Decoding the new economy

There’s an app for that

Some terrific iPhone applications for home use.

One of the reasons for the iPhone and iPod’s popularity are the hundreds of thousands – 350,000 at last count – of applications that enhance the devices and make them more useful for work, home and play.

While it’s not possible to look at every app available, here’s a few useful ones that can make things easier for you at home.

Better Christmas List
For the super organised, it’s never too early to start shopping for Christmas list, the Better Christmas List app allows you to track gifts. The Christmas app uses your contact list for you to budget and organise gift and ideas for your Christmas shopping

GiftPlan
Staying on the gift theme, GiftPlan lets you create occasions as well as import contacts and birthdays, anniversaries and profile photos from Facebook. For each person’s profile you can add likes, dislikes, what you’ve previously given, clothing sizes and other types of gift ideas.

Expenditure
Tracking your expenses is not just an issue at Christmas, the expenditure app not only allows you to keep note of your own expenses but also keep tabs on items like kids’ pocket money.

Classes
Keeping track of school timetables can be a challenge for kids, the Classes iPhone app keeps track of school and university schedules along with the progress and due dates for assignments and projects.

Weekcal
The built in iPhone calendar is good, but the Weekcal app extend its capabilities. Weekcal allows you to flag, prioritise and track your events and appointments as well as drag and drop with other iPhone applications.

Evernote
A great productivity tool for the iPhone and iPad is Evernote which saves your notes, diagrams and pictures on to the cloud. It’s great for saving ideas and notes as well as being an invaluable tool for anyone asked to take minutes of meetings.

Dropbox
Anyone who tries to co-ordinate groups, be they project teams, volunteer groups or organising the local football club know that sharing documents can be a pain. the Dropbox app plugs into their file sharing service and helps you manage documents while on the go.

Park Patrol
A nifty tool for city dwellers is Park Patrol, an application that tells you if there are parking rangers nearby and when to move your car. Great for avoiding fines.

Labor Mate
For expectant mothers, Labor Mate an application that times labour contractions, tracks progress and alerts you for when you need to start heading for the hospital.

Shazam
Can’t identify the song that’s stuck in you head? Shazam is an application that identifies a song playing and tells you the title and artist.

Maybe Baby
The Maybe Baby iPhone app tracks fertility, ovulation and the pregnancy progress.

Tripview
Regular users of Sydney’s public transport system know it’s a sprawling, complex beast. The Tripview Sydney public transport planner is essential if you use buses, trains or ferries to get around the city.

This is only a tiny sample of the over 350,000 applications available in the iTunes store, many of which are free and most of the paid ones are under $5.

It’s worth exploring to see what tools are available to help you at home and in business.

The collapsing barriers to opportunity

The walls preventing us seizing opportunities are falling

Last week I had the privilege of holding a business Internet marketing workshop for 50 people with fellow Smart Company blogger Lara Solomon and Marketing Angels’ Michelle Gamble in Sydney. The day showed just how comprehensively business barriers have fallen as cheap or free online services have giving fast moving companies a huge competitive advantage.

This is true in marketing as Michelle showed in her discussion about the overall branding of the business and Lara in covering the social media tools essential to an organisation seeking to get their message to the world. Tools and techniques that were once only available to the biggest corporations are now available to the small business.

Intellectual property is one of those areas where not too long ago few small businesses bothered to register a trade mark today it’s one of the first things a new start up does. Which was one of the things I discussed in my part of the presentation where I also covered on Smart Company a couple of years ago in The Rules of the Name Game.

The big change though is in capital expenditure — not so long ago the biggest line items on a start ups costs spreadsheet were the servers, desktops and network infrastructure.

Today, those costs have almost disappeared as the founders and early staff use their own computers or the company picks up some cheap notebook or tablets and runs all of these services off the cloud. As long as the devices can handle a modern web browser, everything else is unnecessary cost.

Web hosting and Internet plans too have become far cheaper. With most businesses being able to get a connection and an excellent hosting service for under $200 a month, many can do it for far less than that.

It’s a great time of opportunity for businesses, with an organisation’s web site becoming the cornerstone of their operations and marketing, the barriers to smart people are falling rapidly. It’s time to get your ideas out there.

ABC 702 Sydney Weekend: Why manners matter online

We discuss online etiquette on this month’s ABC Weekend tech segment

What you do on the Internet can affect your home and business life, so online manners matters.

Join 702 Sydney’s Simon Marnie and Paul Wallbank from 10am on Sunday, September 19 to look at some basic rules on how you should behave on the Internet.

We have further information on this topic at Why Online Manners Matter.

Tune into ABC 702 Sydney from 10am or listen online through the ABC Sydney webpage. We love to hear from listeners so feel free call in with your questions or comments on 1300 222 702 or text on 1999 1233. If you’re on Twitter you can tweet Paul at @paulwallbank and 702 Sydney on @702sydney.

How the iPhone 4 could become Apple’s Vista

Apple’s real iPhone 4 problem is the company’s perceived failure to listen

Kevin Turner, Microsoft’s Chief Operating Officer, suggested at Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference that the iPhone 4 could become Apple’s Vista.

That’s a pretty cruel jibe coming from Microsoft, given that Vista was so bad even Microsoft’s own executives struggled with the product and while the iPhone may have problems, they certainly aren’t of the scale faced by Vista users.

