All too often I am speaking in front of a large group and find the need to take a quick poll of the audience. Stopping a presentation to do this is awkward. It interrupts the flow of information and there is just no elegant way of quickly compiling the results.

Enter Poll Everywhere.

They accept SMS messages from the audience to questions posed by YOU and post real time results on their site. A simple solution to a common problem. Genius.

What I found most interesting was not how to apply Google Maps to the business world or how to take advantage of the newly integrated Postini features.  Don’t get me wrong…..that’s all good stuff.  But the coolest parts of the presentation came when Google spoke about how they run their business and what some of their key drivers are.

For example, David Girouard listed 5 notions for innovation.  From Google:

1.  Be open and transparent.

2.  Ideas come from everywhere.

3.  Focus on the user, iterate and improve.

4.  Scale matters a lot.

5.  Security matters even more.

We also got a peek at how MOMA functions.  It was a great advertisement for the Google search appliance.

The point of the entire event was to showcase the Enterprise-level products that Google currently offers.  They are great.  They all work.  Really well.  So why isn’t Google the preferred vendor of choice for email retention, secure messaging, corporate intranets or web security?

The answer is in the cloud.

You see, one of the primary focal points of innovation at Google right now is cloud computing.  That’s obvious to anyone even remotely paying attention.  The problem lies in a corporations willingness to allow their confidential data to be stored with Google and not within their own LAN/WAN infrastructure.

This issue was addressed at the Google Innovation event, albeit not very well.  When talking about security Google said [paraphrasing here]:

Your data is more secure at a Google data center than at your own company.

And they had a few good points to back it up:

1. The biggest source of lost data is laptops.  On average, 1 in 10 laptops are lost or stolen.  Presumably, very few of these devices have whole-drive encryption (or any encryption for that matter).
2. Another popular leak of data is the autocomplete feature in Outlook.  You draft a message with confidential information and intend on sending it to “Frederica” (an employee).  Autocomplete accidentally sends it to “Fred” (a vendor) due to your quick fingers.

At the end of the event I was overwhelmed with great ideas regarding how to apply Google products in trying to solve enterprise issues.  I never heard a significantly compelling argument allaying the fears of company confidential information being placed in a third party’s hands (a Google data center, in this case).  I believe Google’s arguments but the Enterprise does not…….well, not yet anyway.

So what’s the secret to Steve’s success? Like so many things, there is no secret.

There is a process. Here are nine significant points about giving a presentation using the Steve Jobs Method.

There are some pretty interesting solutions here for creating charts and graphs online.

Me? I subscribe to the David Allen school of thought. Getting Things Done, or GTD for those in-the-know, is just about the best personal productivity system for today’s knowledge worker. It has quite a fan base within the technical crowd and many would say that this is where the system really picked up pace and started it’s path towards stardom.

Here is a great primer video from the man himself. In it, David Allen waxes philosophical about his system. More (much more) on GTD during future posts…

That’s right, folks.  The web office application space is really starting to come to a boil (it was already pretty hot).  Yahoo! just picked up Zimbra for a cool $350 mil.

And then…..

Google announced their debut of Presently or “Google Docs with Presentation“  Those engineers sure aren’t the best marketers but with a market cap like that, do you really need to be?

But wait.  There’s more!

IBM also announced a free, online suite of office applications.  Just last week IBM announced that they had joined the OpenOffice.org team.  This is so reminiscent of their Apache strategy (which worked by the way) that it’s scary.  IBM really understands how to leverage the open source community and still manages to earn a buck or two at the same time.  It’s really amazing.  Here’s an article from 2004 that sums it up pretty well.

Where is Microsoft in all of this?  They are not bowing out.  Far from it.  Yet, my impression is that they are still stuck with an old guard mentality.  The web office applications that I have been trying over the past year or so seem really light and natural on the web.  Microsoft is simply trying to adopt their office suite to a web medium.  Is that the best approach?  My instinct tells me no and time will tell us whether or not I am correct.

Reference articles:
Yahoo! buys Zimbra
Google launches Presentations
IBM offers online suite