Every day more people shop online. As shoppers write blog posts about their purchases and read millions of product reviews and their social networks. We have transformed retail:
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Tag: information
Last year Google announced it would provide industrial strength email anti-spam & anti virus (Postini) to K12 schools for FREE. Act Now – Deploy later. Google’s offer ends July 2010
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.
Tags: Google, Google Apps for Education, education, Postini, anti-virus, K12, trends
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State of the Internet
A fun, visual-rich view of the overwhelming numbers being produced on the internet today:
Tags: Visualization, information, Chart Wars, politics, trends
Most recognize Fareed Zakaria from his CNN show Fareed Zakaria GPS. His book The Post-American World is an enjoyable read. The bottom line: The US is not falling behind but rather (quite simply) the world is catching up. Some amazing technologies are lifting the citizens of the poorest third world countries.
The biggest elephant called out in his book is America’s educational system. It needs a much required re-boot in order to compete against tomorrow’s globalized students who have access to free, powerful computing tools including Linux, or new technology like water pumps in Africa. He references Tom Friedman‘s The World is Flat: a Brief History of the Twenty-First Century which I found to be a great read as well.
Zakaria is able to simply convey that America remains the top country for innovation, technology and intellectual property but India and China are catching up fast by introducing more of their citizens to the global economy. India is first only in population growth while their level of poverty slowly dropped.
While true to some extent the reader may be surprised to see the detail about how splintered Al-Qaeda has become. In Iraq for example the aim of this terrorist group has moved from targeting American and Israel to fighting other Muslim warlords and religious groups for control of Al-Qaeda’s future.
It should be noted Zakaria also addresses the issues of global climante and energy. But to again point to Friedman’s Hot, Flat, and Crowded 2.0: Why We Need a Green Revolution–and How It Can Renew America not a lot of new ideas or information.
Overall Zakaria’s book is a gentle wake up call for America and is much smoother on the American reader than Mark Steyn’s America Alone. The war in Iraq and Afghanistan while critical, reveals Al-Qaeda‘s struggle since 9/11 to deliver any significant violence on American soil. Why? Zakaria’s position is that Bin Laden has been so tightly curtailed, his organization still under a microscope has evolved into a communications company and is no longer a true terrorist organization.