There are a lot of lessons to learn from economics, which the Austrian School of thought defines as the study of human actions. Humans have evolved, and our systems have evolved along with us, to build, trade, learn, improve, make progress, overcome challenges, and organize human societies in ways that support various social goals. In the West, particularly America, one of those goals became “full employment,” a vague term that left no room for nuance, much less the disruptions native to huge, complex financial markets. Astride the world like a colossus after World War II, America saw its economy boom and the computer era begin as technology began its now-70-year ascent.

A boom, not a kaboom

Predictions are hard to make, especially about the future. This nugget of wisdom was somehow overlooked as we sought to create our own reality by legislative fiat and industrial might. In 1948, this peculiarly American hubris led the father of cybernetics, Norbert Wiener—a “rock star” among scientists then as iMac creator Steve Jobs was more recently—to pen a dramatic letter of warning to the head of the United Auto Workers, Walter Reuther. The advent of computers, Wiener said, would bring about systems that are “extremely flexible, and susceptible to mass production, and will undoubtedly lead to the factory without employees [featuring] the automatic automobile assembly line.” It was Wiener’s apocalyptic prediction that with such an “industrial set-up” the resulting unemployment would be “disastrous.”

Of course, the sun also rises, and Wiener was so mistaken about unemployment that physicist Wolfgang Pauli’s famous retort about string theory—that an assertion can be “so far off it’s not even wrong”—seems reasonable to apply. In fact, employment figures in the U.S. swelled to a historic peak of 146 million in 2007 from 59 million in 1950 as technology marched in unrelenting progress—bringing the laser printers, plasma display rentals, and Apple products like the iPad that define modern technology. Starting in that same year, U.S. GDP increased by a factor of nearly seven by 2012, from $2 million to $13.6 (in 2005 dollars). Still, the robot assembly lines were being built, and auto workers lost hundreds of thousands of jobs between 1948 and 1990, but mass unemployment à la Wiener never happened. Why?

A history lesson first

Between about 1810 and 1820, a group called the Luddites destroyed then-revolutionary power looms and weaving frames in the north of England. Although some of their motives were born of wider concerns about class and privilege, this assemblage of mostly fabric artisans also saw technological progress as a route to unemployment, particularly their own. Predictions of “permanent technological unemployment” are revived from time to time, and the latest may be a working paper done for the National Bureau of Economic Research in late 2012. Titled “Smart Machines and Long-Term Misery,” Boston University economist Laurence Kotlikoff and Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs pose a question: Are machines so smart, with such powerful CPUs, that they no longer need unskilled labor to operate?

Now let’s back up. Mass unemployment didn’t follow even the loss of entire industries, like occurred in America in the postwar era. Creative destruction implies not only the end of something, but the beginning of something else. Joseph Schumpeter explains that it would have been silly to try saving the buggy whip industry in 1905, too, as whip sales began slipping with the increase in horseless carriage sales. With the auto industry would come much greater economic growth, more companies hiring more people to build more new things that will replace other aging things, and the cycle of “creative destruction” continues. It’s how we got render farms, it’s how we got tablet PCs, and it’s how we’ll get to the future. It’s not neat and clean, and it’s certainly not predictable.

The lesson?

The lesson is a tough one, and runs counter to the human predilection for control, certainty, and order. Progress, unfortunately, is messy, unpredictable, counter-intuitive at times, and only appears clearly in hindsight. In our present Age of Electronic Miracles, the continuously increasing power of computers is evident if you rent laptops and compare specs to just two years ago. The challenge, as always, is to remember that not everything “new” signifies progress. We can see now, for example, that progress in the MacBook line means Thunderbolt connectors instead of Firewire, and the loss of the internal DVD—which, of course, means fewer jobs at Firewire cable makers and more jobs making external optical drives.

Need a Mac or a Windows workstation? A call to (877) 266-7725 or a short message puts an experienced Account Executive to work finding just the right high-end computer rentals or a solution to your digital storage problem. Already know what you need? Use our Quick Rental Quote form and get it now. Whatever the technology challenge, your solution is always CRE!

