6 Million people can't be wrong.

Just like Elvis from my previous article, Bill Gates should have an album of greatest hits, only his would include the number of people his foundation has saved globally. In this time of "Jobs" and how the world is being "Applefied" it's worthwhile going back a few years, to when thousands of people lined up at midnight for the latest Microsoft release before racing home and downloading it onto their PC. Seems Bill and Seattle are no longer relevant compared to Steve and the innovations coming out of Cupertino. The world is more interested in what cloud we put our information on and how we carry that information in our pocket.

Like many people who hit global heights of success, Gates suffered under the "Tall Poppy" syndrome and we couldn't wait to cut him down to size and look to the next coming of greatness. Steve Jobs gave Bill Gates a less than friendly summation in his biography, which Gates replied to in a most magnanimous manner allowing many an insight into a man whose direction in life has changed.

Stories abound about the sums of money that Gates is using to save the world's poor via his medical foundation. $6 billion is the latest number Gates has spent on just the vaccine side of his foundation's work, fighting hep- B, measles, AIDS, polio and rotovirus. Part of the largest single philanthropic enterprise in history, Gates is suitably humble and points to his money being able to focus the global pharmaceuticals into developing drugs that had no chance of being profitable but are effective in lowering death tolls. The measles drug has now been lowered to 23 cents and with one vaccine you never get measles again.

“The metric of success is lives saved, kids who aren’t crippled,” says Gates. “Which is slightly different than units sold, profits achieved. But it’s all very measurable, and you can set ambitious goals and see how you do.” “I’d be deeply disappointed,” says Gates, if in the next 25 years he can’t lower the death toll by 80%. Otherwise, “we’re just not doing our job very well."

Those 6 million from his "Greatest Hits" so far, add up to 3.4 million lives saved from hepatitis B, which causes liver cancer, 1.2 million lives from measles, 560,000 from the Hib bacteria, 474,000 from whooping cough, 140,000 from yellow fever and 30,000 from polio. In the past year the new initiatives have prevented another 8,000 deaths from pneumonia and 1,000 from diarrhea.

Makes you want to go out and buy a Microsoft product, doesn't it? Our attention span and our memory seems to get shorter and shorter, the more innovation and channels we have to work with today. With everything we say, cut down and shortened to the smallest possible throw away line and stories lasting less time, before being made redundant on the web, Bill Gates just doesn't have the same pull anymore when compared with the Kardashians of the world.

So what has Kim Kardashian done lately?

The Numbers Game.

As a child I was fascinated by an Elvis album cover. It showed him resplendent in a gold lama suit with the title "50,000,000 Elvis fans can't be wrong". So before you channel your inner Elvis and give us your best rendition of "hunka hunka burnin love", it wasn't the lama suit that caught my eye but the staggering number on a cover from 1959. I say staggering because in those days to be a fan you actually had to go to the record store and buy the album, you actually had to turn on the TV to watch Elvis on the Ed Sullivan show and you actually had to post a fan letter at the post office. So those 50 million were die hard fans willing to go out of their way to be involved with their idol.

Today it's a lot easier to get fans and a click or two can have your content transferred across the world. With 2 billion Internet users, at least 1 billion of those using Google, 133 million blogs, 800 million Facebook users, 500 million monthly You Tube users, 400,000 android devices activated daily and 100 million dot com domain names registered, 50 million fans seems like an afternoon's work for some like Han Han a Chinese blogger with 340 million readers.

The most influential on the net now have the capacity to change ideas, change culture and bring about change, all from the confines of their lounge room. Without having to attend large rally's, without doing a country tour and without spending time on planes, trains and automobiles people from all walks of life have the opportunity to make a difference if their story is engaging and credible. The ability to find large audiences no longer requires booking agents, writing a hit book or song or even being famous.

People will search you out if they are looking for your story and the ease via multiple search engines, to find what people are looking for with a couple of clicks makes a true fan almost irrelevant. Now those 50 million Elvis fans would only have to download the music, check out the concert on You Tube and give the king a quick tweet about what they thought of his latest hit, all while sitting in a cafe sipping a latte to get the free wifi.

