Archive for July, 2011

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Apple Inc. – From a minnow to a Giant

Friday, July 29th, 2011

Who hasn’t heard of the legendary consumer electronics company Apple Inc.? With its trademark logo of a monochrome apple, it is hard not to notice it. In today’s day and age, the company has literally attained the status of a computer giant. With its impeccable manufacturing standards and distinct products with unique patented features, the wide range of Apple products make it hard not to be a fan of the company.

But the company was not always like this. It was not always seen as a technological giant. Au contraire, the company had to struggle for several years towards the end of the 20th century. The company was founded by the trio of Steve Jobs, Ronald Wayne and Steve Wozniak in the year 1976 as Apple Computers Inc. and had extremely humble beginnings. The first product launched by the company was a wooden hand crafted computer called the Apple I, which lacked a monitor, a GUI (Graphic User Interface) and everything else we now blindly associate with a computer. In fact, the modern day generation would be hard pressed to distinguish it from a regular typewriter, as that is what it looked like.

From these humble beginnings, began a journey of building a company whose USP was its products. “Think Different”, the motto of the company, might scarcely have been implemented more effectively by any other company. Since the very beginning, Apple prided itself in delivering products which were different in their design, structure as well as internal architecture than the products of other companies.

Through its rich legacy of more than 30 years, the company has seen many ups and downs and a lot of infighting and power struggles as well. In the initial years, after a string of successes, the company saw a long line of failures which eroded its market share and consumer trust. These were the years when there was a lot of rivalry going on with then then CEO John Sculley and Steve Jobs, a rivalry which ultimately led to the bitter resignation of Steve Jobs from a company he created.

But all was not lost. As luck would have it, the board of directors eventually dismissed John Sculley, brought in another CEO who again didn’t do much to turn around the company’s fortune. It would finally take the next CEO, Gil Amelio to be the harbinger of change. While he too failed to vitalize the company’s stocks and consumer trust, he did make the decision to purchase Steve Jobs’s company which he had formed when he was ousted from Apple. In 1997, Steve Jobs was reinstated as an interim CEO and under his magical hands did Apple finally manage to find its feet and become the technological giant we have come to know it as.

The company’s fortunes were greatly revitalized in the post 2000 era. With radical design changes to its flagship range of personal computers, the Macintosh, the customer suddenly had a very viable alternative to staid looking desktop computers. But the golden age of Apple Inc. actually commenced post 2007 when the company finally got its act right and successfully ventured into the non-computer markets. The launch of the now ubiquitous portable music player iPod heralded a new era in the company’s history and with the elimination of the name ‘Computer’ from its name, Apple finally became the most valued technological company in the world.

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Business Phones: A Statement of Style and Functionality

Thursday, July 28th, 2011

What are they?

In today’s day and age the de facto mode of communication between people is the cell phone. The old trusty landline has more or less been relegated to the annals of history. So when someone mentions business phones, it elicits an understandably surprised response from the vast majority of people. They wonder what on earth business phones are. Are they landline based phones? Are they some new breed of cellphones targeted at the business person? Or is it something in between?

Well business phones as the name suggests are rightly targeted at business minded people and business owners. What is however not apparent from the name is the fact that these phones are entirely landline based phones. People may scoff at the idea of having landline based phones, that too for business in today’s day and age. But the fact of the matter remains that having a stable fixed landline based business phone is a mark of stability. It lends credibility to a business and is one of the hallmarks distinguishing established businesses from fly by night operators.

What is the utility of Business Phone?

So apart from the fact that a business phone lends credibility to a business or company, what other benefits do business phones provide? Well quite a few actually.

A business phone lends greatly to the organizational capabilities of the company. It helps to properly channelize both incoming and outgoing calls to the company. It greatly facilitates intra departmental and inter departmental calls. Modern day business phones like those from AB Telecom or Avaya have a highly integrated network solutions system to take care of dense office phone networks. They are especially useful for big business houses which have offices spread across several floors and each floor has several departments.

As an example of the efficient organization system which can be put in place by employing modern day business phones, the company is provided with a singular phone number and each employee is provided with a unique extension number. Thus no more does one have to sort through a jungle of mismatching phone numbers and end up calling the wrong person. One can very easily reach a specific person by dialing in the company phone number, the department extension number, the office extension number and finally the employee’s unique identification number. It is a straightforward process to call each other when one employs modern day business phones to handle daily office communications.

