Certainly, some of us make half-hearted attempts to accomplish a few of our life and business goals. But how many people do you know who put everything on the line to pursue their deepest, most life-changing dreams? What are the rest of us doing, and what are we waiting for?

Choices and Challenges

Of course, circumstances get in the way. There are challenges, setbacks and detours. But each of us has a choice. Although it won’t be easy to navigate back to the right path, if we say that we can’t find our way around obstacles, we’re making a choice to leave things as they are.

Last night, I was reading about Roald Dahl, author of such hopeful and imaginative books as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. That might be my absolute favorite story about an underdog who overcomes obstacles while continuing to believe in something, even when all is stacked against him.

It turns out Roald Dahl was a lot like his character Charlie. Dahl’s personal life was filled with hardship and tragedy. In spite of all the challenges he faced, he remained positive and achieved great things. As it says on his website, “The series of misfortunes and tragedies Dahl… suffer[ed did not] made him more bitter. Loss and physical adversity seemed to stimulate his enormous energies to positive action. He fought misfortune as if it was a dragon to be slain.”

Time to Dream Big

I hope that 2011 will be a year of great progress toward achieving our deeply-buried dreams, and a year of doing things that require us to step out of our comfort zones and test our abilities, even if they lead to failure or, even more frightening, success.

I challenge you, as we round out these last few days of 2010: dust off those gutsy dreams and ambitions you’ve kept to yourself until now. Dare to put yourself out there; do something big this coming year. It doesn’t need to look big to anyone else, but you’ll know it is, because it will require you to go out on a limb and do things in an entirely different way.

For 2011, live the way you truly want to live, and achieve what you’ve only ever dreamed you could achieve.

What big, audacious goals do you have for 2011?

Photo courtesy Flickr user Neal

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub. req.):

• Enabling the Web Work Revolution
• Email: The Reports of My Death are Greatly Exaggerated
• How to Manage Consumer-Grade Collaborative Tools in the Workplace

Apache Software Foundation’s President on Open Source and the Cloud (From OStatic) I take no issue with anything said here; Apache projects are the foundation of many web and cloud efforts. But, especially re: NoSQL, I wouldn’t discount the non-Apache products.

CSC Wins Cloud Services Contract for California (From CSC) More important story: Google got the City of Los Angeles, but Microsoft got the State of California. CSC played middleman in both deals.

IDC Prediction: SaaS Revenue Growth 6X Faster Than All Software (From CloudAve) And SaaS providers likely spend less money to achieve that revenue, as the resources required to deliver and sell SaaS are minimal compared with on-premise software. It’s a good racket to be in.

Azul Starts Peddling Zing Java Stack (From The Register) Azul sits a layer below application frameworks like Spring and acts as a seriously scalable Java runtime environment. Azul sells an 864-core appliance, but Zing is its cheaper, software-only offering.

VMware Targets Developers with Code2Cloud App Lifecycle Tools (From MarketWire) VMware’s CIO-pleasing virtualization products get all the attention, but SpringSource’s developer-centric approach could end up being equally as important. The cloud has been a bottom-up success thus far.

For more cloud-related news analysis and research, visit GigaOM Pro.

The highlight of the new features probably is Cloud Connect, which lets users search for data within their various Google Apps at the same time they’re searching standard locations such as file systems or the web.  In terms of convenience, that capability seems tough to beat; I can’t count the number of times I’ve searched through email, the web and a CMS all to find someone’s name or a piece of information I knew I’d seen somewhere. If Google expands this feature even further, into third-party cloud services, it will be an even bigger deal. Every survey under the sun shows businesses more cloud services by the day, and anything that helps tie them all together will be a big hit.

Other features are worth noting too, particularly Dynamic Navigation and Active-Active Mirroring. According to Google, the former “allows users to drill down into search results based on search modifiers for their queries,” and the latter lets users spread search traffic over multiple Google Search Appliances to increase reliability. This is a strategy pulled from the database world, where active-active architectures ensure that consistency and reliability by having two database instances live and sharing the same information.

Although Google Search Appliance is not the company’s flagship enterprise service, it’s notable that the release coincides with Ray Ozzie’s departure from Microsoft. Google and Microsoft compete across pretty much all things cloud, and, as Om points out, Ozzie is generally considered the innovative brain behind Microsoft’s cloud efforts. The two happenings are hardly of the same importance level, of course, but losing Ozzie while Google continues to show it might have some enterprise chops, after all, still is not a good thing.

