BYOD or Bring-your-own-device is a great way of freeing up IT costs as well as liberating workers from their personal computers.

World’s leading information technology research and advisory company, Gartner Inc. recently suggested that by 2017, at least half of employers will require employees to supply their own personal devices for work purposes.

Some interesting facts from the article:

• 38 percent of companies expect to stop providing workplace devices to staff by 2016. (PCs, such as desktops and laptops, are included in the definition of BYOD.)

• BYOD is most prevalent in midsize and larger enterprises, often generating between $500m-$5bn in revenue per year, with 2,500-5,000 employees on the roster.

• BRIC nations, such as India, China, and Brazil, will most likely already be using a personal device — typically a “standard mobile phone” — at work.

• Meanwhile, companies in the U.S. are more likely to allow BYOD than those in Europe (likely due to stronger data protection rules, see below).

• Around half of all BYOD programs provide a partial reimbursement, while full reimbursement costs “will become rare.”

• Gartner vice president David Willis says companies should “subsidize only the service plan on a smartphone.”

The BYOD revolution is going to be a relatively tough one to control and it seems to be successfully taking off quickly. Once you’ve empowered employees and supported their work style preferences, taking away those privileges could be considered a step backwards. If you treat your employees like 9-to-5 employees, guess what, you’re going to get 9-5 employees.

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The hopTo team spent some time outside near our headquarters in Campbell, Ca hamming it up for the camera this afternoon. Such a fun group! #teamphoto

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It’s no surprise that many have embraced the “Bring Your Own Device” trend – employees love it since they can bring their own smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices and executives love it because the employees, not the company, shoulder the cost of supplying them. In spite of BYOD’s continuing popularity, things aren’t all what they appear to be.

The main issue with BYOD? Your company’s IT department wants to keep an eye on the various devices floating around and it’s willing to use Mobile Device Management to do it. But by adding MDM tools onto personal devices, users are no longer in control of their own devices. Instead, it’s the IT department’s call to manage those devices as they please – imaging an employee’s personal device secure wiped after leaving the company, only for personal information to vanish with any corporate info.

When dealing with personal devices, does controlling the whole device make sense from an IT standpoint? It doesn’t – and putting MDM tools on personal devices will likely to cause a serious controversy.

There’s a class-action lawsuit brewing in a federal court in Chicago. It doesn’t necessarily involve BYOD, but it does show an inkling of what could happen if you’re not careful. 200 police officers are currently suing for millions in overtime back pay, all because officers were pressured into responding to work-related emails and calls over during their off time over department-issued devices.

Privacy concerns are one of the biggest reasons why employees are wary of IT-driven MDM. If devices are suddenly saddled with the ability to track employee location and actions, that could definitely complicate things. Remote wipes, the trump card held by so many IT departments, could bring things to a legal boil.

There’s plenty of potential for BYOD to get pretty messy, especially as personal privacy collides with IT’s desire to leverage MDM tools. Besides, there are better ways of keeping corporate infrastructure secure and BYOD users happy – app-based Mobile Application Management is one way of doing just that. Divorcing MDM from BYOD in favor of app-based solutions is the smarter way of managing corporate infrastructure, all while giving your employees more freedom when it comes to their own devices.

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We have exciting news to share with our community!

KillerStartups has featured hopTo productivity app on their homepage and also as part of their “Startup Spotlight” section. This is a great accomplishment for the hopTo team and we are excited KillerStartups has decided to feature a product designed to help anyone access their most important files across their Windows PC or favorite cloud storage from their tablet, most anywhere.

Please share in the excitement with us and check out the article on KillerStartups by clicking on the link!

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Happy Earth Day!

How is your workplace celebrating Earth Day this year? Many work places across the world are doing their part by encouraging employees to use less paper, less electricity and take public transportation or carpool to and from work.  Some companies are even encouraging employees to telecommute.

Here are some Green Tips to help turn today into a day that is good to Mother Earth.

1. Stop paying by check. Did you know that if you pay 20 bills per month electronically instead of by check you would conserve one pound of paper?

1. Eliminate servers with SaaS applications. The Software-as-a-Service model can help your business reduce its carbon footprint. There can be a huge savings in electrical power consumption by deploying SaaS vs. running the same application on premise. SaaS can save you and your company money with reduced hardware, software, labor and energy expenditures.

1. Recycling has a huge impact on the environment. It saves raw materials, utilities and greenhouse gasses. Using bins for recycling is cheaper than garbage removal and really simple.