Besides, all said and done, the call rates for landline based numbers are still cheaper than the cellphone rates in most parts of the world. It therefore makes perfect business sense to install business phone systems in offices to take care of office communication needs. It can easily save many thousands of dollars on annual phone expenditures for the concerned company.

In addition to all of these benefits, modern day business phones come equipped with a host of interesting value added features which greatly enhance the functionality and utility of the business phones. The feature of VoIP is especially useful as it allows the person to conduct international business calls easily and conveniently.

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Understanding the Technology Behind Google

Wednesday, July 27th, 2011

Anyone who is familiar with the internet is familiar with Google. In a short span of time, Google has become a part of our lives in unimaginable ways. Whether it is researching information for a homework project or trying to figure out if you are pregnant, Google is the first resource people turn to.

Google Products

Google offers a number of products, the most popular, being Google search engine, which was the starting point for the company. Even today, the company devotes maximum time and engineering efforts to bring greater innovation and effectiveness to its search engine. Google has also launched a browser called Google Chrome that is very effective and quick in accessing information from the internet.  Google Docs is a popular service that enables you to share presentations, spreadsheets and documents online, without the effort of emailing. Many times, file sizes become a restricting factor in emails. This problem disappears with Google Docs.  Realizing that mobile phones are becoming almost omnipresent with advanced technology, Google has made available its services in the mobile phone friendly format. You can access Google products on your phone by typing m.google.com in the phone browser. These are just few of the products in Google’s vast portfolio.

Technology

Google utilizes world class technology in order to improve the search engine effectiveness for users. The company has state of the art software and technology, which ensure that all search engine results are relevant, comprehensive, updated and extremely quickly available.

Relevance

Relevance is the key attribute people look for when searching for information online. Google uses a technology called ‘PageRank’, to improve relevance. PageRank determines the importance of a web page by looking at what other pages link to it. If the page has more links with other pages containing similar information, it will rank higher in the search engine results. The advantage for the user is that within a single page, he gets other links with information relevant to his search.

Comprehensive Database

Google tries to provide information in a most comprehensive manner by indexing billions and billions of web pages. The Google index today is 100 million gigabytes. The ‘Universal Search’ launched by Google in 2007 integrates images, news and books into your search results, making the results more comprehensive.

Updated Information

Google understands that information which is not current is not only useless, but may even prove dangerous at times. Google’s state of the art technology enables it to provide you with information minutes after it has been posted. This is possible due to software program called ‘Googlebots’ that are continuously crawling over the web and collecting latest updated information to store in the database.

Speed

It is Google’s endeavor to provide the information you are looking within the shortest possible time. On an average the query response time taken by Google is one fourth of a second. And we are all familiar with ‘autocomplete’ and ‘google instant’ technology that identify the search term even before we type it completely, thus saving precious time.

 

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Avaya – Communication Meets Cutting Edge

Tuesday, July 26th, 2011

Avaya is a global leader in providing effective communication solutions for businesses. The company provides unified communication, contact centers and data solutions for their customers. Avaya communication products focus on collaboration enabling a single device to cater to a variety of communication needs.

Avaya Contact Centre Solutions

Customer support is an important aspect for any organization, irrespective of the industry and companies support customers through their contact centers. Avaya is the world leader in providing innovative contact center solutions for its customers. Avaya contact centre solutions enable clients to interact with their customers in an effective and professional manner. Always on the forefront of innovation, the latest Avaya contact center software, Avaya Aura Contact Centre 6.2, enables agents to pick up relevant updates from social media like Twitter and Facebook and answer customer queries.

Avaya Unified Communication Products

Avaya understands the importance of business communication. Effective business communication makes organizations more productive and responsive. Technology in communication has advanced to such an extent today that we have multiple communication devices. Avaya understands that the challenge is to offer a single communication device that satisfies the myriad communications needs. Avaya’s state of the art unified communication solutions integrate voice, data and video, enabling customers to communicate and collaborate in a manner that best suits the particular occasion. Avaya offers an open software platform for developing multi vendor communications and Communications Enabled Business Process Applications (CEBPA) that are very popular with the clients.

