Think Different posters have a great poster with a Steve Jobs Quote. “Here’s To The Crazy Ones” Poster (framed or not) contains the fantastic quote from the 1997 Apple commercial, attributed to the late Steve Jobs!

If you have a Google Apps Account and you understand how to administer this account you can now enable Google Plus for Google Apps for each of the users in your organisation and they in turn can now finally have a Google Plus Profile.

Note: If you are logged into your Google Apps GMail click on Manage Account (should be top right)

A Note on Facebook Pages
Facebook Pages are terrible, admittedly they are getting better. As a company we have invested a considerable sum in building applications for pages with some success, but it is a hard road and the rules governing these developments can be quite limited, with changes looming, it may get better for developers, but for business without integrated apps it can still be a very manual – time consuming affair.

Google Plus for Business

Yes, you will need to be on this site and yes Google Plus for Business (pages, brands) will be rolled out in the coming weeks. Here are some things you will need to know.

Google Apps Users will get Special Treatment
If you are a power user or you want to be a power user you should already be using Google Places, Google Reader (you site must have rss feeds), Google Webmaster, Google Analytics, Google Calendar and possibly even Feedburner. If you have a Google Account you can sign into that account to get access to all of these services (after sign-in)

The above have little to do with what you can accomplish with Google Plus but they definitely will make life easier once Google Business Pages rolls out.

Google Plus Company Pages

Looking through the Google Plus source we can definitely see what is on the horizon and most of this is pretty cool indeed and will have Facebook rolling out updates (finally) for Facebook pages.

Google Meeting
Like Hangouts, but for business, Google Meeting will allow you to organise, record and store, phone, text and video meetings with groups of up to 10 people. Attendees will be able to be invited via Google Calendar, GMail and Google Chat. The possibilities with this will be pretty cool for people to collaborate and share information on projects and the like.

Google Screencasts
You will be able to record screens and share them with people within this meeting, you will possibly be able to create notes whilst you record your screen on the screen and archive all of these within a screencast.

Google WhiteBoard
Google Whiteboard is a document style process where users can collaborate on documents, share them amongst users and then post them via email.

Google Location
This one is a wild guess, but looking at the code, it seems that you can also track people within an organisation (users must opt in) to see where they are currently located on a map.

My feeling is business pages will take over Google Sites, which is very underwhelming, this would mean users can create multiple business pages and create circles for those pages.

All in all Google Plus is building into a substantial success for Google and my belief with Google Company Pages being released shortly it is going to cause some headaches for Facebook. Better yet, we will all benefit from the competition as more and more features are rolled out. Competition – don’t you just love it.

How to get Shortcut (Vanity URL)

www.Gplus.to allows this. This nifty little app lets you create a short URL for your Google+ page, making it easier to share with your friends. As an example, is Gplus.to/peterricci , is much easier to remember instead of digits e.g http://plus.google.com/117489371829741156604

I have just created my Google Apps Plus Account. You can add me here

Over the past few years my thoughts on this subject have evolved from being a strong supporter of the war on drugs to now being a strong opponent of that very same position. My motives for supporting the war on drugs was based on really no evidence at all, yes, the images of big hauls from authorities at home and overseas, the stories I would hear in hospitals all combined to help me get to that position, but I never really thought it through, now that I have I can tell you it was quite an enlightened journey.

I remember sitting on a balcony with my brother, who has some pretty firm views on a wide range of issues, but this one intrigued me more than others. So I did a little research and found that governments around the world spend hundreds of billions of dollars a year fighting a war they can never win – it is very much the same fight as prohibition was in the United States in the 1920′s to early 1930′s.

You ban a substance that is relatively popular and you will find that people will get their hands on that same product “illegally” and you then unintentionally create a sub culture of crime gangs and families all profiting from the creation and distribution of that product. You then need to spend so much money enforcing the law that it that it eventually seems like an endless money pit.

The War on Drugs

In 1971 Richard Nixon announced the War on Drugs and it entered our lexicon from that day on and western countries around the world have all fought the same war and as a result are all in the same positions as before. Underworld figures profit from the production and distribution of the drugs, and consumers are eagerly awaiting with fists full of dollars (many times obtained through crime and theft) for the consumption of these “illegal drugs”.

Governments then unleash armies of forces to combat the production and distribution of these drugs at a massive cost to the taxpayers and then as a double whammy, the taxpayers foot the bill for the prisons and hospitals to enforce and treat the criminals and addicts.

We now have 40 years of hard evidence to suggest this is both a costly and useless exercise. Yes, we can hear the same old “weak on drugs”, “weak on crime” politically and industry motivated chants. But what if we had evidence to suggest there may be another way?

Enter Portugal

The AFP reports that Portugal decriminalized drugs 10 years ago and have a released a set of figures that turns the notion that decriminalization would lead to more drugs available, more crime and more people with addictions.

The President of the Institute of Drugs and Drugs Addiction in Portugal, Joao Goulao said this, “There is no doubt that the phenomenon of addiction is in decline in Portugal”. The number of people over the 10 years that are considered problematic of addicted has fallen by half in since the 1990′s when the figure was at around 100,000.

The new law that was passed in 2001 did not altogether make it legal to use drugs, but instead, forced ‘users’ who were caught to go into special addiction panels instead of a criminal court, effectively decriminalizing its use.

In a report published last week, the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction told AFP that Portugal had dealt with this issue “in a pragmatic and innovative way.” Drug use statistics in Portugal are “below the European average and much lower than its only European neighbor, Spain.”

This is not a slam dunk for the decriminalization of drugs, but Portugal is one of only a few western countries that deal with drugs in a completely different manner and should make others stand up and take notice. Can we continue a war we cannot possibly win? Can we continue to police an industry that costs us much in terms of money and lives? Can we continue to fill our prisons with drugs users and at what cost?

Remember it was only 30 years ago that pharmacies around the world stocked only around 300 types of prescription drugs, now that figure available to pharmacies is at around 30,000 and many more are available over the counter. The reason I bring this up ius that anyone can buy and mix these drugs (often at the cost of their lives) to get their ‘high’, so creating a whole illegal industry makes no sense.

A lesson I have learnt from all of this is that I should never take a firm position on something I know little about and should listen to and investigate others positions.