Coleman Technologies Blog

Sure - if you want to limit how you can leverage it to your business’ advantage. Here, we’ve assembled a few features that you can use to make YouTube a better resource for your business.

First Up: YouTube’s Keyboard Shortcuts

Whether you’re using YouTube as a research tool or presenting your findings in a meeting, effectively using its built-in shortcuts can make your use of the website much more productive (and, let’s face it, more impressive).

If you’re doing research, jumping back to the beginning of a video will be super handy - and is possible, by pressing the 0 (zero) key. You can also use your arrow keys to fast forward or rewind the video in five-second increments (or ten-second increments, if you hold the Ctrl key at the same time).

If you’re using YouTube as a part of a presentation, you can quickly pause and resume the video by pressing either the spacebar, or the K key. If your audience can’t quite hear what you’re presenting, you can adjust the volume using the up and down arrow keys. The M key will mute the video, and unmute it when you’re ready to hear the video again.

Starting From a Specific Point in the Video

Speaking of using YouTube as a part of your presentation, you may not always want a video to start from the very beginning. YouTube gives you a few options to do so - the easiest being grabbing the altered link to your desired time directly from YouTube.

Let’s look at this video about phishing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfnA7UmlZkE

There’s a lot of information in this video. What if you want to focus on one specific aspect, like how phishing can be spotted? This video doesn’t dive into this aspect until just about the one-minute mark. YouTube offers a function that eliminates the need of fast-forwarding to this point. Under the Share option, the menu that appears offers a Start at option. You can select the precise time that you want your video to start. The link that appears will begin your video at the moment you have selected (unless a pesky ad gets in the way):

https://youtu.be/jfnA7UmlZkE?t=63

Search Filters to Improve Your Results

If you’re having trouble finding the right content on YouTube, there are filters that you can whittle down your results by - making it more likely that you will find more videos that fit what you are looking for. You can seek out videos that were uploaded during a specific time frame, that fall within a certain duration, and seek out specific channels, playlists, and other media types - among other filters.

YouTube can be one of the greatest resources available today... as long as you can find and share the information you need. For more ways that technology can improve your business and its processes, subscribe to our blog!

The GDPR (In a Nutshell)

Under the GDPR - which came into effect on May 25, 2018 - any companies that have collected data on a resident of the European Union are then responsible for protecting that data. Furthermore, the GDPR grants these residents a far higher level of access and control over the data that organizations possess.

How United States Citizens Have Reacted

According to a poll, data privacy has become a bigger priority for 73 percent of respondents, 64 percent stating that they felt the security of their data was worse than it has been in the past. 80 percent want the ability to learn who has purchased their data, while 83 percent want the ability to veto an organization’s ability to sell their data in the first place. 64 percent also stated that they want the ability to have this data deleted.

How the Government Has Reacted

Governing bodies at different levels have had different reactions to these demands. For instance, the state of California has already passed the Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) - a piece of legislation that the House of Representatives' Consumer Protection and Commerce Subcommittee isn’t too fond of, as its position is that there needs to be a singular piece of legislation at the federal level to protect data. As of right now, data privacy is addressed in a combination of state laws and some proposed federal laws.

One of these proposed laws, the Data Care Act, spells out that (in addition to promptly alerting end users to security breaches) a service provider cannot legally share a user’s data without the receiving party also being beholden to the same confidentiality standards. Others include the Information Transparency and Personal Data Control Act, which requires transparency and personal control over data, the Consumer Data Protection Act, which could throw executives in prison for abusing data, and the American Data Dissemination Act, which sets a deadline for the government to enact privacy requirements upon businesses.

However, when the Consumer Protection and Commerce subcommittee met to discuss the prospect of a federal privacy law (which it was agreed was necessary), there weren’t any representatives for the average consumer - the ones whose data is really at stake. This reflects the hearings held last year by the Senate, also without consumer representation. Instead, technology companies were invited to participate during both sessions.

Small Business Concerns

That being said, there is very little support among the committee for any regulations that are at all similar to the GDPR. One reason for this: the fear that small businesses will not find themselves able to afford the added cost of compliance.

