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We’ve all seen the strange black squares that are continuously being photographed by smartphone users. They’re called QR codes, an innovative re-imagining of barcode technology. Originally used for tracking components in vehicle manufacturing, these codes are now used in a much broader context. The application of QR codes is even finding new life in creative business ventures and interactive advertising.

What is a QR Code?

    A QR, or Quick Response code, is a unique matrix barcode which is readable by specialized scanners and, more popularly, smartphones. Because QR codes are two-dimensional constructs, they can hold thousands of alphanumeric characters of information much like the traditional barcode found on most purchased products. They are useful tools for business because of their ability to hold considerable amounts of easily translatable information.

    When you scan or read a QR code with your smartphone, the code links you to web-enabled digital content. Much like when a barcode is scanned to generate the price of a given item in a grocery store, in a much more complicated way, when a QR code is scanned, increased numbers of information can then be generated.

How are QR codes used in Business?

    Creating a QR code is easy. It’s an easy process of entering the appropriate data into a QR generator. There are several free versions of this code online, if you’d like to check one out try using the Kaywa generator.

    After you’ve created your QR code, you are able to print it on business cards, posters, billboards, or publish it on the web. Once the code is accessible, potential customers are able to scan the code using their phone and then access whatever information you would like them to see.

Why it works

    Creating a QR code is a unique way of creating an interactive ad campaign. You give the mysterious code to the audience; the audience deciphers the code and is then rewarded with the information you’ve coded. It adds value to that information by making it a fun activity. Though QR codes are still new to America, they have been a popular method of creating brand loyalty in Japan for over a decade. If you’re looking to create a conversation with your prospects, consider using this innovative device.

Technology has advanced to a place that allows for constant connectivity. Getting a hold of someone is as easy (and as impersonal) as sending a simple text message.   No matter where we go, as long as we have a smartphone in our pocket, we are within reach. This has been a beneficial change in many respects, but what are the negative effects of growing up in the age of connectivity? Communication is growing digitally; aspects of this will be positive where others will be negative. In this blog we will take a look at a few of the pros and cons of staying connected digitally.

The Pros

• Being connected means increased safety. No mater what emergency you face; contacting the appropriate help is no longer a serious concern. Through increased technology, cell phone range is greater than ever. Car accidents and unforeseen accidents and illnesses even in remote locations can be quickly relayed to emergency help services.
• Staying in touch is now as easy as clicking a button. Ask any soldier deployed over seas and they’ll tell you that staying in touch with their families is now easier than ever. Sending a message takes only a second thanks to highly advanced Internet connections and international bandwidth.
• Technology has made telecommuting an accessible reality. Thanks to cloud computing, working at home is easy and practical. This allows workers on maternity or sick leave to maintain a valuable level of productivity.

The Cons

• Turning your phone off is challenging. Being constantly connected migh result in a decrease of personal space. With communication barriers being redefined, finding time alone is now more challenging than ever. Remember, it’s important to disconnect and relax.
• The ability to take your office with you also means you are always at the office. While redefining the workday and enabling more flexible hours can increase productivity, it can also make workers over-work. It’s important to keep your private and professional lives independent, which is increasingly difficult thanks to increased connectivity.
• Being connected can cause us to disconnect from those around us. Staying in touch with people who are miles away can cause us to neglect those close to us. We may be communicating with our associates overseas, but we might also be negelecting our friends in the very same room.

Digital communication is simply a new way for us to communicate. However, it’s important to remember moderation when deciding how connected we allow our lives to become. Connectivity is not fundamentally good or bad; instead its merit is dependent on how you utilize it.

For more information on connectivity, as well as an interesting look at unplugging yourself from technology, take a look at this article. 

When I think of tablets — the iPad in particular — I think of watching videos, browsing the web, and enjoying games. Wasting time, in other words. But what if there’s a legitimate place for tablet computers at the office?

