A friend sent me this link which is pretty funny for people who either hate their lack of signal from AT&T or people who hate their iFriends.
I laughed when I read this because it’s so true. I haven’t heard anybody say “DAMN IT, I can’t send email because my inbox is full!!!” since working at a prior company where we used Exchange where 5000 people exclaimed that almost daily. What a colossal waste of their time. Only about 1/10 of 1% of them knew how to set up auto-archiving so it was a huge drain on the organization’s resources.
Good on ya Google. Nice simple ad, straight to the point.
Click and watch. It’s brilliant.
I work on a lot of distributed teams and we use or have used almost everything: Webex (solid but expensive), Adobe Connect (erratic but powerful), Gatherpace (ugly but very cross-platform and very inexpensive), Yugma (I like the team and really tried multiple times but it just never worked properly and the installers always drove me crazy), Skype (proprietary and isolated but excellent for group chat or voice and one on one video), Tokbox (n-way video conferencing on demand up to six people for free with quick ad-hoc setup), FreeConference.com (for audio conferencing), GoogleTalk (quick and dirty IM for Google apps users), Meebo (web-based multi-IM network client that lets you log into all your IM networks at once including Facebook).
There are more but those have been the ones I have spent the most time immersed in this last couple of years. I have worked quite intensely in teams that have used all three of these modes:
- Phone (audio)
- Google Talk (live chat) and Phone (audio)
- Skype (live and persistent chat and audio and video)
The experiences are all very different and it has become more pronounced for me lately. I wonder if anybody has had similar experiences. First, it helps to set some context. Every tool addresses a slightly different X/Y where X is persistence and Y is dynamism. Bob Serr has a slightly fuzzy but interesting graphic of this on his site that I’ll link here:
Phone and video and IM are highly transient and very dynamic in nature. Intranets (particularly old-school ones!) were very persistent and static. That’s changing with products like Google Sites, Microsoft Sharepoint, ThoughtFarmer and MindTouch. Documents are moving up the dynamic scale too as they move out of Microsoft Office and into Google and Zoho Docs where they can be more dynamically updated. But you’ll find something called “Persistent chat” up in the corner and it’s something that has been around in many applications for years but it’s not something that people think much about.
My point is this: your collaboration platform dictates your collaboration space – how much area you cover in this graph. More is better.
My experience in working with Group 1 (phone people) is that it’s okay but human English language is not that great at describing things so I often have to share documents or my screen out so that the people on the other end of the call can really understand clearly what I’m discussing. It’s okay but it’s very limited and I often try to move these people towards more collaborative tools.
My experience in working with teams that are using AIM, Gtalk, or MSN (does anybody use MSN any more?) is that we can have great one-to-one communication (open channel, ping person, chat, optionally move to phone, close conversation, close channel). Moving from that to group chat is simple enough (add a person to the chat) but isn’t frequently done because group chat was only added recently, so users are not accustomed to it. Most of the GTalk users don’t know that there IS a group chat or that you can do audio and video because those features have been slowly rolled into the product but since it was always used as a one to one chat channel, it’s kind of hard to envision as anything but. It’s a chat tool trying to move upstream to become an audio/video tool and it’s not getting there very quickly from a user adoption perspective.
My experience working with teams living in Skype is materially and significantly different. It’s like going from 1940 dial phones to 2020 Star trek video phones. You might think of it as “the way to make free international phone calls” but it really is much, much more. Firstly, the whole company can have an open “watercooler” channel for trash-talking and cross-company live chatter. It’s like the kitchen of the virtual office. It’s always there and you can wander in anytime to see who’s around or even what was said hours ago. That is the power of persistent chat. Second, you can instantly set up and tear down group chat rooms, sort of like pulling four people away from their desks and ducking into a meeting room at a real office. Third, if there’s a reason to do so, you can just hit CALL and all of the attendees are now on speakerphone. Ta-da – instant voice conference without having everybody dial into a freeconference on-demand line. Fourth, you can leave those rooms open sort of like project “war rooms” so that people can have discussion in there about the project and it doesn’t have to pollute other group chats. This is really just another persistent chat, but this time narrowed to a subset of people in just this one project. The great thing about persistent chat rooms is that if you’re logged off when people are chatting, the next time you log in, all of the missed conversation will be replayed for you. This is powerful stuff. Sixth, because video is built in and works very well, people tend to set up their laptops (or purchase new ones) with cameras and actually USE them. In a prior company, we bought all employees new MacBook Pros so that everybody had instantaneous access to skype audio and video without saying “oh hang on a sec – I have to find my camera and headset and plug it in.” Heck, even the new base 13″ MacBooks have them for $1000 each! Seventh, Skype now offers one-way screen sharing which means one less application to fiddle with if you just want to jump on a screen to demo something. It actually works pretty well. That to me is a bonus because there are definitely better screen-sharing applications out there.
