Network Solutions Unlimited Blog

Being a green business is certainly not a bad thing. Not only does it help boost your company's environmental friendliness, but it can often attract customers and clients who prioritize the environment. Less mentioned, however, is how being greener can actually give your business an advantage in the right circumstances.

The concept of a four-day workweek has started to gain significant traction among businesses of all sizes. There's a subtle distinction between the traditional four-day workweek and the compressed workweek, however. Today, we will discuss the compressed workweek and what it means for employees.

Every business relies on technology for at least part of its operations. This means that every business—particularly those with operations that make IT an essential part of the process—will need access to some form of IT support.

For most small and medium-sized businesses today, managed IT is the best option. Let’s discuss a few reasons why this is.

While AI is far from perfect, I always love discovering ways that it can help do something mundane and speed up a workflow here or there. I’m no expert in Photoshop either, so if I need to edit something, I usually depend on someone with a little more experience, but this was a really neat trick I was able to do in just a few minutes!

Professional services make up a significant portion of the business landscape. They can be broadly defined as any organization with trained professionals at the center offering a service of note. The most common professionals under this umbrella term are lawyers, agents, consultants, and others who help businesses in their day-to-day operations. Let’s explore some of the technology that fuels professional service providers.

Any business can benefit from data and use it to improve its operations. This is especially the case where information technology is involved. By collecting the right metrics, you can better evaluate your business IT’s performance and identify areas for improvement.

Let’s review what some of these metrics should be.

With the blockchain growing more popular as a technology, we thought it would be good to discuss how it works and why you should be aware of it. The zeitgeist often portrays it as a nefarious tool used by cryptocurrency and scams, but at its core, it is far from this; in fact, the applications of such a decentralized and transparent technology make it ideal for certain tasks. Let’s explore them.

Love them or hate them, self-service checkout registers in brick-and-mortar stores are here to stay… especially considering that research has demonstrated that Gen Z has about twice the level of buy-in to the automated point-of-sale terminals as Gen X does, and that self-checkout is the predominant form of payment today. With this success, many have wondered how welcome biometric payment processing might be.

As it turns out, it would seem it isn’t.

While artificial intelligence is frequently hyped up to the point that it seems to be plucked from the realm of science fiction, its true applications are actually much more mundane. That being said, these applications are often the ones that show the most promise in terms of the value they have to offer society.

For instance, let’s consider the work that Google is doing through something called Project Green Light.

The IoT, or Internet of Things, is everywhere. There’s a relatively good chance that a device that would be part of the IoT is within your reach right now, perhaps even on your person. Businesses of all kinds use the IoT for various purposes as well, but behind this usage lies significant risk from cyberthreats, and a shocking number of businesses seem to accept this risk without much concern… as in, the vast majority of surveyed businesses utilizing the IoT demonstrated a lack of protection, but seemed not to be bothered by it.

Over the past several years, it has come to the attention of people in various industries that there is going to be a time, very soon, where the data that needs to be stored is going to outweigh our ability to store it. Microsoft, in a collaboration with the University of Southampton in England has taken aim at this very problem and has come up with some innovative solutions. 

Foldable phones undeniably saw a very slow start when they were introduced a few years ago, high prices and horror stories about their fragility scaring away all but the earliest of early adopters. However, thanks to an enthusiastic fanbase, the concept has persisted and has become a legitimate option amongst flagship devices. 

Let’s consider some of the predictions that have been made surrounding the future of the foldable smartphone market, and why business users might be drawn to the flexible form factor. 

It isn’t unusual for modern businesses to turn more and more often to “green” technologies, partially due to the reduced environmental impacts that come with their use, and partially due to the operational advantages that many of these technologies also bring. Let’s discuss some of the options that even smaller businesses can embrace that bring these kinds of mutual benefits.

Technology is one part of your business that you can use to improve your capacity for competing with larger organizations and enterprises, even if you are a small team working with local clients. Today, we want to discuss four crucial technologies that any small business needs in order to be as efficient, effective, and most of all, competitive, as possible.

AI is a major topic lately, whether it’s on the topic of new and upcoming chatbots that are capable of generating text or making art that can compete with even the most skilled of artists. AI is commonly targeted as a culprit in stealing jobs, as well, and with these applications becoming more sophisticated over time, it’s no wonder people aren’t sure how to react to these developments.

The blockchain is a technology that has really taken off in the past couple of years, with many people asking if the same technology behind cryptocurrencies can be applied to other uses and applications. Let’s consider how the blockchain might be used outside of cryptocurrency and in various industries—particularly for security—in the future.

Smartphones are, in a word, ubiquitous. With 86.29% of the global population owning a smartphone in 2023 (according to Statista), one would think—pretty justifiably—that the smartphone market is doing pretty well indeed. 

The opposite is actually true. Let’s take a quick look at the smartphone market and its decreases, as well as the lack of innovation that is largely blamed for this decline.

We frequently discuss how the solutions we offer can make business processes and procedures more effective, but in doing so, we’ve frequently overlooked how the implementation of these solutions—especially in terms of your digital transformation—have impacted your human resources.

If nothing else is certain, then you can bet that the need to improve circumstances or processes gives birth to innovations of all types. Technology has proven this time and again, as new solutions have emerged to solve previously unsolvable issues and challenges not only in the workplace, but in society as a whole. Let’s examine how economic difficulty has driven innovation, specifically in the technology sector.

When looking forward, it’s often useful to consider developing technologies to gauge what you might have access to in the future. Admittedly, a lot of these technologies can sound like a long shot at best (and ludicrous at their worst). However, some of these could very well transition into the business environment. Let’s consider a few out-there concepts that we might see gaining traction at some point in the future.