Life seems to be all about timing. Slashdot posted a story today that the City of Los Angeles has approved a 5 year, $7 million deal with Google to adopt Gmail and Google Apps for Business WITH money from a Microsoft class action lawsuit. Yet another organization migrating away from Novell GroupWise email.
Tags: Google, Google Apps, City of Los Angeles, Novell, gmail, City Government, trends
Act Now – Deploy later. Google’s offer ends July 2010
Google has been helping K12 Schools and Colleges save money by giving free access to their powerful tools in an enterprise setting. Google began offering Gmail and have continued to add more tools to their suite specifically tuned for schools. Known as Google Apps for Education (GAE) this collection provides an excellent solution for schools just as most technology budgets are shrinking…or should I say…being slashed to the bone.
To no surprise Gmail has been a hit with schools. In 2006 Arizona State University was one of the first colleges to migrate to Gmail. They moved 65,000 student email accounts saving over $400,000 in ANNUAL related email costs. Since then more higher education institutions including Northwestern University (case study) and Notre Dame (moved 15,000 students and 150,000 alumni and saved $1.5 Million) have migrated to Gmail.
For Students, Faculty and Administrative staff, GAE has grown to include 7GB of individual email storage, integration with GoogleCalendar, GoogleDocs (word processing, spreadsheets and presentations) and GoogleSites (websites and wikis) for web publishing. Google has even added 10GB of storage to their Google Video offering. These tools provide a tremendous savings for schools who can retire in-house or expensive outsourced systems.
From Good To Great:
A necessary email-related tool schools need is anti-spam and anti-virus protection. And Google has recently responded with an AWESOME offer for K12 Schools that’s too good to pass up:
Postini is a popular (Google owned) industrial strength anti-spam & anti-virus solution. And Google is even offering deep discounts on email archiving, malware protection and web filtering for K12 Districts as part of Postini.
Chris Anderson visits Google to present his book “Free” This event took place on July 9, 2009, as part of the Authors@Google series. My book review of Free.
From the Google Author Series:
He makes the compelling case that in many instances businesses can profit more from giving things away than they can by charging for them. Far more than a promotional gimmick, Free is a business strategy that may well be essential to a company’s survival.
The costs associated with the growing online economy are trending toward zero at an incredible rate. Never in the course of human history have the primary inputs to an industrial economy fallen in price so fast and for so long. Just think that in 1961, a single transistor cost $10; now Intel’s latest chip has two billion transistors and sells for $300 (or 0.000015 cents per transistor–effectively too cheap to price). The traditional economics of scarcity just don’t apply to bandwidth, processing power, and hard-drive storage.
Yet this is just one engine behind the new Free, a reality that goes beyond a marketing gimmick or a cross-subsidy. Anderson also points to the growth of the reputation economy; explains different models for unleashing the power of Free; and shows how to compete when your competitors are giving away what you’re trying to sell.
I found Chris’ idea really is not so radical given today’s economy. It will benefit those companies smart enough to recognize the innovative opportunity to grow their customer base.
Tags: Chris Anderson, Free: The future of a Radical Price, marketing, Google Author, copyright, internet, economy, innovation, ideas, business, radical, reading, trends
Just finished reading Free: The Future of a Radical Price by Chris Anderson. I very much enjoyed his previous book The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More. (review here) The first time I read about this idea was an article he wrote in his 2008 Wired article. Have to admit I was skeptical. Free invites you to learn about new “radical sales techniques” that have actually been around for some time, but could not take off without the influence of the global internet economy.
And YES you can read his book for free online at Scribd and at Google Books. You can also download a full unabridged 6 hour audiobook for free — or purchase a 3 hour abridged copy. Get it?
Like me, if you have not been paying close attention to the Free Economy, there is much to learn from this book.
Anderson traces the history of “free” products (Gillette razor blades in 1895 and even Jello) and services and intelligently outlines how “free” is driving sales in our culture today. Even in our current economic recession.
He introduces the idea by recalling a famous announcement from Monty Python, who’s pirated movies were already on YouTube. They decided to establish their own YouTube channel, place higher quality clips online with links to their DVD products….and placed a hilarious insult letter to all their fans.
Even though they were placing movies online for free, fans purchased their DVDs at Amazon, driving them to the #2 sales rank with an increased sales volume of 23,000%. That’s no typo: a 23,000% sales jump! Clearly Free can work.
Anderson has done great research to help explain (he calls them “sidebars” in the book) to help you see where you have already run across “free” in your daily life including radical ideas including air travel, cars, silverware, textbooks and even a university education.