Site offers tech guide for small businesses | SiliconValley.com

"The statistics may be surprising for a state known for innovation: Nearly 30 percent of small businesses in California don't use cell phones, about 70 percent have not tried conference calling and about half use the Internet for business less than an hour each day.

The findings, based on a survey by the California Small Business Education Foundation, has prompted leaders of the non-profit to start a Web site to help business owners better understand technology." Click the title to read more...

Negotiating Strategies for Sales Professionals | The SalesRoundup Podcast

Here's my recommendation for podcast of the week...

"Do you leverage existing clients to help you close new business? In this episode Joe and Mike discuss how to turn a good client into a good reference and how best to utilize references during the Sales Process to help you close more business faster."

What do you mean you don't listen to podcasts? In my experience, podcasts are a valuable tool for professional growth and development and you don't need to buy an iPod to listen to them, although it's a good excuse for one [Honey, please! I need an iPod for ongoing professional education...].

Most podcasts can be downloaded in the form of an mp3 file and listened to with Windows Media Player or QuickTime, although podcasts become more valuable when you can subscribe to them and automatically get downloads from podcasts you subscribe to as soon as the content is updated. For this, there's no better tool than iTunes which is a free download from Apple.

The Apple Store maintains a listing of hundreds of thousands of podcasts on a wide variety of topics indexed by name and popularity. I currently subscribe to 40 or so podcasts that automatically download fresh content to my computer and sync with my iPod as soon as that content is available. These podcast cover content that I couldn't find anywhere else from politics to faith to technology and I listen to them while I ride my bike or the elliptical machine at the Y or while I'm driving from point a to point b in Wisconsin...

Check it out! It's much better than listening to the Ag report or the same songs you listened to in high school. I've almost completely eliminated live radio as a result. One exception? Jerry Bader's program on WTAQ in Green Bay -- love that guy and his podcast feed has never worked well or else I'd probably never listen to the radio anymore...

Google Apps For Education

"Google Apps is free for schools. It allows students and teachers to create documents
(Word, Excel, PowerPoint), share calendars, chat and more for free on-line. It is an excellent tool to provide elearning.

'Frantic troubleshooting by an overworked staff versus someone else fixing problems smoothly. A sliver of server space per person versus a five-gigabyte chunk. Half a million dollars versus free. That's what colleges are faced with as they decide whether to continue running their own e-mail services or outsource them to a professional service like Google Apps Education Edition' Chronicle of Higher Education, 1/11/2008" Click the title to read more...

This should be interesting...

I sent the following email to several school districts and a couple of 501(c)3's in my area today...

"A recent study by the Radicati Group on ‘Microsoft Exchange 2003 Total Cost of Ownership’ concludes that Microsoft Office is much more cost effective than Lotus Notes with an average acquisition cost of $450.39 per user with a total cost of ownership of $107.02 per user per year. While schools and non-profit organizations are usually able to negotiate much lower pricing, either through educational discounts or through the little known ‘Microsoft Charity Program’, it does not eliminate the need and expense of administration, training, etc.

In the current economic environment, most schools and 501(c)3's would do well to evaluate the benefits of Google Apps Education Edition – a cost effective collaboration suite powered by Google that delivers many of the collaboration features of the Microsoft Back Office suite at a small fraction of the deployment cost and maintenance costs. In fact, the Google Apps Education Edition has NO DEPLOYMENT OR ANNUAL COSTS and ongoing per user administration costs are lower because Microsoft certification is not required. See for yourself at http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/admins/customers.html#edu. [By the way, the Google Apps Education Edition is free for 501(c)3's as well…]

I’ll be calling you to talk more about this topic. Please contact me via return email if you’d like a copy of the report I mentioned earlier..."

This is like offering free money -- I wonder how many of them will take me up on it? What most administrators don't realize is that their tech people have a vested interest, not necessarily in doing the right thing, but in keeping the school or business on Microsoft technology, regardless of how ineffective it is from a cost standpoint. I'll keep you posted...

By the way, what about your business? Should you be looking at this? Of course you should!

Google Apps Goes Premier | InsideGoogle

Here's another move schools and 501(c)3s should make to get off Microsoft Exchange and its expensive licensing...

"Google has launched a new version of Google Apps (formerly Google Apps for Your Domain), and it adds Google Docs & Spreadsheets and a pay service.

There are now two editions of Goofle Apps: the free Standard Edition and the paid Premier Edition. Both editions have Gmail, Google Talk, Google Calendar, Google Docs & Spreadsheets, Google Page Creator, and a customized start page, [editor; Google also added the ability to create extranet sites 10 days ago as part of the package] no limit to the number of accounts, mobile access, and administrator control panel and web-based support.

Premier Edition differs like so: For $50 per user per year, you get a 99.9% uptime guarantee for email, 10 gigabyte inboxes for all email accounts (up from 2 gigs for the free version), the option of removing advertising from Gmail, shared calendars, APIs for integrating existing infrastructure (including single sign-on, user provisioning and management, and support for an email gateway), a limited release of email migration tools, 24/7 phone support, and third party applications and services.

A note: A 99.9% uptime guarantee means your account will be down for no more than 43.829 minutes per month. Google’s getting better, but outages have happened to Gmail, and I’m sure there will be months where Google has to refund a number of customers.

There is a free trial of Google Apps Premier through the end of April. Google Apps is free for schools and other educational institutions, as well as free for families and groups, which is really just another way of saying that those people can only sign up for the free version."

With the UW school system looking at making the move to Google Apps for Domains, what would prevent our local schools from moving in this direction as well? Click the title to read more...

Open source in schools could save the taxpayer billions | ComputerworldUK blogs

Although this post was written in the UK, it's applicable here...

"In a 2005 report the Government quango Becta showed that schools could effect considerable savings by making use of Free Open Source software such as Open Office. In their study they simply looked at “like for like” software replacement using existing networks and computers.

Since this study we have seen the emergence of the new breed of ultra-portable Linux-based computers aimed squarely at the education sector and the inexorable build of Web 2 services such as Google Apps.

This week the Elonex One, a Linux-based laptop costing less than £100, was launched at the Education Show in Birmingham causing much excitement amongst the visitors and a very serious discussion about how best to support this new breed of Linux laptops in schools.

So much has changed so quickly that a model of Open Source school computing is emerging which could save the UK taxpayer billions of pounds and provide enormous opportunities for the home-grown technology sector based around Open Source software."

Local school districts would do well to shed their expensive Microsoft licenses and move to open source. Not only would it reduce costs, but it would also breath life into aging equipment as Linux is much more efficient than the bloated Windows operating system. Click the title to read more...