So the numbers today come too easy and the effort behind them doesn't even require getting off the lounge. The places people used to gather like book stores, cinemas, even shopping malls have all noticed the lounge effect but the smart ones like Amazon, Apple, eBay and the like have taken advantage of the numbers game easy access. Even influential writers like Seth Godin who now writes one of the world's most read blogs never needs to leave home to hawk his latest book or even attend conferences. I know because I read his blog and order his e books online while listening to him via TED, You Tube and any other online conference facility available.

All of this makes those Elvis fans, real fans and not just mouse manipulators. Not all the numbers count. Sometimes small numbers with real effort and engagement count for more.

Yesterme, Yesteryou, Yesterday.

Falling asleep at a friends Birthday late Friday night, not because I was bored but because I had attended a couple of late night concerts and I don't bounce back like I used to, got me thinking about why I spend large sums on the past? Steve Winwood, Steely Dan and Stevie Wonder filled up my nostalgia quota, along with denting my bank balance for the month and they got me thinking what this generation will be nostalgic about in a couple of decades? Surely not the Kardashians or Paris Hilton? Maybe Maroon 5 but then their biggest hit at the moment is about a guy from the 60s, still doing his thing today. Will there be a boomer generation harking back to a simpler time?

Nostalgia still sells out concerts and entertainment venues and for those that lived through the cocaine days of the 70s and 80s they celebrate a time of simple joys. Nostalgia sells to many remembering a simpler time, where airlines didn't just stop flying unless the pilots decided not to fly, where you carefully scripted your thoughts before putting them on paper, where you picked up the phone and where change happened over years not minutes. "It's about trying to go back to a time when things were different," says David Sprott, an associate professor of marketing at Washington State University and the author of several studies on the topic. "When things are uncertain in the present time, looking backward is a comforting thing for people to do."

So with change being the only constant today, albeit at rapid speed, what will people remember about the 2000s that they would be willing to pay a premium for? For nostalgia to sell, it has to have an emotional hook, and with today's convenience, instant media generation looking to the next best thing, what will fill their memory bank and empty their online bank? Will we be nostalgic about technology and the men who pioneered it? With technology the mainstay of our society, Steve Jobs will certainly have a slice of that memory bank and perhaps retro versions of the iPod and iPhone for sale in 20409 will remind people of the fun they had with the first tweet, the first time they filmed and down loaded their friend with underpants on his head or even the rush of having something published on the net.

By then the iPhone will have been implanted into your earlobe and you no longer have to type anything into systems and all you will hear around you will be chatter as people communicate with their equipment, which in turn communicates with everyone else. Maybe there will be nostalgic seminars on talking with people, television and radio along with anything we had to pay for, before the net went free. There will be giants of technology Jobs, Gates, Bezos, Page and Brin, Ellison and Zuckerberg, enshrined for the foresight and the legacy they left but will they engender nostalgia for a simpler time when everything seemed simple, even a phone call.

So as Stevie sings Yesterme, Yesteryou, Yesterday, the question remains, what are we building today that will stand the test of time, to be celebrated in decades to come?

Corporate Manslaughter.

Do you know where all of your staff are, right this minute? Could you contact them on mass if there was an emergency? Ae you looking after them, body and soul? Are you prepared to go to court because your travel policy for duty of care didn't tick the right boxes? Questions like these come up every day as employees travel, become more mobile and need to go to more than just capital cities to do business. The recent Australia, New Zealand GBTA conference was awash with duty of care, mobile connectivity and the consequences of not having either well set up.

In 2008 the UK passed a duty of care act to protect employees making corporations responsible for their safety and their working environment. The big question in all of this, concerns the work environment which no longer means the corner office, with technology giving companies freedom to move and work from anywhere, anytime. You know a government is serious when they don't sugar coat the name and in fact throw down the gauntlet calling it "The Corporate Manslaughter Act", making it sound much more menacing and confronting.

For many it was seen as a vicarious liability because of the difficulty in managing remote staff and the past lack of technology being a hurdle to rounding out a duty of care policy with the employee at top of mind. The act highlights that responsibility sits with the employer and states where a corporation's activities cause a person's death and the failure was because of a breach that falls far below what can reasonably be expected of the organisation, then the company will be prosecuted.

