How IT Outsourcing can Benefit Your Small Business

For any small business to succeed whether it sells a product or service online or in a brick and mortar storefront, it needs up-to-the minute IT services to stay ahead of the game. You may require upgrading of hardware and software as well as online security but don’t have the capital to hire a dedicated IT employee. Companies such as Acora and others focus only on giving large or small businesses IT support. A dedicated IT team can customize its service to suit your business objectives, so you can focus on your sales and operations and not worry about your IT support.

The Main Benefits

The most important benefit of IT outsourcing is it allows the company’s managers to focus on customers and operations without splitting their time taking care of IT problems. This can also be solved by hiring a network administrator, but this means another salary and benefits that a small business may not be able to afford. In order to pay for this, the company may have to pass the extra expense on to customers. When a small business outsources its IT, it has a better chance to competitively price its product or service, and it gets top-level IT service that puts it on par with large enterprises.

Any business big or small can save money by outsourcing its IT operations. It is a good way to control capital outlay, especially for start-ups. This frees capital that the managers can funnel into the company.
Technology changes practically overnight and a professional IT service will be able to implement new technology quickly into your business. It has the facilities and expertise because that is its main focus. Experience is much more valuable to you than qualification. It may take weeks or months for an in-house IT employee to learn about the latest advances, and upgrade your operations. A professional will see the latest advances even before they arrive.

There are always risks involved with any business such as government regulations, financial conditions, markets and competition. IT services will assume and manage much of that risk for you because it has specific industry knowledge. This is especially true for security and compliance issues. It will know how to help you avoid risk in your IT operations.

Services IT Professionals Offer

If you sell products or services online, it’s especially important to have up to date security measures. Here are a few things professionals will do for your business:

• Keep your firewall up to date

• Audit your servers and workstations

• Implement PCI security standards and maintain them

• Implement payment structures such credit and debit cards

When due diligence is enacted on your IT operations by a professional IT service provider, the risks that are associated with maintaining credit card numbers, client data and sensitive competitive information will be minimized. Whenever there is software or hardware upgrades, you’ll get the required malware installed immediately, all the time saving money to focus on production or sales staff who directly drive revenue.

Ear and Tongue Sensors Combine to Understand -Silent Speech

Latest Invention - `Silent Speech’ – Magnetic Tongue Control System

Latest inventions can now recognize `silent speech’ by keeping checks on the tongue and ears. On training it to identify suitable phrases, it can enable people who tend to be disabled or work in loud environment, to control quietly the wearable devices.

This new devices depends in part on a magnetic tongue control system which had been earlier designed to aid people with paralysis to drive a power wheelchair through tongue movements. However, the researchers were worried that the technology which depends on a magnetic tongue piercing or a sensor affixed to the tongue could be too disturbing for some of the users.

The Tongue Drive System – TDS is the work of a team under the guidance of Jeonghee Kim at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, US. The system needs users to pierce their tongue with a barbell shaped device. A professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology and technical lead on the wearable computer Google Glass, Thad Starner, had been motivated to attempt ear movements after an appointment with a dentist.

Dentist – Motivated Silent Speech Recognition

The dentist had stuck a finger in Starner’s ear and had asked him to bite down, some quick test for jaw function. As his jaw seemed to move, so also the space in his ears moved. This led him to wonder if he could do silent speech recognition with that experiment.

The subsequent device tends to combine tongue control with earpieces which seems somewhat like headphones and each of it is embedded with a proximity sensor which utilises infrared light to map the changing shape of the ear canal. Various words require various jaw movements, deforming the canal in slightly different ways.

The team had listed 12 phrases which could be essential, for the test, like `I need to use the bathroom’, or `Give me my medicine, please’. People were then recorded, repeating these while wearing the device. With the tongue and ear trackers in, the software could recognize what the wearer was saying, almost 90% of the time. With the use of ear trackers only, the accuracy seemed a bit lower. The researchers expect to build a phrasebook of useful words as well as sentences which could be recognisable from the ear data.

Jaw-emes

A graduate student at Georgia Technology, Abdelkareem Bedri states that they call them `jaw-emes’. Besides this, they have also started looking into other probable uses for the ear data. One experiment with an improved version of the ear trackers had reached 96% accuracy in recognizing simple jaw gestures, like a move from left to right.

