News in Preview 2021: What’s to Come in Productivity and Technology Next Year?

On this week’s show, we close out the current year with a news in preview 2021 discussion. What’s to come in productivity and technology next year? Listen to the episode to learn what we and our panelists think.

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In this Cast | News in Preview 2021

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Art Gelwicks

Art Gelwicks, a productivity and collaboration consultant, blogger at theideapump.com, and host of the Being Productive podcast as well as ProductivityCast podcast.

Frank Buck, EdD

Dr. Frank Buck makes organization easy so you can increase productivity, decrease stress, and enjoy life. Global Gurus has ranked Dr. Buck as #1 in the world in the “Time Management” category for 2019 and 2020. From band director to principal to central office administrator and now to productivity coach and speaker, welcome to Anything But Idle, Frank.

Headlines & Show Notes

Resources we mention, including links to them, will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context.

Stories of the Week

New Tools of the Week

Augusto and I come across many personal productivity tools and services each week. In this segment, New Tools of the Week, we each bring you a tool we think you might like.

Raw Text Transcript | DRAFT

Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be substantial errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases. The time coding is mm:ss (e.g., 0:04 starts at 4 seconds into the cast’s audio).

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Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:00
Hello, everybody and welcome to anything but idle, the productivity news podcast and this is the live show. So hello and welcome to our personal productivity enthusiasts and community. Today’s show is brought to you by WCC web services. I’m Rick Sidney-Smith. And we’re your hosts for anything but idle. This is Episode 36. The news in preview for 2021 episode and we’re recording this on December 28 2020, just a few days shy of the New Year. Each week we cover and discuss the productivity news headlines of the week. And to do that we have two panelists, which we invite to the show and we’re gonna talk about all things in the personal productivity and technology space. Today we have Art galax and Dr. Frank buck are galax is a productivity and collaboration consultant. He is blogger at the idea pump and host of being productive podcast, as well as being on the ProductivityCast podcast with us to pronounce and myself and Francis Wade. And so welcome to anything but idle Frank. Art.

Unknown Speaker 1:00
Hey guys, how’s it going?

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:03
Yes, yes. And then we have Dr. Frank buck, most people are overwhelmed by the amount of paper and digital information in their lives. Frank book makes organization easy. So you can increase productivity, decrease stress and enjoy life global gurus has ranked Frank number one in the world in the time management category for 2019 and 2020. His career path took him from band director to principal to Central Office administrator and now to productivity coach and speaker. And by the way, I think Dr. Frank is about Dr. Buck is still up for 2021. So go out there and vote for him. I think we have a link to him in the past show. How’s it going? Dr. Buck?

Frank Buck, EdD 1:40
Great, great. hope everybody had a good holiday?

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:43
Yes, yes. Welcome to everybody watching live. If you have questions, feel free to throw them into the comments, feel free to throw them into the chat. And we’ll see those and we’ll be able to respond to you. And what I wanted us to do today is to have a little discussion or what gousto and I wanted us to do today was to have a little bit of discussion about really predictions for 2021. But a little bit of a more a little bit more veracity to the discussion in that way, in the sense that I wanted us to have a conversation about what we know is going to be happening in 2021. Considering all the things we know about 2020, which is probably very little on one side and fairly, you know, clear on the other side. So I wanted us to start with maybe the the world of productivity proper, and then we can go into technology. But what are the things in in 2020 that we learned that will probably make its way into 2021, especially as it relates to working from home or remote work and the proliferation of really the pandemic for at least the next, you know, two quarters, maybe even three quarters of the year, as we start to get people vaccinated. Here at the end of this year, we’re not going to get the vast majority of people vaccinated until mid year, next year. And so that means a lot of us are going to be working from home or at least having some blended work environment until all of that takes place. What are the things that are happening in 2021? From a productivity perspective,

Augusto Pinaud 3:15
the only thing I guarantee right now that has nothing to do with productivity or technologies 2021 it’s coming. But other than that, all bets are off based on the tracking that 2020 had somebody says 2021 is like 2020, but I can drink alcohol. With that said, I think it’s interesting, because this was really a year of force changes, and to evaluate for many people, what their productivity was outside of their normal conditions. And I think we all tend to get complacent to what our goals are, how we do things, how we stay productive, and how we can still keep ahead of the game without really testing and pushing some of the limits and in many cases without testing them. And this year really throw a wrench of anybody who cares about productivity, who has a system, and even those who don’t care about productivity and don’t have a system. Everybody the common theme for everybody was the size of the wrench that was drove their productivity system on how the things that we thought they were solid didn’t change. And I think there are two, two things on that. two prongs and that fork. One is we all learn that our systems were not as bulletproof as we many of us thought it was. But number two, it gives us the opportunity to experience something new that at the end was outside of the comfort zone of So many people, if we will have told people in the beginning of 2020, you’re going to be working from home, three months, they will have laughed at us forget about 910 months that people have been working by now, plus, whatever is coming. So I think that is something really positive for everybody, not only for the people who was challenged this year, but we have seen developers also pushing the line and responding to these new needs based on this new circumstance.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 5:33
Go ahead, doctor. But yeah, it’s

Frank Buck, EdD 5:34
been a bit different for everybody in in some ways, a good kind of better, that, you know, I don’t have the interruptions that I normally have at the office, I might need to work just as well here as I can there. I have technology, so forth, and so on. And then of course, other fields, it’s just turn it upside down education. I mean, you know, I think to work remotely, there has to be some self discipline. And of course, when you’re 35 4050, you’ve got that, you know, all four of us, you could count on any of us to get up and do what we’re supposed to do without somebody looking at us take that same standard and apply it to an eight year old. It’s, it’s not there. But But yet, that’s what schools have been forced to deal with. With that, that eight year old getting up and logging on to zoom and, you know, responding to the teacher. And so mean, so much of what I’m hearing is, I can’t even get the kids to turn on their, you know, turn on the camera. And I don’t know who’s out there and who’s not? It’s No, it’s just an entirely different beast.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 6:51
Yes, it’s parenting, while working at the same time, I think is the great productivity challenge of the current year. And that will continue into into next year. And for all those parents who had to have their kids home during the summer break and be working at the same time meant that they needed to entertain their kids, while also continuing to work. I know, gousto, you had that, you know, with your children. And it’s just it’s tremendous challenge. And I think that, for most of us, who traveled regularly for work, it was also a big impact. I, I’ll say I’ll argue with gousto, that my ERP system was bulletproof. It just wasn’t m 16 proof was it, it wasn’t bomb proof. 16 are still bolts, I suppose so. But it wasn’t it wasn’t prepared for the nuclear fallout of what happened today, in this particular year. But that being the case, I was actually fairly resilient to the to the change in the pandemic, what was really the biggest challenge for me was the fact that I’m used to being on the road and working from many different environments. And the sudden shift back to being any singular place where you have these folks who, you know, are just randomly walking around your house, who you really generally don’t interact with during the work day, like your dog, and partner and spouse, and so on so forth. Those things are and like people, you know, come in to fix things around the house, you know, we moved into a new house this year. And in that process, you know, people coming over to come do things created this, this whole other level of challenge because I was like, Okay, well, I’ve got to do a training. At this hour, I can’t have people drilling, while I’m training, certainly not near wires, where you can knock power out or the internet out those, you know, all of that happened this year, that was very, very dynamic. And I think those things will come into next year. And my real kind of prediction for next year, my preview is that a lot of people are going to go toward the polls, they’re going to they’re going to choose to simplify their productivity systems, or they’re going to choose to really step up the complexity of their systems to match the needs of what they’re what’s going on. And it just depends upon your own work style and the circumstances you’re in. So if you’re feeling that you’re feeling that pressure going into 2021, just remember, you have those two options, there really is a, you know, if you were moderating in some way shape or form, you’re probably going to lean to one side or the other, which is more complexity or greater simplicity. But you’re going to choose one of those roads, it’s a fork in the road kind of scenario. And it just depends upon your needs, right? If you are in a situation where you really are playing with too many tools, and you have too many things going on, going to maybe something more simple is going to be helpful to you. If you’re in a situation where you really need to match the speed and responsiveness of your work, then you’re going to have to go ahead and lean into some complexity there. But I think that a lot of people are going to going to in essence in these first three months of the new year, they’re going to start making those choices because they have to, um, they have no choice.

Art Gelwicks 9:48
Yeah, there’s definitely a sense that as we cross this, I don’t want to say threshold but this milestone of the New Year. There’s a lot of mental change that’s happening for people think think that they’re starting to understand that this is going to continue this way for an indeterminate amount of time. And I’ve talked to a lot of people about this, and they’ve run into the challenge of not trusting their systems anymore. They may have felt like you said that they were bulletproof, they can handle things now. And they’ve lost that confidence in their system to be able to, to keep them moving along the way they need to. And they have to reestablish that. And some of that’s going to be introspection, some of that’s going to be analysis, some of that’s going to be burn it all down and build it new. But we also are starting to realize that we need to be compassionate to the productivity environments that others find themselves in those of us who are easy to step into this world of working remotely and working independently, and we live and breathe this, it’s a much easier transition for other people with greater challenges, like having kids at home, or you know, working in a small, small apartment or any number of things. Those of us who aren’t in those situations, have to be cognizant of the others that are and learn to work with them. Rather than almost taking umbrage to the fact that we have to make that adjustment. Hey, it’s easy for us, why shouldn’t it be easy for everybody? Right, but but I think the biggest thing, and this is the, it’s kind of caught me off guard a little bit over the end of this past year, that people are starting to realize that they’re responsible for a lot more than they used to be. For example, if you’re in a work environment, and your computer wasn’t working, right, you called the IT guy. Or you you know, your phone wasn’t working right, you called the Phone Guy, or lady. Now, that’s you. If your home internet is not working, and you can’t get your VPN to connect it, that’s on your shoulders to manage through to completion. And I think that’s created a much higher level of anxiety and stress for a lot of people, because they’re just not used to dealing with those types of challenges and that level of challenge on a daily basis. I tried to describe it to somebody the other day, who looks like they’re going to have to start working from home all the time now they’ve been doing a transitionary beast, I said you have to think about this as an entrepreneur, you’re now going to be in this case is named Robert, you’re going to be Bob Inc. and you have to think about it that way. Everything is on your back and you have to put things together so that you put your support systems in place so that you can be bobbing and keep moving forward and doing the things you need to do. If you don’t do that, you’re just going to keep digging yourself deeper in this hole. Because you’re going to be concerned about things that you have no control over. And you’re not going to account for those and it’s going to just burn you down quick. So there’s been a lot of I think people are gonna have a lot of introspection I think some of that’s starting to come to fruition but it’s still a long ways to go. I think there’s still a lot of people struggling

Augusto Pinaud 13:02
and but it will but you made a great point on that you know and i and i mentioned for me who thought I had a really solid system for so long that you know fall apart and and I see other people clients and friends who experienced the same and I experienced you know with even my own kids the difference on the positive and the negative of being that responsible at 12 and eight, okay and now coming to the zoom and charging your device the night before and and adding those kind of things to the dynamic okay to Hey yes you are the responsible for charging your device don’t come to me at 740 telling me that it has no battery that’s and listening to teachers. You know every other day people these are the rules you need to come you need to turn the camera you cannot turn the camera off you cannot be eaten during class time. Because and same thing you know as we laugh with the kids the same thing with with the adults you know one of the things that I’ve been noticing is how little phone calls I’ve been getting after a certain point in 2020 because now that people got comfortable with this life in camera thin that short phone call turning to us Let’s jump into a quick zoom or a quick meet or a quick teams. And now those three minute phone call turning to 15 minute things and they have all been expanding because there is more people using the tools and getting to use a little bit of that socialization time for solving those little things that now although things instead of take five minutes are taking 10 to 15 that is really do see many places. So it’s all those challenges that we are going to see increasing in 2021.

