As a Persian/American entrepreneur who lived, found, and  worked for various hot and successful DC tech startups like Yurie Systems (acquired by Lucent for $1.23 B),  telezoo.com (the top 5 B2B in the world), and as the founder of awesomize.me, I’m proud to let you know the world’s first human rights declaration, is on display for the first time in the United States. Starting with our awesome DC through April 28 at the Smithsonian’s Sackler Gallery, then  in Houston, New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles.

The Cyrus Cylinder is one of the most important pieces of pottery in history.  It is a 2,500-year-old artifact, described as the world’s first human rights declaration,  The Cyrus Cylinder carries an account of how Persian King Cyrus conquered Babylon and would allow freedom of worship. It also confirms a Bible story of Cyrus releasing people held captive to return to their homes. This would include the Jews’ return to Jerusalem. The second video below shows the U.S. President Thomas Jefferson’s copy of a book about Cyrus, illustrating how the Persian king inspired the founding fathers and the US Constitution might be written based on his declaration!

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Feel free to connect with me via awesomize.me

Feel free to connect with me via awesomize.me

Here is a 2 minutes demo of what the company is all about and what’s trying to solve:

More about the company here.

Read more about the position here and apply via the contact us page link provided below the job description.

Feel free to connect with me via awesomize.me

Back in December of 2009, Elias Shams launched AwesomeDC blog with mainly One MISSION to accomplish:  To wipe out  all those Politics, corruption, and scandals crap from the face of Washington, DC.  Then to position the Nation’s capital as a city of technology, partying, clubbing and fun! Mainly  as a Tech hub. Read the 2^nd paragraph right below the video of his interview with CNN where he says “My intention with this blog is to show the world Washington, DC is much more than just Politics, corruption, and scandals. Frankly, I am not sure of that myself either, but I will try  I will be covering everything happening in awesome DC, with the focus on the technology, parties, clubs, events, and of course the awesome Washingtonians”

Well! that day arrived four years and 16 days later. We are excited to let you all know awesome Washington, DC is now positioned as No. 1 on Forbes’ newly released list of America’s New Tech Hotspots.

Credit to:
-          Hundreds of our local tech entrepreneurs including Homan Radfar founder of AddThis, the largest social infrastructure and data platform serving 14 m sites and 1.3 B users, Al Noshirvani founder of Motionsoft, and particularly my own boss, Elias Shams, the top network engineer at Yurie Systems which was acquired by Lucent for $1.3 B in 1998, founder of telezoo.com in 1999,  AwesomeDC  in 2009, and now awesomize.me, the social path for u2b2b!

-          Our awesome mentors, supporters, and investors of entrepreneurs including Tonya Harmon with The Founder Institute, Startup America Partnership, Glen Hellman founder of  Driven Forward, Mehrunisa Qayyum founder of PITAPOLICY, Mark Walsh,  Jonathon Aberman, and Frank Gruber founder of Tech Cocktail.

-          Our local universities – in particular the University of Maryland and The George Washington University for introducing and offering various entrepreneurship programs

-          And, particularly to both President Obama and mayor Vincent Gray for their passion and support for technology, and entrepreneurship programs in Washington, DC.

So, congrats to all of our awesome Washingtonian entrepreneurs, supporters, investors, mentors, bloggers, and the media for making this happen! Let’s keep it going. We got to make sure to stay on top for years to come!

Feel free to connect with me via awesomize.me

Feel free to connect with me via awesomize.me

I said “Yes”

Shortly after their migration, the white people faced strong resistance from the native people, the Indians. Right?

I said “Yes”

The Indians and the white people could not get along right from the start so, the white people started killing the Indians with their more sophisticated firepower while Indians thought they could defend their country, land, homes, and families with their knives, bows and arrows.

I said “Yes”

After years of fighting, the Indians realized their fighting skills, bows and arrows were no match against all those heavy artillery and machine guns the white people had. They realized if they continue their fight, their race would soon be destroyed. So, they decided to cook a turkey and have it with their enemy, the white people who had invaded and destroyed their 

She asked “Is this tradition being practiced by the white folks or the Indians in America today?”

I said “good question! During all these 27 years I lived in the US, I never saw it ever practiced by any Indians. So, I guess only by white people. If there some Indians practicing it, I doubt there are that many”

Then, she said “regardless which one of them is practicing it, it seems to me the Indians cooked and offered the turkey to the White
people so the white people would stop killing them. Basically, the Indians did this begging for mercy”.

I said “Yes”

Then she popped the question that I could not answer. She said “I understand why the Indians did this. They just did not have any more energy left to save their families and lands. So they were happy with their decision and they were thankful, but what were the white people thankful for?  If today the Americans regret how they slaughtered the Indians, why are they repeating their mistake by helping Israelis to do  the same thing to the Palestinians now?

Then I thought Oh crap! She has a point. So, I told her I’d get back to her on that.”

All that said, does anyone has a good answer?

I am a naturalized US citizen and I thought I knew the US history pretty well.  This simple question by my cousin made me realize I still have lots of learning to do.

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Either the people in Forbes including Morgan Brennan who wrote the article are on dope or I have always ended up staying in only blonde, blue eyes, vanilla ice part of Houston every time I was there.  I have been in that city four times ever since I got off the boat from Iran to Awesome Washington DC in 1986. I stayed an average of five days each time. I don’t remember ever spotted anyone but blondes and blue eyes with classic American red neck accent there.  So, not sure what multicultural thing Forbes is yapping about.

