(Image: Mandela.is)

The grandsons of former South African president and anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela are following in their grandfather’s footsteps with their work in Africa; however, they’re adding a new strategy to their predecessor’s formula: social media. Ndaba Mandela and Kweku Mandela Amuah launched Mandela.is, a social network that allows the kin to honor their iconic grandfather.

Founder of Africa-focused online platform FaraiMedia.com Farai Gundan caught up with Mandela’s grandsons to discuss the inspiration behind Mandela.is, how the social networking site differs from today’s leading platforms and how they secured capital for their latest venture for Forbes.com.

On the social network’s purpose:

Ndaba says, “It is a platform that connects people with similar interests together and to causes they are passionate about. The platform also inspires people to be active in their communities and to effect change locally.” “Our primary goal with Mandela.is is to create a movement and a platform that has value and that people want to engage with. Our business model is centered around bringing together a lot of people who either want to do good or are doing good,” adds Kweku.

Read more at Forbes.com…

Technology has allowed shoppers to peruse the latest fashion trends seconds after models walk off the runway, find an affordable version of this (or next) season’s looks, and have the pieces delivered to you without ever having to leave the comfort of your coach. Today’s fashion and style apps offer users a sharp UI and smart social integration.

Mashable highlights seven awesome retail apps that will help shoppers get the most out of their retail therapy session:

Kaleidoscope

Window shoppers, this one’s for you. Upon loading the free app, several looks modeled by different people slides through UI, and, if you see something you like, click to expand the look for a detailed breakdown of each individual piece. You’ll discover where to pick up a piece, forwarding you directly to the garment’s online page for purchase.

Hukkster

Savvy shoppers will flock to this app. Select one of Hukkster’s shopping partners to enter a gateway for the company’s website, scroll through merchandise and “Hukk” items you adore but find too pricey at the moment. Hukkster will keep an eye on the product and send you a push notification when the item’s price drops, or when it gets tagged a “sale” item, reports Mashable.

Read more at Mashable…

(Image: National Basketball Association )

Social media has changed the way small screen viewers watch television. Thanks to smart devices, TV viewing goes hand in hand with social media engagement, with many viewers tweeting, Facebooking and Tumblring while tuning into their first screen. Online discussions can heat up when it comes to sports coverage, especially during basketball season.

Recognizing the digital chatter, NBA TV will televise the second annual NBA Social Media Awards. The awards will air on June 12 on TNT.

The Root reports:

Voting for nominees and winners, which will occur via Twitter using the hashtag #NBASMA, will award NBA moments that generated the most buzz on social media. Categories include the 140 Award for “the player with the most impressive tweet of the year” and the OMG Award for “the team with the best video shared via social.” Fans can also vote at the NBA’s Social Media Awards website.

In addition to returning awards such as The BIG (Best In The Game) Award and The LOL (Laugh out Loud) Award, the new categories will include #Trendsetter Award, given to the player that showcased the best sense of style via social media; The 140 Award, awarded to the player with the most impressive tweet of the year; The OMG Award, for the team with the best video shared using social; and The Social Rook of the Year Award, given to the rookie with the biggest uptick in popularity across social media platforms.

Read more at The Root…

(Image: File)

The 2013 Rock the Bells festival is about to get a tech tune-up for its 10-year anniversary.

Holograms of Ol Dirty Bastard, widely known as ODB, and Eazy-E will take the stage alongside artists like Rakim, Tyler, the Creator, Black Hippy, E-40 and Too $hort and Kid Cudi, among other performers, according to AllHipHop.com.

ODB, the former Wu-Tang Clan member, will perform virtually with his group mates, while N.W.A.’s Eazy-E will rock the stage alongside Bone Thugs-In-Harmony.  Their holograms were reportedly approved by Eazy’s widow Tomica Wright and ODB’s mother, Cherry Jones.

The outer-body performances aren’t too shocking. A hologram of late rapper Tupac Shakur stunned fans when it performed at last year’s Coachella music festival.

Rock the Bells tour will kick off  in San Bernadino, California on September 7-8, move to Mountain View, California on September 14-15, then Washington DC on September 28-29, and end in Rutherford, New Jersey on October 4-5.

Here, BlackEnterprise.com’s social media contributor S. Lynn Cooper highlights which tools you can utilize to make an impact on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.