Infoworld recently ran an article about a New York law firm named Proskauer that equipped its sizable team of lawyers with iPads. This wasn’t simply a generous bonus for a job well done. Proskauer’s attorneys are now expected to use their tablets for their primary computing hardware: “Today, more than 500 Proskauer lawyers use iPads to build superslick PowerPoint slides, Excel spreadsheets packed with sky-high figures, and verbose Word documents. Lawyers pass this electronic paperwork back and forth among clients. They even present details on their iPads to judges.”

The utility of tablet computing is particularly evident in the health care setting. As more medical practices change to electronic health records systems (EHRs), doctors and nurses are finding that using portable hardware is a natural (and necessary) shift.

And tablets are spreading far beyond the clinic and courtroom. CIO.com recently published a slideshow of tablets in action (hat tip to Infoworld). You can see these slim instruments at archaeological sites, on the battlefield, and even in the cockpits of planes.

For Proskauer, the switch to a tablet-centric office had its hiccups. “Rolling out the iPad actually turned out to be quite a significant investment in time, much more than I would have thought,” said Steven Kayman, chair of the technology committee at Proskauer, in an interview with Infoworld. “There’s just a hundred decisions that have to be made along the way.”

Call it the early adopter tax: technology trailblazers must solve hitherto unknown problems on the fly, with no template to follow. The law firm had to address these questions: Would lawyers pay for apps they needed or would the tablets come with a preset menu of apps? Would personal use be allowed? How would tablets impact the network — specifically security?

Though these questions weren’t simple, they were undeterred. And the firm isn’t looking back. “You’ve got to be forward-thinking,” Proskauer COO Gurwitz told Infoweek. “It’s clear the world is evolving.”

Have you noticed the steady decline of regular spamming in the past few years? The lowered levels have come about because the Internet has developed along with current technologies to make the z a safer place, one that is significantly difficult for spammers to navigate. However, spammers are notorious for creatively adapting to change. First, we’ll look at why traditional mass spamming has declined. Secondly, we’ll consider how spamming might change to keep in front of recent Internet security updates.

Profitability

    The amount of money that could be made in 1997 with traditional mass spamming is nowhere near the amount that can be made today. Because of current Internet security updates, spammers have to pay for more hardware and work for a greater amount of time to accomplish the same amount of spamming that could easily be done with one machine on one server a little over a decade ago. Someone looking to make money would do better getting a minimum wage job than they would with common spamming.

    Even though the current shape of the Internet has made spamming more expensive than it is worth, spammers are known for creatively adapting to change. How will spammers evolve to survive a more secure Internet?

Smart Spam

    Spammers are getting creative. In 1997, traditional spamming was sending out mass emails to millions of accounts. With the improvement of spam filters, this method is no longer viable. Instead, spammers are mixing their skills with hacking techniques. Spammers now hack legitimate email accounts and send their message from them in lower volume. This form of spamming is also adapting to new connectivity outlets, such as social media. Recently, the twitter account of actor Simon Pegg was hacked, and 1 million of his followers were sent a link to a Trojan virus.

    While new technologies will de developed to help protect honest Internet users, the best protection is awareness. Use caution when following a link from an email, even if it comes from a trusted account. Being aware of suspicious messages and unusual links can help keep you safe from crafty spammers. To learn more and more detailed tips, take a look at this article.

A couple of years ago, we all laughed at then-U.S. senator Ted Stevens when he described the Internet as “a series of tubes.”

In the same speech, Stevens also seemed to confuse the Internet with email, recalling how one of his staffers “sent an Internet” on Friday that didn’t arrive in his inbox until the following Tuesday.

We all hate it when that happens.

But in the midst of our laughter at Stevens’ expense, we secretly hoped that no one would ask us to come up with our own definition, because, well, what the heck IS the Internet?

It’s that thing we can’t imagine living without. It’s the way we work, buy stuff, watch videos, communicate, share memories, conduct research, tell jokes, catch up with friends, etc.

But what is it?

Lucky for us, the guys and gals at Business Insider (BI) have assembled a slideshow that walks through the basics. Give it a look here.