E3, the world’s premier trade show for computer and video games and related products, is coming to the Los Angeles Convention Center from June 11-13, 2013. Operated by the Entertainment Software Association (ESA), the annual show brings together the top publishers of interactive games for video game consoles, smartphones, handheld game devices (a definition that even fits our iPad rental), personal computers, and the web.

E3 draws tens of thousands of creative pros to a single location to continue the ongoing process of creating the future of interactive entertainment. The most influential people from the most innovative companies attend this event. It’s the place to see trailblazing technologies, brand new products for computers, the latest video game consoles, upcoming titles running on handheld systems and tablet PCs, games/apps for mobile and social platforms, and multiplayer web-based adventures.

RCX, or Radio Control Expo, is taking over the Long Beach Convention Center on June 1-2, 2013 to bring everything related to “RC entertainment” to Southern California. Manufacturers, wholesalers, retailers, designers, hobbyists, and competitors will arrive by the thousands to see new products, network with other fans and RC pros, and have a whole lot of fun. Even if you go to run a booth on the expo floor, with a bright LCD touchscreen monitor rental inviting passersby to stop in, you’re bound to take a few minutes off here and there for some flight time!

There is so much entertainment planned that you really have to visit the RCX website’s “attractions” page to take it all in. Some highlights:

• Mech Warefare creates a real-life robotic combat competition that pits participants against each other, piloting custom 1/24th-scale robots armed with Airsoft weapons and other systems.
• Take a test flight in the Horizon Try Me Cage, getting hands-on and flying some of the hottest indoor airplanes and micro-copters from Horizon Hobby’s huge line of aircraft products.
• The Construction Zone at RCX will feature highly-detailed, customized, and functional 1:14- and 1:16-scale model trucks. Scale RC trucking requires slow, precise driving skills along with the assembly of a high-quality model.
• Crazy TV host and Hollywood car designer Fireball Tim will be at this year’s RCX Show signing his new insane children’s book Fireball Tim’s BIG BOOK of Wacky Rides!

Want to strategize an appearance at one or both of these events? There’s still time to get the right event production rentals, so make a call to (877) 266-7725, send a message, or log on to our Quick Rental Quote page.

Adobe’s announcement that its leading-edge Creative Studio programs are now “the Creative Cloud,” available exclusively via subscription, has generated more than the usual wailing and gnashing of teeth in the tech sector. Interestingly, in the past this kind of anger was typically directed at Apple, not “trusty old Adobe,” as people have called it for years. There are still details to be worked out, but the basics are clear enough, and we have them for you.

Creative Studio’s switcheroo

First, there’s a huge misconception, a basic error repeated even by “tech pundits” that should know better. Some people interpret “Cloud” in “Creative Cloud” to mean that the applications will be web-based, like the online Photoshop Express that makes “web crawling” seem positively supersonic. No deadline-driven designer will tolerate the lag of an 800MB photo file loading into a browser. Nobody at Adobe, which has helped power the Information Age since before you could rent laptops, would ask them to. The programs install locally and Adobe checks your subscription status now and then to confirm its validity. If you stop paying, you’re turned off.

The whole thing started in earnest with the release of Creative Suite 6 (CS6) in 2012, when Adobe offered it on DVD (the whole shebang is over $2,000) as well as by monthly subscription ($49.99) to the new Creative Cloud. For that, a user gets all the CS6 programs—but to sweeten the deal, students and current owners of CS versions 3 to 5.5 get the first year for $29.99 monthly. A single app (think Photoshop, the one indispensable program for all creatives) is $19.99 a month or some $240 annually. Doesn’t matter if you work in Windows or on an iMac, both OS types are covered as long as you’re net-connected, and you can install both.

Reasonable rants

So, does it cost you more or less? We’ll give you the conclusion of a good dollar-comparison discussion that you should read after this blog:

• If you are a professional and use CS6 extensively, and always upgrade, you will definitely save money.
• If you use several CS6 programs and upgrade every other year or so, you may break even but are likely to pay more.
• If you use just Photoshop or another single application and/or upgrade rarely, there’s only a 50% chance that your costs will go up. Unfortunately, the other 50% chance is that they’ll go way up.

