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Samsung teams up with Genband to beef up the enterprise tablet

Kevin Fitchard — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 13:30:47 +0000

Samsung promised it was going to get more aggressive about targeting its tablets and smartphones at the enterprise, and today what is likely a key component of its Samsung for Enterprise, SAFE, strategy emerged. Samsung will be offering business customers a unified communications software suite developed by networking vendor Genband. Samsing will first offer the software on its Galaxy Tab slates, but eventually expand to other devices.

Since the SAFE program launched in 2011, Samsung gradually fortified its most popular smartphones and tablets with corporate-grade security while attempting overcome the Android fragmentation problems that plague CIOs. The Genband partnership, however, shows that Samsung wants to do more than just retrofit its phones and tablets for business users. It wants offer services specifically tailored to corporate customers.

Unified communications is a pretty key area for Samsung to launch into enterprise services since it bridges the realm of the business network and the plethora of over-the-top communications apps in the consumer world. Samsung will be able to offer IM, VoIP, video conferencing and chat, and document and media sharing apps that work across an enterprise’s wireline and wireless networks.

“It take years for an enterprise to launch something that consumers are enjoying right now,” Genband CEO Charlie Vogt said in an interview on Monday. Samsung, however, can drastically speed up that process by pre-certifying the Genband UC suite in the SAFE program.

Genband’s UC platform, called Experius, is already battle tested in enterprise networks the world over. Vogt said the company has already issued 20 million licenses for the client software to corporate and carrier customers. Genband offers the platform as a cloud software-as-a-service or it sells the software and infrastructure directly to enterprises, system integrators and carriers.

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Outsource Your Personal Chores and Errands

Meryl K Evans — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 17:00:15 +0000

You can outsource business tasks with sites like RentACoder, Elance, oDesk and many others. But imagine what you could do if someone else could clean your house, shop for groceries, take care of the pet or handle invitations to an upcoming event.

The concept of outsourcing can go beyond using virtual assistants, web designers and programmers. By outsourcing chores, you can remove the stressful things in your life, and as a result, have more time to do the things you love.

Deciding What to Outsource

Web workers often do many tasks that go beyond their areas of expertise. It may be worth investigating the possibility of having someone else take on those energy-sapping chores. How do you decide if you should outsource chores, and which ones? Here are some factors to look at:

Take an honest look at your life. Is your mind constantly racing because you have too much going on? Do you miss important events or milestones of friends and loved ones? Are you losing touch with friends and family due to an overloaded schedule? Do you keep thinking about work when you’re not working? What’s the point of earning money if you’re not going to make the most out of your life?
Evaluate the time and cost. Figure out how long it takes you to complete the chore. Then, calculate how much you would earn if you drop the chore for more income-producing work. Use that number to help you determine how much you would pay someone to do the chore.
Account for possible training time. Some chores may require initial training. To shorten the training time, document the process. Even though the freelancer might do this type of work on a regular basis, the process may not be identical for all clients.
Review spending habits. You may find areas where you can buy fewer things and invest that into outsourcing to gain more time. It’s a sacrifice, but the extra time can be worth it.
Consider chores you despise. These exhausting chores interfere with your emotional state and energy levels, which affect work and personal activities. Hiring someone else to take on hated chores could give you extra energy and time to do the things you enjoy.

Available Outsourcing Sites and Services

You can enter your zip code or city on many of the following web sites to receive a list of services in your area. Other web sites ask you to answer a series of questions and serve up a handful of matches. However, in researching sites that provide these services, I have seen some serious complaints. As with everything else online, do your due diligence.

For live advice, try LivePerson, a marketplace for chatting live with experts in many topics ranging from health issues to spirituality. Browse for the service you need for a list of experts along with their bios, their cost per minute and whether they’re currently available.

You can enter chore requests in DoMyStuff and RunMyErrand. RunMyErrand is limited to Boston, but other cities have similar services. TaskUs not only lists administrative and sales and marketing services, but also personal services such as event planning, selling stuff and travel help. Then there’s craigslist.

Another option is to use a search engine. If you have a specific job in mind such as a chef preparing meals or a dry cleaning service that picks up and drops off dry cleaning, a search engine can help you find local resources. For example, enter “dry cleaning delivery service” to see a list of local services that provide delivery. Some search results include ratings and reviews. If you’re traveling and in need of a suit pressing, use your laptop or cell phone to search for a local delivery service to take care of it for you.

What chores do you outsource or want to outsource? How do you find and evaluate the contractor?

