July 2, 2009
Sonia Podstaskyj has given the term “pillow talk” a whole new meaning. The Nelson, B.C., resident, who runs her own small business as a personal assistant, uses her iPhone to manage international conference calls from the comfort of her bed.
Arranging calls between the east coast and Europe is hard for someone on the west coast. “In the early morning it’s sometimes too early for me to get out of bed,” says Ms. Podstaskyj, who provides PA services for France-based Peter Fenner, president of Timeless Wisdom, a spiritual learning organization that holds cross-Atlantic lectures using teleconferencing.
She uses Calliflower, an online teleconference system, to organize the conference calls between Fenner and his clients. Thanks to her iPhone-based Calliflower application, she can make sure everyone is able to get on the call as the event starts — no matter what the time is in France.
“I use the app from bed, sign into Calliflower at 5 am, make sure the call and the recording is running, and go back to sleep,” says Ms. Podstaskyj, who can be found at afishinsea.ca.
She is one of many small business users in Canada that has adopted the iPhone as a crucial tool to help keep things running smoothly. Apple’s hugely successful mobile phone platform has provided stiff competition for Research In Motion’s BlackBerry, which has been the mainstay for mobile e-mail for most of this decade.
This month, Apple launched the iPhone 3GS, which is a faster, video-enabled version of the phone, and also rolled out version 3.0 of the operating system, which includes several new features such as data encryption, searchable e-mail, and cut and paste features.
Apart from its innovative product design, Apple’s success with the iPhone stems from its ability to cater to customers who want to move beyond mere e-mail. A year ago, the company rolled out the App Store — a part of its iTunes online store that sells applications for the iPhone.
Customers have downloaded more than a billion applications from the App Store. Small businesses can choose a plethora of different software titles including task managers, document editors, and databases, to help make their days run more smoothly.
Mike Auty, director of operations at technology training firm Witz Apple Certified Training, uses another iPhone-based application called Daylite Touch to help run the business, which he joined four years ago. Daylite is a business management application originally developed for the Mac, which combines project management, a meeting scheduler and task delegation system.
To view the complete article, click here.
Tags: Apple, info-tech research group, iphone, iphone app store, iphone apps, ipods, Macintosh, remote access, remote working
