Thursday, May 31, 2012

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Five airport survival apps


Five airport survival apps

By 
May 29, 2012, 10:18 AM PDT
Takeaway: Traveling by air can mean assorted aggravations and delays. Here are five handy apps to make your travels go more smoothly.
Some days, I feel like I live at the airport. Between speaking engagements, consulting projects, vacations, and weekend getaways, I am constantly on the go. One of the things I have found during my travels is that a number of mobile apps can make dealing with airport chaos a lot easier.
Note: This list is also available as a photo gallery.

1: Skyscanner

When a flight gets canceled, you might find yourself scrambling to find an alternate flight. This is where Skyscanner (Figure A) comes into play. Skyscanner, available for iPhone, iPad, Android, and Windows Phone, is designed to help you to find airline tickets based on your search criteria. The thing that makes Skyscanner unique is the fact that the interface shows you how the price changes as you pick alternate flights or travel dates. The interface takes a little bit of getting used to, but ultimately it does a good job of helping you to find the flight you want at the price you want.

Figure A

Skyscanner

2: FlightPredictor

One of the sad facts of life is that every day, numerous flights are delayed or canceled.FlightPredictor (Figure B) helps predict whether your flight will be on time. The software considers a number of factors, including the flight’s statistical record and delays at other airports. It’s available for WebOS devices, Windows Phone, and Android.

Figure B

FlightPredictor
As cool as flight status prediction is, my favorite feature is the collection of airport maps. The app contains maps of many of the major airports. These maps show everything from gate location to airport restaurants.

3: Flight Status

Flight Status (Figure C) is a simple yet useful app for Windows Phone 7 devices. It provides status information for your flight, including departure and arrival times and gate information. It even features a live tile that displays real-time flight information on your device’s start screen.

Figure C

Flight Status

4: Car Locator

I travel almost constantly and I have to admit that sometimes finding my car after a trip can be a challenge. It isn’t so much that I am forgetful. But when you travel so frequently, all the trips start blurring together. I often find myself wondering whether I parked my car in Long Term 1 or if that was the trip before. This is where the Car Locator (Figure D) app comes into play. This handy Windows Phone 7 app lets you mark your car’s GPS location and then guides you back to your car after your trip.

Figure D

Car Locator

5: AirportCodes

You might be able to get through life without needing to know the codes for the various airports, but having an airport code list available can be handy. For example, when you check a bag, the airlines tag the bag. This tag usually has a barcode and an airport code. A quick check of the airport code can help to ensure that the airline is sending your bag to the correct city.
Airport Codes (Figure E) is a free app that lets you look up codes for airports around the world. It also maps the airport’s location. I use the Windows Phone 7 version, but similar apps are available for iPhone and other mobile platforms.
Figure E
Airport Codes

Bonus: My Charlotte Mobile App

I’ll be the first to admit that My Charlotte Mobile App (Figure F) is a niche app –useful only to those who fly in or out of Charlotte, NC, on a regular basis. Even so, I wanted to include it in my list as a bonus because it is so useful — and because other cities offer similar apps. Even though I live in South Carolina, Charlotte is the closest airport. The My Charlotte app provides crucial information about the airport and other services.

Figure F

My Charlotte Mobile App
My favorite thing about this app is that it provides real-time parking status information. It reports which lots are open, which lots are closed, and which lots have relatively few parking spaces left. It also includes an airport delay map that shows which of the nation’s major airports are experiencing delays. And I absolutely love that the app includes traffic and weather information so that I know what I’m in for on the trip home from the airport.
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Inspiration for PowerPoint Presentations

This site has some great presentations that can help inspire you to amp up your next slideshow.

http://noteandpoint.com/
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Wednesday, May 30, 2012

10 innovative ways businesses are using the iPad

Great article, I especially love the iPad as digital signage - it's sharp, affordable, and effective!


10 innovative ways businesses are using the iPad

By 
May 25, 2012, 10:12 AM PDT
Takeaway: Brad Hintze highlights 10 ways that companies are streamlining operations and customer engagement with the iPad.
This is a guest post by Brad Hintze, the chief marketing officer for MokiMobility, which is a provider of cloud-based mobile device management platform for single-purpose iOS and Android devices.
The iPad serves as a single-purpose device in a variety of industries. Here are just a few of the ways companies and organizations are beginning to use the iPad to streamline operations and customer engagement.

1: Point-of-sale

Retailers and restaurants large and small have begun swapping out large clunky cash registers for the iPad. From cash drawers to receipt printers to credit card swipes, the iPad offers an efficient solution for processing sales.

