Kobo

by | Aug 30, 2011 | Innovation

I gave myself a birthday present of a new Kobo as I have gotten tired of carrying all sorts of books around. My first reaction was quite negative as I turned it on and found that the page was only showing around 50 words. If you read 500 words a minute, a device that only shows 50 words means that your reading will be slowed down to a crawl as you flip the page every 6 seconds. Now I have been accused of being rigid in my thinking so reminding myself of that, I vowed to give it a further try.

Once I found it  was possible to change fonts and layout, things began to improve and once I had finished my first book I was hooked. Not so much on the layout, form factor, techno mumble jumble or anything else but by the ease of getting the next book. Finishing a normal book means that you likely won’t start another for a while until you replenish your stock at a store some time later. The great thing about Kobo is that it takes only a couple of minutes to get another book. At 11 at night when you are looking for something to read, you can easily download something and be reading within 5 minutes. Not so of regular book shopping. In fact I hazard to guess that I’ll read more with a Kobo than I did with real books and if many of us do so, this will be a boon for the publishing industry but alas, not so much of one for the retail bookstore.

Technology and the Average Employee

by | Aug 23, 2011 | Management

It’s no wonder that the average employee is overwhelmed. If you look at technological advances in the last 30 years alone, we have gone from getting phone calls and letters and a bit of data to getting:

  • Data
  • Voice Mail
  • Email
  • Instant messages
  • Text messages
  • Facebook Messages
  • Tweats

We have gone from reading the newspaper, listening to radio and watching TV for our news to:

  • Websites
  • Blogs
  • Videos on YouTube
  • Pictures on Flickr

Where we once used a phone to communicate, we now use

  • Cell Phones
  • Blackberries
  • IPhones
  • IPads
  • Computers

If you put together the statistics on the average user who uses these devices and for the most part these are the younger employees for communications alone and not including media or data, the average user sends or gets:

  • 110 Emails
  • 53 Instant messages
  • 80 Text Messages
  • 100 Facebook posts

The email alone is enough to swamp an average employee but when you add in all of the websites, blogs, tweats, videos etc, it is a wonder that we have any time left to work.