Got Stored Data? Is It Burning a Hole in Your Pocket?

So your data is now everyone else's big business. The more you have, the more its going to cost you to keep. But does it have to be this way? Is there a better way to manage your data? I think so...
Offline or Online?
I'm a full time photographer and the biggest assets to my business are my photographs; my clients and my own. I shoot weddings, corporate events and all sorts of other genres in photography for myself as well. Storing photo's and data is an essential part of my working method after a photo shoot so I made it my business to put together a good offline and online backup solution for my business.
I don't like to put all my eggs in one basket. Therefore when on a shoot I use 10 SD cards at 16 GB each and because I shoot in RAW format the files are fairly large. After a wedding I get all the cards together and I create a folder on my hard drive to collate them, where I can then work on them and eventually hand them over as a finished product to the printers or clients.
This is an offline backup. I have turned the copies of my wedding photos into a backup copy by duplicating them to my hard drive. I now feel a bit safer (phew!). This may sound strange, but I have to say its fairly nerve-wracking driving home after a wedding, You get in and the backup's the first thing you do and you hope to God there is not a corrupt card in the collection (especially from the ceremony!).
Now, let's talk about online and offline backup solutions and how you work them to your advantage. As I said, I feel pretty safe, but what if there is a fire overnight or a break-in and everything is wiped out? Well, its all going be lost and not only am I going to have to pay for new gear, but I am likely going to be sued as well. Insurance covers most things, but can't replace those photographic memories.
This is where an online backup solution can help. By now you will have heard of 'the Cloud'. It sounds mysterious, but its really just another hard drive elsewhere (OK it's slightly more than that - its a lot of hard drives and a lot of servers spread over a lot of data centres). There are many varied versions of Cloud storage, for example, Drop-box, Google Drive, Cloud etc., and they all offer (to start with) free online storage.
The review
Drop-box was something I started with when I didn't take online backup seriously but more of a place to dump my contracts and sample photo's. I invited people to my shares and as they joined Drop-box gave my account more storage space but eventually I filled it up as I saw how important online storage was. At the time, their prices were just too high so rather than paying I just bought two large desktop USB hard drives and made one a master and one a slave.
I then configured Microsoft's Synctoy (its free and can be downloaded from their website) to copy everything from one to the other for me. This is really great, you have you own offline backup on your pc/tablet at home and the same folder you have your data in is also being synced (by your choice at installation) constantly somewhere else, for now..
Here is the catch: all of the online 'Clouds' are only giving away just enough space to fit most of your data. They know the average Joe who has, say 1gb of data is eventually going to fill their free offering of say 15gb. To expand on this you will have to pay! Yes, all those MP3's that you have already paid for are now going to cost you per month as well and the more you store, the more you pay. You may even fill up that offline hard drive so a bigger one is necessary and is also going to cost you.
Let me put it this way; what is worse? Delete music you don't listen to very often? Or delete all the formal shots of a wedding (seriously, who looks at those shots anyway? It's the behind-the-scenes stuff you want - right?). Or pay for more storage space online?
I started to look into the other online storage companies and Google was an obvious contender, I already had an email account with them and on clicking around found I had 15gb free not being used. I then decided the 50gb on Dropbox for free was not enough so signed up for Google drive per month and enjoyed 106gb. This lasted a year and I filled it, even deleting most of the RAW files and hanging onto the Jpegs (which are much smaller) I still ran out of space.
Well the good news is it is actually (finally) getting cheaper. Enough time had gone by for all these major "Cloud" companies are fighting over your data which is driving the price down making it affordable for home consumers and businesses. I did a good look-around and as I said, I photograph a lot so I needed a very large cost effective online backup source.
My favourite at the moment is BackBlaze as they fit my needs really well for the price per month. They offer something none of the others do yet... No Cap Limit! It is worth checking it out. They have a set price, but they will backup everything you have got. As soon as I told my friends they all signed up - no joke. It was easy to install and you just tell it which drive to backup (including C: drive) and off it goes. The first backup takes about two weeks but in my case three month's but eventually its done and as you add photo's and data it syncs it. I still do an offline backup though as I always plan for the worst - like no internet connection! outages can happen.
How best to backup your data in 2015
So to help you understand my offline/online solution at the moment, the steps below show you how my offline and online backup needs come together;
1 - I upload data/photo's to my external 5TB hard drive
2 - I start Synctoy (a free add-on from Microsoft for windows users) and duplicate data to my second 5TB hard drive. This may sound extreme but I like to know I have made every effort to backup my data. This is my offline backup completed.
3 - I check the Back Blaze control panel and make sure its syncing
4 - Finished!
I hope you have found this useful, more later!

