Posts Tagged ‘Google’
The Future Of Business – Turn Your Business Into A Platform
This idea of platforms has been talked about for years now, new start-ups are popping up everywhere, many are trying to convert and become a useful platform. Why a platform? The business of the future needs to become a destination and useful, a place where people can come together and do something useful. People always return to things and places that are useful to them.
The best example of a platform to date is Google, they provide an environment where you can run your entire business. That in itself is very useful. Crisis mappers wasted no time responding: In under 2.5 hours Google launched its person finder application, which was also used when New Zealand’s 6.3 quake. A platform can be built upon and used, think of all the things you can do at Google, problems you can solve, and dare I say it, the time you can save. Today you can view your street via Google Maps, you can get images, videos, news, books, you can use Gmail for your primary email service, you can use Blogger to put your content on the NET, you can translate the language of a site. Google provides all these tools at no charge to you, an open & free business model to the extreme, it’s what the cloud is meant to be.
If you have a platform, you will need developers and other entrepreneurs to build on it, creating more functionality which brings more users. FaceBook did that. Networks are built upon platforms, the Internet is a platform, services like Flickr, WordPress, PayPal, self-publishing company LuLu.com, and business software Salesforce.com.
Google as I mentioned above is not just one platform but multiple platforms, multiple ways of using Google, multiple ways to build upon what Google has built and provides to you for free. What is a platform, platforms help users create products, businesses, communities, and networks of thier own. If it’s open and collaborative, those users may add value to platforms.
Questions to ask yourself: How can you or your business act as a platform? What can others build on top of it? How can you add value? How little value can you extract? How big can the network grow atop your platform? How can the platform get better learning from it’s users? How can you create an open standard so competitors will use and even contribute to the network and you get a share of thier value? It’s time to make your business a platform. It’s time to make your business mobile.
As you can see by the list of questions there is much to consider, pull together a team to begin the process of building you platform. If you are looking for help in creating ideas to adopt the future of business, stay here, I will be continually be posting concepts and ideas for you to build upon, or, just e-mail me.
The Future Of Business – To The Cloud And Beyond!
We have to face the fact that the Cloud is where we will store our publicness, our legacy is going to live on forever, not through people, but through Kilobytes cached on servers all over the world. The Cloud is a fact of life, it is only going to grow up and be another reservoir of data, a deep well of information, unlike anything we’ve know to date. You think Wikipedia is awesome, wait till the Cloud matures. The Cloud is not connected computers in a closed network, they are outside, and can connect to any computing device.
Microsoft offers 25GB on Windows LIVE SkyDrive, Online Storage, Google allows you to run your entire business on their servers and with their services. I shared that this was going to happen in 2001 at a conference, I spoke to 500 I.T. Leaders, and they all said I was crazy, it will never happen. Businesses won’t stand for it, people won’t use it! As you can see they didn’t have the foresight an I.T. leader should have, they were closed minded executives, imagine that.
Everything is moving to the cloud for many, many reasons. Business is becoming more social and mobile, and the requires the cloud for that kind of environment to work properly. Location-based services are a perfect fit for the cloud, so going mobile means going to the cloud.
In a previous post I talked about the shift, we’re going from pages to streams, from PCs to the Cloud, Today to NOW, from Me to We, and Items to Data. Where everything will generate a stream everywhere. The cloud is full of storage, full of streams, and filled with the new oil, DATA!
The best way to take advantage of the cloud is to make everything in your business mobile, the cloud lets you access your data and the rest of the worlds data on the fly. Every business will become a platform to use, not unlike Google or Microsoft, people always come back to places they find useful. You can even build your own cloud, well sort of, you can connect an external drive to your router that is accessible from anywhere in the world. That in essence is a cloud, your external drive is where you store everything, so no matter where you are, you can reach your data, but the other options are better.
Almost all major technology corps are offering some form of cloud computing, even though the question of security is still on the table. Security is always going to be a problem, as long as there is humans on this planet, security will be paramount. Having said that, many are clamoring to put their data on the cloud, it just makes good sense for those who work from home / travel most of the time.
The jury is still out on who offers the best solution and I’m not sure it will matter if there is some kind of standard in this environment. Considering the security issue, will you put your data out there, Google has most if not all that you do on the NET anyway. The Cloud opens up new business models based on access, more so than today.
On a different perspective, when clicking the Like Button or Follow, to get access, the dollar value assigned to Likes & Follows will create a whole new metric to measure, one more thing to track, will all cloud environments or storage devices require engagement or just a Like or a Follow.
How will your business use the cloud?
Ever Wonder How Many People Use The Internet? – Nov 2012
Have you ever wondered how many people actually use the Internet? I think about it regularly, more so because I’m interested in how it impacts our online society, how it impacts commerce, and how it impacts your life, day-in and day-out. Even more interesting is how those users use the Internet, what are they looking for, what are they using the Internet for?
I don’t plan on answering all my questions in this post, but I thought I would share some numbers with you. Doing some quick research I found some interesting trends. As of June 2010, there are almost 2 Billion people using the Internet world wide, and interestingly enough, North America where I live, is a small player in all this usage. Here are a couple graphics that reflect what I”m talking about.
