Loss of the baby boomers

In conversations this week, I discovered that by 2014, more than 50% of a certain oil companies most prized oil and gas discovery workers will have retired. For an industry whose share price is measured on the number of oil and gas fields discovered each year this is a disturbing trend.

One of the possible solution - social networks. 'Alumni' knowledge networkers are emerging in high knowledge industries (such as biotech and consulting) to retain access to the people most valued. As well having access to the alumni, there's growing evidence that social networking tools signficantly help those at risk of isolation such as homeworkers, those on maternity/paternity leave, in turn aiding our diversity and vitality agenda.

We know our workforce are already self-organizing and connecting on social networking tools such as Linkedin and Facebook - so should we be starting new networks or harnessing the ones already out there? and How can we leverage an increasingly popular consumer trend to our benefit?

Rumble in the Jungle

Turning unutilized assets into a profit stream is pretty smart - and that's exactly what Amazon is doing with their book selling infrastructure to create Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service). S3 is an online storage web service offering unlimited storage through a simple web services interface. Amazon charges fees for data stored and for bandwidth used in sending and receiving data.

So why might S3 be of interest? From a corporate perspective, a number of big companies are using S3 as a rapid development environment, to support cost effective experimentation and sand-boxing. As the model is a pure pay-per-use environment you only pay for what you use. There are no timely provision or sizing exercises to go through, so developers can do what they do best - develop.

S3 doesn't 'do' everything and should be approached cautiously as a serious alternative to professional data centers as it's not suited for most corporate apps. There are all the usual concerns around downtime, privacy etc. which is mostly out of your control - but many are willing to accept those risks in favour of the low costs.

Over 330,000 developers have registered to use Amazon Web Services, up more than 30,000 from last quarter, according to Amazon’s recent quarterly earnings announcement.

If you want to get a hands on experience of Amazon's S3 service, I would recommend trying out http://www.jungledisk.com/ which is a cloud based storage company which uses the S3 service as a backend. It gives users unlimited amount of data storage for only USD 0.15 per gigabyte. If you want to read more on S3 - there's a good blog entry here.