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/9024184

Reasons Why Windows XP OS Is Still Popular

Even though Microsoft is hoping that people would upgrade to Windows 8.1, many users are still using an operating system, which is about 10 to 12 years old or the Microsoft Windows XP. The reasons why it is popular even today are many. No matter how much Microsoft tries to make its users switch to an improvised version of its operating system, the old operating system continues to be popular. Here is why.
Legacy systems need XP
Even though it is not old enough, Windows XP has performed a decent job of getting around, in that it is still being used by companies and industries. The systems in which the operating system is being used are water plants and power grids that are critical infrastructural systems. This implies that like data acquisition and supervisory control, some businesses cannot upgrade to the latest version of the Windows operating system.
No problems with user training
The hassle with new technology is that no matter how well people are trained in it, it would take time for the users to be completely trained in it. This is definitely true of any move to Windows 8. This has led to many head scratches and baffled looks from the people. With XP so well ingrained in the systems of many companies and since it is so simple to use, users prefer to use the good old Windows XP OS. They definitely do not want to face the hassle of learning the ropes around a new system from the scratch. As such, it might well be the case that until industries have no choice, except to upgrade to some other system, they would be happier with Windows XP, thereby saving them hundreds of hours that they would otherwise spend in training people.
Most hardware is compatible with XP
Many companies around the world have laptops and PC terminals that are ageing and would take time to move to a completely new operating system. Moreover, most of the hardware appliances are already compatible with XP. With budgets being under review, new hardware may be needed to support systems that are completely new, whereas XP is compatible even with old hardware.
If it isn't broken, don't fix it
If your Windows XP OS is functioning just fine, you need not change it. Most people follow this principle and do not change their operating system to a new one. As such, many people cannot afford to change their operating systems. So, they prefer sticking to good old Windows XP.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/9029173

The 10 Best Mobile App Prototyping Tools for Your App

In software development, a prototype is a fundamental working model of a product and information system. This system is built, tested and then reworked as necessary until an acceptable prototype is finally achieved from which the complete system or product can now be developed. Recently from a source I came across some of the useful prototyping tools which were tested as alternatives of PowerPoint to flash. Below are some of the app prototype builders which will help you to choose the right and best one for your app.
The future is here: There are more and more tools which allow you prototyping mobile apps. Below we will have a look at some of them, what their features are and if this tool is right for you.
1. Anxure RP Pro: Anxure comes on the top list. It is an extremely efficient UX tool that allows the designers to make very advanced and interactive prototypes quickly without even learning or having knowledge about front-end coding.
2. Justinmind Prototyper: this prototype is much similar to anxure. It is hard to say that which is better and by the pace of time these two tools keep evolving parallel to each other. These tools have certain advantages over the other.Justinmind has been build with the proposition of being a well-rounded tool for the UX- designers and allows to add sitemaps and scenarios. Another feature would be adding the datasets which include filtering, editing based on datasets.
3. Indigo Studio (Infragistics): this software is an interesting alternative if you're working on a prototype for mobile. It carries an interface solution that makes the interface clean and easy to use which in particular means that the interaction editor, the way widgets are added to the canvas, the events timeline, user maps, journey displaying previews of the wireframes with the brief explanations.
4. Sketchflow (Expression, blend, Microsoft): this software came as an alternative of anxure. This prototype is not as flexible and effective as the designer has never been quick at making their products better.
5. iRise: This software offers an initiative platform for designers, developers and stakeholders to communicate throughout the whole product process. This goes beyond just prototyping, but it is very expensive and due to that none of the clients have ever used it. You can convert your projects into design documentation by using that tool. iRise includes a code converter too.
6. Antetype: Antetype is the first design and layout software focused on visual design, built by UI Designers for UI designers. It saves a lot of time creating and optimizing.
7. Appcooker: Appcooker streamlines app creation workflow and gets ready for production in no time. It is a prototyping tool on iPad.
8. Pixate: Pixate is ideal for ideal for prototyping complex animations or interactions for mobile apps (IOS and Android).
9. Proto.io: Proto.io is ideal for prototyping mobile devices that include transitions and multiple states.
10. InVision: InVision is a design prototyping tool where you need to upload your designs and add hotspots to transform your static screens into interactive prototypes.
Conclusion:
Professional prototype tools such as Axure RP Pro or Justinmind Prototyper require some time to master, but it definitely pays off. I am satisfied that every UX professional should consider mastering a tool like these. Building an interactive prototype is important to avoid big gaps between the design concepts and the final product.
The biggest pitfall when creating interactive prototypes is to end up spending too much time to implement advanced features that require workarounds. These mobile apps prototyping tools would be an effective tool to restate quickly and create design solutions that are self- explanatory, without focusing much on the tool, and without being restrained by that.

