Category: Internet

Google+ explained

What does Google’s latest social media platform mean for the ordinary business or home Internet user?

The latest shiny thing in the online world is Google+, the search engine monolith’s latest attempt at a social networking service. What does it mean to the average user?

Google+ differs from most social networks – particularly Facebook – in that you can segment your online connections into different groups called circles so when sharing information such as comments, updates or photos you can choose to only let certain circles or individuals see those posts.

This addresses the biggest problem with social media; that what we share with our family is not necessarily what we want our friends or work colleagues to see, an issue identified by then Google designer Paul Adams, who has since moved onto Facebook.

At the core of Google+ is the Google Profile which is shared with most Google services such as Gmail and Blogger which gives rise to quite a few privacy concerns as those you share with can get access to this information, although this is the same with most other social media services.

Google+ has quite a few interesting features such as Hangouts which allow impromptu video conferences and Sparks which are random popups of things you might be interested based upon your search history and posts.

As a consumer product, Google+ doesn’t have the gaming and the social features that Facebook offers however that’s expected to change as the product develops.

For businesses, Google+ is off limits. Right now it is only open to individuals although we can expect that will change as Google integrate the product with their small business Places platform along with adwords and their online application service.

Right now Google+ is for the geeks and that’s why the tech media is talking about it. For the average home or business users it’s not quite ready to replace or complement Facebook or other social media services although it’s worth keeping an eye on to see how it evolves.

The stakes are quite high for Google with this product as the overwhelming amount of data at every Internet user’s fingertips is seeing people seeking out sources they trust for answers, recommendations and advice. The social aspect of the online world is going to define the web in this decade just as search did in the previous decade.

For this reason, Google are going to be working hard on making sure Google+ is part of the social web, for the average user we’ll be choosing the tools we trust. It remains to be seen if Google+ is one of those tools.

Password protection

Our passwords are valuable, how should we protect them?

The suspension of eighty students from a suburban Sydney high school once again illustrates how careless we often are with passwords and the access to our computers. In an era of Internet banking, online shopping and social media sites holding our personal details, we have to take web security seriously.

In many ways the teacher who let their password slip to their students was lucky. In the United States, authorities haven’t always been so forgiving these sort of mistakes, and in this case the kids and the system administrators were a lot more adult and responsible than their Connecticut counterparts.

What the incident does show is how the weakest points of our technology networks are ourselves – the most secure systems, toughest passwords and best anti-virus protection won’t help us if we don’t take care.

We looked at protecting organisations in an earlier post, Protecting your data, and here’s some steps on how to take care with your personal details.

Shut down computers

When you’re finished working, make sure you log out of email programs, secure sites, social media services and shut your computer down.

In an office context, this is very important if you’re going away for a meeting or a break as people have been known to use co-workers computers to access prohibited sites or sensitive information.

Should you be using Internet cafes, hotel business centres or airport lounges you should be doubly careful to make sure you’ve logged off completely before walking away from the shared computer.

Hide your passwords

As the teacher at Prairiewood High found, your password is gold. Do not divulge it under any circumstances.

Often doing so is almost certainly a breach of your organisation’s Acceptable Use Policy and sometimes this can mean disciplinary action or dismissal from a job. With your online banking, disclosing your password or PIN can mean you won’t be compensated if money is stolen from your account.

Even a seemingly trivial social media site can cause trouble for you if crooks can get onto it.

Having a complex password is good and we look at a neat little trick for memorable but tough passwords in our Protecting Your Data post, it’s worthwhile making sure your logins are both easy to remember while being secure.

Understand your AUP

An AUP, or Acceptable Usage Policy, is part of the conditions of you using a computer or online service. Many government and corporate networks have a box pop up forcing you to agree every time you login. Take time to occasionally read this.

Should you accidentally give away your password, say to a site that’s fooled you that it’s your bank or a social media site, the AUP will usually have a clause or a sentence on what to do in that situation. Understanding this will give you piece of mind if something does happen.

