Let’s talk about something that wasn’t announced at yesterday’s Apple event: NFC. NFC, or near field communication, is a technology that allows two devices in close proximity to “talk” to each other. Whether you wave your NFC-enabled smartphone over a credit card reader to pay at a store or the store sends a coupon to your phone as you walk by, NFC is going to change the way consumers interact with brands, friends, money, social...

Warning: The following post was written by a PR professional who uses a BlackBerry (gasp!). So after yesterday’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), I find myself once again thinking about the Joneses and how best to keep up with them. If you haven’t heard, Apple recently rolled out its latest upgrades and features to more than 6,000 of its closest friends. To put yesterday in context, the tweets and Facebook posts started rolling...

The passing of Apple co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs on October 6 generated an unprecedented amount of coverage and eulogizing – unprecedented for the leader of a tech company. It isn’t that Jobs was a particularly warm person or a recognized philanthropist – a la Bill Gates. Instead, Jobs is remembered for an obsessive drive to (re)define the role of technology in our lives, and for the products he pushed Apple to make to realize that...

Steve Jobs changed our PeRception of technology by transforming it into something that is a part of our daily lives. As the mastermind behind most of Apple’s greatest achievements, from the first Macintosh computer to the iPad, he created devices and software that not only changed the way we are able to access information, but also the way technology can influence popular culture. Recognizing the power of the press (and, later, social...

Funny how life changes; many commonplace parts of our lives fade away and new items come along that are the current or popular “thing.” I remember laughing back in the mid-1990s when my oldest son, Patrick (who was all of five or six years old) heard someone refer to a “station wagon” and he looked at me and asked, “Dad, what’s a station wagon?”  As we hopped in our car, I told him I would point one out on the road … so we...