These two graph’s are taken from http://www.internetworldstats.com/, reflects total world users:
What these graph’s don’t show you, is how many more people have yet to use the Internet. O3BNetworks is working on bringing the other 3 Billion people online. Oh, the other 3 Billion are expected to arrive in the next 2 -3 years! Fifty Percent of O3BNetworks funding comes from Google. To give you an idea of what that might look like area wise:
So the burning question should be, what does this mean to me and my business, and secondly, how can I tap into this tidal wave of traffic? The world isn’t even half here and I’m having trouble making things work now! As you can see things are going to get a whole lot noisier here online, filtering, aggregating and context are the three words that come to mind. That’s the work of the near future, it’s already under way.
This might give you an idea of what I do all day long, I study this stuff and keep an eye on trends, just so I can help you prepare for whats coming to the world of business in the future.
Feel free to leave comments and or questions.
Googlemania
Today marks another date on the calendar that Google disrupts everyone’s day to try a new feature. How predictable is it that we just have to try whatever Google puts in front of us? They know everything about us, so they know exactly what they are doing come rollout time.
What you may not have heard though, has nothing to do with Google Instant. Think about all the Meta Data Google has in it’s possession, all that it knows about how you search, how you work and maybe even more about how you live. But what about how you travel?
Google’s purchase of an online travel firm (ITA Software Inc.) is under review, that’s right, did you see that coming? The premise of the review is a concern by the US Justice Department, they are looking at what power Google would have if this sale was to be approved. Apparently, the merger investigation is at an early stage and very little is known about it. The Justice Anti-trust authorities are looking at two potential areas of concern:
And I quote from the Globe & Mail, “whether rivals would continue to have access to ITA’s data and whether Google would unfairly steer web searches to it’s travel services.”
Why yes, yes that would be a concern, but isn’t that free enterprise?
ITA Software is used by flight-comparison sites like Kayak.com, SideStep.com, and Hotwire.com, among others, not too mention Bing as well.
After reading Jeff Jarvis’s book “What Would Google Do?” for the second time, I am not shocked by what Google does, they are a smart innovative company that is forward thinking, and they act on that thinking rather than not. Google already has many at an unfair advantage, not because they are a mean unscrupulous run company, but because they see something all of us don’t.
And as far as Google Instant goes, we are in for some interesting times, the SEO snarky pants will be trying to figure out how to game this new search tool.
That’s what’s on my mind today, what do you think of these two moves?
Cloud Computing & The Power Of One
The world of business is struggling to re-invent itself, the comfort zone of executives paralyzing corporations everywhere is coming to a point of no return. With the shift from baby Boomers to Zoomers, the business handbook is about to be thrown out the window and rewritten by these fine young business cannibals. They will cannibalize the very business models that succeeded the last 100 years, only to be thrown out or completely rewritten. The Boomer, Gen X, Gen Y generations are doubling over in pain from the paradigm that is taking place. We are moving to Cloud Computing & The Power of One.
Ten years ago I shared at a conference, that one day Microsoft would have you save your documents on their servers, today we have Microsoft Office in a web based format, and you are saving your documents out there on the Cloud. Now I had no idea what it would look like, but it was predictable. Google Doc’s has you doing the same, not too mention all the other tools you use for free at Google. Google has us, just like Neo in the movie the Matrix. We just can’t help but use Google’s FREE tools, search, Google Earth, Google Maps and so on. Google has figured out how to get our attention, they came to us, they made themselves available to us 24/7, and they did it without making us spend a dime. The Cloud is here and it’s going to get better, stronger and safer. Think about the power you now have because of Google, they have shown you how to take control, they have shown you your true power without telling you.
We have also moved into a new generation of entrepreneurs, we the people are getting the power back again, back from those who have kept us in a fragmented state. The Power of One is unparalleled here on the Internet today, and it’s just beginning. Social Media for some reason woke the world up, and yet, being Social is not new. We’ve been doing it for centuries, it’s just different now, it’s been transform into a digital realm. We are now driven indoors, we can do things today we couldn’t do before, and no each one of us has power we didn’t have before. The challenge with that power, we’re still not sure what to do with it. Sure, some individuals are making good use of this power, but for the most part, the world still doesn’t know they have it. This Power of One.
When speaking or doing workshops, people are so confused by the power they have in their hands, and when you share a few things they have the power to do, they say they don’t know how. With Great Power comes Great Responsibility, it could be that is the underlying fear that immobilizes people. The power of converting mass market to mass niches, which in turn takes the control away from the very people that have kept we the people in a fragmented state.
In the book, What Would Google Do?
The shifts, the paradigm shift we all must go through is a painful one, as we move to the cloud & the power of one, we are a threat to those who want to keep control. To keep you coming to them, to pay for things kept behind walls, to force you to act in a manner that makes you feel sold. Those days are over, the marketplace is now becoming Open & Free, where Open & Free is a Business Model.
The Cloud is a very useful tool, and it will get better. The Cloud will also assist in giving you power you’ve never had before. You do have control, just open your eyes, remove the fear, and let your voice be heard, because the world is listening unlike they ever have before. So speak up, use the cloud & you will be one of the many known as The Power of One.