E-Books From Your Local Library

Libraries are trying their best to make borrowing e-books convenient, but publishers are not making it easy. See E-Books Are Easier to Borrow, Just Be Prepared to Wait. The New York Times story said that e-book borrowing is preceded by e-book waiting. I decided to take a look a virtual visit to the library in Ridgefield, CT and see for myself. I logged on to the library site and clicked on the button for downloading eMedia. The library has 1,730 e-books, but only 347 of them are available. This is what the New York Times writer meant by borrowing being preceeded by waiting. The library had just one copy of most of the e-books I looked at, and since that copy was presently loaned out, I would have to click the waiting list button and get in line to borrow the book when it is returned. The library has one copy of The Pillars of the Earth, by Ken Follett, and there are eight patrons on the waiting list to borrow it (there are dozens of patrons waiting for some books). I selected an available book and clicked to add it to my list. I proceeded to checkout, logged in with my library card number, selected a seven-day lending period (you can choose up to 14 days), and then clicked “Get for Kindle”. I was then redirected to the Amazon site where I clicked “Get Library Book” and the book downloaded to my Kindle just as if I had purchased it from Amazon. The whole process is pretty slick, easy to follow, and efficient. So what is the problem? There are several.

Why isn’t the digital inventory infinite? The library knows how many patrons it has and how many books they read per year. They could estimate how many will be e-books and establish a budget to cover the purchase of X copies for lending. I suspect the answer is that publishers don’t want to do it that way. They want to sell books the same way they have always sold books. One book at a time at a retail price. They are not about to have the book business be like the music business. Or, so they think. The other problem is the mechanics of borrowing the e-book. The process is easy for a Kindle with some publishers following the process I described. With Ken Follett’s books, however, his publisher requires that you connect your Kindle to your PC with a USB cable and then download the book. “Due to publisher restrictions, this book in the Kindle format cannot be delivered wirelessly and must be downloaded and transferred via USB.” Note that it is a publisher restriction, not a hardware or software restriction. You can click another link for instructions on How to transfer Kindle books to Kindle devices via USB.

Kindle is not the only kind of e-book, of course. Some books are in the Adobe ePub format and others are in Adobe PDF format. Each requires a different download and installation of software. The convenience of borrowing an e-book ranges from a few clicks and wireless transfer to your Kindle to a hassle of plugging your Kindle into a PC with a cable to several variations in between. Everywhere you turn, you can see content publishers clinging to the past. In my doctoral courses, the e-book textbooks we use can only be opened with Adobe Acrobat (not Preview on the Mac) and they can not be saved or transferred to an iPad, in other words e-books that can not be read on an e-reader.

Publiishers are clearly struggling to find the right model. They had made progress with the Apple deal, but then the governmnet said it was an illegal approach. Three of the five publsihers involved have agreed to revert to the model Amazon has been advocating — letting the retailer set whatever price they want. We are a long way from getting to a free market where consumers can get what they are willing to pay for. A new book arrives on the scene but you can’t get it on your Kindle until you get in line and wait. A new movie is available, but only if you go to the theatre. You spend $125 for a textbook fee, but you can’t read the book on your iPad. The good news is that there are many entrepreneurs circling the wagons, creating innovative new devices and services. The publishers can slow down progress, but they can’t stop it.

Tags: books, e-book, ebook, ipad, Kindle, publishers

How to Empty Your Inbox

I got a call from Claire Suddath at Bloomberg Businessweek a few weeks ago. She told me about their upcoming second annual “How To” special issue.  We talked quite a bit about the history of email and various approaches to manage it. By necessity, the story had to be edited down quite a bit to fit the available space. (The nice thing about the Web is that space is unlimited. See my original story that caught Claire’s eye below).  My little story is called “How to Empty Your Inbox” and it appears here.  The “How To” special issue includes 55 stories from “CEOs, tech visionaries, U.S. senators, an NFL referee, an artist, and, for good measure, an 11-year-old and a 106-year-old”.  The guest contributors shared a lot of interesting perspectives, and Businessweek did a nice job pulling it all together. The stories can be found here.  