In this article you will find the top ten prototyping tools for your app. whether it would be Anxure, Indigo studio or InVision.You will find the detail what features to these tools carry which differ them from one another and which one would be suitable for your app. for further have a look at our website http://infiniappg.com/

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/9017410

Why Solid State Drives May Not Be The Smart Data Storage Purchases After All

They were touted as superior to the traditional hard drive; however, do not think this does not mean SSD's will not cause business owners to skip calling data recovery services in the local area for help. Solid-state drives may not be any better at protecting files than the traditional drives that spin at around 7,500 RPM and more a moment. Business owners may still find themselves setting aside funds for data recovery in the local area. Why nonvolatile storage isn't driving a better choice for data storage?
Solid-state drives may fail because of their dependency on workload history. If a business uses flash memory, a solid-state hard drive may require out-of-place updates. If there is not enough spare capacity for these updates, it may lead to blocking-wise erasure and fragmentation. The fragmentation in itself is a problem because it could affect the drive's performance overall.
Why do businesses need hard drive recovery if they face these Problems
In some cases, the data from a solid-state drive cannot be recovered using standard hard disk recovery services, as it can if a company is using a traditional hard drive that fails and they must rely on a professional to perform data recovery. Experts may not be able to retrieve data after the fact; however, it is possible to increase spare capacity so that your nonvolatile storage has enough memory for out-of-place updates. It is also possible to use right amplification to provide a higher performance of random writes, decreasing the chances that the solid-state drive will fragment space it needs for updates and erase needed data.
One study showed that improving higher spare capacity also improved random write speed of a single SSD of up to 19 times more. This may possibly make solid-state drives as useful as traditional hard drives, which may sometimes need hard disk recovery and a professional's touch in order to view data after undergoing hard disk recovery in the local area.
Should a business foregone using a solid-state drive with their Raid 5 or higher systems?
Given the solutions that are available these days in data recovery services, using nonvolatile storage's is no longer as devastating to businesses that need reliable data solutions. The problems with an SSD's random writing can be fixed when improving the speed at which those random writes occur and speeding up the parity-less drives so that they offer a higher spare storage capacity.
If the problems with informational bottlenecks and slower write speeds could be overcome, primary storage devices may be used in more critical data operations and businesses may be able to lower their hard disk recovery costs spent annually.

To recover your data before you attempt your own data recovery, visit us at hard disk recovery.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/9010690

What a Mobile App and Marketing Can Do For Your Business

Why a Mobile Application Can Help Grow Your Business
Are you seeking a unique way to market your growing business? If so, you might want to think about developing a mobile app designed for your company and customers. When you utilize a mobile application, you can show consumers details about your company and send them offers anywhere they are. It is a new, unique, accessible, and appealing way to give customers information about your company and what you have to offer. If you are thinking about using a mobile app, you ought to consider the numerous reasons why it can assist you to advertise your company.
Mobile Marketing Can Attract More Customers
A method of mobile app marketing on the Google Play Store and iTunes can help you gain popularity. Being on the two most popular sites for app downloads will draw in brand-new customers to your local business. Clients will see your app in the local market and can gain access to your exclusive app deals. Many new customers will be interested in the local mobile application they find and can download it for free to communicate with your business. A list of features and snapshots will be provided to them so they can chose whether to download or not. With all the features available to you for your mobile app customers will learn more about your services and come in to see your specials more often than not.
Mobile Application Development and Design For Local Customers
A new way that a local mobile app can assist you is the accessibility to your local market of current and new customers. Unlike billboards, which are fixed, mobile apps are where your customers are 24/7. Where is your mobile device right now? I bet it is within 8 feet of you. Local mobile app development for your business is the best method of instantaneous contact with customers. Imagine the ability to have an electronic loyalty reward card, no more paper loyalty cards or the hassles of dealing with customers losing them! You can also send out coupon offers and notification alerts to be sent to your target consumers in your chosen area instantly. This new age advertisement will certainly go to where the consumers are 24/7, and that will certainly make a distinction in sales for your product or service. The best ROI is a Mobile app.
Mobile Applications Can Help Customers Understand What You Do
A third way, in which mobile app development can help you is that it allows you to assist your customer to understand exactly what it is that your business does. It will allow you to distribute your info out into the general public sphere. When your information is available, people will learn more about your service and will clearly comprehend what it is that you can do to assist them in their lives. In today's society, info is effective, and the more details you can offer quickly to your designated consumer the better.. Get ready to work because once you have your own custom app, your business is going to soar!

