Data Net Blog

Technology can bring many dynamic benefits to an organization, but it can also derail its successful trajectory. One of the significant considerations that must be made is whether the technology your organization is implementing fits your business needs. Today, we will describe how having a knowledgeable perspective can help you avoid making investments that may not produce the rapid returns that most small businesses require. 

When a business goes into action to improve itself, it typically goes into the process thinking that whatever changes it makes can significantly affect how it functions. Unfortunately, this isn’t always the case. Today, we’ll discuss how professional consultants provide a perspective that can revolutionize how your business operates.

If you are a smaller Not-for-Profit, it is likely that your organization has been driven from its inception by individuals strongly motivated with a passion for their cause or humanitarian goal. As a result, it is also possible that the leadership has little interest in developing the administrative technology infrastructure that is necessary for any organization to function in the internet age.

You might recall our blog last week on smart chips, a term used to describe some fun and useful Google Docs inserts. Today, we want to take a closer look at these smart chips and what you can do with them in Google Docs and Sheets.

Are you familiar with the works of Isaac Asimov? The author wrote a short story called “Runaround” in 1942, and it introduced the idea of the Three Laws of Robotics, or laws that all of the robots in his Robots series must follow. This stranger-than-reality concept is being used today by Google, which has announced a set of safeguards partially inspired by these three laws to help it control future AI-powered machines.

You can have all the locks on your data center and have all the network security available, but nothing will keep your data safe if your employees are careless with passwords.

Some people say it’s never okay to be satisfied with your business. You should always search for improvement to make your business more valuable to your customers and society. But when is enough, enough? When can you settle in and grind it out without a constant eye toward the future? Today, we thought we’d talk about the fear of complacency and how it can both help and hinder your intentions. 

One area where AI tools can help even the smallest business is in sales and marketing. Every business is marketing and selling in the online digital world. Marketing on social media is a given for every business, and can be a game-changer for a small startup. However, a lot of the tasks of marketing on social media and through your website can involve tedious, time consuming tasks. Marketing tools that use AI can help with drip email campaigns, website visitor tracking, and understanding where each customer exists in the sales funnel at any given moment. Other digital tools that increase customer engagement and drive sales are available and are an excellent introduction to AI as a marketing tool. Using these tools, you can focus your limited sales resources on other, more critical tasks such as closing a sale with a customer that is now ready to buy and not simply exploring vague options. These AI tools are readily available and your MSP can guide you in the adoption and use of them

You must make difficult decisions in any walk of life, especially in running a business. The most critical decisions will focus on policies that help you keep employees and ensure they are motivated. Today, we want to discuss some of the problems associated with employee churn, or turnover, and what you can do to combat it in today’s modern business environment.

As the popularity of blockchain technology continues to rise, it's essential to explore its functionality and understand why it deserves attention. While commonly portrayed as a dubious tool associated with cryptocurrencies and scams, the fundamental nature of blockchain is far from nefarious. In reality, its decentralized and transparent attributes make it well-suited for various tasks, and we'll describe how it can be used for more than cryptocurrency below.

We know that living in a constant state of fear of being scammed is not ideal, but it’s the unfortunate reality of living in today’s technologically advanced world. The good news is that it’s never too late to learn how to avoid them! Let’s discuss how you can be more aware of the challenges of scams not only in a business setting, but in everyday life.

Are there risks to AI? Absolutely. There are end-of-the-world predictions about the use of IA. For a business, many of the risks are a bit less extreme, but they are also very real. For example, in the area of content creation. There are a variety of risks that you open yourself up to. One of the key ones is the trustworthiness of the content created. You rely on generative AI to create an accurate explanation or description of a topic, event, thing, or idea, However, can you, in fact, completely rely on that? The answer is probably a qualified no. The level of “qualified” depends on a variety of factors. Your AI generated content is only as good as its sources, and that can create real questions for readers. Also, an organization using AI to create any type of video, text, image, or audio content needs to be concerned that it may include proprietary information that you need permission to use. Could material created by generative AI suddenly veer off into copyright infringement?

2023 was quite the year, especially where AI is concerned. The technology became the center of attention in the business world and in the public. What does this mean for AI, and how has this technology changed the way we do business, for better or worse? Let’s dive in.

The cloud is a great tool for a modern business, provided the resources a business is using are properly configured. Otherwise, the business is sitting on a potential security breach. Let’s talk about why this is, and what can be done about it.

IT seems it is virtually impossible to avoid hearing about Artificial Intelligence (AI). Ever since ChatGPT hit the market, AI has become a never ending source of news, articles, advertisements, and lots of gloom. Artificial intelligence isn’t exactly new--the term goes back to the mid-1950s. Artificial Intelligence is a broad term and encompasses a few different subsets of processes. Generally, it refers to machines or computers doing things that we consider a skill limited to human intelligence. What has caught the public eye is what is labeled “generative AI”. Generative AI (e.g ChatGPT) refers to the AI tools that can create content, music, images, code and voice. One of the reasons generative AI is so widespread in its applications is that it doesn’t require coding skills for a layperson to use it, instead the user can instruct the tool to create content by using natural language.

Small businesses often find themselves reevaluating their operational strategies to maximize efficiency. While various technologies can enhance operations for any small and medium-sized Business (SMB), this blog will focus on two that stand out as particularly impactful.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been all the media rage in the past year. Specifically, it isn't AI in general, but a specific category of AI known as generative AI. This AI is capable of creating content, such as text, images, audio and similar data. Examples of generative AI tools can create content, music, image code, and voice. What this can include are documents that are used for marketing and other content on websites, as well as images, video, and audio. What made generative AI more widespread are the tools that use natural language to utilize them. It doesn;t necessarily require expertise in coding anymore. The generative AI tool that hit the news and has everyone curious about this development is ChatGPT. This allows any user to create conversations, answer text, and similar “written responses.” ChatGPT and similar tools are available to almost anyone.

Evolving considerations are definitely a major part of doing business. A decision made a year or even a quarter in the past might not be right for your business today. When trying to establish a technology profile that is right for your business, it can be difficult to nail down exactly what solutions allow you to improve overall efficiency while supporting organizational productivity. In today’s blog, we try to give a couple of tips for when to establish when it is time to shift gears and consider new tech.

We’re always telling people to avoid clicking on suspicious links, but the bad guys are making it harder to tell the difference between a legitimate URL and a suspicious one. We’re going to try to simplify it for you, and have you focus on the placement of a single punctuation mark in a link to tell if it might be safe or dangerous.

Over the last half-year, Meta, the renowned social media conglomerate (formerly known as Facebook), has been strategically capitalizing on all the drama within Twitter (referred to as X) by introducing Threads, a microblogging community akin to its X counterpart. Today, we will look at Threads by drawing comparisons with Twitter and taking a look at Meta's motivations in enticing users away from the established microblogging giant.