If there is a way to get there — I would make the trip in a ping.

Proving that ‘tigers eat their young’ those same pundits are already calling Google+….the next GoogleWave.

Wave? Oh, how quickly did you forget about Google’s last B-L-U-N-D-E-R in social media?  Feels like yesterday Google was so slowly handing out Wave invites that it actually killed user adoption by the time they got around to “launching” the product.

Wave was so over-hyped by those same pundits who were also on twitter begging for a Wave invite.  I recall them wishing they could be part of the Wave hype….until the exact moment they logged into Wave they found out how complex the UI was presented. Boy did Google deserve one hard shot right to the groin for that social train wreck.

So those who consider themselves social media leaders (or innovators) are actually voicing their displeasure with Google+ after its been public for just 30 days?  Oh the irony.  I cannot help but relish that quote from earlier this year that puts all those social media so called leaders or innovators into context:

“99.5 Percent Of Social Media Experts Are Clowns”
-Gary Vayerchuk interview

I attended a social media briefing two weeks ago where the guest ‘innovator’ actually stated Google+ would “totally wipe out LinkedIn” but not kill Twitter.  Interesting since LinkedIn plays to the business hiring community. And with a mid-May IPO valuation of $4.3 billion (yes that’s B — as in Billion) I somehow think the hype got the better of them yet again.

Expectations regarding Google and social media are simply out of control.  It will never be what any of those pundits want. With today’s accepted fast user-adoption model it might be time to re-evaluate a “3 strikes and your out” policy.  Will it be strike-two and your out for Google?

I hope not especially since they have been upfront to keep business away for the moment from embracing Google+ as a replacement for corporate Facebook.  It helps when you generate AdSense revenue of $2.04 billion.

Here is one sales method Google successfully employed in the UK to secure Wave penetration into the Higher Education community: Tie Wave accounts to every University student, faculty, staff and alumni when the institution migrates costly legacy email services to Google Apps for Education.  Wave made inroads in UK Universities using that exact strategy.  If Google truly wants Plus to establish a social media juggernaut, then make Plus a standard component of the Google Apps for Education strategy.  And throw in Google Voice for good measure too.

If Wave was killed due to languishing in beta Plus has a chance. Today Google can scale more efficiently than it could just four years ago (Google server infographic) However even with their infrastructure in place they have stumbled a bit out of the gate regarding Plus.

But its not a killer after just 30 days people!

Remember – in the end its all about managing expectations.  Unfortunately social media pundits expect Google to scale Plus into the stratosphere where Facebook sits.  Even with all of Google’s servers they are still not engineered to take advantage of this type of roll-out strategy…..yet.

Began an amazing job this week. Looking forward to new challenges and inspirations.

A combination of art performances including dance, music, visual arts and videography with commentary and discussion were integrated to create a compelling set of experiences.  The session included an overview of the multi-institutional activity involving students, faculty, and administrators. Classes of students from Florida State University, Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI), Butler University, University of Calgary, University of Cincinnati and Indiana University Bloomington met in the months prior to the festival in order to plan and rehearse their respective performances online.

This session examined the presentation of telematic art to the general public via Internet2 at the downtown Indianapolis Public Library. This effort involved strategies to intermingle both high and low bandwidth venues into a seamless, integrated performance environment.

This Friday Wisconsin will introduce their initial CI Day event at UWMilwaukee with remote viewing supported around the State.  It was great to hear WiscNet’s Shaun Abshere at this session today in Q&A regarding Friday’s coming session and supported remote technologies that will be used.

UW CI Day event program at UW-Milwaukee.

The VideoServer component is able to transcoding media streaming that will be published online. This component is also responsible for working with flv, ogg and h264 formats. The MapManager controls and displays the interactive map of Arthron components. MapManager offers to users an overview of the geographical distributed locations of Arthron components.

Today’s panel session included representatives from network organizations and their new community partner discussing their experience and providing their perspective on the opportunities, challenges and lessons learned when building new communities.

David Reese CTO from CENIC (Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California) stated they have provided iPads to everyone with all mapping of fiber routes is now digital (Google Earth) and paper maps are simply being ignored.

Session link

Harvard law professor Yochai Benkler has written a very comprehensive book to describe conflicts between analog and digital data creators in society and how internet based technologies are changing society and commerce.

It’s a good read but hard to grasp due to a focus on economics. Don’t be fooled the by title if your looking at computer networks….he has written it into the binding that ties his arguments together.  It is truly worth the read.

Benkler shares how technology has merged the professional and the consumer into a ‘prosumer’ due to low cost and high performing computers and robust networks have made distribution of information cheap enough that community is now empowered to drive change.

