Twitter is Twitter, the most important global communications tool since email and unlike email, it is all owned by ONE COMPANY.

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Yammer has built its reputation and business on being a communications tool for the connected age, a quite different approach to the ESN.

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With the powerful high-tech communications tool known as a smiley face.

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For most people in poor countries, he thinks, mobile phones are fast becoming the main communications tool, schoolbook, vaccination record, family album and many other things.

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So while Facebook has to back-engineer parts of its highly successful free communications tool into something that can make more money, Google is taking something that makes money and expanding it.

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There needs to be preparation and self-education, followed by extensive town halls, outreach meetings, visits to senior citizen centers, and the use of every available communications tool to get the reform message across.

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For that reason you may decide that a tablet, and especially the iPad or even the new Nexus 7 tablet (if you have a WiFi connection), is a far better choice as a communications tool when you are overseas if you do not need the convenience of a smaller device with its obvious limitations as far as screen size.

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While out on three spacewalks, Atlantis mission specialists Steve Bowen, Michael Good and Garrett Reisman replaced six solar array batteries on the orbiting platform and installed a backup communications Ku-band antenna and a robot tool tray.

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