Iconography/Personal Branding/Color

Keyboard and Mouse Die by Innovation

With the launch of products like the iPad, HPs Touchsmart, and the everyday touch screen novelty, the keyboard and mouse are moving away from iconic pc parts.

A recent article from the Gartner Newsroom explores the growing trend of touch based hardware. "What we're going to see is the younger generation beginning to use touchscreen computers ahead of enterprises," said Leslie Fiering, research vice president at Gartner. "By 2015, we expect more than 50 percent of PCs purchased for users under the age of 15 will have touchscreens, up from fewer than 2 percent in 2009. On the other hand, we are predicting that fewer than 10 percent of PCs sold to enterprises in 2015 for mainstream knowledge workers will have touchscreens."

Trends and learning patterns start in the classroom. New gadgets and applications go viral with young crowds who always tend to be on the cusp of the next great gismo.

-As prices drop, education will become a major market for touch and pen-enabled devices. Younger children just entering school find direct manipulation on the screen a natural way to interact with their computers. Older students are already using pen input to annotate class material or capture formulae and graphics that can't be recorded with keyboards (for math, chemistry and physics classes, among others). However, most school districts do not want to support two separate devices — one for touch and another for pen. To deal with the differing requirements of the different grades, most districts are looking for dual-input screens that support both touch and pen in a single device.

These predictions don’t necessarily tell us much about the first generation of the iPad (and how well it’ll do on the market), but they do show that Apple’s idea of a keyboardless, simple tablet computer may have indeed created an entirely new category of PC devices, one that might be an important part of the PC market in years to come.

http://mashable.com/2010/04/07/50-percent-pcs-touchscreens/

http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1336913

According to CNNMoney, the Dpartment of Labor and Statistics reported a massive jump in new jobs for the month of March. The spike totaled 162,000 jobs, the largest increase in three years. Influential factors included the 48,000 new jobs created by the Census Bureau for the upcoming national tally.
Negative factors included the severe weather impacting most of the nation mid feb which may have skewed numbers for that month.