Your network security solution was supposed to help you solve your cybersecurity problems. Instead, it’s generating more logs and alerts than your team can possibly review.
If you’re a small company with a small IT team, security log overload won’t help you defend your network. You need a tool that can find the most important information within those piles of data.
Updating software is a pain. It’s supposed to automatically update, but it usually doesn’t. Meanwhile, your computer or network probably is vulnerable to the latest Internet virus. Then there are the updates you don’t want because you’re working, and you don’t have time to stop and restart your computer.
Things can be even worse when you’re dealing with video conferencing software. Does everyone on the call have the latest update? Probably not. This can cause real problems. Who cares about a pretty new graphic interface, when the video feed goes black on three screens right before a presentation? All because one software update suddenly made Skype incompatible with OS X.
If only there was a way to bridge all the different software programs on local computers or networks regardless of version to a single video conferencing solution. Then you wouldn’t have to call your local IT guy who’s afraid of Macs or always wants to trouble shoot over the phone. You know, the guy who can’t get the Flash plugin to work right in Firefox?
Annual report: Chances are the words themselves conjure up images of glossy pages filled with charts, graphs, and huge amounts of text that may or may not be relevant to your interests. If you’re like most people, you might skim the typical annual report, looking for the highlights and ignoring the rest.
This has become even more prevalent now that the majority of companies — more than 90 percent — have shifted to online annual reports rather than printed copies. Most electronic reports are searchable, meaning that its easier than ever before to find just the information that you need or want. And while some companies still believe “electronic” annual report is synonymous with “PDF version of printed document,” most are taking advantage of the online medium and creating reports that are more interesting than the typical static report.
Still, while many companies have adopted the use of infographics and cleaner design, and maybe even added some multimedia elements, very few annual reports can be considered truly interactive. However, to stand out, you need to include more interactivity.
Annual reports should be interactive for several important reasons:
While some companies have actually gone as far as to design dedicated applications to make their annual reports more accessible and interactive (check out Windward for more information on reporting software that makes the integration of data and interactive reporting seamless), you don’t always need to go to such lengths. Even including just a few interactive elements can take your report from “Blah” to “Wow!”
First, determine which elements of the report can be interactive. Charts and graphs are a good place to start; consider making it possible for users to isolate certain data, or click links or pop-outs to learn information that is more detailed. Videos or flash animation are ideal for sharing milestones. In fact, videos are a hot marketing tool these days, and incorporating videos into your annual report can actually help build and support your brand.
Other places you might consider including interactive elements are infographics, where you share key data or milestones. Even just organizing your report so that information is arranged under clear headings, so that the specific information is revealed only when it is clicked, can help maintain a clean design while still giving readers all of the information that they need and want.
The important thing to remember about interactive annual reports is that regardless of the bells and whistles you choose to incorporate, you cannot forget that the data and information are the most important elements. When planning your report, consider what you must include, and what is the most compelling information for your audience. Don’t try to include everything, or overwhelm your readers with every cool trick you can think of. As some of the best annual reports of the last few years show, a simple, creative design that looks beyond the numbers will spur better results than even the flashiest report.
Not everybody is versatile enough to accept the touch screen revolution that easily as there are people of old school who love their QWERTY keyboards and the Sony Ericsson Xperia Pro has managed to harp on the right strings.
The Android smart phone, first launched in Canada the Xperia Pro is creating waves already.
A sliding out QWERTY keyboard is a revolution from the gaming keyboard that ruled the Xperia line and this is one of the main features that shifts the Xperia Pro from its usual Xperia line and puts it in the Android phone category.
In the heart of the phone are some very amazing features. A Qualcomm MSM8225 Snapdragon 1GHz processor adds glamour to the 1GB of internal memory.
A 3.7 inch 480 x 854 pixel LED backlit LCD touch screen gives the users a comfortable view.
