A report issued last summer by the Bureau of Labor Statistics in the U.S. Department of Labor put a number to the growing trend of working at home. The report said that in 2015, 24 percent of employed people did some or all of their work at home.
With high-speed networks, video conferencing and other high-tech communication tools, there is often little need for employees, particularly in the IT fields, to be parked in cubicles in high-priced office building. Companies that are recruiting programmers and other IT professionals have even begun to advertise specifically for workers to fill remote jobs.
A website called NewITJobs specializes in posting job openings for workers who would do their jobs remotely.
As I write this article, the site has 27 openings for Javascript programmers, 22 positions for coders who can write Ruby on Rails, and more than 50 IT jobs for professionals with expertise in other areas including systems administration, design and customer service.
NewITJobs says advertisers can post a job opening for $50 for 60 days and reach 100,000 remote workers every month.
At the newspaper publishing company where I once worked, we were always advertising to hire IT professionals. Staff turnover in the IT department was high and the people who left took with them their knowledge of our specialized software and production systems. New hires faced a steep learning curve that got steeper as we moved deeper into the digital world.
That’s not a unique situation and I think it’s why more companies are exploring the advantages of using a managed IT support service like Amazing Support. The service offers general IT support, cloud solutions, business continuity assistance and IT consulting in the in London and Hertfordshire areas in the UK. It also works with international companies that want to get established in the UK.
Amazing Support offers a wide range of services targeted at both large and small companies. It can do an in-depth audit of a firm’s software and connected services as part of an asset management and create a disaster recovery program.
Other services include managed and monitored backups, network audits and email redundancy. And it will help a client explore cloud-based solutions and how they might help a company grow.
For more details about Amazing Support, check out the company’s website which includes a set of case studies for involving different clients and the services that were provided.
When my home Wi-Fi began to get a bit sluggish, I had two culprits in mind. First, I suspected that a neighbor might be tapping into my system and getting his Netflix streams through my Internet connection. And there was the possibility that my Internet provider was not delivering as much speed as it had promised.
A mobile app called Wifi Analyzer had the answers to both questions.
Wifi Analyzer is a free app that scans your home wireless system to discover and identify all of the devices that are currently connected to it. The devices appear in a simple list that IP addresses, MAC addresses, display names, and access points that the system is connected to. Users can customize the list to change icons and edit display names.
If the list shows an Intel device attached to your network and hour house is running all Apple gear, you’ll know something is fishy. The app includes an option to block and untrusted or unknown device. Click it and the guy next door might see his movie halt in the middle of the big car chase.
Because all of my devices were accounted for, so a poacher wasn’t my problem, so I moved on from the Wi-Fi scanner and clicked a second button that launched an Internet speed test. Turns out my cable company was falling short of the promised download speed by a few Mb/s. That was information I could use when I called the company’s tech support line.
For a closer look at Wifi Analyzer, check out the video below and visit the Home Wifi Alert website. The mobile app is available for iOS devices in the Apple iTunes App Store and for Androids in the Google Play Store. You can also get news and updates on the Wifi Analyzer page on Facebook.
When my home Wi-Fi began to get a bit sluggish, I had two culprits in mind. First, I suspected that a neighbor might be tapping into my system and getting his Netflix streams through my Internet connection. And there was the possibility that my Internet provider was not delivering as much speed as it had promised.
A mobile app called Wifi Analyzer had the answers to both questions.
Wifi Analyzer is a free app that scans your home wireless system to discover and identify all of the devices that are currently connected to it. The devices appear in a simple list that IP addresses, MAC addresses, display names, and access points that the system is connected to. Users can customize the list to change icons and edit display names.
If the list shows an Intel device attached to your network and hour house is running all Apple gear, you’ll know something is fishy. The app includes an option to block and untrusted or unknown device. Click it and the guy next door might see his movie halt in the middle of the big car chase.
Because all of my devices were accounted for, so a poacher wasn’t my problem, so I moved on from the Wi-Fi scanner and clicked a second button that launched an Internet speed test. Turns out my cable company was falling short of the promised download speed by a few Mb/s. That was information I could use when I called the company’s tech support line.
For a closer look at Wifi Analyzer, check out the video below and visit the Home Wifi Alert website. The mobile app is available for iOS devices in the Apple iTunes App Store and for Androids in the Google Play Store. You can also get news and updates on the Wifi Analyzer page on Facebook.
Like any mature business, the publishing company where I once worked was littered with incompatible data sets and management software. Created at different times over 30 years, none of them would play well together, forcing the IT department to either write new code or find the best tool to integrate the disparate systems.
Described as a “super blender,” DSYNC translates and synchronizes data between systems. The service works with both both on-premise installations and cloud applications to allow them to share and sync data in near real time.
