While we try to find our direction, the north magnetic pole decides to go walkabout and head toward Russia. Meanwhile, the Old Moon is going blue on New Year’s Eve , until it goes dark because of a lunar eclipse.

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The sky above and the earth below

Here’s wishing you all Happy Holidays and a Prosperous New Year A couple of wallpapers from our UI designer, Kabilan. Clicking on the images below will open wallpapers of dimension 1280×800.

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Season's Greetings from Team Zoho!

In the current issue of BusinessWeek (Dec 28, 2009 & Jan 4 2010) the editors ask an important question in their IDEAS section: They ask if Paul Sammeulson’s follower’s have gone astray? The question isn’t really about morals, but it may have moral implications. The question is about models

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BusinessWeek Asks Great Question After Death of Paul Sammuelson

It is the time of year for lists, and I don’t want my readers to be left without my list. So here are my 10 forecasts for things that might be important in technology in 2010. But before I do that, I want to orient the list for how I see 2010 playing out along a couple of social and political dimensions

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2010 – 10 Tech Forecasts and a Bit of Context

Each organization is unique. Today, I just want to share about Zoho Recruit’s different customization options, which allows organizations to customize Zoho Recruit as per their requirements

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Customization Options in Zoho Recruit

The Amazon Kindle is selling well this holiday season according to reports from Amazon. Admittedly, I have a book ( Listening to the Future ) which is available on the Kindle. I don’t, however, believe that electronic book reading devices are the future of reading.

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Why Specialized Book Readers Aren’t the Future of Reading

A few weeks ago I gave a talk on the value of enterprise social computing at the SharePoint 2009 conference in Las Vegas (read Web World’s take on it here ). BusinessWeek is now analyzing the trend to engage in social media, and it is time for such an industry analysis, even if it is only a couple of pages long (read it here ).

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Don’t Treat Social Media Like Snake Oil, But It Isn’t a Cure for Anything Either

I won’t write a summary of my thoughts, I will let two quotes by Kenichi Ohmae speak for themselves. After you read them, I will ask why we ignore the voices of reason and where such companies exist today, 27 years after these words were first published.

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Rereading the Mind of The Strategist by Ohmae

I just heard from a friend at a large computing manufacturer who has been given his layoff notice. It seems the president of this particular manufacturing company has decided that all directors and other executives without direct reports should leave the company

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Individual Contributors, Layoffs and the March Toward Freelance Planet

I am reading the Tale of Two Cities on my Kindle (switched from an old paperback copy).  It is one of those books I occasionally read in flight or in waiting rooms.

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The Propensity to Resist Change Is Well Established

Yesterday I was listening to CBO head Doug Elmendorf on NPR ( CBO Chief On Health Care Bills ) and was disturbed by the lack of robustness in the analysis being conducted on the fiscal impact of Health Care reform. Read the transcript here and tell me if this doesn’t sound like industrial age thinking to you: models that may not actually fit reality “a model is developed using estimates of how people have behaved in the past.” Uncertainty expressed but not part of the model “And we always emphasize the uncertainty that surrounds our estimates.” But the quote preceding the last one is really telling: “The challenge is that the changes being considered are really outside of the range of changes that we’ve seen in the past in most of the country.” The CBO isn’t using scenario to imagine different futures in which health care reform exists.

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Congressional Budget Office needs Scenario Planning

I saw a recent report that teenage unemployment was edging over 27%. First, I am wondering with US High School graduation rates nationally at under 70% ( http://www.higheredinfo.org/dbrowser/index.php?measure=23 ) why parents or schools are encouraging students to work. I believe wholeheartedly in experience, but not at the expense of education.

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Teenage Unemployment

When you have a set of key performance indicators, you have to make sure they are still valid for the current performance you really want to achieve. The problem with America’s economic recovery is that we don’t know what we want, not in Washington, and not on Main Street.

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Stop Worrying About Housing Starts—Decide on Vision, then Track Progress Forward

The US push toward improved education needs to be careful. As I read simultaneously about the $4.35 billion Race to the Top fund and the rise of evidence-based management, I see a discontinuity. The top bullet in the Department of Education’s release says: “Adopting internationally benchmarked standards and assessments that prepare students for success in college and the workplace.” From what I am reading about evidence-based management from my friend Bob Sutton and his college Jeff Pfeiffer, is, and I agree, the need for scientifically valid experiments that prove what is right and wrong

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Evidence-Based Management and Education – The Obama Dilemma

Zoho Sheet underwent few updates in the last couple of months after our Freeze panes update . Here are the highlights: XLSX File Format Support We recently added support for Excel 2007 file format (.xlsx). You can now import your xlsx spreadsheets to Zoho Sheet and edit them or publish them online.

