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A new social network has an interesting premise: connecting people around the world based on what they want to do before they die.

Called My Last Wish, the app encourages users to post wishes on a ‘Wish Wall’ and then befriend others who might share their dreams.

“I believed in the possibility that there can be two persons in this world with same hopes, dreams and wishes,” Kirtan Thaker, co-founder of the White Lotus Corporation, the group behind the app, told Mashable. “I was confident that if we create a app where this possibility can be turned into reality, people will love this concept and they will get a chance to make friends who are unknown but having just one thing in common which is the last wish.”

When sharing a wish, users can also choose to attach their email address or phone number so others that share their dream can connect with them. Tapping on a person’s contact information within the app will add their information to the contacts list in your phone.

A palm icon appears beside wishes, allowing you to “aLike” a wish you share, or “give a five” to that person to express your support for their wish and become friends.

While definitely a little morbid, and certainly out of the ordinary, the app already has a little bit of a following. Posted wishes range from things such as traveling the world to writing a book. Thaker says that the ultimate goal behind the app is to help people make friends that share similar hopes and dreams, or even help someone potentially find his or her soul mate.

White Lotus plans to add a location-based feature to the app in the future to help you find people located physically around you, and if the iOS version of the app does well the company plans to release an Android version as well.

What do you think about My Last Wish? Is the app cool, or creepy? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

More About: App, death, iOS, iphone

A startup called Uppidy has unveiled a service that backs up SMS services to the cloud, making it easier for individuals, parents, or even your employer to read your text messages.

Uppidy was founded by entrepreneur Joshua Konowe, who came up with the idea after dropping his cell phone in the toilet and going through a difficult process to retrieve his text messages from AT&T. The small startup in Washington, DC launched almost a year ago with a free service for consumers. In the past few weeks, the company started selling to the corporate world.

So far, a few unnamed businesses are testing Uppidy on corporate phones, Konowe told Ars. One customer is backing up and monitoring text messages from 500 phones, and another is doing so on 200. Konowe said he was initially just going to sell to consumers (including parents who want to monitor their kids’ messaging), but interest from corporations led him to develop a business-focused service as well.

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You’ve probably been overwhelmed by enough Instagram shots of this weekend’s annular solar eclipse to think you’ve seen it from every angle and through every filter. But you haven’t seen anything like the video above.

Photographer Cory Poole made the one-minute video by combining 700 still images through a Coronado Solar Max 60 Double Stack telescope, according to his YouTube post. The telescope “has a very narrow bandpass allowing you to see the chromosphere and not the much brighter photosphere below it,” Poole writes. Add in the dramatic, spacey soundtrack, and the video becomes even more of a winner.

What are the coolest annular solar eclipse photos and videos you’ve seen? Let us know in the comments.

More About: space, viral, viral videos, YouTube

The subtlest experiment in quantum mechanics is also one of the simplest: send a stream of particles through two openings in a barrier, and you'll produce an interference pattern because the particles act as waves. Amazingly, this also works if you send the particles through one at a time—the interference pattern builds up slowly as more particles go through. The double-slit experiment has been replicated with photons, electrons, atoms, and even entire molecules.

Typically, the particle nature and the wave nature have to be observed separately; if you track the particles through a single slit, the interference pattern vanishes. However, Ralf Menzel, Dirk Puhlmann, Axel Heuer, and Wolfgang P. Schleich entangled two photons and allowed one to pass through a barrier with two slits. The entanglement enabled them to determine which opening the photon went through, but a detector on the other side still picked up an interference pattern, demonstrating light's wave- and particle-like characteristics simultaneously.

The key to the experiment is the particular state in which the photons were produced. The researchers started with a laser in a configuration known as TEM₀₁ mode, which means the electric (E) and magnetic (M) fields are perpendicular (or transverse, T) to the direction the photons travel. The "01" means there are two distinct points of maximum intensity.

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London soccer club Chelsea won its first Champions League title on Saturday, defeating German side Bayern Munich to become Europe’s best team. It was a nail-biting close final match that went down to a penalty shoot-out.

But on Twitter, it wasn’t even close — Chelsea was dominant.

The all-star London club gained 73% of team-specific Twitter mentions related to the match, while its star players were buzz magnets as well. The match’s five most-mentioned players — in order, Didier Drogba, John Terry, David Luiz, Ashley Cole and Petr Cech — all suit up for the Blues.