The core problem is that many people resist the notion of another monthly bill, like an additional insurance payment. They would rather buy software and use it until it doesn’t work anymore, rather than be compelled to pay—and to upgrade yearly! If you’re already doing high-end work on Mac Pros and Apple Cinema Display Rentals, running CS6 day and night, these new costs are probably incidental to you (or corporate accounting). For a freelancing college student or a self-employed designer, every penny counts.

Okay, then: Why?

Adobe claims that the move from CS to CC was done to put new features in the hands of users as easily and quickly as possible, instead of their waiting for yet another update or major release. The truth is probably a bit more complicated. Veteran Photoshop trainer John Arnold blogged that “50% of the people I talk to…are using a pirated copy [since] they feel they have to have it but they can’t afford it.” Arnold says the iconic program is “already way over priced” and “out of reach of most amateur photographers.”

Adobe has been having difficulty persuading creative freelancers and small firms—who are paying for render farms, mass storage, and other things—to pay for upgraded software when older (legacy) versions will do. (Microsoft and other companies seem to have decided that subscription services are the solution, too.) Low- and no-cost Photoshop alternatives on Mac and Windows include Rawstudio,GIMP, and GraphicConverter, all very good programs. However, Adobe products are uniformly excellent, and there is no way a pro CS user will ever accept a lesser program as a substitute.

 Verdict?

If you make money in modern media, you must have industry-standard tools. You have to have what you have to have, a circular logic that pro users—freelancers, corporate employees, educators, and grad students—recognize and accept. Both amateurs and certain professionals, however, will have the entire spectrum of reactions, considering the amazing range of people using Adobe products. Tell us your experiences and we’ll share them with other readers when we return to update you on this continuing saga.

CRE is the smart source (!) for everything you need, from high-powered computer rentals with Adobe software installed for graphics and post-production to audio visual (AV) equipment rentals . Your solutions on-site, on the road, or at a conference are all right here. Call an experienced Account Executive at (877) 266-7725, send a message, or visit our Quick Rental Quote page if you know what you need. We are here, and we’re ready to help!

We reported in September 2011 on the growing trend toward webcasting, by entertainment companies and conference organizers alike, and the doomsayers and anti-futurists predicted at the time that Google and other Evil Corporations would take over, well, everything. Instead, huge numbers of individuals—singers, musicians, dancers, poets, rappers, actors, comedians—have taken advantage of the technology to distribute their own material. The advantages are numerous: A great, transparent business model; no bosses, no censorship, no second-hand smoke; and the money goes directly to the creators, not to or through a middleman. This trend is not just accelerating. It’s at the “goodness, gracious, great balls of fire” level and still rising.

Comedy makes serious money

Comedians Louis CK, Aziz Ansari, and Jim Gaffigan have recently brought big-time media attention to artist-produced programming on the Internet. Last summer (2012), Louis sold all seats on his 67-show tour via his own website,  and held scalping to under 1% of sales. He also tallied 220,000 downloads of his “Live at the Beacon Theater” special, which cost $250,000 to produce and sold for $5 each ($1.1 million gross). If you downloaded it to a Mac or PC, you could easily prepare it for viewing on your smartphone, desktop, laptop, tablet PC rental, or pretty much anything with a screen. And Louis allowed buyers to download it “a few times” if they needed to, on the honor system. It worked.

Musicians have also begun to take the self-produced route in recent years. Songstress Ani DiFranco gave some suitably squishy egalitarian-ish arguments for avoiding a “corporate sellout” and starting her own company, Righteous Babe. Fact is, she’s making a lot more money now by leveraging social media and all the full array of CTS (“contemporary tech stuff”) to stay in touch with her legions of fans. You can tune her in, along with Louis and the others, wherever your WiFi- and/or 4G-connected smartphone, Android tablet, or iPad rental can get a signal (most anywhere). Louis CK and Ani are popular, and rightly so, but the term “content” extends to the rest of the verse, prose, audio, and images (still graphics, animation, video) that fill every nook and cranny of the Internet with come-ons, how-tos, and everything else. There’s content, then there’s content.