Martin Novak, co-founder and CIO of the Australia-based company, said he and partner Simon Church developed DSYNC as an alternative to existing system integration, which can often be expensive and difficult to implement. Novak said:
We developed DSYNC to help enable connectivity. We quickly realized that even platforms were interested in our integration services as it helped to rapidly connect to multiple applications.
DSYNC works with retailers, insurance companies, banks, financial technology companies, the healthcare industry and government agencies. The service provides a drop and drag mapping and transformation engine, a prebuilt list of applications that it can instantly be connected and the ability to customize connectors. It also offers a developers’ kit for DIY integrations.
DSYNC offers a free trial with no credit card required. packages start at $100 US per month.
For more details, visit the DSYNC website and check out the video below. The company is also on Twitter @_dsync and it will be on display in the US in September at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco and at SHOP.org, the conference for digital retailers, in Dallas.
A friend who spent several years as an IT manager for a large company once told me that while he loved the work, he dreaded the late night phone calls. For a while, his employer was reluctant to let him install remote access software on his office computer and even when they did, their approved program only allowed access to his desktop. He couldn’t monitor or check out important servers without making a late-night drive.
He would have loved RemoteToPC. It’s a single product that combines remote access to a PC desktop with remote monitoring and management (RMM) and the ability to generate critical system alerts via email or mobile phone.
Developed by a Dallas-based team that ran their own IT company, RemoteToPC is easy to install and configure. It supports remote access from any computer that can connect to the Internet. Perhaps more important are the RMM features which aren’t baked into typical remote access programs.
RemoteToPC monitors vital components, such as RAM, CPU and C-Drive and it includes a heartbeat monitor for servers or other important systems that must always be online.
If a systems goes offline or if a crucial metric reaches a critical state, RemoteToPC sends an alert by text or email that tells a manager what’s wrong on which computer. And, if the system is still online, they have the ability to log in and fix the issue.
RemoteToPC is one of the most affordable remote support solutions available with prices starting at $99 per year for 10 computers. All plans are available for a 14-day free trial.
Even the most dedicated IT professionals can’t see everything that’s happening on a company network. Any serious network monitoring requires help from a digital appliance such as SentiNet3, a proactive monitoring device created by the Italian company Data Informatica.
SentiNet3 is a unified monitoring system that can watch an entire IT infrastructure, including applications. It’s users include Italian police and security services as well as private companies.
Antonio Capobianco, the CEO of Fata Informatica, said this about the Gartner recognition:
To be included in the Gartner’s Market Guide, for us is not the only reason to be proud, but also the result of the strong company commitment in the IT systems monitoring field. We are collecting the benefits of our meticulous and accurate work that we have been carrying on for over twenty years. In particular, thanks to SentiNet3 we are able to map constantly computer systems, monitor them and adopt timely remediation in case of security threats.
Details about SentiNet3 are available on the company’s website, which has a list of product features and profiles of how clients are using the product.
Success can sometimes bring failure. Consider the story told by an entrepreneur who appeared on the TV show Shark Tank. The exposure caused a sharp spike in visits to his website, but traffic caused the site to crash.
The ability to scale resources to meet demand is one of the big trends driving the growth of companies offering cloud-based virtual private servers (VPS). BlueiTech, a hosting service based in Italy, describes its target market this way:
“When a shared hosting space is not enough, and a Cloud Server or a Dedicated Server solutions are too expensive for your project, Cloud VPS can be a good compromise.”
BluiTech says its cloud virtual private servers are configured using quad-core processors and can use the most popular Linux distributions or Windows.
Customers get management dashboard that allows users to check the server status, restart server, and control the consumption of resources using any web browser. The company also provides 24/7 tech support.
Everybody will screw up at some point. You delete or overwrite a file that you meant to keep. it’s like tossing an important document into the trash. Big, fat oops.
But in the data world, deleted files aren’t usually deleted. The stuff you need is there, often in pieces, somewhere on your hard drive. All you need is a program that’s smart enough to find those pieces and reassemble them.
That’s what Do Your Data Recovery 4.1 does. It’s a data recovery program that will work on either Windows or Mac computers. The developer says the latest version allows users to more easily scan a PC or Mac drive to recover deleted or lost files.
The new version also fixes a bug in the activation process and improved the deep scan algorithm to shorten the time of deep scan. It can find and recover photos, emails, videos, audio, documents, folders and other files in three steps. It also supports FAT 12/16/32, exFAT, NTFS, NTFS 5, ext 2, ext 3 and is fully compatible with Windows 10/8/8.1.
The days of a lone programmer knocking out a complete application are long gone. Today’s software is so complicated that it is typically written by teams of coders, often in different locations and continents.
At some point, all those segments have to merged, connected and verified, a process that can significantly lengthen the timeline of a project. Implementing continuous integration (CI), a process that makes those connections while the code is being written, can shorten that timeline.
