Techization

A high school friend was visiting over my finals week and we always have the same discussion each time we see each other, “When are you going to get a new phone, my god!”

If you need a reference, see the photo below…

The screen is now protected by cellophane and the ink on the pads have all rubbed off.  How old do you think this phone is?  1999?  2002?  If you guessed either, you’d be wrong.  The phone was new in late 2003.  That’s only 7 years ago.  Now that is really not that long ago, however in tech years that like 7 decades.  Compare that phone to my iPhone 3G…

Technology has come leaps and bounds in a very short amount of time.  Just imagine how phones will look and how they will function in another 5 or 7 years?  You think that iPhone 3GS is cool now, just wait a few more years!

I have to give my friend credit.  7 years with the same device!  Now that is one impressive feat.  My technology heart flutters and begins to fail after 14 or 16 months with the same device.  Could you live with your iPhone or Droid for the next 7 years?

Last year I created a internal memo at the University of Wisconsin — Stout, Wisconsin’s Polytechnic University, about e-readers and their future on college  campuses.  For those uninitiated, UW-Stout is a leader in technology with a high percentage of smart classrooms and providing high quality Macbook’s and HP notebook’s to their students.  Every student on this campus has a laptop.  I think it would be a natural progression to have UW-Stout look into providing their students with this new technology. 

When the Kindle first came out I was excited about it’s potential, but it had many limitations that would make it insufficient for an academic enviornment. It was a non-color screen, so science textbooks would be all but useless no the device.   There was no way to make notes in the margins or alter anything on the screen; us college folks love our little notes in the margins.  I knew that this technology was heading somewhere but it was still in the early stages. 

Now comes the Apple iPad. (cue cheesy music)  A beautiful color screen and plenty of computing power making this a legitimate contender in the ever expanding “how small can I get my personal computing device” race.  It works as a beautiful e-reader and solves some of the problems the Kindle had for use in academic settings.  Some schools are brave enough to jump on the bandwagon early, like Seton Hill University.

“Most of Seton Hill’s 2,145 students will have to pay up to $800 a year in additional technology fees for an expanded wireless network and support system.

And Seton Hill says students may still need to buy textbooks. “We believe the iPad will make e-textbooks more viable to assign and use,” said Kary Coleman, media relations director for the school, in an emailed statement”  (Wall Street Journal)

Some schools are early adopters of the iPad, but Kary makes a good point.  This platform as a digital textbook locker will really take off when publishers start pushing their content to online stores, and that change is coming.   Google is opening an e-book store by this summer while other digital book stores continue to expand their content offerings daily. 

Devices like the Apple iPad and others still in development will look to revolutionize the education industry.  No more heavy backpacks and notebook paper flying all over the room.  A seamless and organized experience, interacting with all your textbooks and notes in one digital environment.   It’s truly an exciting thought.

The shift is occuring, who will be those first “leaders” in this new technology and embrace “e-reader like” devices for textbooks and content creation among students?  It’s still early, but they’re coming.

Want to see the shift that is occurring in action?  Watch this…

British Airways is in the midst of a strike by its crew members causing major havoc for the major airline .  Just in case you are still in the dark, here is a short passage from the Sydney Morning Herald on the current situation.

British Airways cabin crew enter the final stage of a three-day strike Monday, in a dispute over planned changes to pay and conditions that has caused travel misery for thousands of passengers.

After a weekend marked by fierce disagreement over the strike’s effects between the airline and the Unite union, which represents its 12,000 cabin crew, the workers staged a final day of industrial action.

And unless a solution is found to the standoff over attempts by loss-making BA to downgrade its employees’ pay and perks packages, among the most lucrative in the industry, the staff will walk out again for four days from March 27.

Now the chief executive of British Airways, Willie Walsh, came out on YouTube expressing his stance on the strike.  Now what made this move such a great one for British Airways?  Let me explain…

People have great bull sh** detectors built-in.  We as people are not stupid and can read people and situations quite well.  Genuine thoughts and feelings come through and people can sense that.  British Airways could have just issued an official statement and left it at that .  Howver, it would have been carefully crafted by the BA public relations office and consumers would have just ignored it after the first sentence or two, and not given one thought to British Airways stance.  People would have said,”Well they must be doing something unfair to their employees, they are scared to even address head on?!”