We’re now in an age where our personal information is more valuable than ever before and we need to guard what who has access to it. Passwords are going to be part of protecting our data for some time to come so understanding how to use them properly is essential.

The quest for virility

Chasing big numbers on the Internet is the most basic online mistake of all.

One of the common Internet traps is a mindless quest for numbers; when we first go online we’re obsessed with gathering Facebook friends, Twitter followers and LinkedIn connections.

For businesses, we get seduced by the prospect of big markets to sell to; which isn’t surprising when there’s nearly 700 million people on Facebook, over 50 million tweets sent every day and the group buying market is growing almost as quickly as the number of new entrants into the industry.

The current holy grail for many businesses is the viral video; a troupe of dancers extolling your business to surprised commuters, a cool ex-football player giving advice from a shower or a tasteful video of your staff doing their jobs naked is seen as the way to get millions of ‘likes’ or ‘follows’ from eager web consumers.

For the successful ones, creating an online clip seen by your mother and a million of her friends is an easy way to get a campaign to worldwide markets without spending massive marketing budgets. Not to mention the trip to Cannes and the accolades for any advertising agency associated with it.

Sadly creating a video that goes viral is harder than it looks as we discussed at the Media 140 Conference in Perth last week; it has to be quirky, entertaining and attention catching which is pretty well the antithesis of the typical corporate video.

To compound the budding viral videographer’s problems, there’s the corporate desire to control the message. Almost every high profile blogger or online editor has stories of struggling to get permission to use an organisation’s clip because of the managerial urge to control distribution.

No doubt those managers have good reasons for controlling the use of their videos but we can be sure those same control obsessed administrators are constantly bugging their agencies to create something viral.

Losing control is a great risk for managers and bureaucrats. Last year prolific wine blogger Gary Vaynerchuk visited Australia and gave the local wine industry some great publicity.

Sadly, in reviewing the some wines from his visit he described a Yarra Valley wine as having “a taste of burned vomit” (at 4.25) probably put the Australian wine market in the US back a decade.

Gary Vaynerchuk is probably the best case of someone who has grown a business through viral video, through adding interesting valuable content with a real character. An equivalent Australian success has been Natalie Tran’s Community Channel.

One of the other points with these is many of the early successes have been because they were early entrants into a new market. Today, the marketplace is a lot more crowded and videos, like any other online content, are struggling to get heard.

That’s not such a bad thing as it takes away the obsession with numbers and makes us focus on the quality of our online audience. Rather than obsessing about raw hits, we start considering where our customers are.

Group buying is a good example of where well targeted campaigns work well. The successful group buying advertisers are thinking about where the offer, product and audience fit in their business plan rather than just fixating on the tens of thousands of potential customers for a quick sales boost.

While a Charlie Sheen tweet might drive page views, the real business objective of the web is about establishing our brand and attracting the customers we want, not just achieving big numbers.

Picks and Shovels

A business gold rush a great time for entrepreneurs, are you prepared?

It’s often said the real money in a gold rush is made by those who sell the picks and shovels. A great example of this is yesterday’s announcement that Dealised, who provide software for group buying services, has raised $5 million in investor funding.

Undoubtedly we’re in a gold rush for group buying sites with new services being launched weekly. One thing that many observers don’t understand about group buying sites is they aren’t really technology businesses, but sales driven directory services which have more in common with the Yellow Pages or the a giveaway local newspaper than Google, Facebook or Microsoft.

Technology though is important to these businesses as they need to track and publicise their deals which is what Dealised does. By offering this as an off-the-shelf service, it frees up capital and makes life easier for the dozens, if not hundreds, of group buying services being launched around the world each week.

Reducing barriers to entry is one of the things the tech industries are extremely good at ­– as the early group buying sites like Groupon and their local counterparts have found – and it’s something that all businesses need to keep in mind.

The wave of group buying start ups is part of a broader wave of disruptive businesses that are entering all parts of our economy. As we see cloud services remove the cost of buying equipment and software, it becomes easier for new, hungry entrepreneurs to find opportunities.