Frank Buck, EdD 15:08
And then on the other hand, the people that I really feel sorry for those that don’t have the kind of technology that we’re all talking about right now, that can’t log on to something, those remote areas where they just not reliable internet access. You know, as I look at you, the four of us who have all worked together in so many ways, and I’ve never met any of the three of you in person, it’s all been because of technology. And if, during this past 10 months, if we didn’t have technology, we’d be out of business. schools would be totally shut down. So much of our businesses would be totally shut down. You know, we’d be kind of at the K fan. Boyd, like that caveman but but more like Little House on the Prairie where you you really would be dependent upon yourself for so many things. And you’re not be able to hop on a zoom with somebody else to say, Hey, can you help me with the VPN?

Art Gelwicks 16:21
Now, I think gousto brings up an excellent point, though, when you look at the shift to video based meetings and things like that, and going from the three minute phone call to the 15 minute video conference. This is where 2021 within the productivity space, we have to start helping people to become efficient in these new methods. And these new manners. And I,

Unknown Speaker 16:47
yeah, I

Art Gelwicks 16:48
can’t, can’t tell you how many call video calls I’ve sat on as of late. Were the first five minutes in the last five minutes where everybody just saying hello and trying to say goodbye to get off the meeting. Just Just to give you a context, Microsoft just released in teams a new feature, that if you schedule a meeting, 10 minutes before the meeting, and or I’m sorry, five minutes before the meeting ends, it actually pops a banner at the top of the video chat saying your meeting has five more minutes. And then it does it at one minute. And it doesn’t hang up the meeting. But it reminds you that you need to wrap it up. This is coming.

Frank Buck, EdD 17:24
And it gives you an easy out. It makes it kind of makes technology the bad guy. Oh gosh. Oh, this has been a great meeting. Oh, I’m so sorry. It’s over. Instead of you coming up with the well, I sure have enjoyed our meeting. And I can’t Yeah. Thinking back to my doctoral dissertation, but you know, in 1997 was when I defended, which was now gosh, how many years ago and that was before everybody had email and that sort of thing. And so time management, which is what the dissertation was on, having to do with time management, Alabama principles. It was all about controlling, dropping visitors and the phone. And how can you keep those phone calls short? How can you get off the phone more quickly, planning out an agenda for that phone call so that it doesn’t take forever? And having those little cues to sort of be able to wine it? Fast forward now? Same thing with the video coffee? Yeah. Yeah, the same thing that we’re talking about? How can we get out and get off and not make it sound like we’re cutting the other person short?

Augusto Pinaud 18:37
It’s funny, you mentioned that I have a client who he had two Sims account. One of them is still free. And I asked him to send me an invite. Nice. That’s not your normal accounts. Oh, no, no, this is the one I use for some meetings for work. And I’m looking to say it doesn’t make any sense that you’re free is the one you use for work and the other one knows why. And he said, Oh, because the meetings cannot be longer than 40 minutes. Yeah, lots of work. Oh, what’s

Art Gelwicks 19:13
built in pomodoro. For those meetings, man, it’s perfect. And that’s, that’s the right type of thinking in my book that is absolutely the right type of thinking. I’ve been going through a challenge with the client of trying to get them in the habit of not repeating the same information to multiple people multiple times. But not running down the path of saying okay, we’ll get a meeting and get all 18 people in the meeting. No, just do it in the communications chat. Just do it in a chat channel. Post it there once if you need to talk to somebody talk to somebody but it should be where face to face, moves things along more effectively than just the direct sharing of information, you know, brainstorming sessions, things like that. Those are really good uses of this, but just general disbursement of status updates and things like that. No, not really. And, yeah,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 20:07
yeah, I think that what the the narrative that I’m really aware of for 2021 is that this whole idea of time management, of being able to manage one’s time really needs to get to a discussion, which I’ve been kind of on my soapbox for years now talking about, which is, you know, people continually talk about habit formation and habit development as though it were the holy grail of, of productivity. And while I’ve have nothing wrong with habits, I, you know, I think that the more important component that we have on Earth, by virtue of 2020, is that we need to understand our routines so much better. And when we have an upset to our routines, so many other things fall, you know, fail. And this is really important, I think this is just like 2021 is the year to understand routines, and figure out how to make sure that the things that are structured into our data, it’s the latticework on which everything else sets. And once we understand those foundational pieces, we’re able to better manage things. And so, for example, do meetings have to happen in every part of the day, as opposed to just some parts of the day? When is it best to have a meeting? When is it best to actually answer email? When is it best to be responsive to the needs of your children and your spouse, or partner or otherwise? Those are all really important things to understand. I think those are time management principles, that all of us here and the many folks who are a part of the productivity, you know, time kind of teaching community really need to start putting out there. So I can’t, you know, underscore that enough, from art that this is really the year to go out there and communicate those messages about how to effectively manage time. And that really means effectively managing routines.

Art Gelwicks 21:50
Yeah, I, I can’t stress it enough. We’ve beaten the horse of task list into the ground, dug a hole, put dirt on it, and watered it, and it’s got sunflowers growing. The biggest things now that people have to challenge with are How does it feel? How are they? What’s the mental energy? What’s the? Where does this leave them to be productive, to be efficient, and to be effective? It’s really, it’s the hardest part. Because nobody wants to talk about this. This isn’t in a book somewhere. I can’t go by it to do template that deals with the mental anxiety of trying to deal with things. We have to help people moving along with that. So

Raymond Sidney-Smith 22:33
yep, so let’s switch gears to technology. There’s a lot of stuff, that’s good. There’s a lot of stuff that’s going to be happening in the new year, technologically. And most of us around the table have pretty strong technical skills in those technologies, and in those specific areas. And so I want to hear from you in terms of where you feel like Apple will be going in the new year based on what they’ve done in past experience. How is Microsoft going to be changing? How is Google going to be changing? How is Microsoft going to be changing in the new year. And let’s start with kind of what we’ve been talking about already, which is the concept of remote work. And we’ve been we’ve had, in essence, a pandemic forced remote work force, and at least those who are capable of doing so. And that has, of course, brought about this whole concept of, you know, really done in one end, one end, remote working. But on the other end, I really feel as though this has set the stage for stronger telepresence, so that as we go back into the work force, you’re going to have more people who will be who will be coming into the office, through telepresence. And for those of you like how I’m defining telepresence, or at least how I understand telepresence to be defined, is having someone who is not there remote in to people who are physically there. So if you have offices who can have only 50%, you know, capacity in their office, half of those people are going to have to, you know, telecommute in. So they’re going to be attending meetings in a hybrid environment where you may have three or four people in the room, and three or four people who are coming in via remote technologies. And that blended environment is going to create all kinds of other new productivity issues. Think about the the equity in a room when three people are not there physically. Three people there are there physically, those kinds of situations, I think are going to be really important in 2021 for us to figure out productivity wise. What else do you think is happening in 2021?

Augusto Pinaud 24:42
Right, and I heard something really interesting. I don’t remember where I read it about that and said, well, meetings, one of the rules for 2021 need to be that if not everybody is physically present that everybody needs to be virtual regardless if there’s five people in Alpha’s and the other five are not everybody goes vertical. And I think that’s a great way to balance that. But But I think, as I said at the beginning of 2020, that one of the things that all this working from home for us remote was going to create was that for some of those people who always wanted to do it, but the company said, No, no, it’s not possible. Well, sadly, now, the possibilities, and that is going to generate some shift on the workforces, as we understand. Because basically, companies will now need to, or leave these people to leave the remote lifestyle, or have the risk that these people will go and start finding companies who allow them to do that. But also, you have also the other side of that coin, and he’s the people who cannot see the second, that they can get back to their office on their cubicle, and that are missing that environment. so badly. So that is going to be a really shift, because those two forces are going to five plus corporations have experienced the advantages cost wise, bottom line of old is, you know, I, so, all this is going to

Raymond Sidney-Smith 26:25
end we’re in an economic recovery, right? Like there’s that layer on top of it, where they’re forced to have to make those cuts.

Augusto Pinaud 26:31
Correct. Correct. So so all that it’s going to make it really challenging and really interesting for for the remote work for even even people as you were describing at the beginning of the of the conversation, you know, all those people who are used to be on the road, you know, salespeople, I work sort of salespeople, salespeople who are used to be on the road, they have been back to 2008. Okay, where it was like women and unless need to be approved, okay, by every stockholder in the company for you to get into a plane ticket. Okay, we are a public company. So good luck. But that is coming back for, for a while, same as we experienced that in 2008. And that is going to create a lot of frustration for a lot of people. So I think 2021 it’s going to be super challenging on those aspects for a lot of people, especially for the people who their previews, lifestyle was disrupted, because they were traveling a lot of time, and now they’re not going to or because they were happy on the office, and now they’re studying at home. And even the people who are happy at home and now has roommates, you know, all roaming around and making loud noises and interrupting you every three seconds. And so all those factors, I don’t know, if in the last eight to nine months, we have been able to perfect the system that is going to allow us to get out of that. And I will certainly say now we are getting there. It’s much better than what it was nine months ago or we have been getting used to it. But it’s not there yet. I don’t think neither of those examples are ready to, to stay on the way it is. So it’s going to be challenging, at least for the next three to six months, I think. Uh huh.

Frank Buck, EdD 28:35
And and one element that we miss not being together is that sort of the informal learning that happens. You know that the newbie in the office that is learning so much from the interaction with that other person in the next cubicle or next desk, they’re still getting these meetings, these formal meetings. But the learning that happens in the mentorship that happens at the watercooler at lunch right after work when you’re going to get a drink. We’re missing that. And I think you can get by for a certain period of time before that really starts to show up. But then at some point it does we’re, we’re sort of learning only, you know, as we talked about earlier, we’re sort of on our own in so many ways. And I can only last for a certain period of time.

