Have an Opinion!

In a recent blog entry I spoke about the need to be careful with what you write in Twitter because of its public nature, and the lessons that can be learnt from high profile cases of those in the public eye. The flipside of this is that actually having a strong opinion can also be a very positive thing. The fear of being harshly judged publically can be off-putting for any organisation looking to run a PR campaign, but there is nothing wrong with having a strong point of view (perhaps even a controversial one!) if it is backed up by a strong argument and sensible reasoning. Naturally, the Press love a ‘maverick’ and a badly judged claim can backfire on you, but if you have a ground-breaking product or development idea then why not shout about it? Apple is a good example of a company that dared to be different (bucking the trend for a traditional all-PC market), offering a great alternative that caught the consumer market’s attention. But any excellent idea that goes against the status quo will make editors sit up and take notice (and probably your potential customers and competitors too) and is likely to see your reputation grow as an expert in your field. You just need to find something that fits the bill now!

As mentioned in an earlier post, Apple announced its iPad Mini this week. Proving it still intends to be a big player in the IT market, Microsoft Chief Steve Ballmer has also suggested it intends to push towards hardware as well as software, as reported by the BBC news website this week. The company is already pushing hard with the launch of Windows 8, which, being touchscreen-based, is also leading Microsoft’s foray into the tablet market with the new Surface product. It will be interesting to see if Microsoft will be able to gather a strong consumer base by offering a third option against Apple and Android – going back to what I spoke about at the beginning of this blog.

Being able to record what you see through the day has been a favourite ‘what if’ for years (well certainly a pub-type discussion anyway!), but it would seem the wonderful world of IT has answered this need, as reported in the Daily Mail this week. The Memoto camera – billed as the ‘Lifelogging camera’ – is a small digital device that clips onto your clothes and effectively takes snapshots of your daily life and automatically uploads them to a webpage. It also tags the location and time – the makers say it goes to an encrypted page that only the user has access to, thus addressing privacy concerns. It makes the mind boggle as to what the device would record – presumably the average office worker would have a fairly similar set of images sat behind their computer all day. And what happens when you need to ‘pay a visit’ for example? Would you actually want all these images? It’s certainly an interesting concept though.