surveys

Apple earned the top spot in a new corporate reputation study by Harris Poll (via TechCrunch). It awarded Apple with a corporate reputation quotient of 85.63, which is enough to displace a second-ranked Google with a score of 82.82. Only eight companies earned an RQ score of 80 or above that denotes “excellent reputation.” Apple’s achievement is even more noteworthy knowing Google ranked as last year’s most reputable corporation. Facebook and Intel did not appear on the list this year at all. As for Apple’s rise:

Apple’s current dominance is built on strong investments in its brand, predominantly through its products and services. This one-dimensional approach to building reputation has ultimately yielded high associations with all six reputational dimensions. Conversely, Hewlett Packard, which once out-ranked Apple, has headed in the reverse direction. Hewlett Packard’s slowly eroding reputation has been injured by negative perceptions on Ethics and Vision & Leadership dimensions, and its brand is beginning to feel the damage.

Beverages giant Coca-Cola (No. 3), online retailer Amazon (No. 4) and multinational confectionery, food and beverage conglomerate Kraft Foods (No. 5) round out the top five. Apple ranked the highest in Financial Performance, Products & Services, Vision & Leadership and Workplace Environment—four  out of the six key dimensions in reputation. Interestingly, Amazon.com rules the Emotional Appeal category, even though it lacks brick-and-mortar stores and has a limited human interaction with its customers…

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Source: IDG

Research firm IDG on Monday published a new survey called “iPad for Business 2012,” showing that the iPad is anything but a fad as far as big business is concerned. The global survey, available as a downloadable PDF document, noted that 91 percent of businesses that deployed iPads are using the device primarily for work, even if only approximately a quarter of issued devices were supplied as a corporate tool. Consumers and pros alike both use the device for media consumption, which in the case of the latter is predominantly text-based and work-related.

IT and business professionals certainly use their iPads at home. But unlike most consumers, they also use their devices in a similarly intensive way at work. In a further, decisive, break with consumer usage patterns, IT and business professionals use their devices on the road far more frequently than anywhere else.

Some 79 percent of IT professionals “always” use the iPads on the move and 59 percent “always” or “sometimes” use the device in offline mode. Road use usually entails planes, trains, automobiles, hotel lobbies, coffee shops, conference halls and meeting rooms, IDG noted, even though only 40 percent of iPads sold incorporate 3G connectivity.

More than three-quarters of polled workers use the iPads to browse the web, and 76 percent of pros said they “always” use iPads to read content. Meanwhile, 73 percent opted for news consumption and more than half— or 54 percent— use it for work communication. Some 79 percent tap into the iPad on the move and 54 percent use it at home. Social media, personal communication and entertainment follow with 44 percent, 42 percent and 31 percent, respectively.

Corporate iPads rarely supplant notebooks, though:

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According to a Blaze study stemming from 45,000 Android and iOS tests, the Android browser on average loads web pages 52 percent faster than mobile Safari. The results are inconclusive, however, because it’s unclear whether Blaze’s measurements take into account the new Nitro JavaScript engine that comes with iOS 4.3. The report was completed before this complaint was made public and Blaze is arguing that the lack of Nitro boost can “slightly” skew the results given that “JavaScript only accounts for a small percentage of the total load time.”

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