Since I wrote the story last December, I have become more and more dependent on Boomerang.  Whenever I send anyone an email to which I hope for a reply, I click the check box  to have Boomerang send the email back to me if I don’t get a reply to it in X hours or days or weeks, depending on the timeliness needed. Whenever I receive board materials to read, I boomerang them back to me the night before the meeting or the morning of a train or plane ride to the meeting. When an email arrives that I really want to read but don’t have time to at the moment, I boomerang it back to me when I think I will have time. I have numerous periodic emails that I send to myself but where I click the “Send Later” button and have Boomerang send it to me on a specific date or once a month, quarterly, or annually. Boomerang is more than an email manager — it helps you manage your tasks and workflow. 

Original story about Boomerang as published on patrickWeb on December 3, 2011

I wish I had a dollar for every task management application I have used over the last few decades. There are many good ones, but the task manager that consistently works for me–and that I always end up relying on the most–is email. It is not true for everyone, but for me, an email in the inbox is a call to action. If there are more than a handfull of emails in my inbox, I do not feel I am in control of my life. When I have answered an email or taken some action based on that email and I then delete the email, I feel I have accomplished something. When the inbox is empty I feel very good — I have things under control. The problem is that on many days, getting to an empty state for the inbox is just not in the cards. Enter Boomerang!

Boomerang for Gmail is a browser plugin (for Firefox or Chrome) that I have found to be a great productivity tool. It is not a task manager, per se, but it greatly enhances my ability to get to the empty inbox state. If I receive an email invitation to attend an event and the RSVP date is two weeks from now and I don’t have time at the moment to consider it — Boomerang! I click the boomerang button and select “return to my inbox in 4 days”. You can click on choices such as in an hour, four hours, tomorrow morning, tomorrow afternoon, in a week, in a month, or at 3PM on March 14, 2013. A couple of clicks and the email is out of your inbox — but it will be back at a time when you are ready to deal with it. You can also send yourself an email and click the boomerang button to have it sent to you every Saturrning as a reminder to put out the trash. I have one email that comes to my inbox on the first of every month to remind me to update a Google Doc that I maintain as a log with my business use car mileage. Another one on the 15th of the month reminds me to update my steps database from my pedometer. If I am really busy when one of those mails arrives, no problem, just click the boomerang button and have it come back to you in a day or two or next week.

Boomerang also helps with workflow. For example, I may  read the news on the iPad with Pulp and see a story that I think would be of interest to others.  I hit the share button in Pulp and it sends me an email with the story link. I see the email later but I am not ready to write a story just yet — Boomerang! A couple of clicks and the email comes back to me Saturday morning. Another very powerful feature helps with follow-up. You can send someone an email requesting something and select a boomerang option to have the email return to you in four days if there has not been a reply to your email. A few clicks and you get a follow-up system. Boomerange also works with the iPad and iPhone. Maybe something better will come along, but for now, Boomerang for Gmail is helping me organize things the way I want and allowing me to stay on top of things and keep a feeling of being in control.  If you overuse it and everything gets boomeranged and nothing ever gets done, well then you have other problems that technology can’t solve!

Tags: bloomberg, boomerang, businessweek, e-mail, email, inbox, john patrick, productivity, task, task manager

Back from Florida

The weather was so nice, it was difficult to leave and come home. I feel very fortunate to have been able to spend a bit more time in Florida this winter. Thanks to FaceTime, Skype, Polycom, iMessage, email, and the web, it was easy to participate in board meetings remotely. I was even able to chair a hospital quality committee meeting remotely, thanks to the high quality PolyCom video-conferencing system they have. My current doctoral course is in health care economics. One of the team assignments required a teleconference. There were four of us in diverse locations; Ottawa, Baltimore, Florida, and Jordan. If two of the students were in Canada and the Middle East, it didn’t matter that I was in Florida instead of home in Connecticut. We were all just a few hundred milliseconds apart.

