Taking My "Kindle" To Work
With Christmas right around the corner, my “gadgetdar” (gadget radar) has been on high alert. Various evolutions of smart phones, cameras and MP3 players have caught my eye, but lately my eyes have been set, literally, on a Kindle. For those who are not gadget addicts, Kindle is Amazon’s “wireless reading device”, essentially an electronic book which connects wirelessly to a book-download server.
As an owner of a Kindle, a library is essentially at my fingertips. More than 200,000 books are available for easy download, as well as a myriad of newspapers and periodicals—pretty awesome. But, even more impressive than its literature selection is Kindle’s portability, usability and readability.
With HP’s recent announcement of a cheaper process for manufacturing e-paper displays, it is only a matter of time before e-book price-tags drop from their current $350+ price tag to a more affordable level. Not that it matters, Kindle is sold out for the foreseeable future, and offerings from Sony and other competitors are holding their own this holiday season.
It is obvious consumers see the potential of not only Kindle, but of e-book technology as a whole. Who knows? Some day we may all receive our newspapers, textbooks and spy thrillers electronically. However, it is not the consumer application of the e-book which intrigues me, it is the corporate application.
Paper documents are unsecure and wasteful (environmentally and fiscally). Laptops are heavy, unwieldy, and take time to power on and off. As portable as the modern notebook computer is, one must still stop and sit down in order to most optimally use it. Furthermore, many employees acting in a management capacity spend more time reading and reviewing documents than actually creating them.
An e-book modified for business use could connect to secure servers and VPN networks, download PDFs, Word Documents and Powerpoints, while providing a new level of portable readability for the on-the-go modern employee. Bluetooth capabilities could allow employees to quickly swap important documents face-to-face (securely of course). Need to pass out a document at a meeting? Pull out the e-book, and beam it to everyone in the conference room.
Moving forward, as consumer electronics become more feature-rich and advanced, it will be interesting to see how they translate to a business setting. In the meantime I'll be eagerly awaiting Kindle 2.0!
