New Technology

New Technology

  • Laptop encryption, why you need it

    Do you lock the doors of your house when you are not in?  I hope the majority answer to this question is "yes of course I do, this isn't Canada you know!" This leads me to my next question. Are your organisation laptops encrypted? The answer to this question should be the same as the first but I bet it isn't. 

    No I don't think you all are spies before you ask, but I do think you should all be at least aware of why laptop encryption is a necessity for EVERY organisation and not just the ones that send their payslips to employees titled agent. 

    Let me quickly explain what encryption is and why you need it.

  • Now's the time to upgrade your wireless infrastructure

    If your business is relying on older wireless infrastructure it is probably time to upgrade. Wireless traffic is only going up, not only is the demand from each device going up, each person typically has more devices - laptop, phone and tablet etc!

    On top of that, nearby wireless access points, bluetooth and other wireless peripherals all compete with you for the limited amount of wireless bandwidth.

    Enter "5GHz". The "5GHz" band has a lot less devices competing. Typically 5GHz has a smaller range than 2.4GHz, which counter to what you would expect is actually a benefit. It means there are fewer devices competing within an access point’s reach.

    Any laptops, phones and tablets replaced within the last few years probably already support the latest wireless protocol 802.11ac which uses the 5GHz band, why not update your wireless infrastructure to support them? Wireless 802.11ac infrastructure is also now quite reasonably priced.

    telanova will guide you through the whole process: defining your requirements, choosing a vendor, creating a secure design, implementation, and post installation support. Contact telanova on 01344 989 530 or This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. to get started.

  • PCs and laptops are too complex and troublesome

    For most people, PCs and laptops are too complex, too troublesome and too expensive, especially now you can offload so much to the cloud. Why waste time on antivirus, backup, drivers, service packs, upgrades etc? I've been keeping my eye on Chromebooks since they were launched a couple of years ago. Four weeks ago a new Chromebook came out, the Samsung series 3, and I just had to buy one. I love it: it starts up in just 8 seconds, it's as light as a feather, silent, runs six hours on battery, all for just £200+VAT.

  • The IT Productivity Paradox and how to fight it.

     

    "You see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics" - Robert Solow


    It doesn't make sense, does it? The fact that even though we live in the most advanced technological breakthrough in the history of mankind, we should see an exponential curve in productivity; but we don't. It has even been argued to be in decline. With the birth of global communication and easily accessed off-the-shelf technology and software that is designed to maximise efficiency, it's hard to believe that this is the case.

    But it is. Matt Richel, for the New York Times, writes, “statistical and anecdotal evidence mounts that the same technology tools that have led to improvements in productivity can be counterproductive if overused."

    He goes on to explain that the big Silicon Valley firms have a monster of their own creation wrecking havoc in the productivity statistics, with employees checking emails up to 77 times a day, with mundane tasks taking up large amounts of time e.g. group emails and attachments. According to Basex, the United States alone loses up to $650bn a year due to unnecessary tasks and delays that could potentially be remedied by more efficient IT systems being implemented.

    So what on earth is going on?

    The answer is actually remarkably simple and is known as The Productivity Paradox, which has taken countless victims over the years. It is the unusual observation that despite further investment in IT technology to improve productivity, worker efficiency has hardly budged. This is not an anomaly however; the same technology 'paradox' has been seen before in the early 20th century.



    Put yourself back to 1881. You work in a dark, humid and hot factory powered by a steam engine. The sound of mechanical machinery is deafening. Labour turnover is at an all time high due to dangerous working conditions and disease. Then, out of nowhere, Thomas Edison arrives to save the day with his brand new electrical motor! You would of thought businesses would of jumped straight onto it, no?

    Wrong.

    By 1900, less than 5% of factories used electrical power and instead opted for the traditional method. It took until the 1920s, over 40 years, for 50% of factories to use electrical technology. From this, we can see that despite new and exciting technology that could revolutionise the way we think and work, we still hesitate to use it - and for quite some time.

    Why? Because change is difficult and stagnation is easy.

    We as humans are hardwired to resist and fight change. And so, with such a radical change needed to push through required electrical motor legislation (or in this case, computer technology) and despite us knowing the immediate and long term benefits of adopting a 'new way' to do things, it's still uncomfortable for us because it will completely upend the way we think - which is understandable to an extent.