Here are the salient points:

Internet = interconnected network; it’s a network of networks. The Internet is a collection of computers (servers, desktops, laptops, etc.) that share information via telephone wires and satellite links; these computers are all connected by a common software standard called Internet Protocol Suite (TCP/IP). Most us go to the Internet via an Internet Service Provider (ISP), such as AT&T, Comcast, or Road Runner (the three largest ISPs). BI: “When you connect to an ISP, your computer becomes a part of its network. That network is already connected to another larger network, and that network is connected to yet another network, and so on and so forth across the globe.” The Internet is composed of servers and clients. Servers are machines that provide services to other machines. Clients (desktops, laptops, smartphones, etc.) use these services. BI: “So when you sign online at work, your computer becomes a client that’s accessing a Web server. Every device connected to the Internet has a unique numerical IP address The web ≠ the Internet. Invented in the late 1980s by Tim Berners-Lee, the web “is actually a subset of the Internet; it is all the pages that can be accessed using Web browsers [e.g. Explorer, Firefox].” All domain names have a corresponding numerical IP address. Example (courtesy of Wikipedia): the domain name www.example.com translates to the IP address 192.0.32.10. The Domain Name System was created to make the Internet more user-friendly (domain names are easier to remember than long strings of numbers)  
The physical infrastructure that supports the Internet
As it happens, Stevens’ conception of the Internet as a series of tubes wasn’t far from the mark. There exists a physical dimension to the Internet. A 2009 Wired magazine photo essay, Andrew Blum followed the path of a single bit of information as it traveled from the UK to the California coast, photographing the physical infrastructure that makes such a long (and blisteringly fast) journey potential. Here’s a look at one leg of its journey.

When our bit hits the Big Apple, it passes through the beating heart of the American Internet: 60 Hudson Street (right), in the downtown area of Manhattan. More transatlantic and transcontinental lines come together in New York than anywhere else in the country. Western Union opened the building in 1930 as the telegraph junction between Wall Street and Main Street. The ducts that once carried high-gauge copper wire are now filled with thousands of strands of glass fiber owned by hundreds of networks. Techs physically connect them to one another in a “meet-me-room,” neutral territory run by a company called Telx.

Is there a meaningful difference between ‘tubes’ and ‘ducts filled with glass fiber’?

If Stevens were alive today, I might be inclined to send him an ‘Internet’ apologizing for laughing at his tube-based definition of the world wide web.

Creating consumer-based technology has been a popular trend in recent years; developers have noticed success with their products by tailoring them to fit with consumer needs and trends. A perfect example of this is the Google search engine, known for its usability. The reason Google has been so successful is because the engineers who design the functionality behind the search engine do so in response to consumer needs. It is evident that technological innovation is being motivated by consumer trends, but what does this mean for technology on a higher level? Here are some thoughts:

User-Generated Content

Consumer trends have shown a high profit in allowing more integrated content to be developed by a greater number of third party institutions. Effectively, this means that more independent developers can make programs that run well on advanced devices, like the iPhone. Apple has designed the iPhone with this level of customization in mind and in doing so, expanded the use and practicality of their devices. User-generated content is a direct byproduct of consumer-based technology.

User-Friendly Applications

In order for any piece of technology to be successful, it must now be user-friendly. Products that are known for ease of use are dominating the market.  More and more companies are developing products and services that make life easier for the end user. Look at Google, one of the most advanced search engines available. Each new development adds a new layer of user interface that makes Google easy to use. For example, Google will fulfill your search query before you’ve finished typing it. How’s that for ease of use?

User Involvement

Consumers have gotten tired of sitting around all day interacting with their technology by typing or pointing or clicking. Devices have now become more diverse in how users can interact with them. Voice search, motion capture and capacitive touch technologies are all examples of how the consumer’s need to interact has affected the development of technology. Nintendo first implemented interactive gaming via movement with its Wii console, but Microsoft’s Xbox Kinect took this idea further. True, you can now control a video game by moving your hand in front of a screen, but you can also select a movie on Netflix, send an email or browse the Internet all without ever touching a device.