Image courtesy of Google.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):

• What Enterprise Software Vendors Could Learn from the Consumer Space
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In the past week alone: IBM bought Netezza; Cloudera partnered first with Teradata, then with EMC Greenplum; NetApp and ParAccel announced a partnership; Aster Data Systems announced another $30 million in funding; and Oracle rolled out its latest and greatest Exadata system. Add to this EMC’s purchase of Greenplum in July and SAP’s purchase of Sybase in May, and you see a market in perpetual motion.

From my perspective, remaining acquisition targets are Aster Data, ParAccel, Teradata and Vertica, but they might have precious little say in who comes courting. It’s a little easier to predict who might be doing the shopping: Dell and HP are the obvious candidates, as they need data stories to tell, lest they risk letting IBM and Oracle run away with the market for vertically integrated systems. Less likely buyers might be Oracle, which is always looking to expand its database empire; Microsoft, which remains a database leader despite being focused elsewhere right now; and Cisco, which could use some key software  enterprise software assets to stave off competition for its newly launched server business.

Of course, data warehousing is just a fraction of the burgeoning Big Data market, albeit the most-proven segment in terms of customer adoption and knowledge. Hadoop is gaining popularity for storing and analyzing unstructured data — and is increasingly integrated with existing data warehousing and BI tools — so commercial Hadoop startups could get hot. I think partner-friendly Cloudera will be the first to get bought, but Datameer could be a target because of its spreadsheet-based, Hadoop-powered analytics solution.

The bottom line is that data of all types is piling up; customers want to not only manage it, but to derive as much insight as possible from it. Vendors like IBM and Oracle have known this for years; now the rest of the IT space is catching on. If you’re into watching markets evolve and making predictions as to who’ll end up where, this is a great space to follow.

Read the full post, including my thoughts on who might buy whom, here.

Photo courtesy of Flicker user aresauburn.

Sync is a “Pro” feature, so it isn’t available to users with free accounts. Pro accounts start at $29 for 10GB per year. In addition to Sync, Pro users also get backup, “time travel” and file versioning functionality.

Here’ a short demo video showing how Wuala Sync works:

Wuala differentiates itself from other cloud backup solutions as files stored in Wuala get encrypted directly on the user’s computer before they are stored online. This means that no-one, not even LaCie’s employees, can view or access the user’s private data. Wuala users can also increase the amount of storage they get by trading some of their local storage with the service.

If you’re a Wuala user, let us know what you think of Wuala Sync in the comments.
Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): Are You Empowering Your Mobile Workforce?

• Lifehacker: “On Google Wave and “Failed” Experiments”
• Seth Godin: “Train your customers”
• A List Apart: “No One Nos: Learning to Say No to Bad Ideas”
• Harvard Business Review: “Higher Education Is Overrated; Skills Aren’t”
• TheAppleBlog: “Jailbreakme.com: Jailbreaking Made Absolutely Painless”

What are you reading this weekend?

Services such as Yahoo’s Upcoming and Meetup and Facebook’s Events, coupled with a decentralized and grassroots meetup and “unconference” culture have led to an explosion of event invitations in our various inboxes. That first generation of tools is looking a little creaky to today’s event planners, so here’s a roundup of the current generation of “eventware.”

The current generation of eventware all offer a mix of registration, ticketing, mailing list, analytics, payment and promotion features, but each is pretty distinct in its niche:

• Amiando. launched in 2006, Amiando powers some of the European tech industry’s larger, more formal conferences, including Thinking Digital and Le Web. Though private events can be listed for free, public events incur an excessive €1 + 6 percent of the ticket price for each ticket sold. However, the service includes some unique features, including comprehensive Facebook integration and the ability to run an entire conference site from within the app.
• Eventbrite. I can’t think of a week that goes by without receiving multiple invitations to Eventbrite-powered event (including GigaOM’s own conferences). It’s a great solution, with a very vocal and engaged development team constantly providing new features, though the interface can sometimes be a sprawling mess and it’s easy to forget how a previously completed task was completed. Eventbrite’s real power lies in the ability to quickly list and promote an event without too much effort.
• Expectnation. Heavily utilized by O’Reilly Media’s conference team, what’s unique about this service is the ability to manage session proposals, calls-for-participation and manage a conference’s schedule and structure, as well as the sales and ticketing processes. It’s a pretty comprehensive solution, though the absence of pricing information suggests it’s a very premium choice.
• OpenConferenceWare. Perhaps the most interesting development is the open-source OpenConferenceWare project where the creator’s motives were to offer a free and open app to empower others in creating events. It was most prominently utilized in 2009′s Open Source Bridge conference. Like Expectnation, OpenConferenceWare provides features to manage submissions and schedules, but also enables delegates to personalize custom schedules for their attendance (just like SCHED*, reviewed here). Unfortunately, as an installable app, setup requires some knowledge of Ruby and web hosts.

Amiando, Eventbrite and Expectnation are fully formed and comprehensive suites for event planners; albeit expensive. However, I’m intrigued by OpenConferenceWare’s philosophy; with the groundswell in this software category, could OpenConferenceWare evolve into the WordPress of its segment?

If OpenConferenceWare was as easy to customize and install as WordPress, we could see a sophisticated and proven free alternative to the big commercial solutions as well as a vibrant ecosphere of plugin and theme developers. Even a hosted, freemium service — like WordPress.com (please see disclosure at the bottom) — could outmaneuver larger competitors.

Which event planning and ticketing solutions do you use?

Disclosure: WordPress.com is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): Report: The Real-Time Enterprise

Photo by Flickr user LornaJane.net, licensed under CC-BY-ND 2.0

Bearhug consists of four main modules:

Pulse: This module gives your customers and your team real-time status information about your product or service. You can create “pulse updates” and sync them to your company Twitter account to keep everyone updated on issues, downtime, anything that affects their immediate satisfaction. Customers can subscribe to the updates via SMS — for quick notifications if time is of the essence — or via email or Twitter.

Answers: This module is where your consumer community can ask a question and then get an answer from both other members of the community who use your product or service and from your company. Using this module, you can moderate the questions and pick the community answer that best responds to the issue. You can also craft a company response. People can then access the best of both worlds in terms of information. This section builds a robust and interactive live FAQ for your customers.

First Rate: Customers post reviews — both good and bad — all over the web. Customers can post their reviews through this module and you can respond to feedback immediately, provide advice, moderate, publish and syndicate the reviews you want to feature.

Overheard: This module is Bearhug’s listening post. At presstime, it could pull in Twitter mentions of your company, product or service with more services pending including Yelp, Facebook, Flickr and YouTube. Through Overheard, you can immediately reply to mentions of your company or product on the web.

The Bearhug Dashboard gives you a global view and statistics of the activity about your company. You can also access metrics such as your company’s average response time, average rating and customer satisfaction. When you set up Bearhug, you can change the header text, language and messaging to display not only your branding but your brand personality. You can have Bearhug for each product you offer and turn modules on and off depending on your needs.

There’s also a sidebar widget to place a Bearhug support button on your web site.

Bearhug helps you embrace the organic feedback your customers are providing all over the web, while also bringing some management and metrics to the mix.

Bearhug’s currently in closed beta. Use this code to try it: webworkerdaily

What are you doing to reach out to and manage your customer community?

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): Report: The Real-Time Enterprise

• Harvard Business Review: “Leading Virtual Teams to Real Results”
• Harvard Business Review: “Defend Your Research: The Early Bird Really Does Get the Worm”
• Open Forum: “Telecommuting is Not Just an HR Perk”
• Open Forum: “5 Keys to a Great Elevator Pitch”
• CMS Wire: “Web Manager: Top Tasks Versus Tiny Tasks”
• Penelope Trunk: “Privacy is the New Celebrity”

What are you reading this weekend?

• Seth Godin: “Goodbye to the office”
• Ted Dziuba: “SEO Is Mostly Quack Science”
• SitePoint: “10 Common Mistakes Made by Novice Web Designers”
• Zen Habits: “11 Creative Ways to Avoid Becoming a Workaholic”
• GigaOM: “Yes, Comments Can Get Noisy, But We Like Them Anyway”

Here’s a screenshot of my browser just after a restart:

You can see that, as per usual, I have a huge number of tabs open. However, thanks to BarTab, apart from the current tab, Firefox hasn’t actually loaded the content in any of them, reducing the browser’s startup time and the amount of memory it uses.

