You may be wondering if higher education is right for you. In this recession, many are pondering the value of higher education. Though it’s expensive, the overall return on investment is pretty high. Those who have a higher degree, like a traditional bachelors or online master degree, can open up many doors leading to a better life. Many fields benefit greatly from having applicants with a higher education than high school, including nursing and sociology.

Nursing is a very in-demand field. For those who are interested in getting out of their dead-end-jobs, nursing is a good start. You can begin working in the field after just two years of school as a Licensed Practical Nurse. LPNs often continue their schooling online to work towards becoming a Registered Nurse, which is an additional two years of schooling. Either way, becoming a registered nurse can be a very gratifying field for those who are interested in helping people.

For those of you who are registered nurses, in order to take on more advanced practices, a master’s degree is required. Advanced practices include clinical nurse specialists, nurse anesthetists, nurse-midwives and nurse practitioners.

Sociology is the study of society; the study of people and their interactions with each other. As a job in itself, there are none. However, this isn’t to say that the degree is useless. The applications for sociology are many. They include rural sociology, criminology, cultural studies, area studies, child development, cognitive sciences, communication studies, community counseling, peace studies and social work. Think of the degree as almost a jack-of-all-trades type of degree. However, the most successful applicants take a special interest in one of these niche studies. Students who do this will prepare themselves for one of the many career fields out there for sociology. These include international relations, health care, business consultation, urban social work, criminal justice, seminar and workshop consultations, education and administration, state agencies, evaluation research and law.
Sociology is a growing field. It may not be as in-demand as nursing, however with continents creating easier ways to communicate with one another, sociology will be creating new fields including the changes in interaction and culture through mediums such as Facebook and Twitter. This field is still developing, but as of now there are plenty of applications to land a job in the public and state sector.

For those who already have a job, higher education isn’t just for fresh out of high school students. If you are employed and are looking to improve your future, higher education can help you too. Online schools fit any time budget. They are designed to work around you instead of you working around them. For example if a registered nurse wants to complete their education for a more advanced practice, online education would be best for them. Because nurses are very busy, they would have to use online education, which can be completed at the student’s pace, no matter how long it takes.

Online education can also be utilized by entire companies to bring their already experienced employees up to date with more modern techniques. As business models change, the older businesses struggle to compete with younger businesses that are using nonconventional techniques in order to gain business—techniques that are proving to be more successful in the new era. If more companies invested in online education in order to improve their employees, they would see a significant change in productivity and new ideas coming into the business.

Higher education is really just as valuable for those emerging from high school and those who have been in the work force for a while. The benefits typically outweigh the expense and most graduates gain higher job satisfaction. Whether choosing a traditional or online school, either is a safe vehicle to pursuing a higher standard of living in this bunk economy.

Staying on top of the latest technological developments is important for most businesses. Regularly upgrading older equipment and adding new devices has been a normal part of business for years, but cloud computing is set to change the status quo. Businesses are starting to realize that the cloud can offer cost-effective alternatives to costly server upgrades. A business should first determine the future need for storage and other resources and the cost to fill that need coupled with the expected lifecycle of purchased equipment. Then the company should determine the amount of available resources that will be used during normal and peak usage and take into consideration what types of services will be provided by the hardware. After all of these aspects have been considered, the decision for purchasing dedicated hardware versus a cloud solution can be made confidently.
What Kind of Growth Is Expected?

Making a dedicated hardware purchase locks a company into that hardware, meaning that if they need to expand more they will have to purchase additional hardware to compensate. Cloud hosts that provide online file storage, web hosting, data processing and Software as a Service have the ability to scale individual clients’ resources to match their current and future needs. When a company expects rapid growth in usage, they can reconfigure their services to match their projected needs.

How Much Will It Cost?

The cost of regular hardware upgrades can be prohibitive, particularly to smaller businesses. The efficacy of purchasing new hardware versus what is essentially renting the necessary resources from a cloud provider can be difficult to determine without proper investigation. A cloud service provides its clients with a recurring monthly bill while the cost of dedicated, in-house equipment is spread out among several areas. The cost of the physical equipment must be taken into consideration, but it doesn’t end there. The time and money spent managing the hardware, the resources expended on providing adequate space for servers and the cost of powering the equipment can add up and should be taken into consideration when deciding between an upgrade and a shift to the cloud.

How Long Will It Be Useful?