These types of gestures would enable the wearer discreetly control the wearable device. Heartbeat monitoring too seems possible and can support the system to verify that it is placed properly in the ears of the wearer.

 Bruce Denby tends to work on silent speech in his lab at the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris and states that demonstrating that the technology is `industry ready, could be crucialin bringing the technology to the market. He further added that `the true holy grail of silent speech is continuous speech recognition. However, the potential of recognizing even a limited set of phrases is a tremendous boon already for some disabled individuals.

Google Can Reset 75% of Android Phones Remotely

 

Google Can Reset Passcode of Older Versions of Android

The earlier operating software is at risk, namely codenamed Froyo, Ice Cream Sandwich, Gingerbread, Jelly Bean and KitKat. The older versions of Android devices could have their passcode reset by Google, remotely if the court order compels them to enable the authorities to look at the contents. According to a document by the New York District Attorney, it indicates that the phones and tablets running Android software which were released before Lollipop 5.0 seem to be vulnerable to resetting.

Latest software tend to use full disk encryption which means that Google is unable to comply with requests even if it is compelled to do so. Around 75% of Android devices still tend to use a software version which can be accessed remotely with a court order.

The document has mentioned that for some other types of Android devices, Google can reset the passcode when aided with search warrant as well as order instructing them to support law enforcement in removing data from the device. This procedure can be done remotely by Google and enables forensic examiners to view the contents of a device. The latest Android phones have encryption turned off by default, inspite of having the ability.

Automated System Enabling Complainants File

The process of turning it on differs by model though the same can usually be found in the settings menu somewhere. In the meanwhile, for copyright reasons, Google had mentioned that it receives 1,500 requests each minute for removal of specific results from its search engine. Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Google provides an automated system enabling complainants file through an online form.

Every version of the Android operating system tends to have a numerical identifier and a name that has been historically the name of a dessert or candy such as Ice Cream sandwich. Unlike the devices of Apple, Android devices are manufactured by various different manufacturers which are referred to as Original Equipment Manufacturers or OEMs.

Android devices could set up a `pattern unlock’ passcode that is in line connecting at least 4 dots in a 9 dot grid in order to protect the data on their devices. Devices of specific operating systems provide the possibility of locking the device utilising numeric or alphanumeric passcode.

Fingerprint Readers Incorporated in Hardware

Some of the Android devices tend to have fingerprint readers, incorporated in the hardware of the device. However, the fingerprint reader is not assimilated in all Android devices due to the variety of OEMs developed Android devices. Google provide cloud storage in Google Drive as well as other locations and the data could be backed from an Android device, an iPhone, iPad or a computer, to Google’s cloud.

By default, Android devices do not tend to back up to Google cloud storage and hence a user must agree to choose to back up to the cloud where the choice is not a single but a series of choices, one for each kind of data.

Google had opposed the findings of the district attorney. Google’s security lead, Adrian Ludwig, had commented that `Google did not have the ability to facilitate unlocking any device that has been protected with a pin, fingerprint or password irrespective of the device being encrypted or not and for all the versions of Android’.

New Nanoparticle Steals Light, Beams It Stronger

New Nanoparticle - Layers of Unusual Materials

New type of ceramic nanoparticle has been developed by physicist, which is said to be making it easier to track drugs in the body, screen counterfeit money as well as boost the ability of solar cells to capture more energy. The particle which is onion-like is about 50 nanometres wide that is around 1000 times smaller than a human hair or the size of a virus.

Made from layers of unusual materials, its coating is of organic dye, a neodymium shell with a core made of ytterbium and thulium. Combined together, the layers tend to convert invisible near infrared light to blue and ultraviolet – UV light with high proficiency. The capability of changing one type of light to another is known as `up-conversion’ wherein this particle has the potential to do it 100 times more competently than the other particles.

The same is important since such particle can improve many prevailing technologies that tend to utilise dyes, biomarkers or fluorescent tracers. According to Tymish Y. Ohulchanskyy, deputy director University at Buffalo’s Institute, for Lasers, Photonics and Biophotonics – ILPB, he states that the particle for instance, could be utilised in special inks which could be invisible to the human eye, but tend to glow blue when it is hit by a low-energy laser pulse.

Develops Its Glow during Up-Conversion Procedure

Ohulchanskyy is of the opinion that the particles can be used in ensuring that expensive drugs reach their mark in the body. Presently the same is being done by using bio-imaging, which is a technique that labels cells with markers that shine under ultraviolet light shining from specialized imagers.