A better solution to “taboholism” would be to use a tab chunking strategy, but if you can’t (or won’t) modify your behavior, BarTab’s a good way to minimize some of its worst side effects.

Are you a “taboholic?”

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): Enabling the Web Work Revolution

1. Know your policies, terms and limitations.

I believe that the biggest mistake we all make when drawing lines with customers, clients and other professionals is that we don’t have a firm grasp of our own policies and limitations before beginning to do business with someone.

It’s important to sit down on your own, when you’re not under pressure, and decide, “These are my policies. This is how I do business. This is what I will accept. This is what I won’t accept.” That might include things like your rates, how you handle rush jobs, your availability and working hours, how you handle late payments, etc. Figure out your terms and then stick with them. If someone tries to push your policies and limitations, simply say, “That’s not how I do business,” and then outline your terms.

2. Lose the need to be liked.

Our need to be liked can interfere with our ability to run our businesses effectively and profitably. If we’re constantly allowing clients, customers, and service providers to dictate how we do business, simply because we’re afraid of making an enemy or making someone angry, we’ll never get anywhere. I’m not saying that you need to go around being a flaming jerk, but if someone is going to write you off because you won’t allow him/her to run over you, that’s not a friend you’d want anyway. Be willing to walk away from toxic people and relationships and know that you’re not always going to be liked, and that’s OK.

3. Know your value and be confident in that.

I think a lot of times it’s unnerving to stake a claim and say, “This is what I’m worth.” However, it’s necessary to establish that value and know that we don’t have to accept less than that. Sometimes you will come across people who want something for nothing, and there will be times when people who see that you’re succeeding will try to get a free ride on your coattail. If you try to cater to those types of people, you’ll never get anywhere. It’s OK to say, even just to yourself, “I’ve paid my dues to get here. I’ve worked hard, studied hard, and applied myself to make the progress that I’ve made.”

You can be willing to help other people (if they’re willing to help themselves, of course), but you have to always remember to be conscious about how you spend your time. Every minute that you give to something or someone is a minute you can’t get back and is a minute that isn’t going to something or someone else, so always think, “Is this a wise investment?” If you’re giving away your time to someone who constantly takes advantage of you, is always looking for ways to nickel and dime you, or isn’t your ideal client, then you no longer have that time to give away to someone who values it, pays you what you’re worth, and is better-suited for you.

4. Follow a modified “3-strike” rule.

Inevitably, you will come across people who will try to take advantage of you and push your boundaries, and inevitably, there will be times when you try and try (and try again) to work with these people, even though you know they’re not a good fit for you, they are trying to take advantage of you, or the relationship is a one-way or dead-end street. Knowing where to draw the line is the most important thing in these situations, which brings us back to Rule #1.  You must establish your limitations, and a good place to start is a with a modified “Thee-Strike Rule.”

If you find yourself working with a client or service provider who tests your limitations or policies, try to give three opportunities for correcting or improving a situation before walking away. This will be different for every situation and business, but in these situations, keep a mental (or even physical) record of how a project or relationship has gone. If you constantly find yourself back at the same point of negotiating your terms or what you’re worth, then eventually you have to say, “Enough is enough.”

The “modified” part comes into play when your integrity or principles are at stake. In that case, one strike is all you need, so if, for instance, a client or service provider does something or asks you to do something that clearly lets you know this person is not someone you want to do business with, be willing to walk away right off the bat. In these situations, there’s no sense in hanging around for three strikes and allowing the opportunity for your integrity to be called into question.

Finding a balance between being of service and being a doormat who is constantly taken advantage of by customers, clients and other professionals can be a challenge, but by deciding upfront what’s acceptable to you in your business, you’ll save yourself a lot of headaches — and be more likely to create a successful and thriving business.

In what ways do you make sure to leave the doormat at the door?

Photo by Flickr user say_cheddar, licensed under CC 2.0

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): Enabling the Web Work Revolution

The study covered 6,000 British civil servants, all of whom had healthy hearts at the start of the study in the 1990′s. But as it went on, 369 participants had fatal or non-fatal heart attacks or developed angina. The researchers found that even when risk factors such as age, obesity and smoking were taken into account, people working longer hours had a 56-60 percent higher chance of developing heart disease. The authors of the study say that the reason for the increased risk could be because people who work longer hours have less time for relaxation and exercise, or they may be more anxious or depressed.

