I’m thrilled to have Phil Simon return on August 16 for a live webinar with the students at Full Sail University (where I teach) about “The Age of the Platform”, his upcoming book.

Phil will talk about what the “Gang of Four’s” (Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon) business models can teach us and how companies of all sizes can leverage these platforms to create their own innovations.

Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon have emerged as the online power players, and the platforms they’ve built have enabled thousands of other companies, large and small, to succeed as well.

Students will learn from Phil about what exactly is a platform, what they can learn from the platforms of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google, and why their business, whether it’s a consulting company or a widget factory, needs a platform.

The live webinar is only for Full Sail University students, but a recording will be available afterwards that I’ll post here.

It’s sure to be a great session!

About a month ago, I had the privilege of hosting Phil Simon for an online video chat with the Internet Marketing students at Full Sail University, where I teach. The students loved the insights he shared from his last book “The New Small: How a New Breed of Small Businesses Is Harnessing the Power of Emerging Technologies” and how he used Kickstarter and social networking to help fund and promote it. (You can watch the recording at http://ht.ly/5hKRZ.)

Now, Phil is back with his fourth book – “The Age of the Platform: How to Thrive in the New World of Collaboration, Partnerships and Ecosystems”. He has really hit the nail on the head with this one – how companies from giants like Apple and Amazon to start-ups around the world are leveraging existing platforms and ecosystems to improve their business models and innovate around their products and services. Most of the book is already written and I for one can’t wait to read it and add it to the Internet Business Models class I teach at Full Sail.

Join me on Kickstarter in helping Phil fund the process of putting the book together – editing, cover art, etc. You can pledge $5, $10, $25, and so on and at each level you get something more (your name in the acknowledgements, a Kindle copy, a signed copy, etc.). So, basically you’re pre-paying for the book plus doing something good: a true win-win!