Before leaving Florida, I decided to try out the new iPhoto app on the iPad3. It goes beyond the photos app that comes with the iPad. In addition to taking advantage of the greatly enhanced retina screen, the iPhoto app has a new feature called Journals. In addition to viewing your albums, events, faces, and places, you can create journals. A journal is a web page that can include pictures from your albums plus special add-ins from the app including a calendar icon representing the date you took the pictures, a map showing where you took them, and a weather icon showing what the weather was like when you took the picture or alternatively what the weather there is now. You can also add quotations and text boxes. See March in Florida for a page I created as a first try. The pictures can be edited, touched up, brightened, manipulated with effects, air-brushed, and arranged in a collage — all with your fingers. You then save the journal to a glass shelf and it is uploaded to iCloud where you can share it with friends, family, or the public. A home page shows all your shelves with the journals lined up on them in date sequence. In effect, journals gives you the ability to create a web site at iCloud with no traditional design tools. Just your iPad and your fingers.  This is classic Apple making things easy — it just works. But, it is not perfect.

iCloud can be slow in accepting your upload. The shelves on the iPad include a favorites shelf but that shelf does not appear on the homepage at iCloud. The six journals I created are not in date sequence as they are supposed to be. The iPhoto app does not sync with your iPhoto app on the Mac or your photos on a PC. The iPhoto pictures sync to the photos app on the iPad, not the new iPhoto app on the iPad. Syncing is one-way. If you delete or edit a picture or add a new one in one of your iPhoto albums on the iPad, it does not sync to iPhoto on the Mac or on your PC. There are a few things that need polish but you can see the vision coming through. Take a picture with your iPhone or iPad and the picture automatically goes to your photostream at iCloud. iCloud then pushes the picture down to all your other devices. You can then create journals and share them via iCloud. Facebook, Google, flickr, and others have nice ways to store and share photos, but journals are now offering an alternative that includes content creation for anyone with some imagination and an iPad. Take a look at patrickweb.com/iphotojournals and let me know what you think. As usual, I confess to not being a good photographer nor artistically creative.

Tags: albums, apple, events, ipad, iphotos, journals, mac, photos, pictures

iPad Evolution of Resolution

Today was the day so many of us knew would bring forth the next iPad from Apple. In some respects, it is just another iPad, but I am quite impressed with the technical specifications that have been announced. I can’t wait to get my hands on it! This may be the turning point for many new users of the iPad who previously were content with their desktop or laptop computer. I am a firm believer in the “post PC” era as described by Tim Cook in today’s brilliant keynote (watch the video here).

What to do with my current iPad? That answer is the same as what I had done with the iPad 1, iPhone, iPhone 3G, and iPhone 4. Gazelle.com has a very nice model for how to manage the transition of technology. They provide a guaranteed price and offer a very simple process to ship a product to them and receive a market-based payment for it. I especially like the feature that gives you get an extra 5% if you accept the payment in the form of a credit at Amazon.com. I will be receiving $304.50 for the iPad. It may be possible to do better on eBay but the convenience of Gazelle wins the day.

The price of the current iPad may drop fairly quickly as people get attracted to purchasing the newer technology. When will the rapid introduction of new products obsoleting predecessor products that still seem like new? The answer is not any time soon. The pace of technology is rapid and increasing. Consumers are the beneficiary and of course, it has made Apple the most valued company in the world.

The big picture is the transition to tablets. Today I read that a hospital in Canada has purchased 4,000 iPads for their physicians. There are so many applications where you have to “go to” your PC or laptop. With a mobile device such as the iPad or iPhone or any other of the rash of wannabes in the market, the Internet and the applications are where you are, not where your PC is. The updating of records of a patient in a hospital used to be by a chart on a clipboard filled out by the nurse. Much of that has moved to the PC or the laptop on a cart in the hall, or in some cases down the hall, not very close to the patient. The iPad can be with the nurse or physician and not only provide a way to enter the data, but also a way to show an x-ray with amazing clarity to the patient or a 3D model of their muscle and bone system enabling the physician to explain exactly what may be wrong and what will be done to correct it. The resolution of the new iPad is quite amazing and exceeds the ability of the human eye to discern pixels. The iPad displays 3.1 million of them — more than your HD TV. I can not imagine being a physician and not having one of the new iPads.

