Google Apps Serving 1 Million Businesses

I've been a huge fan of Microsoft Office for years. 

I know it inside and out and like it - even love it.

But it still costs several hundred dollars per seat.  Starting back up a lean growth company this past year and thinking about how to enable more web-based collaboration, sharing, etc - and at the same time reduce costs... We'll Google Apps fits the bill.

http://www.google.com/apps | Google's Post

The basic version is free.  The premium version is $50/user per year. We run most of our business on it now.  Everyone has access to docs, presentations and spreadsheets anywhere they are - home or office.

The premium version is the better choice. You can migrate your exchange mail to gmail (all your messages, folders, instantly google searchable!) and it includes Postini messaging security, APIs for integrating Google Apps with IT infrastructure, 24x7 support, 99.9 percent uptime guarantee for e-mail, Google Video and 25GB of storage per account.

Since early this year Google has been touting 500,000 active business customers, primarily small businesses, using at least one of the Google Apps, and more than 10 million active users. In addition, thousands of universities, with more than one million active users, are using Google Apps, the company said. So far, Google's biggest wins are Valeo, a leading automotive suppliers, with 32,000 users, and the District of Columbia, with 38,000 employees.

The company has been saying that it is adding 3,000 businesses a day, which amounts to over 1 million per year.

• Google also just added Video for Business to its Google apps suite. 
  
• Here are all the Google App's intro and demo videos
  

The Art of Raising Venture Capital

Guy Kawasaki (http://blog.guykawasaki.com) posted these very insightful video's on raising venture capital.

LinkedIn's native iPhone Application

It's hot, helpful and handy - you now have ALL your LinkedIn relationships, contact info and updates right at your fingertips.  One of the best iPhone apps available.

http://blog.linkedin.com/blog/2008/08/announcing-link.html

Google Releases Picasa v3.0 - Breathtaking

Get it now at http://picasa.google.com

Picassa 3 is the best computer photo management available and it's free.

Picasa Web Albums hosts billions of online photos from around the globe, with users adding millions of new snapshots every day.

Here is the Demo/Overview Video:

12 Tools for Research on the Web

Mashable shares a great overview of several tools to help with:

• http://mashable.com/2008/09/01/research-tools/

Learn how to save text, audio, video and links during your research online and share these collections of notes with your colleagues.

Organizational Tools

• iLeonardo
• Google Notebook
• Zoho Notebook
• UberNote
• EverNote

Browser Extensions & Addons

• ClipMarks
• iLighter
• Twitterlights
• Dappad
• Scrapbook
• WiredMarker
• NetNotes

World's Strongest Man Competition in Charleston

www.theworldsstrongestman.com

Will be taking place in Charleston, WV and is sponsored by West Virginia Coal Association, Brickstreet Insurance, Pepsi, Chesapeake Energy and the state Lottery and Division of Tourism.

The Charleston area will have two athletes in the competition. Phil Pfister, a former Charleston firefighter, won the 2006 event in China. Brian Siders is a champion power lifter who will be competing in his first event.

12 New Rules of Work

Zen Habits posted a great article on how we are (or how we should) be working - given the new tools available to us in this new global, economy. The article goes into great depth on each point: Here's a recap:

The New Rules of Working

1. Online apps and the cloud beat the desktop and hard drive.
2. Collaborate on documents, don’t email them.
3. Collaboration is the new productivity.
4. People don’t have to be in an office.
5. Archive, don’t file.
6. Small teams are better than large teams.
7. Communication is a stream.
8. Fewer tasks are better than many.
9. Meeting (usually) suck.
10. Open-source is better than closed.
11. Rest is as important as work.
12. Focus, don’t crank.

60 Million iPhone Apps Downloaded in 30 days, Produces $30 Million in Sales

A very encouraging report for application developers and iPhone users. Here are the breaking stats as of this morning:

• Users have now downloaded more than 60 million programs for the iPhone and iPod touch, about 2 million per day.
• Revenue from those applications came to about $30 million.
  
• 70% went to the developers; Apple kept 30%.
  
• At that pace, Apple stands to clear at least $360 million a year.
• Steve Jobs says “This thing’s going to crest a half a billion, soon,” Jobs said in a Wall Street Journal Interview. “Who knows, maybe it will be a $1 billion marketplace at some point in time…I’ve never seen anything like this in my career for software.”
• Of the $21 million that developers cleared in the first month, roughly $9 million went to the creators of the top 10 best sellers.

Apple recently announced that they topped 5 Billion iTunes songs sold.

How Americans / the World Spend their Money

Forbes published a great summary 'in pictures' of how both Americans, and the World spend their money. Here are the links to the two summaries:

• In Pictures: How The World Spends Its Money

• In Pictures: How Americans Spend Their Money

And if you've ever listened to your iPod while eating out...? Well you'ved help shape America's biggest spending category: Eating Out and Electronics! :-)

The deepest bucket by far: restaurants. In 2007, U.S. consumers spent $390 billion at eateries, representing nearly 43% of their overall discretionary spending. Electronics, at $141 billion, or 15.5% of discretionary dollars, came in second.

Red iPhone for Christmas?

(photo by MacBlogz) Some great observations and comments by CrunchGear on the rumors of Apple releasing a red iPhone 3G model for the holiday season. That would be pretty exciting for the millions of customers who are waiting until the holiday's to make their move. Part of the holiday spirit is Apple's Product (RED) campaign offering, which donates a percentage of profits to anti-retroviral medicine to help fight HIV/AIDS in Africa.