Despite Vista’s flaws, Microsoft’s biggest blunder was pretending there was no problem. For months Microsoft maintained the fiction there was nothing wrong with Vista while customer complaints mounted.

This is the risk that Apple are now running. Every day they remain silent on the iPhone’s signal problems makes the resolution more damaging and expensive. Some analysts are claiming each week of delay by Apple could cost them $200 million in lost sales.

Apple need to show they are listening to upset customers and get a fix out now, the simplest and quickest resolution is to admit there can be problems with the antenna and give away free perimeter bumpers, according to Infoworld’s Robert X. Cringely this would cost around $45 million.

The real damage is being seen as not listening. In today’s economy, not listening to your customers and critics is probably the most damaging thing any business can do.

Is digital different?

Does the digital society mean a new elite has developed with a different philosophy and ethical standards?

Two recent columns, Anand Giridharadas in the New York Times and Stilgherrian on ABC Unleashed explored the idea that the digital world is different. But are things really different online?

Stilgherrian argued that Australia’s “digital elites” are politically naive in the way they are opposing their government’s proposed Internet filter. While it may well be true Australia’s tech communities are politically naive, but the real question is do these folk qualify as an “elite” or even as a separate group from the general community at all?

Are the digital elites the coolest, smartest kids in the room? Does being able to setup a Twitter account or use an iPhone make you superior to the bulk of the population?

Surely the whole notion of a “digital elite” is flawed when the bulk of jobs and households are now, to varying degrees, reliant on digital technologies — we’re all digital.

On a similar vein, Anand asks if we need a digital philosophy to deal with the unique issues of an online, connected world. This assumes the issues are unique and societies haven’t had to deal with worlds where privacy is difficult is difficult to find, think of a mediaeval village where no secret would be safe.

Does being able to tweet across the planet 24/7 mean you are excused from the general standards of behaviour? Or does it hold you to a higher level of accountability? Perhaps it’s the latter.

It could be we returning to older standards of behaviour where we were accountable to our immediate community. That immediate community could now as easily be on the other side of the world as much as across the street.

One feature of Post World War II Western life has been our ability to insulate ourselves from the outside world as we became more materially affluent and isolated in our suburban, car dependent, households. To make our isolation complete we relied on the distorted prism of the mass media for our information on what was happening in our society.

The digital media is changing that, suddenly we find we find we are accountable to our peers and the old rules of responsibility are reasserting themselves, just as they did in the pre suburban communities.

Could it be that being far from an elite, as we become more connected we also become more accountable? Does this mean older standards of responsibility and ethical rules will start to reassert themselves?

Perhaps we may learn much about the future from the experiences of our great grandparents.

Twitter is like CB radio and this isn’t a bad thing

Of all the predictions we can make for 2010 one good bet is social networking is approaching, if not past, the fashionable peak of the hype cycle. Particularly Twitter which we’ve seen pronounced dead by various writers over the break.

Last week’s Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show illustrates the Hype Cycle we discussed just before the Christmas break. If there’s one thing for sure, we can say tablet computers, 3D televisions and Google phone are racing to see which will be the first to the “peak of inflated expectations”.

Funnily, we’ve been here before with mobile phones, tablet PCs and 3D entertainment so it will be interesting to see where these are in 18 months or so.

While it’s entertaining looking at the new gadgets, the interesting action is happening on the other side of the peak where real uses for technology and gizmos are found after the hype moves on to something newer and prettier. When the bored fashionistas move on from a product that’s no longer the newest and shiniest we see if something is genuinely useful or just a pointless fad.

My favourite comment was from an weekend newspaper entertainment columnist stating the Twitter hype was driven by “Boring Old Farts Suddenly Discovering Technology” and the whole thing is now dead because an MTV host declared she was over Twitter. The Luddites are crowing that Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and the entire Internet thingummybob can join CB radios in history’s discount bin of overhyped technology.

Citizens Band radio is a good lesson of what happens as a product moves through the hype cycle. In the mid 1970s peak, songs were being written about it and the media was awash with spookily similar stories of how CB radio was ushering in a new era of participatory democracy. Within a couple of years, the hype had passed and those who had a use for it, such as truckies, farmers and service people, got on with their work without the kids and newbies hogging their radio channels.

Exactly that process is happening now with the various online networking tools. The naysayers will crow they were right all along about a fad for boring old farts while unknown to them entrepreneurs will be figuring out ways to make money from these tools and smart businesses will be using them to stay ahead of their slower competitors.

As well as the trendies moving on, the social media snake oil sellers who’ve traded on the social media hype over the last two years will also move on to the Next Big Thing or go back to selling multi level marketing schemes. The honest consultants and genuine experts who survive the shakeout will be able to genuinely add value and help their clients achieve more with the tools.

So a product or technology passing the peak of the hype cycle is an excellent opportunity to use it do great things for your business without the fashionistas and snake oil merchants distracting you. Don’t be afraid to experiment just because the PR machines and fashion victims have moved on.

Nightlife computers, 13 August 2009

This Thursday, August 13 from 10pm Tony Delroy and I will have a look at whats on offer for computer buyers.

We’ll be looking at the best deals, whether it’s worth waiting for Windows 7, the pros and cons of netbooks and how to get the most from cashback schemes.

If you’d like to listen, tune in your local ABC station or listen online at the Nightlife website.

We love listeners comments, questions and opinions so call in on 1300 800 222 and have your say.

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