I would go further and say that most verbal communication over a phone is inefficient and should be eliminated. Many calls seem to originate from folks who are taking a break and want to chit-chat. My recommendation to businesses is that they remove landline phones from all offices. This would force email communication which is more efficient and creates a thread that can be archived and referred to as needed. It also would force any verbal communication to happen face-to-face or in a call to a cell phone which has better caller i.d. and other features. One type of call that is productive is the call that is initiated via email in an effort to avoid a long email exchange.

In lieu of my office line being removed, I am considering changing my outgoing message to say “Due to an increase in the number of unsolicited telemarketing calls, I have found it necessary to ignore all incoming phone calls and voice mail messages. To reach me, send an email to <address>. If the matter is truly urgent then send a text message to <cell phone number>.” Just avoiding the question “How are you doing?” and other traditional verbal exchanges will save substantial time that can be used for more productive matters!

All of that plus phone and standard PDA features--which it sounds like the Apple Media Pad may have... One device is enough and it may as well do everything!

Apple Media Pad with ebook software, phone, etc.
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/ap...

I had a similar experience at an appointment with one of my doctors earlier this week—they must really want to know what vitamins I’m taking to ask three times!

As for application here at Nelson, we are in the process of consolidating our information into one database and then we will pull from that database for reports rather than manually maintaining those reports in Excel. In the past, something as simple as a title change had to be made in at least three places. Our goal is one system of record so that there is only one answer when somebody asks a question.

One of the items on the Obama agenda is better medical record keeping. Medical offices should sit patients down at a computer and allow us to answer their questions properly!

I am struggling to figure out how to sync the company Twitter feed with the status on the company's Facebook page. Can that be done? It seems to want to pull my personal Twitter feed rather than the company feed...

Interesting coincidence that Gmail had a rare outage this week http://is.gd/kU1s A couple of questions: Can Gmail check availability on multiple calendars and book conference rooms as part of Meeting Requests? Can you convert a message to a Task or Appointment in one or two steps?

I do wish they would add a third option for users who are posting comments for "Notify me of replies to my comments"--those are the emails I want. I made the mistake of checking the "Notify me of follow-up comments via email" box (thinking I would be notified of replies to my comments) and discovered that doing so causes it to send an email every time somebody comments on that blog post.

When I entered my Twitter username and password it seemed like nothing happened and that I just went back to their home page. I discovered by clicking on Settings that my account was set up, and I was able to obtain the unique email address that I am to use.

Facebook offers a similar system for uploading photos from your camera phone to your Facebook account.

How will Twitter, TwitPic, etc. monetize these services?

Plaxo also has a similar application to pull in status updates from Twitter. Now if LinkedIn would just join the party so we could post one update and have it hit all the popular social network sites!