A Subtle Interface
What BlueTie does is hardly revolutionary. E-mail, calendars, and file-sharing are familiar functions, even as Web services. You could duplicate almost everything about BlueTie from Google piece-parts. But BlueTie adds two critical pieces. One is a clean, usable interface that ties the pieces of the service together logically and works very quickly. The other is the administrative control that makes BlueTie the business-grade application that its name cleverly implies.
BlueTie looks like it's all business from the moment you log in. It's not afraid of white space on the screen, and it doesn't waste any cycles on eye candy. The application's functions are invoked for the most part by square-cornered buttons that give BlueTie a your-father's-Web-design look. (The calendar design, in particular, suffers compared with, for example, Yahoo's group calendar.)
But overall, plain is not a bad thing. With less screen distractions, you can do what you need to do done faster, and BlueTie works with admirable speed. Even things that you might expect would cause a measurable delay, like downloading your in-box view from the server, seem comfortably quick.
That's good, because being Web-based gives BlueTie a lot to overcome out of the gate. Web browsers and Web protocols historically have not made for richly functional Web applications. Ajax programming techniques have improved things dramatically, and BlueTie takes good advantage of them to provide as rich an application interface as it can. It's still not as rich as one might want, of course -- you cannot drag and drop files from one folder to another, for example, and there is no right-click context menu with a "delete" choice that would help you triage your in-box.
Meat-And-Potatoes Functionality
In fact, there is nothing very advanced in the BlueTie interface -- no clever widgets to set the duration of a calendar entry, no presence indicators to show who's online and who's not. (The paid version, with its IM client, offers more.) But then, there's nothing very advanced in BlueTie's concept of what collaboration means, either. The functionality of BlueTie is meat-and-potatoes.
Verizon is demoing crowd analytics technology that uses 5G along with AI and mobile edge computing to give stadium operators insights into the flow of fans throughout a venue.
As we move closer to fully realizing the potential of Wi-Fi 7, it becomes evident that the RF, signaling, and throughput tests are not merely procedural checkpoints but the pillars of excellence in wireless communication.
With low earth orbit (LEO) satellites fast becoming the norm and 3GPP unifying telecom standards around the globe, the satellite IoT and machine-to-machine (M2M) sector ought to be looking at a bright horizon. But is this the case?
