So with this advertising bonanza that Google dominates, it can afford to give away free services such as Voice, email, chat, document storage, office0like applications. Because they will monotize on the ling tail. And now with Google giving away free 1 Gigabit fiber to towns like Kansas City, Austin, etc – it is shaming the ISPs who can only monetize on their services and not the advertising play which Google leverages. So this is good for small businesses like me who have very little finds to get started, but you can have a fully functioning business for very little costs. But, what are the true costs. They will now all of my business. My emails, my documents, my communication. But I am willing for now to balance that for getting started. How many other small businesses and star-ups would of never happened if it were not for Google’s free or very little cost services? And advertising and getting online – some business live and die by this.

So what are the costs? Well, you have to make that call, is your information so top secret that you are paranoid and need to live under a rock. Well, then Google is not for you. But, if you need to get a small business off the ground, Google is a great option and one of the cheapest. And it has redefined good products that work for cheap and has really shamed many companies in making better products.

Read more on this at this article: The Genius Of Google Fiber

So for those of you who are sick and tired of paying hundreds of dollars a month for your cell phone and tired of the contracts, I have come up with a multi-step plan to allow you to break free of those shackles and set up even a small business with a few changes, that will reduce costs, and make you more efficient.

Step 1:

First get an awesome unlocked (unlock means you can travel abroad – and take advantage of their voice and data plans) and slick phone like this:

Google Nexus 4

starting from $299

And best of all no hidden fees after you purchase the phone

http://www.google.com/nexus/4/

Step 2:

Then get this reasonably priced pre-paid no contract 4G mobile service from T-Mobile

$30/month ($32.50 with taxes, etc) 100 minutes talk | Unlimited text | First 5GB at up to 4G speeds

* Note – You need to get a SIM card sent to you first – and a new backend number but dont worry this will just be a forwarding number for Google Voice

http://prepaid-phones.t-mobile.com/prepaid-plans

Step 3:

Sign up for Google Voice account and transfer(port) your old cell number to the service so you can have all of your phones ring at once.

Cost: $20 to port your number over.

*Note – Your former cellular carrier might charge you an early termination fee. Just another way to screw you on the way out the door.

This process might take up to a day or two and some services might not work, so just be aware of that when you start this process, but in the end it is well worth the effort.

http://www.google.com/voice/

Step 4:

And then the pièce de résistance -

Download Talkatone and this will allow you to make and receive all of your calls and text messages from your Google voice account for FREE.

Yes you read that correctly – FREE – zip, zilch. no moolah.

http://www.talkatone.com/

Step 5:

ENJOY! The savings and not being shackled to a 2 year plan and watching your minutes and text messages overrages.

So in summary $299 phone, $20 porting fee, unlimited voice, data (5 GB – 4G), and texting for under $35 a month. Deal value almost priceless – the ability to tell the big carriers to get with the times. We can make calls over data lines, just set up a unlimited data plan and stop charging us for voice overages, and texting – really texts cost 25 cents? It costs them almost nothing.

In the end I would say this is a pretty good deal. Good luck, and tell me how your un-tethering from the big carrier 2 year plans go.

As we move to the cloud, the traditional IT teams will begin to atrophy and all of the entitled snot nosed IT guys that many had to deal with because they were the bottle neck will soon begin to dissipate. The information will be put back into the hands of the people who need it most, and the developers will have to look at the larger cloud companies for employment. Development will be outsourced to places like India and China if they have not already. And the guys who crawl under your desk and keep the wires and wireless networks up and running will eventually be outsourced to contractors like electricians and plumbers who come in when there is work needed. Does this distopic future really mean the end of IT? No, it just means a shift from vanilla desktop boxes, writing queries and reports and managing wires to a fleet footed team who can manage the cloud products and modify and enhance its capabilities. There will be more business and data analysts and PMOs than there will be your traditional sys admins, C# and Java developer on staff. And who will manage this new team? The office of the Chief Digital Officer.

