Today, Google announced Google Buzz which is their play into the social web.

Here’s a look at how it works.

On the face of it, the simplicity of it seems similar to a microblogging tool such as twitter (you have a space to write your update). However, it is embedded in the gmail interface,  making it easy to transition between your email and buzz. You also have a notification bar just below the text box, telling you important updates (in this case if you have new followers, whether or not you are already following them, and a link to find new followers; a very simple, clean, logical design.

What takes it way beyond something like twitter, is the ability to add pictures, video etc. into the post so it’s a lot more like blogging in that sense (yet a lot simpler). In the screengrab below you see a post from Ed showing the snow in Oslo. Also notice the ability to reply with a chat message… so very good integration with both gmail and chat. Also notice that the Buzz has been posted as publicly visible, you can also post it privately to only your chat contacts.

As you can see, you can like, comment, email and reply by chat to a particular “buzz”

You can also take other actions such as linking to a buzz, viewing all buzz from that person, stop following that person, or muting that conversation which will make it disappear from your feed.

A pretty useful thing is that it can analyse your communication habits in order to suggest people to follow. As Google Buzz grows, this will help you by suggesting people that you already communicate a lot with (via chat and email).

Openness is an important aspect, and connectivity to other online tools that we use is available. The screenshot below shows some of the initial ones such as Google chat, Google Reader, twitter, picasa, flickr etc. but this list will grow and grow. This means that your actions in these other social networks will automatically update your buzz.

An added benefit is that this should also play into Google’s social search, which will show you more relevant search results on google.com based on things that your own personal network are sharing and find useful.

In conclusion – a great start with a good clean design. Twitter have not really innovated much since they launched so it’s great to see Google driving some new ideas into the world of the social web.

I recently stumbled across this old article from Harvard Business Review written by none other than Michael Porter and some of his Harvard colleagues, containing some important lessons for CEOs that are new to the role:

• First, as a new CEO you must learn to manage organizational context rather than focus on daily operations.
• Second, you must recognize that your position does not confer the right to lead, nor does it guarantee the loyalty of the organization.
• Finally, you must remember that you are subject to a host of limitations, even though others might treat you as omnipotent.

They talk about “seven surprises”… things that a new CEO may expect until reality hits…

1. You can’t run the company (The sheer volume and intensity of external demands take many by surprise. Almost every new CEO struggles to manage the time drain of attending to shareholders, analysts, board members, industry groups, politicians, and other constituencies)
2. Giving orders is very costly (No proposal should reach the CEO for final approval unless he can ratify it with enthusiasm. Before then, everyone involved with the matter should have raised and resolved any potential deal breakers, bringing the CEO into the discussion only at strategically significant moments to obtain feedback and support)
3. It is hard to know what is really going on (Certainly, CEOs are flooded with information, but reliable information is surprisingly scarce. All information coming to the top is filtered, sometimes with good intentions, sometimes with not such good intentions)
4. You are always sending a message (A CEOs words and deeds, however small or off-the-cuff, are instantly spread and amplified, scrutinized, interpreted and sometimes drastically misinterpreted)
5. You are not the boss (Although the CEO may sit at the top of the management hierarchy, he still reports to the board of directors. At the end of the day, the board—not the CEO—is in charge)
6. Pleasing shareholders is not the goal (CEOs must recognize that, ultimately, it is only long term value creation that matters, not today’s growth expectations or even the stock price)
7. You are still only human (CEO Should recognize he needs connections to the world outside his organization, at home and in the community, to avoid being consumed by his corporate live)

Africa is one of the richest continents in terms of natural resources, yet most of it is steeped in poverty. In the third world countries there are many basic things needed as a priority over Internet infrastructure (like food, water, shelter), however in a “semi-first-world” country like South Africa, the economy would benefit immensely from the basic business infrastructures that we take for granted here in the UK:

• pervasive, high performance Internet
• a fast, reliable postal system (and yes I am indeed referring to Royal Mail – don’t sound so surprised)
• reliable utilities (water, electricity)

Just the presence of good internet and postal system creates a platform for thousands of online retailers to exist. If people don’t have Internet access they can’t buy online, and without a cost effective, reliable postal system, whatever you buy will be more expensive than on the high street, and probably never reach you. As for reliable utilities, during a recent series of power outages in SA, a friend of mine who runs a furniture factory was out of production for 3 days in one month which cost his business about £600K.

So how far behind is a country like South Africa when it comes to Internet usage? If you visit as a tourist, your impression will be one of a first world country and you’d expect it to be quite high… but take a look at this graph showing the massive gap between SA and USA/UK. It really illustrates how much of the country lives in poverty without something that we take for granted as a staple component of our lives…

If you run email campaigns, this is a good example of how to structure a good email. Why?

They have managed to articulate their value proposition very clearly with no unnecessary waffle.