Everybody slow down a bit

If you hear complaints about “losing money” in the “wider” (or “broader”) digital entertainment market of today, you can bet they’re coming from traditional middlemen. Yes, the Internet has altered (okay, demolished) the traditional ways content agencies, brokers, syndicates, and even TV networks make money. Still, economic data show that, year over year, far more money is entering the overall market, much more content is being produced, and entrepreneurs are finding lots of new ways to create value. Post-production pros working with our render farms and audio pros working with PC-driven digital mixing consoles know how to create the material. That’s because content creators, the actual people sitting at the potent Mac Pro rental workstations doing the creating, must stay updated and leading-edge. They must keep pace with the technology.

The problem is that marketing execs are not keeping pace, and have no such ever-present pressure. They are not compelled to upgrade their approach like a digital artist is compelled to install the latest JavaScript update. The primary challenge, of course, is discovering and developing new methods of tapping into the new and bigger revenue streams being produced by the wider entertainment industry. Legacy firms will encounter more competitors, and individual artists—writers, musicians, poets, filmmakers, performance artists, and (of course!) comedians—will be running their own shows, literally.

“The Sky Is Rising”

If you hear about arts and/or entertainment industries “dying” or “being destroyed,” remember: That’s not it at all. Rather, companies are not rising to meet the new business model and marketing challenges, despite the greater long-term opportunity. Clearly, there are many exciting new opportunities, plural, and just as many ways to succeed. Nothing’s guaranteed in life, but look at the recent trends (as reported in The Sky Is Rising at Techdirt.com):

• Entertainment spending as a portion of income: UP 15% between 2000 and 2008
• Employment in the entertainment sector: UP 20%, with indie artists seeing 43% growth
• Overall entertainment industry revenues: UP 66% between 1998 and 2010

Direct-to-consumer marketing can work for many products and services. It only took this long in the entertainment world because of the obstructionism of dying institutions, old business models, and maladaptive corporate cultures. Economist Joseph Schumpeter had some penetrating insights about “creative destruction” that we will consider in an upcoming blog, insights that will add to your understanding of the powerful forces unleashed by nothing more than the human imagination—as well as the countervailing forces of the status quo, always and everywhere an impediment to progress. It’s the oldest battle on Earth.

If you’ve got a battle coming up—say, planning for a big annual conference—then we’re the best ally you could have. Get the trade show convention rentals and the first-rate advice you need by calling an experienced Account Executive at (877) 266-7725, sending a message, or using our Quick Rental Quote form. However you contact us, we get on the job for you right away. Call today!

In our recent review of technology foreseen by Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek, we discussed the real-time, spoken translation offered by Jibbigo and other apps that run on computers, iPads, Android tablets, and smartphones. Yet there are two other final frontiers in translation: (1) real-time translation of text input for messaging, chat, and phone texting; and (2) real-time translation of written material captured by camera (signs, menus). It all started with optical character recognition (OCR) software, which is now so ubiquitous that it’s typically a freebie on both computer rentals and new retail units. Talking translators are fun, but their improvement typically hinges on increasing numbers of users adding pronunciation nuances to the “sonic database,” which takes a little time. Translation apps for texting and deciphering text in images will mature first, but the Universal Translator is not far away.

The iPhone leads the way

Well, the iPhone and Sendboo lead the way, to be precise. Sendboo, an IM (instant messaging) app for iOS, translates between a chosen language pair. With over 30 languages already supported—from Arabic, Chinese, Czech, and English to Dutch, French, Italian, Polish, and dozens more—Sendboo is making itself useful to much of the world, but cramps its own style by being an iPhone exclusive. There is no Android version, despite the huge market for that OS, and neither is there a browser version to use on your MacBook Pro rental or home PC.