Another interesting aspect of Dealise’s business model is that the business itself is a spin off from the Spreets group buying service which was sold to Yahoo!7 at the beginning of the year.

Overlooked in most of the coverage at the time was that the sale only covered the group buying operations and not the Dealise technology. This freed up the founders and their investors to focus on developing the Dealise software without the distractions of running a daily deals site with its troublesome sales staff and pesky customers.

Most importantly, it kept the software platform which is the most scalable part of the business in the hands of the founders. This has given them the opportunity to build something that can be resold to thousands of other businesses.

In the tech industry we’ve seen examples of this in the past, the best example is when Bill Gates and Paul Allen licensed their MS-DOS software to IBM rather than selling it outright which allowed a massive new industry around IBM compatible computers to develop with Microsoft getting a payment for every computer sold.

While we may not see Dealise become the next Microsoft, it’s worthwhile considering some of these lessons, certainly both the gold rush and the licensing aspects show how we shouldn’t jump for what appears to be the easiest money.

Our industries may not appear to be in a gold rush, but those reduced barriers to entry are affecting everyone from booksellers to manufacturers and café owners. Have a look at some of the software your competitors are using, it’s no longer business as usual.

Carving up the web

What the new domain names mean to your business

As we discussed in 2008, there’s a new type of Internet address about to sweep into the online world. It may well change the web, but not quite in the way the promoters are saying.

On Monday ICANN, the International Committee of Assigned Network Names, approved the release of custom global Top Level Domain names. Organisations can now buy their own Internet addresses rather than adding a .com or .com.au to the end of their online business names.

For example Telstra can replace their telstra.com.au or telstra.com addresses with .telstra and offer sites like support.telstra or shop.telstra.

Some are claiming this portends the end of the dot com era as business drift across to these newer domains and abandon the addresses we’ve become used to over the last 20 years. Others say it will make data easier to find and consequently kill the search industry.

In truth, the immediate effects on business are going to be limited, but these new names are part of a much bigger change that is happening in the online world.

Take up will be slow

One of the first things to understand with these domains is they are mired in bureaucracy with ICANN itself estimating the approval process will take between eight and eighteen months.

Should an application be approved, there will also be a period where approvals will be subject to appeal, this in itself will prove interesting when conflicting claimants  decide to fight over a domain.

The arguments over who owns generic names will probably end up in the courts while geographic disputes say between Melbourne, Florida or Melbourne, Victoria over the .melbourne address will require some very tricky negotiation.

Costs are high

The application cost of one of these global Top Level Domains is estimated to be $185,000 US with $25,000 annual fees so this is a game for only the biggest players.

Even then, we’ll see many corporations not bothering. Given the current proposal includes strong provisions against cybersquatting, there’s no need for trademark holders to rush, it’s quite feasible that many will sit out the hype and wait for the prices to drop.

ICANN’s track record is not good

Over the last decade ICANN have approved 14 new domains ­– .aero, .coop, .museum, .name, .pro .asia, .cat, .jobs, .post, .tel, .travel, .biz, .info, and .mobi – the last three have been mildly successful but most of these names have been ignored, a precedent that doesn’t bode well for a corporation or government building their own domains

There are some useful network management reasons and possibly some branding opportunities with these names, but the risk of confusing customers or web surfers seems to be high.

In this respect, the argument that the new domains will kill search engines seems odd as more addresses is going to increase the demand for a reliable way to find things online.

The middlemen assemble

Already some are touting the new domain names as an opportunity to get more money out of businesses with the idea various sectors can be enticed to use industry or location specific names. However history isn’t on the side of those schemes as we’ve already seen the release of the .travel and .jobs domains being greeted with a yawn.

One effect we can expect is that we’ll be told over the next few years how important it is be to list our business names with a whole lot of new domains; musicians might be urged to sign up with .music or Perth based enterprises to lock in a .perth name. In many ways these ideas already seem to be an attempt to replicate the old directory businesses that the Internet has destroyed in the last decade.

