I was just taking stroll through GoogleDocs and have generated a quick survey. Here it is below, please give it whirl. This is an anonymous survey. I assure you that I do not have access or receive any respondent information such as email address and name.

Chapter Three Search Exercise

Mobile device use in business is actually a very interesting subject to use for our chapter 3 exercise. It is current and extremely relevant to what is happening in many types of businesses.  Well anyway I did my searches through Google News to find articles on the subject for my blog.   I typed in “mobile devices in business” which resulted 13,200 hits.  I then narrowed the search to anything written about the subject in the past week.   This is how current the discourse is about business mobile device use, the hits only decreased to 11,100.  


As you can see from the sources I cited in my previous blog, I used mainstream and well established sources to base my blog.  There was one that I did find intriguing and it was from the Sacramento Bee (www.sacbee.com) an old and established newspaper from Sacramento California.  I liked the article about security with mobile device business use, but as it turned out it was a press release by a content lifecycle management company called Litera (www.literia.com).  At least there was a disclosure added by the publishers of Sacramento Bee.  Although informative, I would consider this unreliable source of information.

Screen shot of "article" from Sacramento Bee Website
Please take a look at the top gray area, there is a disclosure about the "article."

I then followed the link to PR Newswire.  As it turned out this is a firm the specializes in public relations.  

Screen shot of PR Newswire site.

Business and The Mobile Device

Tablets (more specifically the IPad) and smart phones (more specifically the IPhone) have given the anemic mobile device sector a desperately needed blast of excitement and energy. I have not seen so much fervent bustle and buzz since Netscape’s release paved the way for the ordinary non-techno household to access the new frontier called WorldWideWeb. Imagine, armed with a mobile device and the Internet, a user can access work, school and personal documents of all types, communicate through voice, text, internet phone using Skype of Facetime, or email, work collaboratively with colleagues using cloud based applications or through VPN, use the GPS to get directions, take pictures and record video and audio, write notes in a “new school way,” and so much more.


Whether they are for profit or non-profit, all businesses look for ways that would help their company improve productivity. So it is no surprise that businesses would look to mobile devices as a tool that would improve and streamline workflow. The user’s location away from the office will no longer play a role in completing tasks. In addition, as data communication infrastructure improves, it is possible to access to the most recent and accurate information in real-time. With these enhancements offered by mobile devices, the company’s workforce can work collaboratively with colleagues and team members unencumbered by geographical and time constraints.  


Improving the operational workings of a company is not the only role mobile devices will play in businesses. According to Joshua Michele-Ross, learning how these devices work and are used by their customers is essential in understanding customers’ behavior and expectations. Such knowledge is crucial to making adjustments and changes to a company’s CRM system (customer relationship management). In addition, as the business models integrate mobile devices and mobile device management systems (MDM), senior executives and top managers may gather data from these sources to use in their company’s strategic planning.  


Now that we know mobile devices can benefit businesses, there is one major disadvantage to employing them as part of a business model and that is security. Yes many agree that generating, sharing, and saving work digitally is far more efficient.  And because of the portability and ease of use mobile devices offer, users are quicker and more responsive. However, there are two factors that these devices are more vulnerable to intrusion and data loss. The small size of the devices makes them easier to lose or be stolen, and second mobile device OSs are not as secure and do not allow for management like the traditional laptop operating systems.  With the popularity of these devices, these issues have CIOs and their technology staff scrambling to find solutions to address them. 

In spite of the risks, mobile devices are not going away and will dominate the computing scene.  As the usage grows, there will be a greater demand by businesses, individual, and quite possibly the government for the makers of these devices invest in ways that will make it safer and secure for all users.  



http://www.cio.com.au/article/402859/iphone_ipad_security_human_element/
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/46622066/ns/technology_and_science-security/
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/28/tk-ios-gives-developers-access-to-photos-videos-location/?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha25
http://www.forbes.com/2010/01/15/iphone-twitter-computers-technology-breakthroughs-mobile_2.html

The Search for a Search Engine

Search engines have come a long way since the mid-1990s.  I recall the time when my 5^th grader was doing research for her Women’s History Month report on author Zora Neal Hurston. When she typed in Hurston’s name in the query field, some of the results were unsavory and downright pornographic. I am not sure why that happened, but it required that my husband and I check the sites before our daughter viewed it.  

Today searching the Web for virtually anything is common place. Users are more skilled on how to search in the Web and search engines have become more specialized and accurate.  According to www.thesearchenginelist.com there are over a thousand search engines of varying specialties, categories and types and over a dozen all-purpose search engines such as Google and Yahoo. Some make it big and others last only a few years before folding. In addition, there are search engines called metasearch engines, such as Dogplie, that use the results of the leading general search engines and return the top results to the user. 

RIP page for Viewzi, a graphic heavy search engine

Any form of information, whether it come in an image, text, video, and audio, on people, events, and things in general can be found on the Web.  Open a browser, navigate to any search engine Web site and type in a person, place, thing, or event and within seconds hundreds if not thousands of returns will pop based on that query.  This can quickly become too much information and some of which is really not good information which is detrimental to its efficacy.   As a result most users will typically not go beyond the first page of results.  From there, they begin to filter through the results and drill down on the information.    

Presently information overload is not the only concern with using search engines, the discourse among Web users is the matter of target marketing and privacy.   Google has been making headlines with its revamping of it user privacy policy.  The mega search engine giant has widened their services to include social networking, online cloud computing with it roll-out of document applications, blogging, medical records repository and much more.  With an awesome amount of services (most are free to individual users), they have become experts at target marketing and data mining as a means to generate revenue.  Ixquick (www.startpage.com) is a metasearch engine that claims to be the world’s most private search engine. They do not capture the user’s IP address and drop cookies to use for target marketing. I think I will begin using them to support their mission to protect user privacy.  

www.ixquick.com or www.startpage.com privacy protected search engine