None of that would be a concern if the app was lousy. It’s not. In fact, Dave Johnson, a reporter for CBS News Moneywatch, discussed his own experiences with Sendboo in a February article. He tested it with his wife, who speaks French and Russian fluently, and judged the translations to be “both adequate and essentially instantaneous.” Johnson concluded that “the conversation [was] as fast and fluid as any IM client” and had “no lag.” However, there is that small matter of iPhone exclusivity—of course, that should be “iOS exclusivity” since the app will run on our iPad rental, too. That it won’t run on any kind of computer or Android device is strange since the Android market dwarfs iOS, so we’ll keep an eye out for new Android versions to join the two iOS versions: a free one with ads, and a $4 one without.

Point, click, translate

Quest Visual, the developers behind WordLens, call their app “a Babel Fish in your pocket,” claiming it will “translate text by pointing your phone at it.” Results are not guaranteed, and complaints led to some quick ameliorative bug fixes, but the basic process is dead simple: You simply point your phone or tablet’s camera at the words on a menu, poster, or road sign, and WordLens will translate them, in real time, into your chosen language. Translated text is overlaid on the live camera view, which one reviewer called “kind of a wow moment (when it works).” This one has only recently branched out from its iOS-only roots, so it may be subject to additional bugs when running on a tablet PC rental or any other Android-based mobile device with a good camera.

Further confusing things is the iOS pricing, which got enough complaints to spur a recent bug-fix-and-new-feature upgrade. The free demo app (not available on Android) includes no language packs, but does have “text reversal” and “text white-out” test modes. With the $4.99 paid version you get one free “language pack”—the current roster is English paired with Spanish, French, Italian, or German—and can make in-app purchases of additional packs for another $4.99 each. With no interoperability with your iMac or even your laptop, you will have to keep all language packs installed at all times, which can gobble storage space if you travel a lot and start adding more languages. Clearly, though, Quest Visual is a responsive developer, so complain and they’ll fix that, too.

At CRE, we are responsive, too—to your every need, every question, every challenge. Whether you need render farms to push projects out the door, or great trade show convention rentals to pull people to your booth, we are ready to help. Call us at (877) 266-7725, send a message, or fill out the Quick Rental Quote form and let us know what you need. We are here, and we’re always ready! Call now!

In all the talk about the never-ending debut of Windows 8—and there has been a veritable tidal wave of verbiage—there have been a few references to the inauspicious debut of New Coke in 1985. Last year, Microsoft tied a much-changed Windows 8 to its new Surface devices, wagering that a ton of marketing hoopla would establish them as competitors to our iPad rental. But the public isn’t buying it (or them). At the point in the New Coke story where the public made its preferences known, Coca-Cola did the right thing, right away. It brought the favored flavor back as “Classic Coke” while “unhitching the wagon” from the newfangled, widely detested recipe. Subsequent years saw huge sales increases for the firm.

The Coca-Cola chairman and CEO at the time, Roberto Goizueta, recounted the company’s New Coke maneuvers in a 1995 interview, declaring that company execs “really were ready to do whatever was necessary” to make things right. In Microsoft’s case, instead of acknowledging the problems, execs are doubling down on Metro. Many tech bloggers are ready to dump the “new, unimproved” Metro look in favor of getting Windows 7′s Aero UI back, or some of it, anyway. The question rang out on ZDNet: “Does [Microsoft chief Steve] Ballmer have the guts to admit he made a mistake and give users what they clearly want?” It’s a mystery, but there are a few clues, so let’s do some sleuthing…

Windows 8 and Windows RT sales

NetMarketShare regularly reports worldwide tech statistics, and the latest news about Windows 8 and Windows RT is not good at all. How “not good” is it? In April 2013′s report on OS use, Windows 8 was at a meager 3.82%, which means Windows 8 still lags behind Microsoft’s last OS failure, Vista, after about nine months on the market. Tablet PCs and other touchscreen devices with Windows 8 and Windows RT totaled 0.02% and 0.00%, respectively—and you read that last figure right. The launch of the Surface RT is probably the worst in Microsoft history.

The release of Windows 8.1 sometime next month will, according to top tech writer Mary Jo Foley, mark the return of the “lost” Start button, as well as an Aero-influenced UI. In a recent ZDNet debate, it was determined by a wide majority that Windows 8 had already failed, and the only remaining question was whether or not it could be saved. Now, there will always be the need for the desktop PC and general-purpose computer rental, so they’re not going away. So the next question is: Will Microsoft keep doubling down on Metro?