How long it takes for a similar act to be made law in Australia is uncertain but the concerns around employee safety are probably justified considering the nature of corporate travel today. A recent discussion with a resource company highlighted the fact that what they took out of the ground was running out in the so called "safe" countries and the ice fields of the northern continents and the jungles of Africa and South America beckoned. From finding trustworthy transport to safety in camps it behoves such companies to have failsafe policies backed by technology that spans the medias in regards to communication along with safe guards for the wellbeing of the employee.

OH&S policies used to round out to the person responsible for the medical kit stacked with band aids but it now claims company directors as responsible for their employees whenever they are doing company work and as we all know that work line is no longer blurred but invisible as we stay connected and work 24/7. Will there be a time when home offices, cafes, transport facilities and hotel rooms need to pass OH&S working standards?

Cotswold Geotechnical Holdings was the first organisation convicted and sentenced under the Manslaughter Act and fined $750,000 for the death of one of its employees.
The police said CGH had a “cavalier attitude” to health and safety and that it used “out-dated working methods”. The final straw being a small company, CGH is likely to go into liquidation.

Do you know where your staff are, right now? Do you know what they are doing? Are they safe?

Giving it all away.

I remember my first charitable donation as a child, to the local football team, the Warilla Gorillas for their raffle. It wasn't much, after all how much disposable income can you have from a dollar a week pocket money. Still it felt good to help, even a little, and I got to go to a game free of charge for my largess. When it came round to doing it again a friend, much more grown up, added his piece of wisdom and told me when I start earning real money I can write that donation off my tax.

Something to look forward to, I thought, but then I didn't have a clue what a tax deduction was anyway. Yet the good feeling of helping, no matter how small, stayed with me even when I eventually figured out the labyrinth of tax deductions. If you think about it, why does a government need to incentivise people to give to charities, why aren't people giving anyway?

Sometimes they just have to be shown how it's done. Forbes has released its list of the biggest givers globally and the names of Gates and Buffet and Turner and Bloomberg shine brightly with donations exceeding one billion dollars each. It is not an easy list to make and requires donations exceeding 1 billion dollars to be from private wealth, not company shares or family trusts. So 19 givers of over a billion dollars are led by Bill Gates, who gets the monicker of "the most generous man on the planet", having donated 28 billion of his own money and giving us all a reason to feel good about buying that next piece of Microsoft software.

As interesting as it is, to take a peak into the lifestyles of the uber rich and their philanthropy, the act if giving cannot be left up to them. Australia as a whole is a country that gives beyond its capacity, as every natural disaster testifies. Yet the recent government initiative to bench mark charities, showing how much money is eaten up in administration fees, will give many pause to think, how best to donate their hard earned dollars and to whom.

Still there are alternatives to giving the dollar as the only option. It seems we are often inundated from street side stalls to railway spruikers, to splashy ad campaigns and black tie dinners showing the charity arena touches everyone all the time. It seems less time between charity Fridays than Christmas toys and Easters eggs at the local supermarket. I know the feeling when walking past another giving opportunity, wishing I had more dollars to make a difference. Yet it's not always about the dollars and often you can make more of a difference, especially to those around you, with the most precious thing you have, time.

So can earn you another dollar? Of course you can, but you can't get back the last 10 minutes, so spend them wisely and give them generously. While the boys are giving all their dollars away, you can do the same with your most expensive gift, time. Be the most generous you can and Bill Gates won't hold a candle to you.

My Favourite Things.

"Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens, bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens". As Maria sang, "these are a few of my favourite things" in the world's most loved musical, it got me thinking, not a about my favourite musicals but my favourite apps. I know, gotta get a few more action movies into my library.

The iPad purchase I made last year came with a flurry of app downloads across the breadth and width of my imagination. From goofy games about fruit eating ninja bats, to every conceivable social networking tool imaginable, through to so many productivity tools downloaded, that I needed productivity tools just to manage the productivity tools. Pages of apps to show my friends how cool I was, never noticing the accumulation affect it had on my time.