For instance, there are a variety of potential burdens that such a measure could potentially impose upon small and medium-sized businesses. These burdens include:

• All-encompassing overhauls that would result in lost business
• Business failure due to inadequate budgets to make the demanded changes
• Impeded growth after regulations are put in place
• Prerequisites becoming too great to start a business in the first place
• Costs passed down to SMBs from larger companies for technology services

It is worth noting that if your organization does business with people from the EU, you are responsible to adopt the privacy rules of the GDPR.

What do you think? Are laws like these necessary, especially given the cost they could put on small businesses? Have you had any data privacy concerns in the past? Share your thoughts in the comments.

To begin, we have to say that anyone that is talking about 5G as a selling point for any product or service in early 2019, you are looking at a marketing strategy. As the year goes on, however, we will be getting the first 5G networks and devices that can run on them. So, while it is true that some 5G wireless networks will be online in 2019, the lion’s share of networks will be using the same wireless platform that you’ve had for the past decade.

Fourth Generation

In December 2009, 4G wireless broadband networks went online for the first time, with the U.S. finally getting 4G LTE in June of 2010. Much like 5G will be for us, 4G was a revelation for mobile consumers of the time. At the time, 3G networks were doing 200 kilobits-to-five megabits per second and boosting to 4G’s 100 megabits-to-a-gigabit per second is a huge jump. It allowed for cloud computing and streaming media to be possible, and opened up a massive market for mobile applications, and devices that could handle these applications. The effect 4G had on society was massive.

Fifth Generation

Like the 4G networks before it, 5G networks will improve bandwidth speed, reduce latency, and provide a whole new layer of application support. It will effectively bring office Internet speeds to mobile devices. With speeds up to 100 gigabits per second, the 5G connection will be nearly 1,000 times faster than current 4G speeds. This will make any streaming communications seamless and give application developers a whole new construct to work in, improving mobile computing with each new innovation. To put this into perspective, with a solid 5G connection, you could, in theory, download a full movie in a few seconds

This gives people better network stability to ensure that business-critical mobile functions are reliable and has the speeds necessary to provide users the digital tools they need to be productive anywhere they are. The problem many organizations (and individuals) will have is that with this amazing upgrade, when your area gets 5G (Verizon has announced they are launching their 5G the second week in April in Minnesota and Chicago) you will have to get a phone that is capable of working with the new 5G networks. Thus far here is the list:

• Samsung Galaxy s10 5G
• LG v50 ThinQ
• Huawei Mate X
• ZTE Axon 10 Pro 5G
• Unnamed OnePlus 5G Smartphone

That’s it. No Apple version. No Eurpoean version. In fact, of these phones, the Galaxy s10 5G is the only one that will be available in the United States at the time of Verizon’s 5G launch in April.

Also, Verizon is also making available a 5G mod for the Moto z3 for $50. The retail price comes in at a cool $349.99 if it isn’t purchased in the promotional period.

Users should also know that if they are lucky enough to get access to a 5G network, they will be forced to pay extra for access to it. The price currently is an additional $120 per year on Verizon, other Telecoms haven’t announced a true 5G pricing strategy, even though most of them have rolled out some products claiming to have 5G capabilities on handsets that only offer 4G LTE speeds. As we stated above, these are marketing ploys.

Do you plan on using 5G when it’s rolled out? Leave your thoughts in the comments section below. If you would like to know more information about the technology behind 5G subscribe to our blog today.

What is Bandwidth?
In its most basic form, bandwidth is how quickly you can download content from the Internet. Bandwidth is measured in megabits per second, or Mbps. The more bandwidth you have, the faster downloads will run. Some high-speed connections can be measured in Gigabits per second.

How Exactly Does Bandwidth Translate to Download Speed?
If you’re trying to calculate your projected download speed, keep in mind that there are eight bits for every byte. This means that if you’re trying to download eight megabytes of data on a one Mbps connection, it will take about one minute. A 512 megabyte file, on the other hand, would take just over a hour to download on the same connection.