Dedicated servers require upgrades or replacements every few years to keep up with a company’s growing demands. When the time comes to replace equipment a company not only has to pay for the new hardware, but also determine what to do with their old hardware. Sometimes the cost of the new equipment can be offset by selling the old or the company can gain tax benefits from donating certain parts to non-profit organizations, but the up-front cost remains high. By switching to a cloud provider, however, a company gains the benefit of nearly immediate upgrades while only having to pay a monthly fee. Furthermore, there is no down time or low availability during a cloud upgrade, which helps keep productivity high.

How Often Will It Be Used?

Successful businesses tend to upgrade and expand their IT equipment when they perceive an upcoming need rather than when they have reached their limits. Every company needs to have room to grow with their current server solution and must have the resources available to deal with usage spikes. When purchasing dedicated equipment, this can lead to purchasing equipment that can meet these peak needs, but that spend most of their time idling. When a company makes use of a cloud computing environment, however, they can easily scale back their resources during off-peak times and requisition more power when required, eliminating the underutilization of their servers.

What Services Will It Host?

Some services are best kept in-house, whether for low latency or security. Sensitive customer data, for instance, should remain internal and be closely guarded. For other uses, such as app development or file synchronization, a cloud solution will provide flexibility and accessibility.

While I was writing an article last week about Google and Apple’s hearings before Congress—regarding the nature and functionality of location tracking in smartphones—I speculated about what movement profiles of smartphone subscribers would be useful for: Targeting consumers in real time based on their location. Making love connections between supply and demand on the fly, capturing and locking in demand for ‘by-the-seat-of-your-pants’ deals available that night, while rush-hour traffic was still in flux. I thought: “Wow, that would make markets so efficient. It would totally revolutionize the way that retailers and restaurants do business—just for starters.”

Last week, I was speculating about developments along these lines launching sometime this year. This week, it’s already happening. Groupon Now launched on Friday, May 20^th. I hadn’t been paying attention to developments over at Groupon it turns out.

This is the speed of recycle, ideation and recombinance in the tech world in 2011: gratification of demand-side desire and the exploitation and filling of almost any potential white space by the supply side happens almost instantaneously. Tuned to the tech news every morning, I sometimes marvel. It seems like we’re moving at light speed.

Groupon Now came out the day after LinkedIn’s public stock debut prompted commentators to proclaim: “The tech boom is back.”

Groupon’s CEO says that Groupon Now, “has been designed to promote serendipitous discovery of new experiences.” It is roughly the storefront equivalent of painting coming off the walls. Stores, restaurants, and other businesses will promote themselves directly to consumers who happen to be in the area by offering up-to-the-minute deals, rather than relying on the customers to walk through their front door.

Andrew Mason explains the impetus behind creating a service like Groupon Now. He points out that there’s a white space in the marketing arena; no marketing platform can help to create spontaneous experiences in real time. People default to doing what they know—they go to bars, or go to the movies. Consumers are hungry for a greater diversity of entertainment but are not willing or able to do the kinds of research to help connect them to these different experiences. “Right now, when people are bored, their brains tend to go toward a handful of safe activities…People have a limited vocabulary of things they do.” Groupon Now is designed to get around consumer recalcitrance and reluctance to explore.

It’s odd—isn’t it?—that Apple and Google are in so much trouble for owning databases that would potentially allow them to reach out to highly geo-targeted traffic in the same way that Groupon Now is already doing. Consumer engagement with Groupon Now will be voluntary, however, and that seems to make all the difference.

Groupon Now marks a shift in Groupon’s overall strategy, reach and potential. It changes the dynamic and relationship between the platform, the businesses utilizing it, and the consumer. They are moving from what was essentially a very complex, elegant, highly stylized series of email marketing campaigns to a richer and more interactive interface. Mason sums up this shift succinctly, saying that, “With daily deals [we were] pushing deals to people. With Groupon Now, we’re intercepting intent.” Having declined Google’s $6 billion buy-out last December, many commentators believed that Groupon’s growth potential was already reaching its ceiling and that competition from bigger companies (e.g. Facebook Deals, Google Offers) would quickly dismantle their momentum. With Groupon Now, Groupon is taking a quantum leap past their encroaching competitors, securing their lead over Deals, Offers and Living Social for some time to come.

In their top 100 brands report this year, Brand Z said that in 2010, “‘Engaging’ replaced ‘targeting’ in the marketing lexicon.” Groupon’s new strategies seem to be taking this cultural shift to heart.

All’s fair in love and war.  But what about branding?

We know that Facebook and Google are becoming increasingly competitive, jousting for control of increasingly overlapping markets. In mid-May, Facebook has confessed to hiring a PR firm to leak bad press about Google’s privacy policies.  None of the information that they were promoting—primarily about the types of information that could be potentially be harvested by Social Circles—was false or misleading, and in reasonably tech-savvy circles it was common knowledge.  Apparently, Facebook just wanted to create more buzz about it.

