Nicole Martinelli - page 9

Psychotherapist Marcos Quinones has got streamlining a one-man office down to a science.

Quinones, a former software developer, is a New York City-based cognitive behavioral therapist and licensed clinical social worker who runs his entire office on Apple gear.

He credits the iPad with making a big impact in the smooth running of his sole practice.

As part of our continuing series about businesses using the iPad, he shares a few key apps that help him process payments and help with patient records, saving time and money.

Comparing uprisings in the Middle East to what happens when a manager brings his or her own iPhone to work seems like a bit of a stretch, but IT executives say the effect has provoked a similar shake-up.

The people (read: employees) have brought about a groundswell of change in the corporate world by opting to bring-your-own-device (BYOD) and choosing their own apps. This has upended the “regime” of IT departments, who used to be able to control what devices employees used and what ran on them.

Oliver Bussmann, CIO of SAP, makes an unlikely cheerleader for Apple’s iPad — but one who is bound to get noticed. (If you’re now picturing him in a varsity sweater shaking pom-poms, sorry).

But Bussmann is unabashedly enthusiastic about Apple’s magical tablet computer.
SAP deployed some 14,000 iPads to employees last year, making the stodgy German business management software colossal the second largest corporate iPad user worldwide. (Korea Telecom handed over 30,000 to its workers).

“It’s an exciting time. The line between consumer and corporate is fading and we’ve been aggressive in regards to the iPad,” he said. “There’s a  huge opportunity to be in driver’s seat.”

If you’re frustrated that your app was rejected from the App Store, you are in good company.

Scott Virkler, senior vice president of eProducts at global science and medical publishing behemoth Elsevier, had a few choice words about Apple’s approval process – and getting rejected by it.

Virkler, speaking in San Francisco at Appnation Enterprise, said his company had three apps rejected by Apple just last week, “because they don’t get our business.”

You think your users are hard to please? Try cops, says Travis Taniguchi.

He’s a police criminologist for the Redlands Police Department in California, and one of the driving forces behind an iPhone and iPad app-friendly police department. Cops are not only skeptical, but armed.

“You want to talk hostile customers or end users? You don’t get more hostile than a cop,” Taniguchi joked.”They do that lean back thing, then they put a hand on their gun. It’s not easy.”

As the only “suit” on an Appnation Enterprise Summit panel about upstarts – he was gently ribbed by other panelists about not following the casual jeans-and-blazer mandate – he gave some interesting insights about how police departments can implement mobile apps.

Westboro Baptist Church vs. Cupertino

We could subtitle this the “Steve Jobs” edition, his death in October gave rise to any number of oddball tributes and events. The most disturbing? The hatefulcrazy congregation of Westboro Baptist Church staged a series of protests in an attempt to mar Jobs memorials held in Apple’s home town on Oct. 19. The Kansas-based group announced via iPhone that they would stage a hate fest. True to form, they held up their nasty banners outside the Apple campus and at Cupertino High but were met with counter protesters determined not to let them ruin the day.

It isn’t easy being Android when you’re a fugly green humanoid robot and mad as hell. These protesters braved ridicule by dressing themselves as Google’s green mascot to bring attention to a thorny tech issue.

A new corporate accountability consumer group called SumOfUs wants Google to exit the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. If the CoC sounds about as uncontroversial as Main Street and apple pie, think again.

The Android-clad activists want the Mountain View, California tech colossus to pull out of the Chamber, for a number of reasons, including because the CoC “aggressively supports” SOPA.

Hipstamatic Disposable from Synthetic on Vimeo.

Hipstamatic has a new group photo sharing app that just might help you remember what happened last night.

With the Hipstamatic D-Series (as in “disposable”) app,

Here’s how it works: you invite Facebook friends to participate and everyone who agrees can either shoot the roll or just view all the photos when the roll is finished. And just like analog photo rolls, those blurry shots or accidental shots of the floor go in there, too. The basic app is free, but you’ll be able to buy $0.99 lenses to further awesomeize your shots.