Running distributed project teams is hard but it’s becoming the norm. Buying centralized real estate doesn’t make sense for a whole team anymore, not when you’re hiring people all over the globe in order to get the best people for the job. My recommendation is this: if you’re running a distributed project team, figure out how to ensure that they all have machines with built-in mics and cameras and use Skype. Set up a company wide room and a room for every project team. Teach your team how to quickly assemble ad-hoc team rooms and how to make team audio calls. It will give your team a sense of connectedness and the ability to assemble ad-hoc teams that is really really hard to achieve using anything else out there at the moment. It’s hard to run a distributed team at the best of times. the more barriers you can remove (time-wise, setup-wise, technology-wise, excuse-wise), the better the communication, and the better the business can run.
Please add your thoughts to the comments below. I’d love to hear other people’s experiences here.
I’m a huge fan of Tuftian illustrations of complex ideas. Here is a brilliant web technology timeline map from wikipedia.
(Click to see original)
To all the crazy inventors out there, can you please invent this for me? I spend my days working on a computer, looking at hundreds of windows, using 20-30 different applications, chatting across way too many channels. Frankly, it’s really not healthy for us to sit so long, work on laptops, and stare at little screens. Inactivity is death and decay.
I want to step into my “office” which would be more like a World of Warcraft world and it could be in a giant hamster ball on wheels so I could run any direction I want. And I should be in a fully immersive environment where I can run in any direction, and interact with my applications with big motions (must jump onto 4 foot box so I can see my email!) or if I want to talk to somebody who is in a different system, I should have to “run” to the other room to answer the inbound message. I want to be completely utterly physically exhausted from my day at work, not sore from a complete lack of activity and too many hours of no motion in the joints.
Or I suppose I could quit and become a labourer. But my work is so damned interesting and I love interacting with all of the people I know. I just wish I could do it while running, jumping, leaping, climbing, and crawling so I could work, have fun, and stay in great shape all at the same time. Maybe I should be quitting work in the web industry and working as a firefighter but I know it wouldn’t hold my mental interest!
I disagree deeply with Garett Rogers over at ZDNet who wrote:
Google’s Enterprise strategy so far hasn’t produced much traction — and I’m pretty sure this new plugin isn’t a silver bullet either. If businesses find out about it, this new plugin may be enough to get some companies to switch from Exchange to Google Apps, but there are several larger issues that need to be addressed before there is any kind of mass adoption.
Letting users use what they want to use (Outlook) while being able to use a back-end from Google that allows 25GB per user (and not the fantastically annoying 100 MEGA bytes offered up by most in-house Exchange admins because they want to make their lives easier and their users lives hellish) is absolutely brilliant. This is about lowering barriers to adoption and user behaviour change barriers are a big deal.
With this move, IT owners now get to provide better uptime (Gmail’s effective 99.9% uptime is frankly higher than many corporate email systems or at least close to par), more storage (250x more on average), a much more functional web interface than Outlook Web Access, and native Blackberry push email all while saving 66% of their operational costs. I believe that enterprise adoption of Gmail will begin to increase rapidly.
I made a couple of posts the other day (post 1, post 2) about my (our collective) nightmare with respect to calendar and contact and social network management. Boris Mann responded with:
Google Wave, under all the magic, is actually based around XMPP. I’ve been predicting the second coming of XMPP as a protocol to rival HTTP since before it was called that (or, about 3 years).
I have some ideas about the identity piece, and I actually think (yes, crazy, I know) that SXIP was partially headed in the right direction.
Troy is totally spot on about data flows, although it is logins (i.e identity + permissions) plus data flows that is important. “In the future”, one might imagine a composer like Yahoo Pipes where you can “pipe” data workflows between different apps. An email is an email is an email, whether in the billing system, the PM system, or the support system.
None of these are islands, they’re already leaking into each other. We just (for now) have this terrible tool of “synch” rather than connected flows.
First let me say that Boris has always been my bellwether of what’s coming up next. He taught me about Drupal about 2 years before anybody else cared. And he has done this repeatedly so I trust him when he says that real-time communication and XMPP based systems are coming.