Its a fact that mobile apps and marketing grows every day. Many new and old businesses will need help to keep up with today's mobile application development technology. You can read more here on mobile app development features at SocialSEONinja.com where marketing is set at affordable prices for new and old businesses seeking help with online marketing, web design, and mobile application development design.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/9015539

How Business Applications Development Can Revitalize Corporate France

Business applications development for smart phones, desktops, and other personalized devices are ushering in a new era of industrial automation. Web and mobile application development has been successful in bridging the gap between businesses and consumers. While generalization across economies might be grossly erroneous, the case of the French economy makes for some interesting study. Counted among the elite group of G-8 nations, France has a GDP growth rate of 0.9% in 2015 and is expected to rise up to 1.2% next year. While other developed European economies have staged a strong turnaround on the back of corporate performance and productivity. In this article we argue that a shortfall of digital initiatives may be holding French corporate enterprises back. We also discuss how digital initiatives like mobile and business application development services and web application if embraced, can fill the gaps between French businesses and consumers.
Decoding the Digital Economy of France in Numbers
The contribution of the digital economy to the French GDP in the financial year 2013 was 5.5%. This share is estimated to grow to 7% by the year 2020 representing €180 billion in GDP. This is still low in comparison to the other leading European economies, where the share of digital economy is expected to be at 9.7 percent around the same time. If the French economy can play catch up with those economies then the digital portion of the GDP may increase to €250 billion. As things stand as of now, corporate France throws up the following observations:

• 80% households in France have access to internet
• France ranks first in fixed broad band connections
• France has the fifth largest base of tablet and smart phone users in Europe
• 60% of consumers in France buy online

The scenario depicted above proves that France has got the necessary endowments to make it big on the digital front and use it as a lever to propel its economy. There exists an opportunity for French businesses to leverage these strengths. Yet, impediments to growth in France exist as well. While there has been no dearth of digital initiative from the government and the consumers, as data shown below suggests corporate entities have not created opportunities for themselves:

• As of 2013, only 14% of French businesses used internet to manage orders
• This compares relatively low to 26% usage of internet by businesses in Germany
• Only 65% businesses in France have a website compared to 89% in Sweden

This data collected by Eurostat shows the presence of great strengths of digital France that have been wasted by corporate firms. In a survey conducted by McKinsey in 2015, the American business consulting major, French executives have shared concerns on structural rigidities like labour legislation and lack of minimum threshold level of digital skills. In fact it was also observed in the survey results that companies that have been unable to embrace digital initiatives have seen a 20% decline in gross operating income and a converse 40% gain in net profits for those that have been successful on the digital front.
Digital Initiatives That Need to Be Taken by Businesses in France
The writing is there on the wall and businesses in France need to appreciate the opportunities available and the weaknesses they have. When 60% of consumers buy online it is only modest to take the first few steps towards enterprise applications development. There are opportunities for French businesses to connect with the consumer on simple hand held devices like tablets and smart phones as the data shows. Mobile application technology today embraces a full circle of services. Tablet software development and mobile apps can unlock new doors of growth in business. Application development services need to be combined with business intelligence to create a cost effective interface with the consumer. Through cross platform application development, French enterprises can build a touch point management system where the consumer shall be entitled to choosing his platform of interaction with the business. A superior digital experience is a must in order to create value for the technologically trendy French consumer. Customer relationship management has two components namely: technology, systems and information on one hand and corporate culture on the other hand. The corporate culture for embracing technologies like business app development, mobile apps, tablet software development, shall have to be built by the top leadership of French businesses. Technology challenges can be addressed by off shoring applications development services to companies that integrate technology with business consulting.