For anyone interested in the email chain that was leaked by a contact of Burston Marsteiller, starting the whole controversy, you can check it out here.

Anything that Google might have learned about users through Social Circles, Facebook already knew about their users.  And most people—especially industry people—were already well aware of these practices.  So what’s the big deal?

On the one hand, this leaves a mildly bad taste about Facebook in potential investors mouths at a time when the company may be preparing for a public stock debut.  On the other hand, their campaign may have accomplished its intended purpose.  According Brand Z’s brand valuation report, released last week, Google’s brand value slid by -2% this year, while Facebook’s brand value grew by 246%.

So the question is: was this a good idea or not?

Companies and politicians release bad press about their competitors all the time—this strategy is considered totally ethical as long as the information being released is true.  With new vulnerabilities opened up by online reviews, people seem more jittery about bad press than ever.  But aren’t negative ads as much a part of the marketing system as positive ones (albeit only as a complement)?

Aspirin advertisements, for example, will  generally list number of other products and explain why these “other products” are not effective, hoping people will buy “better” products instead(such as their own). Sleeping aid advertisements often allege that their competitors products are “habit forming” and advertise their own products as the one that isn’t. Automotive ads are all about comparing their brands to other “inferior” products.  See for example the Chevy ads from a few years ago whose message was that—due to the fact that Chevy had the best GPS system at the time– owners of other inferior vehicles would end up Chevy owners for directions.  There is the constant infighting among companies like Fedex and UPS over whose shipping services are more effective and so forth.  All of this is part of a healthy market, but it can be one of the more painful aspects of competition.

This video (which is rather naïve but very well-produced) gives, a pretty good overview of negative branding: it talks about how negative ads can be stimulating and therefore memorable.  Their idealistic vision to ‘ban negative advertising’ at the tail end strikes me as somewhat dystopian, not to mention daft, but it’s worth watching all the same.

By and large research suggests that people are more ready to believe negative advertising than positive advertising.  For that reason it is very effective.  However, it frequently has an obvious and unwanted: it generates a vicious cycle of retribution.  This is transparent and up-front in political campaigns, but we see it playing out in the recent Facebook debacle as well.  Revelations that Facebook had paid for a campaign to remind people that Google compromises their privacy ended up reminding people that Facebook compromises their privacy as well.

However, taking a hard look at the numbers in the Brand Z report, I think we have to admit that, of the two, Google came out of the last few quarters the worse for wear.



You have a group of highly knowledgeable and experienced people at your organization. You have a huge project at hand and you utilize this human resource to achieve success. While every individual was efficient and capable, the project fails. Here is a classic example of what an organization may face without adequate team building.

Just getting a few individuals to work on a single project and report to the same boss is not enough to create a team. You need to help all units of the group understand and work towards achieving the same goal – only then it would be able to operate as a team.

It is very important to determine the goals of a team. It is the first step in all team workshops. However, this is not all. Sometimes, a team aware of its goals fails to achieve success. What is the reason for this failure? The reason is simple – you fail to identify the impediments that make team building difficult.

Here are a few common problems that every workshop needs to focus on, and work towards eradicating, for team building success.

Lack of clarity regarding objectives: If the members of a team were not quite clear about the specific goals towards which they need to progress, no team activity or workshop would be of any use.

Lack of support, trust, and cooperation: In the absence of these three elements between the individuals in a department or different departments, as well as between the individuals and the management, it is difficult to work as a team.

Lack of communication: If individuals do not want to confront issues and speak up, there would be no clarity in the functioning. The workshop must aim to rectify this if it needs to succeed.

Lack of proper leadership: Is the leader and the leadership style appropriate? Is the leader apt at handling problems the right way? Does his/her approach make matters better or worse? Understanding this helps assess the situation.

Lack of scope for individual excellence: Every team-building workshop must incorporate two elements – group and individual development. If this goes off balance, things do not work out well.

Lack of proper procedures: Many a times, the use of inappropriate procedures makes it difficult for a team to succeed. Before using any program, you need to find out whether a certain organizational procedure is causing more harm than good.

Lack of regular review: If you do not monitor progress on a regular basis, it is difficult to assess whether there is any problem with a group that you are trying to transform into a successful team.

Mahasweta Bhattacharya, a corporate training consultant, offers valuable guidance to individuals seeking to enhance their leadership skills. If you are looking for team workshop programs, she suggests you to visit http://www.learningtouch.co.in/