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Gadgets Your Kids Will Love

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There is a gadget for everyone, whether you are a student or a businessman – gadgets are fast becoming a must-have, helping us complete tasks, check our email and browse the web from wherever we are. It’s not just adults who love gadgets, though…there are plenty of gadgets which can benefit kids, too, and even act as an emergency pacifier!

Is your child desperate to play with your iPad? They have been a huge success with children – the touchscreen interface is very inituitive to them, and the interface is easy to work out, too. If you don’t fancy letting your child play with your $500 tablet, you’ll be glad to hear that Leapfrog have made a (much cheaper) version for little fingers.

Featuring a 5″ screen with the same touchscreen technology, but encased in kid-safe plastic and teamed with a camera and video camera, this $100 is sure to be a hit with every child. The tablet works as an e-book reader, mainly for children’s books, and utilises the camera and video camera to encourage the child to make films involving themselves, putting them together with sound. It also comes with educational games, including logic, mathematics, spelling and phonics, and automatically makes the questions more difficult as your child gets better. It even encourages them to practise their handwriting on the screen!

Older children will probably prefer the real thing, and with it’s wide range of apps and functionality, you might find a family iPad is the best option for you. Equally, your child might prefer something a little less educational – the new Ninendo 3DS allows your child to experience games in 3D, and you can buy educational games such as spelling, logic and painting – although whether your child will play them is another matter! It also has old favorites such as Mario Brothers and Pokemon!

The gadget market for children is expanding all the time – there are thousands of videos of children effortlessly working Apple products, and the iPad might even get voted Children’s Toy of the Year! Encourage your child to get used to using gadgets to get things done, and it is sure to be a benefit for our gadget-packed future!

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The Traveling Salesman Gets a Boost From the iPad

While the Information Age, and its ensuing technology, has turned all sectors of business upside down from assembly lines to data sheets, and subsequently eliminated some old jobs, it has kept others from the brink of occupational extinction. One such old-fashioned career is the traveling salesman; and the technology keeping the position alive and well in none other than Apple’s iPad.

Once upon a time, as memorialized in Hollywood movies, traveling salesmen were going door-to-door in cheap suits with haggard looks of destitution on their faces, all the while lugging around giant suitcases full of their wares. Today however, they are zooming across the country with nothing but the slim device that is the iPad. The interactivity allowed by the iPad makes it ideal for salesman to easily pitch their products and company without sacrificing the audience’s ability to experience the product. Specifically, the device’s touch-screen technology still lets salesmen provide a hands-on presentation. Salesmen can even play the related videos in the VLC player in their iPad using the VLC player to further demonstrate the products being sold. Usually the VLC media player is fully loaded with video codec libraries and the salesmen might not need to install advanced video codec like Xvid to play the demo videos.

After the customer decides that they do want to make a purchase, there is then the actual transaction that needs to take place. Again, the iPad has stunning advantages here as well, especially with its hundreds of business-friendly apps. Salesmen can process transactions instantly with an app using credit card information or a bank account number. There are also apps that can track the number of sales, averages, shipping and inventory. Salesmen can also have apps like Open Office and GNU Cash in their iPads that they might need on regular basis.

In addition, a reading device like the iPad provides a means for organization. Calendar software keep salesmen on top of their appointments while available mapping technology allows them to plan out in-person sales calls. And a traveling salesman will never have to worry about losing a business card again when it’s conveniently stored in an electronic address book.

There are number of applications a salesman might need in their laptop like Filezilla and Ares that can transfer files from their iPad to FTP servers and the file sharing network. When on the road salesmen once struggled with keeping in touch with evolving trends since they couldn’t carry around each industry publication. With the iPad they can now bring along an endless archive of issues along with online access.

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3 Technologies That Closes Separation Between Management and Employees

Bosses and employees go together like cats and dogs. Where fangs and claws come out during one-on-one meetings, but luckily there’s no scooping or picking up after. That hostile environment however is changing with new technology that better streamlines communication between the two. With modern technology managers and their employees are more like colleagues than adversaries. The three technology types that do the best at promoting an equal work environment are cellphones, laptops and readers like the iPad.