Instead of this approach BA came out with a YouTube video showing chief executive Willie Walsh standing in a casual office setting.  No script, no carefully worded sentences.  The video showed Willie’s stance and what the companies feelings are towards the situation.  People want to interact and feel personally connected with their brands.  This is a great example of British Airways personally connecting with their consumers and critics during a rough time.

Great move British Airways,  great move.

I’m working on a presnetation on ambient awareness.  It has been a research area of mine during my years at UW-Stout.  Now I’m pulling together data, white papers and other research to present an overall idea and analysis.  Do you feel closer to your network because of digital ambient awareness.  Does using tools like Facebook, Twiter, Friend Feed etc. lead to more information crossing our networks?  Let me know your thoughts by commenting!

Here starts a story about the geo-location tool Foursquare.  I was a casual Foursquare user for months and found it fun; the special offers at businesses wasn’t a bad deal either.  It made it worth my while to use the tool though I didn’t have any personal friends of mine using the mobile tool.  I finally recruited a few friends to jump on board and the fun began.  Racing for points, vying for mayorship of our most renowned academic buildings.  Finally my two friends, Mikey and Josh, both used it extensively to track their movements just a few days ago, boy was I in for a surprise.

I checked into Harvey Hall for my 9 a.m. statistical anaylsis course, after 5 minutes of sitting down I get an alert notifying me Mikey just checked into Harvey Hall as well.  “Oh, cool” I thought to myself, maybe I’ll run into him.  I thought nothing of it and left at 10 p.m. to get some lunch at our student center on-campus. 

I checked into the student center at 10:08 a.m. to sit down for lunch, shortly thereafter Mikey checked in as well.  My eyes peeled the room looking for Mikey.  However, the student center is a big place so not seeing him eating wasn’t a surprise.  I ate my quesadilla and kept an eye out for Mikey on my way out around 11 a.m.

I returned to my dorm and awaited for my 2:30 p.m. sociological principles course in Harvey Hall.  I made my way up the hill to Harvey Hall, I checked in for the second time today and almost instantanelousy, Mikey checked in as well.  “Whoa, this is getting creepy!  Is Mikey stalking me?”  I chuckled and went to my class, again I didn’t see Mikey in the building as it is very large with my points of exit and entry. 

I wen’t to Price Commons, the main eatery/cafeteria for on-campus students as I do every day at 4:15 p.m.  Heading to the “Commons” is a habit I do every weekday and I have never seen Mikey there before, until this day. I sat down with friends to eat my supper and in walks Mikey no less than 2 minutes later.  “Okay, now I’m really getting freaked out” I said.  How could this be happening?  Is a friend playing a joke or is this a effect of using Foursqaure with my social network of friends.  Don’t jump the gun, the freakiest situation hasn’t happened yet!

Later in the evening my significant other and I decided to have a very late dinner at the local Applebee’s (shameless plug here) for half-off appetizers.  The local Applebee’s closes at 11 p.m. and we arrived at 10:30 p.m on a Tuesday night.  There were no cars in the parking lot except for the four cars of those who were working.  “Awesome, we will get our food really fast!”  We were about to be seated when I look on the window and who do I see?  Josh and Mikey among other friends are walking in 2 minutes behind us, my phones buzzes as they both check-in at Applebee’s with me.  My mind was bugging out over how this could be happening.   Tuesday night, late, miles from our campus and here they are, again! Ahhhhhhhhh!

So what should I make of all this?  Mikey and Josh were not following me on purpose, who has time for that?  They weren’t checking in from alternate locations just to freak me out as I verified them being at most of the places they said they were.  I think this lends to just how small our ‘world’ is.  We have all heard that phrase, “Small world we live in.”  I believe it to be true.  Most of us go through our day in our own little worlds and don’t realize how close we are to other in our own networks.  Foursquare amplifies these connections and it’s very interesting to see just how close you are to your network at all times of the day.  You may be right around the corner from your best friend or acquaintance and not even know it.

Tools like Foursqaure show just how close we all are.  Is my situation skewed a little? Yes, most of these happenings took place on a 4-year univeristy campus.  Could you stalk an avid Foursqaure user?  Absolutley.  However my generation feels much more comfortable with transperancy than previous generations.  Will I stop using it due to this odd day? Absolutley not. 

