iPads for all! Sort of…

As reported by the Huntersville Herald, the town of Cornelius, Colorado has fond that a new pilot program to replace paper with iPads is helping them save money, production time and helping them be more green. Cornelius Mayor Jeff Tarte and the town’s five commissioners were each issued an iPad 2 recently paid for by the town.

The iPads all plug into the town’s NovusAgenda Software, and provides the commissioners with all of the necessary meeting materials, including budget worksheets, zoning maps and PowerPoint presentations. In previous instances this was comprised of an average of 210 pages of printed material for each commissioner other recipients totaling a total of 19 copies. These packages had to be developed, printed, copied and package for each meeting.That’s a lot of work and cost involved to do this.

Town Manager Anthony Roberts says he’s amazed with how much sense it makes to use iPads and digital material instead of paper. “It’s just a no brainer,” he told the Huntersville Herald. “We used to print all those agenda packets and people threw them in the recycling bin after the meeting.” Plus, Roberts says, going digital helps transparency, since “the beauty of this system is you have everything online. It’s there forever and a day, and the general public sees everything.”

We are starting see more and more applications that have web based interfaces that allow the end user to interact with multiple kinds of endpoint devices that they can use. This is a trend that will help bring down the cost to the end user especially those that have small budgets and allow them to act as big as their much larger counterparts.