Newsweek drills into detail on the latest from Jeff Bezos and Amazon called the Kindle.

Great quote : "Technology is anything that was invented after you were born"

A few highlights from article:

• Some of those features have been available on previous e-book devices,
  notably the Sony Reader. The Kindle's real breakthrough springs from a
  feature that its predecessors never offered: wireless connectivity, via
  a system called Whispernet. (It's based on the EVDO broadband service
  offered by cell-phone carriers, allowing it to work anywhere, not just
  Wi-Fi hotspots.) As a result, says Bezos, "This isn't a device, it's a
  service."

• "There's 550 years of technological development in the book, and it's
  all designed to work with the four to five inches from the front of the
  eye to the part of the brain that does the processing " says Hill, a boisterous man who wears a kilt to a
  seafood restaurant in Seattle where he stages an impromptu lecture on
  his theory. "This is a high-resolution scanning machine," he
  says, pointing to the front of his head. "It scans five targets a
  second, and moves between targets in only 20 milliseconds. And it does
  this repeatedly for hours and hours and hours." He outlines the
  centuries-long process of optimizing the book to accommodate this
  physiological marvel: the form factor, leading, fonts, justification …
  "We have to take the same care for the screen as we've taken for print."

• "The possibility of interaction will redefine authorship," says Peter
  Brantley, executive director of the Digital Library Federation, an
  association of libraries and institutions. Unlike some
  writing-in-public advocates, he doesn't spare the novelists. "Michael
  Chabon will have to rethink how he writes for this medium," he says.
  Brantley envisions wiki-style collaborations where the author, instead
  of being the sole authority, is a "superuser," the lead wolf of a
  creative pack. (Though it's hard to believe that lone storytellers
  won't always be toiling away in some Starbucks with the Wi-Fi turned
  off, emerging afterward with a narrative masterpiece.)

• The answer is probably not, and that's why the Kindle matters. "This is
  the most important thing we've ever done," says Jeff Bezos. "It's so
  ambitious to take something as highly evolved as the book and improve
  on it. And maybe even change the way people read." As long as the
  batteries are charged.

Will this change paper based manual and documents forever? Probably not in the next ten years, but after that, I would bank on it. Will our kids still read textbooks in ten years? What will students think when they enter the workplace when they haven't looked at a book?

Once again, e-HR strategy in the 21st century is so important. Most aren't giving the User Interface, Portal, Social Networking, Mobile Device and Accessibility enough credit. Knowledge Infusion helped its first client launch an internal Facebook community last week with many more planned for the next few quarters. Going forward, it isnt the back office software that will drive success, it is the workforce facing tools.

Another infusion of knowledge...

Click here to read fascinating article

On Monday, Google made another one of it's major announcements even before we at Knowledge Infusion could write a blog about OpenSocial (coming soon). Google Mobile enters the fray. This could easily be called the single most important announcement to the HR service delivery space ever. Lets look a bit under the covers:

• The Google announcement/initiative is designed to turn cellphones into powerful mobile computers. From a Knowledge Infusion standpoint we often hear, "the reason we dont rollout technology is that we don't have PC's where employees are". This argument appears to be on its last breath.

• This quote says it nicely - “The Internet is going mobile, and it’s not just top down, its
  one-to-one and many-to-many all at the same time, and that’s what the Google guys get.”

• Software developers “will build applications that do amazing things on the Internet and on mobile phones as well,” Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, said at a news conference.

Who will be the first in the HR and talent management space? Will something be shown next year at HR Technology 2008? Lets make that a goal!

We have attached a link to one of the better articles on this topic from the NY Times below. Take a read and continue to watch this trend. The issue for HR direct access and better connectivity and communication with employees has always been the device. Is this about to change forever? Thoughts?

Remember how the generation entering the workforce today communicates. Text messages.

Don't want for the Google Phone to revamp your e-HR strategy. This has to be part of your HR strategy into the future.

Another infusion of knowledge...

Link to article