Avaya Data Centre Solutions

Avaya offers world class data centre solutions to clients to maintain integrity of the servers housed within. Clients are very emphatic that data center solutions by Avaya enable them to provide ultra reliable and secure network facilities to their customers. Customers want state of the art data centers that are easy to design, effortless to deploy and simple to manage. The Avaya VENA is the product that offers these features across the enterprise network. Another critical component of the Avaya data centre portfolio is the Avaya VSP 7000 that is a flexible, high density top of the rack server switch, which has gained considerable popularity amongst clients for its reliability.

Avaya Dev Connect Program

Avaya has a unique Dev Connect program, through which it markets and promotes products by other companies that can be used in conjunction with Avaya products. Of course the Dev Connect partners have to pass rigorous quality standards before their products can be part of the program. This is an advantage for customers as they do not have to spend lot of time looking for quality accessories. Also the Dev Connect partners have access to a wide range of technical resources, tools and know-how offered by Avaya.  Plantronics, another communications major is an Avaya Dev Connect member. So you can use the range of Plantronic headsets with your Avaya phones without a second thought.

Corporate Responsibility

Avaya is committed not only towards its customers, but also to society. The company believes in giving back to society and has a corporate responsibility policy in place. Besides corporate charity in terms of money, the company believes in leveraging its cutting edge technologies to meet the communication challenges of society at large. Avaya is also committed to its environmental goals by using environment friendly products in their own operations.

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Polycom Conference Phones – No more Travel for Meetings

Monday, July 25th, 2011

Communication is an essential tool in business. Strides in technology have always aimed at bringing forth devices that satisfy our varying communications needs. Traditionally, telephonic communication was between two people. But there are situations where one or more people are required to join in. In order to address this need, the conference phones came into existence. Polycom, the industry leader in united collaboration solutions has been the pioneer in introducing high quality conference phones that are very effective communication tools.

Polycom Conference Phones

Communication is not a concept, characterized by one sided talk alone. For communication to be effective there has to be an exchange of ideas, with each party involved, being able to understand the other clearly and then put forth its own comments. Polycom conference phones help achieve this. Polycom offers VOIP conference phones as well as analog conference phones.

Features of Polycom Conference Phones

Polycom conference phones provide clear, productive conference calls with high voice quality. They have expansive microphone pick up, so that all words in the conversation are picked up, ensuring zero word gaps. .Polycom conference phones use advanced audio processing that makes conference calls offer very clear voice quality at both ends. Depending on the model and technology used, Polycom conference phones can be used for conference calls or video conferencing. Different models of Polycom conference phones are available that cater to small, midsize or large conference rooms. Polycom conference phones can be used to set up conference calls in two ways – either the called party can participate in the call or can only listen. The latter option may be used in cases where the top management wants to make a special announcement to all employees across locations.

Benefits of Polycom Conference Phones

Polycom conference phones offer a variety of benefits to companies

Considerable Reduction in Travel Costs

With Polycom conference phones, companies are able to conduct meetings with customers, vendors and other associates in remote locations without the necessity of travel. Besides cutting down the travel expenditure, it also has other benefits in terms of time advantage. You save the time that you would spend getting ready for travel and the actual travel time. This time can be utilized productively in the organization. Thus Polycom conference phones indirectly boost productivity.

Meetings more Effective

Polycom conference phones make sure that everyone is heard clearly. This ensures that meetings are shorter and more effective. In email communications, if anybody has a doubt, there is a time lag before the doubt gets cleared. Also the other team members may not become aware of this issue. With Polycom conference phones, doubts, if any can be raised immediately and answered at once too, and inputs from the team is also possible.

In conclusion, Polycom conference phones, because of their ability to connect groups of people across locations, are making business communication more effective and convenient.

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Plantronics Headsets – A Truly Mobile Experience

Saturday, July 23rd, 2011

Mobile phones are a necessity in business communications as well as day to day life. The focus of technology has always been to enhance the effectiveness of this very important device. Initially came the headsets which remained connected to the device, but enabled hands free mobile phone usage.  The next logical technological innovation was the wireless headsets.

Bluetooth Headsets

Bluetooth technology makes the mobile phones more functional by providing wireless headsets. Plantronicss, the US based communications giant has been the pioneer in introducing Bluetooth wireless headsets. Plantronics headsets with Bluetooth technology are the currently the best option available for communication devices on the go offering you a truly mobile experience.

Plantronics Headset Options

Plantronics offers a variety of options in its headsets product range. Given below are some of the most popular Plantronics headsets.

