Basically, there are two types of tablets. One is Wi-Fi and the other is 3G. Wi-Fi tablets allow you to connect to the Internet using an available WiFi network, whereas, a 3G tablet can connect to the Internet using its built-in GPRS feature using a cell phone connection/SIM. 3G are WiFi enabled as well.

BlackBerry PlayBook is an awesome device. RIM has not yet released any 3G device, but still you can stay connected to the Internet using your BlackBerry smartphone by using one simple software called BlackBerry Bridge, which creates a a bluetooth link between your BlackBerry phone and PlayBook.

Unfortunately, the so far available version of BlackBerry Bridge does not support SMS sending, so here is the way to send SMS text messages from your BlackBerry PlayBook.

We have a BlackBerry application called ‘MessageGateway’. This application once installed on your BlackBerry smartphone, enables you to forward email messages from one or more predefined email addresses as SMS to the number mentioned in the subject line.

It can also forward email as PIN, but let us not discuss it here to keep the things simple.

The simple steps below will guide you to configure your BlackBerry PlayBook to send SMS text messages in no time.

What you need?

1. BlackBerry phone.
2. BlackBerry PlayBook.
3. MessageGateway application for BlackBerry

How to configure?

1. Get MessageGatway application for BlackBerry from any of your favorite stores. A few links are as below.

Buy from: BlackBerry AppWorld. Handango. MobiHand. CrackBerry.

2. Install it on your BlackBerry phone and configure it as in the steps below.

3. Go to where MessageGateway has been installed and click the MessageGateway icon.

4. This will open a new screen as below.

4. Click on the BlackBerry options button to open the context menu and click ‘Add New Account’.

5. Provide configuration values.

• “Account:” This is a name for your reference so that you can remember what this account deals with.
• “Email:” Remember, what MessageGateway does is forward an email from a predefined email address as SMS to the number in the subject line. So here you need to provide an email address configured to receive emails on your BlackBerry phone. This can either be any existing one or you can create a new one.
• “Forward as:” You can configure MessageGateway to forward emails as SMS or BB PIN, so here select ‘SMS’.
• “Status:” This is just to enable and disable forwarding so here we select ‘Active’.
• Click the save button and you are done.

6. Now open an email client on your BlackBerry PlayBook. This can either be your own BlackBerry Bridge email client or any other web based email service.

• Make sure the “From” email is the one you configured in MessageGateway.
• In the “To:” field, type your own email address, that is configured to receive emails on your BlackBerry phone.
• In the “Subject:” field, type cell number of the recipient.
• Type your SMS message in the “Message” field and press send.
• Normal SMS message’s length is 160 characters so try not to exceed it.
• SMS is sent.

In the simplest steps, you just sent an email to your ownself with SMS message in the email’s body and recipient’s number in the subject field.

Get MessageGatway application for BlackBerry from any of your favorite stores. A few links are as below.

Buy from: BlackBerry AppWorld. Handango. MobiHand. CrackBerry.

There has long been a need for a real-time field-force monitoring system where people working in field can report their activities on the spot and management can view it, making sure that what has been reported has indeed been performed at the same location.
Let me explain you this way. Most of the companies have sales force hunting for prospective clients. By the day end, the sales staff needs to submit a report of their activities. If the activity report says that the person visited 35 prospects on a certain day who knows whether these prospects were actually visited. Even if we believe this, how can the management find out how much time was wasted in unofficial activities between one meeting and the other.

With the use of smart phones, installed with a Twitter app, this can very easily be done because every tweet has time and most interestingly these apps can post tweet’s location.

So now, things will work like this. The manager has a Twitter account and his sales force as well.

John Doe, a sales representative visits Amalgamated Chemicals and meets their procurement department. All he needs to do is just tweet the meeting summary immediately after the meeting. This will record tweet’s physical location, as well as the time and the manager can see the activity in real time along with the location on the map where the tweet was made. The location will confirm that the visit was actually made. If the manager wants, he can even tweet back for any instructions.

The next prospective client is hardly a mile away from the first one but manager has no idea about this distance. Looking at the time difference between one meeting and the other and taking a look at the two physical locations on the map linked to the tweet, manager can even see if any time was wasted between the two meetings.

The use is just limited to one’s imagination. You can use it for sales force, maintenance team, courier service, surveys, delivery, logistics, mobile medical teams and more.

And yes, one thing very important. Do not use personal Twitter account here. Make another one for this purpose only otherwise you will end up spending more time in Tweeting than doing work.

Scientists have invested a huge amount of time in inventing some truly effective early warning system for the detection of earthquakes and tsunamis, but so far they have not had any reasonable success.

This does not mean that we should doubt the abilities of scientists, but just that sometimes we simply need a breakthrough and breakthroughs usually take time.

With the increased frequency of earthquakes and tsunamis in the recent past and the amount of loss chained to them, I think scientists should now think in a different angle.

It has long been believed that birds and insects have the ability to sense natural calamities well in advance, this can perhaps be the perfect time to test this belief.

Scientists should take advantage of this sense God has gifted to birds and insects. Coupling it with latest computer technologies, they need to monitor the behaviour pattern of these creatures in normal conditions, weather changes and natural disasters. Once they start understanding behaviour patterns, computers can then easily generate early warnings.

Basically what we need now is to use nature to get warned against the moods of the nature. I am sure, after a few calendar changes on the wall, we will have such a system.

Ever since the beginning of time, technological advancements have been taking place but the pace at which we have experienced this advancement in the last 20 years, we have never seen this pace ever in the entire history.

