The New Frontier - 2010 In Review - This articles looks back over 2010 in a retrospective manner. Focusing on the changes in technology and lifestyles, the stories and examples used reflect on what we learned and how we applied that new knowledge. |
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You are here: DIME Home > Personal Development > The New Frontier - 2010 In Review
This articles looks back over 2010 in a retrospective manner. Focusing on the changes in technology and lifestyles, the stories and examples used reflect on what we learned and how we applied that new knowledge.
Author: Paul Burton
Date: Dec 30, 2010 - 8:50:53 PM
With our holiday travel over, I find myself working on 2011 projects - finalizing my second book, revising my first book into its third edition, and working on my 2011 business plan. Today, though, I'm not feeling the rush to get tothe future. Rather, I'm feeling the tug of the past, specifically the last year.
One of the bestthings about the week between Christmas and New Years is the retrospective programs that are aired on TV and published by print and web content publishers. There's something visceral and substantive about reviewing what has happened in the last twelve months. Our day-to-day lives tend to be all-consuming, causing us to focuson the right-now and the immediate future. Retrospectives give us an opportunity to pause and consider what has been and how and why it mattered.
Apersonal favorite of mine is the review of those who have passed away since the ball last dropped. Remembering those people and all that they accomplished during their lives forces me to look at time in the broadest and mostrelevant of senses - the lifetime. Somehow that perspectiveis settling and reassuring to me.
With that introduction, then, let me say that for me and mine, 2010 was a year of some pretty dramatic changes anda number of pretty amazing events. Here are some that come to mind.
To the Cloud and Beyond!
For those who aren't sure what "the cloud" means, I'll try to shed some light on this phrase and how it - the cloud - is actually used.. The cloud refers to computers (usually lots of them, called "servers") that reside in distant places and that exist for the purpose of storing your stuff - anything and everything electronic - on them. Essentially, they replace the hard drive on your computer. All you need to access your stuff that is stored on these far-away computers ("in/on the cloud") is an Internet connection and a web browser, e.g.,Internet Explorer or Firefox or their siblings.
The benefits of cloud computing are many, but the greatest benefit is ready access to your information virtually anywhere in the world from any device that is or can be connected to the internet, including a computer, atablet (think iPad), or a smartphone.
In the last year, both our kayaking business (Outdoorplay) and my consulting business (QuietSpacing) moved to the cloud, to wit:
Outdoorplay Operates Virtually via NetSuite SaaS and Google Apps.
Starting in mid-2009, we (the Outdoorplay team) began migrating the systems we use to run our businessfrom a variety of software programs - the custom-built web site, Mail Order Manager (order and customer management), Cooler E-mail (newsletters), and QuickBooks (financial package) - to a single Software as a Service (SaaS) platform called NetSuite. Though the migration was painful, very painful, we now run Outdoorplay from a single cloud-based provider. That means that whether we're offering product for sale on the web site, sending a newsletter containing coupons for buying products on our web site, processing an order in our warehouse that was received through the web site, ordering product from our vendors to store in our warehouse and sell via our web site, paying for the product we ordered from our vendors, paying our fine team of people for making all the above happen, or reviewing our company's performance by looking at a P&L or Balance Sheet, it's all done in one place - NetSuite. And NetSuite is accessed through a browser. And browsers are used to view the Internet. So, to run Outdoorplay, all we do is sit down at any device connected to Internet, navigate to the NetSuite web site, login, and everything we need is there! (And the cost is about 1/2 an FTE per year.)
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