Now iPad3 was launched but I didn't see there so much improvements that I would have ran into Apple store to buy one. When more and more apps are starting to demand higher CPU power than iPad2 can offer then I'm probably forced to upgrade, but for now I'm hanging in there with my iPad2 and probably waiting if I can skip the ver3 and go straight to ver4 which hopefully have something more to offer. But in the nutshell, maybe a cliché but I really wouldn't like to be without iPad anymore. It's perfect both at work and in my private life.
Thursday, June 28, 2012
Using iPad at work and in private life
It's been about 2 years when I got my first iPad(1), then right after the iPad2 came into market I sold my old iPad and bought new one, with 32Gb memory and the 3G feature. With the 3G feature I could be connected to the internet where ever I was. At the time I already used iPad daily. The user interface was far beyond anything so far, mostly due to the size of the screen and the nicely working touch screen (compared to other versions of touch screens I had seen in the past from other vendors.). But it was more for browsing web, using apps and for fun. But when I got iPad2 which had better support of showing the apps in beamer (video projector) I really could start to use it in my work too, which includes many times the need for showing presentations, tools and web pages in the screen. So very soon I bought the necessary cable for connecting the VGA into the iPad. And I also bought the Keynote software for presentations. I had my laptop with me always as a backup (still have), but I used iPad and quite soon I was convinced it really worked well. One of the very good things was the 3G, which was enough for showing web pages and tools in the web (fortunately the tools I showed didn't use Flash which wouldn't have worked with the iPad), so I didn't need to ask for wireless access and play with different usernames and passwords at each different customer site. Only thing that I noticed was that if I showed videos in the meeting room with the iPad speaker, I could turn the volume all the way up and still it was quite difficult to hear anything because of the humming air conditions at the offices. The solution for that came when Nokia announced their portable, chargeable Bluetooth speaker. I had tried other speakers, but they all had the problem of lacking the low bass tones, so the sound was thin and didn't actually differ very much from the iPad speaker. But the Nokia speaker really had kind of subwoofer which was the best I've heard so far (still the best I've seen). I've changed my phone away from Nokia into iPhone since I was disappointed with the user interface in Nokia phones for many years and their poor selection of software for the phones. But the loudspeaker is great! I've noticed that Nokia does actually best cameras for the portable devices and they seem to make the best loudspeakers also on that market segment. Maybe they should move again into new areas as they've done so many times in the past. So now I have my iPad and loudspeaker, neither one needing any kind of wires, and I get into my presentations and documents either from the device itself with the saved offline documents, or if needed, I can get into my documents in my dropbox (web service for making your documents privately or publicly available), or probably Apple iCloud in the future as well. I can also show photos my Flickr Pro service which is also nice, you don't need to have all the photos in iPad since they really take a lot of space. Since playing instruments and making music is also my hobby I've bought quite many apps for creating music (some very good apps have actually been free). And my other hobby, taking photos, have also crawled into iPad world by the variation of different kind of apps and services like Instamatic. When I'm traveling and actually in my home also, I read ebooks, and for that I use Amazon Kindle software that opens a huge amount of reasonable priced books (around 5-20 USD). It's great! I also use local TV broadcasting company app for recording the movies and TV series, all from my iPad. And then I watch them when I want streamed over the internet into my home TV.
Sunday, September 19, 2010
God's gift to customers?
“If you’re manic, you think you’re Jesus. If you’re hypomanic, you think you are God’s gift to technology investing.” by John D. Gartner, a psychologist and author of “The Hypomanic Edge.”
Well said. I think this reflects the attitude among quite many IT manufacturers, IT service providers and IT professionals. Every product or service is unic and one of the kind and there's no better, right? And customers should just be greatful for getting the product or service (without a doubt....)
I think it's the trap that we've put our selves into by expecting two digit growing numbers, living only quarter at a time, fiscal year max. We're easily categorizing customers with 80/20 rule, being concerned about the 20 and turning our backs to the 80. It's all about efficiensy and numbers. There's no time to serve every customer equally good. Does this sound familiar? I'm afraid that there might be quite many 'yes' answers among IT industry. Even though the information technology itself should help us and also give us the solutions where all customers can be served. Still this is not happening. Majority gets to call to automated call centers and are left choosing from the service menu 'if you want to order press 1, if you....press 5. If ....press 7..... if you wish to actually speak to someone press 9". The phrase I used was'IT should help us'. The idea is not to make everything into automated and cost efficient faceless services.