In thinking about his comment above, I realized that I needed to start a meme in the Saas world:
Integration, Integration, Integration. It’s about the Integration. (Crikey, I sound like Ballmer.)
As a business, you DO want to move to the web, but in order to actually get more benefit than just the supposed (and sometimes difficult to realize) benefits of Saas vs. on premise, it’s important to minimize the number of platforms that you adopt because every extra platform you bring on gives you more identity headache and worse, more data flow headache so your ability to have your people use those systems and flow that data around in a meaningful business process are blocked.
You want MORE Saas on FEWER platforms where everything is PRE-INTEGRATED so you can have single-sign-on and flow the data in a simple way. Salesforce + Google Apps + Echosign = bliss. Google Sites + Dropbox? Nope. Can’t do it. They don’t connect. So to achieve what I wanted the other day, namely finding a simple cloud based file server that integrates with Salesforce and Google Apps in a clean way from an identity and data availability perspective – that sounds like a business opportunity for somebody because it’s not there (or I haven’t found it yet.)
KEEP IT INTEGRATED STUPID (KIIS) – pass on the meme.
And by the way, yes, I’m aware of the Cast Iron’s of the world who help companies with these issues but defaults are important. Something like 99.999999% use the defaults (yes, I made that number up) and so if it’s not built in, then it won’t get used by the broader market.
Business owners know that Google apps are pretty amazing. Valeo, is one of the one million businesses that have taken the plunge – they just bought 30,000 seats of Google Apps. But not all of the “personal” google applications (like Groups, News, Reader, Photos, Shopping, Maps, Books) have been ported over into the Google Apps.
So what do you do if you’re a business running on Google Apps who wants to have internal distribution lists? Well, you could bolt something on. Or you can use Google Groups. But if you use Google groups and your people are already using Google personal for their non-work life, things can get pretty crazy.
First, we have to make sure that you’re clear on the basics:
- Google’s personal apps and Google’s business apps are not the same, so Gmail or Google Apps Gmail are different applications with different log ins.
- Google Groups does not exist in the Business apps, it is personal.
- Businesses need to have discussion groups.
- The work around is to have your people create a NEW, PERSONAL account using their WORK email address. (Yes, brain hurting).
- So they’ll have to have THREE accounts (2 personal and 1 corporate):
- username@work.com (which you give them from the Google Apps admin control panel);
- username@work.com (a PERSONAL Google account that they have to set up separately on their own!) What they’ll need to do is log out of everything and sign back in as a new personal Gmail user using their corporate email address (username@work.com)
- username@gmail.com (their original personal account that they set up on their own).
- Why is this an issue? You can have tabs open in Firefox or Internet Explorer for both the Google personal apps as well as for the Google business apps. So your people can have their personal and their work data open in front of them at the same time. But if they try to have their personal, their work, AND the groups data (which is also personal), things break.
- Here are the answers:
- Option 1: only ever log into work or personal or groups by itself (not very productive);
- Option 2: 2 browser approach
- Run the personal and work applications in multiple tabs in browser #1 (or a site specific browser)
- Run the Groups application with the new userid ID in browser #2 (or a dedicated site specific browser)
- Option 3: 3 Site specific browsers
- Create a site specific browser for each of these and keep them completely siloed:
- Personal Google apps
- Personal/Corporate Groups
- Corporate Apps only
Will any of this ever be resolved and will Groups ever be a full Google Apps for Business application? I don’t know. But until that time comes, this will let you and your company be productive. Enjoy!
Further to my post the other day on the state of the online backup and storage market, I needed to find a shared file-server solution for a small team so I thought I’d take a peek at some of the current top contenders in the market. I decided to check out and register for Egnyte, Box.net, and GetDropBox.com.
I wanted something that was cross-platform, super simple to use, inexpensive to use long-term for a 5 person team, and ideally that would give direct drive mapping to the desktop of a Mac or a PC so you could simply connect to it like a file-server, and I also wanted something that could scale up to a decent size (most file servers have a 500GB drive on them now at the very least).