The future comes a day at a time

Sure, we’re moving into a new era, a “post-PC” future, with tablets and smartphones becoming more powerful, more necessary, more intimately integrated into our lives. Desktop PCs are not going away because of this, any more than mainframes disappeared when PCs debuted—because we regularly do any number of things that require an iMac or an HP Pavilion, things that can’t be done that easily with an Android tablet or an iPhone. Furthermore, even if it’s true that much of our computing (and even more of our storage) will be cloud-based, using a keyboard is still the easiest way for human beings to enter data besides dictation. (Think you can dictate an Excel spreadsheet?)

Windows 8 represents a colossal failure, and not just because of its bad design. If Microsoft stays the course it appears to have set—“appears” because so much is unknown, misunderstood, deceptive—it could be the end of Windows’ dominance in end-user computing. Such Wall Street denizens as KPCB (Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers) and Goldman Sachs are on record stating that Windows market share has peaked. From here on, they imply, it’s downhill all the way to the dustbin of history. All we can tell you for certain is that we’ll keep you posted!

With wide-ranging, state-of-the-art expertise, our Account Executives can help you set up a new production workflow with a Mac Pro rental and mass storage, or show off your corporate pride with thoroughly modern and stylish trade show convention rentals. Call us at (877) 266-7725, send a message, or visit the Quick Rental Quote form if you know what you need. Whenever you’re ready, we’re here to help!

Gartner predicts that the worldwide public cloud services market will top $131 billion for 2013, an 18.5% increase over 2012′s $111 billion. The largest segment is cloud advertising at 48% of the total market (2012), but infrastructure as a service (Iaas) is the fastest growing.

In 2012, IaaS—cloud storage, computing, and printing services—grew 42.4%, reaching $6.1 billion, and is expected to hit $9 billion in 2013. Here’s the complete breakdown of cloud services and their share of 2012 revenues:

• Cloud advertising; 48%
• (BPaas) business process services, second-largest market segment after advertising; 28%
• (Saas, Software as a Service) application services; 14.7%
• (IaaS) system infrastructure services; 5.5%
• Management and security services; 2.8%
• (PaaS, Platform as a Service) application infrastructure services; 1%

The various cloud services segments are separated by large gaps and are growing at different rates, so it is actually a bit early to tell what the relative sizes will be in a mature industry. Despite this uncertainty, there is clearly strong and growing demand for every kind of cloud service. Part of this is because the business decision to use cloud services is as clear as the one that leads companies to rent laptops for conferences and temporary projects—it lets you avoid the expense of hardware purchases and the hassle of repairs, maintain at least 99% uptime, and watch everything just work. Cloud service providers make some of the very same arguments.

Global market growing

When Gartner looks at the global cloud services market, it finds that emerging regions—North Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, etc.—have high growth, but smaller markets. (The exception is China, which is both large and growing.) Conversely, more mature regions—Europe, North America, Japan, the mature Asian/Pacific economies—have larger markets, but low growth. When entering a new foreign market, Apple, like many successful firms, uses cross-cultural marketing techniques to reach the particular nations and cultures involved. Viewing each country or region with regard to its unique cultures, languages, and traditions is just good business, which is why Apple does it for everything from the MacBook to the iPhone. Generally speaking, cloud service providers entering a foreign market will succeed to the degree that they succeed at this.

First, of course, cloud service providers must recognize the opportunity that is beyond the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. Of the total world spending on new cloud services from now through the end of 2016, Gartner expects the North American market to account for 59%, Europe 24%. Smaller markets—led by “Greater China,” Indonesia, India, Argentina, Mexico, and Brazil—may account for fewer dollars in spending, but will achieve higher growth rates. Gartner’s chief of research, Ed Anderson, advises the many cloud service providers to serve the mature markets while reaching out to the emerging ones “to capitalize on the high growth of these regions, particularly Latin America and Greater China.”