Locking down the web

Along with being a cash grab by ICANN, the custom domain name is part of the attempt to divide the public Internet into a cluster of privately controlled fiefdoms.

We’re seeing with social media sites like Facebook – and we can be pretty sure .facebook will be an early candidate for listing – striving to lock users onto their service. These new domain names will help them do that and in turn protect data on their networks being shared on the wider Internet.

This is going to play out in a very interesting way over the next few years as the large players jostle for their slice of the web.

Some larger businesses, and gullible governments, are going to fall for this money grabbing exercise, while the majority of Internet users will be excluded simply by the cost and bureaucratic requirements.

This grab for the Internet is a game for big, well funded players and most of us will be spectators in this struggle. Have no doubt though that while watching the big boys fighting over their Internet turf will be fun sport it will be us that will pay for the results.

The ideas revolution: How to set up a blog

It’s never been easier to tell the world about your ideas, passion or business

It’s been a big month for ideas in Sydney with the Sydney Writers Festival, TEDx, Vivid Sydney, AMP Amplify and XMedia Lab along with many other events intended to stimulate thought and action.

One of the things that’s great with the Internet is we’re able to get our ideas out to the world very easily without spending much money. If you have a great idea, for a business, community group or just an interest there’s nothing stopping you letting the planet know about you and your dreams.

During the Sydney Writers Festival we saw debates between food bloggers and the print critics, particularly notable was Food blogger Rebecca Varidel and her Inside Cuisine website.

Earlier in May, Louise Hewson launched her 52 Suburbs book and exhibition which was born out of her website chronicling her discoveries around the suburbs of Sydney.

The biggest challenge is setting up a website so you can be found on the net, today’s tools make it very easy to set up a site. Here’s a few you can use.

Facebook

If you already have a Facebook account, it’s very easy to set up a page covering your topic or idea.

While it’s simple to create a Facebook Page, be aware there are risks as the company has some quirky policies and not everybody has a Facebook account or is comfortable with it.

Blogger

This is the best basic starting tool which also has the attraction of being free.

Blogger’s simple layout which you can change by dragging and dropping the various parts of the website works well and you can add features such as subscription services, advertising, e-commerce and other features by turning on various “gadgets”.

52 Suburbs and Grab Your Fork are two good examples of Blogger based sites. In Louise’s case she registered the 52 Suburbs domain name – the bit behind the “www” or “@” in an email – which costs around $20 a year.

WordPress

The big daddy of Internet publishing is the WordPress tool. This free software drives most websites and is becoming the software of choice. Rebecca at Inside Cuisine and this website are using WordPress along with thousandds of businesses.

One WordPress’ great attractions is it features thousands of ready to use “widgets” and templates that makes it extremely easy to add features and customise your website.

WordPress offers a free service that gives you the basics of the platform. To get the most from WordPress you need to host the site with a web hosting provider and this can get more expensive and complex.

Other tools

There are hundreds of other platforms you can use to get your ideas out to the world. Worpress, Blogger and Facebook are just three of the most popular and easy to use. It’s worth exploring with what you find works well for your idea or business.

Growing your site

As your site grows, you’ll need to manage content, track visitors and promote it through the various social media and traditional methods. We have some free resources from NSW Microbusiness Month that can help you manage and grow your online presence.

More information

In July we’ll launching eBu$iness: 7 Steps to Get Your Small Business Online… and Making Money Now! Which will cover all the steps of getting your business online, promoting it and tracking your success. Pre-release orders are available now.

We also have some free workshops for business wanting to get online sponsored by the NSW Government, contact us for more details.

If you subscribe to our newsletter we also make available various free offers along with keeping readers up to date with smart new ideas.

There’s nothing to stop you getting your ideas online. If you want to do something interesting, or even change the world, the tools are now here for you to do it.

Business Web Essentials

A free e-book to help your online presence

In conjunction with Microbusiness Week, a New South Wales government initiative to help smaller and startup businesses, we’re happy to release our Business Web Essentials e-book.

