“How to tell the team the bad news“

Alright, that’s made up. But I have seen several rather over-revealing meeting titles on my way down various corridors recently.

Technology for setting up meetings is getting pretty sophisticated these days.

In one or two office buildings I’ve been in recently, there is a small touch-screen on the wall just outside each meeting room showing the subject of the meeting taking place therein.

It’s all linked to the everyone’s Outlook (Exchange) calendars. You invite your colleague/s, give the meeting a subject, then you invite the room as a “resource”. The subject – and the name of the organiser – then appears on the touchscreen as the meeting takes place.

So, as a friendly word of advice, be careful what you call your meetings. More common and less high tech is for people to print out their daily agenda and walk around with it for all to see.

While we’re on the subject (as it were), and for good measure, put as much meaning in to the meeting title as possible, without giving away all your company’s top-secret information.

A popular bug-bear is when a meeting request arrives with the subject “Catch-up and coffee with Bob” or something similar. Of course it makes perfect sense to the organiser, but once Bob’s accepted the meeting requets, it doesn’t provide Bob with many clues at a glance!

If I’ve understood correctly, this means I can claim £4.80 in business mileage against tax (i.e. 24 miles at 20 pence per mile).

If I’d driven I would be able to claim £9.60 (i.e. 24 miles at 40 pence per mile).

It got me wondering. Perhaps it’s based on 10 pence per wheel.

Here are the rates (taken from the HM Revenue & Customs website):

Approved mileage rates

From 2002/03	First 10,000 business miles in the tax year	Each business mile over 10,000 in the tax year
Cars and vans	40p	25p
Motor cycles	24p	24p
Bicycles	20p	20p

How about giving cyclists the same rate as car drivers?

I understand it costs more to run a car – I have on of those too. But if we really want people to do more exercise and reduce their carbon emissions surely we need to be offering better incentives.

Of course the great news is that if you cycle more than 10,000 miles in a year, the rate stays the same. Hooray!

A new Web revolution is picking up steam, and the next Google or Microsoft could emerge from the companies that are in the vanguard.

Via a certain high-profile blog on our intranet!

If you add in every small business in the world – and believe me, Google is thinking that way – you can sum up Google’s ambitions in the commercial world as this: the company would like to provide a platform that mediates supply and demand for pretty much the entire world economy.

John Battelle in his new book The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture

And from Battelle’s blog last week a post about base.google.com…

Word is ripping around the web that Google is testing a new subdomain called base.google.com. A screen shot – the site has been up and down – shows a Google database of sorts where you can “Post your items on Google.” It’s a tagged database of stuff that heads directly into the world of Paul Ford’s classic “Google Takes All” essay.

It’s weird. Even though lots of the time Google’s search doesn’t bring back what I want, and even though they’re starting to take over the world, my overall experience of Google is positive. I don’t feel the same sense of “can I trust them?” I feel when I’m using (or thinking of using) products and services supplied by other global brands.