Chelsea’s coach even outpaced his Bayern counterpart by a rate of more than two mentions to one.

And Chelsea’s sponsor, Samsung, was mentioned nine times as often as T-Mobile, which sponsors Bayern.

This is all according to research by the marketing firm ExactTarget, which tracked and analyzed more than 1.1 million match day tweets to see how the Champions League final played out online. ExactTarget’s findings are summarized — in both German and English — in the infographic below.

SEE ALSO: English Premier League: The Social Media Season

Despite soccer’s worldwide appeal, nearly 69% of Champions League chatter took place in English. The chattiest countries? Great Britain, at almost 23%, the U.S. (9.9%), Brazil (9.4%), Germany (8.6%) and Indonesia (5.8%). The rest of the world together, meanwhile, produced just over 43% of Champions League tweets. Spanish was the second most popular language for tweeters, at 15.8%.

This celebratory tweet from Chelsea’s official Twitter account gathered the most match day retweets, with more than 7,000. Congratulatory posts from UEFA and Spanish power FC Barcelona also gathered more than 2,800 retweets apiece. Chelsea, meanwhile, used the weekend’s social media buzz to surge past 1 million Twitter followers.

For the full picture of how this weekend’s Champions League final played out on Twitter, check out the infographic below.

Did you follow the match? What role did Twitter play for you? Let us know in the comments.

Thumbnail image courtesy toksuede, Flickr.

More About: infographics, sports, Twitter

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I'm not the biggest Gmail fan. Sure, I use the service, but my inbox fills up too fast, and managing the madness is measured procrastination. Email in general is the problem; Google's service is simply easy to blame. But a new enhancement coming in days has me finally ready to adapt behavior to attitude -- and stop being the email file clerk.

Google is in process of adding nifty contextual, autocomplete capabilities to Gmail -- that is if you find this kind of soothsaying useful. I confess to making more typing errors when Google search autocomplete tries to anticipate my thoughts. Mind reader it is not enough, so what good is all that information Google supposedly collects about us all? :) As for Gmail, the new autocomplete starts with what you've got.

Isaac Elias, Google software engineer, explains:

Now when you type something into the Gmail search box, the autocomplete predictions will be tailored to the content in your email, so you can save time and get the information you want faster than ever before. For example, you might now get lax reservation or lax united as predictions after typing 'lax' if you have received an email with a flight confirmation for your trip to Los Angeles in your inbox recently.

I shutter to think how Apple's Siri might respond if I asked for lax. Constipation cure perhaps? I sold my iPhone, so it's all snarky speculation, since I can't ask Siri.

The Gmail feature will be slow coming. "We will be rolling out improved autocomplete in English over the next few days and will follow with more languages over the next few months. While initially improved autocomplete will not be available for Google Apps customers, we plan to bring this feature to Apps domains in the future", Elias says.

Why do these enhancements all seem to come to Apps last? This isn't the first time. Is it one of those businesses aren't early adopters things?

Anyway, the change means that I'll stop filing away email. I'll clear out my inbox to "personal" and "work" folders and sort everything by search. Gmail search already is quite efficient, but contextual autocomplete is enough for me to change my wicked ways -- well, some of them.

What does this mean for anyone emailing me. I might respond within days now. ;-)

Photo Credit: SOMATUSCAN/Shutterstock

Back in February we told you about Lady Gaga’s social network “Little Monsters”, which could turn the concept. of how celebrities interact with their fans on its ear.

The site, powered by Palo Alto based Backplane and still in private beta, skips social networks like Twitter and Facebook, allowing Gaga’s fans to interact with her directly.

When celebrities like Ashton Kutcher and Lady Gaga joined Twitter, it was a major turning point for the product. A whole new userbase flooded the micro-sharing network, who foam at the mouth for every 140 character update from their favorite singer or movie star.

