Coleman Technologies Blog

Artificial Intelligence
AI might be primitive in a lot of ways at the moment, but this doesn’t mean that it’s not growing in popularity. Machines can get smarter the way that humans do when they perform the same function several times, but unlike humans, machines don’t have various emotions to hold them back. Here are a few ways that a business can leverage AI to its advantage:

• Processing large amounts of data
• Personalizing customer experiences
• Operational automation
• Security
• Predicting demand
• And more

Businesses might have expensive operational issues that demand AI-integrated solutions to handle them, thus expanding the market and allowing for rapid adoption. Automation in particular is being adopted at an alarming rate, and this is driving the demand for artificial intelligence.

Blockchain
Blockchain has been making headlines in the news, fueled by the cryptocurrency fads that have utilized the technology. Blockchain creates a public ledger that is distributed rather than centralized, with each block storing all of the data that is relevant to a transaction. Once this data is captured, it can’t be altered without changing all data that has come afterward. This presents considerable data security benefits.

Some businesses hope to use this increased security to their benefit using a more distributed system. The more people who utilize the blockchain, the more we learn about it, meaning more tools are created to help organizations leverage the blockchain. Here are some of the ways that organizations can utilize the blockchain:

• Managing supply chains
• Identity management
• Recordkeeping & archiving
• Data security
• And more

Blockchain is so popular that even Oracle’s head of blockchain development claims that half of businesses will find a use for blockchain in the next three years.

5G
The past 40 years have shown that wireless technology has a lot of opportunity to improve. Wireless broadband will see an increase from the 4G used today to 5G. In fact, it could potentially change the world. Data speeds could reach as high as 1GB/second or higher, giving many businesses access to the following benefits:

• Faster speeds
• Reduced Latency
• Greater Capacity
• Improved Battery Life
• And more

Innovation will drive businesses to adopt faster technologies than ever before, and Qualcomm has found that 5G will become a “general purpose technology” in the near future, used so much that it will be akin to electricity or vehicles.

Virtual Reality
The consensus is that virtual reality is pretty neat, but not practical in the business environment. Unfortunately, this is far from the actual reality of the situation, as hardware and software advances have given organizations the means to use virtual reality in ways previously unheard of. VR is great for immersing users in virtual environments that can be used for practically any purpose, including training simulations, talent management, product design, and shared experience.

What are some other emerging technologies that you think will be helpful for businesses in the near future? Let us know in the comments.

Modern VR Systems

After nearly 30 years of development, VR has been adopted by a miniscule number of companies. It has, for the most part, made the biggest difference in the entertainment industry, where Samsung and Google have a lot of influence. Sony has also established itself as a major player in the VR gaming industry with its Playstation 4. In terms of business, however, these options aren’t necessarily feasible of beneficial.

Two of the most competitive options in the commercial virtual reality space are the HTC Vive (and Vive Pro) and the Oculus Rift. Oculus is owned by Facebook and has led in VR sales, while the HTC Vive and Vive Pro provides a platform for high-end computing systems that are capable of using VR. These two systems work together to provide high-end VR experiences, even if it’s mostly for gaming.

These VR options give users the ability to bring themselves into a virtual world, thus providing developers with great opportunities to build out software to capitalize on it. The applications built in VR give users the opportunity to explore the earth and space in a way that can immerse them in a simulated reality.

The Immediate Future of VR

The future of VR is leaning more in the direction of reality; unlike great journeys or expeditions to places like the moon or the bottom of the sea, VR will be used to create educational resources and training software.

Some manufacturers have already begun to anticipate this shift, using services like Microsoft’s Mixed Reality (MR) devices with hopes of business integration in 2020 a possibility. While not true virtual reality, this platform integrates virtual elements into reality, providing business professionals with great new options to achieve their goals. It’s safe to say that businesses will find some use for these virtual sandboxes to either improve performance or work out daring new ways to accomplish tasks.

What are your thoughts on VR? Let us know in the comments and be sure to subscribe to our blog.