An IT Consulting CompanyMisha Infotech offers highly customized applications development services http://www.mishainfotech.com/application-development.aspx to its clients based on sound business intelligence and technological expertise. The company leads in the field of business app development suite and offers unparalleled digital experience to end users with client specific technology consulting.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/9023572

Why Should Every Business Leader Care About Hadoop?

he phenomenon of big data has been pretty incredible and pretty exhausting for any potential business beneficiaries. That being said, every business leader needs to be aware of the impact that these various technologies will have on their ability to stay competitive.
One category of big data technology is called Hadoop. It is an open source software stack. Open source is a crowd-sourced project that no one owns and everyone can use freely.
What kind of software is Hadoop? Named after a stuffed elephant, Hadoop is at its core a really cheap, highly resilient, and infinitely scalable data storage software.
Here is a quick analogy for Hadoop. Let's say you were one of the original owners of the Apple iPod. Eventually, the size of storage and features change enough that you move on to the next generation and the next. Finally, you get tired of the associated price increase. Instead of going out and buying new versions, you flip the settings to run as data storage and connect all of the old or lesser versions together into one massive file system. Files are duplicated across multiple devices for redundancy. If some older device fails, you simply swap in a working device for the old one. You were previously limited to 64GB of data on a single device. Now that you have hooked all your devices together, you have plenty of space. How many pictures, songs, and movies can you store now?
Similarly, this is what is happening with computer servers. They each had their own individual purpose, and the hardware continually got better. Unfortunately, the cost had serious escalations which each new server. Why not develop a system that allows you to string together multiple commodity servers and overlay an absolutely brilliant methodology for replicating data? This methodology ensures that a single server failure warrants a simple machine swap rather than a complete rebuild of the system. All of a sudden, you have cheap infinite storage and the increasing ability to process that data at high-speed with the added compute power.
Who is using Hadoop for Business?
The current users tend to be in one of two camps: small businesses that have a ton of data they want to use to monitor their operations and large companies that have the resources and appropriate data volumes to discover new business efficiencies.
The smaller companies tend to be gaming companies, SaaS, or digital media companies where the very nature of the business generates a ton of system log data. The log data usually describes the actions and behaviors of the consumers of the various products. For example, multiple watchers of a video may experience a glitch at the same point in a movie they are watching. This would lead to abandonment of the session. As this occurs across multiple viewers, you can discover that there is a content issue that the company should resolve. The same thing goes for gaming. Your favorite MMO experiences a problem that hits multiple users. Find it, fix it, or the game goes away. You can see that the owners of data intensive businesses need to find inexpensive ways to collect and analyze data just to exist.
Larger companies are seeing the light on what it means to be a data-driven company. With more storage and horsepower on the same budget or less, companies are now able to store all kinds of data. Imagine consumer profiles that meld all of the historical account and CRM history (not just a few months) then fuse it with Twitter, Facebook, and purchased demographic information. What can you do with this? You can do some frightening things actually. Are you starting to notice that Facebook regularly predicts items and products you might be interested in? That is all Hadoop making it happen. The more data or attributes you can discover about a person the more precise the prediction. Marketing companies have been the early adopters given the deluge of data that is being produced by consumers and devices. More accuracy in the analysis means better product recommendations and more profits.
Why isn't everyone using Hadoop for Business?
There are a lot of companies that say they don't use social data or do not have "big data." They need to wake the heck up! They are already behind their competitors. If you have any dashboards or reports produced by your IT department that takes more than 5 seconds to return a result, your data is big enough. It isn't just about having a lot of data, it's about speed as well... the speed at which your business reacts to the market.
For most industries, there are opportunities where data processing speed across massive data volumes will create value and transform your business.
Revenue: If you own retail stores where the region is having a freak storm, how quickly can you price optimize your inventory for umbrellas or snow shovels?
Asset Efficiency: Can you constantly calculate the wear and tear on mechanical parts via sensor data and replace them before they cause an operational failure?
Operating Margin: Are you in oil and gas where seismic exploration throws off petabytes of data and takes days to mine? What if you could cheaply store all the data and analyze it in minutes?
The applications of Hadoop for business are limitless. Business leaders need to care. Moore's law is quickly shuttling us to an age of infinite compute possibilities. AI, Robotics, and Synthetic Biology are only a few of the items mentioned in the book "Bold" by Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler, and these technologies are becoming democratized very quickly. This means you don't need technology experts to use them. User interfaces and cloud technologies are making them available to everyone now.
It is time to take off the hat of skepticism and put on the thinking cap of your own personal creativity. What can your business accomplish with Hadoop?

Shane Pratt is a sales and marketing executive in the big data technology space. He has spent most of his career helping people translate technology solutions into business value, and blogs regularly on the topics of big data for business. Shane currently works at Actian and you can sign up for his blog at http://shanepratt.com

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/8997329