If your firm is growth-oriented, we have productivity solutions that can save you precious capital, free you from the indebtedness that robs you of flexibility when you most need it, and help you be as productive as possible. It works with render farms like it works with mass storage or breakout session equipment—no investment, no headaches. It just works. Call us at (877) 266-7725, send a message, or fill out the Quick Rental Quote form.

The CA World 2013 conference, put on by IT leader CA Technologies, just wrapped up after four nonstop days in Las Vegas. Although famous for its first-rate educational sessions, more than 300 of which are already available online, the “big deal” this year was the announcement of CA Clarity Playbook. Now just hold on a minute: Is this company suggesting that there’s something going on with today’s technology (or people) that needs clarification? Say what?

Clarity for parity

It’s not a new problem, actually; it could be argued that poor communication is the cause of most of the world’s ills, from religious animosities to all-out war. The high-tech workplaces, intellectual property (IP) issues, and “creative destruction” associated with technology firms (and technological progress) are all battlefields of a kind, and clear communication is critical. CA Clarity Playbook is an iPad app that does a good job of integrating goals and strategies into the “operating reality” of a business, specifically to improve (1) communication and (2) decision making.

CA Clarity Playbook uses a “mobile dashboard” model for the app, which is HTML5-compliant. It will operate on devices like our MacBook Pro rental and Windows laptops, since Safari, Internet Explorer, Chrome, and other browsers support the standard. It is likely that CA will develop versions for Android and Windows, too, to serve their many customers that are using smartphones, tablets, tablet PC rentals, and other devices. Still, CA Clarity Playbook was designed for “the iPad first, web second,” in yet another indication of how Apple has gained “pride of place” among digital doohickeys.

Using a common language

Eveline Oehrlich of Forrester Research expects the new CA Clarity Playbook app to help people communicate better in the corporate environment, which is the best way to avoid the proverbial “unintended consequences.” In fact, she says, a prime focus of good IT is to “help people get better at communicating and connecting. Tools like this make people connect.” If confusion reigns, and IT doesn’t stay abreast of business functions and goals, performance suffers. “We become dinosaurs if we don’t change,” Oehrlich adds. The best way for IT managers to do that, she suggests, is to stop all the “servers and availability and performance” talk, and engage business execs on their own terms, in their own language.

If you thought, “Hey, that’s a lot of power for an iPad app,” you’re right. CA Clarity Playbook is actually delivered to customers as SaaS (Software as a Service) at the enterprise level, and the iPad app merely grants access to the powerful tools now on the company server(s). If you’re an exec responsible for assessing market conditions as they change, as well as getting event production rentals for an upcoming conference, Clarity Playbook may be just the thing you need. One caveat: The CA pitch is that the “days of the annual, often manual, plan are gone” and that you have to “plan perpetually” now. Perhaps you’re doing fine already. Perhaps the communication at your fir
m is good. But it wouldn’t hurt to check things out and get, you know, a little clarity on the subject.

Let’s be clear about this, too: CRE really is your one-stop shop for high-tech, post-production gear, as well as trade show convention rentals for making the best impression. Call us now at (877) 266-7725, send a message, or fill out the Quick Rental Quote form. CRE: Clearly the best.

If you’re keeping track, the world is turning out a lot more like Gene Roddenberry visualized it in Star Trek than how George Lucas did in Star Wars. (And isn’t trekking better than warring anyway?) While we’re still waiting on Death Stars, light sabres, and ’droids with English accents, the technology of the United Federation of Planets has been showing up for some time now—their communicator became our clamshell cellphone, their data cards our flash memory, their tricorder our iPad rental. The latest time-warped delivery from the crew of the U.S.S Enterprise? Mobile, universal speech translators. Really! (We’ll review desktop applications for translating text and speech in a future blog.)