The laptop and desktop will not disappear because they are still quite useful for those who create information as opposed to those who consume information. Consuming information from a mobile device has changed the world and how we interact with information already — and we are still at the beginning. But someone has to create this content and most of that creation will be done on laptops and desktops as long as typing is involved. How long will that be the case? Talking to Siri on your iPhone is the beginning. Typing may become a thing of the past, but of course art work still requires paint and brushes — or does it? The WSJ reviewed a wide range of new styluses available for use with the iPad (Sketching Out a Future for the Stylus). The world is becoming digital at an increasing pace.

Tags: art, digital, Healthcare, ipad, iPhone, media, nurse, paint, paint brush, physician, radiology, siri, stylus

Speech at SIIA

It was a privilege to be a speaker at the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA) conference in New York on January 25. The subject of the speech was The Future of the Internet but I included an emphasis on impact to healthcare and publishing. The conference was attended by executives from the publishing and software industries. I do not know why the video was captured in five segments, but until I get a consolidated version, the links are below. The slides were on my iPad and the video doesn’t show the screen the audience was looking at. If you want to see the slides, they are here.

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5

Tags: future, health, Healthcare, hospital, internet, john patrick, medicine, music, publisher, siia, technology

Genesys XVIII

The 18th Annual Genesys Partners Venture Dinner — Gen XVIII– Monday night at the Union League Club in New York attracted more than 100 venture capitalists, investors, journalists, entrepreneurs, and industry executives. As always, Jim Kollegger — CEO of Genesys Partners and one of the pioneers of the information industry — was an elegant master of ceremonies. He introduced the various sponsors, next day panelists for the SIIA Conference, several startup CEO’s, and a few of us who have been around the block a few times, each to make some comments.

Like a broken record, I offered the normal upbeat view of the future of the Internet but prefaced my remarks by asserting that we are only 10% of the way there. In other words, of all the things that could be done on the Internet that would save us time and make our lives better, only 10% of them are there. It may sound low but consider retail e-commerce. Although there has been continuous and steady growth of retail e-commerce it still represents just 4% of total retail (as of the end of October). Why isn’t it 25% or more? Much is written about that here at patrickWeb but the short version is that there are still a lot of lame web sites. “Click here for the location of our nearest dealer where you can visit” or “call to buy the product you just found” or “Click here to download this form and fax it to us”. And of course there are the ubiquitous clipboards at doctor offices where we take a pen and provide a lot of information information that they already have.

I described one man’s view of the evolution of the Internet including the seven characteristics below. This parsed way of looking at the Internet has served me well for quite a few years. The things going on under each area continuously change and Jim asks me once a year to do a thumbnail sketch of my latest thinking.

Fast
Broadband in the U.S. is not a pretty story compared to other parts of the world. We are second after China in number of broadband users, but 28th in the world in number of broadband users as a percentage of our population. The problem is that there are too many lobbyists and the FCC is a political organization. The new FCC head is a very smart guy with venture and business experience. He totally gets it. The only problem is that AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon have more lawyers than he does. Meanwhile France is offering 100 megabit access for $90 per month and WiFi throughout the country. Thanks to the telco lobby, many states have banned the offering of WiFi by municipal entities. Every citizen in Greenland has Internet access. We have 31,000 post offices.

Always On

WiFi is part of the fabric of the world. The big shift is streaming of data — not just tweets, but data from *things*. Bridges, toll booths, traffic lights, buildings, cars, and health monitoring devices attached to people. Hospital physicians will soon be adjusting the drip rate on infusion pumps in the hospital from their office based on real-time data from the patient. The WiFi infusion pumps enable hospital administrators to know where the pumps are (they never have enough of them) and which ones need maintenance. The creation of data is staggering. Of all the data in the world, 90% of it was created in the last two years. YouTube receives 60 hours of new video every hour. Wikipedia has 4 million articles and 8,000 editors.