2: Digital signage

With the iPad’s integrated Wi-Fi and sharp display, many businesses are mounting them on walls and on desks to present their latest messaging and advertising. Whether it displays an agenda or just loops an ad, the iPad offers an inexpensive way to show high-quality content and graphics for a variety of applications.

3: Product displays

Retailers have begun swapping product cards for iPads. For instance, Lebron James’ new shoe store, Unknwn, places an iPad next to every shoe it sells, displaying videos, pictures, and the price using an iPad kiosk app.

4: Conference room scheduler

iPads can cut through the hassles of scheduling meetings and reserving conference rooms. Businesses like Disney, ESPN, and Hulu are using apps such as Eventboard to show the schedule for the conference room and hook it directly to Exchange or Google Calendar. Double meeting bookings? Not an issue.

5: Retail sales terminal with credit card swipe

Retailers want to close the sale of every customer who walks into their store, even when the demand exceeds inventory levels. One major shoe retailer has begun using an iPad connected to its online store to take orders from customers and drop-ship those orders directly to customers’ homes. As a fully functioning kiosk, these terminals accept payments through a customer’s credit card right in the store.

6: Loyalty programs

Loyalty programs have proven to be a great source of repeat business for many establishments, and the iPad is beginning to replace the traditional cards found in the everyday wallet. Using solutions like Favorite Eats, restaurant owners tie additional transaction details to customers, providing the benefits of loyalty rewards without the hassle of yet another physical card.

7: Personal concierge

Major hotels have seen an increase in the use of interactive iPad apps that help hotel guests locate interesting local attractions and five-star restaurants.

8: Restaurant wait lists

Restaurants have traditionally used paper lists to manage crowds of customers waiting for a table. But now, restaurants are replacing those lists with integrated apps like NoshList, which notify guests via SMS when their table is available. With the tap of the screen, front-line hosts locate available tables and tag those tables to hungry customers.

9: Employee time clock

Lost time cards and antiquated timecard machines are on their way out. Employee time clock apps eliminate punch-in errors, while reducing the costliness of buying timecards and machines. iPads can be placed on the wall near the entrance of a building for employees to clock in and clock out in an instant.

10: Surveys/customer feedback

What’s the most effective way for retailers to find out what customers think? Ask them directly. iPads make it easier to gather timely and effective feedback. Placing devices directly in stores (as kiosks) enables customers to respond to questions at the touch of a finger.
What are some other ways that the iPad is being used in your organization? Share your feedback in the discussion thread below.

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Friday, May 25, 2012

How the iPad is helping save Greece


How the iPad is helping save Greece

By 
May 23, 2012, 8:10 PM PDT
Takeaway: In the midst of a stormy economic crisis, Greece was able to save $140 billion in debt with the help of the Apple iPad and some great software.
Photo credit: iStockphoto/PeskyMonkey
Photo credit: iStockphoto/PeskyMonkey
Okay, let me be clear about one thing — the iPad isn’t really saving Greece. People are saving Greece. But, the iPad is helping them overcome big obstacles and move a lot faster than they would have ever been able to otherwise.
As I’m sure you’ve heard, Greece is in the midst of an apocalyptic economic crisis and there are plenty of doubters who don’t see how the country will turn itself around any time soon. But, that doesn’t mean people aren’t still trying. For those who are working on finding a light at the end of the tunnel in Greece, they’re getting an unexpected assist from the Apple iPad, according to a new report from Fortune Magazine.
The report explains that financial services wizard Bob Apfel helped Greece restructure its debt in April, reducing the total debt from $270 billion to $130 billion.
Apfel told Fortune, “It was the largest financial transaction in the history of the world, and we couldn’t have done it without the iPad.”
Fortune’s Philip Elmer-DeWitt explained how Apfel bought 100 iPads and used them to help facilitate the deal:
“Greece, as you may recall, was facing bankruptcy this spring, unable to make good on debts worth, on paper, more than $270 billion. In a series of complex restructuring transactions, the country’s Finance Ministry had offered to settle for a fraction of the bonds’ paper value. But getting roughly 100,000 bondholders scattered around the globe — from Russia to South Africa to Kazakhstan — to sign off on the deal on a tight deadline was going to be a logistical nightmare… The Apple tablets, equipped with a custom-made debt-restructuring app, were handed out to the leadership team, including representatives from the Finance Ministry, the Hellenic Exchange (the Greek equivalent of the NYSE), the Bank of Greece (their version of the Federal Reserve) and the three external banks that managed the deal, Deutsche Bank, HSBC and Lazard. The idea was to give the participants a rich set of analytic tools and real-time, secure connections to both the global clearing systems and the back offices of banks around the world.”
In the end, it worked and it saved Greece $140 billion. Greece is far from being out of the water yet, but this is a great example of people using technology to streamline difficult work and make a difference.
Of course, it’s not just the iPad that made it happen. The iPad was just a super-friendly machine that any of the bankers involved could figure out how to use. However, the debt restructuring app and the powerful backend banking platform had a lot to do with pulling this off.
“Split-second decisions were made that couldn’t have been made without the data platform,” Apfel said.
IT professionals should take heart over this. Last week, I talked about how the combination of the iPad and the cloud were transforming IT. Well, this Greece story is an example of how there’s still very important work for IT to do – building apps and data platforms in this case — even when the only thing users have in their hands is an iPad.
Get IT Tips, news, and reviews delivered directly to your inbox by subscribing to TechRepublic’s free newsletters.
http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/hiner/how-the-ipad-is-helping-save-greece/10588?tag=nl.e101
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Why User Interface is Crucial


