Wink and Shoot

If this technology is going to go big, I better brush up on my winking skills. Google also asserts that the winking technology could be used for many other purposes. The wearable technology market is expected to grow from $1.4 billion this year to somewhere between $19 billion and $50 billion in 2018, according to Juniper Research and analysts at Credit Suisse. I think that the whole winking technology is still a bit far away and Google has some serious issues to fix. GPS and internet phones should stay in the media that they are in because it would be a distraction to have your glasses do all of that. What are your thoughts on the Google glass and winking instead of pressing a button? Or are we just creating a problem for this supposed solution?

Saving the World

Mark Zuckerberg, as part of a consortium that created Internet.org, believes that getting everyone in the world online is the only solution. Many question the true altruism of the idea, pointing out that he and his partners will derive great current and future monetary benefit from such a single-minded solution. But so what if they save the world, that's a small price... no? The concept behind getting everyone online is that there will be more links between research scientists and their data in ways that were never before possible, to drive collaboration and, ultimately, success in solving disease and other world problems. There needs to be more focus on basic human needs before there is the internet and software development for everyone because being online will not solve child survival or nutrition. Zuckerberg needs to go to some of the third world countries to get some perspective.

Limiting Screen Time

We live in a digital world, there is no denying it and our kids are growing up without knowing what it is like without technology right at their finger tips. Even our pets have apps designed especially for them. Although, I think that whole idea is rather questionable. Parents need to limit kids’ screen time to only two hours a day, according to a new policy released by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP). The new report says that more kids are tweeting, texting, surfing the Internet, and keeping laptops in their bedrooms, and that usage is linked to behavior like cyberbullying. This idea is pretty much like saying that violent games cause violent behavior in adolescents. The limiting should include video chatting and sending pictures and for setting boundaries for media usage. Personally I do not think that the boundaries would work that well if the parents themselves are spending countless hours online or on their phones. The same goes for texting while driving. There needs to be an example that is there in the first place.

VoIP Planning

When implementing Voice over IP (VoIP), technical teams often overlook key elements. Without proper planning, these issues will come back to bite you. Here are three things to include in your plans to ensure a successful deployment. Make sure that there is a 911 emergency services location reporting. With VoIP, phones usually talk to centralized servers in the network and calls are often routed out of gateways not local to the site. This wreaks havoc on accurate 911 location reporting, so you must plan accordingly. Another important fact to consider is the compatibility with the current infrastructure that exists within the business. Sometimes the integrations are obvious, such as a voice mail server or an IVR that distributes calls from the main line. Some are less so, such as a paging system in a warehouse, a call accounting software package that only finance uses, or an automatic dialer that makes reminder calls to customers. Lastly, make sure that you are willing to take the time and money to train the users on these phone systems if they are not family with it.

Space and Pyschology

How do you sit when you are having a phone conference? Did you know that your posture says a lot about how you feel about your self and how confident you are? And that understanding could be useful for furniture and office space designers, say researchers who documented the relationship between the space that people take up and the sense of strength they feel. They even exposed how potentially corrupting such expansive “power poses” — and the ensuing sense of confidence and self-importance they can trigger — can be, leading to dishonest behavior. Posture might even help for those all-important job interviews. A recent study found, for example, that practicing expansive, striking poses before high-stakes settings like interviewing for a job or giving a presentation can improve a person’s performance — while huddling over a desk or hunching over a smartphone may inhibit innovative and confident thinking and increase anxious reactions.

Quiet

Does it ever seem like when you are trying to concentrate on writing that internet fax, no matter how much willpower you have, different noises will demand your attention? We jerk to the tug of noise like sonic marionettes. There’s good reason for this. Among mammals, hearing developed as an early warning system. There has been a transformation in our relationship to the environment over the millions of years since the prototype for human hearing evolved, but part of our brain hasn’t registered the makeover. We are still sensitive to the noises even if it looks like we are able to stop paying attention to them and it wrecks havoc on our bodies including the cardiovascular system. Of course it is not always possible to completely put ourselves in a cocoon but it would be nice to be able to hear ourselves think.

