kinshuk sunilit aint no, dessert if therez no caek

Mid-Day did an interview with me on one of the community Initiatives I am working on – Indie Game Development, India, Community. The interview is included below:

Gaming is no more a waste of time, it’s serious business. and even if it isn’t, who cares? Living by this law are the members of a freshly formed community DiningCamps. Its founder Kinshuk explains the highs of the game

Not many understand that online or console games develop intelligence, skills and decision-making power.

Especially, IT administrators give video-gamers a hard time because they consider gaming applications as a wastage of space, conducive to viruses and obviously and impedence to Internet speed.

They realise that these very geeks are probably much smarter and creative than you. Here comes a group of game developers who not only want to shed all the myths about gaming, but also give it a corporate twist.

Over to Kinshuk.

Read full interview on Mid-Day website. OR read the scan below (click on image to full view the article)

I have been working in that role and function now for almost 18 months, yet it will be a very difficult job for me to define it. Why am I attempting to define it? Well, all my friends (the Non-geeks) keep asking me – what the hell is your job profile. Guys! Read this carefully and read it Very carefully – I am going to sincerely pour out my heart for you all here – yes I am awesome!

When understanding something, I have always found it useful to begin with the language. The Word “Community Manager” literally means someone who manages the community. So, what is a community? A Community is a ‘social group of any size whose members reside in a specific locality, share government, and often have a common cultural and historical heritage’

For a company, a community is the pool of its customers, partners, suppliers, users, and can include Similar stakeholders (government, society, really!). What is important is that these entities are brought together to co-habitat a specific region. The members also depend on the strategic objectives and direction the company wants to move.

So a community manager is someone who manages this community for a company. Savvy?

What that means is that a community manager is an interface between the company and the community. It is the community manager that gets all the conversations done. He uses the social media tools and platforms to pitch the company’s perspective to the community and brings back ideas and feedbacks from the community to the company. He represents the company in the community and the community in the company. He is the one who balances the community’s welfare with the strategic objectives of the company.

In the present day world, where technology is being abstracted within daily life at a very fast pace resulting in almost instantaneous conversations; a community manager can make all the difference between a successful company and a not so successful company (lets avoid all negative speak). He would be the one creating opportunities, brands, and customer loyalty.

In my (not the very) next post, I will talk about some specific activities almost every community manager undertakes.

Take that huh!

This post was originally published on Digimantra.com

The biggest handicap about using Firefox 3.5 right now is the lack of availability of some of our most loved addons.Yes they are being migrated to 3.5 fast, but yet why wait for them, when you can use them right away? Yup! With a little hack, you can fool your Firefox to believe that the addon is applicable to the version 3.5. However, this might lead to some performance issues. Ok, so let’s start. I am using one of my most used addon as an example – YSlow (You can also check our recommended list of addons for Developers).YSlow is a wonderful addon for your webpage optimisation and I sorely miss it in 3.5 as its not migrated yet. Let’s Begin…

This post was originally published on Digimantra.com

This post was originally published on Digimantra.com

July 1st saw the release of Firefox 3.5. You must already be aware of what is new is version 3.5 and what makes it the awesome-est browser to-date, if not check this Firefox 3.5 preview video and the feature list for Firefox 3.5. In this post we are going to walk you through installing Firefox 3.5 in Linux (no installers for Linux). We’ll be doing it on Ubuntu 9.04, but it will work the same way on other Linux distributions too. Step 1 is to download Firefox 3.5 tarball from the Firefox site. Extract the Firefox 3.5 files from this tar ball and move them to an application directory of your choice. Anything like /home/user/apps/firefox35 (we will use this path as example in this post) or /usr/apps/firefox35 would work fine…

This post was originally published on Digimantra.com

This post was originally published on Digimantra.com

Have you ever had one of those moments when you desperately need an answer but don’t know who to ask? Or that all those you could think of asking have no clue, but you do need an answer? Well, Aardvark is meant for you? Aardvark provides you with a platform to have realtime conversations with friends around topics that you have questions about. This can be way much more efficient and helpful than searching the net. Aardvark uses the latent knowledge people have, which cannot be caputred on a web page. All of this, without downloads. Just email Aardvark or send it an IM, and help is on its way.

This post was originally published on Digimantra.com