Discovering The OFF Switch
by Servaas Schrama / Oct 6
I believe that a lot of people tend to forget about an important feature found on almost all electronics available today: the off switch.
I am not an employer, I am a mobile worker. My gear consists of a Macbook Pro, UMTS card with flat-fee highspeed internet and a Blackberry. I can work from anywhere on the planet with this gear. But what is much more important, I can work when I want. I get to choose the times, the hours. Obviously, there are a lot of hours of working, being busy online. But certain moments, I simply go offline and do something fun with the kids, or just relax.
I do carry my Blackberry when I am offline, but there are times where I switch off email, as 80% of my business communication runs over email.
I firmly believe that …Read More
International Mobility Presents Some Different Challenges
by David Fumento / Oct 4
I carry a very light weight 12″ Thinkpad X61s in a small Waterfield shoulderbag. I also have the Northface Surge backpack if I need something larger. Neither are recognizable as “laptop bags” which is a good thing to help prevent theft. I’ve had Thinkpads since 1999 and they are extremely durable. Extremely. I expect the Dell E4200 and E4300 are in the same class of durability. The Thinkpad weighs 3.5 lbs and has about six hours of battery life. I use it with Verizon EVDO broadband. I also have the Verizon Blackberry Curve. Like the E4200, the X61s and X200s does not have a built-in optical drive which I rarely need anyway. If I do need it I have a very small thin USB 2.0 external optical drive. A special program by Daemon tools allows you to …Read More
Out of the Office and Away From Home
by Stephen Foskett / Oct 2
Balancing work and life has never been easy, and this is especially true for the knowledge worker. It isn’t an exaggeration to say that we keep our jobs in our heads at all times, and modern electronics like the BlackBerry and laptop tend to keep it at our fingers as well. When our jobs require us to travel, work can effectively separate us entirely from our lives for days or weeks at a time. Road warriors must consciously try to focus on life, even as work pulls their attention away.
Always On
Let us first focus on the element of time: …Read More
Real digital nomads need cheap mobile connectivity world-wide
by Eric Ehrmann / Oct 1
Road warriors are Web 1.0, and digital nomads just may be Web 2.0. But global connectivity for people like me, who travel from the US to Brasil to France and build communities online working in languages other than English, is still back with the Flintstones. So perhaps part of being a global digital nomad should be having access to cheap mobile connectivity world-wide. In the US I use a Sprint aircard, in France it is Orange Extreme (not the cologne- the 3G mobile) and in Brasil, it’s Claro! I can feed a classroom of hungry kids in Gonaives, Haiti for a month for what all this is costing me. There is more to being a digital nomad than the upmarket lifestyle trappings. So maybe the next big step needs to be helping us non-card carrying digital nomads to juice up the fiber and get real about cross-border connectivity.
Join the conversation…
Collaborate with some of the leading minds in technology and define what it means to be a digital nomad. The community will collaborate to answer questions about:
- Security challenges of a mobile workforce
- Connectivity and access for nomad employees everywhere
- Ensuring productivity when employees are on the go