This e-book is free to all subscribers of our newsletters lists the online tools that can help your website be more effective online. While it’s aimed at business users, if you’re a blogger or community group running a website you’ll find most of the information in the book will help you as well.

Business Web Essentials lists the important web hosting, search listing, social media and cloud computing services that will help you promote and track the progress of your online presence.

Subscribe now to our weekly newsletter and receive the e-book free of charge. If you’re an existing subscriber, you’ll get the link in our regular newsletter.

Is the dot com dead?

Will private top level domains kill the search engine?

The web is about to change with a range of new domains due to appear. But does it mean the web will get easier to surf, dot com addresses will disappear and Google quietly fade away?

It’s expected ICANN, the International Committee of Assigned Network Names is set to approve custom global Top Level Domain names – known as gLTDs – which will allow big organisations to buy their own domain names.

This idea was first announced in 2008 and was expected to be in place by the end of 2009 but the Internet bureaucracy is not known for quickly making decisions.

Once this policy is in place organisations can register their own domain and not bother with a .com or other suffix.

For example Microsoft could ditch the microsoft.com domain and move the .microsoft address with websites named support.microsoft and shop.microsoft

The cost of one of these global Top Level Domains will be $178,000 with $25,000 annual fees, given the cost it’s only going to be the largest organisations who can afford them.

Even then, we’ll see many businesses simply not bother. Given the current proposal includes strong provisions against cybersquatting, there’s no need for trademark holders to rush, it’s quite feasible that many will sit out the hype and wait for the prices to drop.

Where these domains will work well are for internal networks and secure applications where system administrators can lock out unauthorised devices from their domains.

Excluding search engine robots will provide a certain level of security along with some opportunities for corporate mischief like we’re currently seeing between Google and Facebook.

The potential for misbehaviour by owners of these domains will be a barrier for small business adoption. Few businesses or groups are going to trust their online properties to a .facebook, .ibm or .apple address when they can own a domain with the current registrars.

An application being cited is using the .music domain and selling space to performers. That’s nice but it locks them into the same risks they currently have with Facebook and MySpace that at the first sign of controversy their account will be shut down for allegedly breaching some obscure term of service.

A major problem for ICANN is going to be place names, how do you decide between Birmingham, England or Birmingham, Alabama when the .birmingham name comes into play?

Better still the argument between the city of Victoria, British Columbia and the state of Victoria, Australia becomes problematic.

Even more delightful is who owns a place name? Should Australia wrest the rights to .sydney off Nova Scotia, the dysfunctional state of Aussie politics almost guarantees an unseemly brawl between the Federal, state and local governments over the name.

The corporate sector has similar problems with similar trading names being used in different jurisdictions, Woolworths in Australia and the UK is one that immediately comes to mind.

While it’s clear many of the domain registrars think these new names are going to be a nice little cash cow, it’s not difficult to see they may have misunderstood just how complex and fraught some of the registrations will turn out to be.

Most of the registrations though will be straight forward and far from killing search engines, the further fragmentation of the net into even more domains is going to make services like Google and Yahoo! even more powerful as web surfers will find it harder to guess or remember websites.

On balance it’s unlikely the new top level domains are going to put the search engines out of business or see the dot com addresses we’ve grown used to disappear.

What we are seeing though is the evolution of the web, search engines will adapt and the addresses we use will develop as the technology changes.

It is quite possible that eventually we’ll have our own personal top level domains should we want them when the price drops to the levels we’ve become used to with dot com addresses.

This won’t happen overnight and it’s a long way off if ICANN and their members keep prices high. The famed dot com is going nowhere yet.

The learning curve

We’re still on training wheels when it comes to using social media

When new technologies appear it’s interesting how people experiment and adapt to them, we’re seeing this right now as businesses grapple with social media tools like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter and discover where the benefits lie.

The second edition of the Social Media Benchmarking Study, a joint release by Sydney online consultants Community Engine and the research company Nielson, illustrated how things have changed over the last two years.

