John Tate shares his private letter to Santa about his Christmas technology wishlist.
Dear Father Christmas
I hope you are coping well with the pre-Christmas rush, and that your elves are working out how to source all the new technology devices which are going to be requested in the next few weeks.
To help my Christmas go with a bang, please may I have:
The new Raspberry Pi
The A+ Raspberry Pi model was released last month. In case you are not sure what this is, it is a fullblown computer which is selling in the USA for $20 (or £20 over here).
It is an upgrade to the previous model A, but $5 cheaper. It has 256mb of ram but is significantly smaller than the previous model, and has many other improvements including better audio facilities.
I’d really like to get this for Christmas day as I’ve seen instructions on how to build a model helicopter with wireless capability and an inbuilt camera based on a Pi. If I get it in time I can avoid the relatives, grab several mince pies (as well as my Raspberry) and lock myself away in my room over the holiday period to make it.
For accountants who find the prospect of this too exciting you could of course use a Pi to run a spreadsheet. LibreOffice Calc being one example. For a good review on what it is like visit this site.
Ok, you need to add your own keyboard, mouse, screen and storage unit to make the Pi a working model, but at such a low cost it shows how the ‘internet of everything’ is likely to become a greater part of our professional and private lives.
A toy-fi teddy
On that note, Santa, please may I also have a toy-fi teddy. I saw this on the internet being marketed for £39.95 as follows: “The teddy is a cute and personal way to keep in touch with your loved ones no matter where in the world they may be. Ideal for parents who are working away a lot or can’t bear to leave their kids alone for five minutes, the toy-fi teddy is cloud technology with a heart.”
Using Bluetooth technology and cloud-based servers, the teddy allows you to send recorded messages to your friends and family. If you’re away on a business trip and have left your partner at home with the kids, you record a message on your phone or tablet which is sent to the toy-fi teddy cloud and then passed on to your partner’s device. When their phone is within ten metres of the teddy the message will be received. The teddy has a heart in its chest that will steadily flash when a new message is waiting.
The child presses the teddy’s paw to hear the message and can then send one back to you.
A battery recharger
As I am going to be using so many mobile devices with batteries, please may I also have a battery recharger?
Once upon a time mobile phone batteries could last a good few days, and when they wore out they could be replaced. Now, if used a fair bit, they may not even last the day. I was thinking of the Power Bank 5200 which stores enough power to charge up two phones. This is available for only £29.95.
A wooden abacus
Finally, Santa, I have been having some outages with my cloud-based accounting systems at work and would like a back-up. So please can I have an abacus. A good example being the wooden one from Melissa and Doug Toys, available on the internet for £10.99.
Yours hopefully
John Tate
Note to readers: In case you want to write your own letter to Santa, the Royal Mail offers to deliver it for you. The address is: Father Christmas, Santa’s Grotto, Reindeerland, XM4 5HQ.
Happy Christmas.
John Tate is a business consultant, and a visiting lecturer at Cass Business School
