Ipad: game changing or a toy?

July 27, 2010 — andrewnim

The Ipad has now been on sale in New Zealand for a few days. And true to form it has sold very well. It is undoubtedly the “must have” item of the decade. But what for?

Well that is actually one of the clever things about the Ipad. Like Twitter it is game changing because it is creating a new type of platform around which people will and are constructing never before thought of usage. We are still working out where exactly the Ipad will sit in our technology use. In some situations it will do very nicely and others not so well.

Some examples:

  • Police use with the right apps loaded yes, great for maps/ reports/rap sheets. Put one in every car and watch them find new  ways to use them. 
  • Same with Customs. 
  • Ambulance crews.
  • Doctors. The communication capability between the two would be great especially with a camera attached (Ipad is lacking in this area).
  • Teachers, a return to the old chalk slates (hence the term is used sometimes for the Ipad) Or the old Roman wax tablets (an idea 2000 years in the making). great for filed trips.
  • The supply chain, dealing with orders.

Notice that these roles all have mobility? I still do not see it as a major tool in the office, at the price it will never be a replacement for a fully fledge laptop or desktop computer. It cannot multitask and is no good for laying out complex documents. The viewable screen becomes too small. Great for meeting notes and brain storming,  not for writing them up.

The price is an issue, I recently bought a 13 inch Mac Book pro. It is with out doubt the best laptop I have ever owned or used. Feather light and easy to carry around it does everything I need. And has far more real capability than an Ipad. For office/ creative use at least.

 

Ignoring the suggestions above, the Ipad will be mainly a device for consuming. News, books, videos the web infect information of many kinds.

A comment I read recently, summed it up: “for me the Ipad has replaced the TV as my means of consuming world events and news” 

Game changing indeed.

Posted in Ideas, Knwoledge, systems. Leave a Comment »

Old-school Collaboration Tools That Rock

May 16, 2010 — andrewnim

For many of us who live and work on the web, playing with the latest and greatest new tools just comes with the territory. I find this constant tool jumping fun and exhilarating; however, not everyone that we need to work with wants to have to learn a new tool in order to collaborate with us online. Sometimes simple “old school” tools, like IRC and mailing lists, can work just as well as, if not better than, the new tools. If nothing else, people are comfortable with tools that they know and have used many times before.

My full-time corporate gig is as a community manager for an open-source developer community. The community mainly comprises no-nonsense, no-frills people who love some old school tools. The fancy graphical environments in the latest and greatest collaboration web apps just get in the way of power user developers who know every trick in the book to get the most out of tools like IRC and mailing lists. Keep in mind that open source communities tend to have people — from corporate developers to passionate enthusiasts — collaborating across the globe in every time zone to develop software that we use every day. They know a thing or two about collaboration, and they use the tools that work. I had stepped away from hardcore developer communities for a couple of years when I was consulting, and in coming back to these established tools, I’m rediscovering why they are so useful for collaboration.

IRC / Group Chat

The best thing about IRC or Group Chat is that you can set up a place for your team or your project where people can drop in and out to ask questions or just have conversations with other people working on similar projects. It’s kind of like the water cooler, if you want to get even more old school, where people gather to talk about both work and social topics. Because it’s real-time chat, you can get quick feedback even when you don’t know exactly who to talk to because you are reaching out to a group of people with similar interests or similar jobs.

Lately, we’ve also been holding quite a few scheduled meetings in IRC, and it is a great way to get a lot accomplished very quickly. By scheduling it, you make sure that you have the right people available and anyone can participate as long as they can get some type of internet connection. We also make the logs available, and we use MeetBot to capture minutes of the meeting. This allows people to miss the meeting, but still see a full, unfiltered record of the meeting in the logs along with a summary of the meeting from MeetBot if they just want the highlights.

Mailing Lists

By mailing lists I mean both traditional mailing lists, like LISTSERV, or more recent additions like Google Groups. The fact that I love mailing lists is a bit odd, since I hate email. Part of what I love about mailing lists is the control that you have over how you receive the information. Most lists allow you to get every email immediately, or in a daily digest depending on how you prefer to interact with the list, and many of them allow you to turn the email off entirely when you go out on vacation. That way, your email doesn’t pile up, but you can skim through the online archives when you get back to catch up on the big news. Regular email just doesn’t have that flexibility.

The reality is that everyone uses email, and mailing lists are a great way to collaborate with a group of people without accidentally leaving anyone out of the loop. It’s too easy to forget to copy every person on the team when communicating with a group of people. The online archives are also a great way for new members to learn about the project and get a sense for the history of the group, and it gives you a place where you can always look back at the conversations when you forget some important detail.

