Facebook Flickr

YouTube

• Be an expert on the topic
• Use relevant examples
• Make a case
• Care about the topic
• above all, be entertaining

Ken Robinson in this presentation meets all these criteria amazingly. Watch his presentation on school creativity.

George pulls a few surprises and interesting suggestions. Consider these:

2020 – fragmentation of China.
2050 – Global war between US, Turkey, Poland and Japan (the new world powers)
2080 – “Space based energy” powers the world
2100 – Mexico challenges the US

Mind you, George Friedman is not your average Nostradamus. George is chief intelligence officer and founder of Strategic Forecasting, Inc. (Stratfor), a private intelligence agency whose clients include foreign government agencies and Fortune 500 companies.

Without giving away too many clues of the book a number of other predictions:

- The US will remain the prime global power throughout the next century.
- Wars will be less deadly and fought in space rather then on earth.
- Turkey and Japan will become regional powerhouses as Russia and China decline.
- The US will develop three space-based weapons platforms, which Friedman calls “Battle Stars”
- By 2050, Friedman sees Japan pulling a Pearl Harbor-esque strike against the Battle Stars

The Next 100 Years presents a fascinating picture of what lies ahead.

News-as-it-happens is the answer. Twitter is great for searching for what is happening NOW. You feel an earthquake, hear an explosion or want to know if your favourite team scored? Changes are that a search on Twitter will give you results, Google takes a couple of hours to aggregate results.

People want as-it-happens search results and Google wants to deliver. Whether they buy Twitter or not, expect this feature to show up sometime this year.

Press release from Gartner today: Gartner Says Worldwide Enterprise Software Market to Experience Flat Growth in 2009

In short, Gartner predicts that in 2009 the Global enterprise software market will grow 0,3% (flat) from 2008. The size of the market is almost the same as the GDP of Portugal with $222.8 billion. Gartner predicts flat growth this and next year.

I am somewhat surprised, not necessarily because I see a different reality but more so because almost every other bit of market data points to negative growth. The reality as it seems is that the enterprise software market is relatively strong because it experienced a big shake-out in 2001/2 and because the software increasing deliver on its promise of improved ROI. Especially market areas like virtualisation, open source and SaaS.

Not surprisingly Gartner points to the importance of strong partnerships for enterprise software vendors. “Aligning with partners that can provide local knowledge or industry insight will be a considerable differentiator.”. We’ll take that to heart.

By the way, first day of spring and the weather is great. I expect more good news about the crisis these days – hard to be pessimistic.

In this demo you see some basics of data services. The demo gives access to a number of data sources 1) Dutch postal code table 2) Dutch Chamber of Commerce 3) Geolocation services 4) Google Maps. The demo allows a ’round-trip’ – finding a company registration on an address with only postal code and house number and then plotting that on a map. Give it a try.

I think the demo is very powerfull in the sence that it allows you mash-up several  real-time data-sources in an online rich user interface. Everything is in the cloud, no data is local. Imagine this in your CRM system or online forms.

New item in IKEA’s stores, a slolid wood, hardwearing dining room chair. Somehow I am dissapointed this chair isn’t a little more distinguished…. 

And don’t forget, I need to be wiped clean using a damp cloth and a mild cleaner.

Another appoach is to build a Community of partners who have a strong professional interest in your solutions to:

• Facilitate company-to-partner and partner-to-partner communications
• Help partners expand their market coverage and discover new routes-to-market
• Connect partners to improve customer alignment in vertical markets
• Facilitate the sharing of best practices, solutions and knowledge among partners
• Incorporate other business and marketing programs of value to your partners

The aim of any partner community should be to utilize the ‘network effect’ by empowering the members with relevant information and tools to communicate. Active management and facilitation is essential to increase the value of participation and build adoption to a point where the network becomes self-sustaining.

The advantages of using community marketing over traditional one-to-many marketing is that your partner community has the potential to deliver your message to a larger audience, an audience that would otherwise be hard to address.

Four key elements in building an effective partner community are:

1. Try to understand what your partners really need (use surveys, focus groups or simply ask them)
2. Develop a trusted environment (make sure your partners know that they can participate without directly bringing business to you)
3. Provide compelling content (partners are not customers, don’t talk them them like they are customers)
4. Allow them to collaborate and work together (your partners are likely to benefit from what peer in the industry do as much as learning from your content

A community run well can be your most important engagement with your partners.