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Four years ago, most people were pretty happy with their cell phones. They were slim, they slid or flipped and they had sexy names like the RAZR. Today if university students don’t have a smartphone, they probably refer to their phone as a “dumbphone.”

According to reports published in May, overall, cell phones sold 19% more in year over year sales, but Smartphones were increasingly becoming the default purchase. Sales of Smartphones increased 85% year on year.  That statistic is amazing.  Consumers are flocking to devices that allow them to consume media anywhere and access the internet from anywhere. Cell phones already outnumber TV sets 3 to 1 according to BNET. This isn’t a trend. It’s a mobile revolution.

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Computer curmudgeons might tell you that cloud is just a buzzword for keeping your information offsite (think Google Docs, rather than installing Microsoft Word), but as cranky as those curmudgeons are, they do have to admit there are a lot of cloud business benefits.  Is the cloud right for your business? Here are 8 reasons why the cloud is good:

1. No more “I dropped my laptop. All my data is gone”: Sure you could back up, but how many of us back up as often as we’re supposed to? Cloud servers keep and maintain much more regular backups than the average user.

2. It’s much cheaper to get started on the cloud: It used to be that businesses had to maintain servers in their offices to manage the connections between their computers and their data. When you go cloud, that information is stored offsite, meaning you don’t have to pay for a server.

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You’ve probably seen this already. A list of 11 life lessons that they don’t teach kids in school. Normally attributed to Bill Gates, sometimes from a speech he gave at MIT, sometimes to a small group of kids in a California high school. The list is a long standing favourite online and has been forwarded and passed around so many times, its origins have become apocryphal.

Turns out Bill Gates didn’t give this as a speech at a high school or MIT. In fact he never said any of these things. These 11 rules have never even been a speech!

After a little digging, I found out these rules are an excerpt from an op-ed piece by bestselling author Charles Sykes. Originally there were 14 rules, but the last three are usually omitted because rule 11 is particularly punchy. Since 2000, this particular bit of text has been attributed to everyone from Kurt Vonnegut to Atlanta state representative Brooks Coleman. Over the years references have been changed and the salary amounts have increased, but what hasn’t changed is the core of the message.

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The way people use the internet is changing.

Most people don’t even make it all the way through a YouTube video before they lose interest and go onto the next thing.  When you get a long email, do you read the whole thing or just skim the relative parts? Twitter is massively successful because the 140 character limit boils updates down to only the most essential details. Meanwhile, more and more websites are offering interactive chat as a customer service tool. Internet users today are more than willing to spend a few minutes chatting to a real person, but they’re not interested in trying to read a long FAQ…

Online behavior tells us internet users are rapidly becoming more impatient but conversely, they’re far more willing to interact and to get engaged on a one to one basis with companies online.

So clearly this means the website is dying.

Did I lose you? Let’s think about this for a second…

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A lot of people say that social media is the future of marketing. Maybe, but that doesn’t change the fact that a lot of people who should be using it to market their businesses hate it.

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One of the most important things any business is measurement. You have to know if you’re spending money wisely. We at CMAEON think it’s important too - so important we list Measurement as one of the three “Ms” you need to make your business effective.

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One of the most popular CRM solutions in the world will tell you to automate your sales force, ditch the software and get your reps selling instead of administrating.  Sounds good, right? Except for one small hitch… what if you’re the sales force? What if you don’t have reps, managers and executives to automate?

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Do you still pay $3.00, $5.00, $10.00 per minute for international phone calls?  Ever hear of Skype?

Of course if you were a business person who was paying $5.00/ minute for a phone call (if you still use the phone at all with email, SMS and your Blackberry in hand) you'd be working for the Government and have an unlimited budget.  Oh wait, Governments are cutting back and getting smarter too...

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The latest and greatest online buzz marketing tool seems to be Twitter.  It's all the rage. Business guys like me are wondering though, will it stick?  Obviously, no one really know - so a better question is this: Does it matter to your business?

In today's economy - especially in sectors like Real Estate, Mortgage Banking, or Health Care - transition, uncertainty and economic challenges facing the future of said sectors make business models look more like a Rorschach Test than a Harvard MBA based case study.

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