Art Gelwicks 29:36
I think it has to become more intentional though. When we look at 2021. We’re going to see the people who can make the adjustment and recognize the value of this type of a platform and how to take advantage of it are the ones who are going to succeed. The ones who want to go back to the previous environment are going to be sorely disappointed because that environment isn’t there anymore. We’re not it is not going to go back. We’re never going to see See that complete reversal. So when you talk about things like coaching and mentoring and things like that, and working sessions, having a zoom meeting that just sits open that people can sign in and out of during the course of the day to work on a common project, or just to interact, you know, the equivalent of the watercooler, it sounds a little corny at first, it’s actually extremely useful. I’ve done it numerous times, I’ve done working sessions with developers, where both of us are working on completely separate projects. We’ve run a video session, we’re working on our own stuff, but we can bounce ideas back and forth, just like we’re sitting next to each other. Only difference is, he was in Arizona, I’m here. So I never would have had that opportunity previously. But I do have it now. But this requires us to help people to look at the positive aspects of what we now have available to us, and get them to start taking advantage of those rather than saying, okay, when are we going to get back to the way it used to be, you’re not stop trying.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 31:06
Something something that is is definitely on the pike in terms of technology is the fact that all of the major telecom technology companies are going to be pushing for greater virtual technology development, they’re going to you’re going to see more and more advancement of the various technologies. Obviously, zoom is reportedly making their way toward developing email, calendar and messaging services into the zoom platform, they are prepared for the fact that video conferencing is going to dip sometime probably in June, July, August timeframe, when people start to go back to some semblance of hybrid work. And then going back to a normative life, whatever that might look like. And, and so Google, and Microsoft, and Apple, even Facebook, and so on, so forth, they’re going to be really vying for attention in that video space, because it’s not going to go away. Now that grandma and grandpa and aunt and uncle, you know, they can now interact with the grandkids and their nieces and nephews. And, you know, sons and daughters can now help Mom and Dad, you know, with all kinds of remote technology issues, you know, you’re going to see more and more of this video technology creep into daily life, and it’s going to become a part of the fabric of society. And that means that those companies are really going to be making an in kind of forward momentum in that space. And more importantly, to our productivity. That means we need to learn how to actually use those technologies, productively, I learned today that I can use google assistant to add something to a shopping list, and add a collaborator to that shopping list. So now I can say to to the the assistant, that it can actually now have a coat, you know, co person on that particular list, which is very useful for being able to now have a household shopping list. I mean, we’ve been running multiple shopping lists, now we can just have one. I mean, like that is a huge benefit to us not having to worry about where things are, when we go to go to look for things when we’re shopping, those are the kinds of things that now that we have this this technology coming, you know, to the fore, we’re able to now utilize that. So I see more advanced assistance, I see more advanced machine learning on device. So it becomes much, much faster to do natural language processing on on the devices. And I see far more video technologies being embedded almost in everything. So it’ll just become kind of natural for us. Yeah, it’s

Art Gelwicks 33:33
funny when you think about it, because this is this is the environment, you know, we always say, Well, you know, it’s it’s the year 2020 20 Where am I check packs? Where am I flying cars are? We have wanted video calling capability for forever. The first one I just looked it up, the first video phone network was created in Germany in 1936. We’ve been trying, we’ve been having this sold to us for years. Now we’re living it and everybody’s like, I want to do it. You know what?

Unknown Speaker 34:02
This is what you always wanted.

Frank Buck, EdD 34:03
Yeah. You know, the Jetsons as a kid, one of the things I remember about the Jetsons was how their telephone was this right here. Exactly.

Unknown Speaker 34:13
Exactly. They had

Art Gelwicks 34:15
an Amazon Echo sitting on their desk. They just didn’t know it yet.

Augusto Pinaud 34:19
Hmm.

Art Gelwicks 34:20
But that’s that’s really I still have to go back to that same thing. And you and you were talking right about where does this lead from a technology standpoint, where the company’s going? It has to be common recognition, though, because you see moves like zoom, pushing into broader spaces and video conferencing becoming more prevalent. And then you see boneheaded maneuvers like Comcast reinstating data caps at 1.2 gig get for home users, and are we not paying attention to what’s going on in the world? Or is it just the fact that maybe we can milk a couple more pennies out of To the poor consumers, it’s infuriating to not see that common good come up. But unfortunately, it’s not all that surprising either. So I

Raymond Sidney-Smith 35:10
chargers in your in your mobile device?

Art Gelwicks 35:14
Well, you don’t need a charger you bought 87 chargers, you know, because you’ve been living in the apple life.

Augusto Pinaud 35:20
But if we look at all, Samsung, you know,

Art Gelwicks 35:23
hey, you know, you’re absolutely right.

Unknown Speaker 35:26
I won’t argue that at all, all doing it.

Art Gelwicks 35:29
Well, and that. But that’s again, that’s what boggles my mind is we, we have picked up an exceptional rate during this 910 month period. And I hate to use the term paradigm shift, shift, but it has been a paradigm shift in how we work and how we think about work. And my concern is that we’re going to lose that momentum. And that momentum can be a positive thing now, my worry is, is that as things start to shift, and it starts to mellow it out a little bit, you wind up with higher ups within organizations going well, we don’t need to invest in that that’s, that’s only for a certain portion of our people on a certain given time, it’s going to happen again, at some point this, this type of a thing will occur again, we’ve understood we understand now that we can do this, why would we step away from the strategy of making this an integral part as to how we work, I just don’t get

Raymond Sidney-Smith 36:32
something else that I just really feel like is important for us to all take to heart is that as we move forward into the productivity technology space, where we have much more advanced technologies like this greater infrastructure that Art’s talking about, that we can really take advantage of, you know, Microsoft has been planning this for for a very long time. But they’re going to be bringing virtual computing in earnest to the world. And so Windows will become a cloud environment where Microsoft 365 is going to basically be a power user experience that you otherwise didn’t have before. And we’re not talking about thin clients, and the world of netbooks, and so on and so forth. We’re talking about a what will hopefully be a true platform where you can actually run your full operating system in the cloud, and be able to run those applications in sign of them. And it will be near real time, if not real time computing in that cloud environment. This is just very, very powerful. And I’m I’m really looking forward to seeing this happen. We’ve already seen some of these movements, right with Android on Chrome OS, and Samsung with their version of Android coming on to Windows 10. We’re seeing Apple bring iPad OS and iOS applications to Mac OS on those m one chip, you know devices. And I think touchscreens are coming to Apple devices. They better be if you’re going to force me to use iOS apps on your Mac OS device. Apple, you better give me a touchscreen on the device.

Unknown Speaker 38:07
Well, an iPad?

Raymond Sidney-Smith 38:09
No, it’s not I want a keyboard fixed to my device. I do not want to have to buy a separate keyboard to just see that

Augusto Pinaud 38:17
happening.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 38:18
I don’t know I disagree with you, sir. I think by the end of the year, they’re going to be forced to it How can they force Apple users who are comfortable with using a touchscreen interface? using their their phones, who also want a power device that is in a laptop form factor, run iOS apps and not be able to use that touchscreen interface there. I mean, the market just is going to dictate it at that point. I think I think I’m will do this in 2021.

Augusto Pinaud 38:48
I’m so hope to be wrong when we do this episode in 12 months, and I say I was wrong. I’m looking forward to it. Sadly, I think they are way more stubborn than that. And I will not I don’t think we will see that on 2021. But I think there is something important to mention. As you mentioned that, you know, the future of the microchip is interesting because he was for so long, between AMD and Intel. And now Apple is out. Microsoft is out Google is out and everybody is building their own that bring up significant set of problems for AMD, and Intel, but also bring an incredible bright future for any of those platforms. I says we go more and more to the cloud. Ethan really we are going to the point where it will not matter what you buy for hard work. But you go to the cloud and use it that way. And that is really, really exciting. And as we were discussing weeks back, you know, now Google finalizing the acquisition of Nowhere. So basically allowing to get any old piece of hardware and turn that thing into a Google machine into a Chromebook. That is super exciting being able to integrate the different platforms going to the cloud. And I remember, some years ago, we’re not going to say how many, okay, when we start seeing, okay, this apps coming to the web, but they’ve so underpowered. Now, we are seeing really how the power is finally catching up with what we need on a day to day basis, you were saying? office 365 is a great example of that, you know, when Google Docs came, the first version he was, what it was, okay. And now it’s a really powerhouse, right?

Raymond Sidney-Smith 40:47
Don’t Don’t knock rightly.

Augusto Pinaud 40:51
I said what it was, I didn’t said one way or the other. What advice? Okay, but please, 65, same thing, when it came to first versions, he was not that great. It was the disparity between that and the next step was so brutal. And now it’s getting, you know, to the point where you can leave in that online environment when you can get all that so that’s pushing every device, really, to the browser, that it’s going to make us maybe pretty soon. And I think 2021 has a big opportunity to be a leap year for this into a platform agnostic, where everything will run even more on the browser, unless on the local machine that is going to allow you to go from one thing to another one and really use the hardware you like the hardware you love with the powerful tools of other software company.

Art Gelwicks 41:46
Yeah, it’s also one of those things, when you look at these as the platforms. It gives us the opportunity to truly have iterative software development and continuous delivery. If you think about old versions of office, you had to you had office 2017, or office 2016 and 28th and 29th. It was yearly revisions. That was you got the big update, and you could plan for the big update, and you had it in the 47 floppies in the box or whatever. deploy it that way. Now, it’s just it happens. It happens in the background, things run, things continue to run. Granted, when things break, they tend to break for everybody at the same time. But that’s really not your problem. That’s somebody else’s to fix again and upside. The fix very quick. Exactly. You look at normal outage time for a software bug, prior to the web experience, could take months to get patches distributed. Now it’s literally real time the patches are brought online. Yeah. And that’s, that’s the kind of thing

Frank Buck, EdD 42:52
Yeah, yeah. And when one of us is having a problem, we know that everybody’s having a problem within marriage. Oh, Google Calendar goes down. Twitter lights up.

Art Gelwicks 43:01
Yep. Yep. Yeah, this this type of change that we’re seeing, with Windows making this move towards, you know, having that type of a virtual environment, not so much a virtual machine. But truly, I want to call it’s not a fat client. And it’s not a thin client, it’s kind of somewhere in the middle client. Because it’s just a much more powerful web front end that we’re getting to, and it’s getting more tightly integrated. And I think Chrome OS is the best example of this and has really set the tone from for where this is going, Microsoft will catch up because they have the server infrastructure and the back end that can drive all this stuff. Apple at some point, I think will probably do it too. I mean, there’s going to be some point where they stop releasing version numbered versions of software. And they just start a rolling continuous deployment. There’s so many advantages, and there are far fewer disadvantages to this model. But it also takes us to a concept that I think this is killing off, which is the location locked model. If you think about it, up until this point, you had to have a machine where you’re going to work that needed the software on it that you needed to work with. That’s not the case anymore. It all follows you around. You can just if we talk about something like Samsung dex or something like that, plug in, turn it on, you’re often working because everything comes in finds you. Yeah, it’s bandwidth hog. And there’s, there’s adjustments you have to make for that. But it’s a whole different way of approaching this software model. And I think we’ve talked about it a lot up until this point, the past 10 months have really pushed us hard to recognize the value of that non location locked. Debt machine and software environment.

Frank Buck, EdD 44:57
Yeah, it is all gotten so much easier. You know, I remember the days that if I was teaching a workshop on Outlook, it meant somebody hauling in and setting up computers and installing outlook on every machine and NAS, just simply bring your laptop with you, you know, give me four walls and lights. And, you know, we’re, we’re good to go. And so many things done automatically. You know, I remember when one of the things that we did, you know, once a month was updating, I was reminding all the teachers in my building to go and update windows, you know, remember, we had to do that manually. And most people didn’t even know you had to do that. And they would, they finally learned that little thing. They were update windows for half day, because it was able to restart the machine. And and now that’s all happening for us automatically. I mean, it is so much easier today for everybody.

