Taking business online

As my systems start to take shape around the Blackberry I purchased last month in Montreal I am beginning to see an evolution to a new kind of work. Already I spend most of my day online, but many of the business decisions I make take place in the offline world. Sometimes initiatives never hit an LCD screen but that can be a good thing if you're as busy as I am.

What is getting me thinking about this is where other companies are taking their email connectivity. Both Google and Microsoft are working on small business solutions where you don't just get a website, but email hosting, site maintenance and organizational tools as well. This is probably the best categorical fit for the work I am currently doing but clearly that can't last long. So which direction to move in next?

I'm thinking the next move is to integrate with my media servers. Sure, Google and Microsoft will do a great job with managing information. Adding up numbers and crawling the web. Media distribution is a lot more fun though so I'm going to focus on facilitating content driven networks in the coming months. Am I jumping the social networking bandwagon? I don't think so. So far it's a lot of vanity uploading and convenience streaming of media. Google has video, they sure do. Will they play my music though? Unlikely so far...

The reasons behind this shift in strategy? Well, I'm thinking about moving again so I might move this server to a remotely hosted facility. It will cost about the same but I will have a lot more bandwidth to play with and the added protection of battery backups and monitored facilities. After all, cats cannot reboot servers when they go down (well, they never go down, but that's not my point).