And now for my marketing friends, who have always been looked as the “sales team”, the “cheerleaders”, the golden children of the corn. Well, they all live in a digital world, and print media will soon go to the wayside, and since everything will be digital, it will fall under the purview of the CDO. This person will have to understand marketing, PR, communication, mobilization and the overall digital image of the company. And by integrating all of this know how with the back office, or cloud office functions, this person’s role will be that much more challenging and exciting in the coming years. Do these people exist, who understand the marketing and sales world, all the while being able to understand the convergence of the back office technology? They will have to since having silos in this hyperconnected web and cloud enabled digital age cannot have silos. Will this person originate from the CMO role with some tech background or will it be a savvy CIO who has some marketing chops? We will not know, but CEOs will have to identify that the digital image and management of their companies need to be centralized and be managed with a fleet footed vision. No longer can we wait for IT to get around to it and the marketing team taking all the credit. It will be a world where they will all have to work together and fire on all pistons in order to keep relevant in the coming digital universe. Read more about the transition of the CIO to the CDO role.

Ok, hold the press. $20 for an operating system upgrade, or free for customers who purchased a Mac since the announcement came out in June at WWDC. Sounds reasonable, but what is the real value of this upgrade? Why do I need it?

1. Dictation – this is the one upgrade I am truly looking forward to. Siri on the iPhone has been a bit of a disappointment, and it has misinterpreted some common commands so often, that I have stopped using it all together. Possibly the iOS 6 upgrade and some back end imporvements will make is useful again, but today – not so much for me. But Dictation will hopefully bring back some street cred to Apple, and natively integrate the holy grail of speech reconginition to the operating system. Just double click the function button, or you can customize this, and dictate. And Voilà! You have seamless and speech recognition on your computer. I wonder how Nuance’s Dragon Dictate will react to a possible loss in the market with their very over priced software. But I hear that the difference and why Nuance, might not have to fret just yet, is that Dictation in Mounatin Lion is a cloud product and will require an internet connection to work. Something similar to Siri. So you will have to make sure you are around a internet connection handily to get your speech recognition on. But saving you that $100-$200 might be worth the trade off. We will have to see when Mountain Lion drops in the coming weeks to see if it just another failed attempt to bring a relabeled Siri function to the desktop, or if it will save my wrists from all the typing in my future. Dictation will support English (U.S., UK, and Australia), French, German, and Japanese.

2. iMessage – Even though you could of been one of the lucky to have already downloaded this beta even before Mountain Lion is released, the seamless integration of conversations from all of your devices is novelty but I think pretty powerful. Gone are the days having to install software on every device and log into all of your accounts. Yes, you will have to set up your accounts at first, but then with your iCloud account, you can start a conversation with someone else who has iOS on the phone, go to your iPad pick up where you left off, and then finish the conversation on your Mac. Simple yes, but powerful. It just works. Fingers crossed.

3. Notes – Yes Notes. Simple little Notes. I use it on my iPhone all the time to jot down ideas and things to remember throughout the day. Yes, there are better apps out there, but honestly do I need another app, that just takes down simple text notes, and then shows up on my iPad later on to work with. Right now if you want to pull up your notes you took on your iPad and iPhone, you have to open up Mail and go to you iCloud enabled, .Me account, and your notes are there. But, really? Why cant I just open up Notes and just continue where I left off? This is a small fix or upgrade, however you want to look at it, but finally it is here, and this will be something I will be readily using.

In conclusion, $20 for 200+ enhancements? The Safari updates with Social Media (FaceBook and Twitter), really are irrelevant to me. I use Chrome, so…  Other than that if there speed and graphic processing enhancements, this might make be happy. But it looks like I will be paying $6.67 for the 3 things I would like to see in the new operating system. Still not a bad deal, but those few weeks or days are going to take forever.

But, taking a few minutes out of your day, between watching cute kittens play with strange things and watching that crazy kid do some crazy stunt on his crazy skateboard, you can now register to vote. And the the whole upside of this, that was claimed in the source article, the State of Washington will save up to $2 per registration. Can you say win-win for battered state budgets and the whole notion of voting as being a hassle? People have been fighting for the right to vote in other countries, and we as Americans take it for granted. Now there is not excuse, at least for Washington residents, to not get out there and “Like” the Vote.

