Posted by Jim Van on May 20, 2011 under entrepreneur, eOffice, mobility, portability, small business | 
In 2008, when the economy began the worst implosion since The Great Depression, one of the industries hardest hit was the legal profession. Hundreds of high-powered law firms were forced to cut expenses, including layoffs of lawyers, paralegals, administrators and other staff, many of whom found themselves on the unemployment line for the first time ever. This is the story of a group from a Boston firm who decided to do something about it. Read more of this article »
Posted by Jim Van on May 4, 2011 under mobility, portability, small business |
Sometimes I feel like the tech industry has more bubbles than a Lawrence Welk rerun. We all fondly remember the dot com bubble and its spectacular burst. Lately, the headlines, marketing emails, tech (and business) magazines and conversations at conferences have focused on cloud computing and social networking.
Cloud computing and its related cousin, software as a service (SAAS) has been with us for years. Its growth was greatly aided in the mid-90s by the growth of broadband internet access, making things possible that just weren’t prior to the availability of high speed internet. Wireless internet, once an oddity, is now ubiquitous. One can sit in a McDonalds and browse the internet from one’s iPad. The growth has been nothing short of remarkable.
Equally remarkable has been all the noise surrounding ‘the cloud’. Everywhere one turns, everything is connected to, or through ‘the cloud’. Services that used to be available only to the largest corporations are now accessible by even a teenager on a smartphone. And it’s all happened, really, in about 5 short years.
So, if the cloud is here to stay, or more accurately, morph into something else even bigger, where’s the bubble? Read more of this article »
Posted by Jim Van on October 13, 2010 under eOffice, mobility, portability |
I was recently at T.F. Green airport, waiting at the gate area for my flight to board. I had my iPhone with me, and was listening to a favourite Paris-based radio station while reading a book on the Kindle app. I took a break to take a moment to shop for a birthday present for a friend on Eddie Bauer, and went back to my book. All of a sudden, I received an alarm that one of my clients’ servers was acting abnormally. Within a minute, I was accessing the server, and within two minutes, I’d solved the issue and was back to my book. The flight boarded 10 minutes later.
This is perhaps one of the best examples of two things: How our personal and professional lives have merged due to tedchnology, and how they’ve done so in the absence of a conventional computer desktop. Meet the new portability. Read more of this article »
Posted by Jim Van on October 6, 2010 under entrepreneur, eOffice, mobility, portability, small business |
I live in a relatively affluent neighborhood. Everybody, even the 80-year old couple across the way, has a broadband internet connection. And, most people I know own smartphones and access various internet functions through them.
When I go to almost any public gathering place, from the library to a restaurant, Wi-fi internet access is a given, even at the local McDonald’s. In less affluent areas, broadband, while widely available, isn’t as well deployed, but is still widely available.
So, now that we’ve established the near ubiquity of broadband access to the internet, at least locally, what’s next Read more of this article »
