Google Apps for small businesses

The IT infrastructure is the key enabler for any business today. Whether it is an Entrepreneurial venture or an established corporation, having proper IT infrastructure (mainly email accounts, website and other collaborative tools) is extremely critical to run the day-to-day activities. Maintaining the IT infrastructure with high investment may not be affordable for businesses which are in bootstrapping (startup) phase. Google has come up with 'Google Apps’. Fore more details and check out the 'Overview presentation'.

What Google has done different here?

• It has moved the initial IT setup work way from the business and made it available as an ‘on-demand’ application from the Internet.
• Added support for integrating Google’s popular applications (like Gmail, spreadsheets, calendar etc...) to the domain-name of the business.
• The whole package comes for free with guaranteed uptime of 99.9%. However for premium versions are charged additionally.

I feel this would be another killer application from Google. The main problem startups face is the cost and they may not be able to afford applications in hardware (servers) and software (like MS office) right from day one. Also, by making it available on the web, it’s been made independent of operating system.

How do Google make money from this?

Google makes money when the user clicks the sponsored advertisement.

My prediction – By offering Google Apps to small businesses, Google has opened up new avenues for contextual advertisement. For example when the user is reading the official, by having contextual advertisement displayed can increase the probability of clicking the sponsored link.

Whatever Google's strategy it may be, this is really a good application for startups which are in the ’bootstrap' mode.

United Villages

In third world countries like India, providing Internet connectivity to rural areas continues to be a challenge. Running copper cables to these areas is still a problem due to poor infrastructure. However the recent success of mobile phone re-iterates the fact the Wireless is the way to address this challenge. Also this kind of 'Bottom-of-the-pyramid' markets are having huge potential and yet to be tapped.

Recently came across the 'United Villages' website and the idea looks very interesting. Using pubic transport system (as Wireless Access Points) and providing pre-paid card for the service is definitely a good business proposition.

Computing As A Service In My Telephone Bill

Ever wanted to get updated with good software, computing environment and have somebody else bother about the computer maintenance.

Imagine this scenario.

a. I am an existing Airtel broadband subscriber
b. Airtel announces its new computing package @ Rs.99 a month
c. Curious, I go to see what they have to offer
d. The attendant says you can take a pre-packaged computing USB for free and put into your computer and start off using a given set of provisioned applications
e. She further says they have pre-packaged USB for Teens, Professionals, Adult etc and says I can try one free for a week.
f. I take the Teens USB and put into my computer (assume the comp boots off the USB)
g. On booting from USB, you automatically connect to live.airtel.net
h. Signing on is done and based on your profile, the Teen VM profile is loaded (the actual provisioning process)at the airtel site.
i. At this stage, it looks to be like a sophisticated pcAnywhere and I wonder whats its all about.
j. Then I realize that while the computing is going on at live.airtel.net, all data is being stored in the USB stick or my own hard drive.
k. The intelligent thing that these guys have done is not only with the provisioning (maybe using one of these hi-tech virtualization stuff) but also tap the data addresses, stream it over the net in a secure manner and store it the local USB.
l. Now, I can take this same USB stick with the data and go to any cyber café parlor and do the same operation. I am actually location agnostic now.
m. I went back to my small business and wondered whether I can get my accountant a corporate "Professionals" USB in the same way and stop him from telling me that the computer stopped working and he cannot give me my reports for this quarter.

Why should searching for a book be manual in libraries ?

I had requested for a few books to be purchased at my company office. There were the obvious delays (red-tape, you know) and finally it got purchased.The problems of ordering something in an office means that your manager keeps asking whether you are using what you ordered. Being familiar with the practice, i immediately set forth to the library and asked the librarian for the books.

The library is medium in size (not your usual community library size) but large nonetheless. The librarian used the technology at her command and searched for the book by name and got the ISBN number. From this, she got the location where the book was supposed to be and asked me to go take a look.I searched and searched at the location until the guy next to me started getting annoyed at me asking him to keep moving. Gave up and asked for help from the librarian. She too searched and searched and searched to no avail.

To cut a long story short, somebody had placed the book two rows away. We finally located it and all was well. Importantly, i now could tell my manager that i am reading the books i had ordered.The larger question of course is, why is there nothing that can help you search the rows for a book. How about this idea ?

Develop a ISBN reader. There are several small devices that can get programmed to read the ISBN number wirelessly. Get one with the wireless ISBN reader interface plus a USB or similar well-known interface. Attach it to a computer, run a program that will encode it to search for a list of ISBN numbers. Now take the device with you and run it across the rows. When it senses the ISBN number, i guess it can beep ?

Seems simple but of course, there may be stuff that i am not expert at. It may even be available already. Comments ?

Update [13-May-07] - I have been looking for a device that can do this. The closest is one that actually does the reverse. It collects the ISBN number of books on shelves and can input into your computer. Take a look at

http://www.collectorz.com/book/