Posts Tagged ‘Innovation’

Running Your Small Business from the Cloud

November 1st, 2009

I have recently subscribed to Ross Dawson’s blog ‘Trends in the Living Networks‘ and I have become a big fan of his commentary on Social Networks & Media, and the how this sort of technology not only affects business, but also how technology can be used to provide innovation to obtain an audience and create value.

If you run a small business or are just looking to develop an online presence so that you can build brand and product awareness, I really recommend checking out his post here, where he discusses the sorts of technologies you should be looking to to undertake this.

As a user of a number of these apps, I see real value at looking at these online services.  Out of the Mashable recommended technologies, I currently use the Google Apps for Domains platform (my opendcx.com mail is hosted here), Linkedin, Facebook & Youtube frequently.

Out of the suggestions that Ross adds, I also use Evernote, to synchronise my thoughts and ideas between my PC in my contract role, my iPhone and Macs at home.  This is a simple and brilliant application that is based on Cloud based application storage, with a client front end.  I can capture photos, written text, and snap websites and links.  It even has an Microsoft Outlook plugin which allows me send an email to Evernote for archive or for editing.

As I am branching out and developing the ‘killer business plan’ to work for myself, the technologies on the top of my to use list are:-

  • Salesforce – SaaS provider of CRM software
  • Basecamp – Online Project Management tool

Both these products have API partners where you can link these online services and start to create real innovation by linking data and providing workflow between the applications.  Examples of this are Run My Process that runs on the Google AppEngine.  I think that this is a really exciting time to find services that are different to the standard offerings from all the vendors that small businesses currently use.  Tradition only lasts five minutes in IT and I think that will translate into business software in the not to distant future.

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My first post…

September 7th, 2009
Hi all, after a long break from blogging, I thought I would give it a go again.  Well this is my first post after migrating most of my hosting services to Google Apps and back to blogger.com. I have been running on Webair’s hosting for a while using WordPress, but I have found that security seems to be lacking across the platform and to be honest, I just can’t be bothered trying to keep up with WordPress updates.

I thought I would use this blog to throw around some crazy ideas, maybe innovate a little bit, and give everyone a chance who ask’s me, ‘what do you do for a living?’, to get some insight into what drives me to work in IT.  Amongst friends and family, I am known as a Geek.  I don’t consider myself a geek, just knowledgable about technology.  I don’t play WoW, or wear t-shirts printed in binary code or code programs for that matter.

So what’s going to be the topics I’ll cover on this blog.  It won’t be your run of the mill Infrastructure diatribe, ‘wow look at the new Vendor box that runs a a great SPEC number and uses half the power’.  I will discuss the IT market in general, the development of services in relation to the industry and how innovation, particularly around cloud and hosted services will affect everyone in IT.  I truly believe that if you cannot innovate and change an enterprise IT market in the next 2 years, you will be left behind. Core to this, is how data centres are used, abstraction of infrastructure hardware from software, and treating virtualisation as a commodity.

If you’re already a bit lost, bare with me, it won’t be so heavy all the time!

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