No Good Education Apps

With everyone immersed in the digital world, it is no surprise that many mobile application development companies are becoming like sharks when it comes to targeting students and anyone else in the educational system in hopes of selling them some apps or an idea. There are many education tools that are useful but there are none that will teach you manners and how to be able to maintain eye contact or how to conduct yourself on the multitude of social media platforms. The very devices and media delivery systems that provide us with unprecedented insight and understanding of the world are also distracting us from what is existing in front of our eyes. In a culture where we will increasingly and rightly tap into an app, video or digital tool to learn a skill or collaborate with team members in our class or across the globe, the human race also needs to figure out a way to reconnect with what's in front of us.

Secure Cloud Services in the Office

It depends on you if the cloud services that you use are safe. If you use software-as-a-service providers such as Salesforce.com, Office 365 or Dropbox to store your documents in the cloud, those companies take a certain amount of responsibility for the security of the data they maintain on your behalf. They are not responsible for how you choose who can access the data. You need to choose a cloud service that provides data protection both in transit and when data is at rest—including during backups. Make sure to ask your provider if they have had any past or recent breaches, and if they have, what they did to avoid a repeat. Lastly, know that your biggest threat may be from a malicious or disgruntled employee who is hellbent on stealing confidential or sensitive data and using the information against you. Your own in-house security and user account login and password management need to be tight and you need to know exactly who has access to what.

Getting the Most Out of Your Workday

The first thing to do when you want to make the most out of your time is to prioritize. Make a list of the things that need to be done either that day or that week in order of what is most important. Even though you might want to do the small easier things in the morning when you get to work, it is better if you just tackle those biggest and hardest projects because they are more important and more pressing. The video conference can wait until that certain time that you have allotted for it. This will require some planning ahead. While you are planning ahead, make sure that you leave some empty spaces in your calendar. It might be great to try to plan every minute of every day but things, such as a really slow day or a sick kid, come up and you need to have the ability to be flexible.

Soundtrack for Your Life

We could be closer to that. There is this nifty new mobile applications that takes your playlist to a whole new level. It will choose the music with a tempo that will match your exercise. The app called Spring will first want to know about your tastes of music based on the genre and it will pick songs from the library of 10,000 songs. Then it will ask you the number of steps you take per minutes. If you do not know, it will do an analysis. But the way apps are integrating with Apple’s movement-tracking guts, it’s only a matter of time before other music-streaming services will come out with real-time tempo-changing music in a bigger, better, and, perhaps, more motivational way. It might also keep track of your heartrate to better match your tempo. What do you think of these apps?

Slow Internet

What will you do if the internet slowed down? Do you remember the days when you had to wait to get online and it made that funny dialing noise? So far, net neutrality is going to equal very slow internet. If the Federal Communications Commission adopts its proposed rules, Internet service providers like Comcast or Verizon will be allowed to provide "fast lanes" to websites and services that pay, and slow lanes to the rest. This means that it will be harder for Americans to access those sites that can't afford to pay fees -- including those of new businesses, nonprofits, educators, artists, activists, and faith groups. The result? Startup innovation, free expression, and democratic discourse in America will suffer. One of the scariest things is that communication services will experience major slow downs. One of the greatest things about the internet is that there is open communication between businesses, customers, and many other people. It could be the end of that. Any thoughts?