Like every love affair, the ardour cools and sensibility takes over and practicality rules the short timeframe you have, to love each and every app the same. So when it came time to choose why I bought the iPad in the first place, the sad farewells given the fruit bats along with their crazy cousins, the angry birds, made way for a more intense love affair with apps that really counted and improved my work life balance, along with providing what I needed most, time. Time to really use the technology smarter and get more out of the labyrinth of information available at my finger tips.

So here goes, my favourite apps at the moment. If you love some the same already, great, and if you find some new ones to love then it was worth taking the 5 minutes to read my blog today.

From a space perspective I have embraced the cloud. Even though I have not approached the end of the available iPad space I can see the future where there will be no need to carry technology with hard drive capabilities. My two favourite clouds are "Dropbox" and "Box", both of which provide me with my own private cloud come postbox to file and retrieve countless documents and anything I think will be relevant for later use on any PC loaded with the app. "Box" even went so far as providing 50GB free until recently, to any new members. That's a lot of mail posted to your cloud.

As an avid reader of newspaper articles I am always looking for the aggregators. Why buy 50 newspapers to read a couple of articles in each when "Zite" can give you a personalised paper, filled with only those articles of interest to you, where the more you read and like, the more the app gives you, on a personalised view? If you have media sites you read but don't want to open 20 different magazines and websites, why not let "Flipboard" and "Pulse" put them together in one place for you. If none of those suggestions turns you on and you still persist in reading online pages but don't have the time, consider "Instapaper", which can save any online pages to be read at a later date offline, while you are plane bound or out of wifi range. From a thought leadership angle, consider "TED" where the world's brightest and most creative people discuss topics by invitation only. Eighteen minutes to get your point across to an audience of mental giants makes for great video watching.

From a work view I have a couple of favourites that make the list. After some serious kidding from friends reading one of my articles about going paperless, I decided to bite the bullet and use the iPad as my everyday workbook and along those lines grabbed "Mental Note" to enable me to take notes, save them, collate them and send them straight from the meetings. I also had to have the obvious office apps such as "Pages" and "Keynotes" for presentations. Having said that, the world still insists on PowerPoint and if you absolutely have to show them, then use "Slideshark" to have them emblazoned across your iPad in all their numbing glory. Never forget to load the new "Adobe" reader as the Apple, Adobe war of words calms down, PDFs and their like are now more viewable on the pad.

As a traveller there are just too many apps to consider but some of my favourites include, "Flight Tracker Pro", which can give you every updated airport board, for departures and arrivals, while telling you if your flights are on time or delayed. From a mapping view I use several including "Wundermap" and "Map Draw" which let's me draw on my maps to calculate distances and highlight destinations. Locally I use a couple of apps designed to get me around the city and home on time. "Trip View" for public transport and "Go Catch" for that elusive cab at eleven o'clock at night, always help out.

Okay so the ninja fruit bats have bitten the dust but if anything, the iPad lends itself to distraction from an entertainment angle and that would require a few articles to name all of my favourites. So till that time I hope you get one or two ideas out of the above.

Attention Span.

A baby cries, a small child tugs at its mother's sleeve, a teenager gets some inappropriate piercings and an airline union goes on strike. Not much in common with any of the above but as we have all learnt throughout our lives, there are certain ways to get attention, some better than others. Sometimes it's just acknowledgment you are after and a quick smile from Mum will send you back to the swings. Sometimes it's about getting your way no matter what and that takes being cantankerous, obstreperous and just downright 'ornery with consequences to match.

Such seems to be the way of the unions, causing passenger grief and disruption at our airports as they wrangle with the national carrier over dollars appropriate to the current working conditions. A long time ago the carrier was owned by the government and union troubles were never encountered. Although I suspect government policies, dealing with the aviation industry, were closer to stand over tactics in the halcyon days of exotic and romanticised travel, and unions either took what they were given or looked for jobs elsewhere. There was only one sheriff in town, in the old days.

Today we operate in an open range filled with gunslingers willing to shoot their mouths off at the slightest mention of strike and give forth vindictive comments that only shoot the innocent, the passengers. If it was an Arnie movie, they would call it "collateral damage". Seems the people caught in the crossfire have no where to run but they do have a choice of shelter and today that choice ends up being the competition airlines.

