Amazon’s Echo speakers may be used mainly in the home, but putting the listening / privacy fears aside, they can be useful in a business setting, particularly in small business settings / home offices. With this in mind, here are four skills commands that could help you.

Create Reminders with Alexa

Alexa can act like a personal assistant. For example, you can tell Alexa exactly what you need to remember e.g. business appointments on certain days / times and it will remind you of that task and time. To create a reminder, say the task and its time such as, “Alexa, remind me to review customer accounts 10 a.m. every Monday”.

Create Distinctive Voice Profiles

By setting up voice profiles, Alexa can distinguish who is issuing the command e.g. different people in the office can ask “Alexa, what’s on my calendar?” Ask Alexa for details of how to do it.

ChatBot Skill

By enabling the ChatBot skill, workers can audibly request Alexa to post on their behalf. This can aid productivity. It can be achieved by linking an Amazon account to a Slack account. Users can then post to a specific channel by asking Alexa.

Find Your Phone

You can use Alexa to help you find your phone by using your voice. This is a free skill available from Amazon here. The phone should ring even if it is on silent. It may not work if your phone is in Do Not Disturb mode, but you can add multiple people by name to call different phones instead of just one.

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A study by Pew in the US has found that Facebook is now lagging behind YouTube, Instagram and Snapchat, as a platform where teenagers spend their time.

Down To 4th Place

The study, which involved 750 teens in one month earlier this year, found that Facebook has experienced a 20% point drop since 2015 in its usage by teenage users. Even though 51% use Facebook, this is still a long way behind the 85% preferring YouTube (Google-owned), 72% preferring Instagram (which is owned by Facebook anyway), and the 69% preferring Snapchat.

What’s Been Happening?

An eMarketer report illustrates what’s been happening. The report predicts that in 2018, 2.2 million 12 to 17-year-olds and 4.5 million 18 to 24-year-olds will regularly use Facebook in the UK, but this is 700,000 fewer than in 2017. Most of the young defectors appear to be going instead to Snapchat.

The same report shows that there has been a surge in older users of Facebook, and over-55s will become the second-biggest demographic of Facebook users this year. For example, 500,000 new over-55s are expected to join Facebook in 2018, and this will bring the number of 55- to 65-year-old-plus regular Facebook users this year to 6.4 million.

Teenage Users Passing Over Instagram For Snapchat

One of the reasons why Facebook bought Instagram was so that it could at least keep some of the young people who were deserting Facebook as customers as of one of its services.

Unfortunately, what’s been happening is that young people appear to have been leaving Facebook, and going to Snapchat instead of Instagram. For example, in the last 3 years Snapchat has more than doubled its take-up rate among UK users of social networking sites and apps to 43%.

Why?

It is an age-old feature of teenagers and young people, because of a need for independence and privacy, they would prefer not to go to the same places as their parents, and this is what has been happening on Facebook to some extent.

Also, many more young people have smartphones, and they use them to go where other members of their age / peer group go i.e. on Snapchat. It doesn’t help also that Facebook has received a lot of bad publicity recently over its involvement with the sharing of user data with Cambridge Analytica, and the part it played in allegedly being used by representatives of certain foreign powers to help sway the election result towards Trump.

Facebook has also proved particularly attractive in recent years to older people who have found that its video and photo features are easy to use, and enable them to keep up with the social lives of their older children, and grandchildren,

Facebook For Kids

Facebook has long known that it has been attracting an older demographic, and that young people have been leaving the platform in pursuit of a new experience, and to stay in touch with other members of their peer group.

Attracting a new, young group of Facebook users looks likely, therefore, to be one of the main reasons why, back in December 2017, Facebook announced that it was launching a kind of Facebook for children the form of ‘Messenger Kids’. Some commentators said at the time that it appeared to be a way for Facebook to recruit its next generation of users, and to capture the attention of 6 to 12-year-olds before Snapchat or a similar social network competitor

What Does This Mean For Your Business?

For Facebook, even though it recognises (and is trying to solve) the problem that it faces in attracting teenage users, it still remains the most popular social networking sites in the UK by a long way, boasting 32.6 million total regular users this year. Also, Facebook’s Instagram is looks likely to grow its user base from 15.7 million to 18.4 million this year, although it also appears to be losing young users to Snapchat.

For businesses wishing to advertise, Facebook is likely, therefore, to be a way to advertise to older age groups e.g. those in their 40,s, 50s, and above. In fact, Facebook has also announced an overhaul of its news feed algorithm to prioritise what friends and family share, and to reduce the amount of non-advertising content from publishers and brands.

Businesses with older customer demographics may also want to keep making the most of their company Facebook business page.

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On Friday 1st 2018 from 2.30pm, a Europe-wide system failure at Visa that left shoppers embarrassed as their card payments were declined and stores switched to ‘cash only’.

Not Just Visa Customers

To make matters worse, because a range of different banks and other financial institutions use Visa’s payment system, even those making transactions using non-Visa branded cards were affected and were unable to make purchases.

The problem was compounded by the fact that it happened at a time when many people were leaving work on a Friday. There have also been reports circulating that even if some card purchases were declined, the money may still have been taken from accounts, and customers have been urged to check.

What Happened?

There are no precise details as to the reason for the system crash other than Visa’s explanation as a “hardware failure”.
Visa has also been quick to announce that it has no reason to believe that the system crash was associated with any unauthorised access or malicious events.