However, fluorescent markers could throw the incoming light from the imaging device but the latest nanoparticle does not do so. On the contrary it develops its own glow during the up-conversion procedure.

Ohulchanskyy comments that this feature is such which none of the other materials have displayed. Researchers state that the particle’s dye performs as an antenna, collecting photons from low-energy light sources. Shell of the neodymium handovers the energy to the core, wherein the ytterbium as well as the thulium accumulates the energy of many photons at once, emitting it as a single photon of blue and UV light.

Design Helpful in Overcoming Long-Standing Obstacles

Professor of chemistry at the University of Maryland as well as an expert in nanoparticles, Zhihong Nie, stated that he `was impressed with the new three layer particle. It is an outstanding paper in general. He further added that it is interesting to look at the energy cascade phenomenon and it should not be hard to replicate. He is of the belief that they could be able to scale it up’.

 Guanying Chen, professor of chemistry at Harbin Institute of Technology and ILPB research associate, has commented saying that `by creating special layers which helps in transferring energy efficiently from the surface of the particle to the core, which emits blue and UV light, the design helps in overcoming some of the long-standing obstacles which earlier technologies faced.

The research had been published in the journal – NanoLetters. It was led by researchers at SUNY-Buffalo, the Harbin Institute of Technology in China together with contributions from the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden, Tomsk State University in Russia and the University of Massachusetts Medical School.

Lenovo's Zuk Z1 is a Cheap Smartphone with More Battery than Bite

The Zuk Z1 – First Smartphone From Lenovo’s Zuk Sub-Brand

The Zuk Z1 is the first smartphone from Lenovo’s Zuk sub-brand which joins the growing list of cheap Android handsets such as the Alcatel OneTouch Idol 3 and Asus ZenFone 2. The Zuk Z1 had been unveiled in August in China and though there was no planned date of release for US, it is available now in Europe for €319.99.

One could get a 5.5 inch full HD display, 3GB of RAM, 64GB internal storage, 13-megapixel camera with dual SIM support, fingerprint scanner as well as an equally dated Snapdragon 801 processor with that price. This is because like the powerful though cheap Android smartphone, the Zuk Z1 is not much appealing with regards to the design.

The metal chamfered edges are attractively designed and the plastic antenna stripes towards the top and bottom of the phone are somewhat familiar. The Z1 tends to have a rounded bubbly feel of an older phone for instance like a Samsung Galaxy Note 2 of 2012. The sleek plastic back tends to swell slightly as though the battery within seems to be inflating and though not uncomfortable to hold, it lacks the refinement one tends to get from the latest Galaxy and iPhone devices.

Software – Very Appealing

The most appealing aspect of the Z1 is its software which comes loaded with one of Android’s popular variants, Cyanogen OS, meaning that individuals could get more granular control over their device than Google’s regular mobile operating system. One could tweak anything from the shortcuts on the notification drawer, to check for individual apps to hardware button towards the bottom of the device.

Besides this it also bundled with the software like Truecaller, a caller ID service which besides other things, tends to block spam calls, which is useful and can be uninstalled if not needed. The performance of Z1 is perfect for daily usage, swiping around the home screen scrolling through the apps, texting friends and much more.

Though the Snapdragon 2.5 GHz801 processor does not keep up in head-to-head use with the new chips from 2015, there seems to be slight and infrequent impediments at the time of gaming. The 13-megapixel camera is a bit of a disappointment and attempting to capture moving subjects seems difficult as well as well- illuminated indoor shots are not up to the mark. Besides this, Cyanogen OS’s camera app is particularly poorly designed with no easy access to pictures taken.

Z1 – A Capable Phone

The rest of the hardware seems solid though there are some more limitations. For instance the addition of a USB Type-C port seems that one could use reversible cables which tend to work either way up though it makes the old microUSB chargers useless.

The phone does not come bundled with one Type-C cable. Since there is no microSD port or a removable battery, the 64GB storage and 4,100 mAh battery of Z1 would be adequate to satisfy most of the users. The fingerprint scanner seems good though there were a few missed scans. The Z1 overall seems to be a very capable phone.

 It is not a flagship quality, but it is definitely no ship. The Z1 though, with a generic and somewhat swollen design of the handset does not seem right for all hands, its price at least would be suitable for several users.