Tweriod

Every day millions of people use Twitter to discover and disperse ideas across the web. Now, Twitter has become the daily go-to social media platform for people to connect with businesses and organizations. It’s great because it gives brands the opportunity to connect and assist their customers in real time.

So, if you’re looking for a reliable tool to help you analyze your followers, try a free tool like Tweriod.  Tweriod helps users make the most of Twitter by letting their brand know the best time to tweet. It will analyze up to 1,000 followers, so if you have thousands of followers, you’ll need to upgrade to the premium service.

PageLever

With the ever changing landscape of Facebook, it’s hard to truly know the impact of your posting without feeling like you need to pay for advertisements to reach your audience. If you’ve been using Facebook Insights to try to get an idea on what is happening with your Facebook page, you’re likely seeing some interesting results. Unfortunately, you’re also might be a bit confused by what Insights is telling you.

Welcome PageLever to your analytics mix. PageLever provides a deeper look at your fan pages and focuses on the day-to-day usability of the fans that follow your page. Facebook Insights only focuses on seven points wherein Pagelever can give you over 30.

Statigram

Instagram is a photo-sharing and social networking service that enables users to take photographs, apply filters, and share them on other social networking sites such as Twitter or Facebook. Instagram is an excellent source for your brand to curate positive content and encourage customers to share images of them with your product or service.

A great free tool to use is Statigram, which allows you to access Instagram from your computer to view, measure, manage, and promote your Instagram account. The third-party application creates a visually-appealing, shareable profile page that sums up your Instagram history.

S. Lynn Cooper is a Washington, DC-based digital strategist and communications expert. Cooper is the founder and director of Socially Ahead, a strategic communications agency that specializes in the creation of social and digital strategies and campaign management. Follow her on Twitter at @sociallyahead .

Mandela Schumacher-Hodge co-founded Tioki, a professional network for the education community (Image: Source)

While most people concentrate on curriculum, a large part of education reform will require revolutionary ideas about professional development for teachers. Tioki, an award-winning online professional network exclusively for the education community is one of those ideas. Dubbed “The LinkedIn for Teachers,” Tioki helps people passionate about education connect to one another, discover opportunities, and share information.

Tioki founder Mandela Schumacher-Hodge will be joining Black Enterprise and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for “Today’s Business Crisis: Educating Tomorrow’s Workforce,” which will be held May 15, 2013.

Along with other EduTech entrepreneurs who have a dedicated interest in expanding and implementing new technologies in classrooms to assist teachers, students, and parents, Schumacher-Hodge will share solutions for the critical challenges facing American education.  Mandela has had the unique experience of seeing the education industry from a variety of vantage points – as a teacher, associate administrator, education researcher, and co-founder of an education technology company.

Prior to Tioki, Schumacher-Hodge was a Teach for America corps member and has three years of in-classroom teaching experience in both district and charter public schools. As COO, the 27-year-old power woman leads Tioki’s product development from vision to implementation and is responsible for driving strategic partnerships, sales, and overall marketing strategy.

Tioki has expanded into an international platform used by teachers in over 28 different countries, as well as many of the nation’s top-performing schools and education organizations.

As we prepare for tomorrow’s symposium, BlackEnterprise.com asked Schumacher-Hodge to deliberate on the challenges teachers face and provide advice on using social media and technology as a stopgap to those issues.

What inspired you to launch Tioki?

During my teaching career, there were two particular experiences I went through that subsequently influenced my decision to launch Tioki. The first was being laid off from the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), the second largest school district in the country. The lay-off was a seniority-based process. Rather than take into account factors such as one’s ability to effectively educate children, student performance scores, and teacher evaluations, the district made their decision solely based on the number of years the teacher had been at the school.

The second incident that played into my decision to launch Tioki was my experience hiring new teachers. After being laid off from LAUSD, I was re-hired at a charter school in Pacoima, California, and had some administrator responsibilities on top of my general teaching duties. For the first-time ever, I was on the other side of the hiring table, vetting candidates and trying to figure out what criteria I would enlist to determine who was the best fit for an open co-teacher position. I devoted numerous hours to this selection process, and gave up my own classroom five different times to accommodate demo lessons from candidates.

