At the recent PhotoPlus Expo in New York City, held between October27-29th, hundreds of exhibitors came together to demonstrate their latest and greatest accomplishments in technology.  From new developments in cameras, lenses, printers, clothing, gear, gizmos and gadgets, the Expo had it all.  However, if you consider yourself more of a novice or weekend “photog,” you may have felt a tad out of place. The expo is mostly geared toward the professional shutterbug.  Some of the newest innovations, however, were suitable for both the pro and novice alike, although not necessarily that affordable.  Here are just 3 of the awesome innovations found at the PhotoPlus Expo.  For a deeper detailing, Popsci.com provides a more thorough look.

Sony DEV-3 and DEV-5 3D Binoculars

The Sony DEV-3 and DEV-5 3D Binoculars are like a gizmo straight out of the last blockbuster sci-fi movie! The videos and photographs shot from these binoculars products are astounding. Only the more advanced model, the DEV-5, was on display.  This multimedia camera boasts several amazing features including 3D binoculars, a 7-megapixel camera, and a 1080i video recorder. Ranging between $1400 – $2000, the DEV-3 and DEV-5 cost a pretty penny. However, if you are shopping for a superior quality, multifunctional digital camera, these binoculars may be a great choice.

Gorillapod Micro 250 and 350

Joby, the makers of the popular bendy Gorillapod tripods, debuted their latest tripod, the Gorillapod Micro. This mini-tripod with uncharacteristically rigid legs easily folda under your camera won’t add too much weight or volume. Its compact design makes it extremely easy to take with you anywhere. It’s available in different sizes to fit your demands and is ideal for an impromptu self-portrait with the perfect sunset as backdrop.

Wacom Cintiq 24HD Pen Display

The Wacom Cintig 24HD Pen Display provides a massive 24-inch display to fit any need, from professional photographers to designers. For those who require precision editing of pictures and designs, it might be worth the price tag of $2600. Due to their high demand, they’re relatively difficult to acquire though. The display is praised for its snappy responsiveness and exacting detail, making it ideal for anyone in 3D design, animation, industrial design, game development.

The recent PhotoPlus Exposition was aimed primarily at professional photographers, artists and designers.  As a novice or hobbyist, however, it’s always good to keep up with cutting-edge technologies. Here we could only list a few of the many impressive items like state-of-the-art jackets, lighting, camera bags and gear. You’ll want to check out other articles about the Expo, as well as reviews on many of the other products on display.

You have likely read a lot about the world becoming more and more connected. We don’t only mean with individuals but within our own lives as well. Having our devices more connected makes life easier. Device connectivity can prevent you from interrupting your work, for instance, by transferring a document you are working on at home to your smartphone you can work on it during your commute using a voice transcription app. Microsoft has an interesting take on the future of connectivity, click here to see a video of their vision. This may not be very far off and it begs the question: what apps, devices, or combination of the two will help build a future such as this? Here are a few which I have discovered.

iControl

iControl is a home security and energy management product that Comcast recently unveiled. With this product, people can control the thermostat in their homes, turn lights on and off, and monitor their homes with live streaming video. Various components interact to give individuals full control over their homes when away.

Air Sharing

This app is available on the iPad/iPhone and allows your device to act as an external hard drive. Which means you can easily move files to your device, share and access them easily adding mobility to your work habits.

AirPlay

The AirPlay function from Apple lets you stream music, videos, and photos wirelessly to an Apple TV. Picture yourself enjoying a podcast while in the car then coming home and effortlessly transferring the audio to your home without a pause to continue enjoying it.

As more gadgets, apps, and software work harmoniously together, I see our day-to-day lives becoming easier and more fluid. Connectivity means that all elements of our lives are more connected. Hopefully this means that our tech can stay one step ahead of us and if this leads to less waiting, I am ready for it… how about you?