Foursquare is a great tool that gets its users out to explore their local communities in fun way.  Check out Foursqaure and learn more here.

For those who don’t know me personally, I’m an avid gamer on the PlayStation platform.  Microsoft fan boys need not haze!  When I purchased my PS3 long ago I knew I needed a headset.  Any real gamer must have a headset to communicate with fellow gamers.  I made due with a Mad Catz bluetooth headset for much of that time, and it was an okay peripheral.  The only problem I had was the audio in the ear piece was a little low.  I sure didn’t realize what I had been missing until I bought the official Sony PS3 headset.

Sony did not have a third-party company build a headset and slap their name on it, they built this headset in-house to their specs to match up with the PS3 perfectly.  This headset has two microphones, one on the end for your voice, and one facing outward to take in ambient noise and cancel it out leaving you with clean crisp audio.  Hands down, no contest, no one in the ball park, this headset has the best audio quality on the PS3 platform. 

The button layout on the headset are large and easy to use, even for my large hands.  It fits comfortably on my ear and causes no pain like other headsets I have used.  It comes with the dock you see in the picture above.  What is super cool about that is it will work as a mic even when it’s charging.  When docked, the microphone earpiece acts like a desktop microphone. 

Battery life is about 6-7 hours which is more than most gamers can last in one sitting.  Pairing it with your PS3 via the included USB cable gives you additional features as well.  It will show an on-screen battery indicator and a mute/un-mute icon and offer you a “HQ” audio mode. 

In conclusion, this headset is the top of the line in terms of PS3 headsets.  If your looking for a quality bluetooth ear piece for your system look no further and just drop the money once and be done.  Sony PlayStation hit a homerun with this one!

Price – $49.99

A research report from eMarketer proves 2009 to be the year that Baby Boomers jumped on the social media train.  2009 saw an explosion of growth with the older folks and consistent and steady growth for us young guns.   Check out the graphs below.

You can read a bit more on this newly release report  at Mahable.

Remember Tom Cruise in the film “Minority Report”?  Well we are almost there.  The only thing missing from the new Apple iPad is a HUD to interact with.

Read more about Steve Jobs’s new toy over at TechCrunch.

A recent article on Mashable reported that Google’s Chrome web browser has overtaken the 3rd spot in browser popularity.  This pushes Apple’s Safari back to 4th place.  Take a look at this graphic depicting market share between Safari and Chrome:

[image courtesy TheAppleBlog]

Some say it was a matter of time and I agree with them.  Google’s products are often raved over.  Most Google products are compatible with both PC’s and Macs.   This is because they are web-based apps like Google Docs, Google Voice etc.

Apple’s Safari browser is strongly associated with Apple and the Mac, for good reason.  That’s their browser, much like Microsoft’s Explorer.

Explorer has been tarnished with laggy performance and security holes all of which has been well publicized.  The public has lost trust in the pre-loaded browser, not to mention it has been stalled in innovation and keeping up with web standards.  What are PC users suppose to do?  Download the ‘arch-rival’ browser to the nemesis known as Apple?  Of course not!  It probably doesn’t even cross their mind as an option.  That leaves the highly popular Mozilla Firefox as the ‘fallback’ browser.  Firefox has become a huge success since its release in 2004.

There are two things users care about from their browser: speed and security.  This is something Firefox delivers on both fronts, but now they have new competition on their heels with Google Chrome.  Chrome is simple to use, the fastest browser confirmed in independent tests and also the most secure.  What could be causing this rapid gain in market share for the new browser?

Netbooks, plain and simple.  Anyone with half a brain will not use IE on their new netbook.  So they then consider Mozilla Firefox.  There is a problem; Firefox is very harsh on resources and doesn’t run the best on netbooks.  Where does that leave you?  Google Chrome!  It’s lightweight on resources and ultra-fast and secure.  The netbook explosion has definitely helped Chrome become a major player in the browser market.  With no end in sight to the netbook craze, Chrome will continue its upward swing in market share.

The social web is an evolving ball of our society’s thoughts and behaviors.  The awesome part of it, all that data can be cataloged and reviewed.  Below are the top social trends from 2009 on Twitter and Facebook.

Facebook

Twitter