Productivity
Poll: On What Holiday Do You Celebrate Your ITs?
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Yesterday, we talked all about Administrative Professionals’ Day and how great it was. We all agreed that stopping once per year to thank the Admin Support and Secretaries of your work was a good thing.
Today, I want to know how you celebrate your Information Technology Professionals! How do you thank your ITs?
Today, our Information Thought of the Day (ITTOD) is a poll subject.
I would like your answers to the following poll today. Tomorrow, I will share my hope for this topic with you!
Loading ...I will be sure to share the results. Feel free to add a comment below to add other thoughts that should have shown up on the list.
Do you like polls as a daily topic? Do you have a recommended one for another week? Please let me know.
That is my Information Technology Thought of the Day (ITTOD) for April 15, 2010 ©Scott Coughlin.
Image credits: Maximum PC Magazine
The Age of iPad – Day One
0Yesterday, I wrote about how I believe that today’s release of the Apple iPad represents a revolution in Information Technology. Reviews continue to be outstanding with negative reactions seeming to have more with politics and long standing Apple hate than anything factual. Today, I want to continue the discussion of the revolution… and write about its one-of-a-kind media access.
Again, in the interest of full disclosure, I tell you that I have not touched an Apple iPad yet. If Apple wants to give me access to one, I promise to fairly and rapidly review it and post my thoughts.
There is no peer in the computer world to the media that is accessible from the iPad. Here is just a short list of its capabilities.
- Full web access.
- Full iTunes store access to all of its movies to buy.
- Full iTunes store access to all of its movies to rent.
- Full iTunes store access to all of its songs and albums to buy.
- Access to all of your audio content on any computer.
- Full iTunes store access to all of its applications to buy.
- Access to iPad specific apps like a word processor (Pages), a spreadsheet (Numbers), and a presentation tool (Keynote).
- Full iTunes store access to all of its TV shows to buy.
- All Amazon Kindle content – books, magazines, blogs
- Any electronic book format in the world – including the millions of public domain ones.
- Streaming of Amazon and Netflix TV shows and movies (Mobile Computer First!)
- Marvel Comic books (Mobile Computer First)
- RSS Feeds of any site
- The Wall Street Journal Digital Edition (Mobile Computer First!)
- The New York Times Digital Edition (Mobile Computer First!)
- Zinio Digital Magazines
- National Geographic Magazine (Mobile Computer First!)
My point is simple – This is big. There has never been a digital media content consumption device that has managed to get it ALL. Every e-book reader, iPod, iPhone, slate, tablet, laptop, and palm computer that has come before has had compromises. Either the screen, processor, form factor, or increasingly lack of access to copyrighted content from major publishers has limited it in some way. The Apple iPad breaks down ALL of those doors for the consumer. If the media exists in a digital format, then you can enjoy it on an Apple iPad . It represents the first separation of hardware and software in the mobile space. This is a sea change. One that I warmly welcome.
Later this week, we will look at the Apple iPad Application store and discuss what it means to the computing world.
Please go to Apple’s Official iPad site and see for yourself, on the eve of the Tablet Age on Information Technology, what all the news is about! Welcome to the future of computing.
That is my Information Technology Thought of the Day (ITTOD) for April 3, 2010 by Scott Coughlin.
Image Credit: The Huffington Post
News Commentary: Google to own Printing?
0Google has an amazing knack for developing products that solve big problems that I did not even realize that I had – and then becoming indispensible in the process. Google recently announced, Google Cloud Print is just such an exciting new initiative.
On Mondays I offer comments on some
of the most interesting information technology stories that I have found on the web that week. Please feel free to join in the discussion or suggest other stories.
Today’s comments are associated with a recent, exciting declaration from Google. The upcoming Google Chrome Operating System, is to be a completely minimalist, web-based, cloud aware platform. As you will read, this comes with one major headache – Printing! Give it a read below.
Tech Radar – Google Chrome OS brings printing to the cloud: How Chrome will play with printers
Read more:
As you all know so well, getting a printer to work is a required step in every computer system setup. It is never as easy as they say it will be and every year brings some new initiative to make last year’s “zero configuration” solution have even fewer steps. But today, it still remains that every printer needs an operating system needs a printer driver for every printer – even networked printers. That is where Google Cloud Print comes in. It is essentially a new standard for new printer manufacturers to follow to make their networked printers accept cloud based print requests. That is not very revolutionary, but it is a welcome bit of strong arming from our Technology Age Leader – Google. Their dedication to providing a platform to enable legacy printers to print from the cloud, by their supplying an Internet based print proxy, is really innovative. The basic idea is that your legacy networked or system based printer would connect not to the print server internal to it or on the machine connected to it, as is done now, but rather to a Google Print Server in the cloud. This is very revolutionary and could actually permit a one printer, one driver solution. If anyone could and should do it – Google can and should!
If you have a Smartphone, an iPhone or Blackberry for example, or an iPad, or even just a traveling laptop, you know what a pain it is to try to get a print out from your device at an unusual location. This could be the solution that we have all been searching for to enable the ability for all of mobile devices to borrow printers, use public resources, and print at remote sites without configuration. I hope that it works! Thanks, Google, for taking the lead here!
What do you think about this topic? Do you agree or disagree with me? Do you have a recommended news story for next week? Please share your ideas below.
That is my Information Technology Thought of the Day (ITTOD) for April 19, 2010 by Scott Coughlin.
[Editor’s Note: To my long time readers: This represents a change to my editorial schedule. I have decided that going forward, The IT Thought of the Day Website will publish it’s weekly News Commentary articles, like this one, on Monday’s vice Sundays. Sunday will become the day that I publish my Twitter Archive for the week. Thank you for reading.]