One of the clear conclusions from the study is how businesses are developing the ways to determine benefits of their social media activity with near halving of the number of organisations citing lack of measurable return on investment as a reason for not engaging online.

A barrier that is increasing is the perception that businesses don’t have the time or resources required for which is probably business owners and managers realising that maintaining a Facebook Page, Twitter account or blog isn’t easy.

Time is the scarcest asset for any business that gets more precious with smaller organisation. Even large corporates and government departments struggle with finding the resources necessary to run effective online presences.

One of the tragedies of social media is how it’s been identified as a marketing tool and in this survey with over half the respondents stated they are going primarily use the tools as a marketing channel rather than in customer support, recruitment, research or product development.

This is probably why the perception that social media is a time sink comes from. As purely marketing tools social media is time consuming and difficult. A challenge made greater by the fact we’re all still figuring out how to effectively connect with customers in what is a hostile place to more traditional broadcast based marketing methods.

Given social media is being used primarily as a marketing tool by business, it’s no surprise that the survey found larger corporations are the biggest users as they have the marketing budgets to allocate.

An interesting aspect with big business’ social media investment is how much it’s focused on Facebook. On one level this is understandable as a Facebook “like” is easy to set up and becomes a very simple measurement to follow, although the challenge still lies in converting a low friction click on a Like button into a useful customer or advocate.

What is surprising with corporate Australia’s adoption of Facebook is the apparent lack of understanding of the platform’s terms and conditions and the business risks involved. Again this is probably part of the collective learning curve.

Possibly because of those risks, public sector use is static. We can expect this given as social media is being pushed as a marketing tool which isn’t a priority many government agencies, are you going to skip registering your car because the motor registry doesn’t have a “like” button on their web page?

This liberation from being obsessed with marketing and sales is probably why the public sector is using social media a more creatively as collaborative and research tools where many of these services do an extremely good job.

Many businesses, particularly smaller organizations, believe social media doesn’t fit their objectives. A terrific quote from an SME accountant is “I run a business, not a chat show”.

That attitude’s fine as social media – like pretty well everything else in the business world – is a tool to be used the best way you see fit, just because some businesses don’t need a hammer but that doesn’t mean hammers aren’t useful.

Although when that tool is fairly new, as social media is, it’s probably best to have a play with it and see where if can help your business.

The Social Media Benchmarking Study is a useful survey that shows where businesses are using these tools and how effective they are finding them. It’s going to be interesting to see the field evolves as we all get to understand social media as both consumers and business owners.

How safe is your net connection?

It pays to be careful on the web when travelling.

Reports last week that foreign “hackers” had intercepted emails between Australian government officials and miners raised the issue of email security, just how private are our online messages?

When the media uses the word “hacking” it’s always worth taking a step back and finding out the facts. Often a security breach is the result of a simple setup mistake or the information and passwords have walked out the building with a disaffected, lovestruck or just plain dumb employee.

That’s not to say hackers aren’t a risk organisations should to be conscious of, it’s just that often the security risks are more mundane than we would expect. A good example is the simple matter of logging onto a wireless or hotel network.

We assume when we log into our networks that the data is secure though often the user names and passwords are exchanged in “clear text”, which anyone with access to the network can view your passwords with the use of a “packet sniffer” that reads each bundle of information sent across the internet.

Poor security isn’t just a feature of unprepared computer users, every year the world’s leading hackers and security experts gather at that Las Vegas DEFCON conference which since 2001 has featured the Wall of Sheep, an embarrassing display of user information captured off the convention’s network.

This is a surprisingly common security problem made more frequent with the rise of unencrypted wireless networks which can be sniffed by anyone who can be bothered logging on, this is a common problem when you’re connecting onto free wireless networks at the local coffee shop or fast food restaurant.

The answer to all of this is to use Secure Socket Layer encryption, which creates a secure link between your computer, mobile phone or iPad and the servers. For email use, your system administrator can set this up or if you use the popular web mail services it’s a matter of ticking the box.