However, there is some good news for web workers. A separate paper from the Cochrane Library, published earlier this year, which examined 10 other studies covering some 16,000 people , said that workers who have flexible working arrangements — in other words, get to chose their working hours, like web workers — tend to have lower blood pressure and better heart rates, presumably due to being able to establish a better work/life balance.

Do you work long hours?

Photo courtesy Flickr user normalityrelief, CC-BY-SA

Products and e-Books

If you have an extensive amount of knowledge on a given topic, you can capitalize on that by creating and selling products and e-books, like Chris Guillebeau at Unconventional Guides and Naomi Dunford at IttyBiz.

You could create e-books, audio books and even things like workbooks and planning kits. For instance, if you were an organizational expert or a virtual assistant, you might create kits that help your customers organize different areas of their life and business, like a project management planning kit, or if you were a fitness expert, you might have a weight loss planning kit.

The Pros: The great thing about products and e-books is that they are completely automated and can literally sell while you sleep. Once they’re created and on your site, they can continue selling for you over the life of your business. Also, as you create more products, there’s the opportunity for cross-selling, up-selling and bundling.

The Cons: The bad side is they can take a lot of work on the front end to create, so for instance, if you’re wanting to write an e-book, it might take you several months or more to actually generate the content and format the book. There’s also the delayed gratification. It won’t start generating income for you until you have it on your site. Of course, if you’ve created popular products in the past, you could have an advanced selling list, where your followers can purchase the product or book (perhaps with a discount of other incentive) before it releases.

A Membership Site

As with products and e-books, all you really need to start a membership site is extensive knowledge of a topic (and, of course, the willingness to build up your subscribers). Yaro Starak at Entrepreneurs-Journey.com, Dave Navarro at The Launch Coach, and Darren Rowse at Problogger have all created successful followings based, at least in part, around membership sites.

It doesn’t have to be an overly-complicated setup. You could have a members-only blog, send exclusive emails or have a members-only forum, and it could be a really fun way to stay engaged with your following. If you were a personal trainer, for instance, you might have an online fitness club that provides recipes, exercise videos and support for your subscribers. The possibilities are limited only by your creativity.

The Pros: The great thing about membership sites is that you don’t have to create the content in advance, so if you are able to generate a lot of initial buzz and interest, you could theoretically start generating additional revenue for your business right away, without having to wait for the content to be created. Also, you can create products and e-books from the content as you go.

The Cons: Naturally, generating interest and acquiring subscribers can be a challenge (although the same will be true of getting customers to purchase products). Another disadvantage might be the commitment required from you. If it’s a year-long program, for example, you have to at least deliver on what was promised for the program for that length of time, but that can take as little as a few hours a week to maintain.

Tele-seminars and Workshops

Laura Roeder has created a successful model for her business by offering online classes geared toward her target audience. You can create your own targeted tele-seminars and workshops that use audio, video and articles (or a mix of all three), and you can choose to have them completely automated or with you as the facilitator.

As with a membership site, this is another great way to stay engaged with your customers and clients, and again, the possibilities are only limited by your imagination. This is a great way to break down frequently asked questions or areas within your business where people often contact you for free advice or consulting.

The Pros: The great thing about tele-seminars and workshops is that you can create the content once and simply repeat it time and time again, whereas with membership sites, you have to continually create content, depending on your setup. Also, they can be really quick to implement. You don’t necessarily have to create quite as much content as with a product or e-book, and you can use a lot of ready-made services to get it going, like EventBrite, Calliflower and WebEx.

The Cons: Generating interest is always going to be an issue, regardless of the content model you choose, but aside from that, the other possible disadvantage for tele-seminars and workshops is your own boredom — especially if you actually facilitate the events and host them with any regularity. Of course, you can always alternate the events that you do, or get someone to help you with facilitation.

There are a variety of ways to build additional revenue streams into your business using content, and the great thing is, you’re probably already creating content through your blog, newsletter, or podcast, so you should have a good base of material to start with.

What ways have you used content marketing to generate income in your business?

Photo by Flickr user Kanzeon Zen Center, licensed under CC 2.0