Augusto Pinaud 46:00
But not only that, I mean, I’ve been doing tech support for my family since whenever that is hard. And it is so easy. Now I today, my dad called me for something on his phone and I said, Okay, send you the Google meat link, he logging into Google meat on his phone, share your screen. And now I don’t think in here clicking here, oh, it is such a simplification than before, when you need to tell them go to settings, I don’t have settings on my phone. Every phone has seen not mine, okay. And there was a discussion we had so many times now I can tell him it is go on the third row five down clicking there and no more discussion, if that is called settings or something different. And that has been fantastic for for both sides and those kind of things. I really simplification when you can now the I remember, WebEx when you needed to get out the recession to get that thing installed. So you can share your screen. So you could help somebody or demo something. Now, this comes normal, share the screen, look at each other. It’s finally normal. When the first time we had the fortune to visit Disney World, I remember looking at the concept of chunking in the cameras. And I remember my mother saying I will never do that. But also now I have that memory and see my mom playing with my kids doing this. And many other things. And doing training, as you said, you know, there is no need for me to travel to the other side of the world to do the training, I can do it from the comfort of my home office and get a good session. So all those he’s so much easy. And that simplicity, at the same time has an incredible amount of power that we did not have before. And that is again, one of the things that allows 2020 to show us free mode working on a different way. And one of the things that has been interesting is how much people are going to redefine their the use of their devices coming 2021 because I think one of the things we saw in 2020 was people discovering, oh, wow, my phone can do a lot more of what I thought it was. Okay, and for a lot of people who did not have that many devices is covered, oh, I can do all my work call soon, you know, here in this and then while my kid takes a computer, and all this other things. So I think we are going to see people better understanding what their different devices means on their life, and how to really get the most out of the devices, those devices are not going to be any more work and consumption are going to go into the different styles of work and consumption that you do into that. So

Raymond Sidney-Smith 49:22
to wrap up this segment, what are your final predictions for 2021? Are there any final thoughts that you have for listeners and viewers regarding 2021?

Frank Buck, EdD 49:32
You know, I have a feeling that when we get together a year from now, we’re gonna look back on today and go, Oh, boy, we had no clue.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 49:45
I hope that’s the case that’ll make that’ll make for an interesting conversation. And I’m always excited about those things. Just a couple of other items. I think that the the tablet market has a lot of room to grow. And I think that’s something We’re going to see quite a bit of change in not only from the ereader. Perspective more now that e ink devices are getting a remarkable new set of technologies, not only in the color, reading space, but also in the display market where writing on screen becomes a natural process for those low powered devices that have pretty high computing power at low power consumption. We’re seeing those matchups, and I think I think that’s really going to bring those e readers and writing tablets, really to the fore next year, and they’re really going to champ they’re going to challenge the the tablet market, right? You know, in the high end market where you have iPads, and the Samsung Galaxy Tab, you know, devices, you’re going to see challenges to that, not for the fact that they’re so full featured, but for the fact that they are so power, low power consumption, with the computing power of Android 910 or 11, on those devices, you can do a lot with them, and have them around for a couple of weeks, without even having to charge them, I think that’s going to be really, really interesting to see how people use that in a productivity setup. You think of the bullet journal, but in a, in a in a remarkable tablet to environment, like a remarkable tablet is a remarkable tablet to record to tablet. And so yeah, so So I see that I see that being very, very powerful, even though it’s not my flavor of of how I would want to manage a system because I don’t like remarkables, proprietary kind of system, their their ecosystem is proprietary, I want to be able to have my my data exfiltrated from it easily. The point is, is that they’re going to be a lot of people who are very comfortable with that, and will embrace that digital environment be able to use bujo, or other kinds of methodologies like that in an in a digital space. And it’s not going to be an impediment, because they’re always worried about power.

Art Gelwicks 51:52
I think 2020 or 2021 is going to be the year of the home office. It’s going to be and it’s not just you know, ancillary technology that gets repurposed, we’re going to see a wave of dedicated home office tech solutions, software focused around the fact that the home office is for many people now, the primary office, and we’re going to see that shift. There’s enough tech out there that you can do at a lower cost and get a high quality of return that we’re going to, I just think we’re going to see this push faster and faster. Now it’s going to become an integral part. And I think people are going to make housing decisions around is there an extra room to be in office? We were thinking about it in our own house is one child moves out and gets their own place. Okay, we’re going to shift everything around. So another room can become a dedicated office for my wife, who would never have worked from home before. But now does it four days a week. Okay. We change how we live.

Augusto Pinaud 52:57
I think we are going to see if the if the writing’s on the wall is correct. We are going to see Google making a lot of market share into Chromebooks into they’re not Oh, no, I’m not talking about a school I’m talking about in the business world. I’m talking about into the small business into the home base. And we are going to see Apple and Microsoft towards the end of 2021 cat trying to catch up with that, because I’ve been saying for years that the thing with Google is that they can really make a little push and take a significant chunk of that market without too much effort. And because in part of the cost, because in part of the capabilities, the capabilities and the cost, brilliant, we have seen it with some of the devices you know the Lenovo the word said $300. tablet that is really a full fledge, you don’t need anything else. So I think we are going to see, I hope we see and I’m not wrong into this one. Google really making a leap that is going to cause Apple and Microsoft to try to catch up behind your muted art

Art Gelwicks 54:17
yet apart. Think about it this way. Microsoft has been playing the long game on this for quite some time, because they have recognized the fact that their success cannot be tied to the desktop any longer. It has to be agnostic of that. Therefore, that’s the reason why you have office in the cloud. And you have all these cloud based services. Because whether you’re using Chrome OS, Mac OS, or Windows or Linux, it doesn’t care. If it’s a compatible browser. They’ve got you and that’s that’s where their success can be. I always use the comparison of Google or the Greeks and Microsoft as the Romans. The Romans didn’t come up with the stuff first, but they man they made it scale. Big Google’s innovating on these types of tools and platforms, I don’t think Microsoft’s going to be releasing their own version of a Chromebook. I mean, there’s rumors of the light and or the lightweight operating system and all and that’s fine, that’s more responsive. But it really comes down to what’s the factor, they play, look at schools, look at colleges, they basically give away office 365, especially at the collegiate level. Well, that’s what you want. Because when these college students graduate, what’s the platform, they’re used to dealing with? Word, Excel, PowerPoint, USB access, now, it’s no SQL and Power BI and all those other things, that shift is happening. And I think we’re going to continue to see that shift. And it’s just easier now to do that. The, the price for admission, is much lower.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 55:47
Now you can see a lot of what they’re doing in the gaming world is their goal in the office space, right in the office productivity space. So if you watch them with the Xbox platform, and you watch Google stadia, and you want, you know, you watch all of these, even Amazon with their Luna platform, if you watch what they’re doing in those spaces, that is a leading indicator of what they’re really trying to do for everything else across the board. And, and, you know, like, I always joke in my my work life, that if you watch the adult entertainment industry, the way in which they market themselves, where they go with technology is usually where the rest of us go, think of magazines, you know, stag video, all the way to present days, live streaming, all of these things all started in pornography, you know, they were pushing the envelope on technology, because they knew where to go, because it was going to be where they get the most people. And if we pay attention to those things, we can actually see where the leading indicators of all the technology, I mean, look at live streaming today, all founded in, in that adult entertainment space. And you know, while it’s, it’s taboo here in the United States, we all giggle and that kind of thing, when we talk about it, it really is like, you know, just think, you know, like, if you are aware of what’s happening in that adult look at only fans, if anybody knows what only fans is, you know, this whole platform for adult entertainers to you know, have customized bespoke content for folks, this is now a space where small businesses and and, you know, non adult entertainment, you know, creators are now going to be able to proliferate in that space. So, you know, I’m, I’m required to pay attention to the marketing industry. But really, to a great extent, it is actually what shows us what’s happening in technology by watching these kinds of advancements in what would be considered maybe a fringe industry. But by no means we’re going to Are we not going to see more and more of everything streaming, because we see these lending leading indicators across the board. And I’m very interested interested to see how more and more of these these technologies are going to come in the productivity space, especially as it relates to some of these applications. You know, we see, you know, Evernote, notably this year went to an electron JS platform, you know, where, where they now have redeveloped their application on top of, you know, basically, it’s a JavaScript application. So they are able to now push their application across multiple platforms, all using what they call the conduit, we’re gonna see more and more of this happening, because we can now stream that technology directly to devices. And that’s going to be very powerful, I

Art Gelwicks 58:27
think, I think you hit the nose, or hit it right on the nose with the gaming reference too, because when I look at what Microsoft’s doing, and some of the others the the fact that they have the ability to stream from the cloud, which means I don’t have to have a console for many games, I can just play it off of whatever device will support it. In this case, it’s my phone. stadia does it to Chromebooks. stadia does it to Android devices. Microsoft’s gonna have a browser based version, stadia has a browser based version, but the fact that I can have an Xbox console in my house, and never actually have to sit at it to play the game, I can stream that device across my own home network, to any other device on the network and play it that way, is massive, because now that becomes a home gaming server. And if we look at that type of thing with streaming video content, if you think about it, and there are services that do this, but if I have streaming hosting, like YouTube TV does streaming that streaming recording like a DVR, well, if I have a device where I can cache it locally, I only have to pull it one time. And it can just sit in that local cache, just like downloading to Spotify. It’s the same licensing type of model, you can just verify it. And if it’s not verified, the app kills it off, and you don’t have it because you don’t really own the content. But there are so many ways that you’re right, these streaming and these, these types of connected platforms are going to drive the way we see these tools used. We, as people in the productivity space have to recognize that these are huge opportunities. I mean, if you’re struggling to get work done, it may just be because you’re sitting at your desk, fine pick up and move someplace else in your house, the text there to let you do that. If you don’t know how, yeah, we can talk you through that. It’s the why, why would you want to do that type of thing? Why would you want to have that event advantage and capability? And it’s, it’s coming?

Augusto Pinaud 1:00:26
It’s coming? Well, I

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:00:28
appreciate this discussion. This has been really a lot of fun. And we are going to go into our next segment after the break, where we’ll be talking about our stories this week. And so Thank you, gentlemen. And let’s take a break. Now, to hear a word from our sponsor this week. WCC web services. We’ll see you after the break.

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Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:01:41
Welcome back everybody to anything but idle. Before the break we were talking about basically a news in preview what we expected was going to happen in 2021. And so now what we’re going to do is talk about our news this week, what what stories were in the news this week in the productivity and technology space, a gusto, you want to start us off with some Amazon news?

Augusto Pinaud 1:02:03
Yes, they you can now use the big a without any work, you can basically get full marks and read or text and text to the software that a piece of application and it will do announcement it will do drop ins he will do communication. That is awesome. When the environment is loud. A when I saw the news, if the first time I said I don’t know why we want this, it is awesome. I mean, I can send the message to make announcement in all the devices for directly from the text message. So it’s exactly what I want to say. And I can do it even in the middle of a call like this one. And I can now go and said, Hey, this is happening. Take care of this. So it’s been a really, really powerful and I really hope it goes to big g as well as the others soon.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:02:59
So you’re able to already do that with the Google Assistant. So so the So basically, mme a now has a type with mme A is the name of a feature, you’re capable of doing this on iOS currently, as my understanding, presumably, this will come to the Android platform as well. And you’re able to open up the iOS application, and then type a message to mme A, which will then trigger the directions to the assistant. And for those of you who are not aware of the google assistant is capable of being installed, and you can type those instructions. Once you trigger the device. There is a way to do that within the application and type messages that are directions to it. All right, next up in the news booster.