Don’t get me wrong, I like the new tools, too. I get a tremendous amount of value out of tools like Twitter and the newer collaboration suites that have social networking and plenty of bells and whistles built-in. However, sometimes you just need something quick and cheap that just works. Just because a technology is old doesn’t mean it can’t rock.

What are your favorite “old school” collaboration tools?

via webworkerdaily.com

I have talked about finding the best fit, technology wise many times on Point Concept and agree with Dawn’s comments here.

Posted via web from Point Concept

Posted in Collaboration, Doing Business, Knwoledge, Uncategorized. Leave a Comment »

Busy Time

April 18, 2010 — andrewnim

I have not posted for a while, I seem to have been too busy with other things including a rather secret project called Suggler. The names not secret, just what we are doing. All will be revealed in time. I have also been attending events like Cloud Camp Auckland and talking to lots of people. Working on my business model some, and looking for opportunities. And as ever learning.

I dont think you should ever stop learning or seeking out and discussing new ideas. But some times you need to work out what you should be listening to and what you should filter out. Reading a blog entry by Seth Godin ( incoming ) I use the phrase ” The  Distraction Age”  which is a direct output of the silicon age and the communications age.  Too much too often and still too little. We place ourselves at the mercy of the marketers and lots of well meaning people and then expect to hear every thing they have to say and still manage to do what we need to and have coherent thoughts. Its like filling our heads with foam and trying to listen the the muffled voice of our own mind.

We will soon be at a point where we need a U Shadow. An almost AI which runs as a personal assistant and filteres everything, presenting us with only those things which we actually need to respond to and act on, yet still able to pull up relevant material we will need before we need it. And it will need to be mobile and siting close to us, or in the cloud and connecting to our mobile. That way we might not be so busy being distracted and more busy doing.

Until then its up to us to keep control and be our own filtering systems.

Posted in Ideas, Knwoledge, people, Uncategorized. Leave a Comment »

The emperors new content

November 30, 2009 — andrewnim

I attended a launch party for a new search application the other day. Pingar is an enterprise search platform or should I say research platform. I was totally wowed by the method they have used to produce the results. Pingar is aimed at the enterprise and specifically Sharepoint users at present and it is here that one of its unique strengths lays. Pingar does not produce a list of a zillion links for you to follow. It goes inside the resulting documents and extracts the relevant information. Which it compiles into a human readable report. So say the Chairman of a large corporation does a search on financial reports by sector. He has an overall view of how his company is doing. He can share this with his directors and it can be seen by the sales managers. However, and this is the neat bit for the enterprise, the sales managers can only see those parts of the results for which they have clearance. Pingar connects to the company permissions system and applies its restrictions.

At the party someone stated “journalists may be redundant”. My reply was that as gatherer’s on information they are, but as analysts of information, they are in more demand than ever. It is okay having all this data but, someone needs to make sense of it.

This took me back to a subject which has been on my mind of late. The nature of the content on the web. Can it be trusted and how can business know the validity of the facts on which it is basing its decisions? You see there is a method to research which academics, journalists and “researchers” should use. They should record and verify the sources of the facts they are placing in their content. There is a huge swathe of content (like this statement) which has no factual backing and no references against which it can be checked. I cannot give you a reference or source here because I can find no study on the issue. Its based on observation and may be flawed. But I don’t think so.

Take for example slideshare.com. They provide a great resource, an easy to use method for sharing power points. You go to a conference and the presenter can make his power point freely accessible to all to re watch later. But how many of those power points contain references. I looked at 20 the other day on a particular sensitive subject and only one had any form of reference. Yet people are using these as sources. But they may be the emperors new content. Without substance, without research or references to research, to back them up. Or notice that they are opinion. They may well be created using sources which where created using sources which had no factual basis at all. Yet it is regurgitated and used by the misinformed or the under-pressure  and may well be presented as facts upon which business and political decisions are made.

There is an old adage, “if it is in the paper it must be true”. It seems that this has now become “if its on the web……”

This is one of the things I really likes about Pingar, it produced a report based on the search request using contextual matching. But it also then gave all its sources and with the click of a link would pull the data in to supply me with the deeper perspective as needed. Being built from an academic research perspective, it needs to prove the veracity of the data it is supplying. I am not totally sure how this will work in the web as opposed to an intranet. But then maybe this is actually the tool for the deep web. Finding the real source rather than the conversations about it. Or it may cause a change in the way results are supported with others providing better meta data to support the authenticity of what they are supplying.

That can only be a good thing.

Posted in Collaboration, Doing Business, Knwoledge. 3 Comments »
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