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SmartPhones = Communication & Organization

Written by Jess
Tuesday, 09 August 2011 19:35
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Smartphones change how you do business.  Make them increase your bottom line – there are at least 4 major business functions that Smartphones can streamline.  Here are the first two!

Communication

  • Surprisingly enough, a Smartphone still drags along the 19th century capability of holding a conversation with someone else who is somewhere else.
  • Email is one of the heavy hitters on Smartphones, configuration is relatively pain-free.  Just ask a teenager.  Mostly I use this to respond to what is both Urgent AND Important, leave the rest for your regular computer.
  • Text and Chat enjoy a somewhat blurry co-existence but both allow discreet and immediate communication.
  • Many Smartphones come with the ability to translate voice into text so you needn’t have such nimble fingers.
  • Hey, the Internet is right there.  Research anything at the tip of a finger.  No need to pull out a bulky laptop.
  • Back to eMail for a sec.  We assume you have a “question” section on your website.  Potential customers assume there’s a person in your company just waiting to respond to a question.  Have those sent to your phone and you can present a much more “big company” image by answering quickly.

Organization

  • Your calendar is right there, and the Smartphone is reminding you of what’s next.
  • Your contacts are right there, email and phone.
  • Document managing apps let you take important spreadsheets, presentations and contracts, invoices and work orders “to go”.  And they can often be printed in the field or onsite.
  • You can even take signatures right on your phone.
  • Dictate notes to your Smartphone, record spontaneous totally awesome ideas so they don’t fade away as the next shiny object grabs your attention.

More to follow this week!

 

What Antivirus Program is the best?

Written by Jess
Tuesday, 29 March 2011 22:14
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People always ask us what antivirus program is the best.

 Here’s our take, and it’s from the technician viewpoint:  Eset’s NOD32 Antivirus/Antispyware, hands down.  You’ve probably never heard of it.

 NOD32 hasn’t missed an “in the wild” virus since pre-turn of the century.  It’s fast, it’s effective, it’s competitive in price.  We just wish we received a kickback from recommending their software.  An “in the wild” virus is one that the major antivirus vendors aren’t already studying in their labs.

 Why is this important?  If a virus is “in the wild”, it means that the antivirus companies don’t yet know about it.  It’s spreading from computer to computer relatively unseen and unchallenged.  Experts say that in-the-wild viruses pose the most significant threat to computers worldwide.

 Okay, so Norton and McAfee are the big dogs, they’ve got a fairly large advertising budget.  Our experience is that they cripple a PC so much in order to achieve “security” that they sacrifice either processing power or the movement of technology toward ease of use.  What is ease of use?  Most of us just want the computer to do what we want it to do, we don’t care about what’s under the hood.  Step on the gas, you go.  Punch in a number on your iPhone, it dials.

 NOD32 does that best.  But.  With every single antivirus sold in the world, there is a caveat.  Malware (technically not a virus) can get behind them and still mess up your machine.  No system is perfect.  But having dealt with thousands of infected machines, we’ve found NOD32 far and above to be the most secure solution.

 http://www.eset.com/us/

 

The cost of spam!

Written by admin
Tuesday, 28 September 2010 20:42
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How much does spam cost?

Considering that 94% of all email sent is spam, it can cost quite a bit in lost productivity.  Estimates are about $25 billion per year and climbing.  At a minimum, people spend between 1-2 full work days each year cutting through spam.

• If it makes it to the inbox, you have to delete it.
• If it gets filtered but it wasn’t supposed to, you have to un-delete it.
• And after you’re done with all that, you have to remember what you were doing in the first place.

That doesn’t even count the viruses and malicious links that could be included.  Eeeeww, there are BUGS in my spam???

The best free spam filter we’ve found so far is SpamFighter, available at www.spamfighter.com.  They have a paid version also that costs as little as 6 cents a day.