The strikes will eventually be resolved through a series of ugly meetings with finger pointing, crass comments about the other side and a compromise that both sides will call a win, with one loser, the passengers.

How long the travellers are willing to put up with the inconvenience, disruptions and service downfall will depend on loyalty programs and the airline's ability to spin the end result into a win for all. For many this will not be enough and if they have chosen an alternative carrier in these times of chaos, it may be harder to get them back than the national carrier realises. The recent initiative by the competition to match loyalty status was a stroke of timing genius as corporates willing to give the other guy a go may find they are welcomed as a king and queen and not as a pawn in a game for position and dollars.

Passenger's loyalty attention span, has shortened significantly differences between full service and low cost carriers becomes less about seat pitch, buying a pillow, free drinks and more about getting to your destination. So unions intent on making a point with their employer at the expense of the travelling public, need to be careful what they wish for. The strike initiative may be considered a success if caving in the employer is the desired result but at what cost? The loss of passengers who may never come back to the airline? The loss of brand equity and credibility? The loss of faith from the corporate market to deliver a product worthy of the reputation so long in the making?
Not much use for unions if the airline doesn't have any customers and that could be the end game, if passengers give up on the airline?

PS. Just caught the the competition to Melbourne, and arrived on time. Hmmmm.

Spy vs Spy.

Used to be a time, when companies and countries employed "James Bond" style espionage agents to get the dirt on their competitors and find out when the latest nuclear device would be sold to the bad guys or when the latest high tech product would roll of the production line. They would carry concealed cameras in their cigarette lighters along with tape recorders hidden in the lapels of their custom made dinner suits. All to get the smallest amount of information about "the other guys" and what they were really up to. Not ethical but for some it seemed the only way to stay in front of the competition.

Nowadays, Google, LinkedIn, Facebook etc etc will get you 90% of the information you need and the rest is available when executives and politicians open their mouths without turning on their brains via Twitter, email or text messages.

Seems there is an epidemic of "foot in mouth" disease in the corporate world and it looks like escalating as executives fall over each other to deliver the latest gossip, latest share news and latest boardroom chatter, all to show who is in the know and who has the ear of the information hungry public. It used to be the occasional staff memo that leaked about the directors decision not to pay for the Christmas Party, but today that has taken a back seat to Tweets coming from within a board meeting all the way to LinkedIn faux pas by people like HP VP Scott McClellan tipping off the competition about the company's new cloud computing strategy.

Seems executives have found new ways to shoot themselves in the foot via the plethora of social media channels and at the same time put a whole raft of spies out of business. A Forrester Research survey showing 82 percent of 150 companies that monitor social media are primarily searching for competitive intelligence giving you a good idea why so many spies are now working in pizza parlours.

Everyone loves to be first with a story, it's human nature to want to impress your friends with a secret. Whereas it used to take days and weeks for stories to leak out, today a tweet can travel around the world in seconds and that makes it even more imperative for companies trading in sensitive information to have relevant social media strategies. Strategies that are aligned with the company culture so that everyone understands why there is a need to keep information safe and the consequences of leaks.

Steve Jobs had the culture right at Apple, for no matter how hard people tried, no one ever got the salient information for the latest technology releases until Steve hit the launch button. Sure there was speculation and gossip but Apple used that as marketing fodder and used its code of secrecy to build up expectations that delivered sales records such as the 1 million first day pre orders for the iPhone 4s.

We don't all operate in sensitive areas in our work environment but it behoves us to have some forethought before hitting the button on the latest bit of information tease or office gossip to consider what the consequences are and how they affect you and your brand. It's not about spy vs spy, it's about knowing your job and doing the right thing.

Inspiration.

It's been a week since the passing of Steve Jobs and the accolades and tributes continue in all the media and mediums he influenced. From historical pieces to innovation surprises through to legacies left, his mark was indelible. No doubt like many artists before him, his works including his soon to be released biography will gain even more importance and historical significance with his passing. For many he was an inspiration from a business viewpoint in resurrecting Apple from the scrap heap, for others for showing the world different ways to communicate and rejoice in entertainment they thought they had left behind.