Take a look at how the internet has evolved.  The Akami to YouTube migration showed how multimedia has found a free, reliable distribution center.  When you also migrate 1st generation complex, large scale websites to new blogs and content management systems under the open source business model Benkler states that data is now a “non-rival” product that has democratized the digital workflow of data from brick and mortar to community, peer-developed content solutions.

Benkler suggests modern computing drives new, strong and deep collaboration that can have a large impact on the global economy and society.  Benkler also suggests that as more consumers embrace technology collaboration, change to our culture is possible due to engines of free exchange (wikipedia, creative commons, open source and the blogosphere) could be more efficient (when shared) than current models that are restricted by copyright and patents because the ability to duplicate (or reproduce digital content) makes little or no impact on business.

Tags: The Wealth of Networks, Social Technologies, economy, society, Yochai Benkler, education, change, reading, trends

After reading Tom Friedman’s The World Is Flat 3.0: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century book series on globalization and the breakthrough work by Jerry Wind and Victor & William Fung in Competing in a Flat World: Building Enterprises for a Borderless World.

I found chapters in Corporate Agility a fit perfectly to the above works.  Corporate Agility supports business case studies throughout the book that span a wide range of industries with lessons for all who are seeking new models for business in the 21st globalized century.

The strongest chapter is early in the book surrounding the shift in company buildings and the move to a mobile workforce that permits companies to break expensive building leases and create smaller ‘offices’ with limited administrative staff and resources.

I have experienced these efforts directly in working with clients who have been forced to trim staff and yet end up in an dry office complex with over 50% of their office cubes empty.

Actually I’m reminded of a PR company who hired temporary workers to “work” in all their empty cubes while a potential client made an office visit.  Needless to say they did not understand the basics of a company’s need for agility as described in the book.

I feel the early chapters of Corporate Agility is an expansion of The World Is Flat while the book’s case studies just touch the surface that is presented in detail by Competing in a Flat World.

Corporate Agility’s book website

Tags: Corporate Agility, Flat World, Case Study, China, India, globalization, education, Supply Chain, offshoring, Multinationals, manufacturing, technology, reading, trends

Click here to view the embedded video.

Only 13 percent of the professors surveyed said they used blogs in teaching; 12 percent had tried videoconferencing; and 13 percent gave interactive quizzes using “clickers,” or TV-remotelike devices that let students respond and get feedback instantaneously. The one technology that most teachers use regularly—course-management systems—focuses mostly on housekeeping tasks like handing out assignments or keeping track of student grades.

The survey, answered by 4,600 professors nationwide and did not ask about PowerPoint, which anecdotal evidence suggests is ubiquitous as a replacement for overhead and slide projectors.

Emerging Technologies for Online Learning Symposium, held in San Jose, by the Sloan Consortium.

There seems to be a lesson for all those technology enthusiasts and “leaders” in k12 education:  Regardless of forcing faculty to utilize LMS, they are simply not using technology.

So is the technology investment paying off?  Universities have been investing millions into classrooms and lecture halls. With very tight budgets today I wonder if there is going to be a call for institutional reviews of technology spending.  Clearly the mantra of “build it and they will come” does not apply.

Outside of the mandatory use of LMS solutions (indicated above) faculty have clearly pushed back against technology while their students (paying customers) are eager to embrace the latest consumer electronic releases across the board.  This must be frustrating for IT, Academic affairs and the CFO’s office.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Tab Candy features:
Organize tabs into groups that you can name and position on a desktop-like view
Search and Save tab groups to look at later
Have multiple profiles so that you can sign into the same site with different logins in two different tab groups
Share tabs or tab groups between users, computers and devices (Smartphone supported)

Tags: experimental network, Google, Network, internet access, Research, Internet2, Broadbandt, gigabit, high speed, trends,

Annual costs to support a legacy back-end email server, software licensing and required related services (anti-spam, anti-virus, filtering and backup) must also run 24/7 while “people” costs include training and technical support.

Some legacy email solutions actually require a dedicated server to cannibalize a CPU — not virtualization friendly.  Think OpenText’s WorstClass FirstClass email server.

The green financial picture.
What’s an overlooked annual cost by IT and financial managers?  Electricity.  The cost to power all your school servers 24/7 can be rather shocking….sorry.

The first time I collaborated on a college’s annual budget, I was surprised energy costs for just three buildings on a small campus ran above $260,000/year.  Same probably applies for K12 district buildings.

Server costs and email requirements
If your school is running real industrial servers (1U or even 3U units) there are significant annual costs, regardless of rack, blade or tower servers.  Many schools on tight budgets re-purpose Pentium desktops to be “servers” along with those old, energy sucking CRT monitors.  Not a good idea.  And don’t be so moved by the marketing and PR efforts for “green” servers, they run all day and still cost a surprising amount over a three to five year lease.
…you do lease your school’s servers?

