Business Solutions & Software Group Blog

With all the recent buzz about wearable technology, biometrics, and smart appliances, it can be easy to forget about a much older technology that is still providing tremendous value. Bluetooth. Believe it or not, Bluetooth is celebrating its 20th birthday this year, having been invented by Ericsson in 1994.

Your company's data is extremely valuable, which is why you have security measures in place in order to keep hackers out of your network. Although, it's easy to spend so much time focused on your network firewall that sometimes, securing your backed-up files gets overlooked. In the hands of a hacker, the copies of your backed up data can be just as valuable as breaching your network.

Sometimes it's okay to waste time surfing the Internet, like when you're unwinding at home after a long day at the office. However, wasting time with mindless Internet browsing can become a problem when it cuts into your work day and makes you less productive.

Users of Microsoft SkyDrive are having their service upgraded to the new OneDrive. Besides a new name, OneDrive has been given new features and Microsoft is marketing this solution as the "one place for your photos, videos, documents, and files across all your devices."

Every business has to start somewhere. Starting a new business can be the most exhilarating (and often terrifying) endeavor a person can undertake. Technology can play a extremely important role to get your business venture off the ground quickly.

There's nothing like a professional looking graph to get your point across in a big way. Having all the facts and figures compiled in a dynamic graph is a great way to show market trends and make decisions, but how do you create compelling graphs? One of the best tools for graph making is Microsoft Excel.

In Sochi, Russia, the world's best athletes aren't the only ones having spent years preparing for the Winter Olympics. Russian hackers have also readied themselves for the world's arrival. Hackers have tapped every public WiFi network in the vicinity of the games. We can learn a thing or two about the WiFi problems in Sochi.

It's no secret that employees love working from home. In fact, in a recent survey, 25% of employees admitted that they would accept a reduction in salary for the opportunity to work from home. This statistic may sound odd, but it makes perfect sense when you understand how much money working from home saves both employees and employers alike.

Those paying attention to technology industry news may have noticed the current trend of declining PC sales. Any way you spin it, the latest statistics dealing with the PC market are not favorable toward the future of widespread desktop and laptop computer purchases. Let's take a look at some of the numbers and their implications for your business.

Technology is showing up in unexpected places these days, like kitchen appliances being connected to smartphones and wearable tech enveloping people's bodies. These fun technology trends make life easier, and it is advantageous to get in early on these trends. Technology is also showing up in new and unexpected places in the business sector. Are you up on these tech trends?

In the midst of one of the coldest and most grueling winters the U.S. has experienced in years, millions of Americans are growing impatient for the arrival of spring. As subzero temperatures spread across the country, the cold weather and snow has become a hazard not only to humans, but to their technology. How cold is too cold for your gadgets?

Due to the many different forms of digital communication, you may check your email less than ever before. However, just because you may not use your email account very often, it doesn't mean that a hacker will leave it alone. Every email account is full of valuable information and should be protected with the strongest security measures available.

We marvel at how easy it is to stream media over the Internet and turn our PC or mobile device into an entertainment terminal to the world's vast entertainment library. Having every movie at our fingertips is a new experience, but the technology of instant media is over 100 years old, and its development is a testimony to human innovation.

If you take a look around, it's a mystery that the human race is tied to their technology. Many of us use smartphones and tablets every day to get our work done, to communicate with friends and family, to feed us information, to help us be more efficient in everyday life, to aid us in our hobbies, and to entertain us. In their research, Gartner recently found that over 1.2 billion smart devices were purchased in 2013 alone, opening up new market opportunities for technology innovators to explore. XD Design is certainly rising to the occasion with an impressive line of solar-powered battery chargers.

It's a rare occasion that a company grows to have as much prowess over multiple industries as Google has. Since their launch in 1998, their mission has been "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." By launching products and services centered on this purpose, Google has grown to set the world's standard of information and how it's managed. What can your business learn from them?

Previously, we wrote the blog post, "The Digital Payment War, Round 1", where we looked at the differences between the old school PayPal and the new school Square Cash methods of digital payment. While we didn't officially declare a winner, Google Wallet and Coin are a couple more contenders to our "Best Online Digital Payment Method Ever in History" award.

With the introduction of Microsoft's Kinect and Apple's iPhone 5s, biometrics has exploded! Both of these tools are being utilized for security purposes to lock others out of your device and accounts. Biometrics for these devices are also being employed to grant you access to your technology. As biometrics becomes more popular, you are sure to see it used for your business in the not too distant future.

Awareness to business trends are important for any business owner. The savviest businessman finds a way to use the trending topics to improve their enterprise's operational efficiency. The trends of the past for small business computing seem to be focused on the establishment and practical use of technologies that are relatively new, but are in full practice in the business world. These technologies include the manufacturing and worldwide distribution of devices that enhance a user's connectivity by presenting powerful interfaces to take advantage of their incredible mobility.

Email is (and has been) a prime method of communication for businesses of all sizes. With email comes a whole slew of issues that are essentially synonymous with the technology; spam, information overload, phishing, and information privacy. Even South Florida small businesses that only do business locally are at risk of these issues. Personal email accounts are equally at risk. Employing proper precautions and practices whenever communicating via email is very important to prevent the risk of security compromises, monetary loss, and even legality issues.

Sometimes when your workstation feels bogged down, a relatively cheap and simply hardware update can make a huge difference in performance. Adding more RAM (Random Access Memory, often just referred to as memory) can be a game changer for your bogged down PC.