I can be a magpie sometimes, attracted by a sparkle here, or a flash from over yonder. If you know me at all, you’ll know I’m most excited by the sparkle of the online world so, it’s no surprise that I’m excited about new things I’ve discovered online. Here are the three sparkly things that are currently making me excited online:
The first one speaks to the online shopper I am. I do almost all our shopping online nowadays and I have completely eschewed trolleys from our life as much as possible. The lovely, clever folks over at Hello Square are creating DroppList. Well, being the bargain hunter I am, Dropplist is about to make my life a little easier, and save me a little time on searching. Dropplist is an automated alert system that’ll send me sales alerts for items available from online stores in SA. Whilst my bank account is currently shaking in its boots over this nifty service – Dropplist is entering its Beta phase at the moment – I’m thinking it’ll become quite a nifty tool for me, especially when it’s gift buying time! By the way, Dropplist is created with love in Durban. Those Hello Square peeps just make me even more proud of our city! And, onto the second sparkly thing that’s excited me. The concept of “microjobbing” isn’t new to me. I think, if you’re a parent, you’ve learnt how to break up big tasks into little jobs pretty easily, over the years, and taught your kid how to do it too. Whilst it’s not a new way of looking at things – because we all know that if you’re going to run a marathon, you have to take the first step! – turning smaller tasks into an income creation tool that uses remote workers is a nifty, and modern take on it.
M4Jam takes that a step further, though, and enables people to make money through microjobbing using just their mobile phones. Users (called Jobbers on the site) sign up for M4Jam using WeChat, complete simple tasks using their phones in exchange for cash, during the course of their daily lives. Companies and brands, on the other hand, submit large jobs to the M4Jam team, who break it up into smaller tasks, apportioning it out to their Jobbers, which makes the company’s life a little easier. To me, it seems like M4Jam could give companies an invisible, but very effective workforce to handle some of the “little” business of things, whilst enabling people to make some cash on the move. You can check out M4Jam here, and I’m told it’s launching today!
And, finally, here’s the one that has my heart and eyes enraptured the most. DigiKids. When my fantastic friend and compadre in the computer, Stacey, told me about DigiKids, I think I bowled her over a little with my enthusiasm. I jumped skyhigh, because she and I had apparently been living in the same headspace, but just didn’t know it yet.
DigiKids’ tagline says it all – where parenting and technology collide. If you know me at all, you’ll know that we live a technology-driven life and that I am a huge, massive campaigner for imbuing digital literacy skills into my kid’s evolution. In fact, I now firmly believe that gaining digital literacy skills is as important for children, as learning to read. Yes, that’s a bold statement but it’s not one I shy away from saying. I have seen it in my own kid and, through research I’m doing for something else I’ve been up to for a while, it’s becoming more and more important for parents to help and guide their children towards embracing technology, rather than worryingly steering them away from it. DigiKids exists to help parents do just that – guide their children through a technological evolution and embrace technologies with confidence. So, when that fantastic Stacey asked me to be Managing Editor for DigiKids, I jumped right into it and the site launched last week. I’m truly looking forward to helping DigiKids grow, and providing parents with nifty and easily accessible content that helps them help their kids. You can look forward to some great stuff from DigiKids but, for the moment, I just want to say…Stacey…I said it on the cookies and I’ll say it again – thank you for believing in me! Okay. That’s me for today. The sparkly things in the corners of the Internet are calling me…