Fittingly, the video demo shows a hungover guy trying to put together the pieces of a rollicking night spent with friends from high school.  Like the anonymizing Tweet app, originally designed to liven up boardrooms but popular with Occupy protesters, this could be co-opted to use on reporting events, protests and the like, an scenario Allen Buick says he didn’t plan on but can well imagine.

Artist David Datuna created a striking portrait of Steve Jobs titled “Viewpoint of Millions.” Shown at the recent international art fair Scope Miami, it became one of the most expensive art pieces sold at the fair, fetching $210,000.

It was created from a background pattern of thousands of miniature images of author/philosopher Ayn Rand; the large format iconic portrait rests under a wall of optical lenses made from nearly 80,000 parts.

The mullet – that unfortunate haircut that is business in the front, party in the back –  makes kind of an apt analogy with what’s going on with enterprise cell phones.

The iPhone has eroded the number of BlackBerry users, but many of them still use (or are obliged to use) company-mandated RIM devices at work.

This is what a study by Pyxis Mobile, a cross-device cross-device mobile application development platform, found. They polled mobile-toting visitors of Oracle OpenWorld 2011 including people who work in financial services, consumer goods, manufacturing, higher education, government, real estate, technology, and health and life sciences.

There’s so much buzz around Apple and education in the U.S. these days, you’d be forgiven if you assumed there was a “One iPad Per Child” program officially in effect.

Case in point, a school said to have “shunned” Macs in favor of PCs makes news.

Then you read the story, and it turns out that Adam Gerson, tech director for Columbia Grammar and Preparatory School in New York City, is a lifelong Apple fan who opted for Microsoft servers after slogging through a decade of trying times while trying to keep a network of Apple servers running smoothly.

Florida – When Salvatore Miglino went to pick up his son at his former mother-in-law’s house for a court-appointed visit, he figured there would be trouble.

So he started filming secretly with his iPhone, which may have turned out to be a lifesaver. Cheryl Hepner, his 66-year-old ex mother-in-law, went ballistic and pumped three shots into him before her .22 caliber Beretta pistol jammed.

News aggregators designed to give you maximum reading pleasure on the iPad’s 9-inch screen are scaling down for iPhones. Case in point: Zite just launched a version providing all the news that’s fit to scroll on your iPhone.

São Paulo, Brazil – The arrival of the much-awaited Brazilian iPad may be in doubt – although our trip to the Foxconn factory showed that an local iPhone is in the works – one thing is certain: there’s a huge market for gadgets here.

Brazilians pay some of the highest prices in the world for their iDevices, but many of them buy alternatives – black or gray market goods and fakes.

Commerce hub São Paulo has a whole neighborhood dedicated to selling these off-market electronic items called Santa Ifigênia, where I paid a visit with Alessandro Salvatori of Blog do iPhone.

These days of spectacularly gloomy news just might be getting you down. If you’re looking for an antidote to the “If it bleeds, it leads” media mentality, a do-good iPhone app might be just the thing.

Called “Boom Boom!” it’ll feed you a diet of good news and shared acts of kindness to go. The free app is based on a feel-good game called Boom Boom cards, which has 26 acts of kindness that you (or your kids, or teens) perform and keep track of.

This has been a banner year for the iPad in U.S. education – with tots to teens and university students using Apple’s magical device to learn.

How effective iPads are as a teaching tool is open to debate.

A small study, carried out by Michelle Riconscente, an assistant professor of education at the University of Southern California, offers some promising results, even with the necessary caveat that it was funded by the Motion Math app with a grant from the Noyce Foundation.

Personally, my favorite thing to do after having any picture taken is seek out the “delete” button. (Even if that entails arm wrestling the well-meaning friend to get at it.)

But you may embrace the idea of having your nose or midsection appear in all its glorious 3D in a photo – if so, a new iPhone app called Snappily 3D is for you.

For $1.99,  it promises to bring photos from your iPhone 4 or iPad 2 into a new dimension. Snapily walks you through the shooting process and you can view the pic in 2D or gyroscope and anaglyph mode if you want to check them out with your 3D specs.

