Graduation Loometh Ahead!

Graduation looms ahead on Sunday 5/11/2008. Here's a picture of our announcements.

-Chairman P

Twittering About GOOG and Social Networks

My startup is going fully Google these days. Instead of going for an Exchange server or a hosted email solution, we went with the Google apps solution for our own domain. We are talking mail, docs, calendar, chat and news. There are no SLAs or a human that will answer your phone. But they seem to have fixed the compatibility issues between running Google Apps and Gmail for personal use at the same time. Also, there's a new Blackberry sync for Google Calendars that is quite nice. I've got Outlook syncing with Blackberry desktop and also with Google Calendaring on Google Apps. Nice. I'm liking the Gmail UI quite a bit; it's very fast and intuitive to use. The filters feature gives you more productivity than using Outlook calendars, and I can say that now Outlook is relegated to a backup IMAP client. It is still the source of truth for contact information, for the time being. If the GOOG is listening, they should be working on Contact/Address Book sync and Task sync as well.

Finally, two thumbs up from me for Google Reader. It's nicely done. Be sure to subscribe to my blog if you use it! :)

With all the extra time, I've been surfing around quite a bit. On the social networking side, it seems that Facebook is gaining a lot of momentum in our age group. Apps like Texas Hold Em are doing pretty well. It doesn't compare to playing in the lobby of the Le Meridian, but hey, WEMBA is over now. If you get some time, check out www.friendfeed.com and www.twitter.com. They both seem to have some steam behind them. I just signed up for MyBlogLog and put a badge on the side...let's see how it does.

And finally, here's an interesting article on diffusion of innovation from Harvard:
http://tinyurl.com/4s3ssl

-Chairman P

Wharton Alumni Beer Mug

Graduation is now only one week away; it's next Sunday at 10am at the San Francisco War Memorial, Herbst Theater.

Our cap and gown bags had this plain glass beer mug wrapped in bubble wrap that I wasn't sure what it was for until I poured some Boddington's into it. Then I saw the engraving: "WHARTON ALUMNI, University of Pennsylvania, CLASS OF 2008."

I of the black Ogio Wharton bag as costing me $75K, and the beer mug pictured to the right as another $75K. Let's hope we put it to good use.

See you all at graduation!

-Chairman P