With her own social network, Gaga is making her fans feel even more special, as well as setting them up for opportunities to sell albums and schwag to them directly:

What’s more intimate than that experience? A mobile one of course. According to one of the designers at Backplane, a “Little Monsters” app is in the works:

Check it out. Little Monsters App on @dribbble: drbl.in/ecRI

— Caleb Ogden (@calebogden) May 21, 2012

In response, Backplane’s CEO said that we might see Gaga on the iPhone mighty soon:

Soon! RT @calebogden: Check it out. Little Monsters App on @dribbble: drbl.in/ecRI

— Matt Michelsen (@MCMichelsen) May 21, 2012

What does the app look like? Take a look at the screenshots that Caleb Ogden shared on Dribble today:

While Little Monsters might not take a huge bite out of Twitter’s usage, it surely will steal eyeballs when it comes to Gaga fanatics. If the musician is posting exclusive updates to her own social network, there’s simply no reason to look elsewhere for the content.

Backplane is a community platform, meaning that the Little Monsters model could be spun out an infinite number of times for other celebrities with massive appeal. Justin Bieber anyone?

Only a couple of weeks after launching its much-awaited iPad app, Spotify has now opened its song-filled doors to Australia and New Zealand. In a couple of blogs that look to be all but copy/pasted, the company runs down its services and the pricing points for each.

Free, Unlimited and Premium are all available. Unlimited will run $6.99 AUD and $7.49 NZD, while the Premium pricing is $11.99 and $12.99 respectively.

The company has been on a tear with new updates lately. We’ve gotten the Spotify+Apps combination, improved search and most recently an update for Playlist Radio. Unfortunately, the company’s implementation of its embeddable Play Button is a bit wanting, as it requires that you have Spotify installed in order to play back a track. But with improved social features and a ridiculous amount of funding underway, it seems Spotify is bent on world domination.

Bradley Mellon

Solar eclipse as seen from El Centro, California

Click here to view this gallery.

Over the weekend, an astounding astronomical phenominon occurred: an annular solar eclipse. This type of eclipse, which happens less than once a year, occurs when the Earth’s moon crosses paths with the sun to create the effect of a spectacular glowing ring. This is due to the size of the moon compared to the size of the sun.

Only people in a certain geographic area get to glimpse each of these rare phenomena. This time, people in Japan, California, Nevada, southern Utah, northern Arizona, and New Mexico were granted the best view.

We asked Mashable readers to submit their best picture of the solar eclipse. We received very inventive photo submissions from across the world.

Check out some of our favorite solar eclipse photos that you sent us, and let us know in the comments what you thought of the eclipse.

More About: photography, Solar eclipse, space

The United States Supreme Court has agreed to consider whether a coalition of human rights groups and journalists has standing to challenge the 2008 FISA Amendments Act. The Obama administration has argued that because none of the plaintiffs can prove that their communications were intercepted by any of the government's secret surveillance programs, they lack standing to challenge the legislation that authorizes them.

A three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit rejected that argument last year, holding that it was reasonable to assume the government would use the new powers Congress had granted it. The plaintiffs regularly communicate with overseas individuals who fear surveillance by the US government and say they've been forced to spend money arranging face-to-face meetings because their sources no longer feel comfortable communicating electronically. A majority of the Second Circuit ruled that these costs were sufficient to give the plaintiffs standing to challenge the legislation.

But not everyone agreed. Indeed, the court was evenly divided on the government's request for the case to be re-heard by all 12 judges of the Second Circuit. Chief Judge Dennis G. Jacobs ridiculed the plaintiffs' case, comparing it to a "plaintiff’s allegation that the CIA is controlling him through a radio embedded in his molar." He argued that "the only purpose of this litigation is for counsel and plaintiffs to act out their fantasy of persecution, to validate their pretensions to policy expertise, to make themselves consequential rather than marginal, and to raise funds for self-sustaining litigation."

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The "holiday season" window that generally runs from September through November every year always sees more than its fair share of big name video game releases. But in recent weeks, a number of publishers have delayed their anticipated titles into the early part of next year, rather than having them face what's sure to be another overcrowded marketplace at the end of 2012.

First, Irrational Games announced that long-awaited BioShock Infinite would hit stores next February, rather than its originally planned October 16 release date. Then Crystal Dynamics announced last week that the latest reboot of the venerable Tomb Raider franchise would be hitting in the first quarter of 2013. Finally, just today, Sega announced that its Alien: Colonial Marines game will be released on February 12, 2013 rather than the previously planned "Fall 2012" window (the new date doesn't apply to the planned Wii U version, which is still up in the air at this point).