    But in truth, we all need to get over ourselves and take the initiative. We live in a world of easily accessed software that is a click away. Think of it this way - you have a document you need to distribute and get multiple colleagues to append. Would your business send it on Google Documents, with live editing powered by the cloud and automatic saving? Or would your business use the same method that has been around since the 1990's, requiring all users to send you a separate document and for you to compile it all together manually? 

    Now ask yourself - which of these solutions is the steam engine and which is the electrical motor?

    If your business is using the steam engine, telanova is at hand to help you join the IT Revolution. 

  • The Machine Learns

    Some things seem like Science Fiction. Then you realise they’re here now. Machine Learning’s like that.

    You’re using it today! When you mark an email as Spam, The Machine learns, improving its automatic detection rate for you and everyone else. Through learning by example, The Machine mimics the way the human brain works. The Machine uses a Neural Net, similar to the arrangement of the brain cells in humans, but built in software or fast Silicon hardware, not biological cells.

    For more advanced examples, see “AlphaGo - The Movie”. It isn’t a science fiction movie like “ex Machina”; it’s a documentary about the application of Machine Learning to vocations for which humans spend years in intensive training and rely on “human intuition”. Tasks which have previously been thought beyond the bounds of computers’ capability. Making machines not just as good as an average human, but better than the best expert in the field. After trouncing world champions in the game of Go, the AlphaGo team is setting its sights on medical diagnosis that’s better than the best experts’. A few years ago I’d have thought that impossible in my lifetime, but now a certainty. AlphaGo - the Movie is a real eye-opener and free to view on Youtube

    So what does that mean for your business? Let’s consider the Threats before the Opportunities. Someone, somewhere is thinking of using Machine Learning to do what your business does, better and at a fraction of the price. For Amazon, Google, Facebook, Uber, Netflix, Tesla and thousands of venture capital backed start-ups, it’s in their business DNA. Driving cars: yes, you see that on TV. Cutting hair - yes, why ever not. They’ll do what you do, better and at a lower price, sooner than you think.

    The Opportunity with the biggest prize is to become the leader in applying Machine Learning to your field, potentially dominating the market. If that’s what you want to do, you’ll need to capture a lot of relevant but tiny pieces of information about the running of your business, feed it into The Machine, and turn it into something world beating with the help of some very clever and creative technical specialists. Like Google did with Spam detection and AlphaGo. If you’ve got the ambition, the vision, the nouse and the stamina then people will want to pump more money into your venture than you’ll know what to do with.

    You could work in partnership with a specialist company or form a joint venture with other businesses in your field. Make a good case why they need you rather than another company in your field. It doesn’t have to be an academic research project. You can build applications using pre-trained generic building blocks; from Amazon AWS for example:

    • Comprehend is for finding insights and relationships in text,
    • Rekognition is for image and video analysis: identify objects, people, text, scenes, and activities in images and videos, as well as detect any inappropriate content,
    • Lex is for building conversational interfaces using voice and text,
    • Personalize is for building real-time personalized recommendations for your customers,
    • Translate is a neural machine translation service for fast, high-quality, and affordable language translation
    • Polly's Neural Text-to-Speech (NTTS) turns text into natural sounding human speech allowing you to create applications that talk, and build entirely new categories of speech-enabled products

    More simply, you can use off-the-shelf products in your business that incorporate Machine Learning. Starting from a basic capability the products learn what works for your business from your feedback. Actively watch out for new game changing technology that gives your business an edge over your competition. For example:

    • automating processing of paper and e-paper: receipts, invoices, recruitment etc,
    • image recognition: faces, vehicles, objects,
    • customer service: chatbots, voice response, or
    • cybersecurity

    That’s why you need a forward looking company like telanova. We work with you to select the IT that’s right for your business from the best of current IT, whether that’s using machine learning, other innovations or other traditional approaches. We integrate new IT into your existing systems, train your colleagues in new ways of working and maintain your edge over the competition.

  • When broadband isn't fast enough

    The reality of broadband internet speeds doesn't live up to advertisers' headline rates. The upstream rate, for information flowing from your servers at HQ to people working remotely, is only 5% of the headline downstream rate, and the downstream rate is less than 1% of the speed of your local network. As a company grows with more people working from home, or working at other offices, what do you do next?

  • Why standardise on Windows 8 for your business

    If you're choosing IT for your business, forget about the irrelevant features and focus on how Windows 8 will benefit your business.

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