• It articulates what their product (social software) could do (used as a strategic resource to create a new market and product category)
• It provides some evidence to support their promise, in the form of a customer quote.
• It’s targeted and the message is relevant to my role

My only critique would be that they could make a stronger connection to the business outcome that is created by this new way of working. If you click through to the full case study, the customer quote is expanded somewhat…

“Socialtext lets us drink from a steady stream of field insights about customer needs, perceptions and reactions. We now have fast, iterative learning cycles.”

This could be taken one step further i.e. what does a faster, iterative learning cycle mean for the business? For example, the real benefit that I see is that the marketing team can deliver products/services that are more relevant to their customers, resulting in increased sales and market share. That’s what would really get my attention. It’s all in there, but it may be worth calling out the ultimate business value upfront.

My critique aside, it should be noted that this is the only marketing mail that I’ve actually clicked on this week. I also find it interesting that they decided to send it on a weekend, which in actual fact is probably when I will have the time to read it.

Here is a really good presentation from Kevin Perlmutter of Interbrand on customer experience and the factors that directly impact revenue generation.

This is pretty useful and I can never remember the exact syntax, so here it is for me (and now you) to remember.

In a Google spreadsheet, you can do an online currency conversion that looks up the exchange rate in real time, making my life much easier.

For example to get EUR to GBP just type

=googlefinance(("CURRENCY:EURGBP"))

(note: if you copy and paste this and get an error, replace the quotation marks ( ” ) with your own. For some reason the blog template sometimes changes the quote symbol into it’s own format. I think I’ve fixed it but just in case…)

which will give you the rate ( you can then use that to convert existing cells to whatever currency you wish)

This makes it really easy to build an expense forecasting sheet like this that auto updates the exchange rate

One of the things I often need to do is to calculate the number of work days between 2 dates in order to calculate billable days. There is a very useful function called NETWORKDAYS which does exactly this. It works the same in both Excel and Google Spreadsheets

The syntax is =NETWORKDAYS (start_date, end_date, [holidays])

example =NETWORKDAYS (14/09/2009, 10/11/2009, 18/09/2009) gives you 41 days. In my example I only used one holiday but you can of course include multiple days in there.

Same article, 2 different ads that rotated in the ad space. It shows the massive difference that simplicity and context makes…

First the full article…

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Ad 1…

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Ad 2…

I was fortunate enough to attend the Google Atmosphere conference last week in London. My top 3 take aways were:

• Cloud computing is a reality here and now, and is being used by businesses to reduce cost and redeploy expertise in a strategic manner
• Even if your business is not considering how cloud computing can be used in order to create a competitive advantage, remember that your competitors will be.
• Cloud is not just about saving costs, it’s about freeing up resources in to align them better with business strategy

I have to say that it was one of the best events that I have attended. The delegate level was very high, the speakers were all excellent, and the WiFi worked perfectly throughout! Plus Google showed their commitment to the cloud by running all the demos live over the Internet and most of the presentations were run live over the web using Google docs.

The conference was opened by Google execs Nikesh Arora (President Global Sales and Business Development) and Adrian Joseph (Managing Director, Google Enterprise EMEA), with some personal anecdotes on their experiences as digital immigrants.

Next up was Nicholas Carr with his talk titled Era of the Cloud: The Big Switch. As expected, he talks about the historical move from self generated power to mass scale power grids, but the general theme is how disruptive some innovations and trends such as cloud computing can be. If these are embraced, IT can be aligned in order to deliver real value to the business rather than “producing electricity”.

Next up Dr Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon on “The Cloud Capability” talking about why customers are actually buying cloud computing services.

Now time for the first panel, “The Perfect Storm”. I really enjoyed the panels, form me they were one of the highlights of the whole day. The first one has a high level/visionary focus and the next 2 panels are more practical with some real customers. Guy Clapperton moderates this panel On stage:

• Werner Vogels – CTO & VP, Amazon.com
• Nicholas Carr – Author, the Big Switch
• Paul Daugherty – Chief Technology Architect, Accenture
• Dr. Carsten Sorensen – Senior Lecturer Information Systems, LSE

Then, the next panel titled “Risk and Reward” - some real customers talking very frankly about their experiences. In this session, the Jaguar Landrover deal is announced. On stage is:

• Marcello Cordioli – CIO, Permasteelisa
• Olivier Carre-Pierrat – Infrastructures & Telecoms Director, Euromaster
• Jeremy Vincent, CIO Jaguar Landrover
• Claudio Umana – CIO, Fracarro
• Jean-Francois Caenen – CTO, Cap Gemini France

Then it was time for the Google Engineering team. I really enjoyed this session. They even touched on some futures which is very unusual for Google. Nelson Mattos starts it off and then Matthew Glotzbach does a fantastic demo.