It seem's that the same 80/20 rule goes with the sold products and services as well. It's like only a fraction of sold produtcs are good quality and made ready and the rest is more or less average and not tested throughly, since it wouldn't be efficient, would it? It's better to develope products into the point where they can be sold to customers and then fix only those flaws that you will get feedback from 80% of customes (or from the biggest 20% group). Also there's no point of putting all the needed features into the product at once, is there? It would take longer to make and you get actually more money by upselling the add-ons and new versions. And who's first on the market, gets the cream, eh? So manufacturers and service providers have actually oursourced the testing to customers and at the same time they are charging them several times for the features and fixes that should've been there in the first place.
The scary part is that this way of roadmap thinking and leaving some of the testing to be done by customers has spread into other industries as well. I'm afraid that these successors of IT industry are now moved to serve other industries, so this way of thinking have spread into car manufacturing industry, house building industry, even into defence industry not to mention the healthcare industry. And since everything is more or less based on somekind of IT system, the thought is actually quite horrific. Every plain, train and every weapon or safety system is actually based on systems that can't be tested 100% anymore. This is simply because of the huge number of lines of code and the number of parts, leaving just too many variations to test. And in the end because of the rush to the markets. The faults are called 'features' and the missing features are explained to be 'unnecessary'.
I wonder IF there would be a company who would make very high quality and ready made products or services and would serve it's customers with the humble attitude with personal touch, could it survive at all in todays markets? I think it could. It would differ from it's competitors and it would be very refreshing in todays hypomanic world.
Well said. I think this reflects the attitude among quite many IT manufacturers, IT service providers and IT professionals. Every product or service is unic and one of the kind and there's no better, right? And customers should just be greatful for getting the product or service (without a doubt....)
I think it's the trap that we've put our selves into by expecting two digit growing numbers, living only quarter at a time, fiscal year max. We're easily categorizing customers with 80/20 rule, being concerned about the 20 and turning our backs to the 80. It's all about efficiensy and numbers. There's no time to serve every customer equally good. Does this sound familiar? I'm afraid that there might be quite many 'yes' answers among IT industry. Even though the information technology itself should help us and also give us the solutions where all customers can be served. Still this is not happening. Majority gets to call to automated call centers and are left choosing from the service menu 'if you want to order press 1, if you....press 5. If ....press 7..... if you wish to actually speak to someone press 9". The phrase I used was'IT should help us'. The idea is not to make everything into automated and cost efficient faceless services.
It seem's that the same 80/20 rule goes with the sold products and services as well. It's like only a fraction of sold produtcs are good quality and made ready and the rest is more or less average and not tested throughly, since it wouldn't be efficient, would it? It's better to develope products into the point where they can be sold to customers and then fix only those flaws that you will get feedback from 80% of customes (or from the biggest 20% group). Also there's no point of putting all the needed features into the product at once, is there? It would take longer to make and you get actually more money by upselling the add-ons and new versions. And who's first on the market, gets the cream, eh? So manufacturers and service providers have actually oursourced the testing to customers and at the same time they are charging them several times for the features and fixes that should've been there in the first place.
The scary part is that this way of roadmap thinking and leaving some of the testing to be done by customers has spread into other industries as well. I'm afraid that these successors of IT industry are now moved to serve other industries, so this way of thinking have spread into car manufacturing industry, house building industry, even into defence industry not to mention the healthcare industry. And since everything is more or less based on somekind of IT system, the thought is actually quite horrific. Every plain, train and every weapon or safety system is actually based on systems that can't be tested 100% anymore. This is simply because of the huge number of lines of code and the number of parts, leaving just too many variations to test. And in the end because of the rush to the markets. The faults are called 'features' and the missing features are explained to be 'unnecessary'.
I wonder IF there would be a company who would make very high quality and ready made products or services and would serve it's customers with the humble attitude with personal touch, could it survive at all in todays markets? I think it could. It would differ from it's competitors and it would be very refreshing in todays hypomanic world.
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
It’s getting Cloudy, yes – but locally or globally? Three trends arising.