I decided to check out Egnyte, Box.net, and GetDropBox.com and here are the results:
|
Egnyte |
Box.net
|
GetDropbox.com
|
Target customer
|
Enterprise, SMB
|
SMB, SOHO, Small team, Personal
|
Small team, Personal
|
Mac & PC
|
Yes
|
Yes
|
Yes
|
Web UI
|
Yes
|
Yes
|
Yes
|
Desktop access
|
Yes
|
Yes, Webdav in Business edition
|
Yes, all files in the folder are synced to the desktop. **So if you fill it with files, all the connected hard drives have to have dupes of those files on them. This is a shared/synced folder, not a “remote file server” like the other options.
|
Pricing
|
$15/power user $180/yr unless they all needed Webdav access in which case that is 5 x $15/user/mo or $900/yr!
which gives you the right to share to 20 standard users. That means that a team of 5 people would be charged |
$20/mo so a team of 5 with one account holder would cost $240/yr.
|
$10/mo for 50GB
$20/mo for 100GB
So a team of 5 people using the 100GB account would cost $240/yr
|
Storage Capacity
|
UNLIMITED
|
15GB* that seems low!
|
|
Max size per file
|
|
1GB
|
|
Best fit
|
Replacing an Exchange File server with a cloud based version
|
SMBs and small business customers
|
Small teams
|
| Loves |
Unlimited file storage and webdav access is awesome. |
Simple focused service. |
Super easy to use. |
Biggest issue
|
Their Webdav pricing is completely out of touch with reality. Also, the desktop application and web UI kept trying to get me to backup my hard drive into their storage folder – something I didn’t want – and it was really hard to avoid. |
The biggest annoyance is that they want their “business rep” to call you by phone to let you try their business service for 15 days. Seems like a good way to drive up their cost of sales. They should drop that. Having said that, they were very nice people to talk to!
|
Not really business grade. It’s a sync solution so all files end up synced to all connected drives. So if you upload 100GB of PPT “to the cloud”, you and your colleagues will also have a copy of that on your hard drive. |
Are there others?
Stay away from JungleDisk. Their site is awful and they make you register with Amazon Payment service in order to use them and the user experience is just a total nightmare. Then for billing issues, you have to visit both sites. They really needed to integrate the payment system better.
Nomadesk is a new entrant in the field but they’re PC only so I never looked at them but they are going to reach out to me once they get their Mac stuff in place.
Okay, my Plaxo Pulse “simplify my life” quest spun out of control into exactly what I was hoping to avoid – a full-on examination of my various communication networks and channels. Too late.
My question is this. For all of us uber connected networking, writing, blogging, conference-going wonks, is your system as horrendous? What great ideas have you found to tame the chaos?
Current view:
And here’s the resulting Venn diagram of how my stuff just DOESN’T stay connected in one large meaningful (and simple) way.
Will somebody fix this please? It’s only going to get worse. I’d happily pay somebody a monthly fee to manage all of this, keep it clean and de-duped, analyze my email to capture email and phone number changes, and let me never think about this ever ever again.
And Skype team: WTF are you doing way out there in space?
Okay, so I was finally fed up with my contacts list (or social graph as the cool kids call it) looking like this and being completely unsynced and unmanageable.
Before Plaxo Pulse
Once I got through the slightly hard to use website to actually pay Plaxo for a premium account (there is a 15 day trial offer BTW), I managed to get Premium services turned on. The process to get there was not pretty and looked like this:
- try to find Plaxo pulse on Plaxo site – if I didn’t already know about it, I never would have looked;
- find their “premium service” link buried in a page
- sign up for premium service
- connect blog
- connect Twitter
- connect Facebook (this took 5 tries ande vetnaully I gave up and tried it in Safari instead of Firefox and it finally worked.)
- download and run sync tool for Mac OS X – it works;
- de-dupe contacts – also seemed to work;
- connect personal Gmail account – FAIL 3x
- export all Gmail contacts into vCard format and import into Address Book
- sync up to Plaxo
- de-dupe again
- try to resync to Google now; it now works since there are no Google contacts…but the sync is one way so nothing goes up to Google. Argh.
- Download and use A to G to export Address Book enties into a file that Google can parse;
- Re-run de-dupe. It works.
- Contact syncing to personal Gmail is also syncing
- Just for the heck of it, attach old unused MSN account. It too syncs up.
- Add in work client A’s Google Contacts (again, one-way sync only.)
- turned off the broken Apple Address Book sync connection to Google contacts
Now I have this:
After Plaxo Pulse
Things I’ve noticed:
- Plaxo doesn’t know what it is as a company;
- They have some amazing technology. If they had a focused team leading it, I think they could stop being so confused about their identity and just be the one player in the system that keeps all this crap conneted properly. But it doesn’t seem like it’s in their DNA.
- Their de-duper tool looks way better than the Address Book built-in version.
- They have a really cool thingy that appears in Mail.app that tells you when somebody is not in your Address Book. Apple should have added this about 10 years ago. Thank you Plaxo.
