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This week, two of the latest Android tablets arrived on my doorstep: An Asus Transformer Prime and a Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7. Both are upgrades over models from last year and even though I’ve only spent a little time with each, both have already impressed me for various reasons.
The Transformer Prime is unique in that it supports an optional $150 keyboard dock. Besides adding easier input with a full keyboard and trackpad, the dock adds another 8 hours of battery life to the 10-inch tablet, which can already run for up to 12 hours on its own. The dock also adds a full-sized USB port, which has let me use an Xbox 360 controller to play PC-quality games. Here’s what it looks like:
Two other Transformer Prime standouts are the processor and software. This slate is powered by Nvidia’s Tegra 3 chip; a quad-core processor with 12 graphic cores, which helps explain the excellent gaming. The chip is also powering Android 4.0, or the Ice Cream Sandwich version of Android, which is improved slightly over Honeycomb, which ran on tablets last year.
The Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7 isn’t yet available in the U.S. — an LTE version is coming for Verizon — but I purchased a unit from an importer. I’ve used the original Galaxy Tab daily since December of 2010 and the newest Samsung slate is already proving to be a solid upgrade.
The 7.7-inch display and 7.89mm thickness keeps the device portable for most situations and uses Samsung’s Super AMOLED Plus technology with 1280 x 800 resolution, making for superb visuals and viewing angles.
Unlike the Prime, this tablet uses a 1.4 GHz dual core chip, but I’m already finding it to more than powerful enough for most tasks. The Galaxy Tab 7.7 also runs on Honeycomb, so owners will have to wait for an upgrade to Android 4.0. Since the unit only just arrived, I’ll have more thoughts to follow this week.
Although these two tablets are new, the most popular Android slate appears to be one that doesn’t use Google’s services at all: The Amazon Kindle Fire may be the best selling Android tablet yet. Android tablet sales spiked to an estimated 39 percent of the tablet market last quarter, but by some measures, the Kindle Fire accounts for 40 percent of all Android tablets sold during that time frame. That shouldn’t surprise, given the relatively low $199 price tag and the functionality gained for that cost.
On the software side of things, my favorite third-party Android browser gained some new tricks this week. Dolphin Browser, which supports themes and extensions, added support for both Skitch and Evernote; two popular and useful services. Skitch allows you to draw or annotate on-screen while Evernote is a powerful cross-platform web-clipping and note-taking application. Both the browser and these new supported services are free on Android.
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As a young CEO of a growing company, I find that the most valuable insight I’m gaining these days has been from other CEOs. Certainly this realization isn’t revolutionary – YPO, EO, Mindshare and a host of other organizations are set up just for this kind of knowledge exchange.
But who has time for that? This is a social media world. We’re live in 140-character sound bites. So I decided to ping my favorite CEOs via Twitter to see what kind of wisdom they could drop on me. Here’s the great advice they shared.
Figure out what the top five most important stuff is, focus relentlessly on that and keep iterating. Less is more.
Don’t let people tell you your ideas won’t work. If you have a hunch that something will work, go build it. Ignore the haters.
Just do it. Get it out there, absorb the feedback, adjust accordingly, hustle like hell, persevere and never lose your swagger.
Follow your gut. it may be wrong, but you won’t regret it if you fail. You’ll regret it if you ignore your gut and fail.
Treat people like you want to be treated. Apply to customer service.
Do work for your customers, not for press or VCs. The end user is what matters long term.
Only reinvent the wheels you need to get rolling.
Pick one thing and do that one thing — and only that one thing — better than anyone else ever could.
Make something people want. Then give more damns than anyone else about it and you’ll make something they love.
Buy @ericries’s book. Beyond that? Build a platform. This is the big year.
Startup wisdom: The number one job of a CEO is to not run out of money.
Always be learning from others. Whenever you meet someone, you don’t want something from them, you want to learn from them.
Something my dad taught me: Ask forgiveness, not permission!
Give away the wins, own the loses. Your job is to curate greatness.
Users and employees are key predictive indicators of a company’s success; press and investors generally months behind.
Got some other great wisdom for your fellow CEOs? Leave me a comment!
Peter Corbett (@corbett3000) is the CEO of the creative agency iStrategyLabs, and is the founding organizer of DC Tech Meetup.
Image courtesy of Flickr user Search Engine People Blog.
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There is a lot of talk about data, 3D printing, innovation, design and user interaction and curation. So this week’s theme is a collection of writing that questions conventional wisdom about these aforementioned themes. Most of them are long — so better get a cup of tea now.
PS: By the way, in addition to the Om Says newsletter, you can stay in touch with me via Twitter (@Om) or on Facebook (http://facebook.com/ommalik).
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For big companies like Google, Salesforce and Microsoft, being active in charitable causes is practically a must-do. Companies of this size often have entire teams of employees focused on philanthropic initiatives and organizing company-wide volunteering events. But at smaller companies that don’t have the same infrastructure in place, employees often don’t have the same opportunities to give back, on-the-job.
Screenshot of Causecast for Employees (click to enlarge)
That’s where a new software platform built by Los Angeles-based startup Causecastcomes in. This week Causecast debuted its Employee Impact Platform, a web-based program that connects companies and their employees with non-profits and charitable causes. With Causecast, employers can select a group of causes to which they’ll provide matching donations to whatever employees give. The platform can also be used to organize company-wide volunteering events. Non-profits plug into Causecast for free, and companies are generally charged a flat rate of around $5 per user per month.
Causecast founder Ryan Scott walked me through a demo of the new platform. To me, the best part to me is how easy Causecast makes it to spend extra-curricular time with your co-workers doing something other than going out for happy hour drinks. Non-profits of course will benefit from more companies donating time and money to their causes — but according to Scott, companies benefit a lot as well. He put it like this:
“Employees who aren’t engaged with their jobs aren’t as productive. And it sounds counter-intuitive, but you often have to leave the office to become more engaged with your work, and with your co-workers. Volunteering is a really great way to get everyone together outside of the office to do something bigger than themselves.”
Causecast, which was founded in 2007, currently has 30 employees. Thus far, Causecast has been self-funded by Scott, who first became known in the late 1990s for co-founding NetCreations, where he created and patented the “double opt-in” process that propelled the email marketing industry. After selling NetCreations in an all-cash deal in 2001, Scott said, he decided to find a way to merge his desire to do some good in the world while still staying active in business.
When Causecast first launched, it was an online platform to let all people contribute to charitable causes touted by celebrities and brands. The shift into the enterprise space is a smart one, as small businesses are becoming increasingly important parts of the employment landscape and the general public is calling more and more for corporations to behave responsibly. With Causecast, small businesses can compete with larger, more established companies when it comes to offering their employees ways to give back. It’ll be interesting to see how the new iteration of Causecast takes off in the months ahead.
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