As for the museums and theaters, do I really need to address that? Even people in Bangladesh know Awesome DC has the coolest and best museums and theaters in the Nation – not the world  though.

As for the unemployment rate, thanks to living next to the Gov who has been printing and printing greens, Washington, DC is known for keeping the lowest rate for decades.

Most importantly and frankly  the only one I care, I don’t remember Angelina Jolie ever visited nor has even mentioned the name Houston. She is literally in Awesome DC  once a month

So, my dear beloved friends in Forbes, thanks for the nomination, but our Washington, DC tops in every thing, not just corruptions, sex, and scandals.

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This means Washington, DC based LivingSocial will stay in DC.  The bill requires the company to stay in the District and hire local employees to receive the full amount of the tax breaks. The bill that reduces LivingSocial’s tax costs for remaining in the District, will most likely encourages more businesses including startups to setup their headquarters in Washington, DC.

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1. Create a page for each one of your products and services 
awesomize.me allows your business to go far beyond just a simple company fan page. You are provided the ability to create a page for each of your  products & services linked back to your company page . Having your product and service pages on awesomize.me provides a much more effective sales & marketing exposure to your solution offering and access to quality leads.  You can then leverage the power of rating by your existing clients for each page to acquire new ones.

2. Make sure all your pages are 100% complete

3. Include all of your other social media channels ( G+, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, youtube, etc.) into each one of your awesomize.me pages
The site  is not just another social networking sites, rather a platform that provides your fans, followers, and your new clients enough intelligence about you, your company, your products, and services so they can easily decide where  to follow you and why.

Sample Business page

Sample Personal page

4. Get your trusted peers or existing client to awesomize you
The more and higher rating you receive on your pages, the more they will be found and accessed from awesomize.me search engine as well as Google and other popular search engines indexing your pages. Besides, the better and higher score by the crowd usually translates to a better incentive for others to purchase your goodies and to do business with you.

The score is automatically calculated based on the rating by the crowd

5. Very importantly! Get engaged with their Q&A feature
Their Q&A pages are pretty search engine friendly. Literally, every awesomize.me page gets indexed by Google. So, the more question you post or reply to questions posted by others on awesomize.me, the more your personal, company, product, and service pages will be found and accessed by others via Google.

To see this in action, just Google Josh Sippola, the social media strategist for CenturyLink. His awesomize.me pages rank higher than his Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter page. Better yet – it even ranks higher than his Google+ pages! The same rule applies for all the Q&A pages you create on awesomize.me.

Here is a sample Q&A page. Check out the link to the user’s personal, company, product, and service page on the right hand side of the page. You can also automatically share each question page on your social media channel of choice.

Feel free to connect with me via awesomize.me

According to the latest survey by Hubspot, only LinkedIn has demonstrated the ability to convert traffic to leads for the B2B community that is on par with “traditional” marketing avenues by demonstrating a 2.6% conversion rate. Obviously, given the size of the population on these sites, the ability to effectively convert the visitors to actual leads could be a powerful business tool!

The numbers speak for themselves regarding the challenge and reaffirms the notional information that has been shared by some of Fortune 500 companies that have joined awesomize.me including  HP, Siemens, Honda, Dell, and At&t.

Why Google+, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter have yet to crack the B2B puzzle?
Simple! The genesis of each of these platforms was to share information not generate sales. Consequently, they are naturally geared towards an advertising model. None of these channels have made the transition in understanding and capitalizing upon the fundamental difference between Lead Generation (Lead Gen) and advertising programs. The differences are simple:

- Just because there are over 1 B people on these channels, it doesn’t mean they will pay attention to a company’s specific page or product even after your company has implemented a
social media strategy

- Lead generation programs are focused on promoting your content, not the positioning or messaging that is supposed to drive the demand. I learned that from our past experience with my first B2B startup platform, telezoo.com (1999-2003) that was generating an average of of $300,000 revenue from Cisco and Siemens of the world.

- Since all the existing social media sites are geared toward advertising model, they can only put your message in front of an audience. Capturing a lead requires multiple steps and most the advertising programs offered by the existing social media site include messaging or positioning, but no focus on promoting your content.

Think about it! when was the last time you needed a professional patent service or networking solution or a delivery service, etc. for either personal use or your company and you thought of Facebook, twitter, Google+ or even LinkedIn?

awesomize.me is about to change that

With the launch of the new features on awesomize.me, a solution to this dilemma may be here. Thus enabling companies to crack the code and leverage social media for B2B purposes by:

a) Creating pages that goes beyond a simple company fan page and provides the ability to have pages for each of a company’s products/services
b) Creating a page for the community of current and future customers through blogs and a question page that is integrated into a company’s existing social media channels into each page of those pages you create on awesomize.me
c) Providing analytics that allows you to leverage the power of objective ratings by existing clients to acquire new ones

A simple conceptual graphic showing the awesomize.me ecosystem and its ability to solve the B2B challenge is below.

This is just the beginning. Stay tuned for more news and forthcoming developments including awesome blogs and awesome leads as awesomize.me will empower your company to finally get the ROI you have been waiting for from social media. Meanwhile, to provide you with maximum sales & marketing exposure to your business and solution offering, we encourage you to continue …
a) creating a pages for each one of your products and services on awesomize.me
b) adding as much content as possible in each one of your pages. They will be found by others every time they being searched either on awesomize.me or even the major search engines like Google and Bing.
c) getting more engaged using awesomize.me awesome question feature

Feel free to connect with me via awesomize.me