5 Tools to Googlize Your Business

Feb 18, 2010 -

Whether you love or hate Google, it’s hard to go a day without touching one of their services. From Internet inquiries to mapping your way to your next destination, the search engine giant has come a long way from its days operating out of a Menlo Park garage.

Today, Google is changing the way that we communicate on a personal and professional level. Although many organizations aren’t ready to leave the comfort of out-of-the-box software, there are many advantages to computing “in the cloud.” Web-based tools from companies such as Google offer cost-effective solutions (often free), better scalability, easier collaboration, and enhanced security. While these services aren’t for everyone, many small businesses are starting to make the switch to Internet applications without suffering any major technical setbacks.

To join the Google love affair, there are a few products that are worth trying out. They won’t take too much time to set up or install, and if you hate them there will be no nagging tech salesperson showing up on your door trying to convince you to give ‘em another shot.

1. Google Buzz. This is one of the newest additions to the Google family. To access this product, you’ll need a Gmail account (see below). Buzz is aiming to compete with the Twitter and Facebook communities, among other social networks. In other words, it’s trying to improve online conversations. Last year Google launched Wave, which was trying to capture the social audience. While Wave did have some cool features, Buzz definitely looks more promising since it’s integrated within your Gmail account. What also makes it interesting in a business environment is the ability to have private or public real-time conversations, helping to increase your organization’s productivity with easier collaboration using comment threads with status updates.

2. Google Chrome. This Google download is like the ugly stepsister in the browser world: it just doesn’t get the attention it deserves. While Mozilla’s Firefox is an excellent web browser, what makes Chrome even better is one simple thing: this Google product allows you to search directly from the address bar. Sure, this seems simply enough, but when you start to use Chrome on a regular basis you realize how much time you can save by entering your queries in the same place you normally type a full URL. You might call this lazy searching, but whatever you say about it, there’s no doubt it’s a winning feature.

3. Gmail. Many corporate Internet email services make sending, searching, and sharing messages frustrating. With Gmail, aside from ease-of-use, there are many business advantages. For starters, Google offers you more email storage than you will ever need (and if you do need more, you can buy it at a reasonable price). Although managing emails is a fine art, with Gmail you don’t have to spend a lot of time organizing your messages because they are easily searchable in seconds. However, if you love organizing your email account, there are stars, filters, and labels to make Gmail sorting a breeze. Another obvious benefit to this Google service is the ability to check your email anywhere, anytime, on any computer with Internet access.

4. Google Calendar. There is no more important tool in a business than a company’s calendar. With Google Calendar, you can easily manage all your meetings. The app’s built-in reminders make it easy for you to send a text message or email to yourself at scheduled times before an appointment. If you’re worried about your clients or customers calendar programs getting confused with your Google ways, Google Calendar plays nice with Microsoft Outlook, among other programs. Finally, even if you’re offline, you can still see your meetings.

5. Google Docs. Word processing is a breeze in Google Docs. From creating documents to designing a presentation to crafting a spreadsheet, all of these items can be created and exported to popular file formats, such as DOC, PPT, and CSV. There is no new technology to learn within Docs since the terminology is the same as what you’d find in much of the business world’s popular software. Oh, and it’s free, just like everything on this list, which decreases your software license fees and increases your company’s productivity

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Bill Gates: Billions for next-gen nuclear

Photo: Red Maxwell/Flickr

After releasing fireflies onto his audience at this year's TED conference, Bill Gates announced his plans to fund a viable, next-generation nuclear technology called traveling-wave reactor (TWR). And now Gates has announced an exploration between TerraPower, a TWR nuclear company he largely funds, and Toshiba Corporation, a leader in the commercial nuclear power business.

TWR has been theorized for decades as a cheaper and safer alternative to typical fission reactors, but until now the supercomputers required to make such technology possible were simply not affordable. It is thus no coincidence that Gates has found the perfect match for both his humanitarian and technological aims.

The TWR prototype developed by TerraPower will rely upon Microsoft's supercomputing prowess and a whole lot of computer hardware — 1,024 Xeon core processors assembled on 128 blade servers offering “over 1000 times the computational ability as a desktop computer.”

This may be one of the first times I'm actually excited about nuclear energy. In one of my original posts called The 6 Myths of Nuclear Energy, I clearly lay out all the reasons why today's version of nuclear technology is simply not viable — too expensive, too dangerous, too water-consuming, too politically destabilizing, and on and on. There are so many reasons NOT to fund current nuclear reactor technologies even with the advancements that have been made over the last decade.

But TWR is a real game-changer. Instead of requiring enriched uranium, TWR can burn depleted uranium and other low-grade radioactive fuel stocks. It can also burn them for a long, long time. In TWR, a long-term reaction is created in which the waste from breeding the fuel is recombined to create more fuel inside the reactor. Theoretically, a nuclear reactor could operate for 100 years without changing the fuel rods, and the resultant waste would be much less radioactive than the waste of our modern-day reactors.

Here's TerraPower CEO John Gilleland explaining how it works:

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Death is inevitable [Graphic]

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This man has all the latest tech (pic)

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The Most Badass Alphabet Ever

Television

Sometimes I find things on the internet that leave me speechless with their awesomeness. And considering it’s my job to find crazy stuff all day long, that’s actually saying something.

But today I am bowing down to “The A-Z of Awesomeness,” a series of illustrations by Neill Cameron, where he takes each letter of the alphabet, crafts an absurd sentence around it, then brings it to life with an excellent drawing as you can see above.

There are 25 more epic letters to go, and you must check them all out below:

You like this shit?

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