Loaded with 512 MB of RAM, an 8 MP camera, a front facing VGA video call camera, the Android 2.3 Gingerbread, accelerometer, Sony Mobile BRAVIA engine, and a micro SD expansion, the Xperia Pro is a darling.
This smart phone also has its usual dose of smoldering Stereo FM, 802.11 b/g/n Wi – Fi, HADSPA 7.2 along with HSUPA 5.8, a Bluetooth 2.1 with A2DP and GPS.
The Xperia Pro has a glossy and smooth outer cover and three typical Xperia line buttons at the bottom of its robust keyboard.
Increased performance over earlier Xperia smart phones and with not a vey compact size, the Xperia Pro is a phone much smaller than the larger Android ‘super phones’ in the market.
The Sony Mobile BRAVIA Engine that compliments the Xperia Pro’s LED backlit LCD helps to boost up the graphics by a fair amount and makes gaming and videos a memorable experience.
The QWERTY keyboard has its keys well spaced, offers a soft surface, are slightly domed, decently spaced and makes typing really enjoyable.
The user interface (UI) is slightly different from the stock Android, in which the application tray unlike being an infinite scrolling list is arranged in pages.
The Speedtest Mobile application, on Fido network revealed the ping as being anywhere between 107 ms to 128 ms and downloading speeds reaching the theoretical 7.2 Mbps cap on the HSDPA ( ranging between 5881 kbps to 6891 kbps) while the uploading speed of the Xperia Pro ranges from 1089 kbps to 1193 kbps.
The Sony Ericsson Xperia Pro is one smart phone that is filled to the brim with appreciable applications that make using a phone a lovely experience but it still lacks that wow factor.
Holding the phone in one’s hand one might not love it but likeness is guaranteed.
The Sony Ericsson Xperia Pro though fizzles out in the competition with other Android smart phones; it manages to stay decently close with its comfortable keyboard and good camera.With the dated 1 GHz processor running in its core, this August release phone sure can get the work done.
What is intriguing about this phone is that, it offers all the Android features at a reasonable price; and the phone is definitely worth its money.
It’s easy to assume that adults are the only people affected by data breaches. After all, these breaches typically expose credit card information, social security numbers, and other details used for identity theft. Anyone under 18 does not seem like a valuable target.
In reality, however, children are specifically targeted by hackers. A report published by Javelin Strategy & Research showed that over a million children had their identity stolen in 2017. That resulted in $2.6 billion in total losses, with families shouldering $540 million of that cost directly.
So why would hackers go after youths? It’s because their social security is still valuable even if they are underage. Once hackers have the number they can use it to establish lines of credit. And it’s actually easier to use a minor’s social security number since they have little to no established credit history. Essentially, their identity is a blank slate, making it ripe for manipulation and deception.
Sadly, no kid is too young to be a target. The same study showed that 66 percent of the kids with stolen identities are under 8 years old. Hackers have a complete disregard for a child’s age and no compunction about targeting the youngest kids.
To a certain extent it’s their age that makes these kids vulnerable. Kids spend as much time online as adults but are less aware about cybersecurity. As a result, they often fall prey to attacks and schemes that adults would avoid. Kid’s data is easier to compromise simply because of their relative inexperience.
The frequency of cyber security news articles reporting on kids is rising. Parents must take the lead to keep their kids and their kid’s identities safe online. Here are some tips:
Parents are responsible for protecting kids in the real world, and the responsibility extends to the online world. There are lots of threats to watch out for, but data thieves should be at the top of the list.
Technology disruption does not necessarily have to be negative. It is not an attack on business but rather a force that causes affected enterprises to rethink their operating strategies to remain in business. Those who choose to ignore the inevitable are swept into the abyss of irrelevance and end up folding up and shutting down.
Those quick to notice the disruption early enough embrace it and make it work for them, realizing benefits and advantages hitherto hidden. The disturbance may even cause their businesses to grow more significantly than they were before.
