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Excuse the shameless self-promotion but I was excited to receive a copy of my book - Information 2.0: new models of information production, distribution and consumption - in the post today.
I'll be talking about some of the themes of the book at a talk in London next week to the LIKE (London Information and Knowledge Exchange) group.
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I wrote about Insightly last year and explained why I liked the way they had combined a CRM solution with task and project management functions. It all worked together very well. However, I made the comment that it needed a mobile app before I could seriously consider using it for work. That app has now arrived and is built on HTML5. I've been playing around with it for a few minutes on a Galaxy SII and it seems to work well: allows editing and adding of data and syncs quickly. You can read more about it on their blog post.
Now they just need to look at their pricing - the free entry-level tariff is good but it then jumps to $29 per month - this is for up to 6 users so for a 5 or 6 person company it is not bad but is a bit steep for solo workers. A $10 per month tariff with decent file storage and contacts for single users could be a winner. I can see freelancers signing up at that price point. It would also be good if it did not require a Google Apps account although it is fairly easy got around if you don't use Apps.
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I’ve been happily using SugarSync for a couple of years now to sync files between my work and home PCs. It runs quietly in the background and has seldom caused me any problems. I know that Box and Dropbox offer similar solutions and also have good reputations. However, a few announcements over the last months have made me wonder how these services will evolve as they try to move from a largely tech-savvy customer based to more mainstream users as well as being taken up by mainstream businesses. One of the ways they are making this transition is by integrating their offerings into other services such as SharePoint and embedding them into the operating systems of mobile phones and televisions. Opening up their APIs to allow this integration is a direction of travel for many such companies and makes much sense. Users expect applications to talk to each other and while there are a number of disparate companies offering specialised services such as storage, synchronisation, CRM and task management there is a logic to it. However, what happens as these services mature and the big players such as Microsoft, Google and Apple expand their own similar offerings? There is a danger that companies such as Box, Dropbox and SugarSync will move further away from the end user as they become integrated into workflow applications like Outlook and Sharepoint or are hidden in the background of television and mobile phone systems. The more invisible they become the harder it will be for them to develop customer loyalty and the easier it will be for the customer-facing applications to own the relationship.]]>
I'm not a techie so colleagues who teach computing at my university may disagree with me but the more I read about Flash and HTML5 the more it feels as though Flash is in permanent decline. The quote from this GigaOm article about SoundCloud seems rather convincing:
"People are eight times as likely to share the sounds after playing them (with the) HTML5 widget as compared to the Flash version,”
With those metrics why wouldn't you migrate to HTML5?
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Any organisation thinking of moving its internally managed email and calendaring over to a cloud provider should read this. The University of California at Berkeley recently made the switch and weighed up Google and Microsoft 365. Google won. However, Berkeley have drawn up a matrix of the criteria against which they made their choice. Although Google won overall, it was quite a close-run race. Worth a read.]]>
I know Hillingdon Council is not unique in migrating to the cloud - in this case Google Apps - but I am convinced this is the direction of travel for organisations of all shapes and sizes. If their estimate of a £250,000 annual saving is correct then the logic is pretty convincing. Read more about it on the ComputerWeekly site HERE.
I almost wish I hadn't read this piece from GigaOm about how vulnerable we are to power outages. 96 hours of no power and it all starts to fall apart. I'm going to order my solar-powered phone charger now.
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Michael Fauscette recently blogged about what he calls the Next Generation Enterprise Platform where the emerging technologies that are currently being developed and deployed in many workplaces are leading to new business configurations and disrupting established IT practices. Although Michael is primarily talking about larger enterprises, one of his points resonated with some of my experiences in the SME space:
"The new business model that is evolving will be built on the concept of a business network, tying the traditional business resources closely with those of partners and suppliers. This connected model will also need to include much stronger connectivity to customers. Most currently deployed enterprise IT infrastructures and systems don't support and provide the required management capabilities for this close connected model."
Next-generation CRM systems are making improved connectivity to customers possible but the same technologies are also making life easier for the smaller business. Cheap and powerful computing hardware, mobile devices, 3G/4G networks and web-based services for collaboration, document creation, CRM and project management are allowing small businesses and individuals to work more efficiently from any location. I believe this will lead to a fundamental shift in the way that many knowledge workers operate and have implications for the traditional hierarchical structures of larger organisations. Helping businesses make the most of these opportunities through developing their understanding of the emerging technologies should be a priority for those keen to stimulate economic activity in this country.
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