Dumb Phones

When was the last time you had the so called dumb phone? This is the phone that did not have any mobile applications or internet access with internet phones services. Not to mention all those games that you can play and waste plenty of time with. Technology is not going anywhere and, in my quest to downsize my life and be productive, I don’t want to be tethered to the internet wherever I go. I’ll still take a phone with me when I go out to eat or for a drive and you’ll still be able to call me or text me but if you email me or tweet me and expect a response, you’ll get that response whenever I next use my desktop or other supported device. I want to return to the living. This is not about discipline and not using certain applications. This is about not needing social networking or cloud applications 24/7. I want to return to the joys of listening to music without the need to hold up a sound app to identify the song.

Prison Phone Rates

The FCC has decided to decrease the phone service rates in prisons. Some of the rates can exceed upwards of $1 per minute. The prisons say that the reason for the high costs is that they have to closely monitor and save and track every communication that is done by an inmate, which requires advanced systems. It will take about 120 days for the new rates to take affect. The commissioners voted to impose a cap of 25 cents a minute for a collect call, and 21 cents a minute for a debit or prepaid call. That is less than one-fourth the current rate in some locations. One of the other solutions that prisons should consider is IP telephony which would also lower costs and have more people making calls to their family which might be long distance. What do you think about the current prices for inmates?

Phubbing

How many times have you sat at dinner with someone and you were just itching to check you phone to see if you got an email or a voicemail? And what are the chances that you actually tried to check it without the other person noticing? I thought so. Phubbing: snubbing someone by paying attention to your phone instead of them in a social setting. And there’s an awareness campaign begging us all to stop it. With so many people now owning cell phones, more people are likely to just disregard the person right next to them and pay attention to their phones as if they are going to miss some major announcement. What happened to people talking to each other when they go out together? In a second experiment, the researchers showed that discussing personally meaningful topics in the vicinity of a phone is particularly hazardous for relationships—likely because opening up makes us feel more vulnerable and therefore more threatened by the prospect of a listener being distracted.

Paper vs Digital Trails

It is now easier than ever to be able to follow someone's trail. No matter what you do online, there will always be a trail that can be followed. This means that your personal information can potentially be in danger. VoIP is the new incomer on the list. Gone are the days when in order to hack into people's conversations, you would have to set up physical bugs on the phones. Now you can do everything remotely; you do not even have to be in the same country. Something else that seems to be long gone is standard method of payment - cash. According to Business Insider, credit card companies are selling your purchase data to advertisers. Don’t want companies knowing how much booze you’re buying or other potentially embarrassing habits? Buy things the old fashioned way—with coins and bills. Lastly, often stores will ask for your zip code when you’re checking out with a credit card. Don’t give it to them unless you want to donate your details to their marketing database. Just some things to mull over while you are surfing the digital expanse.

VoIP Security

VoIP security tends to be lax or even non-existent compared to the measures routinely taken to protect other forms of data, such as records and emails. This is largely due to reasons already discussed along some important misconceptions.Security breaches along these lines could certainly be driven by monetary motives such as diverting customer payments, hacking into business bank accounts or even those of employees. Financial theft is really just one of three main types of security risks that can be exploited through your data network. Another type of hacking would be gaining access to other forms of data that competitors could use to undermine your business. One example would be gaining advance knowledge of your plans, such as a product launch, a patent filing, an acquisition, a plant closure, etc. Another would be stealing customer databases for purposes of poaching key accounts or spreading disinformation to drive your customers away. Unfortunately, there are plenty of companies that will not think twice about doing these things to either get ahead or not let new competitors into the market.

Health Sensors

Technology is constantly improving and even used for health tracking. We have come from the pedometer which can tell you about how many steps you have walked to amazing mobile application development that has rolled out with apps that can push, encourage and sometimes even shame you into putting down the milkshake, getting out of the beanbag chair and meeting a fitness goal. Wearable sensors have become smaller, cheaper and more powerful in the past few years. More recently, low-energy Wi-Fi and Bluetooth synching capabilities have made syncing to smartphones, cracking open a world of product possibilities. Digital health monitoring has become a booming field and the use application can range from kids to seniors and the chronically ill. The fitness applications are also growing in numbers and continue to help people keep track of their weight and keep their resolutions that they made ten days ago.

