The government of Mauritius has launched on a bold plan to establish themselves as a “Cyber Island” by making ICT the 5^th pillar of their economy alongside the pillars of Sugar, Textiles, Tourism and Financial Services. Their hope is to establish this island nation as a strategic regional hub for ICT, BPO, and other information technology enabled services, thus attracting foreign direct investment for this and related sectors.

They are not blowing smoke. It appears that they are well on their way to making this vision a reality. They have IP protection legislation and have liberalized telecommunications. This is a bold move when so many African governments are reluctant to relinquish state owned cash cows. They have started a computer in every household initiative. Their ICT sector is growing at over 25% annually, and the marketplace is already populated with hundreds of firms including several major ICT players.

An opportunity that seems especially attractive to me is BPO and call center services for the Francophone world. Mauritius has a wonderfully bilingual workforce (French/English). With the high cost of employment in European Francophone countries, BPO in Mauritius is very attractive. I think this may be a situation where enterprising minds could find BAM and other Kingdom opportunities. JP lists them as having 6 peoples in the least reached category.

Jason is a contributing editor with Momentum Magazine. He serves as a missionary with Calvary International and works as a strategist with the Regent Center for Entrepreneurship in Virginia Beach. He has written a book on business as mission titled Eden Inc.

]]> http://www.momentum-mag.org/2008/07/mauritius-and-the-ict-pillar/feed http://www.momentum-mag.org/2008/07/for-the-e-mail-overloaded-missionary-here-are-great-tips-on-managing-the-inbox http://www.momentum-mag.org/2008/07/for-the-e-mail-overloaded-missionary-here-are-great-tips-on-managing-the-inbox#comments Fri, 18 Jul 2008 01:27:04 +0000 Justin Long http://www.momentum-mag.org/2008/07/for-the-e-mail-overloaded-missionary-here-are-great-tips-on-managing-the-inbox For the e-mail overloaded missionary, here are great tips on managing the inbox from Harvard Business School.

The first piece of software is the browser. You can use any browser, of course, but the tools I describe all come as plugins for Firefox. A plugin is a small piece of code that expands the functionality of a browser in a particular way. Plugins are generally very easy to install: you just go to the website specified, click “Install Plugin” (or whatever other button they use), and Firefox handles everything. Special note: I am remaining on Firefox 2. I did upgrade, temporarily, to Firefox 3, but due to great “glitchiness” I reverted within 2 or 3 days to Firefox 2.

Next, one needs to understand how social networking software works. Most applications use what I will loosely term “feeds.” Think of a feed as your personal newswire - your personal blog - a “stream of information” personalized for you. Using social software, you either (a) consume feeds from other people or (b) publish or your own. (Or, of course, both.) Each piece of software’s “feed” is a specially formatted file, typically in XML or RSS. You don’t really need to know the particulars of the format. The tools I am going to talk about know how to use these files. Just know that you can’t really view them easily in a normal browser–what we’re talking about is software that will fetch the feeds for you, put them altogether, organize them, and show them to you in a special window.

Ok. With that very basic piece of knowledge out of the way, the first tool I’d recommend signing up for is Friendfeed. Friendfeed allows you to take feeds from different services and put them together in one single, organized feed. What’s more, links that are shared on this feed can be commented on by you, and by others who can see your feed (you can choose to make it public). So others can comment on your comments. Since a picture’s worth a thousand words, take a look at my Feed: http://friendfeed.com/justinlong. You will see that I have taken feeds from several places - my Google Reader Shared Links, my blogs, etc. - and linked them here. As soon as I update *those* feeds, Friendfeed *automatically* updates. What’s more, I’m subscribed to other people’s feeds, and they to mine, so I can see *their* updates. But since its ordered chronologically (with newly-commented-on feeds showing up at the top), it’s pretty easy for me to keep track of what’s going on. Registration is free and easy. Its also pretty easy to add any feeds you may happen to have - although if you don’t have feeds, that’s ok. It’s also easy to find others’ feeds. You’ll see them on blogs, but you can also find them through friends. So, for example, if you subscribe to follow mine, and then you see someone else’s note on my feed, then you can subscribe to follow theirs… following the friend-relationship-links.

The next thing I did was to add my blogs to friendfeed. You do this by adding services through its control panel on the right hand side of your personal Friendfeed. If you don’t have a blog, don’t worry about it. If you do, I’d add it. Also, you can add other services - I have my twitter account, for example, although I barely every use it. I also have other things too.

Next up: Google Reader. Reader is an RSS-reader. Most news websites and blogs these days come with RSS feeds. You can subscribe to these in Google Reader, which will fetch the feeds and show you what’s new. You don’t have to go to hundreds of sites each day - you can have their RSS feeds brought to you, when they change. (I have several hundred feeds in my Reader, and I can keep up with the headlines and newsblurbs fairly easy). Reader is also free, as are the newsfeeds. (Of course.) Further, when you’re viewing an entry in Google Reader, you can “share with note” - you can add it to your Shared Items feed, along with your note about why the item is important. If you’ve linked your Google Reader Shared Items feed to your Friendfeed (as I have), this will automatically post into your Friendfeed. It’s your way of commenting on what other people are saying, and on news items of the day, and republishing it: your way of highlighting items that impact the unreached. My shared items feed is here although it’s much easier to simply follow my Friendfeed!

Third: del.icio.us. This is “social bookmarking.” It allows you to bookmark a link, but tag it with categories so you can find it again more easily. But, as you explore the service, there’s quite a bit more. You can create networks of other people who are bookmarking similar things to you, and see what they’ve uncovered. My feed is here. My feed is also linked to my Friendfeed.

