Author Archive
by Anita Campbell
July 20, 2009 at 8:02 am · Filed under
Distributed Work, Notable + Quotable, Web Commuting
Monday, August 3, 2009 has been designated “Telework Day.” Right now it appears to be mainly a Virginia initiative — but individuals and businesses across the United States are being encouraged to participate too.
The Telework Exchange has a dedicated page for Telework Day, providing:
On June 10, 2009, Virginia Governor Timothy Kaine issued an Executive Order to “green” Virginia – calling for reductions in energy consumption and efficiency in state government operations as well as a statewide Telework Day to save the energy of commuting.
The Commonwealth of Virginia, Telework!VA, and Telework Exchange are encouraging organizations and individuals to telework from home or a remote location on Monday, August 3, 2009 – Telework Day
WHY?
Telework is a win-win-win opportunity for organizations, employees, and the environment.
Telework supports:
- Reduction of traffic, greenhouse gas emissions, and wear and tear on public transportation
- COOP: Business as usual
- Personnel recruitment and retention
- Real estate savings
- Work/life balance and commuter-cost savings
So be green, give your car a rest, and make a pledge to telework on August 3.
As you can tell from the above language, it’s being touted as a green initiative and a way for all of us to reduce our carbon footprint. The Telework Exchange site has a built-in calculator that helps you as an individual see how much you are saving (or could save) in commuting costs, as well as the pounds of pollutants you avoid putting in the air by telecommuting. For instance, by using the calculator (you have to register first), it told me that each year I am saving $1,185 in commuting costs based on commuting to my last job, and 1575 pounds of pollutants.
Government officials like the idea of telework, because it takes pressure off of already over-burdened roads, and has the potential to keep the air cleaner.
For employers it can be a productivity enhancer and cost saver. According to PC World magazine:
Not only can telework help companies green their processes, but it can also pay off in productivity savings. For instance, Cisco recently reported it was able to save some $277 million in employee productivity costs alone by sending employees home to work.
“Telework Day is an important opportunity to advocate telework as a business strategy that can have a positive impact on the bottom line and improve organization efficiency,” said Jennifer Thomas Alcott, program manager for Telework!VA. “Telework is one of the most effective ways for people to greatly reduce their work-related carbon footprint and demonstrate that ‘work is something you do, not a place you go.’”
When it comes to employers, you’ll get the most benefit if you have systems and applications in place to make it easy for employees to work remotely. Systems need to be able to support their work so they don’t have to work against the systems. Remote work requires the right types of IT systems, business software applications, and telecommunications systems. Employees will obviously need to be able to communicate, access business applications, share files, and otherwise make it “business as usual.” While it’s possible for employees to work at home with limited access to company systems on a single day or two, as an ongoing way of doing business you may be required to rethink and overhaul your systems to make them more “remote-worker” friendly — if they are not already.
Telework Day could be a way to “stress test” your systems and see how conducive they are to employees working remotely. By participating in Telework Day — or designating a Telework Day of your own in your business — you can test out your systems and see what you’d need to change in order to make telework more widespread.
by Anita Campbell
February 28, 2009 at 12:20 am · Filed under
Webinar
No time, no budget, fewer people? We’ve got 5 big ideas for how to get all the work done.
Join us for a free webinar on March 11, 2009, from 2:00 to 3:00 pm Eastern time. I will be moderating the discussion and will be joined by John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing, and Jonathan Fields, author of Career Renegade. (In case you didn’t guess, that’s me in the middle of those two fine gentlemen.)
In this webinar we will cover:
1. How to automate what you hate — tasks and processes that are time sucks you never noticed or didn’t know you could offload to new tools
2. How going virtual can help – prudent outsourcing can make more sense than ever
3. Why getting “social” at work is good for business – seek technology applications with social media features and that connect you with communities that can provide speedy answers, serve as “free” extensions of your team, connect you to customers faster
4. Why and how to reframe how you think about your job – advice for doing more of what matters and less of what doesn’t
5. How to get your head in the cloud – move more work to the web and save more time and money
We be giving away some copies of our books. Please join us — and be sure to bring your questions too.
The webinar is free, but you do have to reserve a spot — space is limited.
Find out more and register now.
by Anita Campbell
February 24, 2009 at 9:27 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, Web Apps
Gartner, the Research firm, conducted a survey about usage of SaaS (software as a service). It confirmed what many of you already know or suspect: that usage of SaaS is growing. Nearly 90% of organizations expect to maintain or grow their usage of SaaS.
But what I wanted to know was this: what types of software services are companies using? That’s why I found this chart to be particularly helpful, because it shows the categories of SaaS services being used:
The top usage is accounting software (which appears to be used largely by small businesses). That category is closely followed by sales applications and email applications.
Interestingly, Web conferencing services did not rank as highly as I expected, falling near the bottom. I would have expected them to be among the more utilized services, especially among enterprises and midsize businesses that need to collaborate.
What the survey suggests is that there is plenty of room for more growth of SaaS, especially among the lower-ranking categories.
You can download a copy of the full Gartner report here.
by Anita Campbell
February 22, 2009 at 10:23 pm · Filed under
Web Apps
Ma.gnolia, the bookmarking service, suffered a corrupted MySQL database (which also corrupted its backup) and the service is no more.
Larry Halff, the founder speaks frankly in the video below giving a behind-the-scenes look into how Ma.gnolia was run. As he points out, it may have seemed as if there was a sizeable company behind the site, but during most of the history of the service it was just one person — him. He calls it a “labor of love” and described how he bankrolled it all.
http://www.vimeo.com/3205188
Citizen Garden Episode 11: Whither Ma.gnolia? from Larry Halff on Vimeo.
Chris Messina, who interviews Larry, says starting at minute 19:15 what you will no doubt be thinking as you watch the video: that you don’t know what kind of backup and infrastructure and IT practices are being employed in other Web services.
It’s food for thought. Consider where and with whom to entrust your business data from your small business.
by Anita Campbell
January 31, 2009 at 5:10 pm · Filed under
Web 2.0
Chris Anderson, the author of Long Tail and Editor of Wired magazine, writes in today’s Wall Street Journal that in our new economic reality, offering a Web app for free is not a standalone business model. He writes:
What about those companies trying to build a business on the Web? In the old days (that would be until September of last year) the model was pretty simple. 1. Have a great idea. 2. Raise money to bring it to market, ideally free to reach the largest possible market. 3. If it proves popular, raise more money to scale it up. 4. Repeat until you’re bought by a bigger company.
Now steps 2 through 4 are no longer available. So Web startups are having to do the unthinkable: come up with a business model that brings in real money while they’re still young.
Actually, that was never a business model for a Web or software business itself. The underlying Web application, if it was completely free and unsustainable by advertising revenue, never had a business model.
Sure, there was a business model — of entrepreneurs “flipping” startups. They were never in the software business, they were in the business of incubating companies and turning them over quickly. Comparing them to a software business is like comparing a house flipper to a landlord. One is in it for the short term, looking ahead to the exit. The other is in it longer term and expects the property to pay its way. Two totally different things.
But as Anderson points out, just like after the Dot Com bust of the early part of this century, the current downturn forces us all to reflect once again on the realities of business. Not only is “free” unsustainable as a standalone business model for entrepreneurs, but I would add that free is also risky for end users.
Is there a role for “free”? Certainly — as a marketing strategy that supports your business model:
- Use free as a limited time promotion.
- Use free for an entry level product to develop demand for premium products with a price tag.
- Use free to sell something else with a price tag (the old “give away the razor to get them to buy razor blades” strategy).
- Use free as a strategy to get at startups and young people, to encourage them to “grow into” a habit of customer loyalty.
- Use free as a strategy to sell high-margin add-on services.
But whatever you do, don’t expect “free” to be the end goal for a software application. That’s crazy.
More at Paid Content and Techmeme.
by Anita Campbell
January 29, 2009 at 11:07 pm · Filed under
Web 2.0
Two thirds of small businesses are unaware of cloud hosting, says a recent Rackspace survey (press release here).
Actually — I’m surprised that even one third of small businesses know what cloud hosting is. When I saw the press release, I had to stop and think about it myself. It’s one of those terms that is hard to get your arms around.
Cloud computing as a general category is easier to understand. For instance, I can quickly grasp that getting access to software on a “rental” basis via the Web is cloud computing.
But cloud hosting seems redundant. I could envision any outsourced hosting arrangement where your website is on a shared server, as cloud hosting. I am not sure of the difference between a shared hosting arrnagement and cloud computing — after all, aren’t they both “in the cloud?”
Web Hosting Unleashed notes the challenge inherent in the terminology:
The latest trend-maker in the tech industry is cloud computing, a term that is struggling to find a concrete definition. Ask any IT pro to define cloud computing and you’ll get an unrefined answer punctuated by a lot of hemming and hawing. This ambiguity is expected for brand-new computing paradigms, but it makes cloud computing tougher to sell to corporate IT managers. Still, cloud computing — which is similar to grid computing, utility computing and SaaS (software-as-a-service) — is catching on …as a relatively cheap way to access enormous, highly flexible computing resources.
And therein lies a challenge for technology vendors: simplifying and de-jargonizing the message. It’s doubly hard to attract small business customers when your target market has no idea what you’re selling.
You can download the published results from the Rackspace survey here (PDF).
by Anita Campbell
January 28, 2009 at 4:40 am · Filed under
Web 2.0
Will small businesses — and possibly larger ones — get so used to hunting for low cost and free technology options to save money during this recession, that they become unwilling to pay higher prices? I suspect we are deep in the midst of that happening.
The New York Times had an interesting story earlier this week on this very topic, noting:
“Meanwhile, more experimental but lower-cost technologies like netbooks, Internet-based software services (called cloud computing) and virtualization, which lets companies run more software on each physical server, are on the rise. * * *
“The day of the Rolls-Royce laptop and the high-end computer may not be totally over,” said Charles King, an independent technology industry analyst in Hayward. Calif. “But certainly the audience for that type of product is getting smaller and smaller.”
Companies have also started to examine what they can do without and what they can do differently, and their choices may alter the competitive and lucrative landscape of business computing. “
The Times story points out what happened after the Dot Com bust of the early part of this century. Some high-flier tech companies like Sun Microsystems were dragged down as new players like Google ascended, with lower cost or free offerings.
One of the things that also happened post Dot-Com bust is that businesses started getting a taste for technology that was inexpensive or free.
That’s been a trend over the past decade, and I think it just intensifies during times when money is tight.
I could give example after example of technology on a unit-cost basis going down. But does that spell doom (or lower sales) for technology makers across the board? Not really. It’s just forcing vendors to change their business models.
But for small businesses that are end users of technology, it’s a bonanza.
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