The main credit goes to the invention called “computer”. In fact, we did not start receiving technological gifts so frequently till the big brains started working on reducing the size and increasing the processing speed of this machine. Once this was in hand and in control, a bombardment of useful gadgets started.

Most of us use these multi-purpose gadgets for one single purpose or fun or as a trend, but there are some people who use them much more smartly and have made their life easier than ever before.

Today, I will tell you the story of a SHEntrepreneur.  SHEntrepreneur stands for “She Entrepreneur” or a lady entrepreneur.

This lady runs a small business, has an office but hardly spends any time sitting in it. You know why? Because she uses technology smartly.

The lady runs a small manufacturing concern. The business by size is small, but still the largest of its nature in the country.

Her weapons include, an ecommerce web site, a laptop which she switches on occassionaly and a BlackBerry smart phone which stays with her 24/7.

The web site is very much content rich and search engine optimised. This means, she receives quite a satisfactory number of visitors from search engines. These people visit the web site and send enquiries or place direct orders.

Orders are received by the despatch department and a copy of them on her BlackBerry. Orders are shipped and another name is added to the list of satisfied customers.

Enquiries too are received on her BlackBerry phone. She replies to queries or sends price quotes from her BlackBerry – instantly.

To send heavier files like product brochures, she has a fit-to-mobile web site module from where she can send documents with just a single click.

Apart from search engines, the company also appears at top in Google Places, which is another source of prospective walk-in customers.

Follow-up in every field of life is very important. Same is in the case of selling.

According to a research conducted by American Sales Management Association;

2% sales are made on 1st contact.
3% on 2nd contact.
5% on 3rd contact.
10% on 4th contact.
And 80% on 5th-12th contact.

She understand this and considers follow-up seriously.

Against every email enquiry received, she places a follow-up reminder flag on her BlackBerry phone. This is BlackBerry’s built-in feature. You can flag an email for follow-up to give you an alert on the specified date and time.

She also uses SMS scheduler for BlackBerry to send automated SMS reminders where suitable.

To avoid writing emails from scratch every time, she has saved several email templates as email drafts. Hence when a common message needs to be sent, she just picks one from the draft.

Existing client-base is a huge asset. If you are not making use of it, you are sitting like a snake on a chest of treasure.

She has an automated newsletter system built in her web site. The system randomly selects a collection of products from the database and emails it in form of a well formatted email newsletter to the existing customers, as well as the subscribers of the mailing list on a weekly basis.

She has not left social media marketing behind and keeps her Twitter account updated with the latest products to offer and related interesting news from the world.

To be honest, perhaps she has hardly every logged in to her Twitter account but still keeps tweeting. How does she do it? Well, the idea is simple. She has an RSS feed of her products on her web site. This feed is automatically fetched by a service called Google Feedburner and regularly sent as a Twitter post.

What she has created is an infinite loop of automated tasks and we can learn a lot from her practices. Luckily, the lady in fact is none other than my own wife – Farnaz.

Chat has been there for years now. It evolved mainly from IRC like mIRC to today’s better chat options like MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, GoogleTalk, etc.

Most of us chat for personal communication or for fun and now corporate chat clients are also making place in corporate environments but have we ever thought or calculated what does chatting actually cost to a company?

Let me give you taste of what you lose when you allow chat in a corporate environment.

Let us say, you have a company with ten people. You have allowed chat over your corporate network. Usual chat pattern of people is 10 seconds of chat and 10 seconds of work, that is, they chat for 10 seconds and then switch window to work and then switch back. This thing goes on through out the day.
10 seconds chat and 10 seconds work means that the person is just working half the time. So if a routine workday is 8 hours, the person is only working for 4 hours.

Let us go further and do some calculations.

If you pay an average $10 an hour for an 8 hour day, you are paying $80 a day.

Multiply this amount by 20 working days a month, you are paying $1,600 a month.

By allowing to chat in your company, you actually are paying $20 per hour and not $10 because keeping in mind the 10:10 chat pattern, the person is working half day.

In other words, you are paying $800 per month extra for just chatting.

So at $10 per hour, 8 hours a day, 20 days a month and 12 months a year, you are paying $19,200 per year.

Since the person works half day and chats the other half, you actually are paying $9,600 for not doing any company work.

This is not all. Remember, I just mentioned above that your company has 10 people so let us multiply it by 10. This makes $96,000 per year for wasting time.

What if the average salary is $20 and not $10. You are paying $192,000 extra.

Do this calculation with your own company size and average salary, you will understand what you are losing.

In my last post, I discussed whether we really need a tablet. The need differs from person to person but I think that now tablet makers need to think in a different way.

They have seen the success of tablet and they now must decide if they want to present it as a laptop replacement or a cellphone alternate because soon people will start getting tired of carrying three different things for the same purpose – a laptop, a cellphone and a tablet.

In my opinion, a tablet cannot be a phone’s replacement because of its size but it surely can replace a laptop if its size is a bit increased.

Imagine a 15″+ tablet, preferably 17″, with HD wide screen display.

OS similar to what it is at the moment, but better facility interface for the office suites so that formatting the documents and drawing tables is no more a hassle.

An improved mechanism of copy/paste and surely a wider virtual keyboard.

Hand writing recognition enabled to write with stylus or draw anything freehand.

A slim dock station for use on an office table. The dock station should support connectivity with a simple set of USB keyboard and mouse, but must have an option for bluetooth devices as well.

If dock can be connected to speakers for watching movies, that would be great.

And yes, a very slim slide-out handle to carry so that it can be carried even without a carrying case.

More battery life so users can work without the fear of draining the battery out.

If I can have something like this, I think I will no more need my PC or laptop.