Trend one – Global Cloud services: Cloud Computing means very different things depending on who you’re talking with. Many of the big players are offering services based on clouds. Amazon, SalesForce, Microsoft, Symantec, just to mention few. These have been more or less ‘centralized’ clouds that are offering services ‘from the distance’, mostly US based services. Problem there is not only the bandwidth needed, but also privacy and regulations. Not all the information is granted to move abroad, sometimes by corporate policy but sometimes even by law. Also on individual level, you probably wouldn’t want your pictures, music and private info to be stored into place you don’t know in which country it resides, nor do you know about what the laws in that particular country say about privacy or who’s got access to your data and how they’re protected. I think those huge datacenters in various places globally will be suitable for some of the services when data that has been moved isn’t critical and under any laws or regulations and when the price compared to risks gets more weight on decision making. Compelling factor for those services will be price efficiency since even a smaller customer gets to share the benefits of large scale economics which wouldn’t be achievable for them otherwise.
Trend two – Local Cloud Services: I think we’re not there yet and it’s not the only path we’re walking either. I think we will see another trend rising aside. Local cloud services operating in same country as customer, offering localized services with faster bandwidth. Offering services on local language following local laws and regulations. Customers for these locally produced services will be government offices, healthcare, financial and military customers. Also some of the public companies as well. There is a business opportunity for local consumer services as well because of the local language and because of the ease of trusting the local company you know and you can even visit if needed. Something you can’t say about faceless multinational companies operating overseas. These services can be offered by local Telco who already have the datacenters and the connectivity. Since they’re not the best of creating the software and services, maybe this is where the brokering role suites better for them. On the other hand there are many small innovative players that are lacking the capacity to scale into the measures needed to wide scale service offering. There is also a need for third kind of partners needed in this puzzle which have the capability and skills to combine these to, the integrators. So this is the opportunity to bring these players together and create a local brokering business which beats the individual global cloud service providers. Global service providers fit into the picture if they allow the software and services to be ran and the data to be stored at least partly locally – and if they allow localization of their software and services.
Trend three – Cloud service brokering business: This will be the combining of the global and local cloud services. As always, you won’t be finding everything you need from one service provider, no matter what they say in their advertisement. And in the end you would like to have one service from here and another service from there. But problem with that would be both managing the service contracts, SLAs but also how to use the different user interfaces and different technology needed for each and every service you buy separately. That’s why arising business area will be those who are able to combine these different 3rd party cloud services into the one user interface that scales based on where the user is and what is the device and connection used and what the user needs at that moment. This will create a new kind of service business offering. Just like malls are bringing different offering and shops into one place for consumer to walk in and choose what they need, these service portals will be sort of ‘DigiMalls’. The challenge is will there be a standard APIs that makes it possible to easily combine the present and the future offering. We will also need a payment technology that supports one-to-many micro payments to allow pay-as-you-use cloud service brokering business to arise and grow.
Trend two – Local Cloud Services: I think we’re not there yet and it’s not the only path we’re walking either. I think we will see another trend rising aside. Local cloud services operating in same country as customer, offering localized services with faster bandwidth. Offering services on local language following local laws and regulations. Customers for these locally produced services will be government offices, healthcare, financial and military customers. Also some of the public companies as well. There is a business opportunity for local consumer services as well because of the local language and because of the ease of trusting the local company you know and you can even visit if needed. Something you can’t say about faceless multinational companies operating overseas. These services can be offered by local Telco who already have the datacenters and the connectivity. Since they’re not the best of creating the software and services, maybe this is where the brokering role suites better for them. On the other hand there are many small innovative players that are lacking the capacity to scale into the measures needed to wide scale service offering. There is also a need for third kind of partners needed in this puzzle which have the capability and skills to combine these to, the integrators. So this is the opportunity to bring these players together and create a local brokering business which beats the individual global cloud service providers. Global service providers fit into the picture if they allow the software and services to be ran and the data to be stored at least partly locally – and if they allow localization of their software and services.
Trend three – Cloud service brokering business: This will be the combining of the global and local cloud services. As always, you won’t be finding everything you need from one service provider, no matter what they say in their advertisement. And in the end you would like to have one service from here and another service from there. But problem with that would be both managing the service contracts, SLAs but also how to use the different user interfaces and different technology needed for each and every service you buy separately. That’s why arising business area will be those who are able to combine these different 3rd party cloud services into the one user interface that scales based on where the user is and what is the device and connection used and what the user needs at that moment. This will create a new kind of service business offering. Just like malls are bringing different offering and shops into one place for consumer to walk in and choose what they need, these service portals will be sort of ‘DigiMalls’. The challenge is will there be a standard APIs that makes it possible to easily combine the present and the future offering. We will also need a payment technology that supports one-to-many micro payments to allow pay-as-you-use cloud service brokering business to arise and grow.
