techSOAP

Why Google+ felt good...at first.

This isn't going to be a long diatribe on the virtues of Google+ over FB, but just to mention an observation:

The reason people find some intial joy when first enagaging inside Google+ is because of circles, but not because they exist, but because, by starting over with your social connections it affords the opportunity to organize those connections.  

I'd venture to say that most people have grown their social networks in fits and spurts and in that process never really took the time to organize them.  In the case of Facebook, there also wasn't any (good) facility for organizing them.

Google+ comes along and imposes a new organizational structure onto your social connections that forces anew, the vetting and arranging of your social connections.  That disorganized mess of connections that includes family, friends, Christmas card friends, business contacts, high school friends, etc now gets a rebirth, a cleansing in Google+ that feels really good...at first.  Like any good feelings, they last for a while, and with Circles you certainly feel more in control of your social networking experience.  The shine is off the penny for me.  I will continue to use Google+ to explore its differences and to discover content in new ways, but right now its still an experiment for me.

I still find myself not spending as that much time in Google+.  It definitely works and can work well.  It is an evolutionary step in online social communities, however, my most meaningful connections still remain elsewhere.  

 

Infographic: Online Shopping Around the World

via Pod1

Would your customers do demoslam for you?

I love to see people getting creative with tech.  The other day I was watching something on Hulu (probably Late Night with Jimmy Fallon) and was presented with an Ad that had 2 microbiologists "growing google."  It was part of Google's Demo Slam.  I love this concept and idea.  People who love and use Google doing crazy things with Google's technology.  Do you have customers that excited about what you're doing?

Here are some of my favorites:

Indian Food

The Most Awesome 450 page presentation

Beatbox Slam!

Love Slam

If you asked your customers to do a demo slam, would they?

#!*#@ my Dad says - The "C" Word...

I've always been able to gauge how mainstream certain technologies have become based on my parents' understanding/usage of the hardware/software/service terminology.  In this case "cloud" or "the cloud" or "cloud services" seems to have made it there, as my father used the word "cloud" in reference to his tech infrastructure PROPERLY in a sentence!  After I wept with pride, it was obvious that "cloud" has arrived.

My dad is my hero an amazing father and husband and grandfather.  He's part of the baby boomer generation and therefore has had to try and keep pace with a lot of technology changes over the last 10 years especially.  He owns his own business and in the last year has made the switch to cloud based email/docs/backups.  

Joe over @MSPMentor.net has some interesting thoughts too regarding MSP vs CSP vs SP.  

There is no doubt that cloud based apps and services are going to dominate our lives for the foreseable future.  There is still some lag with compliance issues and what's really compliant and what isn't compliant.  All in all it will work out to be a great way to remove client level hardware dependence for the core of most everyone's computing experience.  I can't imagine a software company today not considering how to build their next killer app outside of some form of cloud based delivery.

Have you considered how much of your life sits in the cloud at work?  at home?  

Far more than I would have imagined in 1998.  :)

 

 

Geeks Forget Their Biggest Gadget

Being a geek is both a gift and handicap.  The gift of geekiness comes with the perennial urge and desire to discover new technologies.  You may be a geek, but even if you aren't, everyone knows a geek.  This side of geekhood is the side that helps solve tricky tech problems, the side that loves to have the latest and greatest laptops, servers, storage systems, mobile devices, phones, TVs, ______.  The side that loves to tell people about how cool their gadgets are.  

There are a lot of geeks that have another side.  This other side is the entrepreneurial geek.  This is the geek side that has some ideas on how to make money with his geekiness.  So the enterprising geek starts a business and all of a sudden is a true entrepreneur generating revenue.

So here in lies the problem.  Geeks love new things.  Even new businesses.  So they start a business and get to tweak it for a little while, new computer, logos, website, accounting, bank accounts and so on and so forth.  The problem is that Geeks are always looking for newness.  Well starting the business was fun, but unlike a cell phone there's no free upgrade coming.  So the first gadget, THE BIGGEST GADGET, that get's neglected is their business.  The geek falls back to focusing on the the comfortable things like the next best virtualization service to offer, or the next best backup product, or the latest servers, but they forget to keep focus on the BUSINESS.  So while they stay current on the tech, there is a good chance that things with the business are stagnating. 

