Business Solutions & Software Group Blog

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.

Your identity has quite a lot of value, especially in the wrong hands. Security firm ZoneAlarm put together some numbers in 2011 concerning identity fraud, and it even shocked us. Let's talk about a few of these statistics and what it means.

When you mention the term 'disaster recovery,' most people think about the big ground-shattering events like earthquakes, fires, floods, tropical storms, etc. While these natural events are certainly disasters and devastating in their own right, smaller things can constitute as a disaster for your business, and they aren't seasonal.

Saving a little on your technology can go a long ways, but cutting too many corners can lead to additional problems and expensive downtime. Here are a few ways you can cut costs without creating long term issues.

Tablets are definitely becoming a staple in the consumer electronics world. For the longest time, the tablet PC was an expensive, clunky device that just didn't wow consumers. Some businesses had adopted tablets back in the day, but they were difficult to use, hard to support, and they simply didn't perform for the price tag. However, like many consumer electronics, Apple reinvigorated the tablet market with the original iPad, and now it would seem tablets are here to stay. The question is, are they right for businesses?