3D Displays
Remember that craze with the 3D movies? Manufacturers have been trying to keep people excited about 3D technology for a long time, but it has met with little long-term success. Content creators simply can’t commit to a 3D capture or post production process. A significant lack of content, combined with consumers needing a silly pair of 3D glasses and the hardware required by the display, people just preferred to stick to what had been working in the past. High-definition displays can make 2D programming look astounding, and with such a small demand for 3D picture, the technology has been abandoned.

There have been talks about resurrecting the technology through what’s called Home3D. MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) has found a way to emulate the 3D experience without the embarrassing glasses, but without content made for 3D, you shouldn’t expect to see too much support for this technology anytime soon.

Smart Glasses
Smart glasses, like Google Glass, used to be a hot commodity, but they fell off everyone’s radar relatively quickly. While they initially were quite anticipated, there are very few smart glasses manufacturers left today. In 2012, Google Glass was being tested by several celebrities, but in today’s technology industry, there are maybe a handful of smart glasses manufacturers at the most. These companies still don’t have a clear idea of who would be the consumers for smart glasses, but they have learned that when it comes to this particular product, less is more.

One of the nails in the coffin for Google Glass was the invasion of privacy. While users might be able to come to terms with Google tracking what you say, buy, and do online, adding a camera to your glasses was simply too much for just about everyone. It was thought for a time that smart glasses could be a viable alternative to a smartphone, but the technologies behind the device simply haven’t been perfected to the point of proper implementation.

Virtual Reality
While virtual reality might be “available” today, people have been talking about it for upwards of 40 years. Other technologies being developed and discussed in the 1980s, like VHS and audio cassettes, have come and gone, but the idea of virtual reality lingers on. This is despite the fact that practical applications of VR are few and far between.

The primary use for virtual reality--gaming--has turned out to be a major failure so far. While there is some value in giving people the ability to share experiences online through VR, it hasn’t been a priority for developers, creating a similar situation to 3D technology. VR as a technology might not be completely dead in the water yet, but there isn’t much excitement out there for the technology--at least not to the point where it can be transformative (at this moment).

What are some of your favorite technologies that haven’t been as successful as you’d have liked them to be? Let us know in the comments.

Extension Restrictions
One of Chrome’s largest advantages over its competition has to be its library of add-on extensions. Unfortunately, any kind of functionality with these additional “programs” can lead to security concerns. Google has had to slow down the production of extensions to create new requirements for developers to adhere to. One example is how cryptocurrency continues to be a major talking point, prompting extensions to include cryptocurrency mining and cryptojacking in their features. Google is shutting down these supplemental programs, as well as generally holding developers to higher standards than they previously were. It now demands that developer accounts be protected by two-factor authentication, as well as paying closer attention to apps that require lots of permissions or host their code remotely.

Security Measures
Chrome 70 is also packing in all kinds of new security features to keep phishing attacks away from end users. In particular, Chrome is trying to push education of its native password management tools, as well as warn users when the links they are about to access aren’t secure. In essence, this simply states that websites need to be secured if they want visitors, reinforcing the fact that websites need to prioritize security these days.

Login Concerns
While some changes have been accepted with open arms, others… not so much. While Chrome has allowed users to use the browser without logging into the browser, some have noticed that Chrome appears to log a user in, even if they are only using one service out of the many provided. This is primarily an issue because Google could potentially share the user’s data (think browsing history), which is not something that users traditionally take lightly. In the time since then, Google has announced that Chrome isn’t necessarily logging users into Chrome--it’s more of an in-between measure to show a user which of their accounts is currently logged in.

As with any new solution, there will be roadblocks and concerns that users might be faced with during the experimentation phase. What kind of experiences have you had with Chrome 70 so far? Let us know in the comments.

Innovation
Before we tell you how innovation may hurt your business, we’ll talk a little bit about how it is absolutely essential. Business is, for most companies, a very human endeavor. Humans that do the same thing day-in and day-out, don’t take all that long to get proficient at it. This proficiency, if not tested can soon turn into complacency, but if it is tested too much, it can turn into productivity-sapping frustration. Innovation is the process of renewal. Taking something that has worked, and making it work even better.

