My stony heart melted when Susan Boyle got a spontaneous, thunderous standing ovation from the skeptical crowd at "Britain’s
Got Talent," the latest United Kingdom contribution to the TV talent show genre.
RETURN ON TECHNOLOGY TV talent shows teach recruiting lessons My stony heart melted when Susan Boyle got a spontaneous, thunderous standing ovation from the skeptical crowd at “Britain’s Got Talent,” the latest United Kingdom contribution to the TV talent show genre. If you haven’t seen that heartwarming YouTube video, I suggest you do so before […]
A friend of mine is a minister and an expert on church management and growth. During one of our discussions, it struck me
how much starting and running a church is very like running a business. There are the same problems with morale, with retention,
with site selection, finance, marketing and growth pains. And with technology.
I’m starting to rethink my initial reaction to dismiss Twitter and now see its benefits to gauging opinion, as well as gathering ideas and doing research.
PDFs are still a mystery to many business folk, even those who routinely receive them and read them.
It may be time for our Washington lawmakers to take action on developing legislation regarding Web sites linking to one another.
If a computer-related device still works without any tinkering, I’m inclined to keep it.
My dream application for a cell phone is to use it to locate a person in a crowd.
There is gold to be mined in online communities, which is why so many companies are tempted to try it.
If you’re not using your own computer that’s been religiously scanned for malware, you’re leaving yourself open, and the elegance
of the hotel is no indicator of how safe its computers are.
Consumers use online shopping carts for items that they’re considering buying, not intent on buying.
Ink cartridges signal that they’re empty when they’re not, but consumers can take steps to judiciously use all the ink in any computer printer cartridge.
I can change my mind. It’s painful, like yanking off my right arm for a slightly upgraded replacement. But it happens. For a long time, I resisted holding Web conferences. As the name implies, Web conferences are held over the Web, rather than in person. For years, most of the ones I’d been in were videoconferences with grainy, slowly updated images of talking heads where it was difficult even to know who was speaking. I didn’t like the document-centric online…
Sometimes just the name of a technology is enough to make me hate it. An example is the new hot thing, “cloud computing.” For one thing, the name has given marketers everywhere a new meme to exploit with puns, clever ad copy and pictures, speeches and slogans. There is even a cloud computing expo, where reportedly cloudy references were so numerous that it stormed inside the hall. Cloud computing is already here, and it’s only going to get deeper and…
You know, I love my business brethren. I really do. I admire their tenacity, their courage, their competitiveness. But I have to admit that we are a penny-pinching bunch, and sometimes it impinges on our ethics in ways that are a little embarrassing. An article in a Wall Street Journal blog (www.blogs.wsj.com) points out an example. Technology professionals have long groused that, while their employers talk about securing data properly, there’s rarely enough money to do the job well. Security…
There’s a war being waged all around you, and I’ll bet you haven’t even noticed. Oh, you may have noticed a year or two back, when the media reported on it, but after a while even wars get dull and the press wanders off to report on Jamie Lynn Spears’ baby. There used to be two combatants in the war. One was a behemoth, one of the world’s largest, while the other was an upstart, but gaining ground over time….
RETURN ON TECHNOLOGY Laptop hell: Air travel can bounce, bungle data Travel may broaden the mind, but it’s hell on laptops. If your laptop suffers some kind of death-dealing blow, it’ll probably be on the road. Air travel is the worst. You’re required during security screening to pull your laptop out of its snug little protective cover and submit it to the tender mercies of the Transportation Security Administration’s conveyors, X-ray machines and employees. Then there’s the jostling scramble to…
Travel may broaden the mind, but it’s hell on laptops. If your laptop suffers some kind of death-dealing blow, it’ll probably be on the road. Air travel is the worst. You’re required during security screening to pull your laptop out of its snug little protective cover and submit it to the tender mercies of the Transportation Security Administration’s conveyors, X-ray machines and employees. Then there’s the jostling scramble to put it back in on the far side of the screening…
I’m not big on those classification schemes that put people into categories. You know what I mean, schemes such as, “There are two kinds of people in the world: those who classify others, and those who don’t.” I’m not sold on Myers-Briggs, for example. I consider it a parlor game with no significant predictive value. All classification schemes leak around the edges, so I avoid them for the most part. However, there is one categorization to which I now subscribe:…
