New York Times article today about how some companies are implementing a BYOD (Buy Your Own Device) policy at the office—i.e., giving employees a stipend and letting them buy the computers and smartphones they want rather than the cheap crap usually found on a company’s short list of supported standards. (‘Standard’ is usually corporate-speak for ‘cheap commodity item.’)
“We heard from people saying, ‘How come I have better equipment at home?’ ” said Mike Cunningham, chief technology officer for Kraft Foods. “We said, hey, we can address that.”
As it turns out, people are happier and more productive using the tools they like rather than ones the bean counters think they should have. This is why bean counters and most upper-level management should stay out of technology decisions and work on the things they understand.
A similar B.Y.O.D. program at Citrix Systems, a software maker that also helps its clients implement such programs, saves the company about 20 percent on each laptop over three years. Of the 1,000 or so employees in Citrix’s program, 46 percent have bought Mac computers, according to Paul Martine, Citrix’s chief information officer. “That was a little bit of a surprise.”
It’s been called the consumerization of IT but it really just means that people are willing to spend a little more of their own money on the good stuff, and they’re tired of their employers equipping them with second-rate technologies at the office. And you know all that money the company saves buying those cheap devices? They’re spending most of it on the back end trying to maintain them and fix them and patch the security holes and update the anti-virus protection and, in most cases, pay Microsoft a fee for the privilege.
I understand that corporate IT departments can’t support every device out there while also maintaining security and stability and high quality user support—it’s a harder job than most people realize and there has to be some middle ground between what the user wants and IT’s responsibilities to the organization.
The ideal scenario—it’s happening now, to some extent—is a collapse of this outworn distinction between ‘business’ and ‘consumer’ devices and the emergence of tools that do both equally well. I know quite a few people who are buying iPhones for work, out of their own pockets, rather than accept a free Blackberry from the company. A few are even carrying two devices—the smartphone they want to use and the Blackberry that the company requires them to have. Absurd.
Card.io is another new mobile credit card processing solution, similar to Square except that it doesn’t need additional hardware to swipe the card—instead, it uses a mobile app to scan the front of the card. There’s a little more info on the How it works page but apparently it’s targeted to software developers to integrate credit card processing into their mobile apps.
They are currently accepting early access requests on their web site: www.card.io. SDK (Software Development Kit) available now for iOS, coming soon for Android.
Here’s an interesting bit of mobile innovation: EasySign.
It’s an iPhone app that lets you set up digital signatures and then apply them to documents (PDF, Word, Excel, JPG, etc) right on your phone, then send the signed doc wherever it needs to go. It eliminates the need to print the doc, sign a paper copy, scan the signed doc and then send. You can also insert dates and other custom text.
I like the EasySign concept a lot, but what I don’t like about the current model is that it requires server-side technology for inserting the signature into the document, which means it goes to their servers for processing and is then sent back to the user. Their FAQ states that they are looking into other ways of handling this. Ideally it would all be done locally within iOS and never leave your device until you send the finished product.
Hidden is an application that lets you track your Mac laptop if it’s stolen. Using the built-in iSight camera it will take photos of the thief and screen shots of their activity, then send those pictures and location information to your account.
Pricing is $15 annually for a single computer with additional plans for more machines.
ThisGuyHasMyMacbook is a Tumblr site that one Hidden user set up to capture a thief.
Today Google introduced Google Wallet—an ‘app that will make your phone your wallet.’
A blurb from the Google blog post describing the service:
You’ll be able to tap, pay and save using your phone and near field communication (NFC) [...] Because Google Wallet is a mobile app, it will do more than a regular wallet ever could. You’ll be able to store your credit cards, offers, loyalty cards and gift cards, but without the bulk. When you tap to pay, your phone will also automatically redeem offers and earn loyalty points for you. Someday, even things like boarding passes, tickets, ID and keys could be stored in Google Wallet.
Initially it will only work with one phone (Nexus S) on one network (Sprint) with one credit card (Citi MasterCard) so it’s a very limited rollout.
I’ve recently read that Apple is working on something similar for the iPhone, and I wonder if Apple’s approach will be compatible with Google’s. Adoption of this technology will take much longer if we begin with competing technical standards and protocols.
I also wonder how much more of my life I want to put in a device that’s capable of tracking my location pretty much 24/7 already—now it’s going to track my spending, too. Not only will Google have a near-monopoly on our search data, but now our financial data to analyze and sell to advertisers as well?
Good iPhone tip from this Lifehacker article on how to enter a phone number with an extension.
From the article:
You may not have noticed it, but when entering a phone number into a contact on your iPhone you can press the +*# button on the dial pad to get a couple of extra options. One of those options is “pause,” which inserts a comma into the phone number and serves as a friendly pause when dialing. This is very useful when dialing a phone number with an automated answering system. That pause will let the main number dial, wait a moment, and then dial the extension so you don’t have to. This is a great little trick to save you some time and effort when calling office directories and customer service lines.
If you use Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE) web browser on Windows, take a few minutes sometime to download and install one of the following web browsers (free!) and see how sites likes the one linked to in this post really come alive with a modern browser.
Evernote—the cloud-based service for capturing/organizing/finding/storing a variety of data—just reached the 5 million user mark. Yesterday they had 22,130 new users join. I’ve been using Evernote for a little over a year, and it’s a terrific app that I use most every day. Works great on the web, my Mac (desktop app) and iPhone and iPad (mobile apps). Also available for Windows, Android and Blackberry.
The chart below shows how quickly they’re scaling per-million-users.
