About Me

Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Len focuses on helping small and new businesses succeed through developing appropriate marketing and sales strategies. Len enjoys mentoring, relishes in getting both arms and feet wet in addressing technology, marketing and sales issues. He understands the drivers impacting business results for today and tomorrow including time-to-market, time-to-revenue, marketing, sales channels and social media.

Friday, April 20, 2012

Tablets - Does Your Small Business Need One?

In January my family gave me a Samsung Galaxy Tablet for my birthday. This is a pretty nifty tool and I have quickly adapted to it for a lot of personal viewing. But as I use it I am considering how it can be of value for a small business?

What I Currently Do with My Tablet

1. I view my email and respond. The keyboard interface is easy to use. I wish the @ sign was accessible from the QWERTY keys but you can set up different standard keyboards and experiment to see which one best fits your needs.

2. I use the tablet as an indoor e-reader. I download books from Google, my Kobo account and am now starting to use my library account to access ebooks. You don't want to use this as an ebook reader outdoors on a sunny day. It is almost impossible to see text. I use my Kobo reader for outdoors.

3. I watch lots of video on my tablet whether it is news releases, clips from or entire TV shows, movie previews, etc. The screen is high definition.

4. I access the market to look at the many Android applications and have downloaded many free ones. The ones I use the most include finding the local theatre where a film is playing, looking up restaurants, or finding items in stores in the local area. My tablet is aware of my location and search  results reflect this.

5. The tablet has GPS although I have yet to take it with me in the car to use it as a route planning device.

6. I have created presentations on my desktop and transferred them to the tablet when going on a sales call. PowerPoint and other Microsoft Office applications have their equivalents in the Android world and Office file formats can be displayed through these product suites. The tool I have downloaded is Polaris Office and it is free.

7. I do a lot of browsing on the tablet. The Android browser seems to have little problem with most web sites. Some sites display differently than on Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome, looking like mobile web page views rather than those you see on a computer screen.

As I continue to use my tablet I'll keep you updated.

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