Unfortunately, though, we didn’t find anyone who met our needs. Frustrated by my inability to find a great candidate, despite everything I had done, a thought popped into my head: ‘Man, if only I could see the teacher teach, before I decided to invest the time, energy and resources into bringing them in for live demo lessons.’ All I need is a preview of what they can do in a real teaching setting. After sharing my pain point with my friend, Brian Martinez, we ended up brainstorming, and came up with a solution that would soon evolve into a full-fledged company.

What challenges did you experience building the product?

As with most startups, we too have experienced countless challenges building our company. One of the first and most notable challenges we had to overcome was acquiring technical talent without having any funding, revenue, or additional personal income to pay that talent for their services. From day one, we really had to hustle and get creative in order to recruit talent who would invest their time, energy and skills into building a technology for equity only.

You are an educator not a computer scientist. How did you get Tioki built?

Brian and I were at a disadvantage in that neither of us possessed the technical expertise to build a website, but what we did have was a clear vision, relentless work ethic, great leadership skills and the important ability to intertwine other people’s goals with our own, so that they too would become invested in growing this company.

Our first developer was actually a mobile developer who had agreed to build our website in exchange for equity and room and board with us in Los Angeles. Once he built our website, we were able to start building up our user base and, as we grew, we were able to recruit other members for marketing and sales. We had a team of six working without pay for several months before we got funding. We were able to get funding once we secured revenue, which was three months after we launched our open beta.

Describe the problems in our educational system that you believe Tioki can solve.

Currently, the education system in America can be described as a collection of disparate islands. You have your early childhood centers, K-12 schools, institutions of higher education, alternative schools, school boards, politicians, researchers…the list goes on and on. Each island has its own unique mission, members, policies, and goals, and more often than not, these islands are in their own little bubbles, out-of-touch and blocked off to what knowledge, resources and technology are being used on other islands that they could potentially benefit from.

Tioki reflects our desire to provide the education community with the best platform out there to discover who they need, make meaningful connections and start the powerful process of learning from and sharing with others in the industry, with the hope that all of this will result in the improvement of the education system on a grander scale.

Describe how a teacher would use Tioki in an average school day, month or year.

Making a connection on Tioki means that educators have the unique opportunity to see what others in the field do, use and know. Through the use of specialized skills’ tags, education-specific profile features and linked resources, we make it easier than ever for educators to gain access to the advice, tools, and opportunities that address their most pressing needs. In addition to that, we provide educators with innovative tools to build their own digital portfolio, so that they can establish their professional presence online and start developing their personal brand. Lastly, with every connection an educator makes on Tioki, their professional network automatically expands, increasing their access to more information and opportunities.

What advice do you have for educators who want to implement some form of educational technology in the classroom?

I think that any great educator maintains a delicate balance of staying true to traditional teaching practices that have been proven effective and beneficial for both the academic and personal development of a child, and at the same time understanding that the world we live in is constantly in flux and it’s important to stay open-minded and receptive to new approaches on educating children. With that said, I’d advise educators to be open to learning about technology that can increase student engagement, enhance learning, and expedite the completion of educators’ daily tasks (e.g. grading, lesson planning).

As for principals and school leaders, I would advise them not to always follow the traditional “top-down” approach when it comes to integrating technology into their schools. Your teachers are going to be the implementers and facilitators of this technology, and it’s important that you show them you value them enough to ask them their opinion and factor it into your final decision. If you’re interested in getting teacher buy-in, then it’s very important that you make sure you involve your teachers in the decision-making process, and not just leave them on the receiving end of mandates.

What is unique about Tioki compared to other EduTech products?

The main factor that differentiates Tioki from other EduTech products is that the people, not the technology, is the star of our show. We have a clear understanding that behind every new technology, popular resource, celebrated school and latest educational trend, there is a person or a group of people who are responsible for creating it, and giving educators access to these people has the potential to spark a more engaged and collaborative education community.

How have you optimized Tioki?

Over the past two years, we have optimized the site so that it’s conducive for users to easily embed video files. In addition to being able to upload files from one’s computer, we now accept links from YouTube and Vimeo, and allow users to upload as many videos as they’d like to their profile, further enhancing their ability to showcase themselves on camera or house their favorite educational videos in their video library.

Known for growing businesses internationally, Gregory has been responsible for over one billion dollars in revenue over the course of his career. Most recently, Gregory was VP of Revenue at Spotify, where he helped establish the company in the United States while overseeing launch partnerships like GM, P&G, and Coke, as well as global accounts and vertical strategy. At Google, Richard served in many international roles, creating new markets around Google AdWords.