How Touch-Screen Buttons Netted NYC Cabbies A Cool $144M

BY PRESENTING RIDERS WITH THREE DEFAULT OPTIONS, IN-CABCREDIT CARD READERS INCREASED TIPS.

How much is a touch screen button worth? If you’re a New York City cabbie who was forced to install a credit card reader in your taxi, it’d better be worth a lot, because those damn things were expensive. Well,according to the New York Times, those credit card readers increased tips from 10% to 22%, on average. Designer Joshua Gross did some arithmeticand it turns out that the touch-screen buttons were worth an extra $144,146,165 in tips.
So how could three buttons on a screen bump tips by over a hundred million bucks? Such is the power ofuser experience design--specifically, the power of thedefault option. A taxi rider paying her fare by credit card is presented with three buttons for adding a tip: 20%, 25%, and 30%. You can enter whatever tip you like manually, but you’re probably just going to hit one of those buttons. Since the average tip increased to 22%, that implies that most people hit the middle or lower option. 
I asked behavioral economist Dan Ariely, author of the new book The Honest Truth About Dishonesty, why default options are powerful enough to turn even hard-boiled New Yorkers into generous tippers. "One reason is that they’re the path of least resistance," he says. "Defaults always require less thinking, which is very tempting. But we also view default options as implicit recommendations--we assume that whoever designed the system thought about it and came up with this set of the 'right’ responses."
So buttons make us tip better because we’re lazy and we don’t want to be wrong. Could cabbies have made even more money if the UI designers had presented higher percentages on the tip buttons? "I think the answer is absolutely yes," says Ariely.
But before you go thinking that UI designers could Jedi-mindtrick us all into emptying our wallets just because the buttons say so, Ariely says that even our laziness has limits. "If the options were 21, 26, and 31, i think [the average tip] would have gone higher. But the range has to reflect some possibility of normal behavior. No one is going to leave a 100% tip." Not unless you’re Jay-Z, anyway.
And remember that the highest default option was 30%, but average tips only increased to 22%. This "middle to low" behavior emerges from the system presenting three buttons instead of two, or one. "When you present three options, people think this is the range of acceptable possibilities," Ariely explains. "They don’t want to be too high or too low, so they tend toward the middle option. But this is money, so they’re still motivated to save and go lower as well. This might explain why the average tip reflects an amount in between the lower and middle default options." Still, $144,146,165 isn’t chump change. So the next time you have to explain (or justify) the vaporous concept of "user experience" in design, just drop that figure into the conversation. It should make things clear as day.
[via Joshua Gross; Top image by Nadirco/Shutterstock]
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Facebook Camera App

More news from the Facebook and Instagram merger ... The new Facebook camera app for your smart phone! You take the photo with this app, add cool filters, make edits, then post it to Facebook. Check it out! https://www.facebook.com/mobile/camera


