Summer Sale Madness!

June, July and August are typically quiet months for us (Maybe you too?).

So it’s a great time to do IT work while people are away.

Office moves, upgrades and updates, hardware refresh, training etc.

Book in a project (Anything not IT Support) over the summer months and recieve an additional 20% discount.

Call 020 3031 4734 or email eric@theengineroom.co.uk

(NB: August is now pretty much booked but July still has some out of hours slots available.)

Could Google, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube be our new professors?

Set the scene

You’re in a café with a friend and he/she asks a question that neither of you know the answer to. You both have a burning desire to solve the mystery, but what do you do!?

Back in the day

Not so long ago, we would have either decide to agree on a conclusion, we would maybe ask a third party or if there were none to be found call that ‘super geek – all intelligent’ friend, we all have at least one! Assuming of course that they are not too busy creating the next Appleor Microsoft! (love you Dan!).

Do I hear bells ringing, sound familiar? Well, as you know, this has changed somewhat….

Throughout the last century traditional education systems have gone through many developments especially in the last decade or two. I’m sure you too remember sitting in a room facing a blackboard whilst being professed to by a teacher.  We would sit there and learn from this educator, often and aged lady with a name like Ms Primbottom. I remember mine oh so well, she wore thick glasses, her face was embellished with a frighteningly sharp nose and she possessed gravity defying skill and aim with a chalk duster!  Shudder!

Ms Primbottom would regurgitate Shakespeare, spell out the alphabet, she would attempt to get calculus across and show the exciting points in physics, ahem! Despite her best efforts Ms Primbottom would more than likely be faced with a fairly ambivalent and uninterested class who’s attention was drawn to writing notes and drawing pictures of ‘Spotty Megan’ kissing ‘Edmund the nerd’.

This educator is who we relied on, our main source of new information – other than the dusty books in the library which let’s face it, didn’t get visited often by most!

Today

The internet has changed this, it challenges opinions, allows for free expression, it is available 24 hours a day, it is social and you will be hard pressed to find a topic that has not been discussed, researched and understood thoroughly. All we have to do is whip out our Blackberry, iphoneor laptop, open a Google page and voila! The answer is ours within a few convenient seconds – or possibly minutes if like me you have a blackberry ;o).

Is the internet becoming the lecturer or merely a resource that aids the existing ones? Will the future have CP30 and R2D2 standing in front of a class projecting YouTube videos of Hamlet and chatting in real time to people on Twitter or Facebook about Einstein’s incredible discoveries? It’s quite an amusing image, uh oh, premonitions of the Matrix creeping in……..

via: <a href=”http://www.onlineeducation.net/“> OnlineEducation.net</a>

IS PC the mac daddy?

Geosocial Universe 2011

• Mobile: 5.3 billion mobile devices are used worldwide — that’s 77 percent of the world’s population
• Smartphones: 21.8 percent of all mobile devices are smartphones. Despite what one might think, Apple does not top the list in sales—Nokia does
• Skype: Mobile usage continues to increase thanks to Skype’s wise investment in apps and its mobile platform
• Facebook: Now tops 629 million registered users with almost 250 million people accessing the site via mobile
• Qzone: China’s version of Facebook, Qzone, is experiencing supernova-like growth with 480 million registered users
• Twitter: Broke the 200 million registered user mark with nearly 40 percent of people tweeting via mobile
• Email: Hotmail still dominates email, but Gmail is gaining fast
• Yelp: Yelp is topping 50 million unique visitors per month. Its move to team up with OpenTable earlier this year will only increase its relevancy
• Foursquare and Gowalla: These geosocial specialists are still growing, but growth seems to be slowing down a bit