Have your robots talk to my robots.
We’re moving beyond video-conferencing. These remote-controlled robots glide around your organization’s global offices simulating both formal sit-downs, and more casual break room run-ins. The representative even mentions CEOs using these devices to survey satellite offices.
While perhaps a bit too awkward to catch on as-is, they no doubt signal an acceptance of a new reality: the workforce is global, and often remote.
When should an IT organization adopt that pesky but persistent employee technology request?
As soon as possible.
…the early stages of the hype cycle have… the most differential value… However, in the slope of enlightenment and the plateau of productivity there is little or no differential value since everyone else is doing it.“…The lesson of this story has been known in military circles for a long time… if you wait until the activity is well known and defined enough to be easily and effectively implemented (the plateau of productivity), it’ll provide little differential benefit to you.”
Fortune favours the brave.
“The timing was dire. On January 25th American senators reintroduced a bill granting the president emergency powers to shut down parts of the nation’s internet as a defence against cyber-attack. Three days later Egypt’s embattled autocrats took their country offline…”
Despite a fearsome introduction, the Economist feature goes on to outline how very difficult an American kill switch would be.
“The bulk of Egyptian internet surfers use only five providers. In less competitive markets, even fewer need be nobbled. In America, by contrast, the top five ISPs account for only half the market and the top ten for 70%. An American internet shutdown would require the co-operation or coercion of many hundreds of companies and individuals.”
Complete feature here.
Google I/O sold out in less than an hour. Some wept, some whined, and some… created a Google Spreadsheet to arrange a possible meetup in San Francisco for those left behind.
A product of an interesting thread on Hacker News, let’s hope there are enough sign-ups to make it happen.
The Google Docs document list had an extreme makeover on January 31st, and some of us are still adjusting.
As we continue to fumble through what we miss, and coo over what we now adore, a theme emerges:
“There were four or five incredibly bright, brilliant investigative reporters… none of whom had ever used a spreadsheet before in their lives…”
The Guardian’s Simon Rogers speaks about journalism’s increasing use of data science, and how Wikileaks moved the practice forward in his talk Free Our Data: How We Made Sense of Huge Datasets
The talk was filmed at O’Reilly Media’s Strata Conference.
Enterprise twitter microblogging leader Yammer gets idealogical.
Fun, provocative chat between Robert Scoble and Forrester CEO George Colony at Davos. Less an interview than lively discussion, Scoble gracefully but firmly pushed Colony as he speculated about the future and past of the cloud, Google, Microsoft, and Apple.
Scoble can be an astute analyst himself, as he has an excellent memory for numbers and frequent, unguarded access to the people who build the technology the world uses.
A nice Google-style tell a story through the typing advert for Microsoft Word 2010.
Here, Microsoft shows what it might have looked like to see the founding fathers stumble their way towards The Declaration of Independence, one IM joke at a time.
While it’s evocative of Google’s marketing style, the applications themselves have a least one major difference: Microsoft Word 2010 is a desktop program, and Google Docs is all in the browser.
Thank you for the link, urlesque.
(Source: URLesque)
Google Docs users have long wanted to edit documents with their iPhone and Android devices. But it was the introduction of the iPad that made the pain of poor mobile support particularly acute. That ends today as Google rolls out updates to the Google Docs editor. Android, iPhone, and iPad environments are now supported.
If anything, this announcement felt a bit overdue. But buried in their promo video was a bit of news that felt positively ahead of its time: Android users can now input text to Google Docs w/speech.
Google didn’t mention this anywhere in the text of their blog post, but it merited a moment in the accompanying video, which we’ve embedded below.
Mobile users should be seeing a new Edit button in their Google Docs experience over the next few days.
