Before smartphones and ubiquitous connectivity oozed into the fabric of daily life, there was a time when the end of the work day was not only defined but finite. With the exception of doctors, for whom "emergencies" constituted bona fide life or death situations, virtually no one was accessible outside normal office hours.
However, with the advent of communication and social tools intended to save time and improve productivity, this new always-on, infinitely reachable paradigm has infiltrated our personal lives--to the point of becoming a burden in many ways. In a new industry survey of IT users, 82 percent of workers admitted they stay connected in the evenings, and the majority do so even during vacation time and while in bed. The notion of being "off the clock" has clearly disappeared for the vast majority of workers.
Often in tech reporting, you'll hear a lot about launches, acquisitions and failures. What you don't hear enough about are the makers who iterate in relative silence. For all of the hyped startups of this world (Color anyone?), there are a lot of startups that chug away without the fanfare. So to celebrate those startups building solid and useful products, we're starting a new series called Happy Appiversary. As the perhaps clunky name suggests, we'll focus on startups that are celebrating an anniversary and review their progress.
Lanyrd has been described as a "Wikipedia for conferences," because it aggregates digital content from conferences - such as slideshows and videos. It's also a social network of sorts for conference attendees and enables non-attendees to track events virtually. Lanyrd celebrated its first anniversary last week, according to a blog post by co-founder Natalie Downe. Let's check out how Lanyrd has developed over the past year and why you should use this excellent service.
Kevin Kelly wrote a thought-provoking post about how "the impossible" is happening more often nowadays, thanks in no small part to large scale collaboration over the Internet. In other words, the hive mind. He cites eBay and Wikipedia as two examples of things he would've thought impossible in decades past.
Collaboration over the Web is still evolving. One way it might be immediately improved is by adding more women to collective intelligence projects and by shutting up the loud mouths. I'm not idly speculating here, those were the findings of a recent study by MIT's Center for Collective Intelligence.
A recent report about the "future Internet" by the UK's national innovation agency, Technology Strategy Board, has some illuminating information about the emerging Internet of Things. It suggests that converged services and a brokerage model, amongst other things, will define the future Web. The report is available as a free PDF download, but as it's 59 pages long we'll summarize some key points in this post.
The report defines the future Internet as "an evolving convergent Internet of things and services that is available anywhere, anytime as part of an all-pervasive omnipresent socio-economic fabric, made up of converged services, shared data and an advanced wireless and fixed infrastructure linking people and machines to provide advanced services to business and citizens."
What makes some technology so compelling and transformational that it thrives in a school setting and others languish? We've all heard stories of computers gathering dust in storage rooms while students and teachers everywhere have taken to photocopiers, calculators and, of course, cell phones.
One of my most surprising moments upon entering a very basic primary school in rural Ayenhyah, Ghana - a room with no electricity or running water - was being told that the school had a no cell-phone policy. Students have such a hunger for communication that they get their hands on a mobile phone by any means necessary. They keep them charged using the full power of their creativity, hooking them up to the small solar cell powering the community's medical clinic or latching them onto a motorcycle battery. Kids from Botswana to the U.S. to Zambia love to text.
Competition is about to get red hot between Facebook, Twitter and the soon-to-launch Google Plus Application Programming Interface (API). Yesterday's launch of Google Plus Games was the first instance of 3rd party apps built on the platform being released to the public and that announcement was accompanied by the launch of a new official blog that Google will use to communicate with what it says are tens of thousands of developers who have expressed interest in its platform.
Facebook responded within hours with very public updates to its Games platform. Meanwhile, Twitter is adding features fast and bulking up its developer team with high profile hires of trailblazers who've led developer programs at Facebook, Google and Yahoo in the past. What can Google Plus do to compete for the hearts and focus of platform developers? We asked on Google Plus and the responses we got were quite clear.
Facebook announced today that it has acquired a startup called Push Pop Press and most of the media coverage of the news has focused on Push Pop's dazzling e-book technology for clients including Al Gore. There's been some mention that one of Push Pop's co-founders, Mike Matas, was a former Apple designer.
There's a whole lot more to the story than that, though. Matas wasn't just one of many Apple designers; he designed many of the key interfaces you probably interact with every day if you own an iPhone, an iPad or a Mac. Now he's at Facebook. It's a big deal.
Older Internet consumers are very low users of smartphones and online media, states a new report from McKinsey. To analyze this more, we decided to compare the youngest and oldest groups surveyed: "Digital-media Junkies" (average age 28) and "Traditionalists" (average age 48).
McKinsey states that "Digital-media junkies" are three times more likely to be early adopters of new technologies. This segment makes up 19% of McKinsey's survey, up 7% from 2008. The "Traditionalists" meanwhile make up 24% of the survey respondents, the same as in 2008. Traditionalists overwhelmingly do not own smartphones. They also have not yet adopted online media devices, such as tablets and e-readers.
What's the difference between Live Free or Die style independence and acting like Lady Gaga posturing in a dress made of meat? It could be economic viability, if you're a tech startup.
Long one of the most visible leaders of the open, federated identity technology OpenID, Portland, Oregon startup Janrain announced tonight that it has raised $15 million to build itself into a leading provider of identity management, for big branded websites seeking to leverage big brands of tech ID like Facebook Connect, Twitter and Google. The Wild West had terrible UX and never caught on like the dreamers dreamed. Now Janrain is building a business with OpenID in the background, almost just out of politeness it seems. Big ID has won and Janrain is serving it up on sites like CitySearch, MTV, NPR and yes, LadyGaga.com.
This week, Citibank released a new banking application for iPad, designed to give customers access to common banking tasks (balance checks, bill pay, transfers, etc.) as well as financial analysis tools. While we don't (and can't) cover all mobile application launches individually, the new Citibank iPad is an interesting case study that shows how a large organization has thoughtfully developed a platform-specific application instead of simply repackaging its mobile app for the bigger tablet-sized screen.
In addition, the financial tools now available in the Citi iPad app seem to take inspiration from similar online services, like Intuit's money management suite at Mint.com, for example. And, says the company, the iPad app's progress won't stop here. It will be under constant evolution, getting "smarter" over the coming weeks, and may even help users manage offers and rewards in the future.
