Regular readers know that I usually focus on business social networking issues, and I will continue to do so. However, today I’m covering another “Interactive” topic of equal importance.
In speaking to hundreds of business executives around the United States each month, I find a surprising percentage are not embracing technology, specifically tablets (think iPad or Galaxy Tab), smartphones (think iPhone or Droid), and hundreds of thousands of Apps.
This is an incredibly dangerous head-in-sand strategy. Remember what Darwin observed: “It’s not the strongest or most intelligent that survive… but those that adapt to a changing environment most quickly.” While it’s true for species, it’s true for business on a hyper-accelerated time scale. Think about it. How long can you sit still and not respond to your competition, not enhance your products and services, not upgrade your technology and team?
We live in a world of accelerating change. Ray Kurzweil predicts that between 2010 and 2045 (just 35 years), we’re going to see an increase in what might be called “human-machine knowledge” of 1,000,000,000 times. Looked at another way, the amount of information we’re dealing with today represents just 0.0000001% of what we’ll have in that future. What a quaint, simple world we inhabit today.
To the point of this column: It is now becoming impossible to keep up in business without thoroughly embracing technology. Ii you are uncomfortable with technology, its time to reexamine your mindset. It is a mindset.
Start by buying an Apple iPhone 4S and get to know Siri, the integrated voice assistant. It’s the most magical product that humans have yet produced. Or as an alternative, get your hands on one of the newest Google Android phones by HTC, Motorola Mobility, etc. They are almost as good and, no doubt, these two players will continue to leapfrog each other.
Notice that I didn’t mention BlackBerry or for now, but stay tuned, Microsoft Windows Mobile. That’s because it’s not just about the hardware; it’s also about the Apps.
Apple and Google have an astounding lead over their competitors with vibrant App ecosystems measured in hundreds of thousands. These Apps are changing personal-business productivity. I estimate that my own productivity has roughly doubled in the past two years using this technology and I expect it to continue to increase.
My solution also involves an iPad2 “tablet”. Yes, tablets are a key part of the equation and there are also good Android options such as the Samsung Galaxy Tab.
Now, let’s talk Apps. Consider one called Evernote that stores your notes and a vast array of other information in the cloud. It works on either of these platforms as well as on PCs and Macs. You can put anything into Evernote and then find it fast from anywhere using virtually any device (think Internet café in Costa Rica).
While the basic version of Evernote is free, for $46 a year you also get optical character recognition (OCR). Imagine photographing a business card or scanning a document, even handwritten. Once in your Evernote repository, any relevant word or phrase will bring it up instantly on your iPhone (or any other device). You can even search based on where you were when you recording something. It’s a personal productivity game-changer.
I’ll cover additional Apps in future columns but here’s one more to inspire your thinking. I was in Puerto Rico for a week this past November. Walking the streets of Ponce, there’s little written in English. And in the Historical Museum, there’s none. After lamenting not learning Spanish for about two seconds, I pulled out my iPad and clicked the Word Lens App. On the iPad screen I see video of anything I point at, except that all the Spanish words transform instantly to English. It’s simply amazing.
Here’s the bottom line: If your competition is using tablets, smartphones, and Apps and you’re not, you’re at an increasing disadvantage. Like the dinosaurs, your business is not long for this planet. It’s time to choose to love technology.