Hundreds of Uses, Dozens of Business Fields to Rock

Architecture, salesmen or saleswomen, retail floors, inventory, healthcare, education, design, artists, realtors, hotels, restaurants, gaming…the possibilities are endless.

Medical

Many reports have surfaced that the iPad team has met with many medical professionals in hospitals in the Cupertino, CA area. The medical filed could have all sorts of uses for such a device. Viewing CAT-scans, pulling up a patient’s history with the touch of a finger, and have that information always on and updated.

The medical field has spent billions to become paperless. Read Write Web reported that Kaiser Permanente alone spent four billion. However, just like the smart phone market the software and devices are clunky and the tablet could upend this market. Apple’s intuitive platform, and the iPhone developer SDK provided a springboard for a remedy. Already there are iPhone apps that are beginning to make this shift happen. As Read Write Web reports, there’s Airstrip (allowing a doctor to monitor a patients vital signs from afar) and Haiku, which is the likely killer app that will succeed in the hospital field.

Education

Education is another field that is not only important to Jobs and Apple, but is a field that is prime real estate for tablet adoption. Text books have always been heavy, costly and often outdated quickly. You can imagine a college students text books all on one tablet. This is a field that could explode into a new direction, making way for living documents and textbooks that are updated via WiFi when synced with the iTunes iBooks store just like apps are now.

Depending on your age (and this could be true still today) you may remember history books were outdated, mostly because the books were purchased years in advance and used for far too many years to save money. Schools have historically been strapped for money, cutting many needed programs such as Physical Education and the Arts so budgets could allow for costly textbook upgrades.

For example, a University of Florida study found this:

“Students are learning about Christopher Columbus from books that refer to the native people he encountered as heathens and savages, according to a new University of Florida study.

Most books in elementary school libraries and classrooms have outdated information and outright distortions about the explorer’s expeditions, according to UF researcher Donna Sabis-Burns. She conducted the study for her doctoral dissertation in UF’s College of Education.

Sabis-Burns sent an online survey, receiving responses from 189 teachers and 89 librarians who provided a list of 182 books. Six out of 10 books failed to identify the native Taino people whom Columbus encountered by their tribal affiliation, instead calling them such things as “gentle heathens” and “naked, red-skinned savages.”

Take this example and multiply by 49 states and you can see the problem with analog books is massive. Fortunately, there have been measures taken by some states to switch to e-books, most notably California due to their now famous bankruptcy. Governor Schwarzenegger stated,

“It’s nonsensical and expensive to look to traditional hard-bound books when information today is so readily available in electronic form,” Schwarzenegger wrote. “Especially now, when our school districts are strapped for cash and our state budget deficit is forcing further cuts to classrooms, we must do everything we can to untie educators’ hands and free up dollars so that schools can do more with fewer resources.”

To Be Continued…

Coming Up in Part Three…the other fields and a big kahuna; Gaming.

Posted by admin on Sunday, January 31st, 2010 at 2:38 pm.