Developers have worked on universal translation for years, and a slew of apps are already running on common digital appliances—Apple products from iMac to iPhone, plus Android smartphones, tablets, etc. The goal: instant spoken translations for natural, seamless conversation, with optional onscreen text display, too. Some voice-translation apps may offer versions for every kind of computer rental, too—PC, Linux, OS X—so as to ensure desktop functionality. But Skype and FaceTime videophone calls with built-in, real-time universal translation remains the Holy Grail, so there are major areas of development for both “static” environments like the office (relatively settled and slower-changing) and “dynamic” ones like the mobile market (experimental and faster-changing). You’re going to see better and better apps, for all kinds of devices, starting… well, yesterday.

Jibbigo

Life moves so fast now that it does seem like “just yesterday” that the first version of Jibbigo, Spanish-English, debuted in September, 2009. Many translation apps require a constant Internet connection to access online databases, but Jibbigo is an offline app that needs no phone or data connectivity to function. It now includes 20+ language pairs available from both Google Play and Apple’s App Store. Developed by  Carnegie Mellon professor Dr. Alex Waibel and Mobile Technologies, LLC, it was among the first ”mobile language translation apps” and is quite simple to use. Say a phrase in your language and the words appear as text in both languages on the screens of phones or tablet PC rentals—while being spoken aloud in the target tongue. Lag is apparent, and varies, but is acceptable.

Jibbigo has other features that keep it in the leading-edge position, such as free and unlimited online use, an “add name” function, so-called “Regional Bundles” for travel to various nations with neighbors you’d also like to visit, and the ability to translate both written text and speech. The iOS version plays nice with VoiceOver, so vision-impaired users can still use small devices with small type—you don’t need one of our plasma display rentals to blow the type up to gargantuan size (unless you’re presenting at a conference soon). Featured in an episode of Popular Science on the Science Channel in 2010, and a Nova episode dubbed “The Smartest Machine on Earth” that aired in 2011, Jibbigo has attracted plenty of notice. So has another firm with its own first-rate universal translator, a company whose name we hear quite a bit…

Google Translate

Google really does want to dominate the planet, so it recently upgraded its Translate app, which began life as a standard, online-only translator. As the number of superior offline apps grew, however, Google got the message: The current version of Google Translate has more than 60 offline language packs. While you can access most of Google’s services via any browser, whether it’s running on a MacBook or a Google Nexus 7 tablet, translation apps are much more useful on smaller digital devices. This is why the “app model” succeeds.

Google Translate’s menu shows you every available language pack. You only download the language pair(s) you want to translate between. Although the company calls them “less comprehensive than their online equivalents,” the smaller dictionaries are still useful and will doubtless be continuously refined. Google Translate also deciphers camera input, including vertical text in Korean, Japanese, and Chinese. The app has a version for iOS, too, but as yet it has no offline mode. This—like, oh, everything else—will likely change as we continue to replicate the Star Trek tech environment. Speaking of replication, 3D printers are already on the verge of producing food, so the day is coming when you just might tell your “kitchen app” that you’re ready for a cup of “Earl Grey, hot.”

We’re ready for anything at CRE, ready to help you push that post project out the door or make an impact at your next conference with powerful high-tech helpers like the AJA IO HD and solid, stylish trade show convention rentals. Call us now at (877) 266-7725, send a message, or use our Quick Rental Quote form to let us know what you need. We’ll beam it right up!

Staying abreast of all the progress in science and technology is difficult. Even deciding what to write about in a twice-weekly blog is tough, so we continue to focus on being practical, keeping you updated, and alerting you to new, exciting breakthroughs and important trends. In just one of many accelerating trends, the venerable Microsoft PowerPoint is getting serious competition from low- and no-cost upstarts leveraging open-source software and cloud services. This trend is looking more and more like a tidal wave now, but today’s overview of this new (rather, new and improved) breed of presentation programs will point you to a safe harbor. As always, ratings are subjective and “your mileage may vary” (YMMV).

1. Zoho Show – Part of the free Zoho office suite that includes a spreadsheet and word processor, Zoho Show has surprisingly robust features and is as solid as a rock. Like the other apps in the list, you can use it on any web-enabled device from a MacBook to an Android tablet (although phone-size screens may be problematic). Unlike most of the others, however, Zoho Show makes as strong a case as can be made for replacing your firm’s current presentation application.