The emergence of rapidly evolving digital technologies has a profound effect on business models, and many businesses are cashing in on this transformation. A shift in the way of doing business, propelled by innovative technology and revolutionary business practices, is spawning new products and services.
Digital products are appearing in the market in quick succession, disrupting existing markets and forcing entrepreneurs to re-evaluate their business models.
A good example is how Uber revolutionized the taxi industry in a relatively short time. Uber accomplished this by integrating technology with convenience, offering customers more comfortable payment modes and strategic pricing that enhanced business for the taxi driver. Uber’s global market share is a staggering 62 million trips per month as of July 2016. It operates in over 450 cities in the world.
Trying to fight the technology disruption force is futile, and many taxi drivers in many countries, who wanted to fight it, were rapidly swept out of the market. In contrast, those who embraced the new technology thrived. The taxi industry has seen the rise of numerous other cab-hailing services using the Uber-style business model.
Keenly studying market trends and keeping in touch with emerging technological advances can help your business remain relevant as you will be able to notice the signs of impending technology disruption. This knowledge will allow you to insulate yourself against any damage it may do to your business. You may change your marketing strategy, cut costs or review your operating systems to suit the new reality when it strikes.
By embracing change and flowing with it instead of against it may open up new opportunities that can lead to greater success and growth of your business.
Consumer needs are changing with the times, realizing new opportunities for you. Brands are updated and relaunched now and then to suit customer needs, and to keep yourself a step ahead of your customers ensures your brand remains relevant, locking down your existing customers and roping in new customers along the way.
Here are a few steps your business can take to survive technology disruption:
Once you notice the signs of technology disruption, do not act rashly or impulsively to try and mitigate it. Spare some time to plan your company’s future in the market by evaluating your priorities. As you reshape your business model, dump what may be bogging down your company and seek new opportunities.
By employing modern technology in the way you do business may be a bit expensive initially, but your savings in terms of operating costs may be astronomical. You may consider automating a product assembly line to increase output and bring down personnel costs.
Meeting customers on a personal level will boost customer confidence and inspire loyalty to your business or brand. Some businesses are investing in closer customer contact and reaping big. Sending company representatives to customer’s homes to see how they live or find out how they use the company’s products makes the customer feel valued and appreciated.
Your business should consider offering incentives to existing and new customers. Such incentives could include slashed prices, discounts and product coupons to endear you to customers looking for fair deals. This tactic drives demand, and with careful planning can keep you a step ahead of the competition.
You may have recognized and survived a technology disruption without much loss, but this should not lull you into resting on your laurels. Digital innovation marches stolidly on, with new products and services cropping up every day. Staying in tune with technological developments will ensure that you notice an impending disruption before it hits, adequately preparing you to deal with it effectively.
Businesses should not fear to acquire the services of experts due to cost. Companies looking to cash in on digital advances are more and more looking to update their business systems with the help of consultants or experts in the digital field. A consultation with the professionals at Wavestone US would be a worthwhile investment.
All in all, businesses should always be vigilant to recognize signs of coming technology disruptions by closely following and analyzing business trends.
Running a startup is not easy, and as a founder there will undoubtedly be tons of things that you need to focus on. One of the most important however is definitely project management, as it will play a huge role in determining the success or failure of your endeavor.
The good news is that although project management may seem complicated, you can get a lot done as long as you know the basics. To be more specific there are three pieces of excellent advice for startup project management that you need to know.
Did you know that there are lots of project management methodologies out there? One of the first things you should do is decide which one you want to implement in your startup, as it will help provide some structure.
It should be noted that there is no methodology that is ‘best’. Instead, it is up to you to find one that fits your startup based on the size of your team, complexity of the projects, expected growth, and other relevant factors.
Some of the more popular types of project management styles are:
If you want to manage projects effectively, you first need to have a solid project plan. The plan you come up with must include:
By carefully planning out your project, you’ll find that it is far easier to manage – regardless of the system you choose.
Moving to a project management system for the first time can be intimidating – but it’ll be much easier if you go about it step-by-step.
