Penny for your Eyeballs?

Adobe wants your eyeballs. They're chasing the lucrative consumer dominated business model pioneered by Google.

The beta service creates the capability for authors to monetize newsletters, whitepapers, reprints - anything exported to PDF. The idea is that you upload your PDF file, Adobe analyzes the content and connects it to ads (as per Googles AdSense). When the viewing public opens the document in Adobe reader,annoying relevant ads pop up alongside. When the unsuspecting victim viewer clicks through - the author collect a referal fee. It's Googles primary source of cash so why shouldn't Adobe get a piece of the action?

For content producers / creators, even employers with a large workforce is this a future way to subsidize production costs, offset licence fees or even creating new profit sources? If you want to know more sign up for the Beta and start earning today.

Google Analytics is watching you ...

Thought you might be interested to know that you're not alone. I've now embedded a small amount of code into this page which means you're being watched....

Analystics is really designed to makes it easy to improve your results online. Write better ads, strengthen your marketing initiatives, and create higher-converting websites. Google Analytics is free to all advertisers, publishers, and site owners.

If you want a demo click here

Large File Sending ...

As business globalises and externalises and as media formats grow in richness, depth and fidelity .... files are getting larger and needing to travel further. Enter the 'Large File Transfer Service'.

These services offer tremedious value (many if not most are free), and they solve an age old problem of how to send artwork in development through to an agency and get a decent turnaronnd time.

Secuirty should be addressed in the short term by educating the workforce to think about the content before sending it through the net, password protecting content, validating and advising on which services are legitimate and meet corporate standards (blacklisting those that don't). In the mid to long term enterprises should be focusing on Rights Management - that way concerns of the quality of the messenger or legitimacy of the recipient can be removed.

If you're interested to find out more Lifehacker, have just reviewed a number of consumer file sharing model...

1. Microsofts SkyDrive - 5GB limit, SkyDrive works on a folder-based system, emphasizing the ability to organize your files in personal, shared, and public folders. SkyDrive requires a Windows Live account to get started, individual uploads are limited to 50MB.

2. Box.net - Popular for its simple interface and large feature set, file-sharing site Box.net provides 1GB of free space. Users love it for its collaboration tools and open format, which enables fun features like mounting you web space on your desktop and web service support, and RSS feeds. Like many others in this Hive Five, Box.net provides direct links to files so users aren't held up at a landing page to get their download. Box.net's biggest drawback is its free account's filesize limit, which sits at a rather paltry 10MB.

3. DropIO - Renown by users for its simplicity and impressive interface, Drop.io (original post) doesn't require registration for use and specializes in document sharing, offering built-in previews of everything from images to PDFs. The innovative service has recently added a couple of new features, like free sending and receiving of faxes and voice recording. The free account has a 100MB storage limit, so unless you're ready to spend some cash, Drop.io is best-suited for smaller files.

4. Yousendit - Free transfers up to 100MBs, plug-ins for Outlook, Photoshop, and Macs Aperture - which offer a seemless and transparent experience for users. Impressive 2GB transfer file size limits.

Social Technographics Explained

An interesting apporach which Forrester is launching to segment user populations. Would be interesting to understand how these profiles vary industry by industry and function by function. Short slide show paints enough of a picture to be able to grasp the key concept. Tip - if like me you're struggling to read the words (and don't have your glasses / microscope) click on the little icon in the bottom right of the slide show and then click the option - full screen.

View Upload your own

Going Public is the only way to get RSS Feeds ....

Techie interlude ...

Becomes apparent that you can't have a closed group blog and have RSS or Atom news feeds enabled. :(

The reason - RSS doesn't support authentication ..... yet. The full story below ....
http://blogging.nitecruzr.net/2008/03/private-blogs-do-not-have-newsfeeds.html

ePP

Word of the day is 'ePP' - Employee purchase programme.

There are a couple of flavours of ePP - in all cases, ePP offer some form of employee benefit typically discounted software or hardware. Some companies (such as BA) bundle their enterprise software deals with their hardware deals. e.g. Vista Ultimate + Office 2007 + Dell D630 + HP Printer. Discount rates are typically between 10% and 20% but can be as much as 35% off the retail price.


ePP isn't just a giveaway ... it also benefits the enterprise

Many companies (e.g. major airlines, and banks) are using ePP to drive home adoption. Why? - Think about it...

• Every copy of Office 2007, or Vista at home is building user experience - and reducing the adoption leadtimes when the products become released in the corporation. This in turn reducing training requirements ... and improves overall enterprise productivity


• Using ePP to re-enforce 'good behaviours' - e.g. a number of companies are providing 'free' antiviral products to help staff familize themselves with concepts such as viral updates and personal firewalls. Every home device which is secured and employee mind which more familiar with secuirty concepts benefits the enterpise.
  
• ePP is also a great peace offering, how often does IT offering something of real personal value. It's a fringe benefit offering real monetary savings for employees.
  
• Every Network ready home PC = One less the enterprise needs to provide, it also represents a chance to connect more of the workforce outside of the office without need to incurr provisioning costs

So why no ePP?

The real sticking point in the past has been around recovering licence keys and tax implications for software or assest when employees leave the company.

The good news is the new schemes in place today don't infringe on the enterprise - and therefore have no tax, or asset recovering implications - in the same that rental car and hotel chains offer employee weekend rate discounts to employees of large corporate accounts. What is important however is to ensure that employees are aware - that these purchase are independent - i.e. they are outside of the standard corporate support frameowork.

So ePP + Remote Access = Good news for consumerisation.

When one phone is never enough

An interesting article from Gizmodo regarding dual SIM phones. Not such a crazy idea, given the number of people who are currently carrying around two phones to support to work / home personas. Not convinced the execution is right - why not just have one phone with two SIM slots and a UI?

Eating our own dogfood

Welcome to the worlds first consumerisation blog (or at least the first that I know about).

Why should we use blogger...? A couple of thoughts...

• It's a consumer tool (owned by Google)
• It's hosted externally (so fit with our eat-our-own dogfood approach)
• There is some degree of control over permissions - yes don't worry if I've set this up properly those folk from P&G shouldn't be reading this
• Consumerisation is a big subject, so sharing some of the thinking as it develops will be important.
• You're also in control you can subscribe or unsubscribe at will -
• Finally this is not costing us anything (other than energy) and took about 30mins to setup.

Some obvious concerns, would be around Public vs. Private. The blog is closed (at the moment) but we should agree - what can / should and can't / shouldn't be included. Some common sense should apply here. The first rule might be, not to use any company names or brands?

So thoughts? Ideas? Should we be doing this differently?