Sometimes a Great Notion: The iPad Arrives
April 1st, 2010 by Keith Burton
Okay, I guess I told a “white lie” — sort of. Someone asked me a few weeks ago if I would be getting the new Apple iPad, and I said, “No.” Wrong answer. The more I thought about it, the more I knew that I had to visit the Apple Store in early March and pre-register to buy one of the first iPads. I did, and this Saturday, the UPS delivery man will pull up to my home with a package containing a 64-gigabyte iPad from Shenzen, China. I’ll be among the more than 240,000 consumers who pre-registered to get the very first iPads, which says something about the power of all things Apple.
Anyone who knows me will tell you that I’m an early adopter of new technologies and all things Apple. I bought one of the first Apple Powerbooks in the early ‘90s, as well as an Apple Newton Messenger, a forerunner to today’s PDAs. And through the years, I’ve been on top of Apple’s introduction of new desktops, laptops, iPods, iPhones, MacBooks, the MacBook Air and now, the iPad — purchasing these for business and personal use.
If you read Newsweek, BusinessWeek, The Wall Street Journal or dozens of other publications this week, you’ll see the headlines on the much-anticipated introduction of this cutting-edge tablet device, the iPad. It promises to revolutionize the computing world — and I’m wagering it will have a profound affect on how we, as communicators and consultants, adapt technology in internal communications. I’ve already cancelled my print versions of the WSJ and the NYT, and will do so with other publications, which I’ll plan to read online. I’ll use it in client and prospective client meetings to share presentations on our work. I’ll use it remotely to access shared drives, to create documents, presentations and worksheets. I’ll use it to play video and to listen to audio books and music, as well as to read books available through the iTunes store, amazon.com and other sites. I’ll use it to catalog photos. I’ll use it to read blogs and email, visit Facebook and websites, and to research all things related to employee communications and the forces that shape our discipline in the global workplace.
Imagine, if you will, managers using the iPad to access a repository of files and materials that comprise the “toolkit” they’ll use to communicate major changes to their teams. Imagine employees using it to view the “virtual” meeting site, with video, that their CEO is deploying to introduce new petroleum exploration and drilling activities directly from the North Sea, and what this capital project will mean for employment and growth in the future. Imagine the storytelling model coming to life through the YouTube site that the company has created to share with us on our iPad. Imagine using “social bookmarking” and RSS on our iPad to help guide us through the labyrinth of the corporate intranet to information that we need to do our work — while we’re meeting remotely in a “tailgate” session being staged from the back of a pick-up truck near Topeka, Kansas.
We can only imagine how dramatically this device will transform work as tens of thousands of existing apps available for the iPhone, and a host of new apps that have been written just for the iPad, find their way into the machine.
I’ll report back. I’ll let you know what I think about the iPad and how we can use it to lift our game. But I’ll never again say “No” when someone asks me whether I’ll ride the wave of another Apple tsunami. You know the answer.