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Microsoft Excel 2007 (XLSX) Support & Other Enhancements In Zoho Sheet

PHILADELPHIA – Swarthmore College senior Caitlin Mullarkey ‘09 was named the 2008-09 Philadelphia Inquirer Academic All-Area Female Performer of the Year, as voted on by the sports information offices of the 28 institutions from the Philadelphia metropolitan area. Junior women’s tennis player Rachel Wallwork ‘10 was also honored as the women’s tennis All-Area Performer of

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Mullarkey Named Philadelphia Inquirer Female Performer of the Year; Wallwork, Lau Also Honored

Today we’re very excited to announce a one-of-a-kind integration between our award-winning Zoho CRM service and Zoho Mail (and other e-mail platforms too). The problem our customers were facing was clear: they manage their customer relationships with Zoho CRM, yet most of their customer communications happen via e-mail. Our goal was to not only bring both of these together, but to do so in an elegant and easy-to-setup and easy-to-use way.

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Introducing Zoho CRM integration with Email… and an invitation to Zwitch

The afternoon edition of The Gardner News carried just a small wire service story, below the fold, with a Dallas dateline, that said that President Kennedy had been shot. By the time that I read that paper, on November 22nd, 1963, we’d already heard the news on the school’s PA system and we were sent home early. For the next bunch of days, the TV stayed on, mostly tuned to CBS where we watched Walter Cronkite as he guided us through that wrenching time

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On the future of print journalism

I conducted a workshop on the future of project management at IIR’s ProjectWorld conference in Baltimore last week. Here is the brainstorming based on Microsoft’s future of information work scenarios: Proud Tower Project Management = science Rigid processes, only need to know what you need to know Single methodology Strong government influence on practice, but company ultimately decides on competitive issues Scope, cost, schedule (pick one) Very reliant on internal resources and capabilities Schedule is driven even if not realistic Low level of forgiveness for failure Control + Good Model = company existence Low innovation and freedom of thought Quality= Doing what the boss says Continental Drift Project Management = discipline Reduced Innovation Government dictated methodology No outsourcing Resources only extend to region No worry about language (assumed) Divergent standards around the world (practices by region) Duplication of many companies doing the same thing Reduced specialization at the individual level – more “Jacks of All Trades” Projects are low risk Highly secure environment Less variation among projects Many compliance projects Virtualization of organization takes place within trusted core Quality=do what is least risky Frontier Friction Project management=art All about people, trust and relationships Resources: use who and what is available Need to learn to negotiate with power (when power isn’t constrained by common law) Dependent on the luck of the skills that are in the pool No certifications or standards Skills taught by mentoring Quality = do the right thing Freelance Planet Project Management = experiment (adventure) Team recruitment=Ocean’s 11 model (people I know and trust) Highly networked teams Only as good as your last job Strong peer pressure to succeed (last job reflects on team too) Either very honest or very dishonest, no room for gray Many projects, smaller in scope Projects are interesting No big firms (can’t gain critical mass among branded individuals) Negotiating with teams for credit, pay, etc. Methodology is determined by team, by project Communities of practice Less economies of scale Prima Donnas Meritocracy Highly personal knowledge, shared only with trusted individuals (including very private Associations) Learn by doing on teams (Take responsibility for your own learning) Quality= do what offers the most learning within time and budget constraints that delivers what the customer says they want (so my contract will get renewed)

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The Future of Project Management – From IIR ProjectWorld Workshop

Rabbit is a web-based operating system that connects people, processes and content, combining the power of social networking into an enterprise environment. A key component of Rabbit is its information sharing capabilities, which let users work on documents they’ve uploaded to Rabbit’s web workspace, and share this with other users. Rabbit has selected Zoho for this because of Zoho’s proven ability to provide high levels of functionality and performance, and to provide a smooth transition for enterprise users from working locally on the desktop to working on the web

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New Zoho API Partner : Rabbit