A similar service works when you’re browsing the web, on visiting a secure site the address should start with https instead of the usual http, the “s” on the former stands for “secure”. A padlock symbol will also appear – in the bottom left hand corner of Firefox or beside the site address at the top of both Chrome and later versions of Internet Explorer.

Before logging onto any secure service, including social media platforms, both the https address and the padlock symbol should appear before you enter passwords or sensitive information like credit card or banking details.

Sadly, the secure websites are not always foolproof as sometimes the site will use a secure connection for your password details then once you’ve logged in, return to an unsecured version. This is how the Filesheep program that was released last year works by sniffing cookies and other stored information from unsecured websites.

It’s surprising how many tourists and backpackers get caught out while doing online banking, checking their email or using social media while on the road.

Without logging into a network securely, then logging out when finished and making sure their details haven’t been saved, it’s quite common to see travellers getting their details stolen.

Assuming you’re safe because the network belongs to a high priced hotel or resort doesn’t always work either; a few years ago passengers on a major cruise liner had their bank accounts compromised when one of the crew was stealing data passing through the ship’s Internet cafe.

You don’t need to be a mining executive in China or Julian Assange to fall prey to the Internet snoops, whole industries and criminal organisations are built around using your data so it’s a good idea to be making sure your information is secure while taking a little bit of caution and using some judgement before logging onto a network.

The Networked Business

The first of the City Of Sydney’s Let’s Talk Business looked at how business can use the cloud

The first of the City Of Sydney’s Let’s Talk Business workshops looked at how business can use cloud computing services to help improve the marketing, operations and profitability.

My presentation, Business In The Cloud covered the definition of cloud computing, the benefits for business, the risks and the case for getting on the cloud.

The text of the presentation, shown here has been broken into four segments each addressing the individual points.

What is the cloud?

The opening section looked at what cloud computing is, the underlying definitions and how it works. We discussed how the underlying concepts of cloud computing are nothing new and how the concepts of shared resources across a reliable and robust network are part of the very reason for the Internet itself.

The benefits of cloud computing

Having defined cloud computing we look at the benefits of these services, focusing on the flexibility online software delivers and how businesses can use these tools to quickly seize opportunities in our fast changing society.

Risky business

Every new technology has its risks and cloud computing is no different. In our third presentation we look at some of the online traps and how to manage them.

The business case for cloud computing

Concluding the presentation is a summary of the business case, balancing the benefits and the risks and concluding with how businesses might use cloud services.

Further information

Illustrating how businesses can use online tools, we have a list of some of popular business cloud services that can help your organisation use the web to be more flexible and innovative.

The presentation was part of the Let’s Talk Business series of workshops run by the City of Sydney and held at the Customs House. There’s three more events in the 2011 series covering the new consumer, mobile internet and business leadership.

If you’ve been along to the Lets Talk Business events, or have some ideas on how business can use cloud services, we’d love to hear your comments.

The networked business Part 4: The business case for cloud computing

Part 4 of the Let’s Talk Business Cloud Presentation

This is the fourth and final part of the presentation given as part of the City of Sydney’s Let’s Talk Business series of events on new business technologies.

The case for business cloud computing

Cloud computing is part of the future of of business. Increasingly it’s going to become of fundamental part of our society as we become more connected.

Business is open 24 hours. Even if your office or staff aren’t working at 4am on a Sunday, customers are checking your website to look at your products. If you are selling online, everything has to be running.

The cloud is not a tool for every business. For some, the risks or limitations mean they are better served running application or storing data on their own computer.

For most businesses though the cloud changes the game, it makes them more flexible and productive.

In an era where we’re seeing massive change in our economy and society, it’s the business who can respond quickly to the new normal who will survive and prosper.

Cloud computing helps businesses adapt and are part of the key to running a successful enterprise in the 21st Century.

This is the third of a series of four posts taken from The Networked Business presentation. Parts One, Two and Three are also online. A list of the useful business cloud computing tools to accompany this article.