A constant need for renewal fuels the technology industry. Take, for example, a legacy computing system. A business can still utilize it because it knows what to expect. It’s been using the applications and the software for quite a while. Since it creates no new problems, and the management of it is routine, it works for your business, until it begins to cause other problems.

How could it be then, that this kind of unquestionable efficiency is actually hurting your business?

Well, the answer is pretty standard. With solutions available that take less capital to maintain, are available on newer technologies, and enhance your workers’ ability to be collaborative/productive, the expectation would be that embracing new technology systems will actually cost the business less than maintaining and supporting a legacy system. The legacy system will eventually be untenable because it will be so expensive to maintain, or, it will lose effectiveness. Either reason suggests innovation is an inevitability.

Innovation Betrayal
We’ve already established how serious business owners (and other decisions makers) need to be innovative in their procurement and deployment of business-class solutions to get more out of their business investments. What happens when the innovations they choose do the opposite? What if everything they’ve been told by industry leaders, by mentors, and by their vendors turned out to be completely ineffective?

What if by innovating some of their IT, waste and inefficiency spiked? What if the end result of a dedication to accepting new hardware and other solutions is that capital, that could be spent elsewhere (or, to maintain systems that worked properly for some time), is completely wasted? How can you justify taking capital from a functioning system and leaving your staff with a shiny, new system that doesn’t deliver the same effective computing platform (or operational effectiveness) that their old system did?

We all know that supporting a legacy computing platform is not just costly, it is risky. With the thousands of threats out there just looking to feast on unprotected, network-attached systems, upgrading to more secure systems that don’t need as much diligent oversight should likely be a priority of every business.

How do you make these two concepts play nice? One way is to virtualize. In the past, legacy applications were a major problem for IT administrators, but nowadays, there are solutions that make legacy application virtualization not only possible, but efficient. That way, you’ll be able to maintain the use of your legacy applications, but host them on a public or private cloud platform. This presents any organization with several benefits that include:

• Better for continuity
• Cost reduction
• Improved security
• Easier software licensing
• Boosts in accessibility

It may seem ironic that, by using some of today’s most dynamic technologies, you won’t have to move off of your old software systems, but that is the case. To virtualize your data, your applications, and any other part of your business’ computing systems the IT professionals at Coleman Technologies can help. Our technicians can provide you with the information and resources you need to successfully move your locally-hosted applications to the cloud, whether you choose to host that locally or not.

Customer Relationships
Another way that businesses have improved the way they do business through innovation is by overhauling the way that they handle their customer relationships. If your business has found success by pressing the flesh and getting out and having face-to-face relationships with customers and prospects, you shouldn’t change that now. However, today there are solutions that can make those face-to-face relationships more valuable.

By integrating technology solutions designed to help you better manage your customer relationships, you can subsidize those face-to-face relationships with automated correspondence and other services designed to promote enhancement to your organization’s sales and support. One solution is called Customer Relationship Management (CRM).

A CRM integrates all facets of your business together with one piece of software, not only improving customer relations, but also streamlining processes for sales, productivity, and support. By having all the information your team needs in one simple-to-use solution, they can produce more, provide better support, and collaborate better than ever before.

Another technology that is working to improve customer relationships is social media. There are dozens of different social media sites for a business to consider, but depending on the industry your business services, you may be able to get away with minimizing your social media presence and still have it work to enhance your relationships with customers and prospects. The major social networks like Facebook and Twitter can be of great benefit for businesses to promote their brand and interact with customers.

At Coleman Technologies, we help businesses just like yours do more with the use of technology. Our managed IT services work to proactively manage your business’ IT to ensure that you are experiencing the technology in the way it is designed to be experienced; and, that your company gets the most out of it. For more information about how Coleman Technologies can help you improve your business, call us today at (604) 513-9428.