The App Culture That’s Affecting Today’s Business Environment

 The use of smartphone apps by enterprise employees is not an isolated or passing trend. Overall, the rising app culture is seen as good news, but how do you avoid the pitfalls and what does the phenomenon presage for the future of work?

Consumerization of corporate IT is having a profound impact on workplace culture and business models. Employees are energized by greater freedom and flexibility while enterprises are rewarded with efficiencies and enhanced services. While this new app culture brings security risks, privacy issues and employee productivity concerns to address, by and large, it’s regarded as a positive shift.

How The New Normal Is Changing The Conventional Workplace

In fact, according to a recent study by the Economist Intelligence Unit, four out of five organizations believe app culture will have a net positive effect on their business, although the adoption of app culture is far from uniform.

Read the report to learn what sets the early adopters apart, why the C-suite are the chief cheerleaders for app culture, and what this cultural shift could mean for your business.

Read the complete report at AT&T’s Networking Exchange Blog.

This is a sponsored post from AT&T. 

Ping is an app that makes your email more like text messages

Do you send rapid fire emails from your smartphone and want a way to send emails even faster? Do you wish email was more like your messaging app, with “typing” notifications? Do you want to see every email from your girlfriend or boss all huddled together in a single thread? Do you wish your email was automatically sorted into those from “people” and “everything else”? Do you want to set a custom email notification sound for each person you regularly talk to?

If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, you just might love a hot new cloud-based email app called Ping, which is launching soon. I’ve been testing out the beta for a few weeks, and I can confirm that a lot of it’s features are a big change from the way we’re used to doing email. For one, instead of sorting emails but subjects and conversations a la Gmail, Ping shows you ALL of the email you get from a single person or group of people in one giant thread, just like your text messaging app on your smartphone. Read More

HLN: The Best Football Apps to Check Out This Season

Are you ready??? It’s Football season again and you want to be prepared. So get out your smartphone and grab some of the best apps out there to stay on top of your teams, your fantasy football league, to learn more about the game, and even one for all of you who bleed purple like me to stay on top of the world’s greatest team, THE RAVENS.

NFL Mobile – FREE for basic and $5 a month Premium
Available for Android, Apple, Blackberry, and Windows Phones

This app contains everything you could want to know about the NFL this season. Scores, standings, news, schedules, a link to NFL.com fantasy football, and video highlights. It has custom team alerts. So you can get an alert on everything RAVENS—scores, injuries, highlights, etc. All information tailored to your favorite team. For HUGE Football fans that cannot go without there is a premium upgrade. If you are a Verizon customer, you can upgrade to premium features for access to NFL RedZone which lets you watch games live on Thursdays, Sundays and Mondays. This also gives you access to the NFL Network 24/7.
The Premium upgrade costs $5 per month. Read More

The Best Tech to Prepare for Severe Weather

September is National Preparedness Month, and on my blog we’ll be taking a look at all the different ways you can leverage tech to stay safe and protect yourself and your family. One thing you should always be prepared for is severe weather, especially if you live somewhere that’s prone to regular flooding, hurricanes, earthquakes or tornados. However, even if your location isn’t disaster prone, there are steps you should take to be prepared in case of any kind of emergency!

While there’s plenty of tech you should already have available just in case (things like hand-crank operated radios, extra batteries, duct tape), today I’m going to take a look at a few great pieces of tech you probably haven’t thought of but will definitely come in handy should the big storm hit your home this year.

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TODAY: Medical apps, sites to keep your family healthy

This week I had the pleasure of working on a segment with Dr. Keri Peterson, Internal Medicine and contributor to Women’s Health Magazine!  We discussed some incredible medical apps and sites that we feel people should really consider for their own benefit. Oh, and I was joined on-air by Al Roker and none other than Brooke Shields!

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Can Bunkr Kill PowerPoint?

We’ve written before about the ubiquity of Microsoft Office products and their transition to mobile environments. Admittedly, they’ve been a little slow on the uptake, which created an opportunity for a number of companies to develop software meant to replace these seemingly irreplaceable office tools.

Bunkr is one such of those tools—a new product from a French startup that explicitly wants to be a PowerPoint killer. Whether it can dethrone the reigning champion of the slideshow is a separate question, but it does offer a lot of nifty features if you’re looking for an alternative to Office. For starters, Bunkr looks and feels a lot like PowerPoint. If you’re familiar with using that, making a switch to something new shouldn’t feel that weird. But Bunkr offers a few features that make it stand out. Read More

HLN: Upcoming mobile games to watch out for

Video games can already be addictive, but some mobile games are really taking it to the next level. On HLN, I explain how even though games like Candy Crush may be simple to learn and to play but that doesn’t mean they can’t also suck you in for hours. With the explosion in mobile over the past few years, mobile game development has never been hotter and now tons of games are vying to be the next Candy Crush. Keep reading for links to all the apps I mentioned on-air.

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CUBED: Work smarter on your smartphone with “Documents to Go” app

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: entrepreneur Jodie Yule is constantly traveling and working from her smartphone, but needs a way to get even more done while on the go. Right now, she’s juggling an endless stream of office documents coming in, but she has to wait until she’s back at the office to work on anything. Since she has a smartphone on her all the time, wouldn’t it make more sense if she was able to squeeze some work in during all those little moments in-between deliveries of her product, a weekly newsletter delivered to restaurants and coffee shops called “Coffee News”?

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