The new commitments step up the competition among tech companies aiming to show consumers and governments that they are curbing the environmental toll from their widening arrays of gadgets.
CIO.com Senior Writer Tom Kaneshige attended a wearable technology show yesterday and stared a bevy of smartwatches in the face. Today, he ponders whether anyone needs one of these trendy devices to know what time it is -- or maybe that's not the point.
Last week, I saw a plug-and-play web camera. OK, you've seen things called that before, but this was different. It works like this: You plug a gateway device into a network. You switch on the battery-powered camera. You push one button. Now you have a palm-sized device beaming live images onto your network.
During Altiris' user conference in April, I watched a lunch panel discuss the "consumerisation of IT" and whether that's a good thing. My initial thought was that it was probably bad for enterprises that want to control everything, but may be good for smaller businesses.
Today’s corporate end-users are far more tech-savvy than their productivity with IT tools indicates. After all, screen-deep in instant messages, widgets, and elaborate consumer web applications, they’re proving themselves well-versed in the production and distribution of content as facilitated by the consumer Web 2.0 craze. Yet to utilise this hidden expertise in an enterprise setting requires a deeper understanding of what draws end-users to these technologies and how these consumer technologies are reshaping end-users’ technology expectations in the workplace.