“As the number of apps continues to increase around the globe, there is a growing need to democratize the app search space,” said Gregory. “Quixey is building the next great search company and I look forward to championing what has become a key solution to fixing app discovery.”

“Richard brings unique global expertise and experience to this role as Quixey continues to develop new partnerships and strengthen our focus on new markets around the world,” said Tomer Kagan, CEO and Co-founder of Quixey. “He joins us at a time of rapid growth, as Quixey now powers over 100 million queries per month.”

With the addition of Gregory, Quixey will be placing an emphasis on monetization and revenue as it unveils more partnerships this year.

Quixey has scaled from 5 to 70 employees in less than two years and has partnered with major app stores, search engines, manufacturers, carriers and web platforms to power app search queries globally.

(Image: ThinkStock)

Due to the widespread availability and use of smartphones and tablets, email is more accessible than ever and, as a result, it has become deeply embedded in the daily workplace and personal lives of most employees.

The conventional, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., five-day work week is a thing of the past for the overwhelming majority of workers at small to mid-sized businesses (SMBs), according to a new survey on work-related email habits. The independent, blind survey of 503 employees in SMB workplaces in the U.S. was conducted by Opinion Matters on behalf of GFI Software.

“Email has transformed the way we do business globally, but it has also had a fundamental impact on the work/life balance for many employees, especially in smaller organizations,” said Phil Bousfield, general manager of IT operations at GFI Software. “The research results have affirmed how critical it is for organizations to manage the use of email effectively, not only to prevent employees from being overwhelmed by a deluge of data, but also to ensure that email is exploited as a revenue generator and benefit to the business, rather than an inconvenience.”

The results highlight employee habits around email usage, including response frequency during the work day as well as after hours:

The new 24/7 paradigm

• Based on the reported email habits of survey respondents, the line between work and home life has become blurred. More than three-quarters of respondents (81%) said they check their work email on weekends, 55% check email after 11 p.m. and 59% keep on top of their work email while on vacation.
• Outside of regular work hours, more than six in 10 (64%) check email at least once a day. 12% of employees said they check work email in real time beyond the standard workday.
• One in 10 respondents admitted to checking work email at a child’s school event, 9% at a wedding, and 6% at a funeral. An additional 6% said they logged into their work email while they or their spouse was in labor.
• On the flip side, nearly one-third (30%) of employees also said they send personal emails from their work account.

Email used at the office more than any other form of communication

• Despite the growing use of instant messaging platforms, email dwarfs other forms of office communication. 44% of respondents use email at work more than any other communications format, with 28% relying primarily on the phone, 22% on face-to-face, and 6% on instant messaging.
• Email is a constant presence in the lives of SMB employees during the workday. More than three-quarters (76%) of respondents said they typically reply to emails within one hour during work hours, with nearly one-third of them (32%) replying within 15 minutes.

An organizational and business intelligence tool

• Many employees use email for more than just communicating. Well over half (58%) use it as a means of storing and retrieving information.
• Nearly two-thirds (62%) of respondents use specific folders to organize their email for easier access, and 29% of employees archive their email.
• The oldest saved email by a survey respondent was received back in 1994.
• Less than one-quarter (24%) of SMB employees said they use their email as a business intelligence tool, identifying a massive missed opportunity to extract value from email data.

Differences among regions and professions

• Employees in the Southwest are the quickest to respond to email, with 42% replying within 15 minutes of an email arriving. Only 27% of residents in the Midwest respond as quickly.
• Residents of the Southwest are most likely to have checked their email while they or their spouse was in labor (14%). Just 3% of employees in the Northeast have done so.
• Professionals who say they have checked email at a funeral are more likely to work in IT and telecommunications (14%) and finance (13%). People working in sales, media and marketing and health care said they have never checked email at a funeral.
• Legal (38%), IT and telecommunications (32%), and manufacturing (34%) professionals are more likely to respond to emails within 15 minutes. Professionals who think that responding to an email within one working day is sufficient are more apt to work in education (23%), retail, catering and leisure (20%) and arts and culture (20%).
• Employees at larger companies are more likely to check email during off hours.  Two-thirds (66%) of respondents who work at companies with fewer than 10 employees  check email outside of regular work hours, while 75% of those who work at large companies said the same.
• During vacations, 74% of sales, media and marketing professionals said they check their email. In contrast, less than half (46%) of manufacturing and utilities employees do so.

