BusinessWeek (www.businessweek.com) has a recent story about a growing $1.8 million enterprise that’s doing
just fine without the Internet, Web site, texting, customer-resource-management software, a fax machine or a single computer.
In fact, the company doesn’t even have electricity.
An instant messenger is one of those technologies that seems silly until you start using it.
It’s hard to imagine an invention more commonly used than the light bulb. It’s a shame that by 2014 we probably
won’t be able to buy them anymore, at least not as readily as we do now.
3G is the third generation of cell technology and is designed to make it easier to send video and other bandwidth-hungry material.
If you’re not involved in one of these massive failures, you can take solace in the much smaller
problems you have every day.
A college administrator believes technology shifts the educational focus from the wits and wisdom of the instructor to the
bullet points in the presentations.
Companies are using Facebook as an alternative way of reaching a vast audience, not as a replacement for their own Web sites.
A half-hour perusing the various social media sites can give you carloads of information about your sought-after individual.
Who among us hasn’t pondered life’s great questions? Why are we here? Why aren’t we somewhere else? Why
do some people never learn how to parallel park? And perhaps most mysterious of all—is it true that operating
electronic devices on an airplane may cause it to go out of control and crash? Perhaps surprisingly, the answer is that nobody
really knows.
Employees often react badly to, as they see it, being followed around. There are even privacy laws to consider.
It’s remarkable how many people don’t bother setting security features on their expensive smartphones. Because
they keep the phone somewhere close to them most of the time, they believe it’s secure, but that’s not true.
Many micro-businesses stuck a toe into the office-rental waters, regretted it, and they’re retreating to home
offices.
I’m wary of the “send” button. I’ve sent thousands of e-mails, and a fair number of them proved
to be problems later on.
One thing I love about my line of work is that the simplest things get fascinatingly complicated.
Now there are hordes of Web sites in every industry,
for every region. If you use your site to attract business, you’re a snowflake in the world’s biggest blizzard.
Technologists don’t usually give the law a basketful of respect. From our point of view, the law is struggling frantically to stay within a hundred yards of our bleeding edge. By the time the law gets around to speaking on a technical subject, the subject may not even exist anymore.
It’s getting so you have to use a search engine on the Internet to find a search engine. There are now dozens, perhaps hundreds,
many of them highly specialized.
Grabbers do little research before buying gadgetry. Investigators like to know in advance what they’re getting. It’s to the
investigators I speak.
Today, there are some small “notebook” machines on the market that mock the high prices of their bigger siblings. These can be had for $200 to $400, and have enough features to make them real business tools if you’re not too demanding.
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.
