Lower Operating Costs by 90%

Globalism is here but its impact has not truly been realized yet. Many companies just are not aware of the opportunity that is available to them in resourcing large portions of their costs to outsourced inexpensive freelancers. I do it and you should consider doing it to.

Jeff Bulla's recent post on lowering operating costs by 90% reminded me of just how important this strategy is and I've included some of his observations from a few recent participants in outsourcing solutions here. I originally became familiar with the notion from Tim Ferriss' (shown above) Four Hour Work Week. Every business today needs to understand how accessing outside resources can help them to grow faster and create more professional results.

You might want to check out Yvonne Adele the CEO of Ideas Culture and Matt Barrie the CEO of Freelancer.com.

Yvonne launched a service which is titled “Ideas While You Sleep” . This is how it works.

If you have a business challenge and you would like the global community to help you find some ideas (brainstorming) to help you answer that challenge then you do the following

• Submit your business challenge at 4pm your time
• You receive around 100 ideas at 10am the following morning

The tools for communicating and enabling this mobilization are  Twitter and Google Docs and what you obtain is a large range of inspiring ideas to answer your business challenge.

Some of the challenges solved recently were

• How do I attract the right franchisees? – Funky Photo Booth
• How do we dramatically increase vistors to realestate.com.au in 1 month? – Realestate.com.au
• How do we attract more single males to community project events? – m.a.d woman

For more challenges read more here

Ideas While You Sleep now has clients in 12 different countries and over 400 Ideas Agents ranging in age from 16-82 in 8 countries.

Matt’s company Freelancer.com is  the world’s largest micro-outsourcing website with over 1 million registered professionals from 234 countries & regions of the world. Through Freelancer.com, small businesses can quickly and cost effectively hire just about any skill set – on demand 24×7×365.

Matt delivered some interesting points during a recent presentation that Bulla's site shared

• 80% of the worlds population is about to join the Internet
• More people in the world have capacity to provide labour than sell goods
• You can outsource Website design, IT & software, content writing, blogging, graphic design in fact almost anything you can think of
• Typically these services can be provided at one tenth the cost that you are paying today

Thanks Jeff for reminding me of this important point. Question: If you had unlimited labor at one tenth the cost what would you outsource, and what difference would that make to your business? Watch Four Hour Work Week Overview below.



Cloud Computing Surge Expected to Continue

Larry Dignan of ZDNet shared stats from a recent IDC report that global revenue from public cloud computing services is expected to grow at five times the rate of traditional IT.

Public IT cloud services revenue is expected to hit $55.5 billion in 2014, up from $16 billion in 2009. That adds up to a compound annual growth rate of 27.4 percent. Traditional IT product growth is expected to be 5 percent over the same period. That's right; growth rates in the cloud will be 5 times the rate of traditional IT.

IDC is projecting the following (statement):

• The cloud computing model will dominate growth for the next 20 years;
• There will be a next-generation of killer apps;
• Small and medium-sized business will lead the public cloud computing charge;
• Leading IT vendors will change as cloud computing gains market share.

All of that said cloud computing will still only represent 12 percent of total IT product spending by 2014. However, cloud computing will account for more than a quarter of the net new IT growth.

For now, the U.S. leads in revenue from cloud computing with 70 percent of the global sales pie. By 2014, the U.S. will account for 51.4 percent of global cloud computing revenue. Europe and Asia Pacific are regions expected to grow quickly.

Is your business setup to take advantage of the cloud ?

Wireless Devices & Wellness

"Wireless Health" is a term that has been emerging over the past several years. As with all industries, advancing technologies are bringing revolutionary solutions to the huge health "care" marketplace.

A recent article by Dana Blankenhorn titled, "Could wireless health get too rich and too Slim?" addresses medical technology's increasing momentum. He selects the grand opening of the West Wireless Health Institute, as evidence with some important recent announcements which raise an interesting question:

• The Wests have put another $25 million into the Institute, bringing their total commitment to the effort to $90 million.
• Cisco, Medtronic and Carefusion have all joined as technology and education partners.
• The research partnership with Slim, who has also teamed up with the Gates Foundation in a $150 million health partnership.

