With his breakthrough performance in Kindergarten Cop, Arnold showed us why he would someday be Governor of California and leader of the free-world. Or whatever. In the meantime, here are some “baby steps” (get it, Kindergarten, baby steps?) to using social media in your practice, courtesy of Sociable Lawyer.
1. Do not be afraid to try
2. Share your knowledge
3. Polish your online rep
4. Strength in numbers
Posted via email from practice (redux)
This recent piece in ComputerWorld highlights the growing interest in hosted Microsoft Exchange. No surprise; but why now? And if you use Hotmail or Gmail, you may even ask why hosted Exchange is worthwhile at all. If so, consider this:
First, hosted Exchange offers full-featured contacts, calendaring, and e-mail in tight integration, just like the Outlook on your desk. Meanwhile, it spares users the typical pain in the ass features of a self-hosted Microsoft product: compatibility issues, upgrades, backup problems, disaster-recovery, smartphone support, spam filtering, patching, etc. In effect, with hosted Exchange you get your own “virtual e-mail server” in a secure, faraway datacenter, but only pay for what you use, usually on a monthly basis. Microsoft has been using this deployment model for some time in the educational market and it has worked.
Second, whereas Microsoft takes a top down approach to security, Google generally works from the bottom up. For instance, Google generally starts with consumer-facing products and scale them upwards until they can work in an enterprise environment. Thus Gmail, Google Calendar, GTalk, and a host of Google consumer toys has been integrated and reborn as Google Apps. Microsoft on the other hand usually starts with enterprise products, makes an obscene amount of money via licensing, and scales down to smaller business and consumers. This was the genesis of Outlook.
Third, consider that the gap between Google Apps and Microsoft Office is getting narrower all the time. And with its Office 365 product Microsoft is blurring the line between it and Google even further. Office 365 retains the look and feel of MS Office, while saving the organization tons of money and virtually eliminating the need for beefed-up IT departments (sorry IT guys).
As with all technology, lawyers are the last to know. Once the cat is out of the bag though, news spreads fast. Your opponents are going to take every advantage they can, so you should too. Ultimately hosted applications such as Exchange and web-based applications like Office 365 and Google Apps are the future. And why not: law firms are about serving clients, not endlessly fiddling with their IT infrastructure.
Google has become a jungle: a paradise for spammers and marketers. Almost every search takes you to links and sponsored sites that make Google money. Almost any popular search term will take you to seedy neighborhoods.
We’re fighting a losing battle for the web and need alternative ways of finding information. I hope a new breed of startups fill this void: that they do to Google what Google did to the web in the late 90’s—clean up the spam and clutter.
Editor’s note: Vivek Wadhwa is an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University. You can follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwa and find his research at www.wadhwa.com.
By Alex Chiu of Google Operating System Blog
1. More free storage in Google Docs: at least 20 GB.
2. Gmail HTML5 that loads faster and integrates.
3. Android keyboard provides useful suggestions.
4. Google Earth web app, and vector-based Google Maps.
5. Database of useful things, data, and related info.
6. Full data sync for Google Chrome extensions.
7. Chrome for Android w/data sync, web apps, more.
8. Google search uses inferences to answer queries.
9. Personal Alerts about things and people around you.
10. Google embraces Facebook and Facebook Connect.
Read the rest of the predictions here on the Google Operating System Blog.
Remember Gtriage, the startup that helps manage inbox clutter by highlighting important messages? How about the Gmail Priority Inbox? In fact the idea behind Priority Inbox seemed so similar to the concept behind Gtriage that I even speculated that Google may have bought the startup outright.
Looks like I was almost right. Today AOL took the initiative and bought Gtriage. I know … AOL? But Eli, the President and co-founder of Gtriage, seemed genuinely excited. An d it sounds like AOL still has a few tricks up its sleeve.
So this is Practicehacker’s way of saying congratulations to Eli and the crew at Unblab. Good luck guys. Keep us informed about your new project. Finally, let’s see if I get this new Internet business model:
Now that’s a strategy.
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