According to a Harris Interactive poll reported in USAToday, 50 is "the breaking point for employees' daily allowance of e-mail. Anything more sets their heads spinning, based on the results of more than 2,000 American adults in early June."
Harris found that one in five people say "50 work-related e-mail messages per day is the magic number before they feel swamped. The effect is even more pronounced for smartphone users -- 37 percent feel 'overwhelmed' by 50 or more work e-mail, says Jonathan McCormick, chief operating officer of Intermedia, a Web-based e-mail provider of services including Hosted Exchange, that sponsored the survey."
Evidently small-business users want to stay that way: Fully 94 percent of small-business employees said 50 e-mails is their limit, USAToday reported. That means only six percent of small business employees have learned how to answer five e-mails, play Bejeweled, answer five more, drink coffee, answer five more, make a couple work-related calls, answer five more and work for twenty minutes.
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Tommy Lee -- insert Motley Crue joke here, he's probably heard 'em all before -- hits the road for snom again, starting with the Association for Information Communications Technology Professionals in Higher Education's Summer Seminar, hosted by UC Berkeley at San Francisco's Palace Hotel.
The higher ed technology confab is "always one of the busier conferences for snom," company officials say, as it brings together "a broad cross-section of IT decision-makers from US colleges and universities."
Unified communications is expected to be a hot conversation topic in higher education soon, with schools such as Georgia Military College realizing the benefits of this technology on campus, snom officials say.
At the show, snom exhibited its portfolio of IP desktop phones with the special snom OCS firmware that enables these phones to integrate with both IP PBX and Microsoft OCS R2.
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Great -- something to finally save you all that laborious work of tweeting.
Industry observer Ben Patterson reports that there is a dictation app for the iPhone which takes what you say and puts it directly on Twitter or Facebook. Because as we all know, it's so tiring to tap out 140 characters.
As iSmashPhone reports, "a few other features have been added to further improve the App's usability. So far one of the only downfalls of this App is a lack of iOS integration similar to what Google was able to do with their voice recognition technology in Android. Having to launch the App to get started makes it a bit less send-messages-on-the-fly than we would like. Though, we may see something cool happen if Apple makes use of the tech they purchased back in April."
Nuance's free Dragon Dictation app was released last week. Patterson calls it "pretty accurate" at taking short segments of speech and turning it to iPhone text, reporting that "Do you want to meet me at the restaurant at seven," "I just had a great meal on 28th St." and "Starbucks is just way too crowded in the morning" all came out as spoken. But as he noted, it was, at first, a case of the cure being worse than the disease:
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If you're one of those under the impression that Radiohead is a good rock band, as evidently industry observer Dan Kricke is, then you're impressed with the fact that they used text-talk for the OK Computer track "Fitter Happier."
And if you've heard Stephen Hawking speak, you're familiar with what text-talk sounds like, as Kricke says that "droll atonal voice." Well, if you'd like to play around with that yourself, you're in luck: Kricke reports that there's a new iPhone app for that, the free Type n Talk.
It's "a bare-bones experience," Kricke says: "You type in a phrase and the app repeats it in the computer voice, but that doesn't make it any less amusing. While it seems to say any English words with no problem, it will also make an attempt at most gibberish you throw at it as well... this is pretty fun technology."
Intrepid journalist that he is, Kricke reports that "throwing rap lyrics into it and having them come out robotic and sterile is quite a treat."
Appolicious goes with the Hawking meme. "This app is a great idea, just type the word and it talks for you. It reminds me a bit of what Stephen Hawking uses. My only gripe is that sometimes the computer doesn't pronounce the words correctly. Don't ask my why, but the first word I typed was 'Shut Up!' and it came out 'Shatap.' If the developers improve this app just a little, it will be awesome."
Read more here.