Many of these consumer-based technological advancements may seem to only consider the pleasure of the user and have little sensible implications.  It’s important to consider how these new technologies will affect the future.  User-generated and friendly content could one day allow hospitals the ability to develop personalized monitoring programs for each patient; code writing and development could be accessible to everyone. User involvement has endless implications for the development of new devices. Though consumer-based technology is motivated by profit, the possibilities for future technologies are still valuable to society as a whole.

To see some specific ways consumer technology is being implemented practically, take a look at this article.

A resume is identified as a document used by individuals to present their background and skill sets. Typically, a resume contains a summary of relevant work experience and education, formatted professionally and presented directly. Essentially, a resume is a piece of paper that seeks to define a person as an argument defending their qualifications for the applied to position. It makes sense that a resume be allowed a certain amount of creative flexibility. If the person applying to said position is creative, or if the position itself requires a bit of creative thinking, then why not present a creative resume? As technology advances and the definition of professionalism expands, more and more resumes are being presented as creative pieces. Here are a few things to consider when on either side of resume presentation.

When Creating a Resume

    Make sure your resume finds a middle ground between presenting your skills and appealing to your future employers. If you are applying to be a banker, for instance, a no-frills resume typed in “Times New Roman” is probably your best bet. However, if you’re seeking a position the requires creative and abstract thought, feel free to express yourself artistically. If the prospect reading your resume doesn’t appreciate your creative flair, chances are it’s best you shouldn’t be working for them in the first place. Here are a few tips to help get you started:

1. Be graphic. An infographic is a great design choice when applying for any creative position. They are interesting, factual, and will set you apart from most other applicants. Take a look at this example. Infographic
2. Let your style match your personality. If you work best by yourself, let that be represented in your design. If you work best in a group, let that be represented as well. Take a look at this example: Design and style
3. Utilize flair. If you are able to turn your resume in as a PDF, don’t be afraid to add specialized components to give a bit of flair to your application. This shows off both your creativity and your talent. Take a look at this example. Flair

When Reading a Creative Resume

creative resume will show you some very unique qualities in an applicant that a standard resume might leave out. For example, reading a well-done creative resume can communicate the ability to think outside the box and base intelligence. These are qualities that any job can appreciate because are essential to any business. Don’t shy away from seriously considering a resume that is not “traditional” in its presentation. A creative resume could come from the perfect candidate for the job.

As technology advances, job seekers will find more and more creative ways of expressing their talents in the hope of setting themselves apart in any applicant pool. Having an open mind when reviewing these creative resumes will allow your business to find the most creative and adept candidate for the job.

A resume is defined as a document used by individuals to present their background and skill sets. Typically, a resume contains a summary of relevant work experience and education, formatted professionally and presented directly. Essentially, a resume is a piece of paper that seeks to define a person as an argument defending their qualifications for the applied to position. It makes sense that a resume be allowed a certain amount of creative flexibility. If the person applying to said position is creative, or if the position itself requires a bit of creative thinking, then why not present a creative resume? As technology advances and the definition of professionalism expands, more and more resumes are being displayed as creative pieces. Here are a few things to consider when on either side of resume presentation.

When Creating a Resume

    Make sure your resume finds a middle ground between presenting your skills and appealing to your future employers. If you are applying to be a banker, for instance, a no-frills resume typed in “Times New Roman” is probably your best bet. However, if you’re seeking a position the requires creative and abstract thought, feel free to express yourself artistically. If the prospect reading your resume doesn’t appreciate your creative flair, chances are it’s best you shouldn’t be working for them in the first place. Here are a few tips to help get you started:

1. Be multidimensional. Designing your resume as an infographic will help you stand out as well as represent the many layers of your personality. Check out this example: Infographic
2. Match your style to your personality. If you work best under deadlines, work that in to the visual aesthetic of your resume. If you work better in an open schedule, represent that in the same way. Here is a great example to consider. Design and style
3. Utilize flair. If you are able to turn your resume in as a PDF, don’t be afraid to add specialized components to give a bit of flair to your application. This shows off both your creativity and your talent. Take a look at this example. Flair

When Reading a Creative Resume

If you’re in the position of reading resumes, especially at a small business, be open to accepting those that are creative and not just a simple list of talent and accomplishment.  A creatively designed resume may seem silly and unprofessional, but it tells you a lot about the applicant. It shows that they have the ability to think outside the box, aren’t afraid of taking risks and are clever. These qualities are ones that might be left unrepresented in a conventional resume but are also paramount to the success of any business, large or small. Keep in mind that if someone submits a creatively designed resume, they could be an invaluable asset.

