Sekiur My Thoughts

Tim Ferriss and Kevin Rose discuss their top 5 Must Read Books.

Random w/ Tim and Kevin – Ep3 from Glenn McElhose on Vimeo.

I endorse the following:

• The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing
  
• Getting Real
• The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

Other books on my reading list this year.

• The Knack
• The Integrity Dividend: Leading by the Power of Your Word
• The Trophy Kids Grow Up: How the Millennial Generation is Shaking Up the Workplace
• Mastering the Hype Cycle: How to Choose the Right Innovation at the Right Time (Gartner)
• Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else
• Inside Drucker’s Brain
• Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us
• High Altitude Leadership: What the World’s Most Forbidding Peaks Teach Us About Success
• Plugged In: The Generation Y Guide to Thriving at Work
• Content Nation: Surviving and Thriving as Social Media Changes Our Work, Our Lives, and Our Future
• Smart Networking: Attract a Following In Person and Online
• Making Technology Investments Profitable: ROI Road Map to Better Business Cases
• Strategic Alliances: Three Ways to Make Them Work (Memo to the Ceo)
• Reward Systems: Does Yours Measure Up? (Memo to the CEO)
• Wargaming for Leaders : Strategic Decision Making from the Battlefield to the Boardroom

Had to post this unbelievable ad. I’ll leave it at that.

This years Educause conference took place in Orlando, Florida.

Educause is a nonprofit association whose mission is to advance higher education by promoting the intelligent use of information technology. Membership is open to institutions of higher education, corporations serving the higher education information technology market, and other related associations and organizations.

The association provides a social networking Connect site that supports blogs, wikis, podcasts and other platforms for IT professionals to generate and find content and to engage their peers; professional development opportunities; print and electronic publications, including e-books, monographs, and the magazines Educause Quarterly (EQ) and Educause Review[1]; strategic policy advocacy; teaching and learning initiatives; applied research; special interest discussion groups; awards for leadership and transformative uses of information technology; and a Resource Center for IT professionals in higher education.

Major initiatives of Educause include the Core Data Service, the Educause Center for Applied Research (ECAR), the Educause Learning Initiative (ELI), Net@EDU (advanced networking), the Educause Policy Program, and the Educause/Internet2 Computer and Network Security Task Force. In addition, Educause manages the .edu Internet domain under a contract with the U.S. Department of Commerce.^[1]

The current membership of Educause comprises more than 2,000 colleges, universities, and educational organizations, including 200 corporations, with 16,500 active members.

Below are pictures from the conference:

My schedule at the conference:

Tuesday, October 28, 2008

• Full Day Seminar – Cloud Computing Made Simple and Affordable: Using the Virtual Computing Lab (VCL) to Provide an Effective, Powerful, and Economical Rich Services Environment

Wednesday, October 29, 2008

• Discussion Session : Cloud Computing
• Emerging Technologies : Crafting a Campus Identity: First-Year Students, Residential Life, and Social Networking
• Discussion Session : Business Continuity Management
• Leadership and Management : Top-Ten “Gotchas” for the New CIO
• Networking and Infrastructure : High Availability and Server Consolidation with Virtualization
• Discussion Session : Policy and Law

Thursday, October 30, 2008

• Leadership and Management : IT Matters, but Information Resources Matter More
• Emerging Technologies : Developing Low-Cost Applications Using Offshore Companies
• Discussion Session : Network Management
• Enterprise Systems : CRM Adventures: Three Perspectives
• Networking and Infrastructure : Structuring Authentication Across the Campus Community
• Lightning Round Session : Security and Privacy Lightning Round
• Teaching and Learning : Are You Ready? A Systematic Approach to Training New Help Desk Staff
• Enterprise Systems : SOA Built on Open Source Web Service Technologies
• Networking and Infrastructure : Deployment of a Virtualized Server Grid
• Security and Privacy : Network Admission Control: A Survey of Approaches

Friday, October 31, 2008

• Enterprise Systems : IT Disaster Recovery Within the Framework of Business Continuity Planning
• Leadership and Management : Deploying an Open Source, Online Evaluation System: Multiple Experiences

Overall I thought it was an excellent conference, there weren’t as many people this year as previous ones.

The exhibit hall was fun as always. Some exhibits were great and others sucked which brings up another subject. Marketing.

There were two exhibits that stood out amongst the crowd. The first one from Bradford Networks and the other from Trapeze Networks. These guys not only gathered leads, but engaged their prospective customers allowing them to deliver their sales pitch. Two companies that I will definitely be following up with.

Other companies that did well on their marketing pitch were Turning Technologies, Novell, CDW, Zimbra, Elluminate, and Microsoft. Although the only thing Microsoft had going for itself was as great demo on a smart-board of Image Composite Editor.

Microsoft Image Composite Editor is an advanced panoramic image stitcher. The application takes a set of overlapping photographs of a scene shot from a single camera location and creates a high-resolution panorama incorporating all the source images at full resolution. The stitched panorama can be saved in a wide variety of formats, from common formats like JPEG and TIFF to multi-resolution tiled formats like HD View and Silverlight Deep Zoom.

The things that characterized the good exhibits can be summarized in a few words. They were accessible, had an inviting environment, gave away free stuff (like free iTouch and laptops every hour) and had either professionals or very seasoned sales people giving the presentations.

On the other side of the coin, were the very big and expensive exhibits which just didn’t deliver.

Some that deserve mention are AT&T which has a very expensive three environment exhibit representing campus life and U-Verse all over the place. Alcatel-Lucent had a not very inviting exhibit and their staff sat down most of the time. Citrix was just offering a $5 Starbucks card for filling out a survey. Cognos had a closed exhibit that wasn’t inviting to anyone.

Its not that these companies were cheap, which they were; but they are spending a lot of money for lead generation when they could also be qualifying the leads and delivering their product demos to a captive audience.

Nortel stocks have plummeted after they annouced lower than expected sales for 2008.

It has seen its biggest declines since 1980 according to Jonathan Ratner article “Nortel faces tough timing as peers struggling too”.

“With softening demand and increased competition, Nortel may need to once again retool and refocus as it looks to find its position in a consolidating industry,” RBC Capital Markets analyst Mark Sue told clients.

After spending three days with the folks at ATT at the 2008 FOCUS Users Group, I got Nortel’s marketing spill which was all centered about going Green.

I am all for minizing energy use and saving resources, but something is seriously wrong when thirty minutes into the conversation all I am getting as a potential client is not how good the product is, not how much better it is than its competitors offering, not the features and how they’ll make all the issues I deal with on a daily basis go away but rather how much I will save on my electricity bill.

Nortel needs to go back to the drawing board, focus on the basics, be better than everybody else and then market it.