DigitalChalk ASTD 2009 Twitter Game Rules

#DigitalChalk will be giving out a total of three $100.00 Visa gifts cards – one for day one and two on day two of ASTD 2009 Expo (June 1^st and 2nd); those eligible must be at the conference to win and must be a follower of @DigitalChalk on twitter. There is a limit of one prize per person. 

 The goal of the game is to figure out a three-word phrase from clues on tee shirts.  Here is how it works:  

1.      June 1st and 2nd, we will send out three tweets announcing the release of a clue. 

2.      The first four people to report to the DigitalChalk booth 1519 will receive a free DigitalChalk tee shirt with a clue on it.  

3.      The first person to observe all three keywords, Tweets the phrase to DigitalChalk and shows up at the booth will receive $100 Visa gift card

Click Here to view a short video about the game

 

My Twitter Confessions

I have to confess that for the first couple months I was on Twitter I actually took them seriously when they asked "What are you doing?"  I kept hearing people rant on about using twitter for relationship building and brand marketing and customer support and and and....  I just didn't get it.  I have to give big props to @ttolle (oh my, did I just do that @ thing?) for finally helping me see the light.  We went to #SXSW this year and everywhere I went people were making connections on Twitter.  The real eye opener was when I sat through a lecture by @Werner CTO of Amazon and the best questions for the panel came from Tweets the moderator read.  

Yes, I have the twitter bug.  My Facebook status is automatically updated from it and I have a tweet client on every connected device I own.  Here is why, I recently had two old friends sign up on DigitalChalk because of tweets they read on my facebook.  Today I had someone DM me on twitter asking what is DigitalChalk.  To top things off, last week we saw a DigitalChalk and XYZ company product comparison question posed and were able to respond.  This week I was able to tweet about two of our new customers training offerings on DigitalChalk.  

The thing that I finally figured out?  Twitter is like everything else that's worth doing, it takes time to learn it.  Who knew you could do so much with 140 characters.  Maybe that's exactly the point...

 

Enterprise Cloud Computing Misses the Point

With the recent Google outage, the tech news world is full of prognosticators who want to pass judgement on Cloud Computing readiness for the Enterprise.  The 24 hour news churn seems to be impacting even the tech news crowd.  My guess is that Nicholas Kolakowski  and Garret Rogers  both wrote their pieces about Cloud Computing from a large corporate network that they complain about (privately) and they are probably required to email a copy of their postings to someone using the corporate Exchange Server that mysteriously keeps going down.  Come on guys, are you kidding?  Cloud Computing IS the Enterprise.  

Let's get real for a minute, the Cloud is simply virtualized, externalized services. In many cases these services are servicing the same organization internally and they find it useful to timeshare externally for a profit. 

 Examples include Google, Amazon or Force.com.  Ok, let's be honest, nobody's network services are immune to outage.  Five nines of reliability (depending on how you count them) still amounts to 8.76 hours of downtime per year!

Are outages annoying?  Sure, can they be costly, of course.  I'm all about making the service providers deliver as promised but I also am pragmatic enough to know that in all of the enterprise accounts I have worked, I have never found one that didn't have it's share of outages.  

Here is the real question, is the Enterprise in need of a Cloud service?  Small and medium size businesses and individuals need access to the services Cloud Computing can provide.  Enterprises have the opposite problem, they need to make sure they reach maximum possible utilization of the services they have.  Cloud Computing is comprised of a lot of services being provided by Enterprises who want to maximize efficiency.  The story is best told when looking at the Amazon 2008 earnings "Amazon’s “other revenue” — which includes that of AWS — totaled $550 million in the last 12 months, up 32 percent from a year earlier. " Courtesy of Kevin Kelleher at Gigaom