2) Clarify (the situation, problem, or opportunity)

3) Create (the idea for the proposed solution, budget, flexibility, alternatives)

4) Change (the impacts, human issues, what-ifs, stakeholder landscape)

5) Confirm (the measurements of success, who/how/when)

6) Continue (think about how to ensure lasting success, risk avoidance, success factors)

7) Close (lessons learned, benefits followup, help client become self-sufficient)

The Seven Cs of Consulting: The definitive guide to the consulting process

But what happens if Google will buy them?

It will create a direct competitor to all journalists and existing media channels, like Fox News, CNN or BBC.
Twitter users as “Citizen journalists” will post their stories and have adwords. They will publish their pictures on Twitpic and get paid for it.

Good news or bad news? It depends. Twitter isn’t an open platform, it is again an user silo. Good for Twitter, good for Google, sometimes too much in transparent for it’s users.

Google tried to realize the same deal with Jaiku 2 years ago.
Jaiku was a niche community before Google. After the deal more and more spammer joined Jaiku.
Last year Jaiku failed and Google gave up the project
(it will be opensource, but for me the project failed).

The biggest fact: a Google/Twitter deal will initiate a worldwide inflation of new Twitter users. Those news will spread the Twitter community worldwide,
because Google knows everybody and a lot of people will look on Twitter, if Google will announce the deal.

But what happens to Twitter, if the big news will spread and more and more users and more and more spammers will join Twitter?
Maybe it will be harder to track real information or to filter the right value for me.

So it’s time to jump on an open Twitter alternatives, let’s be more active on Identi.ca …

Apple earned last weekend with iPhone 3G sales an estimated $330 million in profits over three days.

Is there too much hype with the iPhone? People need to get back to real life?
Has anybody counted how many blog entries to IPhone were created in the last 7 days ?
Twitter seems to be flooded with IPhone tweets.

Back to the real life: we love our IPhone 1.0 with good well-done metallic case.

There were impressive stats one Iphone tweets in comparison to Nokia and Blackberry on Twist – see trends in twitter:

Friday, 11 July 2008, weekly

Friday, 11 July 2008, monthly

Mr. Doepfner, CEO of Axel Springer tells people to have more fun at work with Apple. Every company should know what people love and everybody knows: working with a mac and its software is really fun!

see Mathias Doepfner’s video message at YouTube

video summary:

- dear employees:
.. i present you an it decision
.. all workstations will be migrated to Apple
.. AxelSpringer will be the largest Apple customer in Europe
.. AxelSpringer will be the second largest Apple customer worldwide after Google
.. what you see is what you get
.. Apple produce the most beautiful products
.. your desk will look better with an Apple product on it
.. enjoy every new morning with your new Apple product
.. better prices for our company
.. advantages for you, somebody of you will need to learn the new usability
.. it is not only an IT decision, it forces cultural change of our company
.. you will have more fun at your work!

offtopic: Axel Springer launches a new homepage design today, unfortunately i cannot view all their homepage data

Some companies just blog about updates to their own technology and that’s good for existing users to see. Others are fun to read whether you’re a user or not. Here are some of the company blogs we recommend reading for a good time, like 37signals, ning, viddler etc.

Every good company should have one!

See a list of company blogs at ReadWriteWeb.

1. An Inability to See the Bigger Picture
2. An Aversion to Using Solid Financial Practices
3. A Lack of Clear Vision
4. A Lack of Passion
5. Lack of Clarity on the Reasons for Success
6. Too Many Distractions
7. Disconnecting from Customers
8. Integrity Outages

Read more: businessinmotion.ca

• The first is misaligned goals.
• The second are undisclosed concerns about the risks of collaborating.

Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life wrote a great story in his blog:

The truth is often that the so-called jerks are really just thinking “You’re not my manager, so I’m not going to ask how high when you tell me to jump.” Once you find out you’ve hit this problem then the path to solving it is clear. You either have to (i) make sure all collaborating parties want to reach the same outcome and place have similar priorities or (ii) jettison the collaboration effort.

Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.

Confucius

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

Leonardo da Vinci

And back to business – a simple method of simplifying:

Collect – Choose – Eliminate – Organize.

–-
Posted by The Thomas Koeppen Blog 2008.