Everywhere
There are one billion computers (including tablets), one billion cars, 1.5 billion televisions, and 2 billion Internet users. Small numbers compared to cell phones — 5.2 billion paid subscribers. The Internet used to be where your PC is, now it is where you are.  Most of the cell phones are dumb but soon most of them will be smart and they will all have Internet access. The mobile web is unfolding and is taking part in creating data in addition to consuming it through streaming. When you take a picture on your iPhone, it goes into the photostream and from there to iCloud and from there to all of your other devices.  

Natural
Social networking has become fundamental to all aspects of our economy and society. Integration of social networking with a full range of web applications will evolve to become the primary means of collaboration. The emerging issue is that many people are a bit liberal with sharing their every movement — what they are eating, listening to, where they are headed, their current latitude and longitude, and where they slept last night. They are not thinking that some day they may run for office or interview for a job. OpenSocial is an important new standard that will enable social media apps that work across all of the social media sites. The Europeans may legislate it, but regardless, a capability is needed to be able to remove things from the social media.

Intelligent
The Semantic Web is the next big turn of the crank but the crank is moving slowly. Most web pages have links but do not have context. In other words the words on the page do not necessarily mean anything — but they could. If a web page said “Join us for a concert by The Eagles at Kimmel Center in Philadelphia next Tuesday” that set of words could have a lot of context. Clicking on it could add the concert to your calendar, knowing what “next Tuesday” means. It would also know exactly where the Kimmel Center is and that The Eagles is a performing group that performs a particular genre and your music player would receive a list of suggestions of music they have recorded or links to live concerts under way at the moment. This is the tip of the iceberg. The semantic web will lead us to a point where most of the interactions of web pages will be between computers not between computers and people. The biggest growth of intelligence is occurring in the field of analytics. Exabytes of data are being stored. Analytics will enable businesses to make sense of it, model their business and continuously adapt to what is going on. IBM’s Watson took on humans on the Jeopardy Show, but what is more interesting is the ability for a primary care physician to call and get a recomendation based on patient data they describe to Watson. Within a couple of seconds Watson will be able to review all medical information in the world and make a useful suggestion. Business Intelligence and analytics are poised to enable new insight into the mounds of data that are being accumulated.

Easy
Technology isn’t the easiest thing at times. There are many dimensions to “easy” but one good example is the Nintendo Wii. At a local senior center, members find the Wii to be their exercise coach. It is not just for kids! The iPhone and iPad have shown how easy it can be to get applications on a handheld computer. Amazon has done the same with the Kindle. Most companies still don’t get the idea that the Internet is about power to the people. If you can’t make it simple, people won’t buy it. Cloud computing has become the mainstay for me and for millions. The convenience and reliability of the clouds is compelling. Add Dropbox and you have a completely replicated set of data, wherever you are and with whatever device you may be using. How about TV? Three remotes — BlueRay, Cable box, and TV — include 151 buttons. Even a savvy child could not possibly master this impossible user interface. Boxee TV has produced a good model of the future of TV, but I suspect that an upcoming Apple TV will be what finally provides the needed regime change.

Trusted
This is the big one. Will we trust the Internet? Security technology is available to achieve much higher levels of security than presently deployed both at enterprise and consumer levels. It is a constant battle and requires significant budgets and a lot of talented people to maintain the needed security. The bigger issue will be privacy. (Stay tuned for the Firefox “do not track” feature). Banks have our personal information and they are using it. Healthcare insurers have more information about our health than our doctors do. Nevertheless, there is much to be optimistic about when it comes to electronic medical records. Perhaps 25% of doctors and hospitals use them but they are not easily interchangeable and accessible. This will change over the next few years as the government adds dollar incentives to make it happen. The result will be better quality of care, better outcomes, and fewer errors. And, fewer clipboards.

On Wednesday I gave a talk about the Future of the Internet and Healthcare at the SIIA Conference. The presentation can be found here.

Other patrickWeb conference related stories

Tags: broadband, fcc, future, health, health care, Healthcare, IBM, internet, ipad, iPhone, jeopardy, john patrick, Mobile, opera, siia, social media, supercomputer, union league, WiFi

Kindle Update

Thanks to Mary Keough, over at IBM, for reading my post and correcting me on the weight of the Kindle Touch. I was thinking of the new $79 Kindle when I said six ounces. I weighed four devices this morning to make sure I got this right. Here is what I found.

