I provide a monthly report and feedback on where our industry is heading, what new technology is making ripples and what the market is leaning towards in its choice of vendors. From Carriers and transit providers, software, operating systems and utilities to networking hardware and servers, the list just goes on and on.

Today I am going to write about how I am able to keep my finger on the pulse and keep track of  trends to identify what important changes are happening.

I set out to search for a way to keep on top of a variety of topics. I knew of RSS feeds, newsgroups and blogs to gain my data. This proved to be extremely time consuming as I would have to trawl through numerous bookmarks only to find some without updates and would leave me with a browser filled with open tabs. So I thought, how could I view all this information without having to go through all this pain? How could I find a way to know if  new articles exist?

The answer started with Google Reader. I started subscribing to feeds, blogs and newsgroups in order to keep up to date. This was only good if I was in front of a computer, and typically when I am in front of a computer, I have a lot of distractions, and find myself doing work or following YouTube suggestions.

I had only partially found a solution to my problem, so I sat back and thought, where can I find time? When are the times that I usually need something to read, or need something to amuse myself.

Several scenarios popped into my head:

• On the train
• On the toilet
• In a doctors waiting room
• Sleeping material before bed

What I needed was a solution that would provide me with a portable, easy to use and flexible application to give me access to these Feeds.

Being an iPhone owner I first looked to the App-store and was surprised by what I found. I stumbled across an App for both iPad and iPhone called Feeddler. Feeddler gave me the ability to synchronize with Google reader and gave it in a view that worked for a portable device. I was able to read all the feeds and mark them as read as I went. I could set the app to offline reading so I could read whilst on the train without 3G connection dropouts. It gave a quick overview of all the articles, and if something took my eye I could click on it and read more. Once I read an article, it would synchronise back to Google Reader so the read articles were updated.

Feeddler allows for more than just reading an article, from each article you have the ability to email the link or article, post it to Facebook or Twitter or even open it on the devices Safari Browser. There is  integrated features of Google Reader, you can “Star Rate” , ” like”  and share with other Google users.

Overall I have found Feeddler to be a very useful tool in order to keep up with the Industry trends. I have been able to efficiently and effectively subscribe to feeds and view relevant content. It gives me a portal to what I am looking for and give me an edge when making decisions on new technology. I suggest you give it a try.