Coca-Cola remains top of the heap in Interbrand’s 2009 list of Best Global Brands.  IBM, Microsoft, GE and Nokia make up the rest of the top 5 in the list which remains unchanged from the 2008 ranking.

Interbrand brands itself as the largest global brand consultancy and produces the Best Global Brands list annually.  It ranks market-facing brands with at least one-third of revenues originating outside its home country through a combination of traditional financial analysis and various measures of the brand’s strength.

Asian representation in the list is mainly through a handful of better-known Japanese brands – Toyota (8), Honda (18), Sony (29), Canon (33), Nintendo (39), Panasonic (75) & Lexus (96).  South Korea’s Samsung (19) and Hyndai (69) also fared well.

The United States government is embracing the cloud computing model in an effort to address its rising IT costs.  US federal CIO Vivek Kundra recently announced the launch of the Apps.gov website where US government agencies can acquire and deploy cloud computing applications.  While sensitive and secret data will continue to be handled by secure government-operated facilities, there is vast potential for savings for Uncle Sam if agencies can leverage low-cost, web-based technologies for routine, non-sensitive applications.

Cloud service infrastructure and application providers like Amazon and Google are certainly eying the public sector market with keen interest. The US government alone spends over $75-billion on IT, for example.  These technology companies are thus working hard to address issues related to the security, privacy, and data management concerns that are typically associated with a move to the cloud computing paradigm.

Smartphone sales is set to surpass PC sales globally by 2011 according to RBC analyst Mike Abramsky.

While the total sales of mobile phones has actually decreased on a year-on-year basis in 2Q 2009, the smartphone segment has shown a healthy 27% growth despite the economic downturn.  Much of this growth can be attributed directly to the spectacular market gains by Apple’s iPhone.  RIM’s Blackberry range also contributed significantly to this growth.

Nokia, though a little late to this dance, has recently picked up the mantle again with the N97 model while the original smart-phone pioneers Palm are back in the game with the Pre and its spanking new WebOS platform.  Even traditional PC giants like Acer & Dell are  piling into this lucrative segment.

The good news for consumers is that many vendors are scrambling to produce cheaper smart phones.  These are designed to run on open operating systems such as Symbian or Google’s Android platform and targeted at the pre-paid subscription market.

A New Zealand accounting executive found out just how damaging capital letters can be.  She was fired for sending confrontational e-mails filled with capital letters.  For added measure, she also “provocatively highlighted phrases in bold or red”.

At some point. most of us would probably have been at the receiving end of similar fully-capitalized rants.  But how exactly did this all-caps style become associated with yelling?

This BBC Magazine article provides an interesting peek into the development of capital letters.  In the beginning capped letters were actually reserved for formal writing.  Nowadays, however, being too liberal with capitals can apparently be a capital offense!

We have just formally launched our first stand-alone web application – DocuBuzz – an on-demand document management solution specifically designed for small businesses and distributed teams.

The concept for DocuBuzz evolved from our experience in developing custom document & records management solutions for a variety of clients.  In the course of these projects, we realized that the core document management requirements are quite similar across most small businesses.  We also realized that most off-the-shelf solutions were simply not suitable for small businesses – being too expensive, too complex, or both.

DocuBuzz is our attempt to offer an alternative – a simple and affordable document management solution that leverages the benefits of the web-based, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model.  The current version of DocuBuzz aims to cover the essential document management needs of most small businesses.

Core features include:

• An intuitive multi-user interface
• Collaborative Notes & Tags
• Full text search with search filters
• Document versioning
• Built-in document viewer
• In-situ link & file sharing with variable shared-link lifetimes
• Flexible folder sharing permissions

Head on over to www.docubuzz.com and activate your fully-functional free trial account to check out DocuBuzz for yourself.  We are extremely eager to hear what you think about it.

According to separate studies done by the Carnegie Mellon University and Google, you can expect between 2% and 13% of all hard drives to fail in any given year.  This failure rate is much higher than what hard drive manufacturers’ data would lead you to believe.

This PC World article explores some of the reasons for this discrepancy in the expected reliability of hard drives.

Regardless of the actual scale of the problem, the bottom line for your business remains simple – back-up all your critical data regularly so that any hard drive crash is merely an inconvenience rather than a disaster.

“Cyberloafing” – the act of accessing the Internet for personal purposes on company time – is set to increase in Singapore.  So claims a report in today’s Business Times quoting a conference paper by a local academic.

Such activity could well be a drain on productivity, but the paper does point out that not all types of cyberloafing is bad for business.  In fact, browsing the web has been shown by several studies to have a positive effect on cubicle life in general.  It allows people to cope with life and work stresses and may even contribute to increasing a worker’s “business intelligence”, thus boosting productivity.

The effect of checking and responding to email, however, is not quite so clear-cut.  As it requires time and effort to manage emails, it can generally be a drain on productivity.  However, companies concerned about cyberloafing should avoid knee-jerk reactions such as a blanket ban on all personal web usage. The net result of such a response would almost certainly be negative in terms of general morale.

The only sustainable response to this challenge is to start managing by objectives – not tracking input.  In other words, set clear goals and objectives for you team and measure productivity by how well these goals are met, not by much much time is seemingly put into achieving them.

The Internet genie has long escaped the bottle – don’t waste your time trying to stuff him back in. Instead, focus your effort in leveraging the technology to boost your business’ competitiveness.

Nothing signals that a technology has arrived better than a fight over standards.  The slug-fest that recently broke out over the “Open Cloud Manifesto” shows that the cloud computing concept is no longer simply hazy vapour-ware.

Cloud computing refers to the trend where computing power is becoming a utility that is generated remotely in the in the Internet’s vast backbone infrastructure (”the cloud”) and delivered as a service through the web.  The so-called Open Cloud Manifesto essentially calls on the major IT vendors to avoid erecting proprietary fences for the cloud platforms they are developing.  The hope is that with open standards, customers can easily port data, applications and services between different cloud platforms.

While few would argue against the benefits of such open standards, there is certainly going to be a bitter fight over exactly whose standards and conventions to adopt before the dust settles.  This a par for the course for any emerging technology.

Currently, IBM, SAP and Cisco appear to be driving forces behind the manifesto – these are services and commodity hardware providers who stand to benefit greatly when cloud computing really does take off.  At this stage however, the real pioneers behind cloud technology are absent from the list.  The likes of Amazon, Google, Salesforce.com and Microsoft are, not surprisingly, more cautious about potentially giving up any competitive advantage they have built up for the sake of altruistic openness.

The current flap is just a minor skirmish.  As cloud computing grows at its current pace, a full-scale standards war could well be on the horizon.

Download the Open Cloud Manifesto Draft 1.0.9 as pdf here.

Google is not letting the tough economic climate cloud its long-term vision. Declaring that “the current downturn is an ideal time to invest in nascent companies”, Google announced the launch of Google Ventures – its latest venture capital fund.

Google Ventures will be focusing on early stage investments in young start-ups. It is expected to invest up to US$100 over the next 12 months – not just in the internet and software space, but also in areas such as clean-energy, bio-tech and health care.

So, if you believe you’re on to the next big thing and could do with a financial leg-up, why not pitch your vision to Google Ventures?

Still wondering what Web 2.0 is all about?

Here’s a rather creative attempt at explaining the difference between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 without any words from the folks at Not in Words: