Social marketing firm Buddy Media is being bought out by Salesforce.com in a $689 million stock and cash deal. The transaction will close Oct. 31 (the end of the third fiscal quarter).

Among its 1,000 customer, Buddy Media includes the companies ofFord, Hewlett-Packard and Mattel. Thanks to its capabilities of sending targeted marketing content through YouTube, LinkedIn and Facebook, Salesforce.com will build on the monitoring technology in social media through its recent Radian6 purchase.

According to Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff, the Marketing Cloud leadership will enable the company to take advantage of the massive opportunity within the next five years.

The purchase is arriving on the heels of rival Oracle’s buyout of Virtue, who is the competitor to Buddy Media.

Checking to see if a directory exists and then creating it if it is not present requires a few lines of code.  Isn't Python great.   Begin by importing the os module and use the exists and makedirs functions.

import os

if os.path.exists(somedirectory):
   os.makedirs(somedirectory)

We are not all equally motivated. Some people have more self-drive than other people. This is why we find that some people always end up at the top even when the odds are against them. An employee, with this realization, through the Human Resource department, should be able to design efficient career development systems. For this system to work, the employer must understand the nature of the business environment in which they are operating.

Why Train Employees?

The purpose of training employees is to enable them to grow with time and increase their efficiency. The business world is quite dynamic, nothing stays the same for long. Training one’s employees allows them to keep abreast with the ever changing technological advancements and many other factors that are relevant to his/her line of work. Employees cannot be expected to solve all their employer’s expectations with static skills and techniques. Even the most updated technology becomes obsolete at some point.
People are the biggest assets in organizations. For an establishment to flourish, it is important that the employer understands certain key things that help spur their development.

In a report from the Harvard Business Review, “The Impact of Employee Engagement of Performance,” the most impactful employee drivers are:

A whole new world was thrown wide open with the advent of the concept of open source. The biggest advantage of open source projects is the easy availability of the source code and also the rights to tweak it or modify the code as we deem fit.

Listed below are some top open source projects that are making waves with their innovative ideas at this moment.

ProjectLibre

Project Libre is the open source replacement of Microsoft Project. It was one among the top 10 open source projects of 2013. With over 6 million downloads; it has most certainly captured the imagination of people around the world. Details of project Libre could be found at http://www.projectlibre.org/ . Project Libre has separate release for mainframes. It also has a web based version which further increases its overall appeal. One of the main advantages is that it has a list of tasks that can be tracked to closure. It can also be used in conjunction with LibreOffice to provide a great set of tools to the team leaders.

Diaspora