Sunday, March 21, 2010
Social media
In my business I need to get attention about the products my company sells. Also I need to get information from the customers what are their pain points so that we'd know what products and services to concentrate on. And how we could serve them better. In order to achieve that, I started to read about social media, reading books published in 2009 about Blogs, Twitter, Wiki and Branding. I've had this Blog from 2005, but back then it was more of sharing one interesting issue with others, not something ment to be supporting any business goals. Now it was time to go further and start to learn how to use these tools to get noticed and to be different from the competitors.
I created Twitter account @DimiDoukas and started to use it. I think it's like mini Facebook and mobile SMS combined. It's a good way to follow interesting people and companies. I haven't created any Twitter accounts for business yet. I'm more like testing the concept with personal account first to learn more how to use it and how to combine different social medias together, like Blogs and Twitter. It's surprising and almost overwhelming how many different tools you have nowdays that you can use for letting your customers know more about you and your company, and to get immediate feedback from them. To follow and update my Twitter with my Nokia E71 (S60) phone, I bought Gravity software, which is one of the most versatile tool I could find. It costed 10 EUR which is about 14 USD and can be found in http://mobileways.de/products/gravity/gravity/ or through Nokia OVI shop http://store.ovi.com from your phone's web browser
I created Twitter account @DimiDoukas and started to use it. I think it's like mini Facebook and mobile SMS combined. It's a good way to follow interesting people and companies. I haven't created any Twitter accounts for business yet. I'm more like testing the concept with personal account first to learn more how to use it and how to combine different social medias together, like Blogs and Twitter. It's surprising and almost overwhelming how many different tools you have nowdays that you can use for letting your customers know more about you and your company, and to get immediate feedback from them. To follow and update my Twitter with my Nokia E71 (S60) phone, I bought Gravity software, which is one of the most versatile tool I could find. It costed 10 EUR which is about 14 USD and can be found in http://mobileways.de/products/gravity/gravity/ or through Nokia OVI shop http://store.ovi.com from your phone's web browser
Thursday, May 05, 2005
Experience Podcasting
PODCASTING - Static Web pages and blogs are old news.... experience podcasting
It's a new way to listen 'live' broadcasts when ever you want. Sort of mobile version of Radio on-demand. But what makes it very interesting is that everyone can be radio stars. And that's why there's a world full of all kinds of podcasts about various issues.
"Podcasting is a way of publishing sound files to the Internet, allowing users to subscribe to a feed and receive new audio files automatically. Podcasting is distinct from other types of audio content delivery because it uses the RSS protocol. This technique has enabled many producers to create self-published, syndicated radio shows."
Information about podcasting origins
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podcasting
Software to subscribe, download and review podcasts
http://juicereceiver.sourceforge.net/index.php
This is one of my favorite podcasts coming from 'TC', Rotterdam ,Holland
(Copy this link below and insert it to your Podcast software as a new subscription)
http://spacemusic.libsyn.com/rss
And entering this address below to your blogmatrix (or other podcast and weblog reader) you can subscribe also my weblog and get always notification when there's something new in here
http://dimidoukas.blogspot.com/atom.xml
Some links about Podcastinghttp://podcastalley.com/index.php
http://www.podcastpickle.com/
http://www.engadget.com/2004/10/05/engadget-podcast-001-10-05-2004-how-to-podcasting-get/
(How to Podcast...)
It's a new way to listen 'live' broadcasts when ever you want. Sort of mobile version of Radio on-demand. But what makes it very interesting is that everyone can be radio stars. And that's why there's a world full of all kinds of podcasts about various issues.
"Podcasting is a way of publishing sound files to the Internet, allowing users to subscribe to a feed and receive new audio files automatically. Podcasting is distinct from other types of audio content delivery because it uses the RSS protocol. This technique has enabled many producers to create self-published, syndicated radio shows."
Information about podcasting origins
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podcasting
Software to subscribe, download and review podcasts
http://juicereceiver.sourceforge.net/index.php
This is one of my favorite podcasts coming from 'TC', Rotterdam ,Holland
(Copy this link below and insert it to your Podcast software as a new subscription)
http://spacemusic.libsyn.com/rss
And entering this address below to your blogmatrix (or other podcast and weblog reader) you can subscribe also my weblog and get always notification when there's something new in here
http://dimidoukas.blogspot.com/atom.xml
Some links about Podcastinghttp://podcastalley.com/index.php
http://www.podcastpickle.com/
http://www.engadget.com/2004/10/05/engadget-podcast-001-10-05-2004-how-to-podcasting-get/
(How to Podcast...)
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