I have to admit that I am vascillating a bit between the Kindle and the Kindel Touch. They are both very light and a pleasure to read on. The touch screen is nice, but the simple buttons on the Kindle create a certainty about your intentions. When I swipe, sometimes I go back a page to make sure I had not swiped two pages. With the Kindle, a click is always “a” click. All the Kindle devices are great, and I suspect the Fire will keep getting better with software updates and follow-on models.

Mary asked about the advertising and quetioned whether it is worth the extra $30 on the Kindle or $40 on the Touch to get the device “without special offers”. My opinion is that it is not worth the extra money. The special offers appear as a screen saver when you stop reading. They are totally unobtrusive. You can easily not even notice them. If you want to look more closely and are interested in something being offered, you can go for it. Speaking of reading, the biography of Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson was really great (see Apple at Grand Central Terminal). I am now reading Fall of Giants: Book One of the Century Trilogy by Ken Follett. I have read most of his books, and this one too is really good so far. 

 Other patrickWeb stories related to the Kindle

Tags: amazon, apple, fall of giants, fire, founders hall, ipad, iPhone, isaacson, ken follett, Kindle, kindle fire, kindle touch, steve jobs

Kindle Fire – Part 2

On September 28, Amazon announced three new Kindles — a $79 Kindle, the $99 Kindle Touch, and the $199 Android-based color touch screen Kindle Fire tablet. Technology pundits have criticized the Kindle Fire’s touch screen and various aspects of the user interface (see Daily Report: Kindle Fire Attracts Critics, and Buyers – NYTimes.com). I have observed the shortcomings also, but I think the device has a market niche that will be well served — people who like to read books. At $199, it is less than half the cost of an iPad. Amazon will relentlessly promote the Fire on its site and is rumored to be nearly ready to provide software updates for better performance and improved user interface.

I remain a believer in purpose-built devices. The iPad is great for documents, weather, stocks, surfing the web, and reading books at the kitchen counter. The Kindle Fire is great for reading books. That is what it does best. It can also do most everything the iPad can, but not everything. I don’t see myself giving a slide presentation with a projector and the Fire. I don’t plan to put 40 gigtabytes of dropbox folders containing all my data on the Fire. The Fire is great for reading a book, listening to music, or watching a movie. It is basically a media player. You can do many tablet computing tasks, but that is not what it is best at. The device I like the best for reading books is the new Kindle Touch. It weighs six ounces and has no moving parts. Turning pages and setting bookmarks is as easy as a touch. You can change the font size to the optimum and read comfortably for long periods of time wherever you may be — incuding outdoors in the sun, which you can do with an iPad. If I am at the kitchen counter and want to read for ten minutes, I launch the Kindle app on the iPad and it automatically takes me to wherever I left off on the Fire or iPhone or wherever I last read — a seamless experience. So many gadgets, so little time! I plan to donate the entry-model Kindle to the senior center.

Tags: amazon, apple, fire, founders hall, ipad, iPhone, Kindle, kindle fire, kindle touch

Apple at Grand Central Terminal

It was a coincidence that I had a board meeting in New York City yesterday, on the day that Apple was opening it’s fifth retail store there. The store opening was planned for 10 AM with collector teeshirts to be given to the first 4,000 visitors. I arrived at Grand Central Station from Connecticut at 8 AM and there was already a line of 2,500 people. When I returned to the train station at 2PM, the shirts had been gone for two hours. I was one of the many thousands who visited the store, which will have 315 employees. Some day my grandchildren’s grandchilren will tell friends that their Pop Pop was there on opening day.  The Wall Street Journal reported that more people visit an Apple store each quarter than visit Disney’s four biggest theme parks in a year. It was quite a site to be there yesterday. I took some pictures but the one’s in the WSJ are much better. There is a short video done by Engadget that is worth looking at (see  Apple just arrived at Grand Central Terminal, we hop aboard video).