- Skype is still an island but I barely use it these days as I mostly live in Facebook and Google chat.
Overall, not the world’s worst process, not the best – probably a 5 on the scale of ugly things you really want to avoid. But it probably went faster because I have done about 1000 contact and calendar import and exports for other systems ver the years so I get the process and understand sync chains well.
But so far it doesn’t seem to have caused a new singularity or black hole to come into being. Good first step. I’ll let you all know how it goes. Feel free to comment below.
UPDATE: June 2, 2009
- Plaxo Pulse’s sync is only one way from Google contacts into Address Book and that’s useless so I’ve added Spanning Sync back into the mix.
- Also Plaxo had (but then abandoned) LinkedIn sync – a feature I had originally wanted but now it’s dead and gone.
- So with Spanning Sync managing my Address Book <–> Google Contacts and hopefully not borking them too much (I had problems with Spanning syn in the past), Plaxo is now relegated to just keeping my Facebook contacts and status updates in sync and doing more powerful de-duping than Mac’s Address Book.
It now looks like this, (adding in calendars and IM networks):
It remains to be seen whether Plaxo is worthwhile. I’m fine with losing access to my old MSN account and if at the end of the day it’s just a $65/year de-duper, I’ll pass.
Thanks Brendon for making me look at Spanning Sync again. I had left it when Apple and Google built their sync tool…which then stopped working. Hopefully SS will do the trick.
This seems like an awful lot of complexity. I may just turn off all of my networks and become Amish.
According to IDC, online storage is growing at a 33% CAGR to become a $715M market by 2012. One of my favourite quotes from Don Valentine of Sequoia is “Great markets make great companies .” Judging by the sheer volume of companies in the online storage space, it seems that a lot of entrepreneurs think that the online storage space is a good place to build their next company.
In the relatively short era of online storage, there has been no shortage of sturm und drang . As with all nascent markets, venture capital flooded in, funding many look-a-like companies with little differentiation and many have struggled to truly understand their customer’s needs and differentiate their offerings to sustain themselves over time. The result has been entertaining to say the least. It has been a ghoulish tale of ghosts, zombies, rumors, theft, deceit, and opportunity.
Back in 2007, you had Google’s GDrive still being rumoured but also being 18 months late , feisty startup Mozy winning a large scale contract from GE , ElephantDrive launched and Box.net partnered with Zoho. Fabrik raised another $24.9M, Microsoft released Windows Live SkyDrive and presenter Egnyte was telling the world that they were KM2.0 providers (remember KM 2.0?), and TechCrunch started to wonder where GDrive was (for the first but not the last time.) Nirvanix also made some waves as they released their beta , Iron Mountain – one of the largest document repository companies weighed into the market with a hybrid offering and the Wall Street Journal again warned us of the imminent arrival of GDrive. But it was not to be.
2008 had enough drama for a Michael Lewis novel. Omnidrive staggered around the edge of the deadpool like a zombie with his head still attached by a strand, and then failed again . Five months later, the CEO was still proclaiming “We’re not dead yet.” It was like the scene from Monty Python of the body collectors (see 1:02 to hear Omnidrive’s CEO say: “I think I’ll go for a walk.”)
Troubles also plagued DivShare which flew close to the deadpool before landing on the auction block back in 2007, then managed to have a security breach where user data was divulged from a “malicious user” attack (why on earth was that data available to a malicious user??), but which would go on to quietly acquire “over a million registered users” and become profitable before selling to a new set of owners over at 3Sixty in early ‘09.
Still back in 2008, The big guys jumped into the fray with EMC picking up the 1990s darling Iomega (remember the 128MB iomega zip disks?) for $213M, and Symantec buying SwapDrive for $123M, while AOL was busy shuttering a number of services including their XDrive . There were some incredible successes as well with Carbonite’s CEO taunting the market gods by bragging about their “26 consecutive months of double digit month-over-month revenue growth” and Box.net winning the online storage vendor slot for Dell’s netbook strategy.
With the economic storm in full swing and the inauguration of the 44th President of the United States past, the comedic relief ensued. The now annual rumors of GDrive’s “very near release” made the rounds for the fourth year in a row although few people are falling for that old saw anymore. Yahoo tripped, fell, and lost its Briefcase on the way to work. And perhaps as a statement on the industry’s silliness as a whole, even Dilbert jumped into the market with Dilbertfiles.com. I mean, you almost couldn’t even write that if you tried.
