Carl Weinschenk

Six Reasons Business Should Pay Attention to Social Marketing Facebook seems to always be in the news, and this week is no different. Two of the headlines concerning the company have nothing directly to do with business uses of the platform. However, they do point to nascent trends of which corporate planners should be aware. […]

Anatomy of an Engaging Application Here is something for which the folks who came up with the term “Internet of Things” can take credit: Unlike some other phrases, Internet of Things (IoT) is unapologetically vague. The only vaguer acronym would have been the “Internet of Lots of Stuff.” IoT is a lot more honest than […]

Report Shows Mobile Devices Drive Quarterly Growth; Bing Continues to Gain Market Share Clearly, one of the biggest stories in the last couple of decades has been the rise to ubiquity of cell phones—and later smartphones. It’s reached almost absurd proportions. Many people have more than one device, or more than one subscription for a […]

Seven Tips to Minimize Communications Downtime During Natural Disasters Hurricane/Superstorm Sandy hit the east coast of the United States a year ago this week. It’s a time to take a quick look backward to some pretty dire days and then look ahead to assess whether readiness has improved in the areas impacted by the storm. […]

The Latest in Voice and Speech Technology The weather in the northeast is getting cooler, the trees are turning and the Halloween decorations are up. That means one thing: The holiday shopping season is here. It’s too bad that the consumer electronics world skips autumn, but there are millions of tablets and phablets to sell […]

Eight Tips for Bandwidth Management This week, I had the opportunity to attend Cable-Tec Expo ‘13, the annual engineering conference sponsored by The Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers (SCTE). The gathering, held in Atlanta, was upbeat and well attended. The industry’s technical community clearly has crossed from perceiving the advent of Internet Protocol and the […]

Twelve Hot New Tablets Hitting the Market The acceptance of something as the common wisdom, such as the ascendency of tablet PCs, is no reason to stop paying attention to it. Indeed, once the spotlight is turned off and marketers and technologists ply their trade more deeply, the progress may actually accelerate, but mainly go […]

Leadership Scorecard: The Top Six Telecom Vendors The explosion of electronics of all sorts into everyone’s personal and business life caught the cable and telephone industry a bit flat-footed. Their networks, which are based on coaxial cable in the case of the cable television operators and copper in the case of the telcos, had to […]

Leadership Scorecard: The Top Six Telecom Vendors I don’t generally use personal anecdotes in posts because it seems a bit narcissistic. Categorically refusing to do so, however, in a way is just as narcissistic. In any case, this is a brief story: A couple of months ago, I upgraded to a Samsung Stratosphere II (which […]

The shutdown is over and the default didn’t happen, so it turned out to be a good week. While that drama was playing out in Washington, D.C., a typical mix of important news and good commentary was emerging from other places. Today, I’ll cover some of the highlights. Cisco Trots Out Its Big Numbers to […]

Mid-Market Cloud Services Adoption Trends In a way, the emergence of cloud computing is really what unified communications was about all along. Or, more precisely, doing all the heavy lifting in a place logically “above” the enterprise itself fits in perfectly with the concept of unified communications because it avoids the silos and boundaries at […]

The ABCs of BYOD It may be that more isn’t written about phablets, a cross between a phone and a tablet, because the name and the concept itself seem a bit absurd. They are sort of an electronic liger. Both ligers and phablets do exist, however. While the population of hybrid tigers and lions may […]