Samasource

I watched a fascinating video today of Leila Chirayath Janah, the founder of Samasource, speaking at a TEDS conference.

From Samasource’s description of their mission:

Samasource enables marginalized people, from refugees in Kenya to women in rural Pakistan, to receive life-changing work opportunities via the Internet. The core of this concept is microwork - little bits of labor that can be performed anytime and anywhere that add up to a real livelihood for our partners. In parallel, we enable socially responsible companies, small businesses, nonprofits, and entrepreneurs in the US to contribute to economic development by buying services from our workforce at fair prices.

Also, see the Samasourcing blog.

My 6-Week Nightmare With Adobe Support

I am in the midst of a 6-week saga with Adobe Support. Hands down, it’s the worst experience I’ve ever had. I wrote a running commentary on my situation while I was on hold at various points in my last phone conversation with support (and other departments) on January 8. The commentary is included in a letter I sent to Lambert Walsh (apparently the VP of Technical Services at Adobe, at least according to this post on an official Adobe blog) and Tracy Moisan (on Mr. Walsh’s staff) on January 11. I live about 20-30 miles away from Adobe headquarters, so I’m assuming the letter has now been delivered. But I’ve heard nothing from them yet. So I can only assume that no one at Adobe is interested in solving my problem.

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Crisis Relief For Haiti

My friend Dave Dias recently filmed this commercial for mPower Giving, relating how we can use our mobile phones to contribute to crisis relief for Haiti in the wake of this week’s disastrous earthquake.

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World Flix

I was reading our local newspaper today when I came across an article about a new startup dedicated to improving quality of life for people in some of the poorest communities in the world through modern technology.

World Flix, with a tag line of “E-Philanthropy for the Next Generation,” is a fascinating project which combines online videos of social projects around the world with a PayPal-enabled donation system to raise funds for microgrants to worthwhile humanitarian projects.

Here’s a sample of what you’ll see when you visit worldflix.org:

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Finding E-Commerce Sites On The Yahoo! Merchant Solutions Platform

Not sure if this will help anybody, but I thought it was a neat trick.

Awhile ago, a company I work with was interested in finding ecommerce sites to partner with that made about $2-3 million dollars per year. I told them that sounded like a Yahoo! Store to me, and that there was an easy way to search for ecommerce sites hosted on the Yahoo! Merchant Solutions platform.

Every site hosted on the Yahoo! Merchant Solutions platform is required to have a privacy policy which begins with this text (automatically inserted by Yahoo!):

This site is hosted by Yahoo! Store.

We can use that fact to search for Yahoo! Stores on any subject. Just go to Google (or your favorite search engine) and enter something like this:

+“This site is hosted by Yahoo! Store” +{your choice of keyword}

The result will be a set of links to Yahoo! Stores which pertain to the word (or phrase) you chose as a keyword.

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