In the births and deaths section of the news this year, Backblaze launched what seems to be the world’s simplest backup service while HP’s Upline went offline for good, going out in a blaze of glory by refunding its users all payments that had been made to the short-lived service. In the wedding announcements, Lacie merged with Caleido AG , creators of Wuala’s online storage system.
I need a simple but powerful online file-server for a small workgroup. I have tested out JungleDisk and found it infuriatingly awful and can’t recommend it at all (to the point that I refuse to link to them). Next up are Dropbox, Egnyte, Box.net and Mozy Pro. I’ll let you know what I find. Or if you have experience with any of them, drop me a note at troy at troyangrignon dot com or leave a comment here.
Have you seen this new 100mpg Hummer H3? Holy crap. It accelerates 0-60 faster than its gas counterpart and gets 4-5x the mileage. Rasertech and FEV, an established auto design and manufacturing company has built a hybrid vehicle platform that can be used in most larger SUV type vehicles up to and including their test vehicle, the Hummer H3 from GM.
Their somewhat dodgy claim is that the vehicle “achieves 100mpg in daily driving.” The reason for that is that they know that most drivers drive less than 65 miles per day and that in that case, this vehicle drives the first 40 of those from the batteries and then kicks in the gas engine beyond that. But marketing jedi mind tricks aside, it’s still pretty damned cool. Even Arnold Schwarzenegger loves it and he’s one of the greenest politicians the U.S. has these days.
What vehicle would YOU want if you knew that it could get 100-120 mpg? Hmmmm, Hummers are still too ugly. But how about a Nissan XTerra Hybrid? Or aToyota Forerunner hybrid?
It is these sorts of discontinuous leaps that will be critical to addressing the automotive industry’s 100+ year old thinking. Congrats to the Raser and FEV teams.
Well, Google Apps continues to make headway into the enterprise. Yesterday it was announced that Valeo has deployed 30,000 seats of Google Apps. That’s an impressive sale. The deal was coordinated by Cap Gemini. I’m guessing that it was done by their recently formed cloud computing team that was assembled back in Fall 2008.
There was an even more important piece of news buried in the story though. As the old journalists used to say, “Don’t bury the lead!” Google finally adapted and released a critical piece of technology from their acquisition of Positin that allows corporations to use their existing Active Directory systems (their lists of users and groups and permissions) for Google Apps. Before this Google Apps Directory Sync tool was released, the adoption barrier was so huge that there was no real way for a company to adopt Google Apps. The downstream permissioning nightmares that come with having Google Apps disconnected from your Directory Service are horrendous.
The long and short of this is that with that AD Sync tool now in place, Google has removed one more MAJOR barrier to adoption to large enterprises. Nice work Google Enterprise & Postini Team!
I am not normally much of a Seth Godin fan most of the time but I have to say that I really loved the TED talk he gave on tribes. It intuitively makes sense and I think he asked some really great questions and had a fantastic call to action. The key questions were: who are you pissing off, what tribe are you trying to connect, and who are you going to lead? He ended with an ask which was “In the next 24 hours, go start a movement – find people and lead them somewhere….we’re waiting.
Cool talk. Worth watching. Great job Seth. Good tribe-finding and leading yourself!
Apologies but this post was originally created with the Google Reader “Recommended Reading” widget and it is severely screwy. I can’t get it to lock down data in time so it keeps reflowing new articles into it that are unrelated to cloud computing. May I suggest instead that you click here to read all of my cloud computing articles. Sorry for any confusion.
Okay, since I’m on the techno lust track today, here is the new Tesla S coupe that has been announced. Hmmm, toss up between this and the Range Rover. Is it just me or is there a significant overlap between “green” and “good design”?
Tesla S coupe ready in 2011
Check out the concept Range Rover that is aiming for 60mpg courtesy of this article over at Fast Company by Ariel Schwartz.
Wow. This thing can get 60mpg??? I’ll believe it when I see it. But I have to say that it triggers some deep techno-lust for this geek.
Range Rover concept courtesy of Fast Company
Thanks to Brad Feld for pointing out this excellent article by Jonah Lehrer titled “How the City Hurts Your Brain…and what you can do about it.” Having recently moved from the Bay area back up to relative country side where I see trees mountains and birds all day, I can attest to much of what is in this article. I enjoy cities but I also find them very stressful and always feel as though I’m under attack from the noise of Harleys, trucks, cars, sirens, and people. There is a lot here for urban planners to consider. It’s an excellent read.
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