Augusto Pinaud 1:03:45
The next is an article from ladders how not to get crazy when you work from home. And I laugh because the picture of the article is a little kid with a mother smiling ha I’m guessing that picture was taken at 6:45am. Because by seven that’s not a real big. But I think talks about the health from a health perspective and how certain brands has been working into trying to help people into balance this, you know how, you know what they said a wellness is what the five things I mentioned is what the nourish the tribe, the groom. And finally, where and it is interesting because as we were discussing at the beginning, this has been one of the massive challenge for everybody who has kids around the house. And it doesn’t matter if your kids are little or your kids are a little bit older. I The other day I was having a conference call with a client and the connection was awful and suddenly you He has told them, Hey, can we reconvene the stub the call and reconvene for tomorrow earlier? So yeah, no problem, please, your interest thurible today, and he laughs I know my kids are playing among me and there is nothing I’m going to do to get them down. And that is a problem, it’s a real problem that we will have not considered before. But at the same time, he brings a lot of extra problems. You know, a lot of people have discovered mesh in 2020. Okay, so they make their wireless connection, a lot more stable, others has admitted that a hardwire cable to the computer will make the connection more stable, and they don’t need to deal with the kids using the Wi Fi, and other things. So all these things, too, are important to keep our our own sanity into into working from home and not going crazy. Sorry, it was going he was saying in the first segment 2021 probably it’s going to bring a ridiculous amount of technology into the working at home park.

Art Gelwicks 1:06:08
And, and it goes back to that point I made earlier about having to be not the expert, but be comfortable with so many things that we haven’t had in the past that, you know, at work, if we had a network issue, or we had low bandwidth, we went and complained to the network guy or the helpdesk guy. Now that’s us. And we have to deal with that we have to figure out why we’re struggling. And we have to look at what are the possible mitigations it’s requiring people to broaden their horizons a little bit more than they’re comfortable with, or in many cases a lot more than they’re comfortable with. And if we if I just touch on that previous segment a little bit, what will 2021 have, I think we’re going to see a huge boom, in home based work services. So you know, people who will provide remote network support for you in your home office, people who will provide the virtual assistants, I think we’re gonna see a huge boom in knows anything that because we saw that with things like instacart, cart and doordash. And the services will arrive to fill the need, the needs are definitely demonstrated there. So it’s only a matter of time, before those services start to come into play.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:07:25
Yeah, I used to have a personal concierge in when I lived in DC. And it was great because you know, I could have them pick up the dry cleaning, and so on and so forth. And at that time, you know, the the nature of the business I was in, I just didn’t have a lot of free time. And you know, they could meet the cable person, you know, at the house and let them in and do all those kinds of things. And it was great, you know, and not everywhere in the country is is that capable of being done. And I think that now where safety, and health is a concern, having someone who can do all those things, clearly and effectively. So that you can stay home and work safely at home really is going to increase the need for that. I mean, we already have alcohol delivery services in, you know, various parts of the country. We have Uber Eats and doordash and so forth, as you notice are but I think we’re going to spread to more and more categories of this of these more, or just bespoke services that allow us to do that. What you’re, what you’re saying to me is that it sounds to me like we’re gonna have msps for residential, in essence,

Art Gelwicks 1:08:34
well, and it wouldn’t shock me either. I mean, I can see the potential for decentralizing things like a doordash or an instacart, to local delivery services. I mean, you have a lot of restaurants and things like that they try to do their own delivery, they struggle because they have to keep somebody on staff and they have to keep cars running around. But then they go to somebody like doordash that provides the service, but they take a big chunk of money to do that. I think there’s opportunities and the technology’s there for smaller businesses to start up and say, Hey, everybody within, you know, 10 miles of this town will provide your delivery service for you and, and we’ve got a little web app that was built that allows people to register and do the payments, all that text there. It’s just waiting to be applied and scoped accordingly. So I think that’s where we start to really see this.

Augusto Pinaud 1:09:28
I think from the other side too, from people you know, we we have used instacart and I certainly stores that we like to shop that I hate to go because of the time that it takes to get in and out and do all that process that I will never buy it. I will never go again I will do only instacart wisdom and we have discovered that not walking around. Okay, eliminate the temptation of the extra 10 things that Trump has Jump into the cart, that at the end of the day, when you add the progression and and when you look at it, it is for us as turned cheaper to go instacart and me going to the grocery aside of the point that I save time, I don’t need to take care of any, you know they’re going in, they’re just not adding those five things that tend to, you know, suicide jump into my cart, and I somehow end up paying for them. But, um, things like that we are going to see more and more of those I agree of those services on some piece coming into those service providers coming in jump into meat is really a specific meets and really needs that can be solved in a much better way. Mm hmm.

Frank Buck, EdD 1:10:49
Yeah, and and not only the problem of those things jumping into the cart that you know, that you weren’t thinking about in are just sort of appear before you. But the opposite of that, the things that you’re looking for the store, but you can’t find anybody that will help you. But when you’re in front of your computer, you just do a little search. And then there it is, and you you comparison shop, and you do your thinking and your measurements and whatever it is for whatever it is you’re wanting to buy, just boom, put it in my cart, click to pay and wait for it to show up at the door.

Art Gelwicks 1:11:22
Yeah, it’s that last mile that I think is going to be one of the key pieces of 2021 people have fallen back on normal, you know, Amazon delivery for just about everything as of late. And we’ve seen a couple of things happen. One, we’ve seen massive growth in Amazon. But two, we’ve seen the long haul delivery services kind of fall on their face. You look at the Postal Service, you look at FedEx, you look at UPS, they all struggle, even Amazon with their own delivery services, struggle, time delays and delivery delays, small businesses, local businesses can’t compete with that long haul. But could they compete in the local space? If there is an aggregation of those services, to find a more productive way to get that part of that end connection done, then I think so i think there could be that space there. And like I said, the technology is there to make it happen. What we have to start having as people having that productive vision as to, there’s got to be a better way to do this. And then taking it to that step, and not trying to be the next, you know, House of Bezos, but just trying to be let’s make this work within you know, our town.

Augusto Pinaud 1:12:40
And I think that’s the key. The key to what you’re saying is not try to be the next massive monster, but to be the local that I cover one or two towns, and I’m particular to this local area, more than I want to be the next big, big corporation. Now

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:13:02
the funny part is, is that back in the day, when I lived in DC, there was a service called doctor delivery. And they did what basically Uber Eats, and doordash does, and so on, so forth. grubhub seamless, and they conglomerated the various restaurants, you could order from any restaurant, you could order food from one place or another and they would just go pick up the food and bring it to you. And they went out of business, I think in 2016. And I wish that they had survived to 2020 because they would have proliferated in this environment. And that’s what we need, I think that we do have a real struggle, of course, between big tech trying to solve this problem by eating the most they can out of out of individuals who are just trying to make a living. And, you know, the reality is, is that while you may not be aware of this, Uber is trying to replace drivers with computers, right? They’re trying to replace them with with driverless vehicles, those people are just basically beasts of burden until they can get rid of them. And that really creates a problem for us in society, when there aren’t enough jobs for the people in our country. Because we’ve automated everything away. That was an easy, you know, honest day’s work type of living. And with these living wage problems, we’re going to see greater and greater stresses on all of us, those of us who are even knowledge workers are going to be required to create more output for the same amount of hours in the day. So don’t think that this is just a pressure on those folks who are blue collar workers. I think that that’s pressure on all of us in the knowledge worker space. And we need to be mindful of that and equitable in the way in which we manifest the future of how this works. And, you know, I think that we’re kind of in a in a middle ground here where we’re still seeing some of the remnants of the old world, you know, look at the trucking industry. They’ve had a bloodletting in the trucking industry. Why? Because more and more technology has ended. increased the, the needs of the few who have conglomerated those companies and wanted all the truckers to basically, you know, get to places faster, even though like the laws of physics Can, can possibly overcome some of those issues. And so what was once a really good industry and a good paying job is now you know, a now a freelance business, you have to have your own business, in essence in order to own a truck owner, big rig and long haul. And, and you’re making less money for doing so. So you know, what are the real values that we want to embrace in the in the world, and those are things that we really need to come to some some like, you know, inner thought about and come to terms with. And I think this all has a connection to productivity and technology. Because the more those two spaces come together, the more we’re required to take responsibility for the fact that we’re developing ways in which all of us work. And when we do that, we are also aggregating the efficiencies that are potentially removing other people’s livelihoods. And so, you know, every time I order something from doordash, I have to make a judgment call, you know, because I know that that is currently employing someone, but in the future, that’s funding doordash, where does Uber now own them? I think ground so now, you know, that’s funding Ubers desire to get rid of that person in the future. So that, you know, it’s like, there’s some weird, you know, dualistic problem there for me that that that double edged sword that we all have to kind of take

Art Gelwicks 1:16:34
to heart, I admit, I don’t use doordash, I don’t use any of that, if I need, if I want food all over it, and I’ll go pick it up, or I’ll use their internal delivery service. Because I know, it’s connected to local people who are employed in local environments, I know a good chunk of that money is not going to the Uber corporation that really isn’t delivering any value as part of the exchange in the transaction aside from transporting from one spot to the other, and they’re not even really providing the transport. So you’re right, there has to be we have, I don’t wanna say moralistic decisions. But we have ethical decisions that we need to make as part of looking at our technology, looking at our productivity, looking at how we put these things to use and how we interact with them. And what we choose to support, not support. And that not saying that any, any particular one is any better than the others, I don’t want to slam any anyone, or make anybody who feels who uses things like doordash or instacart feel bad, use what works for you, absolutely use what works for you. But we need to make sure that we are encouraging that depth and breadth of technology and availability, to have those kinds of choices.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:17:56
And, and as much as about that is that I you know, I work in the small business arena. And I’m, I’m usually advising small businesses throughout the day. And one thing that I really have to impress upon folks is that if something makes your life more productive, if it allows you an efficiency in that way, and there’s a small business owner or a small business in your area that can do that, but they just aren’t leveling up their their digital experience to make that happen. It I’m not saying you’re responsible for reaching out to them and telling them that they should. But if you feel the the the urge. If the spirit moves you please, as someone who is a small business advocate, go reach out to them and say, Hey, listen, I just doordash something, and I would have purchased it from you, if you have the infrastructure to make that happen. And don’t give me this argument that I can’t You can’t make it happen because the technology is too difficult. All of this technology is now trivial trivial to make happen. And so please encourage them if you if you feel that, you know that internal goal to to support local small businesses go out there and let them know that because if they have a question, just have them reach out to me, I will be happy to tell them how trivial it is to make this this this technological change. I struggle I I’m the one who see those people struggle every day. And I help them through those issues. And I know that it can be done. And so just just know that it’s possible, we should be supporting small business, and it is the lifeblood of our economies. And we don’t necessarily treat it that way. But when we do we can see great economic benefit by having these local businesses be supported themselves through these through these this new technological paradigm. I mean, we’re capable of doing so much and we’re just not we’re scratching the surface as business owners. I’m in that space. So I know I’m on a soapbox, so I’m gonna get off of it. And let’s move on in the news. Augusto, what’s our next news item?

Augusto Pinaud 1:19:48
Me I was ready to so

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:19:52
tomorrow if I let us talk

Art Gelwicks 1:19:54
to us want everybody to note for once it’s not me on the soapbox just just to be clear. Not me. Up there this time, oh, you will

Augusto Pinaud 1:20:01
get me let me use box bomb. That’s the next news from Chromebook system says Chromebooks may be getting a big update the max number of virtual desk allowed and then unmute myself and run and see you guys tomorrow morning.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:20:19
So that everybody has an understanding. Currently right now in a Chrome OS device, you’re capable of having what’s called a virtual desktop. This is very similar to desktops, on Mac OS devices, and even on Windows, where you can have multiple desktops. And in essence, you can place multiple applications into a different desktop, just just like you have your normal desktop with different applications running on it, you can have multiples of those on all the major platforms on Chrome OS is the same. So your Chromebook or chrome bed or otherwise can have multiple desktops it’s been captured for, and there is writing in the code that shows that they are in discussions to double that to eight. And I think that’s a fantastic development. I’m an avid user of desktops, because I like to be able to see the applications I’m using in the same space together and having eight is better than four.

