Expanding the reach of automation

Last weekend I attended the Shape Expo (website here) in San Francisco, and my experience there surprised me. I read a fair amount of tech news and was already somewhat familiar, to some degree, with most of the the new tech: virtual reality, object recognition, artificial intelligence, robotics, holograms and more. Still there were many "wow" moments seeing the exhibits, but I found that the biggest "wow" was one building in accumulation, and it was well articulated in a panel discussion on Saturday afternoon entitled "The Networked Future." 

One of the most interesting points of that presentation was the fact that the large networking companies (AT&T, Verizon) have surpassed Moore's law over the past five years.  (Moore's law is that an emerging technology's advancement will double capacity every 18 months.)  This has been happening in both network speed and capacity, and the trend is so pronounced that young developers and students have pretty much abandoned one of the main tenets of software developers from the last century: namely, programming within resources.  

Today's app developers don't worry about bandwidth or RAM speed. They just assume that the machines will keep up with anything they can do, and in this era, they're right.   For those of us who have spend much of our professional lives surveying data to see where we might use a 4 bit integer instead of an 8 bit, this can be a bit disconcerting, but it's also liberating.   

Another interesting point was that the public is about to see and use internet in very new and different ways. Although it's generally understood that the internet is here to stay, and that its role in our culture has grown ubiquitous and permanent, what's less understood is that it's morphing from just an information conveyance - which it will continue to be - to a physical and situational control network. It will help you control your air conditioning. It will tell you if your teenager has been speeding. And if you manage a business, it will provide you with more actionable information per hour than you'd ever thought possible - far more than you can utilize - and it will make good decisions based on that information.  

Back in the 1990s, one of my first jobs as a developer was for a software company that made and supported a logistics software for the public warehousing industry. The software managed customers, inventory intake, storage, location, billing and shipping to the point of optimizing multi-customer truck loads for best efficiency. What it did not do was talk to truck drivers, scrutinize their routes, stops or driving behavior in the truck. But now that company is very likely to be considering products and services like IMBOT, that come with hardware and apps that can relay this kind of information, and very soon, secure APIs to let developers integrate services with larger management software. So it soon may be possible for "smart" software to oblige a request for something like a last-minute emergency product shipment by optimally diverting a nearby route, updating the driver's delivery schedule with a new timetable, and making any secondary updates as needed - all without any human having to dig for time-sensitive information that would almost always be incomplete, and making a decision that may become problematic because of incomplete information and unintended consequences.  A computer is really much better at logistics, especially where complexity and/or speed is an issue.  

This will change everything for business and supply chains, and it will offer small companies the same information advantages as large shipping fleets.  

Step One Adaptive Adds Speech Recognition

Speech recognition is becoming common on computing devices, and the World Wide Web Consortium – the group that controls web browser standards and the HTML markup language – has included it in the HTML5 specification being implemented in all new web browsers.  As a web-based application, Step One Adaptive benefits from this browser modernization and now takes advantage of it to add speech recognition. 

We have implemented this feature for text fields, and microphone icons will now appear next to fields for those using the newest Chrome browser for Windows or Android.  As other browsers comply with the new standard and issue new versions, the little mics will be there too.  In the meantime, we recommend Chrome. 

As the speech recognition technology improves its ability to understand human speech and sentence context, the browsers will issue updates and the benefits will appear in your app automatically.  Of course we are always looking for ways to leverage technology to improve the user experience and save our customers time. 

Heartbleed and passwords

First, the heartbleed bug doesn't mean that your passwords have been compromised.  It's a bug that allows memory overflow and could have been used by someone to mine spills for useful data.  There's no reason to believe that anyone knew this was possible before this week - no hacker chatter - but there's no way to know for sure.

Think of it like this:  You've been living in your house for two years, and one day while working in your garden, you find an extra house key under a gnome, hidden there by the realtor.  You have no reason to think that anyone has used it to get into your house, but they could have gotten in and out without you knowing about it.  Now the key is going to be locked up, but should you change your locks anyway, just in case someone found it and made a copy?  To be really safe, yes.

But the greatest security issue with passwords isn't the heartbleed bug.  It's the tendency for people to choose by patterns.  These patterns are often English words, names or other patterns that make a password guessable within a range of only a few million possibilities - a manageable number for a computer.

Naturally, people like to use passwords that they can remember, but the problem with that is that our memories are pattern-based, and patterns are guides for hackers.  There are only a few hundred thousand commonly known English words, and fewer if you're looking for a word that's easy to remember and spell.  These are considered "weak" passwords.  Hackers can use software to test for them.

But if you use a random combination of characters and numerals, the number of possibilities is exponentially larger.  Using a mix of both upper and lower case, numeric and punctuation characters, an eight character password can have 576 trillion possibilities - that's literally about a billion times more "unguessable" than a known English word.  "Strong" passwords are those that do not emulate known patterns.

(Use this link to make a strong password: http://steponebusinessservices.com/strongpassword)

The other major vulnerability is making all of your passwords the same - again, to make them easier to remember.  The down-side of that should be obvious.  The solution is to use a different strong password for each site, and keep a list of all of them in a safe place (more than one place).  There are password managers (like LastPass and many others) that encrypt and store all of your passwords for you, so that you just have to remember the one for the manager - if you feel comfortable trusting a service like this with everything, it's an easy solution.

