At Get IT Here we see the iPad as a game changer for business. We know that it has changed the way we work. We found it took a little bit of getting used to, especially if you are new to Apple and don’t already have an iPhone. Although if this is your situation, you will get the most benefits.

Apps

With an iPad you can browse the web to find web sites or you can use Apps which are helpful tools made especially for the iPad. Often Apps supplement a web product. Apps are a cut down feature of software that people will want to use on the move. Every day more and more apps are built but here are a few we think are must haves if you want to do more than play Angry Birds….

Business Essentials

All businesses rely on email, contacts, calendar and these are all easily synched with your iPad. You can have these business essentials synchronised across all your devices.  You may be able to manage the set up of this yourself but if not give us a shout at Get IT Here.

Accessing Files

One of the biggest adjustments we found with the iPad is the closed nature of the device and how to get your documents and data transferred to it. Unlike a laptop computer, you just can’t connect a USB stick or a storage card into it and copy files. We found using DropBox and GoodReader a way to getaround this. For small businesses with no server, Dropbox is a great way to access our files between all devices..

Reading

If your travel for work the iPad is terrific.  The iPad Kindle app means eBooks, articles, PDFs are all available and easy to read. One of our resolutions this year was to be paper free and we have now stopped buying most print newspapers, books and magazines and purchase these on the iPad. If your eyesight is not the best, the readability of the text on the iPad is excellent.

Edit Documents

The iPad is not just for reading. It is a useful tool for writing and editing documents. There are many apps available for writing and editing documents, presentations, spreadsheets. Apple provides its own suite of applications for these – Pages, Keynote and Numbers.  To be fair we use our iPads to read more than to edit documents. It is easy to email documents in Word or PDF format. If you have the iCloud enabled, all the documents are automatically backed up on the cloud, and available for use anytime, and any linked iOS device.

Bit it you are planning to write a long complex document, we recommend using your computer.

Attend Meetings

Both Cisco’s Webex and Citrix’s GoToMeeting have iPad applications. We like being able to attend an online meeting and not be chained to the desk. Skype also works brilliantly on the iPad.

Take Notes

Thanks to the iPad it is easy to take notes at meetings and conferences then use Evernote to sync the notes back to your computer. No more losing notes or having to type them up after a meeting. The keyboard on the iPad is fine but if you can’t type you can buy a stylus and use Penultimate to handwrite notes directly on the iPad.

Give Presentations

Meetings and presentations are a constant for business. Being so portable it is easier to use the iPad for formal and informal presentations, Once you have your presentation ready and stored in DropBox, there are apps that allow you to transmit what is on the iPad to a TV or projector — all you need are the appropriate cables, which are available in the Apple Store.

We like Prezi but this takes a bit of getting used to.

Music

I use Last.FM to listen to music while I work. This way we are not endlessly buying music. We coughed up for a subscription and love the way Last.Fm suggests music we  like. It creates a radio station based on your music choices which you can play through iPad. There is also RDIO and Spotify is launching in New Zealand any day now.

VEND

If you are a retail business, there are many apps available to take payments from your customers via your iPad. We are very impressed with New Zealand company Vend which is providing a cloud based POS alternative but we will do a full blog on Vend at a later date.

What apps do you recommend for business?

Tempted to get an iPad but wondering if you really can justify it for business? They are cool, your kids want one (actually you want one!). Is the iPad just another gadget or is it a game changer?

The new iPad 3 is now out and with that, a reduction in the price of the iPad 2. For most of you, we can’t see any real business advantage of getting the new iPad 3 and presently there are some great bargains to be had in New Zealand on iPad 2’s.

Reading Apple’s iPad marketing makes it all sound very tempting.

As a business tool, you’d definitely want to “Streamline your daily business tasks with apps that eliminate paper-based processes, give you real-time information, and improve efficiency of common office activities. Explore the tasks below to learn how iPad can change the way you work”. Which, so far for us at Get IT Here, it has.

We think you should consider an iPad for business use if you:

• Travel for work and take material to read
• Need to present portfolios over coffee.
• If you don’t already have a smart phone and need to be able check your mail, calendar, contacts. The iPad easily syncs your email, contacts and calendars in real time (that means right now, over 3G)
• Have a desktop but no laptop
• Have to show customers products online – printed presentations will be a thing of the past, saving paper, ink and ultimately money.
• Have a new shop, and need a till for eftpos transactions and inventory.
• Find lugging around a laptop cumbersome and heavy.
• You take notes at meetings and conferences.
• If your company brand is about innovation.
• Like to use Skype but hate being chained to the chair.
• Attend online meeting but hate being chained to the chair.
• Need a quick way to translate text between languages when traveling.

Why not just use my laptop and smart phone?

• Long battery life
• Light, portable, easy to have with you all the time
• iPad makes text easier to read than with a smart phone.
• If you have poor eye site the beautiful backlit screen an ease of making text larger will not having you struggling to seeGo paperless – Reading documents on the iPad is pleasant and not awkward like on a laptop
• Multi purpose - kids, home, work but that’s another story.
• Your laptop doesn’t make you look cool when you pull it out in a bar

Finally, if you’re not completely sold on your tablet being an iPad, you can save a lot of money buying other brands. There are now excellent and affordable competitors at the high end. If you’re looking for a tablet that can be used for e-mail, Web browsing, and can do without the Apple logo there are plenty of other options.

When the first earthquake hit on Sept 4th, I was in Christchurch doing some routine maintenance at a client’s head-office. Aside from a pretty scary near-miss involving a million-year-old chimney, it was a relatively minor event as far their IT went and they were back to work within a couple of weeks. In the February 22nd earthquake however, their office was totaled.