In Back to the Future, Marty McFly travels back in time, from 1985 to 30 years earlier, arriving in a suped-up DeLorean to 1955. While in the past, he subsequently messes-up his parent’s first meeting, and must then change history while he tries to get them together to insure his own existence.  Likewise, in the film’s first sequel, Marty travels through time to assist his children.  In the futuristic vision there are hover boards and flying cars.  Though fanciful, we can see areas where the world we live in mirrors much of what’s occurring in both films – but are we truly closer to the technology found in Hill Valley in 1955, or in the film’s futuristic sequel?

First, we should ask ourselves where we thought we would be by 2011. Of course we’d have flying cars and hover boards by now, wouldn’t we? Yet here we are, still driving fossil-fuel burning cars, riding scooters and bicycles, whilst wearing fairly normal clothes. Basically, if you took a step back and looked at the way we conduct our lives, much of the technology we use today existed 70 years ago. The television had been invented. Cars already had modern features like air conditioning and radios. Movies were shown in color. The Wizard of Oz, made in 1939 has special effects that rival many independent moviemakers today.

Many movies in the past, however, have prophesied some of the advances we use today.  Arnold Schwarzenegger was caught carrying a gun through a full-body x-ray machine trying to board a plane in Total Recall.  Airports are now employing very similar tech. In Minority Report, Tom Cruise deftly moves from image to image, mirroring the type of touch screen technology, 3D monitors and holograms that will exist – if they don’t already – in the very near future.  In 2001: A Space Odyssey, Pan Am flies the common man to outer space.  Virgin Atlantic is making that possible today for that same traveler, though they need to shell out $200,000 for a seat.

Some of the most amazing futuristic technology is used everyday:  Video phones and “Skyping” people on the opposite side of the planet for free are commonplace.  We are able today to clone sheep, cows and mice.  Are humans next?  The ethical dilemmas surrounding genetic engineering are being discussed right now.  However, if you looked out the window at the world we live in today, does it look more like 1955?  Does your mental picture of life in 2011 match up with the reality?

Ultimately, there are advances seen around us everywhere to remind us that the future is occurring now: Video billboards, the internet tracking our every move for our advertising dollars, 3D television, movies that cost $13 for some reason. But here is where the more things change the more they stay the same: Chevrolet is still making convertibles, Universal is still making movies, and you can still watch Back to the Future any time you want — though I’d skip that 2nd one and go directly to the third.

Are you a perfectionist? Many of us are!  Perfectionism can help to keep us motivated, work harder, and achieve more, but will it always help your performance or can it hinder you too? If you find yourself focusing too much on getting the perfect outcome or debating and changing things repeatedly, you might be walking the line of extreme perfectionism. This can lead to wasted time and resources, especially if you are managing people. In the end, the result doesn’t justify the effort and stress it can cause. Below are a few great ways to keep yourself out of the net of extreme perfectionism.

Make a Decision and Stick to it
When you decide on a direction to take and announce it to your employees, stick to it. One of the traps of perfectionism is wasted time second-guessing yourself. If you’re constantly changing gears after your team has started the project, then you have wasted those recourses. You will never know if your third, fourth, or fifth decision would be any better.  As they say, go with your gut!

Trus t your Employees
Listen to the input from your employees when you have unveiled your plan. They are great resources and will let you know what is possible. If they like the plan then it’s probably a good one. Their support will help prevent you from sliding into the second-guessing game that I previously talked about. Another way to prevent wasted time is not to micromanage your workforce. Once you have assigned tasks, take a step back and let them manage those tasks. You hired them for their expertise in the first place, right? And before you execute your plan …

Have a Plan B
Sometimes things go wrong, so develop a backup plan. This will help you stay more flexible mentally and keep you from being held to the constraints of your first plan. The more flexible you are, the more you will be able to handle the “non-perfect” things that happen throughout your plan and your day.

