Big Business : We Heart the iPad
It would seem the Big Business world has a serious man-crush on Apple and their iPad :
Reservations aside, Wells Fargo saw how quickly the iPad might take hold amid businesses the weekend it was released. Finance executives of large companies -- those that generate more than $50 million in sales -- accessed corporate accounts with iPads, says Amy Johnson, a Wells Fargo vice president who works on the company’s online portal and mobile strategy.
Johnson used one of the iPads bought by Wells Fargo to demonstrate financial products during a May 13-14 conference. She says she now carries the iPad with her everywhere.
Hmmm... Wells Fargo. SAP AG. Tellabs. Daimler AG. What do you think they know that you don’t?
Other companies using the iPad at work include Daimler’s Mercedes-Benz. Sales representatives in 40 U.S. dealerships in late May began using iPads on showroom floors to order on-the- spot financing options for customers, says Andreas Hinrichs, vice president of marketing at Mercedes-Benz Financial.
The company now is considering doling out iPads to all of its 350 U.S. dealerships.
This is the power of taking information with you anywhere. This is the dream of the paperless office writ large. This is the future, and it is happening now.
And this is making the most of your customer’s valuable time. Think about it.
Shocked! Shocked We Are!
Color us mildly surprised to find out some of Apple’s most staunch critics are on the take :
What most readers don’t know is that the Berkman Center and many of its leading professors have financial and personal ties to Google and other tech companies—ties that are not disclosed when these academics speak or publish, and that I discovered after auditing a class with Zittrain.
Oh, the tangled inter-webs we weave...
The class, it turned out, was funded by “a special grant from Microsoft,” according to Stanford Law School Dean Larry Kramer. Students were not made aware of Microsoft’s involvement.After finding out about the Microsoft grant, I became more curious about how academic work about the Internet is funded, and began asking the Berkman Center and Zittrain for more details. According to a statement provided on June 10 by Berkman co-directors John Palfrey and Urs Gasser, Google is the center’s top corporate backer and its fourth-largest donor (Harvard University is fifth), providing roughly $500,000 over the last two years to support an overall annual operating budget of approximately $5 million. Palfrey and Gasser say the Berkman project receiving the most financing from Google, StopBadware, is “now a separate 501(c)(3) entity,” but when I spoke to the project’s director, Maxim Weinstein, in May, Weinstein said he still works in Berkman-leased office space in Cambridge and that actual plans to phase out StopBadware’s relationship with Berkman are “fuzzy.”
The only thing ‘fuzzy’ here are the deplorable ethics being used. Sorry, we stand corrected - there were no ethics being used in a clear-cut case of conflict of interest.