Outline: The Education Apple - episode 28

“The show that discusses Apple technology in the formal Classroom as well as in the classroom of our daily lives”

1. The Cast

• Barrett Mosbacker, Superintendent of Briarwood Christian School, publisher Christian School Journal

• Bill Brazeal, Technical Architect, Technology Specialist and Principal - ezNet Solutions

2. Tech Review

• 25% of Couples Say Smartphones Distract Their Partners

• The Pew Research Center released a new report that looks at both the positive and negative effects of tech tools

• The Internet can bring couples together, but one in four say smartphones are distracting to their relationship.

• 21% of adults feel closer to their partners because of online or text messages

• In younger adults, between ages 18 and 29, are more likely than older couples to cite the Internet (45%) and smartphone use (42%) as a distraction

• 67% of couples in serious relationships share their online passwords, while 27% use the same email account

• Only 11% share a social media profile

• One in 10 adults (both married and single) say they have sent sexts or a nude photo or video to someone they know
  

• Apple Sold More Macs and iDevices Than All Windows PCs Sold in Holiday Quarter

  • Apple sold more iPhones, Macs, iPads and iPod Touch devices than the total number of computers sold by the entire Windows PC industry in the holiday quarter

  • First time that Apple has surpassed the PC market in hardware sales

  • Apple's iOS ecosystem alone -- never mind its Mac sales -- is already very close to surpassing the PC market in unit sales

  • Apple saw an average hardware selling price of $584 across the iPhone, iPad, iPod, and Mac lines, according to MacRumors research.

  • For the third quarter of 2013, the average Windows PC sold for just $544.30
    

• iOS Dominates Enterprise Market with 73% of Mobile Device Activations

  • iOS devices grabbed the top ten spots for most popular devices in the fourth quarter of 2013

  • overall number of device activations has increased 34 percent from Q1 to Q4 of this year

  • Many organizations are migrating away from BlackBerry to meet end user demand and embrace newer platforms like iOS and Android

  • The device usage report from enterprise users shows that the iPhone made up 54 percent of total device activations, while Android smartphones followed with just over 20 percent

  • The iPad maintains a strong hold on tablet activations, claiming 91.4 percent of enterprise tablet activations in Q4 2013, while Android accounted for the remaining 8.6 percent

  • The iPad was most popular in Financial Services and in Business and Professional Services, with the two sectors accounting for 60 percent of all Q4 iPad activations

  • CEO Tim Cook confirmed "the enterprise area has huge potential" and said he expects Apple "would have more and more payback in the future" due to the company's investment in this area
    

• Yahoo Labs and Carnegie Mellon forge $10 million partnership

  • Personalization - Meyer’s vision: Reinvented website and search a version of search that is part Facebook and part Google, a streamlined, personalized experience for each individual user

  • Yahoo announced a partnership between its Yahoo Labs division and Carnegie Mellon University, to focus on mobile and personalization projects

  • The partnership is that Yahoo will be giving researchers at Carnegie Mellon access to Yahoo's APIs and data services

  • Researchers can experiment and build products using real mobile data from users

  • Potentially data from every Yahoo application could be available to the Carnegie Mellon researchers (it would be opt-in for users to allow data use)

  • Carnegie Mellon - "Many of our colleagues have to work with artificial data sets," said Rachman. "Our scientists will get to work with real systems at scale"

  • Another component of the partnership is the creation of Yahoo Fellows (this could be used as a recruiting tool)

  • This partnership is just another of Yahoo’s many deals in the last few years

  • It just purchased a diary startup called “Wander” for $10 million

  • Sort of following in Googles footsteps “tech giant / R&D labs”
    

• American businesses are holding credit card security back

  • A lot of Cyber attacks on credit cards reported recently

  • "Chip and PIN" is buzz word lately in US

  • Chipped cards are more secure than cards that stored data on a magnetic stripe, which can be more easily copied by thieves and printed onto blank cards

  • A bit of History is in order:

  • Global standard developed in 1994 by Europay, MasterCard, and Visa known as EMV

  • The standard ensured interoperability between merchants, banks, and a new type of credit card that contained a computer chip

  • Most of Europe, the Netherlands, Canada, and Mexico all moved to the new standard. The US did not (due to convenience and cost)

  • Fraud in the US was relatively low at the time and the cost of replacing readers in stores and issuing new cards to customers was high

  • Americans traveling abroad frequently find they can’t buy metro tickets in Paris because their cards are incompatible with the machines

  • Payments processors including Visa and MasterCard will be implementing a "liability shift" in October of 2015

  • The policy will penalize issuers that don’t put chips in their cards as well as stores that don’t accept chipped cards

  • Most of the new chipped cards will still have a magnetic stripe on account of the fragmented adoption of chip readers

  • The current pending US rollout of chip cards will allow use of the less secure chip-and-signature cards rather than the more secure chip and PIN cards

  • Representatives from the banking industry say chip and signature is what consumers and merchants want: convenience and speed

3. Briarwood School iPad Program

• Moving forward

4. Apps and Followings

• Barrett -

  • App Picks: azendoo: A beautifully simple project management platform with real-time messaging, collaboration, cloud storage integration (Evernote, Google Drive, Box, Skydrive....

• Bill -

  • App Picks: Banca - all currency converter - 99 cents

    • designed for iOS 7

    • Instant conversion to all chosen currencies

    • Uses your location to automatically add the currency for the country you’re currently in

    • Automatic refresh of the exchange rates

    • Automatic transition to offline mode when network is not available

    • Use long-press on the delete key to clear all values

    • Integrated simple calculator with basic operations

    • Supports every (non-obsolete) currency in the world

5. Wrap up and closing remarks...

Don’t forget to follow us on the Internet

Bill: Twitter - @billbrazeal         Web - http://billbrazeal.com

Barrett: Twitter - @BMosbacker

Blog:  Christian School Journal http://christianschooljournal.com/

Thanks for listening in, be sure to tell your friends, watch for our next episode coming in two weeks.  So long for now.