So all you startup entrepreneurial geeks, don't forget to always be looking to optimize and tweak your business.  Its the BIGGEST GADGET you have to play with.

I happen to be a tech geek, but this applies to design geeks, sales geeks, construction geeks.

Are you a geek?  Has this happened to you?

 

 

“On behalf of” is no longer

One of the biggest problems with using Gmail with a custom domain email account was that you could send mail from Gmail as you@customdomain.com without recipients seeing the nasty little “From username@gmail.com On Behalf of you@customdomain.com” message with every email.  The reason for doing this was to help your email avoid being caught in spam folders and to show the recipient’s mail server that “Hey I know i’m not using my customdomain.com SMTP server but I still want to pretend this message is coming from you@customdomain.com”

Well the Gmail team has finally opened up the option for you to use your customdomain.com SMTP server for sending mail.  If your you@customdomain.com email address doesn’t have a SMTP server for you to send through, you can still send it the way that Gmail used to handle it with the “On behalf of…” message.

Here is the announcement from the The Official Gmail Blog. 

 

Technorati Tags: IT,SMB,Google,Gmail,smtp,email,server,security

Let virtualization change you!

More than ever companies are looking for ways to improve.  If you're not they you are doing your clients or your company a disservice.  I challenge you on this, let virtualization change you.  I remember being a jr sys admin and having to try and restore our Exchange 5 server by myself with my boss out of town.  I was scared out of my mind.  It took me all weekend but I figured it out, waited for the tapes to catalog, then restore, then replay the database.

That all seems so foreign to me know.  Virtualization has changed the life of an IT consultant/manager.  Don't get me wrong you can still screw up big time, but recovery (in a well managed environment) has become something that should breed confidence in a job well-done.   The flexibility afforded to IT folks by virtual machines means the hardware and services offered to your users are moving farther apart.  "The server is down." excuse doesn't fly in a virtualized enterprise.  If the "Server is down" then you drag and drop to get it up again. Every key area that used to be filled with excuses when things went wrong has been improved in a virtualized environment:

• backups
• disaster recovery
• number of servers needed
• cost
• adminstration
• uptime
• performance

Nothing replaces the good IT consultant/manager.  There isn't one thing that can make a bad IT consultant/manager good either.  Virtualization either makes the good ones look even better or helps the bad ones continue to look bad.

 

Technorati Tags: technology,virtualization,vmware,hyper-v,IT,management,CIO,change

Location based services are going to explode

I can't wait to see how the new iPhone app store from Apple is going to revolutionize location based services. I write this after having just updated my Twitter profile with my current latitude and longitude with a tap in the twitterific iphone app. Stay tuned this is going to get interesting.

Security for the SMB market. Part 1...

More and more IT industry voices talk about security for the enterprise, mostly in response to GLBA, or SOX, or HIPAA, but the SMB market is grossly ignored and under-informed about the risks they are under from a information security perspective. 

Here in Orange County, CA for the last several years mortgage companies are a dime a dozen, and now they are dying daily.  So what happens to all that information that they have had on all their customers?  Its a huge problem that has been largely untouched. 

Here is the big problem, no one can convince a SMB owner that they have information that any one would target.  They understand that some of their customer info is private and needs to be confidential, but they don't see themselves as a potential target. 

if their customers only knew, that the computer used to process their last refinance is now in the bedroom of the brokers teenager, they would faint...

Technorati Tags: security, hacking, GLBA, SOX, compliance, information security, privacy, SMB, IT

Summer Blog Break is Over....

I took the summer off from blogging in an effort to refocus myself both professionally and personally as well to just have some good old fun! 

Welcome back to the faithful followers if there are any left.

What was the best thing you did this summer?