ATMs Still Working in UK

In the UK, although many customers found themselves in extremely awkward situations e.g. unable to pay for meals or petrol, customers were still able to take cash out of ATMs (if there was one nearby). This led to large queues forming at ATMs in towns and cities across the country.

Queues

Whereas many customers faced the embarrassment and inconvenience of having their cards declined in shops across Europe, others found themselves being forced to wait in queues because of the disruption. For example, in Berlin’s Alexanderplatz, it was reported that Primark customers had to queue for 20 minutes to pay, and staff were unable to note the reasons why transactions were failing. Also, it was reported that the Visa system failure caused a 45 minute wait for those trying to use the Severn Bridge as drivers were unable to pay the toll by card.

Anger

Not surprisingly, many people took to social media to vent their anger at Visa for the embarrassment and inconvenience caused. In Spain, the Guardia Civil tried to calm and re-assure people by sending a tweet urging everyone to stay calm, and used a picture of Captain Jack Sparrow to help explain that if they couldn’t pay, it wasn’t because they had been robbed or hacked.
Visa has apologised, and has stated that its payment system is operating at “full capacity”.

What Does This Mean For Your Business?

Even though the problems only lasted a day, it is only a matter of weeks since TSB’s catastrophic computer meltdown caused misery to customers after the bank tried to migrate its computer systems from its old Lloyds Bank systems to its new core banking system, Proteo4UK.

We are now a society that is moving away from cash, in favour of cards and particularly contactless payments. Also, this move away from cash has meant the closing of many ATMs. Both of these factors mean that system failures of this kind can be particularly disruptive.

For businesses, customers not being able to pay meant that profits were hit, their premises experienced disruption with some staff being left to face angry customers, and unable to offer a clear explanation.

The incident has, no doubt, also illustrated to any potential hackers how interconnected payment systems are across Europe and how many countries could be brought to a virtual standstill if they were able to breach the systems of major payment processing companies such as Visa.

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If you use Microsoft Outlook and you don’t want an important email that you need to follow up with to get lost among the deluge of each new day’s emails, you can keep track of it by creating a ‘For Follow Up’ folder. Here’s how:

– Click the Folder tab on the top of Outlook: File > New > Search Folder.

– The New Search Dialog Box will pop up.

– Select the ‘Mail Flagged for Follow Up’ option from the ‘Reading Mail’ dropdown list.

– Click ‘Ok’, then right click ‘For Follow Up’ in the Navigation Pane.

– Right click, and then click ‘Show in Favourites’.

– You will now have a ‘For Follow Up’ Folder amongst your other folders.

n.b. If you hover above the time-stamp in the message, you can click the follow up flag to add it to the list, instead of having to choose it from the Follow Up drop-down from the tool bar.

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Globalnet aims to be an integral part of your success, providing the best business advice, superior IT support and technology to help you reach your goals. 

A peanut-shaped, hand-held, smart, long-range tracking device called LynQ has been launched that can tell you how far and in what direction your friends are, all without the need for a data connection, and without monthly fees.

Why?

As well as being used for outdoor activities to replace traditional maps and location methods, a ‘LynQ’ can be used as a safety device for tracking children or pets, for rescue workers, or for making sure dementia sufferers don’t wander too far. It can also be used as a fun / leisure device e.g. to find each other in festival crowds, or to keep track of each other when hiking or skiing.

How Does It Work?

Powered by a rechargeable power cell that can offer up to three days of battery life between charges, a LynQ can reportedly track other LynQ users from up to 3 miles (5km) away.

Being marketed as a kind of smart compass for the 21st century, the LynQ doesn’t need an app, phone or Wi-Fi network. Instead, it uses what is described as “a new approach to GPS”. This means that LynQ devices send their GPS coordinates directly to each other. The GPS data has a compression algorithm applied to it in order to make it possible to send that data more frequently and reliably.

2 To 12 People Can Use

LynQ allows 2 or more people (up to 12 can link up) to use a one-button control and simple digital interface to find each other. The display shows a simple display of distance and direction that changes accurately as you move towards or away from your target, and the single button allows you to switch between people you’re tracking.

The display turns off automatically when you let it go to hang by its clip, thus saving battery life, but the LynQ is always receiving the data.

Other Features

The device allows you to create a “home” location that linked devices can point toward. It also allows you to set a safe zone (a radius from your device) that will warn you if the other person leaves that safe zone. You can also send basic preset messages like “meet up” or “help.”

The price is $154 / £114.30 per pair (early bird), going up to $200 / £148.40.

What Does This Mean For Your Business?

This is another smart device that shows how a combination of technologies can be used to create something that can meet a real need and has multiple applications e.g. leisure, sport, safety, and even defence. For example, the Thai Ministry of Defence tested LynQ and found that it helped soldiers find each other much faster while radio silent, and helped them quickly get into formation for a search mission.

This could also represent another possible way to keep track of those in the care of others e.g. dementia sufferers being tracked by carers. Back in 2016 for example, a barcode tagging system for tracking elderly dementia sufferers was being tested in Tokyo, but the LynQ could provide an even simpler and more practical system.

Quite simply as a gadget, the LynQ appears to have multiple applications, thereby offering many opportunities to business and personal users. The fact that the LynQ requires no monthly fees, and doesn’t require a data connection will increase its appeal.

The hope is that the LynQ device is secure and that signals can’t be intercepted and used by criminals to track victims e.g. for attack or abduction. There are still widespread fears about the vulnerability of many smart / IoT devices to hacking, but the fact that LynQ doesn’t need a connection could make it safer.