Gmail on the up down under
Although it's very cool to post on the corporate message board: 'Hey - why don't we save the company millions of dollars by using Linux, Gmail and OpenOffice ?', there are obvious barriers (security and Excel luddites to name but two) to large corporations adopting server based software.
However, I always thought Google Mail would be an obvious fit for academic institutions to reduce the costs of software licenses and IT management. Adoption of such 'software as a service' would make sense as although some students are 'late risers', the majority could also be classified as 'early adopters' who are comfortable with the technology.
This recent announcement that the Department of Education in New South Wales will roll out (a customised version of ) Google Mail to 1.5 million students is an interesting development.
The cost of the new system will be $9.5 million as opposed to the $33 million for the previous Exchange/Outlook based solution with students getting an increased quota of 6GB (previously a miserly 35MB).
Although the initial contract is purely for email services for students only (no Google Talk), the obvious extension is to include Google Docs and Spreadsheets to displace Microsoft Office.
Adsense case study for a personal blog
One of the reasons I decided to put Adsense on this blog was out of sheer curiosity. There are plenty of Google sponsored case studies available from American shoe shops that significantly increased sales and revenues using Adsense. Successful blogger John Chow is totally and refreshingly transparent with all his various revenue streams but I didn't have a clue what income (if any) a small-time blogger might expect. So, here - drum roll, please - are the revenue figures for this blog for the first 3 months- July - $8.31
- August -$8.33
- September - $8.77
- Most clicks in a day: 4
- Most lucrative click: $1.64
- Least lucrative click: $0.01 (yes, 1 cent)
- Best day: 5 June 2007 ($2.16)
- Worst day: $0.00 (too many to mention)
how fast is Google Blog search ?
Less than two minutes to index a new article. Impressive.how to create perfect tables in WordPress
Create tables, resize, add rows and columns, preview the output and add the finishing touches in Google Docs. Then simply paste the HTML into the WordPress WYSIYG editor.Facebook penetration of corporate America
I was interested to read that Microsoft have over 17,597 employees registered on Facebook out of a total of 70,000 employees. I thought I would try to discover how other leading IT companies compared, including my own. The staff numbers come from Google Finance and the rounding errors come from me. The following Facebook networks are only open to company employees with a valid email address although, obviously, a better metric would have been some measure of recent activity.| Company | Employees | FB factor (%) | |
| 10,674 | 5,545 | 51.9 | |
| Yahoo! | 11,400 | 3,911 | 34.3 |
| Microsoft | 71,000 | 17,980 | 25.3 |
| Sun | 14,000 | 2,942 | 21.0 |
| IBM | 355,766 | 23,400 | 6.6 |
| Oracle | 74,674 | 4,280 | 5.7 |
| SAP | 41,919 | 2,300 | 5.4 |
| HP | 186,000 | 9,742 | 5.2 |
| Intel | 90,300 | 4,219 | 4.7 |