Photo by stock.xchng user Sanja Gjenero

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What To Do Before Your Web App Shuts Down

Aliza Sherman — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 18:00:45 +0000

I just received an email message about the demise of Projecho, little more than three months after first hearing about the easy conferencing application during its big PR push.

What do you do when an application you’ve adopted and incorporated into your work process suddenly goes under? Nancy recently wrote about why she doesn’t trust the cloud for her work, but when you run a virtual company or are part of a virtual team, it isn’t realistic to keep all of your work on a local computer. Even if you aren’t a virtual worker, there are still apps that die quick deaths every day — their demise can leave you out in the cold.

How do you protect yourself from the pains of losing the functionality of one of your favorite apps? Here are some of my thoughts about making a smoother transition even when there’s a technical bump in the road that you didn’t anticipate.

Hold your geeky horses. Did you just get an invite to an app in alpha or beta? Did you just read about the debut of a new app in your favorite news source? Stop, take a breath, and wait a little bit before adopting it as the tool you’ll use at the exclusion of other tried and true offerings. Sure, there are some new apps that come out that fill a big needs gap. However, there is a difference between being an early adopter and changing your processes to accommodate an app that may or may not make it through its first year of business.
Back up your options, not just your data. Yes, a cool app like Projecho comes along that offers affordable and super-easy video conferencing, but clearly it isn’t the only game in town. Before you go ditching your more costly option or before you jump on a new app bandwagon for any reason, have a contingency plan — a fallback app — that you can go to immediately if the new one fails. Of course you may save a bundle moving from a WebEx to a Projecho, but look at the unanticipated costs of having to switch back over, retrain staff, and change processes.
Inventory your options. Once you determine the backup apps for the ones you currently use, make a list or spreadsheet that clearly spells out the apps you use, your process, and your fallback plan in case an app goes under. This handy list can make for a smoother transition with less scrambling around for new solutions if you lose an app to the bad economy, bad business models or other app destroyers.
Get the e-newsletters. Lately, I’ve been opting not to get the e-newsletters from apps I sign up to use because of email overload. But frankly, if I hadn’t been on Projecho’s list, I may not have seen the news of its demise as promptly as I did and would have had to wait to see it in a news source — if I even saw it at all before arriving at the site one day to find the doors had closed. Even if you never read any of the e-newsletters in detail (and in some cases you should, because they are filled with useful tips on using the product), skim the headlines before trashing. I clearly could not miss “Projecho Discontinuation” in my inbox.
Buy the backup plan. Clearly not all web apps involve saving your data in the cloud. Projecho is a video conferencing tool, for example, so it is just there to use when you need it. But if you are uploading — or creating — assets purely online, either get in the habit of keeping your own backups (either on a local drive, or using a cloud backup service) or pay for a more premium account that includes additional online backups. You can never back up too much, and if your web app goes kaput, you’ll be glad you did the extra work or paid a few extra bucks.

Keep in mind that some of these tips can work for you whether you’re working with cloud apps or software on your computer (WordStar, anyone?).

How do you plan for the possible demise of your favorite and most-used web apps?

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Apple Job Posting Suggests iPod Touch to Gain Camera

Darrell Etherington — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 19:37:03 +0000

There’s been lots of talk recently about what the future might have in store for the new iPhone camera, with one report claiming that the orders have already been placed for 3.2-megapixel sensors for the device to be released in June. Today, AppleInsider pointed out a recent job listing that seems not only to confirm the rumors about the iPhone, but also sparks new ones about the possibility of the iPod touch getting a camera soon, too.

The job listing called for a “Camera Project Manager” whose responsibilities include driving “the design, development and integration of camera modules across iPhone and iPod,” the operative phrase there being “and iPod.” If it turns out to be true, the addition of a camera would allow future iPod touch users to use the many camera-dependent apps currently available for the iPhone, and would further narrow the gap between the two devices. Readers should note that the listing has been changed since, with iPod references removed. This could be the correction of an error, but more likely, Apple realized they were tipping their hand.

While few (if any) other portable media players currently on the market offer a built-in camera, this past week saw the North American release of the Nintendo DSi, which now offers music playback, built-in web browsing and not one, but two cameras. The update to Nintendo’s wildly successful DS console is seen by some as an answer to Apple’s inroads into the mobile gaming arena, especially with the introduction of DSiware, which will basically be an app store for the DSi. Adding a camera to the iPhone could be a move on Apple’s part to position it even stronger against the DSi and the upcoming PSP refresh, about which very little is known at this point.

All I know for sure is that if Apple were to give the iPod touch a camera (and video recording capability), in addition to the recent line-in support and external speakers, there are very few devices either released or planned in the PMP or portable gaming category that could come close to matching it.

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