It's not like these delays will leave the holiday game shelves barren. Plenty of highly anticipated games are still planted firmly in the busy three-month span, including the newest entries in the Assassin's Creed, Borderlands, Halo, Medal of Honor and Call of Duty franchises (and probably some games that aren't sequels, but who cares about them?). The end-of-year glut of major releases is the obvious result of a flood of extra holiday gift dollars pouring into the game market during the holiday season. After all, would you rather release a game during a month when only serious gamers are going to be looking to buy it, or during a month when those gamers' non-playing friends and relatives are also looking to spend some extra money in the sector.

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The B9Creator is a 3D printer that’s flying off virtual shelves on Kickstarter.

The B9Creator is a do-it-yourself 3D printer kit. Currently, it’s one of the most successful 3D printer projects seeking funding on the website. Backers have already raised $164,418 with 21 days left until the funding deadline. The project surpassed the initial $50,000 goal within a day.

Supporters of the project will receive a B9Creator 3D-printing kit with a donation of $2,375 or more. The estimated delivery date for a limited number of printers is August 2012.

Guitars, custom prosthetic limbs and jawbone transplants are all products of 3D printing. These printers create solid objects by generating layers of material on top of each other.

The B9Creator, developed by Michael Joyce, is made with anodized aluminum and stainless steel. The portable device is supposedly able generate more complex and detailed models than other 3D printers.

It does so via a projector, which is attached to the machine mechanically and shines light to “cure” the resin material, setting it in place. This allows the B9Creator to generate fragile, high-resolution molds. The 3D printer generates about an inch of material every hour.

SEE ALSO: 3D Printer Creates Chairs From Recycled Refrigerators [VIDEO]

The resin costs 10 cents per gram. A miniature Eiffel Tower mold printed by the B9Creator is seemingly sturdy and extraordinarily detailed. The model, which weighs about 12 grams, only used about $1.20 of material.

Once the B9 is in production, consumers will be able to build and print resin models at home. The machine is less than 30 pounds and about two and a half feet tall. The B9Creator kit will come up with basic software allowing users to come up with new models. The printer — upon completion of the project — will have an open API for developers to advance the existing software and hardware.

Would you buy a 3D printer for office or home use? Tell us in the comments what you would create.

More About: 3D printers, kickstarter, Tech

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In what some might view as a surprise announcement, T-Mobile’s CEO, Philipp Humm, told the Seattle Times that his network is more than content with the performance of Windows Phone. Microsoft and its partners have been quite close-chested when it comes to Windows Phone sales figures, making comments of this nature revelatory.

Here’s the full excerpt from the larger interview that relates to Windows Phone:

[Seattle Times]: T-Mobile made a commitment to push Windows Phone this year. How is that working out?

[Philipp Humm]: I think we have a very good relationship with Microsoft, and we discovered that, in particular, for customers who are new to smartphones, they really enjoy the simplicity of the Microsoft [user interface], so they like the design and the ease of it.

[Seattle Times]: Are Windows phones selling as well as you hoped?

[Philipp Humm]: We are so far quite pleased and I think Microsoft, if you talk to them, [is] quite pleased with T-Mobile.

There are two important points that Humm made, the first of which is that Windows Phone is finding its own niche. In a world dominated by the iOS-Android duopoly, to find market space is a challenge. However, given that most markets are still making the transition to complete (effective) smartphone penetration, Windows Phone, given Humm’s comment, may have found its in.

Secondly, his comments that Microsoft is content with T-Mobile implies that the working relationship between the two firms will likely continue. T-Mobile, which lacks both the iPhone and a top-tier Windows Phone handset, could use a hand up.

And of course, having a carrier positively remark on Windows Phone sales is, well, not exactly small potatoes. Still, Microsoft, how about some real figures?

Music-streaming site Spotify announced on Monday that it is headed down under.

The Sweden-based popular service — which came to the U.S. in the summer of 2011 — will be bringing its platform of more than 16 million tracks to Australia and New Zealand. The move highlights Spotify’s aggressive growth strategy of expanding into new markets.

Although Spotify recently launched in Germany, it has yet to debut in certain regions, including Latin America and Canada. Competitors such as Rdio, which is already popular in Brazil and Canada, and Sony Music Unlimited, which has currently the broadest international availability, are already mainstays in Australia and New Zealand.

SEE ALSO: Spotify Who? Pandora Surges Past 150 Million Registered Users

However, there is no denying that Spotify has its sights set on global growth.