Final tools for the day: shareaholic.com. This is a great new tool that I just stumbled on, as it hugely simplifies how you can share items you find on the web (particularly from pesky news sites, blogs, etc. that do not have RSS feeds). When you find something on the web that you want to share, you can just click the button on the toolbar and tell it where you want to post the link.

How to use these tools on behalf of the unreached

By setting up your own accounts and then subscribing to others who have a passion for the unreached, you can begin sharing things you’ve run across. Conversations can be built around tools like Friendfeed, where comments can be shared and added to. Further, Friendfeeds can be reposted in other places - blogs or personal pages. (I have reposted mine on my personal identity page and on Facebook). If those of us who were both missions-passionate and tech-savvy were to do this, we could begin connecting with each far more easily.

Interested? leave a comment - or subscribe to my friendfeed, so I can subscribe to yours !

In 1998 I wrote about the future of books, and speculated about the implications of the electronic availability of books. That day is now here: the Amazon Kindle with a 2GB SD card can carry nearly 2,000 books; and an 8GB SD card is easily available. While over 120,000 books in Kindle format are available from Amazon, this does not include the additional thousands of e-books available in other formats (e.g. Mobipocket), as well as the fact that a Kindle can easily use standard HTML, Word, and PDF formats—which means you could feasibly carry every issue of Mission Frontiers, IJFM, EMQ, IBMR, Missiology, Lausanne World Pulse, whole encyclopedias, Operation World, several versions of the Bible in your favorite language, and all of the readings for the WCIU’s World Christian Foundations course. At $350, any missionary ready to buy an iPod or a cell phone should seriously consider the investment.

% of Christians who have used Instant Messaging in the past week: 33%

% of Americans who sent someone a text message via a mobile telephone: 30%

% of Christians who searched for online information or content: 84%

% of Christians who reported watching a video via the Internet in the previous week: 26%

% of evangelicals who listened to a sermon via digital recordings: 38%

% of other born again Christians who listened to a sermon via digital recordings: 31%

% of other adults who listened to a sermon via digital recordings: 17%

Could it be that most of us just don’t like sermons? Or those who like sermons aren’t typically that tech-savvy? Also, an interesting note from Barna’s report: a trend is considered at the “tipping point” when it reaches 20% of the population. Momentum has previously taking a bit of a different tack, arguing that something reaches a tipping point when its growth rate consistently exceeds the growth rate of the population (see “Hunting Microtrends“).

Google Reader (reader.google.com…) is one of the best blog readers available, and now it has new abilities to share entries you’ve found interesting along with your notes. This is effectively a free blogging tool. (There’s also  a free tool for commenting on regular web pages that don’t have RSS feeds).

Gmail provides a free, high powered web-based email account; mail can also be downloaded from Gmail into your favorite POP client (i.e. Outlook or Thunderbird).

Google Calendar is a free, powerful calendaring application. We maintain multiple calendars: for work, for home appointments, and for project itineraries.

Amazon S3 (aws.amazon.com…) and Jungle Disk (www.jungledisk.com…) combine to give you extremely cheap, infinitely scalable hard disk space. S3 is access to remote storage on Amazon’s massive server network; you pay $0.15 or less per gigabyte of storage per month. (30 gigabytes = $4.50 or so per month.) These files are fault tolerant and backed up; Amazon guarantees their availability at 99.9%. Jungle Disk makes the Amazon S3 file service map to a local hard drive, so you can just drag-and-copy files over. This is a great offline backup service. It is available with encrypted connections if you require.

Highrise is a wonderful contact management (or donor management) tool. It gives you an email address you can forward emails to, and it will automatically pick up all the contact information available in the email. Basic editions are free. Multiple users can be given access to a single Highrise account. (See www.highrisehq.com…).

Grouphub is a great project management tool as well, from the makers of Highrise.  Multiple users can access the same account, which provides for milestones, to-dos, questions, notes, calendaring, etc.

PHPBB3 is a free, open source bulletin board service which can be downloaded and installed on a website for use as a threaded message board. There are services that will give you free or semi-free space to set up a PHPBB without having to have your own server or domain.

Strategicnetwork.org… (which we manage) or Google Groups are both great tools for establishing email groups for distribution of news or communications. Both are free.

If you’re hunting for bibliographic information on a book, just click over to the World Catalog (www.worldcat.org…). It features virtually every book in print with a quick reference link to the appropriate citation format (e.g. APA, etc).

If you want to send out email newsletters and track respondents, you can use Constant Contact—but Campaignmonitor.com… gives you basically the same features and is much cheaper.

Q10 (www.baara.com…) is a free bare-bones editor for those of you who (like me) find yourself distracted by the siren call of the Internet. It consumes your entire screen with a simple black page and minimalist features. (No boldface, italic, underscore, etc.) I’ve found it useful for writing papers and articles.

If you have Outlook, you may find the free tool Xobni (now in public beta) to be of immense help. It will index your Outlook message store and provide lightning fast access to contacts and past emails, and show you who knows whom. It only works in Outlook right now.

Download Accelerator Plus (www.speedbit.com…) is a widely used download manager that helps use multiple connections to speed the download of larger files. When you’re downloading huge PDFs or Powerpoints from someone’s website, this is a must.

YouSendIt (www.yousendit.com…) is a great tool for sending files that are too big to send as attachments. It uploads the file to the YouSendIt server and then sends a link to the file to your contact. They can download it at their leisure with a normal web browser, and the file gets deleted afterward. This is also good etiquette so that you don’t send someone a huge multi-megabyte file that they’re not expecting, particularly when they pay for their connection by the megabyte.

If you have a great tool to mention, send us a note via email to editor@momentum-mag.org….