Overwhelmingly, email is viewed positively, not negatively

• Workers overpoweringly appreciate the value of email, despite its omnipresence in daily life.
  Ninety percent of respondents said email is a “blessing,” with just one in ten (10%) considering it a “curse.” Regardless of all the stresses and strains that a deluge of email can bring, it is still preferred to the way we used to work.

“The research also revealed some worrying trends, including that many organizations are failing to efficiently use their collected email archives for customer relationship management and other business intelligence functions, and that many users are putting their email at risk by maintaining unnecessarily large Outlook PST repositories in order to use their inbox as a living database,” said Bousfield. “This is inefficient and puts the organization at risk of substantial data loss from email archive corruption.”

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Mandela Schumacher-Hodge co-founded Tioki, a professional network for the education community (Image: Source)

The idea for Tioki, an online professional network exclusively for the education community, wasn’t happenstance, but it wasn’t planned either.

When Mandela Schumacher-Hodge started her first job as a teacher at a low-income, low-performing middle school in South Central, Los Angeles, the last thing she could imagine was receiving a pink slip 11 months later. The layoff had nothing to do with her performance–it was budgetary. The Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), was about to undergo one of the biggest budget cuts in history, eventually giving notice to some 2,000 teachers, administrators, and counselors. Schumacher-Hodge was a casualty as a result of LAUSD’s mass firing. “Last In, First Out” policy, a seniority-based hiring and firing process.

“I definitely value those who have dedicated several years and even decades of their lives to being a teacher, and I understand the improvements that can be made as one accumulates more experience,” says Schumacher-Hodge, 27, who has a master’s degree in education administration and policy from Loyola Marymount University. “But I do not believe that years of experience alone, should be the sole factor in determining one’s value as a teacher, both as it relates to being hired or fired, and as it relates to how much one is compensated.”

Schumacher-Hodge went on to acquire classroom experience as a Teach for America Corps member and eventually snatched up a job at a Charter School in Pacoima, CA. But the LAUSD life lesson got her thinking more about ways she could level the playing field for all educators to enter the profession. Additionally, when a position opened up at her school, she experienced the frustration inherent in sitting on the other side of the hiring table. Although she screened resumes, conducted phone and in-person interviews, and instituted demo lessons—where teachers came in to teach live lessons while administrators observed—Schumacher-Hodge realized that none of it was enough because she was still unable to find a great candidate.

That’s when she and co-founder Brian Martinez came up with an idea for DemoLesson, a tool that would empower teachers to break out of the archaic resume box and showcase their real-world teaching on camera. Teachers can easily embed video files and links to videos that showcase their teaching ability and experience. It equipped schools with a tool to effectively and efficiently secure the very best educators that match the needs of the students and the culture of the school. It would save schools the time of inviting a candidate by the school only to find out that their teaching skills were not up to par. DemoLesson was the first teacher hiring platform to incorporate video demo lessons and won first place at Startup Weekend Education in San Francisco.

The company has since expanded beyond HR into a connectivity, discovery, and knowledge-sharing platform and changed its name to Tioki. Dubbed “The LinkedIn for Teachers,” Tioki’s purpose is to advance the education system by connecting all of the people who know it best, with the intention of sparking conversation and collaboration that would not likely happen otherwise.

Tioki, which is currently backed by Kapor Capital, 500 Startups, and Imagine K-12, has expanded into an international platform, used by teachers in over 28 different countries, as well as by many of the nation’s top-performing K-12 schools like KIPP Charter Schools, teacher preparation programs like Teach for America, universities like USC, and teacher policy networks like StudentsFirst.

Even Jim Shelton, assistant deputy secretary for innovation and improvement at the Education Department, can be found taking advantage of Tioki’s niche education network.

This week we celebrate Tioki and co-founder Schumacher-Hodge as Tech Startup of the Week for creating a resource that helps teachers to facilitate a more dynamic learning environment for not only the students, but themselves as well.

Join Schumacher-Hodge and other EduTech Entrepreneurs at “Today’s Business Crisis: Educating Tomorrow’s Workforce,” a symposium hosted by Black Enterprise in partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, to be held May 15, 2013.

Click here to read more about Mandela Schumacher-Hodge…

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