How to fight the power
So how much does your school’s servers cost to power year-round?  Gather total watts for EVERY computer in your server room which includes KVM/SAN/DNS/RTSP/CIPA filter and spam/virus systems along with all attached monitors and run the numbers.

Don’t overlook HVAC costs too.  Even small server rooms required large HVAC.  Is there a large server room at your school?   You should be looking at a rather BIG number. Hopefully your school has negotiated an acceptable rate from your regional electrical conglomerate.  For many small schools this is reasonably accurate:

Monday – Friday:
7:00am to 7:00pm 5 cents / kilowatt hour
7:00pm to 7:00am 3.5 cents / kilowatt hour
Weekends:
7:00am to 7:00pm 3.5 cents / kilowatt hour
7:00pm to 7:00am 3.5 cents / kilowatt hour

Remember servers run weekends, holiday breaks AND all summer long — even though K12 districts mostly sit empty.  Yes empty….lights are on but nobody’s home and your still burning your energy budget.

Your CFO will think its outrageous believe me, followed by a call to auto-shut down idle office and lab computers.   By the way, run the numbers for ALL computers at your school campus-wide:  computing labs along with Library, business offices and dedicated computing studios.

Re-coop costs
It helps if your IT staff embed energy-saving measures in their system configurations.  This means computers are configured to power off, dictated by your school’s traffic patterns of actual use.  Configuring monitors to “dim” is NOT energy savings (guys, the monitor still requires power in “dim” mode) so just power it off.  Believe me the time it takes a student to push the power-on button is worth the green effort.  Present the modified numbers by your CFO….it will become mandatory in the default configuration.

Can you believe lab computers are configured to NEVER sleep?  Yep – power consumption is burning money 24/7/365.  Stranger than fiction to watch a school’s budget burn up right in-front of your eyes.  Irresponsible and outdated attitudes are simply passed-on in the way of increased tuition or higher taxes for a K12 school district.

Obsolete Certification
Ironic that email administrators have been known to use established certifications as an excuse to continue running an expensive, legacy system.  Remember your school (tuition or taxpayer) is paying for certifications, some approaching $1,000 to re-enforce legacy email solutions.

I have watched the use of FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) while addressing alternative email solutions with a college email administrator…a true “deer in the headlights” moment.  And of course the issue of being certified was part of the reaction.  It scares the hell out of them. Discussions about changing email become a threat to some or political firestorm for others.   In the end you need to convey that shifts in the computer marketplace continue to accelerate, and email is now apart of that discussion.

Conduct an energy audit.
After partnering with a regional energy conglomerate to implement a college’s first-ever energy audit, I learned much about implementing efficient measures directly impacting the organization’s IT carbon footprint while reducing annual energy costs.

Today’s students are more aware of their need to reduce carbon footprints while junior faculty are embracing green energy savings at home and at school so there is real momentum despite an IT team’s outdated approach to let everything run all day and all night.

At one operations meeting with College executives I learned the school was going to partner with the energy conglomerate for a financial gift.  I simply asked to consider negotiating a $0.15 shaving off our kilowatt/hour costs….the school did not recognize that avenue of thinking.  Remember that $260,000 annual energy bill.  One would hope a-quarter-of-a-million-dollars would change the way people think.

Google Apps for Education
By migrating from an internal email server (and associated services mentioned above) to Google Apps for Education (GAE) schools eliminate ALL server related AND energy costs.  And maybe, just maybe if your school is forward thinking you can reduce expensive Microsoft site licensing with GAE’s bundled suite.
Yesterday Google announced two more states have adopted GAE for 3,000 schools across Colorado and Iowa.  I see lots of financial and energy savings as well.

Its all about change and I know change is hard.  May I recommend Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard.  At the same time I believe sharing the spreadsheet energy cost saving should be enough for most decision makers.

Tags: Google, Google Apps for Education, email server, Postini, technology budget, increased tuition, taxpayer, tipping point, carbon footprint, K12, trends

As budgets have been cut across the country for education, this is a smart move for many financially strapped school districts.  Does it pay for a District to force taxpayers to pay for expensive, legacy email programs like FirstClass and Novell when cloud based solutions with robust feature sets are being embraced by K12 and Colleges around the country.

Source article

Tags: Google, Google Apps for Education, education, Postini, anti-virus, K12, trends

Clearly the business model for ANY publisher to develop a tablet is a mistake with the marketplace is its infancy.  The internet forced computer companies to move faster in transforming their business.  Its simply smarter to drop SI into the iPad Store inside iTunes.  The RIO is much better.

And just six months later….SI has announced its coming to the iPad for the same price as the print version.  So much for their own hardware eh?