The costs to Christchurch in terms of lives lost or uprooted and frayed nerves has been given heaps of coverage since the quake. It’s been an enormously traumatic six months for our second-biggest city and in the business sector we’re hearing about business owners who have survived with lives and staff intact but with offices and IT systems un-reachable or even, completely destroyed.

Many of these businesses are rallying together – larger corporations are re-locating staff to other centres, while smaller guys are, in some cases, working off laptops at the CEO’s house. We’ve seen organizations like Melanie Morris’s Christchurch Business Recovery Centre open to help SMEs get back on their feet by providing services ranging from access to office equipment like stationary and computers, right through to boardrooms and a place to have your mail delivered.

One of the major problems facing many of these businesses though is data-retrieval or loss. This is a crippling problem that, for many, will spell the end of a business they’ve poured their heart and soul into.

The client I was visiting in September was saved this issue because a few months ago, they converted to a cloud hosted service for their email and data storage. For so many other businesses I’ve helped out over the past few weeks though, the picture is much more grim. Many of them were running off a physical server, stored in their building, which is now completely unreachable. All their project, job information, financial records, client contacts, staff records and business information are lost or, at best, only as up to date as their last back-up. In many cases, this means more than a month of data lost.

We’ve been helping out some of our IT mates down in Christchurch by restoring the most recent back-up of their clients’ data on virtual machines hosted in the cloud which, in most cases, means these businesses can get back up and running within a day. Being hosted in the cloud means that if something happens to the computer system they’re working on – an aftershock causes more damage or a laptop simply breaks down for some reason, their data is current and safe, with a number of back-ups stored around the country. Hopefully meaning one less thing for these frazzled business owners to worry about.

Until recently, Microsoft’s Small Business Server was really the only option for most growing businesses. Data costs were astronomical if you were using the cloud for everyday server storage. Now though, the cost of sending all that information back and forth to off-site servers is so low it often works out cheaper than installing an on-site server. One of the big benefits to this is that your data is being backed-up in real-time at a number of different server storage locations around the country. This means, even if something was to happen to your office, there are duplicate copies of your data, heavily encrypted and safely stored in units elsewhere in NZ.

We’re doing as much as we can to help these clients get back on their feet until their regular Christchurch based IT providers can take over again and then we’re going to be systematically making sure our own clients are protected if this sort of event happens again. What about you?

And Sexy Photo Gate, which is especially hilarious for not even bothering to hyphenate. Oh, Hong Kong, how I loves ya.

So, “Antennagate”. If you don’t already know – and of course you do, but I’m probably going to describe it in some entertaining manner – the iPhone 4 loses signal when you hold it the wrong way (which is to say, the way you’ve always held every mobile phone you’ve ever used). The problem is not insoluble, if you’ve got some duct tape handy, but due to the impending threat of lawsuits and of people not liking him, Steve Jobs has announced the inevitable: free cases for everyone.

What I like about the whole thing is that the problem somehow didn’t come up in testing, and in my cartoonish imagination, that’s because no one testing the iPhone 4 thought to actually use it as a phone. “How’s the testing going?” “Just tried out an app that gives me live updates of the salinity of Wil Wheaton’s sweat: works fine.”

Anyway, this is all going to blow over soon enough. If that’s the biggest complaint about the iPhone 4, it sounds pretty damned sweet.  And these scandals never last. Remember Toallagate? Yeah, me neither.

We shall conclude with a song.

You know those animations where a kid in a movie opens a book and the ink spread out and displays the page in a kind of spreading creeper of art? I want to see the Light Touch hovering over a book that is blank except for a few small points of reference for the computer, and have an interactive book that knows when you’ve turned pages.

That’s possible now. You know why? Because we’re living in the future.

Naturally, Engadget’s title image is of the optimal use of Flash – watching Homestar Runner cartoons.

Internet Explorer 9 will support the Canvas graphics technology and the video and audio tags specified as part of the still-developing HTML5 standard, said Ryan Gavin, senior director for Internet Explorer, at a media event in San Francisco. The company demonstrated the performance of the third platform preview as compared to other browsers, taking specific jabs at Firefox and Chrome as it made its demonstration.

As part of its bid to overhaul Internet Explorer–which is still the world’s leading Web browser but has been losing share and cachet–Microsoft has chosen a new strategy for rolling out code to developers and browser enthusiasts. It released the first “platform preview” of IE9 at the Mix conference in March, and has now released new versions every eight weeks, Gavin said.

So says CNet.

Particularly amusing is Microsoft speed-testing IE9 with a game that’s apparently parodying the Google Chrome speed tests mentioned on this blog some time ago.

Meanwhile, the iPad is also upsetting the usurpers of the common handheld book, with e-book reader readers catching on to the fact that they are increasingly obsolete.

But as the iPad release date draws nearer in New Zealand, I get a feeling that I haven’t had since swine flu (or was it bird flu?) For months, I’d mind my own business, occasionally hearing about the flu on the news, and basically ignored it. But then I realised that this is exactly what people do in zombie movies in the lead-up to the night when everyone turns into a zombie. These little hints that you ignore, until it’s too late and the world is never the same again.

Of course, most people consider world zombie domination to be a bad thing, and that’s not what I’m saying about iPads. What I’m saying is that I have this growing sensation that Apple’s redefining people’s experience of technology, dragging us (some kicking and screaming) into the 21st century.

Consider this little gem. Japanese scientists (yes, them again) are playing around with touchable holography.

Touchable holography. Apple’s pioneering interface philosophy. Velcro.

Are you thinking what I’m thinking?

So wait till your mum isn’t behind you before you open it.