Newsweek had a great article last week that was questioning the merit of letting President Obama keep his Blackberry:

“So while legions of BlackBerry fans cheer Obama’s success in keeping his, insisting it makes users more productive and connected, experts in cognitive psychology and in human-machine interactions who study pop-ups, e-mail alerts, calendar reminders and instant messaging—the most intrusive and ubiquitous pre-BlackBerry technologies—have two things to say: distraction overload, and continuous partial attention. For whatever the virtues of a handheld, there is no question that, depending how you use it, you risk never focusing exclusively on any thought or perception for long and never being able to work straight through to completion on anything. That’s OK for tasks you can handle with half your cerebral lobes tied behind your back. It’s less fine when the task is, say, watching for track signals while operating a train.”

I know that my iPhone has changed the way I think. There is no question that the iPhone is the most incredible piece of technology I have owned. While I accomplish a lot, especially when I am traveling, I feel  I am always distracted. It is hard to..... read more >>

We are spending a lot of time thinking about how identity will play itself out on the Internet. We are constantly running into the limitations of the existing arrangements even when companies from our portfolio are trying to collaborate. While there is definitely movement afoot with Facebook, Google and others extending their authentication to third parties and possibly moving the OpenID standard along (see previous posts on this).

But there is also another candidate for identity at least in some situations and that is the mobile phone number. I was reminded of that several times yesterday...  

Since our focus is small business trends, we don't often post about specific products.  But I recently bought a Clickfree PC data backup unit, really liked it decided to write about it. 

I don't know much about data backup, except that I should do it.  And I don't want to know about data backup. 

Because of this, I outsourced the work associated with researching backup products to Ramon Ray's Smallbiz Technology blog.  They highly recommended Clickfree, so I bought one.

I brought it home and minutes later I had backups of all of our home and office computers.  No muss, no fuss, no fooling around with installations, software, etc.  You just plug it into your USB port and it does the rest.

Mobile Agent Technologies ( www.agentos.net) is an early stage start-up offering an integrated platform for decision automation- Einstein Enterprise. This combines and integrates various technologies typically sold separately, like business rules and analytics, and is intended as a horizontal product for the automation and management of decisions.

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I love how the iPhone has been driving innovation through competition.  A while ago I also pointed out what I believe to be the biggest Achilles heel of the iPhone and how that might provide an opening to beat the iPhone.  Well the first contender for the role of Paris has shown up and it is Palm.  Palm?  Yes, Palm unveiled the Palm Pre at CES.

The Pre does exactly what I suggested, which is to use the standard Javascript, HTML, CSS model to pro... read more >>