Job seekers will constantly find new ways to set themselves apart from the crowd. A creative resume is a great way to do so, as it allows the applicant the opportunity to develop his or her own standard as it relates to the job wanted. Keeping an open mind when creating and examining a resume is the best way to screen highly qualified and effective candidates.

Big Internet news this week: ICANN, the institution that manages the allocation of domain names and IP addresses, announced it would allow virtually any word to become a top-level domain (TLD).

Among the 22 TLDs available today, the most common is .com. Soon we could see a flood of new TLDs — generic or branded — such as .apple, .salad, .panama, or .nike.

“ICANN has opened the Internet’s naming system to unleash the global human imagination. Today’s decision respects the rights of groups to make new Top Level Domains in any language or script,” said Rod Beckstrom, president and CEO of ICANN, in a statement on the organization’s website. “We hope this allows the domain name system to better serve all of mankind.”

In the near term, most commentators believe the change will better serve large corporations, who will rush to apply for a branded TLD and won’t balk at the $185,000 application fee.

In addition to that rather large barrier to entry, the new naming change comes with some other fine print: ICANN warns would-be domain squatters and impostors that the application process will take several months and depending on the requested name, may be reviewed governmental agencies the U.S. and abroad. Applicants for new TLDs will have to show a reasonable claim to the name they are buying.

Maybe you’re wondering: who’s ICANN and what provides them the power to institute this change?

ICANN — officially known as the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers — is a private non-profit that is under contract by the U.S. Department of Commerce to manage the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority.

Learn more: http://www.icann.org/

Smartphones have been one of recent history’s fastest growing technological advancements. Like most technology, the inception of smartphones has led to the necessity for other supportive technologies to be developed. For example, mobile devices being able to connect to a full version of the Internet requires developers to produce and design new ways of interacting with the Internet. Because of this, technology has turned to an older program, voice recognition, to develop a new and interesting user tool: voice search. Voice search was created with a simple mission: provide easy Internet searching without worrying about undersized keyboards or long scrolling text. While voice search fulfills this mission, it also opens the door for current technologies to find exciting and new applications.

What is voice search?

The Internet is dependent on the ability to search the seemingly infinite amount of information available online.  As more and more mobile devices are able to access the Internet fully, it has become increasingly important that they are easily able to search online content. Voice search streams speech digitally through the Internet to a remote database running computationally demanding voice-recognition algorithms that return corresponding text to a user’s search box. In basic terms, voice search uses the Internet to turn your voice into text so you can search the Internet.

All of this is made possible by utilizing cloud technology. Because Voice search takes voice recognition to the cloud instead of a mobile device, it allows for very high performance in both response and accuracy.

While voice-recognition technology has been around for quite some time, the way most consumers have interacted with it has been through robotic customer care. Voice search has taken recent cloud technology, as well as a few well-written algorithms, and turned it into a highly functioning voice recognition tool.

What is the future of voice search?

    The future will most likely see an increase in the adoption of voice search technology, not only in interactions with the Internet but also in controlling the devices themselves.

However, the most exciting and logical next step in voice recognition evolution would be language understanding technology. Classic search is based on matching query terms with an index of words found in documented text. Language understanding would differ from that in its ability to function abstractly. For example, a classic search for “change volume” would find documents or files containing those words. The same search with language understanding would result in bringing the user to the settings that control volume. Imagine changing the volume on your computer simply by asking it to change.

Voice search is a perfect example of how technology evolves in line with cultural trends and practical designs.  We can look forward to highly effective voice command and recognition functionality on future devices.  If you’d like to read more information on voice search, including its history and development, please check out this article.