Today's Digital Class Boosts Learning

I attended my daughter's high school open house this week and was impressed by how the digital media transformation has impacted education. There was zero exchange of paper. No class handouts, guidelines or rules to carry around from class to class. Instead, every classroom was equipped with a healthy size LCD screen to run the Apple TV platform. Teachers, who grew up using beepers, used  iPad touch screens to give brief presentations on their classroom objectives, teaching strategies and student expectations. Their fingers slid across a touch screen for everything they needed to share, with no need to uncap a white board marker, let alone white chalk. But the coolest thing about the school's new platform was  the instructor's ability to engage students in learning, using interactive apps with immediate feedback on their inputs. For example, in Anatomy, students were using a 3-D app that featured 360-degree views of all of the human body systems. Using their own individual iPads, students are asked

Apple's Influence On Boomers

The passing of business luminary Steve Jobs this week should serve as a time of reflection for Boomers everywhere. Sure, Apple has had a profound effect on people of all ages around the world in the last 13 years since Jobs rejoined the company. But Steve Jobs' innovative spirit and vision for how computing and media could change our lives started more than a decade before Apple purchased his Next company. For any of us with more than 25 years of professional experience, Jobs' influence was truly transformative. The 1984 introduction of the Apple Macintosh desktop gave birth to the "almighty" cut and paste and mouse pointer concepts, forever changing our proficiency to develop and easily edit written content. I remember the excitement in our small agency office the day the MacIntosh units were set atop our desks, still draped with a branded grey cover so none of us could really see what we were getting. The "unveiling" occurred in unison when an Apple tech representative spent the day with us to "launch" our new system. Never having anything closely remote to this in college, you can imagine our collective awe as we saw the new color screen turn on and icons line the home page of our Apple OS. The best and most exciting feature was that we could begin writing our press releases, go back to any part of the release by clicking the mouse feature, copy text and paste it anywhere in the body of the release and save it on an external disk that we could share with our colleagues. Wow! that was huge then and it dramatically increased our office's productivity. We could now create boilerplates for the end of releases that we didn't have to type each time we wrote a new press release. And while the MacIntosh was huge for communications businesses, it revolutionized every sector. Lawyers could easily adapt agreements, professors and students could enhance research papers and administrative assistants could easily organize their executive's correspondence. It's ironic that Boomers can best appreciate Steve Jobs by looking into their past, given that he was all about the future. But even someone as visionary as Jobs, I think, would admit that the best way to figure out where you're going is to know where you've been.     

The Smartphone Race Track

Smartphone history was made this week when Apple (iPhones) pushed ahead of Research In Motion (Blackberry models) to lay claim to the second largest maker worldwide, behind Nokia. Apple doubled smartphone shipments to 14 million from the year-earlier period, thanks largely to the release of the iPhone 4. The Smartphone race is being closely watched by marketers, as mobile marketing continues to grow rapidly. Of course, while app developers create programs for every mobile platform, it's those platforms with the largest market that get the most attention. So keeping tabs on who's on first and in the lead is crucial for Rainmakers.
Enter Android. While Apple has surpassed RIM, Android's growth rate has shot past both Apple iOS and BlackBerry. Android was installed on 44 percent of phones sold in the third quarter of this year, well ahead of its two main rivals.Apple's answer is it will counter with the debut of the Verizon iPhone early next year, eagerly looking to slow Android's explosive growth. And the Smartphone race goes on.

"All My Gaming" Tops Daytime Television For Women

It used to be that soaps and daytime television programming were an ideal way for Rainmakers to reach female consumers, but with more women joining the workforce, that traditional approach became less effective. Today, daytime television is under further attack with the advent of social online gaming. That's right, the majority of 15 million Farmville (Zynga) online gamers in the United States are women 18-50 years old. According to a research firm named Flurry, the social gaming audience on mobile devices now rival that of individual top-rated TV shows, leading many analysts to believe that these social network games are playing a significant role in the 50 percent drop in advertising media buys around soaps and other daytime programming since 2005.

Ping My Motown Friends

You know social networking and the success of Facebook  has come of age when Apple, which usually charts its own unique path, has jumped into the social-media fray with an iTunes-based network called Ping.

It's understandable and makes good business sense. It's where consumers are spending most of their Internet time, and Apple has millions (160 million) of iTunes customers who can engage right away. But the creation of Ping puts Apple in an entirely new market, one dominated today by Facebook. Ping will have all the social-networking features we have come to expect, such as friends, photo and video sharing. The biggest allure of Ping is the way it's centered around sharing and shopping for music. 
So with Ping you can know what your friends are listening to, where your favorite musicians are performing, all with a lot of "buy" buttons. You can express your appreciate for a certain music genre and make new friends based on common music interests and groups. That's a powerful, social feature. Rainmakers are banking on the fact that most consumers would want to socialize with others that share interests in favorite songs, music eras and artists.
Once again, Apple's innovation leads the way. Can't wait to find all my Earth, Wind & Fire Motown buddies on Ping. What music groups will you join on Ping ?