"Big data" hype: Is there anything in it for small business?

If you read or even browse business or tech blogs, you’ve probably heard that something called “big data” is changing the business world – specifically the big business world.  In the past few years Google, Facebook and other big players have been collecting huge amounts – more than could be managed and analyzed by methods and tools available until recently.  That data flows into their big data stores and their big analytic systems.  It’s used to create predictive models of consumer behavior based on complex correlations and other analysis, anything from product and media evaluation to design feedback about what colors on a webpage header lead to more desirable clicks.  The sheer volume of data available to major corporate retailers allows them to perform fine-grained scientific analysis on consumer behavior, including reactions to the fine details of stimuli.  It’s almost a new kind of psychology, with quantitative methods that statisticians could only dream of until recently.

This is possible because tools like Hadoop and MapReduce have solved the scaling problem for databases, and big businesses are investing to take advantage of the petabytes (1 PB = a quadrillion bytes) that flow in from their heavily marketed products and services.  So can small business join the big data party?  

Bad news first:  Unless you’re the next Sam Walton or Jeff Bezos, your small business is never going to have the data volume or analytic tools (an staffing) for big data research.   And while it might be nice to have a ton of detailed behavioral research on your potential consumers like Walmart does, you probably don’t spend your days worrying about that or the many other advantages held by big business economies of scale.   Actually, big data is one of the less important of those advantages. 

But the hype around big data reminds us that there is value in data – any data – that has comes from your business, whether from your customers or your own work processes.    While your small business may not need big analytics, it can easily afford (and probably already has) good ole fashioned "structured data" – the stuff that lives in SQL-based systems from MySQL and Oracle to desktop apps like MS Access and FileMaker.  The question is, are you using those tools to their full potential? 

There are obvious benefits in time-savings, error reduction and other efficiencies to be gained by creating and using structured data for reporting snapshots of what’s happening, and as a guidance system to automate or direct activities like order fulfillment, complaint tracking, or sales contacts.  In fact, there's really no other way to stay on top of business processes.

But the benefit is too often forfeited by small businesses in some aspects of their business.  Most everyone keeps sales stats, and probably website hits and ROI on advertising, but what about fulfillment, complaints, supply lines, time-in-process for all of the above?  Any data point in your system can become a criteria group with counts, sums and averages, compared against other criteria and used to identify success and problem areas.

Small businesses should have software that lets them look at any shared data point and group by values. A small business owner should be able to see at a glance where data falls by location, by manager, by product. Is one team leader having more than her share of delays? What’s your average return rate based on time of day shipped and shipping manager?  What about the next thing you haven’t thought of yet?  With a good database app, you decide what to analyze.  Don't forget what the databases can do for you.

At Step One we can help you set up all the "buckets" you need, and you can modify them as needed. And our flexible reporting tool will let you group by any non-unique criteria in your database and apply any filter.

If 2013 was the year of the tablet and cloud, will 2014 be the year they rescue your IT budget?

Never has more bang for the buck been available.  Inexpensive mobile devices running cloud applications are about to change everything for small businesses, non-profits and unions. 

Low-cost tablets have been widely hailed as a game-changer for personal entertainment, with their marketing and media coverage focused squarely in that milieu for obvious reasons.  Less is heard about what tablets can do for small businesses, non-profits and unions.  That’s mainly because the "apps for that" are particular at least to the type of enterprise, and often to the specific organization.  You won’t hear much about business apps on television or major media sites (except for those with very broad reach like Salesforce and QuickBooks), but the personal entertainment market for tablets is quickly educating administrators and managers about the capabilities of their wonderful new toys, with work applications coming to mind more lately with the increasing availability of attachable keyboards.  Add the maturation of cloud-based apps in the past few years, and light bulbs begin to come on.  In fact, 2014 will likely see administrators' and managers' heads glowing everywhere. 

If running your business apps on tablets and clouds sounds a little scary, you're probably not alone.  But once you take a breath and consider, it's actually not scary at all.  First, unlike past crossroads in tech (Windows vs Mac, Iphone vs Blackberry, VHS vs Beta, etc), this time it probably doesn't much matter which brand you buy.  Android, Windows and iOS tablets are all viable for web-based apps.   Second, the new generation of software applications (like our Step One Systems) are web-based and designed to work across a full range of web browsing devices.  These applications are generally more reliable, more secure, and more efficient to develop, maintain and customize than traditional enterprise software.  They'll run on any tablet you  fancy, and they'll run just as well on your old Windows XP laptop or MacBook.  

Of course there are still jobs that can only be done - or are better done - on a PC or Mac, but not everybody needs them.  If even a few laptops can be replaced with tablets, your organization saves a lot of money on both hardware and software.  

About the Author and Step One Business Services

My name is Barry Diederich.  I've been a software developer for 20 years, and an independent contractor and business owner for 10.  Currently I own and manage Step One Business Services LLC in Daly City, California.

Step One is a provider of rapid-rollout information processing applications on the SaaS (software as a service) model.  Apps are flexible, cost-accessible cloud software services that can accurately model your business procedures and drive quality execution. We work with businesses and non-profits of all sizes.

We also provide custom development services by quote or contract with rates from $50/hr to $80/hr.

We are happy to answer your questions!  Please visit our website at steponebusinessservices.com to contact us.