Art Gelwicks 1:21:09
So I tried to explain it to somebody one day, because I was talking about virtual desktops. And they’re like, what the heck when I used it, like, think about it, like in your kitchen, you have one part of your kitchen to do one type of thing, maybe chopping up the vegetables, you have another part of your kitchen to actually cook the food, you know, your stove? Well think about those as desktops targeted around types of work and activities that you can keep there. And you can switch between them. You don’t have to try and do everything right on top of the scope. And that’s it’s not a perfect analogy, but it gets them a little bit closer to thinking about, well, what can I do with these virtual desktops? So yeah, I agree with you completely. Eight is great if you’ve been hitting the cap of four, but if you haven’t even tried it yet, it’s absolutely worth trying.

Augusto Pinaud 1:21:55
Yeah, I describe it to people of wearing different hats. So think about that, when you come to your business. And you now need to do accounting, you don’t want to do accounting was the email beeping, because you will not be able to do it. Now you can have one desk for the accounting, one for the marketing, one for the sales, one for the operations and just move around on that and have clean and only the information relevant to that ad right there. And I agree eight, better than four.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:22:22
And I’m somebody who has I work programmatically. So like I have groups of projects underneath what I call programs, it’s just kind of a different horizon, if you think in the GTD sense. And so I want to be able to work in that space at that time. And so I might have an application open in, in most cases, their web application. So it’s just having another browser instance open. And I will have that running on that desktop with those items open along with the other things that I need. So I can have each labeled virtual desktop, they’re waiting for me to do that work in that space. And so I may have four or five of those running at any given time here on a Windows device on the Mac, your I’m sorry, on the Chromebook, you’re limited to the four. But it really gives you that ability to then say, Okay, I’m, I’m going to be working on this right now I’m going to do the podcast work. And I can put all that stuff into that desktop space. And if I have to switch gears for the next hour or two hours on something else, that’s great, it’s going to be parked there. And when I come back, it’s going to be exactly where I left it. And it’s not gonna have cluttered my view while I was trying to work on it, which is a huge time saver for me. Because queuing up all those pieces takes time. So why queue it up, and then take it all down to have to re queue it up. It’s just a real time saver. And I love it for that. Okay, moving right along, we have some unfortunate news out of Amazon, Amazon is now facing charges from the National Labor Relations Board for firing some employees, they’re calling activists. And and so they’re the, you know, this is just kind of like room room to grow for all the various technology giants. You know, Google has been accused of this, you know, and and Microsoft in the past has been accused of this. Now, here we are with Amazon, you know, basically firing people for doing some level of internal activism. In this particular case, she was speaking to other workers about improving workplace conditions and pay increases were paid, you know, equity generally, relating to the covid 19 pandemic. And so, this is par for the course we’re probably going to see this happen over and over again, as people try to gain equity within these larger firms where a lot of people are either freelancing in the case of Amazon where you have amazon flex, these are not employees, these are people who are interacting with Amazon as a freelance status. And, and then, of course, Amazon employees proper in this case, Courtney Bowden who’s the, the person who filed the claim with the NLRB. They, you know, this was an actual employee, but, you know, I don’t I don’t think we need To know any more than that, then this is happening. And we need to take this to heart these, these things are going to be happening and we need to be aware of them. It turns out that one of the Amazon VPS resigned in protest over the firing of the activist employees. So clearly, there’s some legitimacy there to the to it based on, you know, somebody resigning in protest. So interesting stuff there. All right, moving right along, get some Microsoft news.

Augusto Pinaud 1:25:29
So Microsoft, Intel, well, actually, it’s more Intel news, as everybody knows, now that Microsoft is ready to go Intel Exactly. Well, Intel basically false to report that Microsoft told them that they plan to design their own chips. And we have mentioned that Apple did. Google is doing it, Microsoft, but the news really is that I’m assuming to avoid the price continue going lower than what he has gone because of all this news, they decided to not report oops, that little thing called Microsoft is going to start designing their own ship. But but it what is interesting for me about this news is two things. I don’t think I could be wrong that Microsoft is necessarily interested in enter into the chip market. So I’m curious to see if what they’re going to do with this chipset. It’s really make their surface line really, really strong, while then allowing the external people with Intel or AMD chipsets to continue doing what? What are the offset brands? And I don’t know if that is their plan, obviously. Or are they plan to really start selling chipsets to HP and asis and Lenovo and all that? I don’t think so I don’t see Microsoft into that game. But I see them creating a chipset to make their surface and the Xbox line and all that incredibly powerful to, to grab a more high end market to those lines.

Art Gelwicks 1:27:14
Yeah, aside from the surface and the Xbox lines, Microsoft has always had a very dubious history when it comes to manufacturing hardware, or at least coordinating that. Moving the chipset work inside, does give them the opportunity to target the operating system more directly to how the chipset functions, because then you have that give and take back and forth something that apples always had as its own internal advantage designing its own chips, ties iOS to it, therefore both work better with each other. The downside that Microsoft has with that is they can’t cut their nose off to spite their face with the entire remaining basically, white label PC market that’s out there. They can’t build to just that one chip. Now if they’re targeting specific types of devices, like the high end surfaces, like the xboxes, that type of a thing. There’s validity there. And I I would compare it to what Google does with the pixel devices. It’s creating a reference standard 10 something for other companies to shoot for in producing their hardware. Will they be successful with it? The time will tell I mean, Microsoft’s, like I said, they’re about, you know, 33% on their shooting ratio when it comes to hardware. So in the NBA, that’ll keep you off the bench. But that’s about it. So we’ll see what happens, I will be very curious if they do not target two key things. One will be battery life, specifically optimizing the mobile devices for that. But secondarily, graphics processing, I believe that they’re going to have to continue to push harder into integrating superior graphics processing into their core processors, rather than relying on secondary graphics cards for that, if they want to go to tighter and smaller devices. And if you take something like a surface, you’re not slapping an Nvidia card on it, there’s just no place to put it. So you have to provide something else alternative. And if you want to have those fall into that high end graphic space, as we were talking earlier about virtualization and streaming, and and gaming capabilities, you need that integrated into the platform itself. So I’ll be curious to see where it goes. But time will tell.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:29:36
Yeah, and a lot of this is about control. They want greater control over the supply chain and the manufacturing of their devices. And Google’s making this inroad Apple has already done it with iOS and now with Apple silicon and and so Microsoft is taking that charge as well. Remember that a lot of these devices are still going to be made by other manufacturers is going to be HTC and Qualcomm and so on and so forth. They’re just going to be branded as Microsoft and Google and otherwise. So, you know, again, this is just about tighter partnerships and and tighter control over the SOC s that are being developed, so that they’re capable of doing more and tying their systems to it. It sounds like a lot of this is, is moving toward arm. And and so, you know, I think that that makes actually proper good sense because so much more is going on the web and we know the power of arm with web technologies. So

Art Gelwicks 1:30:33
yeah, I still have to say it’s, it’s all about power management in my mind. That’s really what the key is.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:30:39
Absolutely. Okay. Let’s flipping bits and more zoom. And so what’s going on with zoom a good stuff, you are muted?

Augusto Pinaud 1:30:48
Sorry. It’s always the first time it happens to this show. Imagine that we made it for thought, without any any mute comments. So as we were saying early, when we were talking about our prediction, Sumi is reportedly prepping for the crash of the video, and trying to see what they can do with email and calendar and task and hitting directly on the other productivity verticals send the same way. Microsoft did, I think an incredible work with teams. Film is now looking into how they’re going to stay in this game when videoconference presumably calls down. I don’t see video conference going down that much yet. At least not during 2021. But, but it’s good to see that they’re trying to plan for that.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:31:45
I don’t think I don’t think it’s about video conferencing going down. I think it’s because all of the other major platforms are providing their services for free Microsoft Teams is free for users, you don’t even have to have a Microsoft account in order to use their meet now feature and all these other things. And so Google’s providing free video services, you’re capable of doing so much more now. I mean, you know, signal and WhatsApp and Facebook, messenger, and FaceTime, and you know, like, keep an ending. And all of these services now have video conferencing features, less of it is going to be needed for me to be able to, for me to have to pay zoom for that. And that means zoom needs to protect themselves going forward, adding more productivity features into the platform is actually quite smart. Because if they I mean, they’ve tried that with messaging, and I don’t know, if any of you use zooms messaging feature like as a as like a channel replacement for like Slack, or otherwise, I see the value in it, I just might my existing habits are around other technologies. So it’s very difficult for me to go ahead and make my way into zoom is being that space plus nobody else I know uses it. It’s kind of like signal, you know, I have like a few people who I have the capability of using signal with and then that’s it. And and most people have flocked to telegram and I’m a huge fan of telegram. So that’s okay with me. And but you know, like, the reality is, is that now with telegram, you know, even telegram is now bringing group video group audio chat, something like that, to the platform, you know, like we’re seeing more and more of those platforms that have no cost associated with it. Zoom has to diversify its options. So email and calendar and chat. Those are, those are places they can go because they have a lot of eyeballs currently on their platform, that makes a lot of sense for them to make inroads and even shaving off just a couple of percentage points of those people who are free users, then having businesses pay for those infrastructure pieces, becomes a good revenue source for them. See,

Art Gelwicks 1:33:46
I I have a theory on this. I’d like to hear what Dr. Frank has to say about it. To me, this is zoom making a strong education play. Because it’s a lot of effort for zoom to take the ground that Microsoft has already seized in the corporate space. However, Google really doesn’t provide the same video capability that zoom does. But if zoom can offer the email, and the calendar, will now they can become the student platform and the teacher platform and the integrate, integrate and connect in that way. Granted, there’s a lot of other things that Google does, too. But to me, this feels like an education. It’s

Frank Buck, EdD 1:34:27
gonna take an awful lot to wrestle that away from Google. You know, he a Google Classroom that is so well entrenched. And then Google Sheets, Google Docs, Gmail, I don’t see that going anywhere else. You know, Microsoft has made a pretty good play, and, and has gotten a little bit of a share. But I think where zoom is going to continue to Excel is just you know what To bring the video conference app of choice, you know, it’s huge in the education market, except for those who are scared of zoom bombing, you know, from days gone by, and, and, you know, have gone Google

Augusto Pinaud 1:35:18
later. But even, you know, my kids school, it was funny because they, they have Google classroom and all this and they start using Google meat, but because all the students come with the same quote, unquote, company domain, and the way they set up, the kids were getting ahead of the teachers, especially they all this came and then kicked, kicking people out and banning people from classes, that I mean, some adults, that’s really funny as a parent, not so much. And you need to put the serious face in front of your kid and say, Please don’t do that. Okay, but and the solution for that was, let’s go to soom. Because we do not have an easy way to avoid this to happen other than the teacher coming early, that it’s not always possible. So I think, are they going to take Google away from the schools? No. Are they going to assure themselves to not be replaced by Google meat? Most likely, because what we have seen, at least on on our school is Google meat is nowhere to see, as a platform to teach the kids and to do those media conference. Yeah, I

Art Gelwicks 1:36:30
have to agree with you. I mean, zoom won’t break the stranglehold that Google or zoom won’t break the stranglehold that Google ads, but they have a massive foothold that they need to try, hold, try and keep a hold of. And I think the last thing that they want to do is be considered a one trick pony. Because then it’s easy for somebody to step in, like what Microsoft’s doing with teams, and take a big chunk of that from them. I like the idea that there’s more competition in the email space and the calendar space. Because more competition is always good for getting new ideas, new innovations. And I’m hoping that zoom can come up with some crazy neat ways of doing things that the other guys start to adopt. And we see improvements on probably the two tools that do not want to change or get better, which is email and calendar. But

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:37:26
yes, zoom has made a really good move in integrating with other tools. I mean, that that has been their saving grace is that they now are integrating with Asana and, and all of these other tools. And I think that is really, really smart of them. And I think is where they will continue to excel. Certainly not in infrastructure pieces, I don’t I don’t really think they’re going to innovate in the email space, but hope springs eternal.

