All posts tagged: technology

Gen Y generations

Forget generations X and Y. They definitely can’t be seasoned by decades, particularly not gen Y. It is evidently split into micro-generations; Gen Y-ers could at best be clustered by 3 or 4 years. Take the early 80s-born for instance. They loiter around social media, they’re mildly fascinated by facebook, they use skype as a ‘cheap’ means of communication, they google their recipes. But that doesn’t make them one of us. They’re not compulsively RSS-fed. They’re not facebook addicts, nor pro-multi-taskers. Their social lives aren’t dependent on google talk. They don’t get twitter. SMSing is not ingrained in their system. A blog is just another website. Forget functionality; their motivations, aspirations, values, opinions, all belong with gen X or are only incrementally different. Here’s a snapshot of us (not them) in the workplace. I surfaced in 88, incase you’re speculating. I wonder what the 90s-offsprings would say to my ‘micro-generation’. Given the pace at which our lives are evolving, we are probably not far from the point when a year will be sufficient to create …

Saturn & Stargazing

2009 is a special year in the night sky. The Earth is exactly at the same level as Saturn in space,Β allowing us Earthlings to catch a vertical view of the second largest planet in our solar system, a one in 15 years phenomenon. To celebrate the International Year of Astronomy, the Science Center in Singapore has opened up its Observatory for free stargazing sessions every Friday night. This week, the main telescope was aligned to focus on Saturn and its moons, and it made for a spectacular sight. In the magnified view of the telescope, Saturn appears exactly like it was depicted in secondary school geography textbooks, complete with the rings. The rings, which are really pieces of dust and ice moving at tremendous speeds, look gorgeous! Of the 62 moons of Saturn, only 4 of the brighter ones were visible through the telescope, and appeared as though they were protecting the rings of Saturn. To the naked eye, or through a pair of binoculars, Saturn only appears as a bright star in the sky. …

Social media

I recently discovered that a lot of people are unaware of the social media phenomenon, even though they are very much a part of it. As a believer in the power of social media, I owe this post to them. Simply put, social media collectively describes all tools that enable people to talk online. Often interchangeably used with the term Web 2.0, social media consists of social networks like Facebook, content sharing sites like Youtube and Flickr, blogging platforms like WordPress and Blogger, and user-generated information sources like Wikipedia. The term, coined only recently, is creating waves in the PR world. It is aΒ colossal avenue for people to share their insights, opinions and knowledge, through interaction with others like them on the World Wide Web.Β  Currently, the size of the social media community is estimated at 400 million. According to a study by Strategy Analytics, by 2015, 1 in every 6 people will be users of social media platforms. Billion dollar companies like Dell, Starbucks and Coca-Cola are reinventing themselves through social media and reconnecting …