Software Developing Companies Helping Small Businesses

Instead of merely maintaining technology, IT service providers are increasingly being asked to become technology drivers and bring innovation and new product ideas to their clients. When it comes down to it, a successful insourcing partner impacts all areas where technology touches the organization, as well as providing standard IT support and maintenance that allows companies to maintain core efficiencies. With the expansion of cloud services and internet phone, it is even more important for companies to be aware of the security issues that they will be facing. They need to be able to stay ahead of the game and the hackers if they want to maintain their sensitive information secure. A unified communications strategy allows information to flow seamlessly through an organization by using tools such as voice over Internet protocol (VoIP), video conferencing, mobility solutions such as iPhone, iPad and tablet integration, and call center functionality such as call recording and reporting.

Latency Problems

VoIP service delay or latency is characterized as the amount of time it takes for speech to exit the speaker’s mouth and reach the listener’s ear. Latency sounds like an echo. There are 3 types of delay commonly found in today’s VoIP networks:

1. Propagation Delay: Light travels through a vacuum at a speed of 186,000 miles per second, and electrons travel through copper or fiber at approximately 125, 000 miles per second. A fiber network stretching halfway around the world (13,000 miles) induces a one-way delay of about 70 milliseconds (70 ms). Although this delay is almost imperceptible to the human ear, propagation delays in conjunction with handling delays can cause noticeable speech degradation.
2. Handling Delay: Devices that forward the frame through the network cause handling delay. Handling delays can impact traditional phone networks, but these delays are a larger issue in packetized environments.
3. Queuing Delay: When packets are held in a queue because of congestion on an outbound interface, the result is queuing delay. Queuing delay occurs when more packets are sent out than the interface can handle at a given interval.

The solution to this VoIP service problem would be to prioritize. Prioritizing VoIP traffic over the network yields latency and jitter improvements. Policy based network management, bandwidth reservation, Type of Service, Class of Service, and Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) are all widely used techniques for prioritizing VoIP traffic. A quality VoIP router can solve many of these issues and will result in business quality VoIP service.

Chosing a VoIP Provider

So you have decided to open your own business and now need to consider your communication solution and what provider you would go with. One of the main things that you need to know is your business's needs so that the phone service provider will be able to work with your business and make it more efficient and productive. When you are defining what your requirement are, you need to ask yourself a couple questions. Will your VoIP system be mainly for personal use, or for your business? How many people are going to be using it? Also be sure to increase your knowledge of VoIP trends and issues by reading articles and blogs and joining forums. Look at user reviews. Gather as much information as possible before making your decision. Does the VoIP Service provider give you an option for providing uninterrupted service? If so, find out what is the additional cost. This may be an important qualification in your search for a VoIP provider. Lastly, check in with friends and colleagues.

Unified Communication

VoIP services are pretty much the best solution to unified communications because it enables people to connect with each other anywhere and anytime. The cloud is another large player that will come on the field because it will let businesses move away from the regular on site PBX. The IP telephony is the best investment that a small business can make because it is a scalable solution that constantly brings new things and fit the business needs perfectly. One of the new developments is text messaging that is coming to internet phones in 2013. Americans 18-29 average nearly 88 text messages per day, compared to only 17 phone calls - the way we communicate, the way we do business is changing. According to a Pew Institute survey, the number of text messages sent monthly in the U.S. grew from 14 billion in 2000 to 188 billion in 2010. A 2012 study by independent telecommunications analyst Chetan Sharma indicates that U.S. cell phone customers send an average of about 675 messages per month, and now, a growing number of business workers are texting for work on their personal phones. This means that there is a larger field for mobile application development for businesses. AB Soft will have all the answers to business applications and VoIP systems that you seek.