Frank Buck, EdD 1:37:50
Okay, calendar, maybe I just don’t see email. I mean, calendar is such a nice fit, because so much of your time, you know, it’s the zoom meeting is in your calendar. And the easier it is to get that same meeting in your calendar and make it a one click right from your calendar into the zoom meeting. You know, and you know, you love zoom. And, and here’s this list of other things that are on your calendar, your Google Calendar, whether there’s zoom meetings, or whether they’re not, it’s like, you know, here’s your day, I’ve read your calendar, here it is for you in zoom. So how good a job they do with calendar, you know, with all the other features

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:38:31
my whole foreign calendar? Yeah, my whole thought here is this is this ends up being a dollars and cents issue, which is that we’re coming into a belt tightening period, and we’re gonna see austerity measures across the board, both on on in government side, but also in industry. And as people start to tighten their belts, it’s very easy to say, Well, what tools do we already have that we’re paying for, and you’re paying for Microsoft 365, if you’re paying for Google workspace, or you’re paying for one of these kinds of productivity suites already, zoom is on the chopping block, because you don’t need it just because everybody likes zoom doesn’t mean that they need it. And I can see a lot of organizations saying, Yeah, we’re moving to Microsoft Teams, we’re moving to Google meat, because we’re already paying for it. So why, why do we need to have this other technology on the books that we don’t technically need? So I see that being their biggest concern, and especially in the education space, where all of these education budgets are going to get slashed and slashed. Again, I don’t know how teachers and principals and administrators are going to do it. But they’re going to have to, you know, basically cut even more and provide the same level of services to children. It’s really going to be tough over the next probably two years.

Art Gelwicks 1:39:44
Now, what I would love to see him do, we want to talk about getting him to innovate. I want to see video emails done currently in 30 seconds or maybe two minute cap, record, send, receive back and forth that way. They have the If it’s completely self contained within their infrastructure, there’s very little overhead cost for them. They could do something very innovative with that leveraging the combinations of their platforms, it’s when it has to cross from like, say, the Xoom email system to Gmail, that it would probably fall on its face because you have data transfer and things like that. But if you could do that internally, that’s, I think that’s one of those could be very interesting feature sets. I wouldn’t be surprised if we see somebody else go down that path, too. I’d love to see Microsoft do it in teams, honestly. Because if you think about it, how much can you get across in a five minute video, as compared to what you would have to do to type all that out?

Frank Buck, EdD 1:40:44
Of course, we have that with loom.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:40:46
Yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s a little different. I mean, you’re so Google has done this the best so far, because if you were using Google workspace, if you attach a, a YouTube link, which again, in Google workspace, a YouTube link can be private within the organization. If I’m sending a message between parties, myself and someone else, recording a YouTube video is trivial. Now, directly in the browser, I’m capable of recording it, and then attaching that link in the email then provides a an inlay. In essence, there’s a video now embedded in the email on the Google recipient side, which now is just basically sending back and forth video messages. Google’s done that the best so far, unfortunately, most people don’t know how to do it. And so it’s not done. What what artists talking about, I think, is really interesting. I don’t think that’s the 2021 thing, I think, come back in 2022. And we’ll talk, maybe we’ll see it start to approach that space. A lot of people have tried to solve this even loom. But the problem is, is that one, the protocol for the size of of email messages is limited, you need to have both servers reading the same, you know, basically mime, or whatever the format is to be able to give that preview and clickable player, more html5 support, I think, gives us maybe a little bit more capabilities there. Maybe more web assembly support, even could us give us more capabilities there. But I just I don’t Unfortunately, the technology is just not there yet. Yeah,

Augusto Pinaud 1:42:19
I it’s interesting, say, I bowed down to that. Because when I get text messages, and the beauty of text messages, you need to write short things. And now people he’s been getting into these boys text message, and they go hours and hours, and you’re like, please write it down. Like, not only that you are here, or you’re you cannot, in every situation, listen. So they start bombarding you with these voice messages. And you’re like, Why Why? So I hope that never fly.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:42:53
So before art responds, I will say also that this is a huge problem in the accessibility space. So if you are in a corporate environment, and you think it’s more productive to record an audio message and send that along, remember that you may get a message from HR telling you that the person who may have an auditory, you know, disability is now not able to understand what you’re saying. And that creates all kinds of compounds and downstream effects. This is a problem in marketing with with a lot more people trying to go to audio and to video, remember that accessibility, what’s good for accessibility is good for you, you need to remember that you are speaking to every level of people, not just the fully abled people that you think you’re speaking to, you’re going to trip up on that if you really try to send too much audio message and frustrated gousto.

Frank Buck, EdD 1:43:47
Yeah, and outside of the accessibility, you know, when it’s text, you can skip to the end, you can go back to the middle, you can search. So when it comes to reference kinds of things, you know that none of us save voicemail messages, for reference purposes. You know, we’re always transcribing those things

Augusto Pinaud 1:44:09
you did.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:44:12
But But again, I’m using other technologies that allow me to be able to transcribe that audio and, and see the audio and text side by side, I want that option. And it’s actually a huge issue for me, and in most of my note taking, which is that I want both I want to be able to reference things. It’s why I’ve been a longtime fan of Livescribe. And their technology to be able to pinpoint where I’ve written notes and matching those up with the audio so that I can match what I said to what was being said at the same time, because what I heard is not necessarily what I wrote. But I want to have context to why it triggered me to think that and those are really useful data points for me for important things. But there’s Sona sense on software. There are other tools out there that really give you the capability there. And now, with Google recorder, you can actually record and transcribe in real time, which is really helpful. So Google recorder, you can install the app if if your operating system, if your Android version doesn’t already have it, you can, you can sideload it, just go find the Google recorder and one of the APK mirror another site like that. Google recorder allows you to be able to basically place the phone down and in real time, you know, both record the audio, but then transcribe it to text. So you can see both of those, there’s otter.ai, which integrates with zoom. You know, there’s all kinds of these features that allow for that, but it’s not everything, you know, if you if you want to telegram me an audio message, it’s not going to be transcribed. And that’s going to limit me in my ability to consume that message in certain environments. If it’s a client message, I can’t just play that out loud. Even if I’m at home, that may mean I have a home based coworker who can’t hear that message. For confidentiality purposes. I take that very, you know, I take that. All right. You know,

Art Gelwicks 1:46:00
I’m gonna hold you How is that any different than getting the phone call, though?

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:46:04
Because in the phone call, only they can hear me. Right? Like, I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t put that I wouldn’t want. Yeah, exactly, exactly. But I mean, like, there’s a reduction of, of productivity when I have to play a message and then put it up to my ear to listen to it. You know, it’s just like, kind of silly. I’ve got to now put a headset on maybe and listen to it. So I can type message. It just seems cumbersome to me that okay, that reading it on screen is just so much faster, as Dr. Buck said, I mean, like, if you want to reference something, you can just quickly scan the words. And it’s far faster to do that than to be like, wait, was that 23 seconds into the message that they said x? Like, I have no idea. I guess

Unknown Speaker 1:46:44
that’s great.

Art Gelwicks 1:46:45
But I’ll flip it around. What if What if a good portion of your audiences non native English speakers, if I’m going to type up a whole bunch of stuff, I can’t guarantee that they’re going to get the same context, because they don’t read literally read it the same way I write it, even down to local colloquialisms that may come across. But yet, something as simple as this little video message that I send across to everybody on the team. They pick it up. Oh, okay. That’s what he meant. So there, while we say that there is a context that we have to be cautious of, we also have to be cautious that that context does not kill the opportunity to put those types of tools to use, and at least try them to see if they deliver productivity.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:47:26
Yeah, definitely agree with you, I think important to recognize that there are going to be issues that fall to that side, I would always rather, in my world, at least foreign speakers to type messages to me, because I have a real difficulty understanding English with from foreign accents. Not a gousto. But because I’ve listened to him enough, like I get his English, but you know, for me,

Augusto Pinaud 1:47:48
I have trained,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:47:50
like I, I can interpret what it used to say, even when you know, there may be a mix up of like particular English words, or those kinds of things I just got, I’ve gotten a good sense of what he’s trying to say to me. But generally, it’s marked far more, you know, readily accessible to me when I read even broken English better than listening to someone say something. And so your point is well taken art, which is that we all need to know how everyone best receives information and communicate with them in that way. And I think that’s that’s a very good point, we should all be taking to heart. All right. Our final piece of news before we go into new tools of the week goes to what’s our final news this week, this year. You’re muted.

Augusto Pinaud 1:48:34
No, I was I was just hitting the click cup. It’s 1 billion valuation in 100 million Series B race. And it is interesting to see those numbers for kickoff, and on what the future of these productivity apps have on all these valuations.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:49:00
Yeah, I think that click up being a not a new player in the market, but fairly new in terms of other long standing tools like Trello and Asana, and so on and so forth. There $1 billion valuation kind of sounds to me, like when companies were being valued in the millions, and they were being considered before unicorn status came came about, you know, this kind of reaching a billion dollars was a big deal. And now it sounds like so many of these companies are being valued at at a billion dollars or more. And I find it a little bit fascinating. Next week, I want to bring to the table I just recently found came across an article about the fact that Slack, and their purchase by Salesforce was a little bit more about surviving than thriving. And so I’m interested to see this but we’re seeing more and more of these billion dollar valuations and parts may just be equity inflation, right? You know, these folks are putting in dollars, they want to get returns, so putting high evaluations is it gives them a latitude to, to grow into that number. But at the same time, you know, I think that being a billion dollars today is is kind of the new being, you know, $100 million company, we’ve just 10 X Factor because of what for whatever reason, the equity firms, whether they be AC and VC just want to see these big dollar values associated with them.

