Metro Money: Growing Number of New Yorkers Are Using the Library for Office Space - WSJ

By

Anne Kadet

April 17, 2015 4:10 p.m. ET

 

App designer Jay Collins loves his free office space. The building
features fireplaces, hardwood floors, oversize windows and oak
bookcases. The Wi-Fi is excellent. The research facilities, superb.

The location? Staten Island’s Port Richmond Library.



“I usually find myself in the teen room, because no one’s ever in there,” says Mr. Collins.

The
32-year-old, who schleps his laptop and iPad to the library four days a
week, says he has tried other options, “but once I found the library, I
didn’t have to stay home being lazy, or at Starbucks getting fat.”



The
library may lack the cachet of a rented desk at a pricey co-working
space, but as Mr. Collins discovered, the stacks even offer networking
opportunities. He has landed side jobs designing logos for fellow
entrepreneurs, not to mention a gig designing a clown suit for a
professional jester. read more...

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Google is preparing for screenless computers - Quartz

Don't get too attached to this thing. AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez

The spread of computing to every corner of our physical world doesn’t just mean a proliferation of screens large and small—it also means we’ll soon come to rely on mobile computers with no screens at all. “It’s now so inexpensive to have a powerful computing device in my car or lapel, that if you think about form factors, they won’t all have keyboards or screens,” says Scott Huffman, head of the Conversation Search group at Google.

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Google is already moving rapidly to enable voice commands in all of its products. On mobile phones, Google Now for Android and Google’s search app on the iPhone allow users to search the web via voice, or carry out other basic functions like sending emails. Similarly, Google Glass would be almost unusable without voice interaction. At Google’s conference for developers, it unveiled voice control for its Chrome web browser. And Motorola’s new Moto X phone has a specialized microchip that allows the phone to listen at all times, even when it’s asleep, for the magic word that begins every voice conversation with a Google product: “OK…”

1

There’s nothing new about voice interaction with computers per se. What’s different about Google’s work on the technology is that the company wants to make it as fluid and easy as keyboards and touch screens are now. That’s a challenge big enough that, thus far, it has kept voice-based interfaces from going mainstream in our personal computing devices. And in cases when they are in use, such as interactive voice response systems designed to handle customer service calls, they can be frustrating. Read more...

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