AppleInsider reports that it sold 1 million 3G iPhone's in the first 4 day's of it's release. When the iPhone first launched it took 74 days to sell the first one million original iPhones. The new iPhone 3G is clearly off to a great start.

AdAge Power 150 Blogs

Advertising Age has produced a great resource for professionals in media, marketing, advertising and public relations. Their new Power 150 Blog list is online at http://adage.com/power150blog

The Power 150 is a ranking of the top English-language media and marketing blogs in the world, as developed by marketing executive and blogger, Todd Andrlik. It's really as simple as that, except that the name isn't strictly accurate: It currently ranks more than 500 blogs written about all types of media and pretty much every imaginable marketing discipline.

Cool Friend: Evan Williams / Twitter

The world is full of brilliant, enthusiastic achievers. As an ongoing part of this blog, I hope to introduce you to some of the world's most interesting and successful entrepreneurs.

Today I'm introducing Evan Williams of Twitter.

Evan was one of the co-founders of the Blogger platform that is Google's primary platform today and attracts over 163 million+ users each month.

Today, Evan is the vision behind Twitter - the planet's highest growth micro-blogging / instant messaging service that lets millions of users each day answer the question "What are you doing ?" with a short 140 character response.


As you know Twitter has had incredible success, adoption, venture funding, continued growth and is quickly becoming a defining company of our times. Here are some deeper links to connect more with Evan and Twitter:

• USA Today Article 7/21/2008
  
• Inc Magazine - Interview about Twitter Startup Success | print version
  
• Evan's Twitter Log
• CrunchBase Company Profile
• Union Square Ventures Funding
• Evan's Personal Weblog
• Wikipedia: Evan Williams

If you are not already, you should really consider exploring around with Twitter. Personally, I've met some of the most interesting, accomplished individuals in the world - by being able to connect and communicate with them through Twitter.

Here is my Twitter connection with posts from each day's experiences. Thank to Evan Williams for this fantastic service.

• http://twitter.com/paulhelmick - Let's connect.
  

19% of Americans Own $22 Trillion in Assets

Following up the last post on World Wealth. Media Post Publications has written a great report on wealth segments in America.

First, here is the link to the (beautifully formatted if I may say) Nielsen Report (pdf)

Second, a highlight of some key facts:

• Claritas defines this emerging group as households with incomes above $100,000 and income producing assets of $100,000 or more. That income puts these households in the top 19 percent of all Americans, earning more than double the national median income of $49,280.
• The New Mass Affluent consist of eight distinct groups, each with its own lifestyles, media patterns and preferences
• The New Mass Affluent are sophisticated consumers who often tune out traditional marketing strategies, and many simply don't think of themselves as rich.
• TheWealth Market, most closely resembles the traditional portrait of old money. Filled with suburban couples over 65 years old, these 2.6 million households control a much larger share of assets in the country than their numbers would suggest. Some 48 percent of households in this segment have more than $2 million in assets-nearly 44 times the national average
• See more profile segments in the article.
  

Rich Reach 10.1 Million, Their Average Wealth Surpasses $4MM for First Time

Here is a great report (pdf) on where the world's wealth is and where it's now coming from. Marketing Charts put forth a great summary and they share these facts that:

Driven by market capitalization growth in emerging economies, the wealth of the world’s high net worth individuals (HNWIs) increased 9.4% to $40.7 trillion in 2007, according to the 12th annual World Wealth Report from Merrill Lynch and Capgemini.

The number of HNWIs in the world increased 6% in 2007 to 10.1 million, the number of ultra high net worth individuals (Ultra-HNWIs) increased 8.8%, and for the first time in the average assets held by HNWIs exceeded $4 million.

HNWIs are those with net assets of at least $1 million, excluding their primary residence and consumables; Ultra-HNWIs - who number some 103,000 - are those with net assets of at least $30 million, excluding their primary residence and consumables. The highest proportion of Ultra-HNWIs to HNWIs is in Latin America:

The graph's that they provide are very insightful:

I hope this provides an insightful perspective for entrepreneurs who are raising funding or marketing to the affluent segment of the market.

Blogger Templates

So in getting started, Google gives you dozens of great templates for your weblog. But what if you want some additional choices for your design and layout, but don't the hassle of custom coding and css web design?

Blogcrowds is a great resource with several additional, updated templates. Several of these even provide for a three column layout that makes even better use of all that real estate on your screen.

Visit Blogcrowds to see the gallery.

New Weblog

Just transferring off of our old WordPress weblog to the Blogger platform. It seems like just a couple years ago it was the other way around. Now back to Blogger. Why? I was such a WordPress fan, but maintaining codebase for 10+ blogs... our team has better things to do.

Google's made some major upgrades to the service, added categories/labels, improved the layout/widgets, etc - and really just made it simple and maintenance free. With 10+ blogs that our companies maintain, we just want to spend less time supporting the technology and more time communicating and sharing resources with our readers and friends.


You can look forward to seeing more great content ( that was formerly posted on www.executiveedgenews.com ) continue on this site. I'll continue to share lots of resources for entrepreneurs, executives and growing professionals to help you succeed, prosper and achieve your goals.

As always, I appreciate your readership and time you share with us each week.

All the best ~ Paul