We always assume that the digital transformation will be lead by the youth. Or at least Mitch does.

Kevin O'Keefe came across a recent study which indicates that older readers needed less brain activity when reading on a tablet than on paper or e-Readers. The authors used EEG devices to monitor (theta band) brain activity and tracked eye movement. In fact, the older readers, aged 66-77 years, were actually able to use the tablets better than younger participants.

The point here is that the readers' subjective preference of print over tablet was irrelevant, for all age groups. Most of the participants . . . [more]

As you are no doubt aware, RIM Blackberry finally brought its new operating system and a new phone to market this week. The first phone, the Z10 does not have a keyboard – a first for Blackberry. 

So will this save Blackberry? My take on early reviews is that Blackberry fans will like the new phones, and they will probably result in fewer people trading for iPhones, Android phones or Windows phones when their Blackberry terms expire. But it probably won't result in a mass of people giving up their iPhones, Android phones or Windows phones for a Blackberry.

The practical reality . . . [more]

Here’s a question raised on a US legal technology list that seems relevant to Canadian law too.

What's the duty of care of mobile devices as pertains to patches/updates provided by the vendor and/or provider?

Example:

I bought an Android phone in June 2012, which received an over-the-air OS upgrade in late July to Android 4.0.4. This release was provided to me well after the version was released to the public. Also, since that time, 2 other versions of Android (4.1 and 4.2) have been made available. There are known security vulnerabilities in the 4.0.4 release.

Yet I've certainly not

. . . [more]

Don Tapscott, author, speaker and advisor on new technologies and media, was interviewed by McKinsey Quarterly back in September 2012, and a video excerpt plus transcript of the interview was released last month. See: Making internal collaboration work: An interview with Don Tapscott. This interview has been raising questions around the web, and thought it would be useful to look at it here on SLAW. . . . [more]

Here's a quick tech tip I came across yesterday that might come in handy for some people.

If you're using a modern browser (and why wouldn't you be?) you can turn it into a text editor by putting what follows into the location bar and then clicking in the window: . . . [more]

We remember Robert Wilkins who died in Lexington, South Carolina last week.
Bob was a pioneer in the application of technology to the practice of law. In 1979 (that is not a typo), he published “Word Processing for a Law Office”. He was the editor of the Lawyer's Micro-Computer, The Lawyers PC, The Perfect Lawyer and Shepard’s Elder Care Law newsletter. When I started going to ABA Tech Show almost 30 years ago, Bob Wilkins was a legend, since he had designed his entire Trusts and Estate practice around his technology.

Without pioneers like Bob, today’s practice is almost unimaginable. . . . [more]

At New York Legal Tech this week, Thomson Reuters will unveil an interesting basket of software products for the legal market. While a lot of hard innovative work has gone into the products to be released at the start of February, the most notable feature is the elements that they share in common.

The most significant development was not the suite of products that were unveiled but the change in strategic direction that they embody. I've commented before on how Thomson Reuters acquisitions appear somewhat disjointed. But this was evidence that the central vision of products like Serengeti has . . . [more]

While reading about Newegg's victory over patent troll Soverain Software over the weekend, I was reminded of the Three Billy Goats Gruff fairy tale I read to my children just a week ago.

Soverain claimed three patents it owns gave it intellectual property rights over the "shopping cart" technology that virtually every e-commerce site depends upon. Sorverain filed lawsuits against Nordstrom's, Macy's, Home Depot, Victoria's Secret, Avon and even e-retailing giant Amazon.com.

While Soverain successfully extorted millions of dollars from these e-commerce companies, it picked one last fight that would prove to be the patent's troll's undoing. That fight was with . . . [more]

2012 has not been a good year for RIM. The company became a favorite punching bag for technology pundits as it continued to delay products and fail in everything from marketing to developer relations. RIM's co-CEO's lost their job, and the company's new CEO, Thorsten Heins, promised the company's new operating system, BlackBerry 10, would catalyze a turnaround for the company, something many tech experts thought was delusionally optimistic.

The company has finally pinned a release date on BlackBerry 10: January 30th. Rogers and other carries are taking pre-orders today, and RIM is sending out preview hardware and software to over 120 . . . [more]

Imagine a tool that would round out the existing built-in spell- and grammar-checking tools in Microsoft Word, but instead of simply correcting errors, this tool would make your writing more concise. This tool exists, and it's called WordRake.

You can think of WordRake as an automated editor. Gary Kinder, a lawyer and writing expert, codified many of the patterns he saw while editing documents into a set of rules that WordRake utilizes while processing a document.

Here is example of WordRake's automated editing in action:

WordRake is a powerful add-on to Word, and is one of the only . . . [more]

My post Why Can't You Just Make it Work Like Google? last week surprised me by going viral. Well, as viral as a blog post about information management can go. It certainly seems to have struck a nerve with people from all across the legal industry. It turns out that making search work effectively inside the organization is something a lot of people are attempting to tackle. After posting it, however, I realized there is also a reason why you would not even want to use Google as it functions out on the Internet for use inside the organization.

Allow . . . [more]

How many knowledge management and IT professionals have heard this refrain? Why can't we just use Google (or something like Google) to find documents inside our organization? Why do we need to spend time and money organizing documents and adding indexing or classification or a taxonomy?

The problem lies with a significant difference between web pages on the Internet and internal documents: Google uses links from other websites as recommendations as to what is good content. It uses links plus a number of other things together in its secret algorithm–which gets changed periodically–to help its system figure out which web . . . [more]