The best analogy from all articles read over the week gave me Steve Jobs as Walt Disney for the current generations and like Walt giving our imagination room to fly. Like Walt, Jobs and his ilk, including the Richard Branson's and the Bill Gate's of the world were looked to for inspiration and their books and every utterances were captured via all manner of media. Globally their reach was unimpeachable but it wasn't like you could give Steve a call and ask his advice.

Every day people look for inspiration in their business life, their family life and their community life but more often they overlook what is directly in front of them. You would be surprised what some of your work colleagues have accomplished, what family members have achieved and what you can gain from your community. All things you can use as inspirational fodder to spur you on to the next level of success.

An 80th Birthday party for my father in-law gave me such an insight within the family environment and gave rise to some inspirational speeches, especially for the grand kids. From being chased out of Burma and the Indian Sub Continent by the invading Japanese as a child, to successful careers with Qantas and as a teacher, to now writing down the memories of eight decades, a life well lived with a legacy built up of family values should be more than enough inspiration for any of the children following on.

So the trick is not to continually look into the distance and overseas for what you are looking for, but dig down closer to home and closer to work to find stories of inspiration and people looking to lead tribes of self minded colleagues and friends. That will give you reasons to stay creative, innovate, experiment and follow your own drum.

Everyone has a story to tell and most often it is about overcoming adversities and figuring out better ways to get through the day, so why not listen closer to home, you might be surprised what you find. You may also be surprised how much influence you have and how many people look to you for inspiration. Think about it for a moment and think about what an inspiration to your kids you are? One day they'll say my Dad did this and this and isn't that amazing.

Steve Jobs was a man for his generation and he left too soon and the unwritten potential he left behind, is the greatest tragedy of his passing. Don't let that be your legacy, go inspire someone today, you know you can do it.

Trust.

"Do No Evil". What a great tag line. Sounds like it could belong to a previous article on Get Smart. A naive line from the 60s, encompassing wanting to do everything right and really really not wanting to do evil because there was already so much of it in the world. When you are a small company fighting the injustices created by the global players, everyone believes in you and of you. Such was the way of Google against the tyrants of Yahoo, AOL and the king of the kingdom, Microsoft.

Like so many popular movements before it, Google became a champion of the people, who were looking for their own way of tackling this new monster called the web. A new way to look at the world, from above and on the ground, a new way to search for things you didn't know you knew or even wanted to know. All the while doing the right thing and giving it away for free. Sure there were Ad Words but they were for the people that wanted to do business. We all agreed that 90% free was a good deal and surely the 10% business that Google wanted wouldn't make any difference to us.

Then Google became Gloobal and the world was different. Google was now so big that even 10% was bigger than most multi national companies and people started looking for a new champion. The bigger the company the more likely there is mistrust from the general public, especially if they don't understand the technological intricacies of how they really make their money. Google is looking to take on all competitors in it's field and more with the recent foray into social media with Google+ and the daily deals with Google Offers.

Yet it's the recent updates on services such as CNN, declaring "Bon voyage travel agents - Google's taking over travel" that have many in the travel industry feeling they trusted the wrong site for too long. Seems the travel industry was happy for Google to provide information and maps free of charge to them along with destinational information and put up with the information it provided OTAs but draw the line when the giant oversteps the mark and joins the already despised OTAs.

From Hotel Finder, through Google Flights to the most recent acquisition, Zagat's food site, Google is finding it hard to hide behind, we are doing this for the greater good of information being available to all. It all looks like a recipe for travel heaven to those living online and an attack to those still providing relevant travel services face to face. Google is already the most sophisticated search engine there is and it doesn't take a leap to see them challenging the big OTAs and going for everyone's business, including the high street travel agents, once they aggregate all of the search tools with a "book it" button.

With online hotel revenue already past $120 Billion in the US alone and slated to pass $150 Billion very soon, it seems odd that a company so advanced and in tune with online business today, hasn't decided it wants a slice of the action. Still we may all be wrong and it could be for the greater good of travelers without any repercussions to the travel industry.

Still I'd stay close to my clients and work on the angle that Google will never be able to replace, you.