The first few steps are relatively straightforward. All you need to do is take an inventory of the tasks that are on your teams to-do list, organize them by project, and then map out a workflow.
Next you should look into finding a project management tool that will help you to manage the system more effectively. It will also be a good idea to try an employee monitoring tool such as WorkExaminer that will let you keep track of what your team members are working on.
If you do use WorkExaminer, you’ll be able to see what apps are being used, websites visited, or even use employee screenshot monitoring. It is an important tool to track how your employees spend their time, identify distractions or bottlenecks, and improve productivity.
The data in WorkExaminer’s reports can help you to review exactly how effective your project management system is, and make improvements accordingly. It’ll also be a source of objective and unbiased data that you can use to reward or talk to employees based on their productivity.
Just remember that WorkExaminer does have different versions, so you should compare pro versions.
With the right tools in place, the final step is to brief your employees on the new system. Explain clearly how things will be done, and let them know the reason why the system is being implemented.
At the same time you should also introduce them to the new tools, and in the case of WorkExaminer explain how it will be deployed.
By following these three pieces of advice, you should be able to manage your startup’s projects far more effectively. It may take a bit of time to familiarize yourself with the new system (and tools), but before you know it things will be running smoothly.
In fact as time goes by you may want to improve upon your system further. The data from WorkExaminer and the project management tools you use can help pinpoint issues in your system so that you can work on them.
Make no mistake there’s no such thing as a ‘perfect’ system, but your goal should be to find a project management style that is the best fit for your startup – even if it is a hybridization of several other styles.
Today, one of the most promising and rapidly growing segments of the crypto industry is DeFi, or decentralized finance. They are becoming the most affordable alternative to most financial services that people use regularly: lending, insurance, escrow, investment and risk management.
The development of decentralized finance leads to the destruction of the traditional model of the financial system, to which everyone is accustomed, despite the shortcomings. But now financial processes can work more efficiently due to automation using smart contracts. Intermediaries are no longer needed, scammers are not afraid – transactions are transparent, verified and carried out independently.
This is the next step in the financial technology revolution that began 12 years ago with the advent of Bitcoin and blockchain.
Decentralized finance has been gaining attention since the market crash in March 2020, but few understand the essence of the phenomenon. At first, it was a common name for analogs of traditional financial instruments that are implemented in a decentralized architecture. They have now grown into a public ecosystem of decentralized services and applications based on public blockchains, predominantly on Ethereum.
The goal of decentralized finance is to create a financial system that is open to everyone and does not require user trust, and to promote the principle of self-sufficiency. This aspect seems like a disadvantage to conservatives, but it teaches us to take responsibility for DeFi investments.
At first glance, decentralized finance appears to be similar to financial technology (FinTech), which is also aimed at modernizing financial services. However, they differ in that FinTech simply relies on traditional financial infrastructure, while decentralized finance already includes new components.
Since decentralized finance is an affordable alternative to many traditional financial services, anyone with the Internet and little knowledge of cryptocurrencies can interact with the DeFi ecosystem and manage the assets added there. To this end, blockchain developers have created hundreds of new DeFi projects with their own protocols, peer-to-peer networks, decentralized applications (dApps) and services.
The first widespread use of DeFi was in stablecoin projects. This is a cryptocurrency, the rate of which is tied to the price of the underlying financial instrument (fiat currency, exchange commodity, raw materials). Accordingly, all issued stablecoin units are backed by a reserve located in a reliable storage. The value of dollar-pegged stablecoins is provided by the issuer itself, and their purchase and sale is associated with AML / KYC procedures.
There is also another type of crypto projects, among which a striking example is MakerDAO – a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) and a protocol on Ethereum. It has both the native DAI stablecoin and the ability for everyone to issue their own stablecoins via the DeFi protocol. Their emission can be compared to the emission of money backed by gold, only here ether is used instead of gold. The user sends a certain amount of ETH or approved ERC-20 tokens to a smart contract that creates a new stablecoin. This is called “collateralized debt positions,” meaning the DeFi tokens generated represent a collateralized debt to MakerDAO.