Unlike its initial offering in the U.S. which featured only six months of free unlimited access, users in Australia and New Zealand will have full access to Spotify indefinitely. In March, Spotify revealed plans to keep the service free past the six month trial. Originally, for those that didn’t sign up for a premium package — ranging from $4.99 to $9.99 a month — the site would be limited to 10 free hours of streaming music each month.

Which country do you wish Spotify would roll out its services to soon? Do you think the platform is on path to become the largest of its kind? Let us know in the comments.

More About: apps, Music, rdio, sony, spotify

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Microsoft has revealed the final product lineup for Visual Studio 11, including a version of Visual Studio Express for Windows Phone app development, along with system requirements. Read more...

Redditors currently serving in the U.S. armed forces are about to get a big thank you from the Reddit community. The social news site aims to pair users in the U.S. with members serving abroad in an offical Reddit gift exchange for the troops.

The initiative is part of a larger ongoing project, “redditgifts.” This secret-santa style gift exchange allows users to swap goods with each other. Past redditgifts exchanges have presented users with DVDs, letters, basic necessities and even a laptop.

The troops gift exhange launched Tuesday — and comedian Stephen Colbert has already claimed the first spot on the list of gift givers, or “santas.”

Colbert is no stranger to Reddit. The community caught his attention when they raised more than $100,000 in less than 8 hours for the “Restoring Truthiness” rally

According to Reddit, it will be getting more well-known Redditors to join in on the redditgifts for troops exchange too.

In the video below, Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian claims he was inspired by recent conversations with members of the armed forces on Reddit who received care packages from other users.

This is one of many recent initiatives from Reddit that show the impact it has when it convenes its large community for goodwill. We’ve seen what small gestures and random acts of kindness had on one terminally ill man, and Ohanian hopes to bring the same encouragement and good-spirited nature to the many troops overseas.

SEE ALSO: How Reddit Saved One Man’s Life

Signups for troops and santas begins Tuesday May 21, and ends June 18. Users sending care packages must ship by July 9.

What do you think about Reddit’s recent acts of social good? Share your thoughts in the comments.

More About: reddit, stephen colbert, trending, U.S. Military

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San Francisco startup Leap Motion today unveiled its killer product, a small USB-attached three dimensional sensor (a la Microsoft's Kinect) which is meant for use in small spaces on small screens. The product is called Leap and is available in limited quantities for just $70.

Leap creates an eight cubic foot interaction space, and Leap Motion says the tiny device is "200 times more sensitive than existing touch-free products and technologies." This is appealing because the current motion control experiences delivered by Microsoft with Kinect, and other third party providers such as Belgium's SoftKinetic are "living room" experiences which require users to stand anywhere from six to eight feet away from the sensor. Leap can sit right on your desk and utilize only the space in front of you and around your PC if you so choose.

The peripheral is designed to be used on Windows 7 machines, and lets the user click, grab, scroll and use "touchscreen" gestures like swipe and pinch to zoom in 3D space. Leap can also determine when the user's hand is holding an item like a pencil or pen, and can change the input accordingly.

The team says it will be ready to support Mac OS, Windows 8, and Linux machines in the near future, but does not have a release date yet for even the first batch of devices. We're all pretty excited about the possibilities here, but we haven't gotten to see the device first-hand, and all the imagery is mocked up. We're trying to find out if this is worth getting worked up over.

Currently, Leap's launch goal is Winter 2012, but developers will be able to get their hands on one of "thousands" of free developer kits in the next one to three months by applying to participate in the developer program.

First in a series. Many IT professionals know how difficult major technology purchases can be. Projects like picking a new CMS system, selecting a data center or replacing helpdesk software are relatively infrequent. This means employees are not well-practiced with determining and organizing requirements or the product selection process.

They are often biased towards those products they already know, and may not be familiar with some others competing in that market segment. Throw aggressive sales people and tight deadlines into the mix and you have the recipe for a technology purchase that is decidedly not optimized for the business.

Lack of structure in decision-making is a large part of the difficulty. Putting a structure around the decision-making process makes it easier to manage and consistently faster. However, the real payoff is when you make a purchase decision optimized for your specific needs. In other words, you buy something that really works for your organization!