As Blankenhorn points out, "in just a few years wireless health has been showered with money, tied into the very wealthiest circles, and given enough corporate partners to choke a horse."

Dana finds this "ironic because wireless health is not an area that should require immense charitable support. Sensor and wireless communication chips are ready for prime time venture funding and deployment today. They have been for some time."

Well, given Dana's skepticism, the emergence of wireless wellness is upon us and the opportunity for them to help revolutionize the wellness and sick care systems is enormous. However, until some smart business people get involved and the economics of the systems change, these technological capabilities may indeed only be relevant to a few.

I suggest you watch this TEDMED video delivered by Eric Topol who says we'll soon use our smartphones to monitor our vital signs and chronic conditions. At TEDMED, he highlights several of the most important wireless devices in medicine's future -- all helping to keep more of us out of hospital beds.

The New Paradigm of Content - It Isn't Just About Books

NYT reporter Nick Bilton shared an insightful article on the recent post of book publisher, designer and writer Craig Mod (on the left with monks) titled "Former Book Designer says Good Riddance to Print". It caught my attention because there are a few things Craig shares that not only apply to the book industry and they apply to ALL industries relating to content. Here are Craig's two most important points.

1. Content can be broadly grouped into two types: content where the form is important, such as poetry or text with graphics, and content where form is divorced from layout, which he says applies to most novels and non-fiction. This same categorization applies to other content formats.

2. Instead of arguing about pixels versus paper, as many book lovers tend to do, or any form of content comparison including vinyl vs. digital iPod for that matter, it is more useful to focus on whether the technology is a good match for the content. In other words, does the format make the content more appropriately consumable ? This is where new technologies will not just be replacing how things were done but creating new ways that heretofore where impossible.

When evaluating the issue of content and its deployment Craig's approach clarifies some questions. For example, I work in the fitness industry and witness the distribution of program content in the form of hard copy DVD and CD's. In the arena of fitness education, which is what this hard copy content is used for,  the content is very difficult to consume, a direct function of the manner in which the content is deployed.  When evaluating the replacement of this hard copy content, there is no doubt that new interactive forms will be of great benefit. As Nick points out in the article:

"Mr. Mod also discusses the need to push the boundaries of how we interact with content on these devices. Apples’s iBookstore, for example, takes the book metaphors too literally in a digital setting and doesn’t innovate enough given the tools at hand. “The metaphor of flipping pages already feels boring and forced on the iPhone. I suspect it will feel even more so on the iPad. The flow of content no longer has to be chunked into ‘page’ sized bites.” For hundreds of years, we’ve been consuming information on static pages, and for the most part, this content has been presented with a beginning, middle and end. Nonlinear, digital platforms will prompt a new range of thinking about stories and how to tell them."

For all the objections every industry will have to change and the upheavals it creates, the bottom line is that these technologies will have a great benefit in making people more productive. I'll leave you with this final quote which should be enough of a reason for folks to stop objecting so much to the idea that old copy books will be largely eliminated. There is much good when you really think about it:

"Once we dump this weight, we can prune our increasingly obsolete network of distribution. As physicality disappears, so, too, does the need to fly dead trees around the world.”

Cloudforce 2010 - San Jose

You know I'm a big fan of the cloud and it just keeps getting more and more interesting. Now the next generation of cloud computing is upon us. It’s mobile, collaborative, and social and available today with Cloud 2. It’s changing everything! A big salesforce.com event in San Jose on June 22, 2010 will address the Cloud 2 trend.

Salesforce.com Chairman and CEO Marc Benioff and industry luminaries from CA, VMware, and BMC, and thousands of others will see how the next generation of cloud computing will transform entire businesses. Watch !