How is Twitter Impacting Travel ?

Twitter is a great tool and resource for some travelers who use it for everything from checking itineraries to ordering a meal. Interestingly some 60% of people who purchase travel online are social media users and more and more savy travel companies are proactively offering customer support for travel matters via twitter. JetBlue serves as an excellent example of how to do Twitter well.

SmartMoney reporter Kristen Bellstrom talks about creative ways travelers and companies are using it to connect. Watch !

What's Not Included in the iPhone 4 OS ?

Nicole Lee, associate editor for CNET, recently shared some interesting observations in an article today about what was NOT included in the recent iPhone 4 OS upgrade. Here are her thoughts:

• Mass storage mode: We would've liked to see an easier way to just drag and drop files from our computer to the iPhone without having to go through a third-party app.
• Tethering with AT&T: Yes, we know this is already possible with the current OS, but AT&T in the U.S. have not gotten onboard with it yet (tethering is currently available in other countries like Canada and the U.K.). We were hoping we would hear more about it at the event, but no dice there.
• Audio profiles: It would have been nice if the iPhone had different audio profiles for different environments that you could easily switch between.
• Flash support in Safari: Yeah, this was a pie-in-the-sky wish, but we know a lot of you out there wanted it.
• FM radio: Another one that was highly unlikely, but again, we know there are some who want it.
• Wi-Fi syncing: We would've really liked it if we could sync or back up our information on the iPhone over Wi-Fi instead of having to plug in our USB cable.
• Built-in photo editing: We know you can get third-party photo editors on the iPhone but it would be nice to have a built-in one as well.
• Printer support: This is a little more relevant to the iPad, but we also wished iPhone OS 4 would provide some printer driver support, which would be very helpful for printing out documents and notes.
• Multiple notification bar: On Android, there is a handy pull down area where you can see all of your recent notifications, like for your new messages or new voicemails. It would be nice to see that on the iPhone as well.

So do you think that her expectations were a bit too high for this recent release ?

What Will iPhones OS 4 Be Like ?

iPhone's new operating system details were released in a press event at Apple's headquarters today. The OS 4, will be released to developers this week and to users in the summer. It will provide access to calendar, photo library, still image and video data, and includes abilities to help apps run faster. In addition the new OS will support multitasking of apps. It will be interesting to see when the continual upgrades stall out and when a new iPhone hardware device is planned to be offered.

"We weren't the first to this party but we're going to be the best, just like cut and paste," said Apple CEO Steve Jobs, alluding  that cut-and-paste hadn't been available until a year after the first iPhone launched.

Jobs went on to say, "It's really easy to implement multitasking in a way that drains battery life. If you don't do it just right your phone's going to feel sluggish and your battery life is going to go way down. We've figured out how to implement multitasking of third-party apps and avoid those things."

The new iPhone OS will allow users to press the home button twice to see a menu of  active apps. Tapping one app takes you directly into that app. Apps can remain running in the background. Some of the benefits to this are, for example, that you can keep listening to music in Pandora while doing other things on the phone. The multitasking enables push notifications to alert users to an incoming Skype call. "It was really simple to implement. Just a dozen lines of code," said Skype's head of product development David Ponsford.

Another example of the new OS capabilities are letting you know when an app running in the background has requested your location from the device's GPS. This to address privacy and security issues.

The announcement comes a week after Apple's launch of iPad. Apple has sold 450,000 iPads to date, and users have downloaded more than 1 million iPad applications and over 650,000 digital books from the iBooks store. The company has sold more than 50 million iPhones and 35 million iPod Touches.

TheiPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad all run iPhone OS 3.0. The current OS has been criticized for lacking multitasking support for full multitasking. The OS also restricts add-on software to apps available through Apple's App Store.

The App Store currently contains 185,000 apps, Jobs said, adding than users have downloaded more than 4 billion apps from it to date. About 3,500 of those apps are optimized for the iPad.

Additional features planned for iPhone OS 4 include a 5x digital zoom camera feature, and tap to focus in video.



The Big Short - A Human Story

Living in New Orleans, it is gratifying to see one of its native sons do well. With the Saints winning the Super Bowl this year behind quarterback Drew Brees and now author Michael Lewis sharing his recent book, The Big Short, Inside the Doomsday Machine, an expose on the recent global financial crisis, there is a lot to be proud of in the "Big Easy".

In the case of Lewis, once you start you can't put down the "Big Short". More than that, while reading it, you can't imagine the story could be true; but it is. More than just a recount of facts about the financial crisis and what happened during the past decade, the book is a deeply human story about a small group of people and what they faced with clear minds amid a group of lunatics.

Read Felix Salmon's review on the Barnes and Noble site, here is an exerpt:

The result is that rarest of beasts in a world drowning in financial-crisis books: a new book which actually breaks news. For instance, Lewis uncovers what could possibly be the single greatest trade that any Wall Street banker ever made: in December 2006 and January 2007, Deutsche's Greg Lippmann paid an insurance premium of 0.28 percentage points to take out insurance on $4 billion of triple-A-rated bonds from Morgan Stanley's Howie Hubler. Less than a year later, that $11 million bet paid off to the tune of a whopping $3.7 billion. I'll save you the math: that's an annual return of more than 33,000%. There's lots more where that came from: this is an assiduously-reported and beautifully-written book. There aren't many reasons to be happy about the global financial crisis, but here's one: that it brought Michael Lewis back to his roots, to produce what is probably the single best piece of financial journalism ever written.

The story illustrates how institutions run by experienced people with a lot of knowledge can fail, quickly and dramatically. What happened in the financial markets can and will increasingly occur in many industries, as leadership becomes disconnected from the day to day realities being impacted by rapid advancements and change.

Watch the recent interview on Charlie Rose where Lewis shares more details and views. Get the book and remember that when everyone thinks they know the facts sometimes they don't.

Why is Google Successful ?

Tom Davenport comments that "you can't emulate everything that Google does", and he's right. But it is instructive to watch his HBR interview as he outlines the unique yet basic things Google has done to be successful. Here are some of Tom's thoughts:

1. Develop a scalable platform;

2. Have an excellent method of testing and deploying new products and services;

3. Have a high tolerance for failure; and

4. Treat knowledge workers in a method that improves their productivity.

Methods of organization and innovation are fundamental to success in any organization and these are but a few. Our companies try and help people adopt the forementioned and other disciplines that are part of best practices for success today. Watch this interesting interview.