Karl Fisch, a high school administrator at Arapahoe High School in Littleton, Colorado, pulled together a powerpoint with some interesting and thought-provoking ideas.

Shift Happens – Did you know?

Karls blog is here.

Michael Wesch is an incredible visionary and is is Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University. His presentation, “Web 2.0… The Machine is Us/ing Us” is incredibly thought provoking and really nails down the fact that we only can estimate technologies advancements but are yet unable to comprehend the affect on every day life.

Web 2.0… The Machine is Us/ing Us

At the end of the financial year I gather up key staff and retreat to a place where quality time can be spent planning. The interruption free environment allows us to throw away what we have done so far, start with a fresh canvas and create the future. There are planning events continuously throughout the year however the financial year end session has a greater bearing as it marks a milestone, gives us an opportunitiy to celebrate successes from the last year, allows us to decompress and reflect and then move on to face the challenges and excitment that the new year will bring us.

To some extent these planning days are structured with a framework generally followed so as to ensure that we arrive at the end of the planning days with outcomes. That said there is a high degree of free-form, as there has to be to engender a creative environment. The Strategy Session framework workbook is available at the link below albeit with confidential material removed.

Strategy Session Workbook here  [Word 166K]

Innovation is the key to the creation of new wealth in economies. Innovation drives employment growth, technological development, business rejuvenation, and global competiveness. Entrepreneurship provides the link between invention, innovation and success. Innovation is the application of the new technology or process to a new product, service, or production or management process. Someone has to do all the hard work between the invention and the innovation and between innovation and the attainment of sustainable competitive advantage – that person is the entrepreneur.

Software companies have innovated in a variety of areas which have spurred other software companies to innovate further. The power of these software industry innovations results from their ability to innovate far beyond the product itself. Consider this list of innovations that an entrepreneur can use:

SaaS, Software-as-a-Service, is a software distribution model in which applications are hosted by a vendor or service provider and made available to customers over a network, typically the Internet. The emergence of the on-demand, SaaS business model and the success of vendors like Salesforce.com makes it an increasingly prevalent delivery model for software vendors.

Open Source refers to any program whose source code is made available for use or modification as users or other developers see fit. Open source software is usually developed as a public collaboration and made freely available.

SOA The days of proprietary architecture are falling to Service-Oriented Architecture which powers Web services-driven new releases, such as SAP’s NetWeaver and Oracle’s Fusion.  A service-oriented architecture is essentially a collection of services. These services communicate with each other. In Service-Oriented Architecture autonomous, loosely-coupled and coarse-grained services with well-defined interfaces provide business functionality and can be discovered and accessed through a supportive infrastructure. This allows internal and external system integration as well as the flexible reuse of application logic through the composition of services.

Global Development. The power and efficiency of outsourced and offshore development services firms, particularly in India, has driven innovation.

Enterprise 2.0 has allowed the rapid adoption of new collaboration and workflow technologies, such as Socialtext’s wikis, to automate tacit interaction. The most common definition of Enterprise 2.0 has involved the application of Web 2.0 technologies in the enterprise. Enterprise 2.0 is the synergy of a new set of technologies, development models and delivery methods that are used to develop business software and deliver it to users. See http://sandhill.com/opinion/editorial.php?id=98

Web Delivery The ability to download, try-before-buying and pay online for software has drastically reduced sales cycles as well as sales and marketing costs.

Mashups. The arrival of the ability to merge applications together to achieve new functionality in a new application. A mixture of content or elements. For example, an application that was built from routines from multiple sources or a Web site that combines content and/or scripts from multiple sources is said to be a mashup.

Google Apps with the launch of new Web-based or open source, Microsoft Office-like applications. Google Apps is a service from Google for using custom domain names with several Google products. It features several known Web applications, including Gmail, Google Calendar, Talk, Page Creator, and Docs & Spreadsheets.

Pricing Models. The rise of subscriptions, ROI pricing, shared-savings pricing or other value-based pricing options

Hybrid Models. The usage of multiple pricing, delivery, marketing and development options in a single organization has allowed substantial differentiation.

The ANZA Gateway to the US Conference was held over 3 days in late October 2006 at Silicon Valley’s newest incubator facility Plug and Play Tech Center in Sunnyvale. For a start-up in the SaaS space the setup at the Plug and Play Tech Center would be ideal. Shobeir Shobeiri, the Business Relationship Manager for Plug and Play Tech Center, showed me around. Typically for around $500/mth you get a cubicle to work from; similar to a serviced office, and includes janitorial, security, parking and furniture. Phones/Internet/IT Services are additional and are only available through Plug and Play. You can proceed month-by-month if you wish, moved in immediately if desired.

What makes if very different from a serviced office is the large data center in the basement. There is plenty of rack space to put your gear in. The cabinets are locked and accessible by tenants of those cabinets. You can rent as much or as little cabinet space as you need and scale to your requirements. The previous tenant of the building had priority power off the grid so even in a brown-out mains supply is there. Being a data centre of course it has UPS. The perfect place for your SaaS start-up.

Check it out at PlugandPlayTechCenter.com

Hmmm. This is the first time I’ve seen Google throw an error…