Facebook is the darling Social Media website, and has gone public recently. With all of the controversy surrounding it’s IPO, and how Facebook will try to capitalize on marketing their user’s data without disenfranchising the base, will be interesting to see. But, the darling Social Media site is cooling off. It stock has fallen almost 3% as we speak, it debuted at the much controversial $38 a share and is now on a life support system at $27 and possibly falling.

Articles like this, describe the cooling of Facebook and the warming of Google+. Of course we still have to see the 250 million Google+ user base get closer to the 900 million plus that Facebook has. But sheer numbers does not tell the tale. Its quality, not quantity, that keeps user engaged, and since Facebook has gone public it is now pivoting its strategies very quickly into mobile and now LinkedIn’s territory, the professional job posting space.

Instagram was purchased for a cool billion by Facebook, and they seem keen on ruling the mobile space since they are a little behind the curve. If they can capitalize and readjust their business model whilst not turning their 900 million user based into marketing chum, they might keep their top spot. But, if Google has their say, they will be giving Facebook a run for their money. Let the Social Media Dance Off begin!

So some start-ups who are trying to attract the most talented (and I suppose the most productive), are looking at ways to take the work-life balance into their own hands. They are trying to recruit these talented workers with incentives. For example, a company in Denver who is giving $7,500 to “Get off the Grid” and take a truly “Paid” vacation. Talk about paid vacation, this takes it to a whole new level. Facebook incentivises with “Parental Leave” and paid “Baby Cash” – making it not only a miracle to bring life into this world, but your job encourages it with time off and a monetary reward, $4000 in fact. And the children are not only the ones who benefit, but places like Zynga offer on-site pet grooming services. Who says there is no free lunch, places like Google and Facebook have been offering employees with all sorts of gourmet delicacies from their own cafeterias for free. And probably the premier benefits provider, Red Frog Events, allows their employees to take a month long sabbatical to any continent with the people they choose to bring with, free birthday messages, and unlimited vacation. So, if you were to find a way to work for all of these companies at one point in your career, you would accumulate over $10 in cash for having babies and taking a vacation, and your pets would be always be “Best in Show” form. If you could only take advantage of Red Frog Event’s unlimited vacation and the Denver $7,500 cash for taking that vacation, you would really never work. You probably wouldn’t have a job to come back to, but it would be an interesting experiment nonetheless.

So, what is work-life balance? Why do we work so hard, yet complain when we feel that work is sapping the life force out of us? And why are there companies treat their employees with the respect and dignity and others just insert some copied benign text in their employee manuals and weekly newsletters, telling us to balance our personal lives all the while being a productive team member? But, unfortunately a vast majority of businesses in the United States does not beholden themselves to their own rhetoric, and the employees live in fear of being cast as a lazy employee who finds ways to not pull their own weight on the team. Read more from WebMD and how you can take your own proactive approach to a healthy work-life balance. We can live in awe and be jealous of our counterparts who are working at “cool” companies, but if we don’t take matters into our own hands, we will never truly find that balance.  The burden should fall on the employers, but also should rest equally on the employee to make it happen as well.

It may seem simple enough, that atoms are made up of protons and neutrons, but there is much more under the hood going on. And the scientists at CERN have possibly come up with evidence to show that there is a possibility that there is not just matter and anti-matter, but there might something more such as quadruplets that each have slightly different characteristics. (AP – Frank Jordan) And slamming atoms in a super collider that has never been created before is beginning to pay off and the questions are beginning to be answered.

Indirectly CERN has helped with the collaboration and communication of the world with the advent of the WWW.  But, also, the organization has pushed the boundaries on distributed or “Cloud” computing to share files and computing power.  Now that the “Cloud” has been making a huge push into the mainstream, we have much to be thankful for.  So, we can ask and answer, what does some 16.5 mile (27 km) super collider in Switzerland have to do with us.  Well, without the lead up with the World Wide Web, Cloud Computing and possibly a list of other inventions that CERN has had a hand in, we would not be at this historical point in human history.  We will be able to explain some mysterious things that physicists have not been able to explain.  Sometime the lead up to great answers spawns some great inventions that has made an impact in the mainstream technological world.  Thank you CERN and good luck on your endeavor on explaining the mysteries of the universe.