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.
To no surprise globalization is bringing the world closer together and thereby making commerce “smaller” and faster as global financial markets increase the efficiency of established information systems. Recent growth of internet penetration has changed dramatically. Today China has more internet users than America has citizens.
Consider this form IF you can image everyone you know connected, literally everyone in the USA — then you would see China has surpassed our population. With almost 75% of Americans connected implications are huge since China has only 20% of its population connected. I blogged about this impact with YouTube in March.
Original graphic
Tags: Internet Users, China, population, internet growth, internet, economy, trends
X+Y does NOT equal Z. Students enter high school thinking X of the world. In college they should better be exposed to Y because by the time they graduate, the real world will be Z. And there is nothing worse than having a student enter the competitive global world two steps behind.
Charles Fishman’s The Wal-Mart Effect: How the World’s Most Powerful Company Really Works–and How It’s Transforming the American Economy is simply a must read for every parent, student, faculty member and career counselor in America.
Fishman has done a great job of getting a lot of success stories and failures. So how does this lesson hit home? In Milwaukee the role of Master Lock could not have been more eye-opening. Its a great example of Globalization hitting any city in our country, and the company, city and its employees not ready to deal with the impact of Walmart’s demands. Master Lock was well known for making a good, solid product that sold well for over 75 years.
But by the early 1990s Master Lock was dismantled by Globalization and Walmart. And after Master Lock opened factories in Mexico and China to meet the demands of promising/competing with/against Walmart, the company’s Milwaukee workers lost their jobs. Fishman points out Master Lock employees in Milwaukee who shopped at Walmart inevitably shopped (outsourced) their own jobs out to Mexico and China. Master Lock is just one of many companies in Fishman’s book that showed how eager the likes of Levi Strauss, Vlasic Pickles and Huffy Bicycles were willing to throw themselves at the Walmart bus. As a result of poor business planning they were simply run over by that bus too. All filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
Does it really come as any surprise today on the global stage, little mom and pop companies also are shutting down. One former owner continues to shop at Walmart after their company was forced to close its doors basically over a nickle in pricing with Walmart. We know its the biggest corporation in the country, (its the largest employer in the state of Wisconsin) yet produces nothing at all. So just how big is the effect of Walmart? As of Fall 2005:
3,811 Walmart stores in the US (1 store for every 78,000 Americans)
53% of the US population live with 5 miles of a Walmart
90% of the US population live within 15 miles of a Walmart
97% of the US population live with 25 miles of a Walmart
16% of national grocery market is at Walmart
If you think about over saturation in the United States, well….California has only 191 stores. The impact of Walmart is huge important for education. The opening chapter relating to package design is a must read for every designer. Walmart’s demands to reduce packing has changed an industry. And if you want your client’s products to sell at Walmart, they better meet the Walmart’s rules, or else your client will hire another designer to make them fit. Period.
And I’m afraid while many will oppose the growth of Walmart in America, their focus is furthering new growth in China, India and Russia. Just as “democracy” has reached all 3 billion of them.
Today WiscNet is offsite at the 10th annual Angelbeat conference at the Milwaukee Hilton City Center. The team is coming in from Madison and I was able to sleep in this morning until 5:30am and hang with Max for a bit before driving downtown. The agenda looks pretty good, should learn much today:
