Business strategy as a fighter pilot

The F-16 fighter jet is, as supersonic military aircraft go, a modest machine. It measures just 49 feet long and 31 feet wide from wingtip to missile-capped wingtip, and it weighs about half as much as its U.S. Air Force predecessor, the F-15. With a top speed of 1,350 MPH, it lags the F-15 and other big planes. It can't fly as high or as far. But in battle, the F-16 defies physics. Its design allows extreme maneuvers, even at low speeds. It dumps and regains energy in an instant, and despite its light weight, it can withstand nine times the force of gravity -- which enables some serious twisting and rolling. Pilots jag and flip with subtle nudges to a sensitive electronic flight-control system. The plane is unthinkably agile.

Now think of your company: Is it an F-16 or an Aeroflot turboprop?

(credit to FastCompany)

platform as a service

In doing some due diligence for one of my non-profit clients, I am discovering a newly coined term: "Platform as a Service". SalesForce.com is the leading CRM vendor using this phrase regarding their APEX Code platform. They host the code in an on-demand SaaS way enabling users to build custom apps and deploy them in a hosted environment. Other companies enabling the platform as a service is NING, a private label social networking company and Kintera, a non-profit CRM/CMS company. NING is built from the ground up to be a platform and Kintera has revved their code to enable a platform as a service with their Kintera Connect program

Google Webmaster tools

Yet again, Google has impressed me a specific set of tools for managing a Website (They call is "Webmaster Central") within the Google database. Webmasters will first need to verify ownership of the domain (which is a good security measure.) Once you have verified ownership, webmasters get access to all kinds of useful data on their website. Here is just a few of the features I think are useful.

- Add a Sitemap file. Very useful for those in need of some eCommerce SEO help.
- Robots.txt analysis
- Crawl stats (including page rankings)
- Check internal and external links (and who links to your site.)

Here is a link to the official Google announcement back in Febuary.

Non-profits + google apps = Powerful solution

A few days ago, Google and NTEN hosted a social mixer to discuss success stories with Google Apps within the non-profit sector. What this means is that Google is extending the education edition of Google Apps to registered 501(c)(3) organizations. The headline for the http://www.google.com/a/npo/ site says it all: Google innovation. Powerful solutions. Zero investment.

Here is a link to the official google post

What does this really mean for non-profits? Well, they will get industry leading hosted infrastructure for a fraction of the costs of maintaining internal operations. Now with the support of SalesForce.com also giving away their product (first 10 seats) to non profits, the world is changing fast for NPO's technology solutions. I wonder how Microsoft, Yahoo, Kintera, Blackbaud, and Convio will react.

Goog411

What else will Google think of next. This is possibly one of the coolest and most innovative products from Google in a while (and they make a lot of cool products.)

Check out: http://labs.google.com/goog411/