A very big stack

Last Updated on Friday, 25 December 2009 09:51 Written by Steve Monday, 30 November 2009 08:48

In an article about Google’s choice of switching from Gears to the upcoming HTML5 for offline access, Red Write Web referred to a previous post they made about going offline:

We question whether offline access is even necessary. After all… in today’s world, you’re never too far from an internet connection. We concluded that offline access is important now, but less important with each passing day.

In the US and Europe that may be the case, but I’m realizing just how much we take for granted with technology. We talk about turning computing into a utility, while in many places the utilities don’t even run like utilities. It’s been a good shift to start thinking about what we need to do so that the rest of the world can take advantage of the cloud.

The cloud is actually way up on top of a very tall stack of infrastructure that includes:

• clean water
• social stability
• reliable power
• functioning local economies
• accessible banking systems
• and then, finally, affordable, redundant Internet access

That’s quite an infrastructure just to get a service like Salesforce.com or Amazon EC2 to run. And most of the people in the world live in places that are missing big pieces of this stack, so we’ve got lots of work to do before the world can make powerful use of cloud computing, the least of which is HTML5-based offline access.

My Nonprofit Starter Pack Session from Dreamforce 2009

Last Updated on Saturday, 28 November 2009 06:10 Written by Steve Saturday, 28 November 2009 06:10

Getting the Most of of the Nonprofit Starter Pack. We cover 3 main things:

1. Configuring the Starter Pack
2. Importing Contacts via the wizard
3. Upgrading a package

Feel free to fast forward through the first 4 minutes, where we’re getting 110 people logged into their orgs…

Infographic on the Internet in Africa

Last Updated on Friday, 25 December 2009 09:51 Written by Steve Friday, 27 November 2009 05:17

Great infographic documenting the current state and near future of Internet access in Africa. What I see in these numbers is amazing growth that is poised to explode as the cost per MBPS is expected to drop 90% in the next year. Wow. Another amazing stat–27% of African Internet users are in South Africa.

From Appfrica an entrepreneurial incubator in Uganda.