There is a fine line between perfectionism and having a critical eye. It’s essential to always shoot for the best, but worrying about getting something perfect is damaging to the project and your mental health. The steps I’ve outlined above will help you to free yourself from the perfectionist mindset, if you find yourself there. Here is a great article about avoiding the pitfalls of perfectionism all together.

In a world where technological advances turn up everyday in news-feeds and broadcasts, the annual T3 Gadget Awards is a microcosm of all of these advances in one location.  Like the Oscars for Technology, the T3 Gadget Awards nominate the most cutting-edge gadgets out today. With past releases like the iPad 2, Microsoft’s Kinect and huge advances in gaming, it’s worth a quick note to show many of the most important revelations which have taken place in 2011.  Over 960,000 votes, together with the final tabulations of a 6 person expert panel, decided the winners.  Here are just a few of the more interesting revelations, as well as some interesting–if not ironic–choices for winners.   

Ironic Winners

The categories for the T3 Awards, from Best Retailer to Gadget Personality of the Year, the awards span a variety of categories.  It is interesting to note the winner of the Gadget Personality of the Year Award was Mark Zuckerberg.  Of course he’s a monumental figure in the communication world, but hardly exhibits the charisma of George Clooney.  Another interesting category is Best Commuting Device, where anything that aids your travel from here to there is considered. One of the contenders was an electric bicycle; but the winner, in fact, was the Amazon Kindle. True, it makes the time pass quickly while commuting, but maybe something that actually travels may have been a clearer choice?

Influential Winners

One of the most interesting awards, Digital Media Service of the Year, was a bit of a surprise, seeing that Mark Zuckerberg walked off with the Personality of the Year.  Instead, it was Twitter that beat out Facebook and Google for this influential award.  Surely the CEOs of giants like Apple, Google and Facebook aren’t crying themselves to sleep over their T3 Award losses.  However, they should definitely take note that Twitter’s win speaks volumes with regards to where social media is headed.  Facebook must continue to innovate and not upset their community, or they may well end up lost and overlooked like MySpace.

Surprising Winners

For many, the iPhone 4 would probably be guessed as the runaway winner of the Phone of the Year award. Instead–and more importantly–because more serious tech fans cast the votes, Samsung’s Galaxy S II walked away with the award. In the Tech Brand of the Year category, Google was the big winner, beating out rivals Facebook and Apple.  Again, it’s “just the T3 Gadget Awards”, but as always, it’s preferable to be the winner than the runner-up.  And when millions of dollars rides on word of mouth advertising and brand recognition, every little bit helps.

Ultimately, The 2011 T3 Gadget Awards offer an fascinating insight into how much and how fast technology is changing.  If you were to go back to the first awards given in 2008, some of the heavy hitters of the time are no longer viable, while some upstarts were just getting their feet on the ground and are huge players today.  Although these awards are given annually, with the speed that many of these items are created, they may want to make it a semi-annual event.

Becoming greener is on many people’s agendas these days. Whether the intention is to save money or limit the impact to the environment, this is true not only for individuals, but many high-tech companies as well. A necessity to knowing how to conserve energy is becoming aware of the aspects of your home or business that consume the most energy.

Japan recently hosted the annual CEATEC conference earlier this month just outside Tokyo. During the conference, Toshiba and Intel announced their recent developments in energy monitoring. It’s no surprise to see these companies coming forward with big developments that permit individuals and companies to control and monitor their energy consumption. The following are a couple of the changes they will implement in 2012 that may change the way companies and individuals regulate their energy consumption.

Intel

Intel has developed an application that grants PC users the ability to monitor the energy consumption of their PC. One of the more user-friendly aspects of the application is the dashboard, which displays easy to read graphs and statistics making the data simple to comprehend quickly.

Toshiba

Toshiba is combining their recently acquired Landish Gyr smart-meter tech with some of their own developments to bring a “smart home” offering to the table. The “smart home” gives people awareness of the energy consumption inside their homes. Toshiba is also creating a variety of cloud technologies for energy monitoring that will be available to many different types of industries including healthcare and city infrastructure.