Estimating Your Business’ Needs
In order to reach an appropriate estimate for your business’ bandwidth, you’ll need to use a little math. Take the estimated traffic that you expect each of your processes to take up, as well as the number of users that are engaged in this process. You’ll want to assume that this is during peak operations; otherwise you might not have enough during an important operational period. You can generally rely on the following speeds for bandwidth estimation:

• 100Kbps and below: Low-end, single-line VoIP phones and e-fax machines. Some more basic computers have processes that use less than 100Kbps, but in the business world, you probably aren’t using them.
• 100-500Kbps: More computers and laptops fall into this range, as they are more likely to be the ones streaming, downloading, emailing, and browsing than other less intensive devices.
• 500Kbps-2.0Mbps: Cloud solutions and standard definition video conferencing take up about this much bandwidth. This is the general range for Enterprise Resource Planning solutions, Customer Relationship Management platforms, and Point of Sale devices.
• 2.0Mbps and more: High-definition conferencing solutions, remote access, heavy cloud access, and other resource-intensive tasks fall under this category.

If you keep peak activities at the top of your mind, use them to add up what your staff will need to stay on task and ahead of schedule. For example, let’s say you have ten users, including yourself. You might be using 450Kbps for correspondence, while six of your employees are using a CRM solution at 2.0Mbps each. The last three are using high-definition video conferencing software for 2.5Mbps each. Add all this up and you can expect to use about 20Mbps at heaviest use, but you want to go a little beyond this to 25Mbps, just to be safe.

What are other tips that you might want us to share? Leave us a comment and let us know.

Birth of the Internet

The first Internet was born on college campuses. It was built by intellectuals, for academics, without the massive list of considerations that now accompany software development. It spread quickly, of course, and somewhere, pretty early on, it was decided that by being able to support commerce, the Internet could become one of the west’s greatest inventions.

This came to fruition in 1984 when the first catalogue was launched on the Internet. This was followed by the first e-store (at books.com) in 1992, and the first software to be sold online (Ipswitch IMail Server) in 1994. Amazon and eBay launched the following year and the Internet has never been the same.

By then, the academic uses for the Internet had multiplied, as well. By the time Amazon launched, many colleges and universities were offering students access to the Internet as an important part of their continuing education. Boy, was it ever.

Today, you’ll be hard pressed to find a classroom (outside of the poorest school districts in the country) where every classroom isn’t Internet-ready.

College Internet Needs and Cybersecurity

This stands true in university and college circles, as well. Campuses today are almost completely connected. You’ll be hard pressed to find a place on a modern campus that, as long as you have security credentials to do so, you can’t gain access to an Internet connection. In a lot of ways, it is the demand for access that makes network security a major pain point for the modern college. Firstly, having to protect computing networks from a continuously variable amount of mobile devices is difficult. Secondly, the same attacks that plague businesses, are also hindering IT administrator efforts at colleges.

Colleges themselves aren’t doing anyone any favors. According to a 2018 report, none of the top 10 computer science degrees in the United States require a cybersecurity course to graduate. Of the top 50 computer science programs listed by Business Insider only three require some type of cybersecurity course. Moreover, only one school out of 122 reviewed by Business Insider requires the completion of three or more cybersecurity courses, the University of Alabama. Regardless of the metric, it’s clear that learning cybersecurity is not a priority for any school.

Are There Cybersecurity Problems Specific to Colleges?

The short answer is no. That’s why it's so important to get people thinking about cybersecurity any way they can. No industry can afford to have the skills gap between people that hack and the people looking to stop them grow any wider. This is why, no matter what you do (or plan on doing) for a living it’s important to understand what your responsibilities are and how to get them into a place that can help your organization ward off these threats from outside (and sometimes inside) your network.

Many colleges have turned to companies like Cyber Degrees to help them not only educate the people utilizing the college’s networks to why cybersecurity awareness is important, but also help people understand that with the rise of cybercrime and hacking-induced malware, that cybersecurity has become a major growth industry with many facets. In 2015, the Bureau of Labor Statistics found there were more than 200,000 unfilled cybersecurity jobs in the U.S. With curriculums not prioritizing cybersecurity, and with threats growing rapidly, imagine how many are unfilled today. As demand rises for competent individuals to fill a multitude of jobs in the computer-security industry, colleges need to do a better job prioritizing cybersecurity training.

For the business looking into protecting itself, look no further than the cybersecurity professionals at Coleman Technologies. Our knowledgeable technicians work with today’s business technology day-in and day-out and know all the industry’s best practices on how to keep you and your staff working productively, while limiting your exposure to risk. Call us today at (604) 513-9428 to learn more.