1. Have virtual business meetings. Virtual conferencing saves money and helps your business go green.

1. Ride your bike to work or take public transportation. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, leaving your car in the garage just two times per standard work week can reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 1,600 pounds per year.

1. Use hopTo! hopTo makes it simple to work from most any location with the freedom to connect to your most important documents on your work or home PC in real time. hopTo features a completely redesigned Microsoft Office experience for your iPad that emphasizes user touch and user experience. It’s fun, sexy and convenient.  Plus, its been widely recognized that people work at different times of the day from various locations and want the ability to access, edit and send documents on their smart devices in a simple way.

Let us know what you are doing to help celebrate Earth Day!

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It’s Official! hopTo has launched hopTo productivity app on the Apple App Store!

hopTo Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary of GraphOn Corporation (OTCQB:GOJO), today announced the launch of the public beta of its new mobile productivity app, hopTo, and its immediate availability for download on the iPad App Store.

hopTo is an innovative product that brings a new level of productivity to the iPad. It is a powerful mobile workspace that allows users to manage, edit and share their documents by leveraging the power of their own PC. The underlying technology behind hopTo is protected by the company’s aggressive intellectual property creation strategy, with nearly 100 patents that have been filed in the past year, and other proprietary technology.

“We’re incredibly excited about this first-ever public beta release of hopTo. We believe that post-PC devices represent a tectonic shift in mobile productivity, and that there is strong demand in the market for a powerful, flexible productivity workspace that includes rich document editing capabilities with full Microsoft Office compatibility,” said Eldad Eilam, President and CEO of hopTo. “At the same time, users expect elegant, intuitive user interfaces and support for their favorite cloud storage solutions. Most users have documents stored on their personal computer, in addition to documents stored on cloud storage services such as Box and Dropbox. We designed hopTo to perfectly address all of these requirements.”

“hopTo reinvents mobile productivity with an amazingly intuitive user-interface and a robust feature set,” said Christoph Berlin , COO of hopTo. “This public beta release of hopTo includes a powerful tab-based multitasking concept, an aggregated search feature that includes documents gathered from the user’s PC and from cloud storage services and many other compelling features. We plan to release several major updates later this year that will include, among others, even deeper document editing capabilities, iPhone and Android support, and integration with additional cloud storage services.”

hopTo is now available as a free download from the Apple App Store at: http://appstore.com/hopto. Once the app is installed, users will be automatically enrolled onto a first-come, first-served account activation process. The app allows users to watch a real-time clock estimating when they can start using their copy of hopTo based on their position in the reservation queue.

hopTo is currently compatible with the iPad (2^nd Generation and later) and the iPad mini (1^st Generation), with plans to release iPhone and Android support in the near future.  To learn more about hopTo, visit: www.hopTo.com

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Time and productivity are two very important things we rely on to get more accomplished. When there is more to do, we invest more hours. But time is finite and many of us feel we are running out, that we are investing as many hours as we can while trying to retain some semblance of life outside of work.

Take a moment and think about your typical day. Do you check your email on your smartphone before you go to bed or as soon as you wake up? Are you running from meeting to meeting with no time to sit down to finish your latest project budget? Do you spend your evenings on the couch or front of your television on your iPad either dabbling in work, personal productivity or surfing the Internet for the latest and greatest?

Have you ever sat on your couch ready to relax and suddenly read an email from a co-worker telling you the report you’re presenting the following morning has a typo but it’s on your hard drive at the office and you can’t get to it? We’ve all had instances similar to this. And, we’ve all used various applications to access our documents – whether it’s by emailing it to ourselves, accessing cloud storage, remote access applications or VPN. But, when it comes to editing documents it’s quite a different story. If you’ve ever used a remote access application, the first thing you’d notice is that the application heavily relies on projecting your PCs screen directly to your tablet. And, it’s typically a mouse driven interface, at that. Have you tried editing an excel document on your tablet? Difficult, right? It’s probably just easier to grab your laptop or wake up an hour earlier to head into the office.

I’m happy to say, hopTo will greatly subside your productivity issues. Editing a Word or Excel document might actually be easier to do on a tablet compared to your PC. I know, that’s a pretty big claim to make. But, the user interface is just so simple and it’s actually what you would think Excel and Word should look like on a tablet.

So, go ahead. Start doing things you didn’t have time for before. Start going to the gym, beach, fishing or sailing. If you are using hopTo, I guarantee you’re going to have more opportunities to do more fun things.