After visiting the new Apple store, I could not help but think about Steve Jobs. He will be revered for many generations as a great innovator and business leader. After you read his biography by Walter Isaacson, you will also respect this great biographer. I met Walter in 1996 just before he became editor of Time Magazine and I was greatly impressed with his embrace of the Internet. He came to IBM with some colleagues and we brainstormed about how the publisher might take advantage of the Web. None of us really knew the right strategy at the time, and unfortunately, the publishing industry still has not figured it out. Industry by industry, it was Steve Jobs who showed the way.

Steve Jobs – by Walter Isaacson is already the biggest selling biography of all times.  Jobs not only authorized the biography but gave Isaacson access to his home, his family, and his innermost thoughts over a two-year period leading up to just before his death. Great biographers write about great people. Isaacson’s books about Benjamin Franklin and Einstein were great but much harder for me to read. The Jobs biography read more smoothly in part because I could identify directly with the technology issues so aptly described in the book. I know or have met many of the characters in the book. Although not a technologist, Isaacson did a gret job in desscribing the technolgy issues in layman terms. He offered an insight that will help many readers better understand the impact and potential of technology.

The basic premise of the Steve Jobs philosophy was to create a simplified and integrated experience for the consumer. Critics say that the integration of iMacs, iPods, iPads, etc. with iTunes and Mac OSX represents a monopolistic strategy. After reading the biography, I suspect most people will be convinced that it was an intense desire to make things easier has been the driver. Jobs would say that products and profits are both important, but elegant and simplified products are most important. It was the intense drive and focus of Steve Jobs that made such products available to the mass market and catapulted Apple to become the most valuable company in the world. 

I continue to believe that the Amazon Kindle is the best platform for reading books, but I read the Steve Jobs biography on the iPad. 

Tags: apple, ipad, isaacon, steve jobs

Boomerang Your E-mail

I wish I had a dollar for every task management application I have used over the last few decades. There are many good ones, but the task manager that consistently works for me–and that I always end up relying on the most–is email. It is not true for everyone, but for me, an email in the inbox is a call to action. If there are more than a handfull of emails in my inbox, I do not feel I am in control of my life. When I have answered an email or taken some action based on that email and I then delete the email, I feel I have accomplished something. When the inbox is empty I feel very good — I have things under control. The problem is that on many days, getting to an empty state for the inbox is just not in the cards. Enter Boomerang!

Boomerang for Gmail is a browser plugin (for Firefox or Chrome) that I have found to be a great productivity tool. It is not a task manager, per se, but it greatly enhances my ability to get to the empty inbox state. If I receive an email invitation to attend an event and the RSVP date is two weeks from now and I don’t have time at the moment to consider it — Boomerang! I click the boomerang button and select “return to my inbox in 4 days”. You can click on choices such as in an hour, four hours, tomorrow morning, tomorrow afternoon, in a week, in a month, or at 3PM on March 14, 2013. A couple of clicks and the email is out of your inbox — but it will be back at a time when you are ready to deal with it. You can also send yourself an email and click the boomerang button to have it sent to you every Saturrning as a reminder to put out the trash. I have one email that comes to my inbox on the first of every month to remind me to update a Google Doc that I maintain as a log with my business use car mileage. Another one on the 15th of the month reminds me to update my steps database from my pedometer. If I am really busy when one of those mails arrives, no problem, just click the boomerang button and have it come back to you in a day or two or next week.

Boomerang also helps with workflow. For example, I may  read the news on the iPad with Pulp and see a story that I think would be of interest to others.  I hit the share button in Pulp and it sends me an email with the story link. I see the email later but I am not ready to write a story just yet — Boomerang! A couple of clicks and the email comes back to me Saturday morning. Another very powerful feature helps with follow-up. You can send someone an email requesting something and select a boomerang option to have the email return to you in four days if there has not been a reply to your email. A few clicks and you get a follow-up system. Boomerange also works with the iPad and iPhone. Maybe something better will come along, but for now, Boomerang for Gmail is helping me organize things the way I want and allowing me to stay on top of things and keep a feeling of being in control.  If you overuse it and everything gets boomeranged and nothing ever gets done, well then you have other problems that technology can’t solve!

Tags: boomerang, e-mail, email, productivity, task, task manager