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Wednesday, May 23, 2012

Smart Shirt Syncs To Your iPhone


Smart Shirt Syncs To Your iPhone, Trains You In Pilates


DOES THIS MEAN FACETIME IS COMING TO ABS?
As the weather warms and we all realize that we’ll be removing clothing in public for another summer, pilates seems like a better and better idea. But how do you--what’s the verb I’m looking for--pilate? Pilatorize? Pilatiocize?
Move, by ElectricFoxy, is a prototype tank top that uses four stretch sensors to feel the postures of your shoulders through your back and recognize the poses of exercises like yoga, pilates and even sports like baseball and golf. If you did something wrong in almost any activity, haptic feedback (vibrations) could let you know. It’s an automated trainer for those who don’t like yoga classes, much like the MotivePro.
But what makes Move a bit different is that it actually syncs with an iOS app in real time, not so differently from what we see in Nike+ products. This sort of on-the-fly analysis is technically daunting, as it means that not only do positioning algorithms need to recognize and identify postures, but the built-in Arduino needs to crunch these numbers in real time. And when it comes to pushing one’s body into some pretty extreme contortions, inaccurate or mistimed feedback could be pretty devastating, ironically inducing the same sort of injuries the Move is built to prevent.
I don’t envy the development team, but the idea has extreme potential. Imagine wearing Move to your weekly golf outing, then charting your swing’s progress over time. Or better still, what if you just wore Move as an undershirt at all times, and rather than optimizing your downward dog, it just watched out for those stupid motions we all make that could tweak your back. The longer it recorded, the more data a doctor could analyze, cross referencing any new pains with any red flags in your entire movement history.


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Social Media Marketing eBook

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National Park App

This is a really great concept to have a passport book with stamps you collect as you go through the National Parks. This app actually provides a lot of other data about the parks like historical sites, maps, pictures, descriptions, links, etc.
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/mobile/apps/national-parks-by-national-geographic/
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Agile challenges


Agile grows up and new challenges emerge

By 
May 22, 2012, 1:16 PM PDT
Takeaway: The conversation shift from “why should we adopt agile?” to “how can we adapt to agile across the enterprise?” presents a new set of cultural and tactical challenges.
At the RallyON conference in Boulder, CO this month (which I attended at the invitation of Rally Software), I noticed a distinct shift in emphasis from similar conferences I’ve attended over the years. The previous conversations about pure methodology, such as the measurement of team velocity or the best ways to apply agile techniques to distributed teams, have been supplanted by an emphasis on two key topics:
  • Mastering the cultural evolution to agile, and
  • Applying agile concepts at the strategic or portfolio level.
From my perspective, this swing from the tactical to the strategic is a sign of maturity. The basic agile battle, which focused on comparisons of agile to traditional CMM and PMI-inspired methods, is over and won — agile works. The case studies of organizations that have benefitted from agile’s ideas are many and persuasive. The value it has delivered is undeniable. No longer do agile proponents need to prove that iterative, value-focused, collaborative, and self-directed methods promote innovation and creativity in product development. The conversation has shifted from “why should we adopt agile?” to “how can we adapt to agile across the enterprise?”.

A new set of challenges

This change in emphasis presents the agile community, and the enterprises we serve, with a new set of challenges that cut to the core of the values, beliefs, and cultures of our stakeholders. In order to contribute to the evolution of our clients or stakeholders, we must elevate our sights from the tactical to the strategic, and from the methodological to the cultural. In fact, one of the key insights from my conversations with agile enterprises and their advisors is that organizations that focus solely on the methodological, and neglect the cultural and strategic, are the most likely to fail at agile transition.
Tactical tunnel vision is a common stumbling block. By focusing on the methods rather than the culture of agile, we set the expectations of everyone, from the executive suite to the PMO to the business stakeholders, that all we have to do to become agile is migrate from Work Breakdown Structures (WBSs) to backlogs and from Gantt charts to burndown charts, and we’re on our way toThe Agile Enterprise. I’ve observed organizations that implement a handful of these techniques without changing the expectations of executives for predictive estimates, or the requirement for business sponsors to commit to collaborative practices. I’ve even seen organizations try to introduce these techniques by “stealth,” counseling their clients to keep calling their methods by the old names (calling a backlog a task list or project plan, for example) in order to “avoid confusing the organization.”
This tactical paradigm breaks down quickly, for obvious reasons. No matter how agile the development team is, if the executive and business sponsors continue applying a top-down, long-term, predictive strategic planning cycle, the agile team will either get caught in unrealistic, externally imposed deadlines and budgets, or get stuck waiting for funding and approval to move forward as the executive committee engages in its three-year strategy cycle. If business sponsors have not internalized the need to take ownership of the projects that are critical for their business, and continue to engage in “thrown-over-the-wall” requirements development, agile development teams get stuck making decisions that can only be made by those with subject matter expertise and accountability for the results. Agile teams can whip through multiple iterations, adding value with high velocity, only to find themselves waiting for the sponsor to grant them an audience for a grudging “project walkthrough.” In short, unless the entire method of planning, funding, and scheduling the enterprise’s portfolio of projects evolves, the twain between traditional strategic planning and agile practice will never meet. This inevitably leads to the death knell known as “we tried agile and it failed.”
In regard to culture shift, one idea that was explored in numerous sessions at RallyON was the “4 C’s” concept of organizational focus, originally formulated by William Schneider in 1994 in his bookThe Reengineering Alternative. Underlying this concept is the central truth that changing culture is a long-term, painstaking, and often frustrating exercise, which is not likely to occur on the accelerated schedule necessary for agile transitions. According to 4 C exponents, it’s better to understand the current culture and work within it to migrate to agile without trying to push the cultural boulder uphill. I won’t try to condense this complex idea here - refer to the hyperlinks above for more depth on the topic. Suffice to say that recognizing which of the 4 C’s - control, competence, collaboration, or cultivation - is dominant in the enterprise that’s evolving to agility, and using that recognition to help the enterprise make the right decisions, is more likely to succeed than trying to force change through the organization against its cultural predisposition.