Thanks to DeFi, decentralized exchanges (DEX) have returned in popularity in 2021. They operate on the blockchain and do not store cryptocurrency and user data on their servers. That is, these cryptocurrency exchanges act exclusively as a platform that connects buy and sell orders. This trading model allows you to do without passing KYC and does not depend on a narrow circle of large traders.
Peer-to-peer prediction markets have firmly occupied their niche – these are platforms that allow you to place bets on various events, events, elections, and more. There is a parallel here with the usual bets, for example, on sports, so the principle of operation does not need a detailed explanation.
In addition to stablecoins, DeFi exchanges and prediction markets, there are at least 8 other areas that are included in decentralized finance:
In 2021, DeFi projects grab attention in much the same way as ICOs in 2017 and IEOs in 2019. But why is there a stir around them? What are the prospects and benefits of DeFi in general?
DeFi allows people who were previously unable to use financial services to participate in the global economy. In the world, about 1.5 billion people do not have access to banking services, that is, they do not have a bank account, or a debit or credit card. There are many reasons for this injustice, but the main one is that many people who are not covered by banking services do not have all the documents that financial institutions usually ask for. Also, in certain countries, it is difficult to collect the required credit points. And somewhere there are no bank branches outside the capital at all.
One of the main benefits of DeFi is true decentralization. The very fact of managing a crypto project using smart contracts by all participants, and not by managers, means a lot.
In addition to maintaining a stable value for money, the use of decentralized finance allows you to passively earn on the available cryptocurrency. There are many options: savings accounts with high interest rates, asset allocation, and more.
At DeFi, only you have control over your assets. With decentralized services and organizations like MakerDAO, you are in control of your finances around the clock. No official can suddenly ban you from the dApp, freeze your account or withdraw your funds.
In DeFi, all information is open and available for review, it allows you to choose safe projects and services while sitting at home. In real life, if you need a loan, you have to go to lenders, compare interest rates to make sure the information is true and there are no hidden fees. This is not the case with DeFi – all the information you need to know about lending protocols like Compound is easily accessible and transparent.
DeFi offers businesses the following benefits:
Do you need to develop a DeFi solution? Boosty Labs (https://boostylabs.com/blockchain/defi) will create a solution of any complexity for you – from stablecoin to DeFi application or DeFi platform.
Digital currency is electronic money (or coins) that does not have a centralized emission center and paper equivalent, so it does not depend on the decisions of government and regulatory bodies. Each unit of such money has its own digital code, reliably protected using cryptographic algorithms.
The main features of digital coins include the following:
To create a cryptocurrency, it is necessary to clearly understand all the features of its development and further functioning, otherwise efforts, time and money will be wasted.
Basically, any digital currency is created in order to make a profit in the end. Therefore, before making your own cryptocurrency, you need to carefully weigh the pros and cons.
Most often, a person is prompted to launch his crypt for the following reasons:
In addition, it is desirable that the new coin carry some improvements in relation to other currencies or, which is not so often, be based on a fundamentally new platform offering a unique product. Considering the duration of all processes (the development of a unique code itself takes at least a year, plus the time to promote the project), it is necessary to foresee the development of the interests of potential users.
Many people want to repeat the success of Bitcoin, while not putting in the appropriate effort. People most often confuse the cause and effect of the success of projects, since they believe that you just need to issue a cryptocurrency, and then it will find its users, appear on exchanges, and its rate will skyrocket. However, in order to create your own cryptocurrency, the following steps are necessary:
It is almost impossible to carry out all processes independently. As a rule, a team of professionals is recruited, you have to pay for this. At the same time, it is desirable that the attracted specialists not only work for money, but be like-minded people who share the project ideas. They don’t have to be just performers. It is desirable that these were ideological people, theoretically and technically savvy.