Time Inc, holds major content providers in business/finance, international, luxury/portfolio, lifestyle and style/entertainment media categories and with the initial wave of eBook publishing just beginning to hit a business sweet spot it should not be long before popular titles begin to appear alongside SI.

Tags: Sports Illustrated, Time, Inc., iPad, Tablet, design, wireless, magazine, trends

It appears that Apple has produced a product that consumers have been wanting and are willing to pay quite a premium.  But at the same time Apple has cut into Amazon’s ownership of eBook sales.  The problem with both of the above devices – they are not color.  Think about purchasing a dedicated eReader that cannot produce color, and is only available for, well….reading….despite Amazon’s attempts to open the Kindle platform with an API and goals of an iTunes-like store.

Amazon left their newer Kindle DX at $500.00

Tags: iPad, Kindle, Nook, price war, ebook sales, reading, trends

As initial reports are indicate this is a new, in depth re-birth of magazines for the digital world.  By exploiting the iPad’s technologies the premier issue is loaded with interactive multimedia extras simply not available in print.

So now comes the business end of the release:  $5 an for each app issue while you can get a full year print subscription for just $10.
–Since I have a print subscription — can get all my back issues on the iPad?  Doubt it.  Lets not be foolish – publishers are setting elegant revenue models for their print to iPad app conversions…..

Reviews:
Wired’s internal review (duh) – Wall Street Journal review – Business Insider review – Gizmodo review

Tags: iPad, publishing, design, trends,

Google CloudCourse LMS

To no surprise CloudCourse is fully integrated with Google Calendar.  Google has also made CloudCourse customizable for schools by supporting service provider interfaces:

Sync services – Sync CloudCourse data with school’s internal systems
Room services – Schedule classes in school locations
User info services – Support for school profiles (employee title, picture, etc)

CloudCourse was built in Python and uses Django (web application framework) and the Closure Javascript library.
CloudCourse code site and wiki link

Tags: CloudCourse, open source, Learning Management System, LMS, education, python, django, trends

Tags: Google Wave, beta software, Collaboration, real-time, communication, test audience, limited preview, trends

As many have shared on twitter — a lot of people with Google Wave accounts simply “don’t get it” and the new channel on YouTube will provide a great single repository for Wave fans to learn about their real-time collaboration solution.  Wave is a web-based service, computing platform, and communications protocol designed to merge e-mail, instant messaging, wikis, and social networking.

As many have accomplished, Waves around the world have proved to be excellent communication opportunities for individuals.  If Google wants to reach out to small groups and large organizations, they must provide mass accounts to really kick the tires and integrate this promising tool into their infrastructure…..BTW it can help revolutionize a number of outdated ‘workflows’ that are in use today in non-profits, education and business.

Tags: Google Wave, beta software, Collaboration, real-time, communication, test audience, limited preview, trends

Google migration from Exchange:

The process to migrate looks relatively simple. Through Google Apps, a customer enters their Microsoft Exchange user name and what it calls “two-legged OAuth,” consisting of a consumer user key and a consumer “secret”. They then upload a .CSV file consisting of the email addresses, calendar and contact information. It is optional what to migrate. For example, an IT administrator may upload email addresses and contact data but not the calendar. Email service does not get interrupted during the migration.

Coupled with Google’s offer to provide free anti-spam and anti-virus filtering (Postini) for K12 schools until July 2010 — its getting more and more difficult for Districts to continue using expensive, power hungry ($$$$) and outdated email services like Novell and FirstClass.

Why?  Check out Google’s simple cost calculator to see how much your School District (Tax Payers) can save by switching.  The Oregon School District in Wisconsin left Novell for Google and saved over $11,000 annually.  In tight economic times this makes a lot of sense (and lots of cents)

Laszlo Barabasi will be releasing a new book Bursts: The Hidden Pattern Behind Everything We Do at the end of April and if its anything like Linked it will become another best seller.

At the same time Laszlo Barabasi has released a social networking exercise (cool) called BuRSTS “that is a performance in human dynamics, a game of cooperation and prediction, that will gradually unveil the full text of Bursts.”  Talk about hitting a social networking home run!  Now if everyone will start grabbing text…

Linked demonstrated that patterns in space (How Everything is Connected to Everything Else and What It means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life) while Bursts will focus on patterns in time.

A couple of quotes about this upcoming release:

“In Linked, Barabasi showed us how complex networks unfold in space. In Bursts, he shows us how they unfold in time. Your life may look random to you, but everything from your visits to a web page to your visits to the doctor are predictable, and happen in bursts.”
-Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody

“Barabasi is one of the few people in the world who understand the deep structure of empirical reality.”
-Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan

I think Bursts is going to take us on a new ride.  I’m looking forward to the journey.

Tags: Bursts, Albert-Lasziò Barabàsi, Network, Power Hubs, reading, trends, relationships, reading