While these two companies have big plans for energy monitoring in 2012, it appears like many companies in the US are moving away from it, namely, Microsoft and Google. In June, Microsoft announced the discontinuation of Hohm, their energy-monitoring service launched in 2009. Google also seems to be changing its green game by shutting down Google Powermeter, which they also launch in 2009.

We will see what he future holds for the green technology world. It may well head further in the direction of energy monitoring or turn to something different entirely. If you have any ideas or speculation on how technology companies will become greener; please share them with us.

Do you remember hearing the initial disappointed comments right after the iPhone 4S announcement?  To put it simply, everyone was a bit dissatisfied that the new iPhone wasn’t going to be a full-blown revamp of the iPhone 4. Some were concerned that it would just be an iPhone 4 with a few simple upgrades, suckering gadget-junkies to stand in line for hours only to realize that the 4S was basically the same as its predecessor, with only a few more bells and whistles.  Well, the reality is, the new iPhone is a bit of both. It’s not a revolutionary product like the original iPhone – or even the iPhone 4.  Rather, it’s more evolutionary with several impressive upgrades.  Here’s a quick look at 3 of the upgrades Apple has created in the 4S – and whether or not they’re worth waiting in line for.

Software

Not surprisingly, the 4S is much faster and powerful.  It features the same dual-core A5 chip that’s found in the iPad 2 and it makes opening apps, loading the web browser, scrolling through screens and countless other operations super smooth.  Apple states that the 4S is two times as powerful as its predecessor and has 7 times the graphical prowess.

Siri

One remarkable distinction between the iPhone 4 and the 4S is the addition of  your very own “personal assistant” named Siri.  When it works, it is an amazing feat of technology. You can simply tell Siri to contact a colleague and tell her you’re running late.  Tell Siri, “I’m feeling like Indian food,” and she will tell you where the nearest place serving Sag Paneer is located.  However, the caveat is “when it works.”  When Siri cannot understand a particular command, area or specific person, she will tell you humorously, if not annoyingly after a while, that she can’t process the info.  Undoubtedly this will be fixed in the future, but it would be wonderful if it worked flawlessly now.  See this article for another take on Siri.

iCloud

Another cool aspect of the iPhone 4S is that it has in essence made MobileMe a stock feature.  All Apple products from now on will have access to iCloud. This means that it no longer matters which device you use, you can access any piece of information you’re looking for, whether it’s an mp3, a photo, app or document.  It’s truly remarkable, until you stumble upon some of its unwieldy aspects. The most frustrating of these is the fact that MobileMe has already created a user ID that iCloud doesn’t recognize. In addition, if you have an email address through Yahoo or Gmail, it won’t recognize them because they don’t have a me.com address. All new technology comes with learning curves, but the fact that we think Apple should be above these frustrations makes them all the more, well, frustrating.

So, should you upgrade to the iPhone 4S? It depends on the type of user you are.  If you’ve shown up at midnight for previous Apple launches, you won’t be disappointed with the 4S.  It is faster, more powerful, has impressive upgrades like Siri and iCloud, and we didn’t even mention the improved camera and editing features.  But if you’re satisfied with the phone you’re using now, and it does all you want it to do, you could easily wait until Apple’s next revolution – which, knowing them, is right around the corner.

The cloud has become advantageous for many businesses. Due to the massive amounts of information that can be stored in the cloud and the prevalence of tablets in our lives, creative businesses have greatly benefitted. The cloud gives people in creative industries an edge they didn’t previously have. It may not be obvious how creative businesses have improved due to the cloud, so here are just a few ways they’ve changed.

Portfolios
You once had to carry heavy portfolios when meeting with clients.  Those portfolios were limited to the amount of work you could carry within. Portfolios, when stored in the cloud, are not limited to physical size. You can organize your past work into categories that fit the needs of different clients. By accessing your portfolio quickly on a tablet, you can share your work more easily and this can lead to more opportunities.