A hosted CI service called flow.ci says it can make the integration process faster and easier to use. While many CI tools need additional coding or other complex set up steps, flow.ci promises two-click simplicity.
The service works with several programming languages, including Ruby, PHP, Python and Android. And it supports plugin for code analysis, notification engines and other elements.
Users can try flow.ci for free until the end of its current beta period. For more details, visit the flow.ci website.
If you are an IT executive in charge of your company’s disaster recovery plan, Unitrends has a $50 Amazon gift card with your name on it.
The global cloud solutions provider is offering the reward to promote Unitrends DRaaS - disaster recovery assurance as a service. Unitrends offers cloud-based recovery solutions to ensure that a business is “always on,” even in the event of a disaster.
In a 15-minute telephone conversation, a Unitrends representative will review a company’s disaster plan and explain how Unitrends DRaaS can guarantee a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of less than one hour.
The gift card offer is available to qualified applicants schedule and complete the call with a Unitrends solutions consultant.
For more details and to sign up for the call, check this special page on the Unitrends website.
I have an account with a local server company that I opened several years ago. It includes hosting space for a couple of small websites. I haven’t had any issues in the past, but that doesn’t insure the future.
What if the company’s building burns down or my files get lost or stolen? Do I have a backup? Do they? I don’t know.
I do know that there are services like Backup My-Website that offer safe file storage similar to what Carbonite offers for files stored on desktop computers and mobile devices.
The company offers schedule daily or weekly site backups that include MySQL database and emails. A starter package that includes one website and one database, up to 0.5 GB, with seven days of backup history. The company is currently offering the package as a free trial for 30 days. Packages for multiple sites and larger storage limits are also available.
For more information, check out the home website for Backup My-Website.
If you know anything about 404, you know it’s nothing good. On the web, it means you’ve driven down a dead end. You followed a link to a page that is broken, outdated or unresponsive, usually for reasons unknown.
The dreaded 404 error message is the bane of web managers everywhere. When I was in charge of more than a dozen websites, I would literally lose sleep wondering if I was sending my readers down an off-ramp to nowhere.
Today, webmaster have access to sophisticated tools like the Broken Link Tool from Atomseo, which will launch a speedy analysis of any website and deliver a detailed report within a few minutes.
You can get a free link check (up to 3,000) by entering a web address on the front page of the Atomseo website. I gave it a test drive by entering the address of a site run by a local small business that is well known in my community.
Atomseo checks both internal and external links as well as backlinks pointing to a site from a third-party location.
The internal check helps you discover links you might have forgotten about. If you delete or rename a page on your site, that breaks any links that point to that page. External links point to a page outside your domain.
Perhaps most important are broken links that point to your site from third-p[arty sites. Getting linked from an external source, especially a high-value site like CNN or The New York Times, can boost your visibility with Google and other search engines. At the same time, an external pointer that delivers a 404 error is a serious demerit.
The check I ran on the local business's website scanned about 3,300 pages. It found only a couple of internal and external errors, but logged a stunning 10 percent error rate for links pointing to the local site after checking only 100 backlink pages. That’s the sort of report card you wouldn’t want to show to your parents.
The free version of Atomseo is like a quick checkup. It delivers a snapshot of your site and lets you know if you have a link issue. Serious webmaster will want to consider the Professional package, which costs $9.95 a month and checks thousands more pages and links.
Future enhancements for Atomseo include real-time link monitoring, scanning for broken images and automated redirection for broken links. You can get their full story in the video below and more details about services and prices at the Atomseo website. The link-checking tool is also available as a Chrome extension in Google's Chrome Web Store.
When D-Wave introduced its quantum computer two years ago, it was reported to have a price tag said to be “north of 10 Million dollars.” So, there’s no chance that you’ll ever have access to one.
Or maybe there is.
Pascal Papara and his associates at ARES Computer inh want to make access to high-level computing available and affordable. ARES has launched a Kickstarter campaign to back a effort that would make quantum computing “accessible to a broader user base including institutions, schools and medical facilities.”
ARES hopes to raise at least 70,000 Euros by Sept. 11. Project backers will get various rewards including free cloud storage, a Raspberry Pi case or the W4LK3R computer that’s based on the Raspberry Pi 2.
The money will be used to create an access and sharing model using a cloud platform and D-Wave’s Quantum Technology. Users will be able to access the system using a desktop OS or Raspberry Pi.
For more details, check the video below and visit the Kickstarter page.
I started reporting on gadgets and gear when Atari ruled electronic games and computers used floppy disks. My weekly column ran in the The Louisville Courier-Journal and online at USAToday.com and ABC News.com. I was a regular at tech trade shows including COMDEX, CES and the CEDIA show for home theater. Follow @GizmoEditor on Twitter and on Facebook. Contact me at ricman@iglou.comI also create short videos for vendors to use on Amazon and YouTube. Click here to see a portfolio of my recent videos.
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