Who Killed Twitter?
"While eating breakfast, read newspaper headlines and e-mail, get updated on the daily commute, or use your fingers to expand your calendar and get details on the day’s events.” And you can use it to "help your children with their homework or oversee their play activities while getting dinner ready."The question is, would you buy one?
Stocks are plummeting. Banks are failing. The money's all gone.
If you're a small or medium-size business owner with employees, I'm going to tell you something you already know: Layoffs are coming, too. The knee-jerk impulse to lay off half your staff in order to cut employee costs by 50% can be just some antiquated institutional habit. Technology enables all kinds of desirable alternatives to letting people go. Here are three ways to USE NEW TECHNOLOGY TO CUT COSTS WITHOUT LAYOFFS.
I love automated searches. Setting up automated "bots" to do your searching for you saves enormous amounts of time and effort. You "set it and forget it." But you have to know where -- and how -- to do it. Here are my favorite FIVE WAYS TO KNOW EVERYTHING ALL THE TIME.
You hear a lot about how great cell phone GPS is. Tech pundits blather endlessly about the amazing new features and capabilities of cell phone GPS (guilty as charged!) And you even shelled out extra for that fancy smart phone with GPS as one of its best features. So WHY AREN'T YOU USING IT?
Cell phones are the Mother of All Convergence Devices. In the past 10 years, bland, single-purpose cell phones have assimilated digital cameras, media players, PDAs, GPS devices, camcorders and much more. Phones are great for convergence because we always carry them. Stand-alone digital cameras, GPS devices and others might be left at home most of the time, but anything built into the camera goes everywhere. But phones aren't the only objects carried everywhere. SUNGLASSES, WRISTWATCHES AND PENS go, too -- and that's why they're getting the convergence treatment.
People don't like Windows Vista. Users are moving to Mac or Linux. In order to stop the bleeding, Microsoft is apparently rushing Windows 7 to market. But is this really the Windows 7 they set out to create? Or is is just Windows Vista with window dressing. Wait, Windows Vista labeled as the "next version of Windows"? Isn't that called "MOJAVE"?
Business cards are as obsolete as fax machines. And like fax machines, business cards have us still using paper to move electronic data from one digital system to another. Business cards suck, but the good news is that the MOBILE SOCIAL ADDRESS BOOK of the future is coming soon.
If you're unfamiliar with the term, product placement is a form of advertising where companies pay or barter for their products to be used as "props." So, for example, Batman uses the not-yet-released Nokia XpressMedia 5800 cell phone to foil the Joker in "The Dark Knight," because Nokia arranged for it. The reason I hate movie and TV placement is that it's sneaky. It only works if the viewer is kept ignorant about the fact that the advertiser paid for placement. The reason I love online product placement is that it's not sneaky. It works best if the placement is "OUTED" AS A PAID ADVERTISEMENT.
This past week has seen a flood of announcements from major companies about new mobile social networking services. All this industry activity has sparked widespread interest and engagement in mobile social networking. Twitter, Facebook and other social sites have been burning up the wires this week talking about, linking to and getting on mobile social networking services. HERE'S WHAT HAPPENED THIS WEEK IN THE WORLD OF MOBILE SOCIAL NETWORKING.
While nobody was looking, the Internet, the blogosphere and the Twitosphere rendered the old-fashioned press conference OBSOLETE. (Don't tell the media!)
Subnotebooks are easy to take anywhere, but hard to use once you get there. Mozilla, the company that makes the popular Firefox browser, announced this week a software plug-in for Firefox called Ubiquity, which wasn't designed for, and isn't promoted as, a subnotebook usability enhancer. But it turns out that UBIQUITY IS ESPECIALLY POWERFUL ON SUBNOTEBOOKS, and makes them far easier to use for multi-window tasks.
According to one theory, humans developed language in order to be able to live in larger groups. Expanding our "social networks" -- then, as now -- enhances survival. And the desire to maintain as many relationships as possible is part of what makes us human. That's why I'm here to urge you to JUMP ON THE SOCIAL NETWORKING BANDWAGON with new-found energy.