Exactly a week ago, Apple made a revolutionary announcement around the textbook market for Education.  Apple formerly announced the launch of the iBook Author tool (http://www.apple.com/ibooks-author/) and the iBooks 2 app for the iPad.  iBook Author allows textbook publishers to create interactive, rich, and dynamic educational content at ease and doing away with traditional books and the push to digital textbooks.  Publishers already creating digital textbooks for the iPad ... [More]

Small businesses are using many cool applications and tools to run their business.  These new tools are helping out in operations, project management, web content, collaboration, communications, and other areas of the business.  Our little firm, Compass Intelligence, uses a wealth of tools for our business. I wanted to share a few of them that you too might find interesting:   Basecamp - We use basecamp for project management, sharing, and collaborating on projects for our client... [More]

  It is important to understand the applications that exist in the healthcare industry.  As technology vendors better understand all of these applications including their environment, their infrastructure and hardware needs, their security requirements, and how they inter-relate or integrate within and across healthcare systems, these vendors will be better able to address healthcare technology needs.  A short list of primary application trends in the healthcare vertical are ... [More]

  The overall banking market is plagued with economic hardships with more than 150 bank failures in 2010 alone, and the bad loans and mortgage/lending crisis is expected to continue to negatively affect the overall U.S. banking industry beyond 2010. The good news is that 2011 is expected to see a recession in the number of closures, as 2010 is expected to be the peak of bank closures.  Also according to the FDIC, banks brought in$18 billion in profit for the first quarter of ... [More]

One of Compass Inteligence's customers, Kennet Partners, sent me a newsletter today that had some interesting news about growth markets.  Please see below what was stated in their February newsletter: Growth SegmentsWhile we (Kennet Partners) are seeing growth in a range of areas, several stand out as offering significant promise: Mobile - Companies are rapidly jockeying for position in the Mobile ecosystem. SAP acquired Sybase ($5.8B), HP Acquired Palm ($1.2B), Apple acquired Qu... [More]