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Category Archives: Outsourcing

Samasource launches outsourcing survey

March 20, 2008 in Nonprofits, Outsourcing, Technology by leila
In an effort to better understand the outsourcing needs of US non-profits, socially-responsible companies, and small businesses, we’ve launched a brief survey. Responses will be used to recruit vendors that meet our quality and social impact criteria for our pilot project, starting this month.

The New and Improved Facebook Platform

March 5, 2008 in Facebook, Outsourcing, Technology by leila
Ben Ling, Director of Platform Product Marketing at Facebook, offered some valuable insights on the direction of Facebook’s platform to attendees of Graphing Social Patterns in San Diego. His talk emphasized increased support for applications that add long term value (such as Causes, an app that helps users support non-profit organizations) and tools that eliminate [...]

Opportunities in outsourcing ripe for SMEs

March 4, 2008 in Africa, Outsourcing, Social Enterprise by imende
As corporate competition rises companies are constantly looking for solutions to increase efficiency at manageable costs. Several companies have discovered that outsourcing certain operations of their business has provided these solutions and allowed them to leverage their competitive edge. The idea behind it is to outsource secondary operations that are not core skill [...]

Kenya’s Quest for Fiber

February 26, 2008 in Africa, Outsourcing, Technology by leila
From Sam Imende, Samasource’s program manager in Nairobi: Kenyans are eagerly anticipating the construction of two major fiber optic cable lines that will greatly enhance internet services and significantly cut down the costs of telecommunications in the region. The current copper cables and satellite systems in Kenya have put ICT based companies at a major disadvantage [...]

Thomas Friedman on I.T. and E.T. in Rural India

February 23, 2008 in Outsourcing, Social Enterprise, Technology by leila
Tom Friedman wrote about the growing rural BPO trend in India last year after traveling to Ethakota, a small village east of Hyderabad where Satyam Computer Services, one of India’s outsourcing giants, set up a data center. In a New York Times Op-Ed, Friedman describes the challenge of setting up shop in areas with unreliable [...]

The Green IT Revolution

February 19, 2008 in Outsourcing, Technology by leila
Gartner, a Stamford-based consulting firm, recently named “green IT” as one of the ten forces that will shape business and information technology in 2008. Survey data seems to support this — according to Forrester Research, as of October, 38% of IT professionals said their companies use environmental criteria in their evaluation and selection of IT [...]

“Wily Brokers” Hurt Kenyan Outsourcing Firms

January 15, 2008 in Africa, Outsourcing, Technology by leila
Brokers have cost some of East Africa’s top outsourcing firms tens of thousands of dollars in finder’s fees that led nowhere. A recent article in Business Daily Africa reports that many local firms are forced to use middlemen to find work, since foreign business development is prohibitively expensive. Often based abroad, middlemen dictate contract terms [...]

One Laptop Per Freelancer

December 21, 2007 in Outsourcing, Social Enterprise, Technology by leila
One Laptop Per Child is making headlines with its $188 XO laptop, the brainchild of MIT’s Nicholas Negroponte. The project has received plenty of criticism for its failure to lower the price to $100 (Negroponte’s goal) and attract key politicians and government buyers from low-income countries. Some tech bloggers and reviewers dislike the laptop itself, [...]

World Bank: African Diaspora Key to the Continent’s Development

December 10, 2007 in Africa, Outsourcing by leila
The World Bank held an African Diaspora Open House on November 29th in Washington, D.C. A 2005 study found that remittances from members of the diaspora are in excess of $4-6 billion per year, making this group a vital force in Africa’s development. This has some implications for the responsible outsourcing movement. Professionals living outside their [...]

Greater efficiency is expected from nonprofits

November 27, 2007 in Nonprofits, Outsourcing by joysunwordpress
A recent story in the New York Times highlighted the growing pressure on non-profits in the U.S. to operate more efficiently. Foundations and non-profits have been called”the last bastion of paper, pencil and greenshades”… but times are definitely changing, and outsourcing will become an increasingly important strategy for organizations looking to become leaner and [...]