Remember those sneaky Smurfs? The in-app iPad purchases from the free game Smurf’s Village – and dozens of games like it – had parents seeing red as their toddlers accidentally ran up credit card bills.

The Kindle Fire also has a similar problem. Kids who play about with the 7-inch tablet are just a few swipes away from Amazon’s famous 1-Click Ordering, a feature that cannot be disabled on the device. (If you haven’t disabled in-app purchases on your iPad, here’s how.)

Reuters reports that Jason Rosenfeld’s 3-year-old daughter basically bought her own Christmas presents after seeing Dad’s shopping history on the tablet.

The smiling faces make it look like a rowdy night out, but this jubilant photo was snapped with an iPhone in the back of a Russian police van.

Yesterday, Moscow-based blogger Alexey Navalny was carted away by the authorities while documenting the massive protests following the country’s contested parlimentary elections.

“With my lads on the police bus. They all say hi,”  Navalny tweeted in Russian. An hour later, he posted another Instagram photo, this time a group portrait in the Izmailovo jailhouse of everyone arrested.

If you have a micromanaging boss, watch out. GPS Punch! is a new iPhone app that promises to “track employee attendance in business situations.”

And what are those situations? The free app says it can use the iPhone’s GPS to “eliminate slacking off” as employees are on sales trips, since managers can see where their employees are and track their moves. It follows those sales employees on the road, ostensibly boosting sales calls by monitoring location history, so you can’t hole up in a cafe somewhere instead.

Those road warriors can now get the “punch” from babysitting bosses in Japanese and English. (An Android version of the app is next up, they say.)

Toys R Us won’t even start selling the Nabi Kids Tablet until next week, but it’s already sold out in pre-orders.

Billed as the first full-featured Android platform made especially for kids, the 7-inch $200 tablet  comes loaded with about $150 in games and uses “kid-friendly” software. (Apparently they haven’t seen how adroit the tykes are with grown-up versions.)

The device, designed by FUHU and manufactured by Foxconn, is being marketed to parents who want their kids to stop messing around with their iPads.

If you’re in New York December 5, it would behoove you to stop by the West 14th store for a free workshop with Dan Marcolina.

Marcolina’s the guy behind the acclaimed iPhone photography book and app “iPhone Obsessed” (currently on offer for $3.99 in iTunes) and he’ll be sharing tips and tricks including how combining picture choice and multiple app processing can turn a simple snapshot into a statement.

There have been a countless articles and even books about how you might channel Steve Jobs trademark style for presentations, but you’d have a hard time finding videos of all of those talks in one spot.

Enter Stevenote.tv. It’s a labor of love from web designer Fabio Fiss, who thought it would be a fitting tribute to the late Apple co-founder to gather all of his public appearances by topic in one place.

Saucytime is the latest company to pair sex with Apple’s handy videoconferencing technology FaceTime.

Apple’s desire to keep their devices G-rated hasn’t kept adult chat services from trying. But iP4Play, the first company to launch a porn chat service over FaceTime went bust after just a few months, citing low FaceTime adoption.

The latest come-hither chat service is the UK-based Saucytime. To my American ears, the name promises more Benny Hill-esque titillation than graphic raunch. That’s intentional, says co-founder Lei.

Jundiaí, Brazil – Foxconn’s iPhone and soon-to-be iPad factory about 45 miles north of Sao Paulo is an open secret; despite all the conjecture, it’s exactly where it’s supposed to be and three curious reporters had no problems poking around.

On Oct. 31, the Brazilian telecommunications document agency ANATEL issued the OK for Foxconn to start producing mobile phones for Apple. Although the government started talks for a Foxconn plant back in April 2011, this was the first official document wedding Apple’s name with Foxconn in Brazil. After reading about the news in the Sao Paulo daily Folha, I spent about 20 minutes fudging around with my minimal Portuguese to track down the document with the exact address on the agency’s website.

Curious to see what was actually at that address, I asked (well, pleaded with) MacMais editor Sérgio Miranda to drive me there. He and Alessandro Salvatori from Blog do iPhone agreed to spend the day taking me on a wild goose chase.