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Since we have officially entered the post PC era, I thought it would be and interesting test to work sans PC for an entire workweek. Meaning, no computer while at home or the office. Needless to say, it’s been quite an experience.

My job changes quite often and typically on an hourly basis. My go-to tools include a 13” MacBook and a large screen. I store most of my documents on my hard drive or in my cloud storage. My functional software tools mainly include a web browser, an email client, various communication clients, a variety of cloud storage and assorted artsy tools.

My basic rule was that I couldn’t touch or access my computer all week, although I did occasionally use my wireless keyboard with my iPad. I figured if Apple allows it without jailbreaking, I could allow it too. I usually have no problem typing on the iPad’s onscreen keyboard for short items, but if I was going to work all day, I needed the screen space and typing speed that a hardware keyboard would offer.

Since, I do work for hopTo and we are mostly focused on productivity tools, I’d like to mainly focus on my remote office experience and BYOD. While, I am all for BYOD it can be a bit challenging if you don’t have the right tools. While there are a ton of fantastic apps available to complete just about any task, remote access and various writing/editing tools have found to be sometimes awkward and challenging.

The majority of my job can be done using Microsoft Excel and Word. So, to be fair I wanted to give the top four remote access solutions an equal opportunity to be part of my experience. Each day, I used a different remote access tool to access and edit my documents on my PC and cloud storage. With all of the remote access clients I used during the four days, I found similar challenges with each one: 1) Multitasking and toggling from document to document 2) Using a mouse driven interface on an iPad is difficult because the touch area is so small 3) Lack of functionality and limited formatting options. Meetings during these four days were a bit challenging and frustrating for a few people.

My final post-PC experiential day, I switched over to our remote access solution, hopTo. No screen-scraping. Tabs for multitasking. Sliding toolbars for my fat fingers. And, a simple way to access documents with a touch (fat fingers or not). Not only did I save hours within my day by being able to touch the exact tool I needed the first time, but it was less frustrating on a multitude of levels.

The one thing I learned, working on a tablet made it a bit more difficult to monitor daily instances, but there was a tradeoff: it was significantly easier to be productive when actually writing. In fact, I produced slightly more the day I worked on the iPad than on a normal day, and I didn’t miss any significant news—work-related or otherwise. I did feel as if I was somewhat disconnected from the world compared to my usual setup, but I wasn’t—I just couldn’t see everything at the same time, all the time.

What a fun challenge. I’d be interested in hearing from anyone that works remote or is part of BYOD.

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Aside from announcing our official launch on the App Store (in the future), this is likely going to be my most favorite blog post. Over the past few months, the hopTo gang has been working non-stop days and nights to write the hopTo program that will bring Excel to your iPad in an exciting and never seen before way. It’s really, really #awesome (not to mention gorgeous) and I’m excited to be able to show a sneak peak to the hopTo blog readers. Believe it or not, Excel on your iPad will actually be easier (and more fun) to use than on a PC.

With Excel for hopTo, you can expect such features as:

• ♦ Intuitive buttons to add additional sheets within your Excel workbooks. The easy tap sheet buttons also makes it simple to toggle back and forth between sheets.
• ♦ No need for a mouse. Just tap the cell you want to edit and start typing your favorite formulas.
• ♦ It’s easy to format one cell or one hundred cells by tapping the cells you need. Did you ever think Excel could be so much fun!
• ♦ You’ll notice swipe menus in both Excel and Word for hopTo. Swipe menus make it easy to format and edit all of your text with complete accuracy. Plus, each swipe menus reveal additional formatting options.
• ♦ Need more decimals within your cell or cells? Just tap the cell and slide the decimal slider. You’ll instantly be able to turn your tenths into millionths and beyond.
• ♦ The (1234) button will easily turn your numbers from a positive number to a (negative) number with a quick tap.

Go ahead and create more work for yourself. You’ll think us later. We promise.

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If you had the opportunity to witness the debut of our new innovative mobile app, hopTo,  at the 25th Annual ROTH Capital Partners Conference yesterday, we’d love to hear your thoughts. However, if you weren’t available to make the trek to beautiful Dana Point, CA, you’re in luck. We have an audio webcast available for your listening pleasure.

In the audio webcast, listen to hopTo President and CEO, Eldad Eilam, discuss the past, present and future of hopTo.

While we are still in beta, we expect hopTo to be available soon! Keep checking back for more details on our launch.

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