Creative Collaboration
In the past, collaborating with individuals in different time zones was very difficult. It required sending huge files through email, working on them independently then sending them back. This created multiple versions and duplicate copies, which was confusing. The cloud permits people to work on the same file simultaneously. This speeds up the collaborative process and keep everyone on the same page, so to speak.

Brainstorming
Mind mapping is a great way to brainstorm and when done in conjunction with the cloud, the quantity of people that can give their impute is not limited. You can access these files on tablets, work with local collogues, and update the shared file for everyone. These elements break down the distance barrier that has limited idea brainstorming in the past.

With the expansiveness of the cloud and the mobility of the tablet, there are almost no limitations to where creativity can happen.

We all love computers. Don’t deny it, you’re on one right now. The reason why computers are so popular, obviously, is due to the value they offer. This value isn’t only present in what a computer offers, but additionally in what a computer costs. Even basic netbooks costs a few hundred dollars. This makes these valuable machines regular targets for criminals. Make sure to keep your computer safeguarded from these attempts; here are some tips to do so.

Physical Security

The appeal of most personal computers is that they’re portable. Even desktops can be moved easily with a few cord disconnections and a quick pull. To make sure both your laptop and desktop computers are secure within your home or workplace, consider buying a strong, keyed cable lock. Essentially, they help chain your computer down in a manner that makes them very difficult to steal. These items can run for an average of $40, but they offer a priceless sense of security.

Data Security

Computer’s are worth more than the sum of their physical parts. When a computer is stolen, the thief may have access to your personal information and data. Even if your computer is password protected or your data is encrypted, the information stored within could, in theory, be accessed. Because of this, it’s a good practice to store your bank account, credit and social security information in a different location. Having your identity stolen on top of losing your computer would only add insult to injury.

Keeping Track

Wish there was a way to track down your computer when it goes missing? Yeah, there’s an app for that. Downloading tracking software onto your computer will help you to locate it once it’s gone, so long as the hard drive remains intact. While a computer may its hard drive wiped clean once stolen, there has been numerous occasions in which computer tracking apps have been successful in returning the stolen item to its owner.

While all of these tips are useful in keeping your computer safe, there is no replacement for common sense and reasonable vigilance. Make sure to take good care of your computer; chances are it takes good care of you.

Workplace education programs (WEP) can bring about positive growth in company morale. Companies can utilize this in small ways with educational handouts, education breaks as a group, or by supplying full or half day classes to employees. Either way, learning interesting things keeps people inspired and exercises their minds. Employees will feel as if you care about them because it supports their personal goals of furthering their careers. Knowing their company is investing in them makes them feel secure in their position.

That being said, workplace education programs can be tedious and if the classes aren’t challenging enough to hold employee interest, it can negate all of the positive results that can come from these programs.

Here are a handful of ideas to keep your education programs interesting and fun.

Divide employees into groups – Groups create healthy competition and encourages collaboration. They also help employees get to know each other better, which can lead to a more supportive team environment.

Give Incentives – Whether given to groups or individuals, incentives can be a good way to motivate people to pay attention and work hard.

Be Playful – Turning education into a game will help with retention of the materials being taught. Additionally, games also help to develop team-building skills.

Implementing education programs in the workplace not only supports your business by creating a more educated work environment but also promotes self improvement. These programs can be exciting and a fun method to break up the week. If providing classes isn’t something that your company is capable of doing in the foreseeable future, try implementing something on a smaller scale, for instance giving your staff a subject to study and then holding a quiz. Divide the group into teams and create a game out it.  The team with the most right answers wins donuts and coffee the next day. Workplace education programs can be scaled to fit your company; the most important thing is that, when done right, workplace education programs can have a strong positive effect on your company in general.