I saw this post on Duct Tape Marketing and it got me thinking, maybe its time to try Mac.

I’m hearing way to many good things about the Mac to ignore it anymore. I’m at a stage were I’m thinking of buying a new Laptop for home that I can use for doing a bit of work (Web application Development). I’ve never used a Mac properly at all. When I was younger the reason I wouldn’t buy a Mac was because I couldn’t use some of the more popular software that was only available on windows.

I think I’d like a Mac once I got used to it, my question really is will windows Vista be good enough to keep me using it instead? What to do, what to do …

Very interesting statistics were published on the World Internet Usage Statistics and Population. From this table it shows that only 15%! of the world uses the internet which is surprisingly low. When you consider Asia alone has over 50% of world’s population it starts to make more sense given their low adoption rate. This combined with Africa which has an expected low adoption rate of less than 3% really lowers the world average.

Taken from Read/Write Web -Worldwide Internet Penetration is just 15%

From a business perspective I can see a lot of business plans referencing to the strong growth in Asia and companies expanding their services and language versions to accommodate these countries. There appears to be an opportunity to focus on this market with a long term view to grab the huge population yet to embrace the internet the way we have in the west. Surely the likes of China and India will eventually have internet adoption closer to 50% of the population. Japan for example has a very good internet adoption to match the US and some countries in Europe.

I didn’t spot any exact figures for Ireland but maybe someone can point me to another resource so we can compare and contrast with the rest of the world. From a personal point of view I wonder how closely those percentage adoption rates correlate with business internet adoption rates in those countries.

I say for the CEO or Manager but in reality these could be used by any worker looking to be as productive as possible each day. I, for one, find myself looking more and more at information or news sites from RSS feeds etc., as of late. This time, while valuable for keeping up to date with what is going on my industry doesn’t really drive my business forward. So with that in mind here are two little tools that will help you be more productive each day.

TaskBlase is a small windows app that hooks into outlook. Basically you set a task that you want to do and click start, when you get that task done press stop and repeat. Each of these tasks and time spent on it is summarized in your outlook calendar. So if you use a timesheet application like 1time your can easily update your timesheets. You don’t need to be using a timesheet application to find value in it.

I think it helps you set a task and just focus on that task until its done, like upload document A, finish review document C, create logo, reply to client X etc., or even bigger tasks like life sustaining client work. I have to say in principle its a good little app but its very rough around the edges. I think it could integrate with the task bar instead of being a stand alone app. For me anyhow I had problems moving the app around the screen, useful all the same though.

The next one is a FireFox extension called TimeTracker; a very simple extension that records what time you spend browsing each day. In the options menu you can filter work related web pages and at the end of the day you’ll see how much time you have wasted looking at other websites. It is pretty amazing and somewhat depressing all at once. It works really well though.

I find them useful anyhow and while I sometimes forget to start the TaskBlaze the Firefox TimeTracker is very useful. I think competing with others in the office to have the least amount of wasted time might be the most effective, well for the competitive ones anyhow.