Previously I identified the hidden costs of poor technology purchasing. This followup is the first of a two-part article describing a structured method for making technology purchase decisions. The first part covers creating and managing purchase requirements. The second explores evaluating products against these requirements. This structured approach works best for technology purchases where there are many product features to compare or requirements to consider. Note that in this article the word product is defined very broadly, and includes software, hardware and intangible services that an enterprise might purchase.

Organizing Requirements

Properly defining purchasing requirements is the key to making the best possible purchase. People often begin with a blank page in Microsoft Word when gathering requirements. Initially this works well, but it does not scale up as the number of requirements grows. As the information increases, it gets harder to manage the requirements because there is so little structure. What structure there is, must be manually managed.

The first step to bringing structure to the decision making process is to organize requirements with a spreadsheet. Because there are always far more requirements than products to be evaluated, it is better to organize the spreadsheet with requirements columns down the left and products across the top. Spreadsheets work very well, but they eventually suffer from a scaling problem as the number of requirements increases.

This could be improved by building some sort of database. That usually is too much work for one purchase, but leads to the idea of a general-purpose tool. Since that is the realm of commercial products, this article concentrates on using spreadsheets to make the purchasing decision.

Requirement Details

The second step is to realize that a requirement is more than just a name. Each requirement has several parts, as listed below. Typically, these are arranged as columns on the left of the spreadsheet. Note that requirements can also be expressed as features; it depends how you word them.

Name: A short descriptive tag that uniquely identifies a requirement.

Description: Provides context and amplifies the meaning of the name to ensure everybody knows exactly what is meant by that requirement.

Person: Optional, and only used in larger evaluations involving many people. Describes to whom the requirement is important.

Importance: This describes in words how much the requirement matters to the business (or person).  Usually implemented as a drop down box. There should also be a numerical measure associated with the importance (more on this in the second article), and a description of the importance. See table below for an example. Note that the “Importance Description” is vital so that everybody involved has the same understanding of each term in the table.

Reason: Explains why the requirement is important, and provides context for evaluating products against this requirement.

 

Example of a Requirements Importance Table
Value	Requirement Importance	Importance Description
0	No interest	Do not care if this requirement is satisfied or not. This entry verifies the requirement was considered.
1	Nice to have	Nice to have if the requirement is satisfied, but nothing to worry about if it is not.
2	Useful	Useful if features satisfy this requirement, but if not there would only be a minor inconvenience in working around it.
3	Important	Without satisfying this requirement, there is noticeable inconvenience, but that can be worked around with some effort.
4	Very important	If this requirement is not adequately satisfied, there is a good chance of selecting another product. There would be significant effort expended in working around it.
5	Critical	This requirement is almost essential, almost a must have. There would be major limitations when using the product if this requirement was not adequately satisfied.
6	Show stopper	If this requirement is not adequately satisfied, the product is automatically excluded. Few requirements are true show stoppers, usually most are critical.

 

Finding Requirements

After using the product in production for a few months, you do not want to find features are missing. That is when you can get buyer’s remorse! Thus, this next step of finding requirements is very important. There are three primary methods, listed below.

Your Knowledge

As an IT professional, you usually have some knowledge of requirements, especially on the technical side. This is a good place to start. Product reviews can be helpful, particularly when the reviewer makes negative comments. Pay particular attention to any reader comments added to on-line reviews because they can highlight real issues, and can alert you to the presence of unknown competitive products.

Reverse Engineering Product Features

When considering a major technology purchase there are usually a few potential products already in mind. Use the features of these products to generate your list of requirements. This is really reverse engineering your requirements from the product features, and is an incredibly powerful technique for rapidly getting a comprehensive requirements list together.

After reverse engineering the first product, you have a great set of requirements and a product that matches up very well. You are tempted to stop right there! But when you repeat the process with a second product, your perspective quickly changes, and you are likely to add quite a few more requirements. It’s a bit like needing to hear both sides of an argument. Ideally, you want to reverse engineer the features of at least three products to ensure you get a broad enough mix of requirements.

User Input

After reverse-engineering requirements, you need other people to tell you how important the requirements are to them, and why they are important. This helps you better understand the problem the proposed purchase is attempting to solve.

When considering software purchases it is useful to examine the flow of work around the system because that can also alert you to new requirements. Pay special attention to the manual workflows of existing processes.

