Walsh IT Group Blog

Would you believe us if we told you that the maps we have grown up looking at are remarkably skewed? That pull-down map in the front of every elementary school classroom probably wasn’t to scale, for one reason or another. Modern technology can make it possible for hackers to skew satellite imaging, and this could very well be used in the cybercrime avenue in the future. The developing technology of deepfake images could bring about a whole new type of threat.

COVID-19 forced many businesses to adapt to the new normal, and many of those who simply refused or were unable to do so fell by the wayside. As you can imagine, technology played a pivotal role in helping many businesses adjust to these changes. Let’s take a look at some of the more notable examples of how digital technology has helped businesses adapt to these circumstances.

While most people may be most familiar with the concept of the blockchain thanks to cryptocurrencies—particularly with the recent behaviors of some coins—this first application of the blockchain has blossomed into many others with great potential. Let’s go over what blockchain technology is, how it works, and how it can benefit businesses of all kinds.

For years, people have been increasingly worried about the potential onslaught of automation on human jobs. As computer systems and artificial intelligence have improved, there are some legitimate concerns for unskilled workers or those that work in industries where automation is featured. Today, we’ll dive into what concerns workers should have on account of automation and why no one should be panicking quite yet. 

Business technology can be a complicated topic, and with it appearing in more and more aspects of daily operations, it is important for organizations of all sizes to be sure that they have a complete understanding and awareness of how they put their IT to use. These considerations make it imperative that certain best practices are made part of your standard operating procedures… and for this to be accomplished, company leadership will need to lead by example.

Paper documentation has long been a fixture in the office as a means of helping to organize information and other resources. Of course, asbestos was a fixture in building construction for quite some time as well, so it should be clear that the established way of doing things is never guaranteed to be the best. Considering this, let’s go over what a modern Document Management System is and what options a small to medium-sized business has to choose from.

Even the most seasoned technology professional—the most gung-ho person about the technology—probably thinks that there’s too much IT-related jargon and buzzwords now floating around. There is a good reason for this: analogies and euphemisms are effective ways to communicate concepts and ideas that would otherwise require technical experience.

However, there is such a thing as too much.

Technology is a big part of the front end of almost every business. This is doubly true today as most businesses have built—and actively support—a robust web presence. Technology, however, is also used to power a business on the back end. Today, we’ll discuss a couple ways that today’s businesses are benefiting from automation behind the scenes, as well.

There are theoretically countless ways that artificial intelligence can have practical applications. One that you may not have initially considered: as a content filter for Internet comments. With trolling, spamming, and other misuse of these platforms getting far out of hand, let’s consider how some platforms are using AI to fight back.

Smartphones are a big part of modern society. Just go to any place where people congregate and look around, you’ll see what we are talking about. Businesses have finally begun to realize that they can’t do anything about people bringing their smartphones into the office, so they have instead begun to alter their strategies on how to manage these devices. Let’s take a brief look at the modern smartphone and see just how much people are depending on their mobile devices. 

Innovation is a core necessity of the market economy. Taking good ideas and making them more dynamic and practical fuels economic growth, efficiency, and creates a better standard of living for the entire culture. IT is now firmly transforming the way that business is done with innovative tools and strategies. Today, we’ll look at some of the shifts we are seeing come about as a result of information technology. 

Augmented reality is a technology that has been around for a while, and has been thought of as one of the “next big things” for the past few years. AR almost broke out of obscurity with the development of Google Glass earlier in the decade, but with well-founded security and privacy concerns that come with providing the technology that makes AR possible, the market dropped out. That’s not to say that AR is done, however. In fact, it seems as with the growth of new technologies, AR is also beginning to grow.

While we typically write about matters that concern your business and its use of technology in this blog, we decided to do something a little different today. Someday in the not-so-distant future, today’s students will make up the workforce, and their educations are more shaped by technology than ever before. That’s why we wanted to examine the role technology plays in education (warts and all), to understand how it is impacting our youth.

There have been whispers for years about manufacturers using flexible OLED (organic light-emitting diode) displays to create devices that were flexible enough to fold in half. As late as 2018, that’s all they were...whispers. In the subsequent year, to the surprise of many industry professionals, several manufacturers have committed to creating foldable devices. We’ll look at the technology behind these devices and tell you about which foldable devices are going to be available in 2019.

Technology innovation continues to move rapidly. It seems that every few days that there is a major breakthrough with some type of IT or other computer-based technology that is seemingly going to change the world; or, at the very least improve humanity in some way. Sometimes, however, it just wasn’t meant to be. We’ll take a look at a few technologies that once were shoo-ins to transform society, only to have come up short in one way or another.

Artificial intelligence has been making waves in the world of cybersecurity, as machine learning could potentially make the solutions we have today smarter and better at their intended jobs. However, artificial intelligence has also appeared on the other side of cybersecurity, as cybercriminals have begun to leverage A.I. as well.

At the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES), new products (and the technologies that fuel those products) are put on display to give industry professionals a look to see what companies are working on. At CES 2018, held in Las Vegas, Band and Olufsen introduced their speakers-as-art-concept, Samsung unveiled a 146” television that is designed to take up a wall, and many companies, including Aura, introduced new smart home security products that are sure to get an intruder’s attention (over Wi-Fi).