A common issued device for a many Fortune 500 enterprises are company cellphones. Not only do they keep every employee, no matter what level, connected, but also with more advanced models, they provide the tools to work more efficiently. Co-workers and managers can exchange information like documents and email when on the go, eliminating any delay until someone is in front of their computer, which can cause a little stress and tension. Additionally, bosses and their colleagues can better build a connection through informal means such as text messaging.

But there are always those times when a lot of work needs to be done and will necessitate much more than a smartphone to complete. This is the job the laptop; one of the great portable technologies that have allowed businesses to operate anywhere. It also has presented new opportunities for workers to prove themselves to their peers as they can take the same data from their work computer with them. Additionally, a boss and employee can put in overtime in settings other than in the office.

What really causes the most tension between management and their teams? The work, of course. Less intrusive, but more interactive than a laptop are digital readers. With these handy devices teams can make work more fun with their touchscreen technology and do it all in a more relaxed setting. Using a plethora of apps, bosses and employees can exchange and create data like never before.

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Office Romances Grow With new Technology

What does a football quarterback have in common with office romances? The incident of NFL superstar Brett Favre sending racy photographs to a reporter with his cellphone is representative of most workplaces today where new technology has made it easier for employees to kindle office romances discreetly. The proliferation of communications technology has created new ways to get business done, but also many more ways to accomplish some other, personal, tasks while at work. Subsequently, because of this, office relationships aren’t as taboo, and career threatening, as in the past.

The hardest thing about starting an office romance is doing it without anyone else knowing. During the days of relying on land line phones, Xerox machines or hand written notes, there was quite a paper trail. But with smartphones and readers, like the iPhone and iPad, company paramours can keep everything with them. No love notes left on desks, or left in the copier, for others to stumble upon. Instead, texts, pictures, art, music and just about anything else can be sent between devices.

But then there is always the necessity of trying to look busy. So when one co-worker wants to profess his or her love to another without leaving their desk or be seen clicking away on an iPhone, they have to be a little more tactful. That’s where the new versions of many email clients have come in handy. Google’s GMail, for example, has chat capability, along with video and phone applications. While it may seem like someone is cranking out the newest company white paper, they just may have been chatting all day with the person in the next cubicle.

Social media has a similar presence to email in the workplace these days. While businesses don’t like employee spending time on the site, they are so popular, and used by businesses themselves, that it’s nearly impossible to ban. And the technology happens to be a good way to start flirting.

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Gadgets Present Distractions in Offices

For all of the benefits that come from having the latest technology in an office, there are an equal number of issues that arise from those devices. The most common problem with new gadgets in the workplace? Distractions. Sure, there never has been and never will be an office that doesn’t have it’s share of distracted workers. But with a lot of the hottest digital toys out there, groups of workers can be distracted at one time instead of just one wayward individual.

And the greatest technological distraction of them all is the smartphone. You could say phones now are too smart for their own good. With the newest smartphones, co-workers can play games against each other live; a far cry from the days of comparing scores in Mine Sweeper. Then there is the constant texting and collection of apps that do everything from simulate fart noises to impose mustaches on photos of your co-workers. While listening to music isn’t always a distraction in the workplace, it can be with smartphones that can house large music libraries and allow for instant downloading. This means instead of employees casually listening to a radio station in the background, they’re spending time trolling through their music collection.

The newest gadget to make waves in the past year is undoubtedly the digital readers like the Kindle and iPad. They have been perfect for offices so employees can better carry around documents and show interactive presentations. But their interactivity is in itself a distraction. Instead of a bored employee playing the drums on their desk, they can actually play a drum machine on their iPad. And with such a large screen, movies come in picture-perfect clarity. Another thing that looks nice on the iPad, as well as other readers, are magazines and newspapers. While it’s possible to browse publications online on a computer already, with digital readers workers can hide the fact that they reading whole novels at work too.

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