Puerto Rico based iGenApps showed off its signature service at the DEMO Spring event in silicon valley this week. iGenApps offers the ability to create iOS and other mobile apps with no programming knowledge and just a basic working knowledge of HTML. The service is centered around web app development, but the company claims a premium service will turn web apps into native apps for a price.
Gone are the days of walking into a bank with your passbook and having your deposit stamped and recorded. Technology and the advent of online banking has eliminated the need to shuffle through the mouse maze line of your local banking institution and has replaced our favorite smiling teller with bright LED screens and Helvetica font. Online banking is a major convenience that saves us time and allows us to stay in our pajamas that much longer.
Yesterday, Microsoft announced its Windows 8 product lineup. The lineup includes just three editions as opposed to Windows 7 and Vista, which offered twice as many options though some were targeted at developing and niche markets. In addition to streamlining the overall offerings, Microsoft also drew a sharper line between Windows 8 for desktop, notebook, and tablet PCs with x86/64 processors and Windows for ARM-based tablets.
If the dividing line between a full-fledged version of Windows and a version designed for low cost tablets seems vaguely familiar to you, it’s because the strategy is pretty similar to the distinction between Apple’s OS X for Macs and iOS for iPhones, iPads, and iPod touches.
In fact, the entire desktop and mobile lineup that Microsoft is developing seems to borrow pretty heavily from Apple’s playbook.
One of the traditional ways for IT professionals to highlight their knowledge of specific technologies and technical concepts is through the acquisition of certifications. There are a number of vendor-crafted certifications available as well as vendor-neutral certifications that illustrate competence in various technical disciplines like troubleshooting and repair, security, healthcare, and overall network management. Certifications have never guaranteed a job in and of themselves, but they do help candidates sell themselves to recruiters and IT managers.
One of the many challenges with the consumerization of IT, mobility, and cloud services trends is that they are dramatically shifting the skill sets required to succeed in the IT field. As a result, the perceived value of certifications has fluctuated as softer skills like business integration and project management have become more desirable. The need for professionals that have extremely specialized skills is being surpassed by the need for IT generalists.
Mobile technology is playing an ever bigger role in the workplace. According to a recent study by IT training and certification giant CompTIA, 84% of knowledge workers use an iPhone or other smartphone for at least some work tasks on a daily basis – unsurprisingly email and using web-based services ranked as the most common and universal uses.
Despite that level of use, the survey – which didn’t break out numbers for corporate-owned versus employee-owned devices – found that only 22% of businesses have an official policy regarding the use of mobile technology. An additional 20% indicated that they are exploring options for mobility policies but haven’t yet completed them.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pA810ce4eLM
After teasing the game way back in October, Criterion will finally release Burnout Crash! for iOS tomorrow, April 12. The top-down racer will be Criterion’s first mobile game, and it’s already shaping up to be a huge hit. Even David Hasselhoff loves it, as you can see from the clip above.
Ubisoft has confirmed that its future iOS games will store your save data in the cloud, allowing you to sync your progress across multiple devices. That means you can beat missions and levels on your iPhone in your lunch break, then continue your game right where you left off on your iPad when you get home.
It’s a feature that almost every game — especially those build for both the iPhone and the iPad — should not be without.
It’s rare to see government agencies at the front of the technology curve, but it’s becoming more common with U.S. federal agencies after U.S. CIO Steven VanRoekel declared at CES that 2012 the year of mobile for the federal government. While most agencies have pushed to reevaluate their mobile technology option during the past few months, the Environmental Protection Agency seems to leading the government charge to mobile.
The EPA announced earlier this week that the agency has adopted a new “mobile first” policy. Under the policy, it is a setting forward-thinking IT mandate than even the most tech-savvy companies have yet to consider or embrace: develop solutions for mobile devices first and then re-work those solutions to function on the desktop.
Earlier this week, NetZero launched a new freemium mobile broadband service using Clearwire’s WiMax 4G network. Although NetZero is the first U.S. company to launch a “free” 4G service, it isn’t going to be the last. Skype founder Niklas Zennstrom has begun work on a similar service called FreedomPop that will launch this summer.
FreedomPop plans to offer more monthly data for free than NetZero’s paltry 200MB. It will also target iPhone owners as a major part of its user base.
We’ve known about Verizon’s plan to introduce family shared data plans for quite some time now and have been patiently awaiting their release. It now appears we may see them soon as new images have popped up suggesting Verizon is in the end stages of development. PhoneArena managed to get their hands on a screenshot showing what appears to be Verizon’s future Family Data Usage Calculator. If it looks familiar to you it’s because it follows closely with Verizon’s current Data Usage Calculator which helps customers figure out which plan would best fit their data usage needs.
As a business owner, I love being able to take payments on my iPhone or iPad when I’m on the go — like at my booth during Seattle Comic Con. That’s one of the reason’s I’m a big Square fan. But while Square has a beautiful design and makes taking credit card payments a snap, it lacks a lot of features real businesses need.
Enter USAePay, which, like Square, also offers iPhone and iPad-compatible credit card readers. But together with their iOS app, USAePay provides many features Square doesn’t. And it’s for that reason, I decided to take USAePay for a spin; here’s what I found.
Paypal has finally made it into the mobile payment market after being beat to the punch by the likes of Square and Intuit. PayPal may be late to the party but they have a more recognizable name in the world of payment systems and that may just be enough to push them to the front of the line. Besides their name, they’re also offering merchants a 2.7% flat rate on transactions versus the 2.75% offered by Square. PayPal didn’t stop there either, launching a full on geometrical attack by choosing a triangle as the shape of choice for their card reader dongle.