During lunch, I took a look at the demo pods. These were manned by the Google “doctors” in their white lab coats – very cool. I watched some demos of Google Wave, Google Apps, and Enterprise Workflow  for Google apps with Google partner Cordys. CapGemini and Nordic Edge were also there although I ran out of time so didn’t get to see their stuff.

After lunch and it was time for the customer panel “Collaboration in the Workplace” with:

• Paul Cheesbrough – CIO, Telegraph Media Group
• Francois Blanc – CIO, Valeo
• Todd Pierce – SVP & CIO, Genentech
• Andy Beale – CIO, Guardian Media Group

It starts off with Paul Cheesbrough, CIO of Telegraph Media Group showing the results of their research relating to the move to Google Apps… for example he showed a stat that staff now spend 36% more time communicating with co-workers which has had a positive effect on productivity. There are loads of interesting things in here, take a look.

Now time for the big man, Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com. Marc is an entertaining speaker, and despite the pretty salesy pitch, most people seemed to lap it up.  I really loved the demo double act of Tim Barker and Jager McConnell, who showed an amazing demo of “Service Cloud 2″ – my key takeaway was how a business can use Service Cloud in order to interact better with customers whether it’s by phone, twitter, facebook or old-school email. This could really create a competitive advantage since not many businesses really do CRM well.

Geoffrey Moore, author of Crossing the Chasm, was up next. This video is essential viewing. His session is all about the importance of focusing on core, essential business. IT energy should be focused on improving the business, not on running commoditized services (such as email for example). Geoff says it best, watch him…

Last but not least… the “Fireside Chat” with Dave Girouard (President, Google Enterprise) and Alan Eustace (SVP Engineering and Research, Google). This was an awesome session. When you watch this you can see the difference in culture between Google and their competitors. Open, honest, straightforward, insightful…

Thanks to the Google team for a great event. If you want to follow the happenings of the day over twitter, it all happened on the #atmosphere hashtag And if you missed atmosphere, you might still be able to attend the “Innovation at Work” event happening in London later this month. No famous authors, just pure time with the Google folks looking at the latest stuff from the Google Enterprise team.

An interesting announcement from Rentokil today that they are moving 35000 users to Google apps… I think this validates that Cloud Computing is not a thing of the future, it’s here today and is delivering value to business right now. Too many people think it’s something that will be happening, sometime in the future…

Although they do expect to make significant cost savings, what’s interesting is that this is not simply about cost reduction. The fact that Rentokil is a global business, means that cloud computing can provide them with many advantages that may be difficult to achieve with “on premise” software, such as:

- global data distribution: when you log on from the office in Bangkok your user experience is similar to when you are back home in London (as long as the Office has a decent Internet connection) – because your data is always “close to you”. With traditional “in house” IT this cna be pretty costly to achieve because you need to replicate your data globally. In the Rentokil case, Google does the heavy lifting for them at a much lower cost due to their economies of scale.

- continuous innovation: with in-house IT infrastructure, any new stuff needs to go through a lengthy testing and deployment process before being rolled out. This cost time and money, and takes too long. With cloud-based apps these can be tested by the provider and implemented when ready, for all their customers on a regular basis. Typically, cloud vendors add in new features and capabilities every few weeks. Think about this in relation to corporate IT systems – what version of MS Office are most large enterprises running – Office 2010? Office 2007? No – mostly Office 2003 which is now over 6 years old.

- “innovation economy” – what I mean by this, is an economy of scale whereby all Google’s customers can benefit quickly, from new capabilities introduced to the product. Unlike a traditional software vendor, Google can quickly get a view of what is working well, or not-so-well, with parts of their offering, because everything is running on their infrastructure. Once an update or new feature has been tested and released, it is instantly available to all customers globally. It’s not something that an IT team has to concern itself over, so their time is freed up to consider how their business can use these new features, rather than just implementing them. Most “cloud vendors” have these short release cycles: Salesforce.com (cloud CRM) and DimDim (web conferencing)  release new stuff every month, blueKiwi Software (social networking for enterprises) releases new features approx every 2 weeks!

Here is what Rentokil says are the key capabilities for them.

• Google integrated chat and video features to support training & improve productivity
• Powerful personal and shared calendars
• Consolidation and standardisation of a single mail system and address book
• Improved collaboration within and between divisions and functions
• Automatic email translation and real-time translation in Google Talk

The last one is very understated – automatic translation of chat is a huge thing for a global multi-national corporate. Now technicians in vietnam can chat with technicians in slovenia, both in their native tongue rather than a “corporate standard” such as English. Awesome stuff.

Anyway – it’s good to see these things becoming a reality TODAY for enterprise computing.

I.T. teams can no longer ignore that these things are happening – instead they must figure out how they should be using cloud computing in order to further the goals of their business.