Stories by: Tom Kaneshige

Think mobile app, and what do you see?

When Alice fell down the rabbit hole, she emerged into a Wonderland of oddities: trapped in a shrinking body with talking animals, mad tea parties, and a Queen of Hearts who shouts, "Off with her head."

Let's say you need to pull some corporate data off an employee's personal iPad. Under the newly and hastily crafted bring-your-own-device policy, or BYOD, the employee is required to hand over the iPad to the IT computer forensics team.

When the district sales managers of a luxury retailer logged into their corporate email accounts on shiny, new iPads for the first time, at the same time-cheers went up.

Bring-your-own-device, or BYOD, is a movement blurring the line between work and personal life. After all, BYOD is all about employees using personal smartphones and tablets for business purposes. So does this mean people check Facebook when they should be working or read job-related emails on weekends?

In the mid-1990s, I ran across what looked like an incredible story: A teenager, dubbed the Whiz Kid, was selling a ton of computers from his parents' home. Newspapers told the story complete with images of the teenager talking on his cell phone-which, at the time, was a big deal.

A few years ago, corner-office executives shucked their company-owned BlackBerry smartphones in favor of personally owned iPhones, and then demanded IT support them. Thus began the great march toward BYOD, or bring-your-own-device.

Three IT workers with iPads gathered around a whiteboard in a conference room in Boston to figure out how to improve a long-standing technical service- and running into more questions than answers.

Dubbed the new iPad, Apple's third-generation iPad hit the streets last week, igniting long lines at Apple stores and racking up huge sales. A few days later, though, after the dust settled critics began weighing in.

The iPad promises to make your work life a little easier. Traveling salespeople, airline pilots and even construction workers don't have to carry around heavy binders anymore.