Art Gelwicks 1:50:25
Yeah, it reminds me back to the days back in the 90s, when you had the dot coms firing up, and the number of them whose business model was nothing more than to get the IPO pop, and to sell it and get out. I see a lot of these valuations right now. I think we’re going to see even more of them over the next 12 months, again, as we the things we talked about earlier. And my challenge to each one of them is great. You got the valuation, that’s terrific. What are you doing different? Yeah, what’s, what’s your path? What’s your roadmap? What’s your strategy? Are you willing to communicate that? I mean, I, I struggle with some companies that deliver fantastically capable applications, but can’t seem to communicate their strategy moving forward. And that doesn’t instill a lot of confidence in me, I’ll still use their product until it falls over. But I’ll also making sure that I have a very strong exit plan for them as well. And I look at companies like clickup, that may be the next big thing. But then again, maybe not.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:51:31
Yeah, elegance is very different than than business model. And a lot of these are elegant solutions, but they really don’t have a sound business model behind them. clickup has done, you know, like what a lot of these companies have done, they have a free tier, so you get a lot of, you know, users to sign on to the onto the system. And the goal, then is really a marketing issue, which is trying to get more people to sign up beyond the free level. And that’s going to drive valuation. So if you can show increase in free to paid at a particular rate, then you can start to extrapolate valuation based on that. That’s not necessarily true, though, if the entire market is considered, and I’m, I’m continually baffled when I look at these reports, when we finally see IPOs happen, and they do their public filings, I’m like, Wait a second, you know, they valued based on early data of increased scale. And then when they go on to the market, they recognize that that’s not actually the pace at which they’re growing. They’re they showed what their pace of growing was early on. And then you see the market kind of correct them. And by that point, they’ve gotten an influx of cash from the markets, and they’re off to the races. And so they’re kind of gaming the system in that way, similar to the way that we saw specs come onto the market and start to game the system as well, we’re gonna see more and more sec scrutiny here, that’s gonna potentially cause some of these valuations to be adjusted, so to speak. And, but you know, I’m all for props to click up for their valuation good on them, I hope to see them do well and create greater innovation in the market. But I also see a lot of these smaller productivity technologies. Really, there’s a there’s an open playing field, if you do not believe that there’s an open playing field, in the in the in certainly in the task management project management space, you are, you are putting your blinders on, there is such an open market that I think 2021 is providing us because no one has solved the problem yet. There’s so many other unique and individual environments, that productivity, both project management, task management, calendar management otherwise, still has in terms of of opportunity. All right, with that, that takes us to our new tools of the week. And so as I say every week gousto. And I come across a whole bunch of technologies every week in our research in preparation for these episodes. And so we like to share a few of the maybe new tools to us, or maybe old tools tools to us, but new to you, tools that we find along our productivity and technology journey. And of course, we invite our panelists to share those technologies as well. And so this is new tools of the week. And so for our first new tools of the week item, I’m going to be sharing a an item that is somewhat self serving. But I’ll explain why in a moment. So buy the first tool of the week, then first new tool of the week is a product called other side.ai. And other side.ai is in essence, an email software that uses artificial intelligence to draft email for you. So in essence, you typed just a couple of words or or you know, maybe a sentence or two and then it actually recraft the email in proper format to be able to be sent. So the productivity gains are That you can say, I need the, you know, TPS report on Monday. And instead of you typing out, Hi Bill, enter, you know, how was your week, blah, blah, blah, all of that stuff, in essence, other signs, AI is going to do that for you. And all you have to do is type those few words. And it basically triggers the system to go ahead and do that. So they are currently in beta. And I’m just asking the community for a little support, if you go to this link, which is my website, our Sidney-Smith dot com forward slash other side AI, that will and I’m not getting any

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:55:38
remuneration other than the fact that they’re going to bump me up in the list to basically get access to the software faster, I want access to this. So go to our Sidney-Smith dot com forward slash other side AI, and and that will put you in the waitlist, but it will bump me up in the waitlist. So thank you for doing that if you do. And so that’s other side.ai, I’m thinking this is going to be a huge an interesting piece of technology, not so much that it’s going to replace anyone’s email, all told. But I would love to see this as a part of other email systems, I’d love to see this integrated into the Gmail interface into Google workspace mail, integrated into Microsoft Outlook, so that when you are trying to write email, you can just quickly easily get this stuff up and running. And so I see this as being interesting. I see this being more interesting once other technologies take hold, and come into the market when Microsoft and Google and others adopt, adapt, redevelop, you know, this these technologies and put them into their own systems. Alright, and with that, then, uh, gousto, what is your first tool of the week? Cool,

Unknown Speaker 1:56:47
new, new tool, I’m sorry.

Augusto Pinaud 1:56:51
So it’s an application for the widgets on the iPhone or the iPad, and is called auto task. And basically, what gives you is the equivalent of the old posted where you can have one thing that you want to remind yourself and put it there. So widget said you can have it there as a single widget single thing to remember. But it’s not designed to bring your whole productivity nearly so you add something you want to remember. So I’ve been using it to I have maybe for the old days where you had that agenda you open, and it had that quote at the top I have, for whatever reason love that forever. So I’m bringing those every day a different one would have task. So every time I open the widgets on the phone, that’s what I see. And it’s a good way to remember them. So that’s the application of the week.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:57:49
Fantastic. And then next up is is that you aren’t?

Unknown Speaker 1:57:53
Yeah, that’s me.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:57:55
Go for it. What’s your task? What’s your story? Oh, actually, that’s

Augusto Pinaud 1:57:59
a good thing.

Art Gelwicks 1:57:59
It’s a it’s a little app I stumbled across the other day just poking around, because I gave myself the objective. Over the next couple of months of trying to focus on purely mobile based task management, not worrying about web access, not worrying about anything else. I just wanted to see what are the good apps, I came across this little guy called test Kido. One I love the name, I think the name is great. But what’s interesting about it is it approaches tasks from the way we always tell people to not deal with them, which is scheduling them. It allows you to directly synchronize with your calendar and integrate your tasks into a timeline with your calendar events. So maybe you have a meeting from eight to nine, and then you have an opening block from nine to 930, you can then add tasks into that nine to 930 block, and then manage them as events for lack of a better term. The other thing that’s nice about it is it provides not only this really innovative timeline view, but it also gives you a board view for managing projects and things like that. I haven’t dug into it a lot in a lot of depth yet. But the user interface is very clean. It’s material focused, very quick as well. definitely has some potential. It is very early days for the app. I think the downloads are in less than 100 K so far, but I have not seen anything in it that has turned me off as of yet. So it’s definitely worth looking at if you’re trying to integrate your calendar and your to do list.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:59:30
Fantastic task keto tsk, it Oh, there. Thank you. Thank you art, and Dr. Buck. What’s your pick this week.

Frank Buck, EdD 1:59:40
Mine is called photo scan. And this this is not a new one. It’s what I’ve used probably for a year and it’s been out longer than that. But it’s just a little app and I used it very recently in taking old photo albums from my father and My grandparents. So you’ve got these things, these photos that are under plastic, and they’re in photo frames and all this other kind of stuff. So instead of having to take them out and lay them on a flatbed scanner or something like that, it’s just a little app on your phone, you just hover over it. And it actually takes like four different pictures, it has you maneuver the phone, it shows a little dots on the screen, and you just move your phone from.to dot. And what it does, it takes out all the glare that you would get if you were just taking a picture of a picture. And then of course, just upload some right into Google Photos and bikes, what would be a very laborious job, very quick and easy.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 2:00:48
Fantastic, great application. And I have shown my mom how to use photo scan. And I think she still knows how to use it. So all good there. Okay, with that, that closes out this week’s new tools of the week. And do we have any announcements? I think I have one, which is that tomorrow. So if you’re listening to the podcast today, but tomorrow, I will be announcing a new masterclass that I’m doing for Evernote 10. And so for those of you who are interested, if you go to events.evernote.com, you’ll be able to find it there. And I think that’s probably the easiest way to send all of you just go to events.evernote.com you’ll find that Evernote masterclass there, and you can attend the live version of those free so I just want to do that for folks. And so, events that evernote.com for those who are interested in the new Evernote masterclass starting January will probably mid to late January, at this point. And so with that, let’s see, oh, art, did you have another tool you wanted to share with folks? Ah, yeah, I’ve

Art Gelwicks 2:01:55
got a quick little one that I found very interesting. And this is just targeted to people who are Google notes users, or actually, I’m sorry, Google Keep users. There’s an app called bundled notes, which looks like Google Keep acts like Google Keep, but it does a lot of the things that you wish Google Keep would do. It’s only available on Android. But take a look at it, dig it out. And if you do try it, I would love to hear from people. And what they think about it related to Google Keep specifically because it falls. It’s one of those apps that’s like, yeah, I really see what you’re doing. And we’re gonna do that, plus some more stuff. So I’ll be curious to see what anybody has to say. But it’s called bundled notes.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 2:02:36
Fantastic on Google on Google Play.

Unknown Speaker 2:02:38
Yes. Awesome.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 2:02:39
Great. All right. Dr. Buck, we’ve reached the end to the show. How can folks keep in touch with you and keep up to date, right book

Frank Buck, EdD 2:02:49
dot orgy? Come over to my website, join the email list. It’s worth your while.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 2:02:55
Wonderful. And you’re at Dr. Frank buck on Twitter and Instagram,

Frank Buck, EdD 2:03:00
Graham Pinterest, you name it. I’m the same name everywhere.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 2:03:06
As always, thanks for being here on anything but idle talked about. All right, and art. How can people keep in touch with you and up to date with the work you’re doing out there.

Art Gelwicks 2:03:18
As always, you can come over to the idea pump, see what I’ve got going on there. And I’m getting really close to picking something off the vine. I’m just going to leave it to that, but it’s coming. So watch for the next announcement on that. Because first of the year, it’s hit, it’s going to hit the floor.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 2:03:33
Fantastic. Welcome. And thank you for being Thank you. Anything but idle art. All right, good stuff. We reached the end,

Augusto Pinaud 2:03:44
we reached the end of this episode and the end of 2020. And so it’s been a fantastic year to anything but idle. And I’m really happy of what this year have brought. And I’m looking forward to 2021.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 2:04:00
And so thanks from me to you a gousto. For those of you who watch, don’t know, gousto was the one who puts together the show notes and all the other work that in the background to make anything but it’ll happen each week. I do not have multiple versions of me. And the gousto really does the heavy lifting here to make anything but it’ll happen. So thank you for making that happen. So that is my thanks to a gousto. And my well wishes for everybody for a hopeful 2021. I know it’s going to be difficult going forward into 2021. We’re not out of the woods yet. But we can see light at the end of the tunnel with multiple vaccines available. And hopefully now vaccinations happening out there in the wild and people hopefully getting some sense of stability. Because of that. If we miss something in this show, say we had a prediction we didn’t quite get to or if you have a prediction that that you think you want to share. Feel free to head over to anything but idle calm, you can go ahead and Leave a comment. On the episode page. All of our episodes are numbered. So this is Episode 36. So if you go to anything but idle comm forward slash 036, you’ll be taken to that episode page, you can go ahead and leave a comment there. If you’re watching the video on YouTube, you obviously can comment on the YouTube video. And we also have our DNS open on Twitter. So at anything but idle, you can tweet at us or you can dm us at anything but idle. And that goes for any other questions or comments if you go to anything but idle comm, you can click on Contact, and you can go ahead and contact us there. On every episode page, we also have our show notes. So links to all of the articles that we covered, sometimes extras for things that we didn’t get a chance to cover, but we still tracked and correlated. For purposes of the episode, we have our tools of the week, we have the text transcripts that we generate using otter. So all of those are there available to you in PDF as well as to be able to read on the page. And so feel free to find those out there. We do this every Monday right now every Monday at 6pm. eastern US Eastern Standard Time. So feel free to join us anytime for the live show. And if you’ve enjoyed watching today, feel free to click the thumbs up icon that helps us to increase our productivity listening community or watching community. And so thank you for doing that. You can also leave a review in Apple podcasts or Stitcher. Those are the two primary ones that really help us grow our community. But the compliments also help us want to keep doing it. So just feel free to head over there. And leave a review and let us know how we’re doing. We’re always happy to hear from you. And so thank you for doing that. With that. We’ll see you next year. This brings us to the end of anything but idle for December 28 2020. And we’ll be back here on January 4 2020. And so here’s to productive life.

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Download a PDF of raw, text transcript of the interview here.