Some time ago, I was introduced to Kiva (www.kiva.org), a web based micro loan service. According to their website “Kiva’s mission is to connect people through lending for the sake of alleviating poverty.” For as little as $25.00 you can help individual or groups of entrepreneurs from third world countries grow their small businesses and become self sufficient. “Kiva is the world’s first person-to-person micro-lending website, empowering individuals to lend directly to unique entrepreneurs in the developing world.”
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Our philosophy “Everything on the ‘Net” appears to many business people as risky.

Why? The first fear is typically “I want to ‘own’ my own data” (translation: I want to see the hardware in my own server area.) Or the other popular objection is, “the Internet isn’t secure.” There are many other ways to push back on the inevitable adoption of the Internet as computing platform.  Name yours. Read the rest of this entry »

This post is remarkable in that I’m setting in a coffee shop thinking about posting to our blog. The fact that I’m thinking is hardly remarkable. But, the fact that this is being written from my iPhone is. Further remarkable is the fact that I didn’t even have the software that I’m using to write this until I had the thought to write. I went to the iPhone App store, downloaded a free blog writer and did this.

It’s truly remarkable that I can have a thought, desire to share it and with hardly a moment passing… Here it is!

The secret to being a great technologist (apart from having innate diagnostic skills) is having a good “tool-box” of things to use to solve an opportunity.  Take 50 years of solving technical opportunities, add it to our superior innate diagnostic skills, and mix it up with our keen ability to learn new things and I can assure you, we have a great set of tools to use in moving your organization to the Internet (really, solve any of your technical opportunities!)

Listed below are some of the tools we are currently working with.  In reviewing the tool box of solutions we are familiar with, you will get an overall sense of how and where we fit in terms of helping your organization make the move to putting your business on the Internet.

The List Of “Tools”:

• Team Viewer - There is no reason to let distance separate us from helping and or supporting you. Team Viewer is an incredible solution for remote support, remote teaching, and remote desktop sharing. This product is very easy to use and overcomes the silly issues of Firewall’s, private networks, and technical configuration confusion.
• Grand Central - One number that can follow you anywhere and will take to all of your other numbers.
• ZOHO - This is tough to describe as there are so many parts to the ZOHO solution. Our best advice is to seriously check ZOHO out. In fact, we are seriously considering moving from Google Apps to ZOHO.
• MindMeister - Online MindMapping solution that allows us to collaboratively present ideas visually.
• Gliffy - Online drawing application (think cloud based VISIO).

Google Apps is and has been, since it’s by invitation only beta days, the primary IT infrastructure for OMBNexGen: We live in Google Apps!  While the various individual principles were using Google’s personal services for some time, once we came together to form the new company, OMBNexGen, LLC, we purposefully deployed all of our “internal” (remember for us “internal” is a concept that lives on the Internet Cloud) IT infrastructure through the Google Apps for business services.

Our email is hosted and managed by Google Apps, our office automation solutions like Wordprocessing, Spreadsheets, etc., are provided through Google Apps, and in addition our collaborative workspace services, i.e., Google Chat, Google Video, shared documents, and our Intranet services are all provided by Google Apps.  We use the Premium Google Apps version so that we can have the security and SPAM services of the Google Postini products as well as compliance and email retention services.  In a sentence, Google Apps is our IT infrastructure.

As early Google Apps converts and by invitation beta testers, we have developed an incredibly strong and rich skill set in all of the Google offerings (Google Analytics, web-tools, maps, etc…).  To a great extent Google Apps epitomizes are philosophy of what is smart about the direction the Internet can take in terms of transforming IT into Next Generation solutions.

While Google Apps is completely second hand to us, we have come to understand and learn that even today many organizations don’t know or understand the extent of what Google offers in terms of commercial class enterprise IT services.  Everyone knows Google search, but lots of people don’t know Google Apps.

If an organization does nothing else to upgrade their IT infrastructure to Next Generation Internet services, it must and should seriously consider Google Apps for email.  Email is one of those organizational must have services, like a phone and electricity, that should be as trivial and reliable as having a phone or electricity; Google Apps hosted email for business is as good as it gets for enterprise email.  How many organizations can say that about their MS Exchange environments! Furthermore we challenge anyone to show us an email solution that is less expensive, while still being enterprise grade and quality, than Google Apps business hosted email.