The popularity of roadmaps

The word I heard most during my attendance at the RallyON conference was “roadmap.” Agile thinking requires us to recognize that we cannot plan further than we can see, and that predictions and estimates become hazier the further into the future we try to project. This recognition makes the traditional concepts of carved-in-stone estimates, schedules, and even corporate strategies untenable. If we can’t know what the marketplace will look like in three years, much less how our teams will choose to respond to the new realities, what’s the point in planting stakes in the ground?
The idea of a roadmap, a plan that acknowledges that strategies will shift while enabling the development of consensus on a foundational vision and path, has been zealously adopted by the agile community. Roadmaps can define the next few releases of a product in significant detail, and sketch out the expected feature set of future releases without the perceived certainty or the constraints to change and creativity of a signed-in-blood, task-by-task WBS. The leading vendors of agile development support tools (VersionOne, CollabNet, and Rally) have embraced the concepts of agile portfolio management and roadmap development and offered them in their product suites.

More about agile adoption

I spent the week in Boulder interviewing agile consultants, vendors, developers, and executives, and I’ll be presenting and analyzing their comments over my next several TechRepublic columns. I learned a lot about the real-world challenges and successes of agile adoption, and hope to bring those lessons to TechRepublic readers.
While the basic questions of agile feasibility have been answered, the hard work of implementation and evolution remain. Through the heavy lifting required to guide enterprises to these new ideas, we’re overcoming challenges and learning what really works, not just tactically, but culturally as well.
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Tuesday, May 22, 2012

SEO from The Expert

Matt Cuts is Google's head of webspam. So basically, he knows exactly how to appear first in Google rankings and how to best optimize your website. This video talks about the qualities of a good website. I would highly recommend subscribing to his YouTube channel and/or blog if SEO is a priority for you.

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Tools to Manage Photos


Five tools to tame your photo management chaos

by Jack Wallen  |  May 21, 2012, 4:49pm PDT  |  Image 2 of 11
01faststone_1.png

FastStone Image Viewer

FastStone Image Viewer does red eye removal, resizing, retouching, cropping, and more. It has a full-screen mode, quick access to EXIF information, a thumbnail browser, and it can  handle multiple image file formats.

03studioline_1.png

StudioLine Photo Basic

StudioLine Photo Basic offers some unusual features, including Geo Caching, image editing, descriptions, archiving, and online albums. It also offers dual monitor support and a built-in auto-update function.

05irfanview_1.png

IrfanView

IrfanView is unique in that its manager and thumbnail viewer are two different tools. And although the interface might seem a bit outdated, the tool is still powerful and useful.

07shotwell_1.png

Shotwell

Shotwell is the open source photo manager for the GNOME operating system. It comes preinstalled with all GNOME 3-based and Ubuntu Unity systems. Shotwell is an incredible tool for managing your photo collections. It includes direct import from cameras or SD cards, automatic grouping of photos by date, tagging, ratings, editing (rotate, crop, red eye reduction, exposure, saturation, etc.), and the ability to easily publish photos.
09darktable_1.png

Darktable

Darktable is not just an image management tool, but a photo workshop and workflow tool. It can manage your photos, as well as work with RAW images. It also offers plenty of powerful filters and tools, helps manage images with tagging, supports color profiles, allows you to search images with database queries (via a plug-in), and offers a full-screen zoomable interface. Unlike most of the other image management tools, Darktable does have a steeper learning curve. It's free and is available for Linux, Solaris, and OS X.
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