  • Plantronics Voyager Pro Bluetooth Headset

This is one of the best selling Plantronics headsets, popular for its sleek design and affordability. The headset has won the i7 Product Design Award for its unique shape that sits snugly in the ear. The feature unique to this Plantronics headset is the Audio IQ2 that delivers noise cancellation more effectively, making the audio clearer. The microphone in the headset is positioned closer to the mouth, making your voice more distinguishable at the other end. The Plantronics Voyager Pro Bluetooth headset has windsmart technology that deletes excessive wind and other outside occurrence sounds from your call. An important feature of this Plantronics headset is that the parts touching the ear are made of soft material, making it comfortable to wear for long periods.

  • Plantronics M100i Bluetooth Headset

This Plantronics headset packs in an impressive range of functions, despite its compact size and light weight. The headset offers six hours of nonstop talk time. It has dual microphone for crystal clear audio performance. This Plantronics headset is compatible with mobile phones and other devices that have Bluetooth technology. So you may use it with your Bluetooth enabled smart phone or laptop.

Features of Plantronics Headsets

Convenience of Use: Plantronics headsets are small in size and fit easily in the ear. Because they use Bluetooth technology, you can answer calls with a single touch on Plantronics headsets, even when the phone is away. This is because two or more devices with Bluetooth technology, within 30 feet automatically connect with each other. So the embarrassing situation where you are frantically searching for your ringing mobile phone will disappear.

Cost Advantage: Bluetooth technology is relatively inexpensive for companies to implement. This results in major cost advantage for customers as the Plantronics headsets are priced affordably.

Benefits of Plantronics Headsets at Work

Using Bluetooth technology, all Plantronics headsets are wireless and offer a total hands free mobile experience. With Plantronics headsets, you may answer an important call, without interrupting your work. There are many instances when you need to provide information to the caller at the other end. With Plantronics headsets, you can easily search for files physically or on the computer, without interrupting the call.

Other Benefits of Plantronics headsets

Plantronics headsets are very useful while driving, if you want instructions to reach somewhere. Several states have legislations in place that permit you to use only wireless headsets while driving. Plantronics headsets are ideal for this situation. Plantronics headsets are also useful at home, where you can multi task, going about your regular activities, while talking on the phone.

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Multi Tech Fax Servers- all in one solution

Friday, July 22nd, 2011

A multi tech fax server is an all in one fax server. The product has the entire capability of advanced faxing. It is a life time investment for small offices and medium sized business organizations. This fax server distributes the faxing capabilities over WAN. The equipment is a complete solution for the office fax system.

Multi Tech Fax servers are different from traditional fax machines. They are neither bulky nor complicated navigation. This new fax server is portable and easy to navigate. It can easily convert files. This fax server can convert PDF files into TIFF files. The fax finder also delivers the TIFF files to the receiver’s inbox. The file can also be transferred to the network finder. The machine can also send faxes by the applications of Microsoft. It does not require physical existence of the data which needs to be transferred. The modern technology has changed the entire outlook of the fax machine and faxing services.

The Fax Finder also provides secured services. The privacy of the fax sent can be maintained even if the users are connected through LAN. There is a variety of functions that are catered by the Multi tech Fax Server. The equipment provides a facility of including a number of documents in the same fax which makes it cost saving. The user can get the notification of any error or failure while the data is transferred. The notification is sent via e mail. Web interface is available with easy management. Multi Tech Fax Finder can be easily configured and the firmware updates are available. The fax server has a huge space for the storage of both inbound and outbound faxes.

The product comes with a two year warranty for the customers. It has been tested for any kind of problems or loopholes. The main benefit of purchasing Multi Tech Fax Servers is that it is truly worth the investment made. The customers can get the true value of the money invested. The product has a complete return on investment. It is durable and extremely reliable. The technical detailing of the Multi Tech Fax Servers has been done in such a way that it requires minimal navigational requirements. It works automatically. The product is compatible with all kinds of operating systems.

This is very important that the product is compatible with all types of Windows operating system. It can be easily configured to different personal computers therefore is easily transferrable also. It can convert the documents from email to fax and fax to email also. The customers can trust the product without any hesitation.

SE Telecom has been the official provider of Avaya Phones and Cisco phones for years in Canada. It has become a name the customers can trust upon. The technical team of SE Telecom is available for the customer’s assistance whenever required. The years of experience have made this company an expert in this field. Change the entire outlook of the office communication system with SE Telecom.

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