No matter what industry you’re in, you can leverage Rich Site Summary (RSS) feeds to gain a competitive advantage. Whether it’s simply by seeking out all of the best news sources within your field (both the big ones and the obscure) or keeping tabs on your competition, good RSS readers have helped businesses small and large to condense the net — with it’s millions of new news and opinion articles that are published every single day — down into headlines that can be easily skimmed and articles that can be read, archived, or saved for later.

For years, I’ve been using one RSS reader in particular, Google Reader. It has helped me keep up with the various blogs, authors, and websites I read not only to stay in the loop on the latest happenings in the tech world, but also to get the news first, as it happens. When I need to pitch HLN, CNN or the TODAY Show on a new segment idea, my Google Reader account is literally full of hundreds of ideas just waiting for me to sift through. When I need to know what’s happening on the web and across the blogs I respect, I turn to Google reader for information and inspiration. But this expands far beyond tech—no matter what industry you’re in, once you’ve done the work finding the best blogs and websites out there, and have subscribed to their RSS feeds, you’re able to stay on the cutting edge of new trends and be the first to know when major news impacts your business.

Two ways around the Google Reader shut down

In the 8 years Google has been running their extremely popular reader service they have virtually taken over the entire RSS industry. But the service, while the industry standard, apparently doesn’t do anything to help Google’s business model and the search giant announced recently that they’ll be shutting down the service on July 1^st. Now, this doesn’t mean that Google Reader-style RSS readers are necessarily dead in the water, as countless other services have been working over the past few months to create strong platforms for Google Reader users to switch to. But it does mean that you no longer have to rely on RSS itself to serve as the glue behind how you read the news. In fact, this may be the right time to pick an alternative.

Keep Reading this Article at the AT&T Networking Exchange Blog –>

 

 

Earlier this week Apple made a whole bunch of announcement at their keynote at the Worldwide Developers Conference (or WWDC). Most of the event was geared toward developers, so the focus was on software, but Tim Cook and company also revealed some hardware to get consumers excited. There’s a refresh of MacBook Air that’s already available in stores, plus promises of updates to the Mac Pro desktop, as well as the Time Capsule and Airport Extreme.

New MacBook Air
The big news here is that the MacBook Air has a new processor, called the Intel Haswell, that promises both superior performance and better battery life. Apple promises both the 11″ and 13″ models will now have “all day battery life.” What this means in practice is that the 11″ MacBook should get 9 hours of battery life, while the 13″ will get 12 hours. It remains to be seen just how well that works in practice, but even if battery life isn’t quite as-advertised, it will still be significant improvement over current models (compare 9 hour for the 11″ to the previous model’s 5 hours). The new processor will also load programs and graphics faster. The best part may be that the new MacBook Air is already shipping, starting at $999 for the 11″and $1,099 for the 13″ model.

 

New Mac Pro
This was really more of a preview of the new Mac Pro than an announcement. We still don’t have all the nitty-gritty on technical stats, though we can expect to see them this fall as part of Apple’s usual hardware-centric event. The Mac Pro is Apple’s high-end desktop, beloved by video editors, graphic designers and other power users, and it hasn’t seen an update in quite a while (at least by Apple product cycle standards). The Mac Pro has been shrunken down and redesigned, and even though it is a traditional “tower” in the sense of the desktop computer, it looks more like an external harddrive from a few years ago, or even a very space-age bucket. What we do know is that the design is a new way of dealing with the tremendous heat put out by desktop machines, a very real engineering issue, especially for very powerful computers. The Mac Pro promises to be just that, with an Intel Xeon CPU and dual GPUs, plus dual Thunderbolt 2.0, 802.11ac wireless, dual Gigabit Ethernet, HDMI 1.4, and support for 4K displays. It’s a serious upgrade from the current Mac Pro, but we’ll have to wait to get pricing till later in the year.

 

AirPort Extreme and Time Capsule
The AirPort has a brand new look: tall and rectangular, at 4 inches by 6 inches. Apple says it has been completely redesigned, but what’s probably more important to power users is the 802.11ac Wi-Fi. 802.11ac Wi-Fi is also available in the new Time Capsule models, which will still sport 2TB or 3TB of storage space depending on the model you purchase. The 2TB Time Capsule will be $299 and the 3TB will be $399, while the new AirPort Extreme will cost $199. Both are already available from Apple.

 

 

We’ll be talking more in-depth about Apple’s announcements today, but for now here are the highlights from the keynote at the World wide Developer Conference:

New iOS7:
Apple announced a new operating system, iOS7, with a complete design overhaul. All of Apple’s apps, including Photos, Safari, weather, calendar and Game Center, have all been redesigned with a sleeker, more modern feel, including a new font choice (Helvetica) and completely updated color palette.

iOS7 also offers keychain storage through iCloud (which will communicate with OSX Mavericks), AirDrop, smarter multitasking, easier access to device settings, and the ability to update apps in the background. iTunes will now offer radio, a la Pandora or Spotify. Plus Siri’s got a new voice and some new search tricks. Activation Lock, a new security feature, will build on the ability to remotely erase your iPhone. Basically, if someone steals and wipes your iPhone, or you wipe it after it has been stolen, whoever has your phone will be unable to unlock the phone and activate it with new service unless they also know your Apple ID and password.

iOS7 was made available to developers today. Everyone else will have to wait until the fall, when it will presumably ship on new devices.

New MacBook Air
The new MacBook Air starts shipping now. Apple promises all-day battery life, improved CPU responsiveness from updated Haswell processors and much more affordable flash memory prices. 11″ models start at $999 with 128GB of flash storage, 13″ models at $1099 with 128GB of flash storage.

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Collaboration and workflow when you or your coworkers are highly mobile can be tough: accessing documents and keeping them in a usable, standardized format still presents a challenge, especially when you start to have multiple users and multiple devices. The good news is that lots of big organizations have recognized the problem and going for solutions. AT&T recently announced their cloud-based document sharing system, AT&T Mobile Workplace, in an effort to address these exact accessibility and usability issues.

The basic idea behind Mobile Workplace is that anyone in your organization should be able able to access the same document anywhere and from any device. But it’s especially important to keep documents synced and current for the entire company so that no one is working from an old version or overwriting anyone else’s changes. Mobile Workplace’s cloud-based solution takes care of that, both as a desktop client and a mobile app.

Maybe the best feature though is actually just document editing, which can still be laborious or downright impossible on a mobile device. Mobile Workplace makes editing possible and streamlines the process. Plus once documents are synched, they can be edited offline and synched later once an internet connection is available – perfect for flights without WiFi or train rides.

Pricing starts at $6/month/user for the Basic package. There are also enhanced and premium services available depending on which features are right for your business; to learn more about AT&T Mobile Workplace visit the AT&T Small Business site.

A recent article on Quartz by Christopher Mims about Kickstarter brings up an interesting point about the present (and future) nature of Kickstarter projects: Kickstarter recently rejected a smartwatch project that was very similar to the Pebble, perhaps the most famous Kickstarter project ever. The Pebble, an iPhone-compatible smartwatch, raised over $10 million on the site, meaning that Kickstarter as a business made a good chunk of money too. In rejecting the Pebble analogue (called Boddie) Kickstarter is committing to a certain set of company values that aren’t money — at least in the short-term.

Boddie’s rejection can most easily be attributed to new standard for products: Kickstarter is no longer accepting gadget campaigns that only have a rendering as proof of concept. That makes sense, given how many fully-funded gadget projects failed to deliver to backers in a timely manner, or in some cases, failed to deliver at all. It was a source of a lot of online outrage and probably the first truly bad publicity to which the site has ever been subjected.

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