What 'Cloud Computing' means for you, me & our clients...

• I upload my photos and videos onto Facebook & Flickr
• My emails are all housed within Gmail
• My CV is set up within Linked In, as are my business contacts.
• I publish my blog and house all my blog content within Blogger.com.
• I save my favourite blogs, news and updates within my iGoogle page.
  

This is known as 'Cloud Computing'.

Simply put, Cloud Computing is the practice of housing all of our content and information within a remote data center rather than within on-site servers which we have locally.

Facebook, Blogger.com, Gmail and Youtube can be described as 'remote servers'.

These websites maintain the servers and storage facilities we need to access our content and information via a simple, familiar web browser whenever we want.....

So what?

Cloud Computing has been talked about for years, the concept is not new or particularly ground breaking, however, whilst it has been a topic of conversation for IT geeks, tech nerds and everyone within silicon valley for the past few years, it's only now that it is starting to spill into the advertising and marketing arena.

Why?

......because now consumers are jumping on the bandwagon, whether they know it or not.

As a consumer, it doesn’t matter whether you have a PC or a Mac or a mobile phone or a BlackBerry – or any new device that doesn't yet exist – you can get access to the cloud.

Cloud computing is liberating people from their computers as now they can access everything, anywhere, anytime...

Already, some people leave their laptops at home when traveling on business since their smartphones carry the load.

In 5 years time this will be the norm as mobile devices, powered by cloud computing, wifi and 3G offer as rich experience as today's computers.

Essentially cloud computing is a driving force behind device convergence and currently the Smartphone or iPhones of the world are leading the way....

So how mobile savvy are you? How accessible is your brand? How many touchpoints do you offer? Are you available anywhere at anytime?......I doubt it, you might have a website, a call centre and a branch but do you have a .mobi site too?

Too often, mobile is an afterthought rather than the focal point when it comes to digital marketing but that shouldn't be the case.

Change the way you see mobile and reframe the opportunity because mobile internet usage and convergence is moving at a lightening pace, made even faster by the release yesterday of the iPhone which has subsequently lowered the cost of the original iPhone to $99 (US) - aka a lower barrier to entry to become an iPhone owner....

We all know that iPhone owners interact more than 5x as much with mobile internet and services than other phone users, however, this trend is widening out to incorporate Smartphone owners of any model. With the cost of these models falling as a result of the rapidity of new releases, soon they will be ubiquitous...

So maybe you should be ubiquitous too....?

Just think about it.

Ten years from now, we will laugh at people who still take laptops on business trips....