Will the new iPad gobble up so much bandwidth that it will cause serious network congestion and performance issues for small businesses or even major enterprises? Are businesses networks up to meet ever increasing demands of wireless devices and mobile professionals?
These are questions that networking vendor Brocade put to its customers recently, specifically highlighting the launch of the new iPad. It found that half of all businesses think that the new iPad to could add to the number of wireless devices on their networks and possibly increase the overall amount of traffic.
If there’s a buzzword for here at the first CITE Conference, it would have to be trust. Virtually every discussion I’ve had over the past two days has boiled down to the level of trust between IT and users.
Trust may be the foundation of all healthy human relationships, but it isn’t something that comes easily to IT professionals in the workplace. That’s the underlying tension that IT staffers have when it comes to the consumerization of IT. It isn’t about devices or public cloud services. It’s about trusting the users that you support.
No one likes to be throttled — just ask Shep Smith — so when AT&T started sending throttling warnings to “unlimited” customers they considered to be the “Top 5%” data hogs, outrage and confusion ensued. After multiple complaints and an online petition, AT&T was forced to clarify their throttling policy and what it means to be in the “Top 5%.”
Mobile customers have been waiting for what seems like forever for family shared data. One carrier that’s been slowly working on making it happen is Verizon. Not to long ago we saw leaked training material from Verizon that showed they were gearing up for some sort of family shared data plan. We now have a better idea of when to expect these changes as Verizon’s Communication CFO Fran Shammo spoke about them in an investors meeting yesterday.
Users of Google’s Flight Search will now be able to receive the same great desktop features on their mobile devices. Flight Search is now available for both Android and iOS users who search for a flight via their mobile browser. Just search for a flight departing from the US and watch as Google provides you with a table that shows available flights, including duration and prices. Benefits of Google’s Flight Search include:
The world is mad for smartphones. Everyone wants the latest and greatest smartphone that blows their mind with its ability to tell you where your friends are at, what they’re eating, their opinions on Rick Santorum’s sweatervests, and their favorite cat videos. But phones become outdated so quickly that we quickly toss out last year’s trend and pickup the next great mobile device more frequently than we change our car’s oil. It should come as no surprise, then, that pretty soon there will be more smartphones on the planet that humans. In fact, it will happen by the end of the year.
Life hasn’t been good to RIM lately. The company is losing developers and major enterprise clients on a weekly basis. Its PlayBook tablet hasn’t made a dent in iPad sales (or even Android tablet sales, for that matter) and the company is practically begging Android developers to port their apps to the PlayBook. You’d expect the company to be frantic, particularly after the ousting of its co-CEOs last month… but that isn’t the case.
In one of the biggest delusions of grandeur that I’ve ever seen (which is saying something considering I was once the IT director for a mental health services agency), the company’s executives and board apparently think things are fine, that Apple is on the verge of death, and anyone outside the company is a moron. At least that’s the picture one RIM board member painted in an interview with Canada’s Globe and Mail recently.
Often the first and biggest question that confronts any company developing a new mobile presence (or revamping an existing one) is whether to focus on developing a native app or a mobile web site. While each approach has its pros and cons, one way to decide may be to look at how users are accessing content on their mobile devices like the iPhone and iPad.
Unfortunately, the latest news from comScore is that users are evenly split between using a dedicated native app or using a mobile web browser to access content – making that criteria alone useless when it comes to developing a mobile strategy.
While Apple has previously dismissed the idea of porting its entire Mac OS X operating system to ARM-powered mobile devices, the Cupertino company has at least been working on it. That’s according to one intern who worked with Apple’s Platform Technologies Group — a subdivision of the CoreOS department — for four months back in 2010. But does it really mean anything?
Windows Phone 7 hasn’t been the runaway blockbuster that Microsoft probably envisioned when it launched nearly a year and a half ago. Despite advertising campaigns and a strategic alliance with Nokia, Windows Phone use still ranks well below iOS, Android, and BlackBerry use. But new details about the platforms future that were leaked earlier this week show Microsoft may have a solid strategy for gaining marketshare with the next major Windows Phone update, which will likely coincide with the launch of Windows 8 for PCs and/or tablets.
One thing that seems very clear from this new information is Microsoft seems to be taking cues from Apple’s playbook when it comes to creating an ecosystem of devices – like making it easy to shift apps from a phone experience to a larger tablet experience.
The question is, can Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8 on tablets challenge Apple’s iPhone and iPad dominance in the business realms?
SAN FRANCISCO, MACWORLD / IWORLD 2012 — The Neat Company has long been known for its scanning devices, like NeatReceipts and NeatDesk. Those devices let you take your paper receipts, documents and business cards and scan them into your Mac so that you can organize them in a way that makes sense to you.
But here at Macworld/iWorld 2012, The Neat Company is focusing on their latest venture: conquering the digital realm. The thrust of what they are presenting here is all about the cloud. NeatCloud and NeatMobile, to be specific.
A Microsoft spokesperson has revived rumors that its Xbox LIVE platform is coming to iOS after they revealed the company’s plans to provide the Xbox experience and its titles on other platforms. While iOS users already have access to a basic Xbox LIVE app, Microsoft is expected to introduce a more in-depth experience including Xbox LIVE games like that available to Windows Phone users.
The mobile Safari browser that comes baked into Apple’s iOS devices is quite possibly the best mobile browser there is. But what if you want don’t want to load mobile web pages? What if you want to enjoy websites in their entirety?
Unfortunately mobile Safari doesn’t let you do this, but a free third-party browser called Dolphin does. Here’s how to ditch the mobile web and load full, desktop websites on your iPhone.
