8. Andy Stanley – The most powerful man in the room
  9. New Google Maps Mobile – hold on to your GPS
  10. Jack Welch / Lars Dalgaard Keynote video – I finished Jack’s book, “Winning” — easy read with LOTS of practical info. Highly recommended.

Thanks for reading my blog.

SoCon08 – Web 2008 in 1.5 days

Posted by on Jan 3, 2008 in Blogging, Business, Technology | 0 comments

I attended SoCon07 last year and really enjoyed it. SoCon08 will be held at the University of Kennesaw, just North of Atlanta from February 8-9, 2008. You can register here. It’s not free like ’07 — this year it’s $43 for the full 1.5 days (including a Networking Dinner) or $15 for the Saturday. It’s still a great deal vs for example AlwaysOn’s $1875 OnMedia NYC 2008 event.Great place to meet all sorts of people that are part of the Atlanta (South East) tech scene.Are you going?

Free and Low cost cell phone calls – Jajah, Soonr, Jaxtr, Fring, Lypp, MaxRoam

Posted by on Dec 24, 2007 in Business, Technology | 0 comments

Skype is not the only game in town anymore for free or cheap local and international calls. I use Skype a lot for making international calls when I’m connected to the Internet with my MacBook Pro. When I only have my Blackberry, I use VIP’s local and toll free access numbers to make international calls. Recently I started using Jajah’s local direct dial. On Christmas day Jajah is offering FREE calls.

Here are a few options for making cheap or free calls from your cell phone:
Jajah: Jajah has been around for about a year and I’ve used it on and off. Their new Jajah Direct service works great. They link an international number to a local US number. You dial a local US number and the phone rings in the foreign country you’re calling. This way you can make cheap international calls from your mobile phone. At the moment they have local numbers for most large US cities, e.g., Chicago, New York and San Francisco. I hope they add Atlanta soon. Jajah is very easy to set up and use. You can also use Jajah Mobile Web to make calls from your mobile phone. BBCalls integrates Jajah functionality directly into your Blackberry’s phone book app.

Soonr: I posted about Soonr before. Soonr brings your Mac or PC desktop to your cellphone. With Soonr Talk you can call your Skype friends from your cellphone. If they are online the call is free, else you pay the SkypeOut rate. I haven’t used this recently, however when I used it, it worked great. It does take some time to set up. If you have a lot of Skype friends and you have a browser enabled cellphone with a data plan then your calls are free, cool! This “SoonR Talk workaround enables VoIP on your iPhone” — post from Engadget.

Vinny Lingham – CEO of Synthasite

Posted by on Dec 10, 2007 in Business, Entrepreneurship, South Africa, Technology | 0 comments

Synthasite

Recently Vinny Lingham stepped down from his post as chief strategy officer of IncuBeta, the online marketing company he co-founded, to concentrate on the interests of his venture capital company, Lingham Capital and more specifically on Synthasite. Lingham, along with his wife, Charlene, and a couple of friends started IncuBeta in 2003 and have grown the Cape Town company into a 50-employee operation with offices in the United Kingdom and United States. IncuBeta owns and manages several businesses, namely Clicks2Customers, a performance search marketing partner; SEM agency Quirk, ReveNews, and CostPerNews.

 

Another IncuBeta startup company, Synthasite, is now one of the primary investments of his venture capital enterprise, Lingham Capital, and one of the primary targets of Lingham’s attention. Synthasite recently received another round of financing worth $5mm.

 

Lingham is a mix of youthful energy and idealism, hard work, brains and national pride. He’s 28, works 60-70 hours a week, is a member of the Mensa organization, and loves South Africa.

 

Raised in East London, a city on the east coast of South Africa, Lingham received an information systems degree from the University of Cape Town and (Vinny corrected me: he dropped out because he didn’t have the finances to continue. I wouldn’t be surprised if he gets an honorary degree from UCT) an honors degree in electronic commerce from the University of South Africa. He is a fourth generation South African with ancestors from India. He loves to read, especially novels by Dan Brown and Tom Clancy, and is a movie fan. He considers Virgin founder Richard Bransen and U2 lead singer Bono personal role models. (He admires Bransen for his passion and fun, and Bono for his work for Africa.) In 2006 Lingham was the winner of the Top Young IT Entrepreneur in Africa Award. He is also listed in South Africa’s who’s who database.

 

Are we losing the World Wide Web (www)?

Posted by on Dec 7, 2007 in Blogging, Technology | 0 comments

Well, not really…I recently started to see that many blog URLS omit the www. prefix, e.g., using only blog.beyond438.com instead of “www.blog.beyond438.com”, or “jeffnolan.com” instead of www.jeffnolan.com.

no-www logo

Read all about the deprecation (I had to look up the word) of “www.”. The no-www.org site seems to be the definitive source. It’s a quick read and I decided to cite the main idea:

No-www.org philosophy

No-www.org strives to make the Internet and communications about it as fruitful as possible. To that end, we make the modest proposal that website makers configure their main sites to be accessible by domain.com as well as www.domain.com.

Wikipedia has a no-www entry that’s a bit more technical. This Dailyblogtips post is well written and understandable. I quote some of the article here:

The problem arises because Google and other search engines view the two versions as two distinct sites, even if they have the exact same content (technically, in fact, the “www” denotes a subdomain that could point to different content).Search engine ranking is based, among other things, on the number of incoming links to your site. If you keep the two versions available some people will link to “http://www.domain.com” while other people will link to the “http://domain.com”, basically splitting your backlink count.

Dialyblogtips also posts on how to tell Google your preferred domain. If you have a WordPress blog then you can use this no-www plugin from Mr WP himself (read the comments).Finally, you can test your own site’s no-wwwness here…is it a class A, B or C. Be careful your site may end up on the “Wall of Shame”.Ok folks, this is a test. In the comments explain in 2 sentences what all this means. Go!

Elon Musk’s Tesla ousts co-founder Eberhard

Posted by on Dec 6, 2007 in Green Energy, Leadership, South Africa, Technology | 0 comments

Jeff Nolan posted on the ousting of Tesla’s co-founder Eberhard. The San Jose Mercury broke the news. Here is the Tesla Motors press release, and the rumors on the Tesla Motors Club forum. In a previous post I mentioned that Elon Musk is the main investor and chairman of Tesla Motors. I want one, these cars are very cool and green…Dec 10, 2007 update: Here is another post from Good Morning Silicon Valley and also from the good people @ All Things Digital.