Managing Requirements

As the number of purchase requirements grows, you need to manage them. Do this by collecting related requirements in groups. You can also weight requirement groups, explained in the follow-up article. Broadly speaking, requirements are either technical or business. Under business, you should include things like legal, compliance, etc. and softer things like vendor financial health, product price and contract flexibility. For example:

• For any vendor, what is their financial health? What is their cash flow like compared to competitors? You do not want to sign up with a vendor and find they go out of business after a year.
• You could look at datacenters. What is the average age of the equipment? Too new and it may suggest an immature vendor. Too old and it may suggest cashflow problems.
• You are considering a SaaS product. Does the vendor require a minimum commitment of a year, or will they allow you a monthly contract while you pilot the product?

Even though these softer requirements may be somewhat subjective, it is vital to consider them because they can make a real difference to the vendor relationship and the ultimate success of the purchase.

Requirements Conclusion

Properly defining your purchasing requirements is the key to making the best possible purchase. In this article, we described a structured method for creating and managing purchase requirements using a spreadsheet. In part two we describe how to rate products against the requirements so you can select the product that best meets your specific needs.

Photo Credit: Adchariyaphoto/Shutterstock

Chris Doig has personally seen the problems caused by poor technology purchasing in multiple companies. He co-founded Wayferry, a startup that created a free decision support tool for technology purchasing. Wayferry’s mission is to help IT people everywhere make better technology purchasing decisions.

Google will be adding yet another new improvement to its Gmail service, which should bring better autocomplete predictions to the search box for Gmail users. Read more...

Josh Lafazan, an 18-year-old high school senior from Syosset, New York, shattered all kinds of records when he was elected to his school district’s board last week. He became the youngest-ever elected official in New York state, and voter turnout was well above normal.

How did Lafazan make such an achievement possible? In part, thanks to smart use of the web and social media.

While many commentators are marveling at the Internet’s ability to bring together large swaths of people from across nations, Lafazan’s campaign did just the opposite: he used his website and social media, such as Facebook and live video service Spreecast, to bring together his nearby friends and neighbors under his campaign’s banner.

“Josh was the only candidate for school board to have a personal website,” said Jake Asman, Lafazan’s campaign manager and fellow Syosset High School student. “He really went out there and expressed his campaign views. He used his Facebook page and Spreecast the same way.”

On Spreecast, Lafazan engaged in face-to-face town halls with his soon-to-be constituency. Asman credits the video site with a great deal of the campaign’s success.

“Spreecast was a big one for us,” said Asman. “We had more than 2,000 views on our first Spreecast. Josh was able to interact directly, face-to-face with members of the community. It’s one thing to have a story on [the local news], it’s another for people to ask questions directly. He answered every question he got, it took almost two hours.”

Lafazan also built up a sizable community of followers on Facebook. A note he posted thanking his supporters gathered more than 400 likes — an impressive feat for a candidate in a campaign with only a few thousand voters.

Social media proved useful when the campaign took a turn for the bizarre. The Syosset school district accused Lafazan’s father, Jeffery, of stealing information about the district’s residents. An automated message that went out to voters before the election said that “Jeffrey Lafazan unlawfully removed district records that contained the names and addresses of residents. He removed the records without permission and ran away,” according to NBC.

Lafazan’s father later returned the documents, saying he didn’t know he wasn’t allowed to take them.

Lafazan, meanwhile, labeled the accusations as a “smear campaign.” He took to Facebook to explain his side of what happened, and Asman said that move helped Lafazan beat the rumors.

“When the school district tried to pull their smear campaign, Josh hopped on Facebook and sent out a status with what had really happened,” said Asman. “It got 250 likes and 200 shares. People very quickly realized what was happening.”

Of course, Lafazan campaigned hard in the offline world, too.

“He was in the community and the high school every day, interacting with neighbors and other seniors that were 18 and could vote,” said Asman.

Lafazan went on to win the election by more than 2,000 votes, or 82% of the total votes — and it looks like he’ll be using social media to govern, not just to campaign.

“If anyone has any suggestions to help improve this district,” wrote Lafazan in a post-victory Facebook post, “do not hesitate to contact me and share those ideas with me.”

How is social media changing local elections in your neighborhood? Let us know in the comments.

Thumbnail image courtesy of iStockphoto, sjlocke

More About: Facebook, Politics, Social Media, spreecast, US