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What Can an API Do for Your Business?

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WHAT IS AN API? An API is a program that runs on a web server that other programmers can use to integrate your business logic into their own programs. It’s an application that has no user-friendly front-end even though it runs on a web server. It’s a program that exposes your own business logic to the world. Salesforce is the perfect example of a popular API. Every sales person knows of Salesforce, and it’s required by many organizations. Salesforce doesn’t have a main website application such as Twitter or Facebook. Instead, its business model is focused on...

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Introduction to GIS

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WHAT IS GIS A GIS is most often packaged as computer software which combines various tools to manipulate data and visual assets into an interactive geographic experience. Popular GIS software includes: ArcGIS  Grass  QGIS  Kalypso  The most popular system for everyday use is Google Maps. This is a typical GIS in that the user can view satellite overlays, use search terms to query the database (e.g., “restaurant”) and filter the results using a specific search radius (e.g., within a ZIP code). HOW GIS WORKS GIS software performs to...

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The New Moral and Legal Issues with Self-Driving Cars

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First, there is the issue of programming morality into the decision-making software of the driverless cars. For instance, if a driverless car is faced with the scenario of crashing into another car or swerving out of the way and potentially hitting pedestrians, what decision is the right one? Does the car have a responsibility to protect the driver? After all, the driver is the company’s customer, right? Or does the car have a responsibility to protect the pedestrians? There are several difficult scenarios that the companies building these cars need to consider with great...

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How to Protect Your Business Against Cyber Attacks

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PROTECT ALL DEVICES WITH SECURITY SOFTWARE All computers, tablets, smartphones and other devices with access to company and customer data should be protected with antivirus software. Security programs that monitor your devices for viruses, malware and security vulnerabilities are essential on all connected devices. In addition, you should apply the latest updates to security programs, operating systems, apps and other software as soon as they are available, as they may contain crucial security patches. USE DATA AND DISK ENCRYPTION Encrypting your data and hard disks helps to...

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Web Scraping Software to Increase Profits

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SITE MONITORING The most simple web-scraping software will check if your website is live and functioning correctly. When every minute of downtime could be costing revenue, having a service that quickly informs you of any problems is invaluable. TOPIC MONITORING Services such as Google Alerts can be very useful in staying on top of developments in your niche, but scraping software can take this idea to the next level. You could scrape multiple news sources and social media platforms, filtering the results by content, to find out which topics are hot in your area of business. ...

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Information Technology and Business Strategies 

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Gone are the days when IT focused on buying what was only available or affordable and in turn expected the business process to fit.  Today the business is strategized and IT must be able to fill the requirements.  But in order to have a successful overall company strategy, planning should be accomplished together.  IT needs to understand the goals and objectives of the business, both from a short and long term perspective.  In the same manner the business side needs to understand the limitations faced by IT whether technical or financial. So what do these planning...

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5 Machine Learning Tools Entrepreneurs Should Know About

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PREDICTION If you want to integrate machine learning into your software code, Prediction is a must-discover. Offering a machine learning server (open source), Prediction lets you create anything from a machine learning-enabled ecommerce interface to a product recommendation engine. Why write the code yourself when Prediction makes implementation so easy? COGNITIONLAB If bot building is on your to-do list, add CognitionLab to your list of helpful entrepreneurial tools. CognitionLab uses machine learning to help users create powerful bots you can incorporate into...

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Understanding GPS: The Nuts and Bolts

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SAME-FREQUENCY BROADCASTS  While every GPS satellite has been assigned a unique encoding signature, the Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) standard is used across the board to unify the scheme. Because CDMA allows for the concurrent transmission of data over a single channel, multiple satellites can send out information to different users on the same bandwidth at the same time. To limit interference, each satellite signal is sent across a widened spectrum. CDMA for GPS is split into two coding schemes–one is used by the public, while the other is reserved for U.S....

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An Introduction to the Dark Web

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DARK WEB OR DEEP WEB?    You may have encountered the term ‘Deep Web’ as well and, understandably, assumed that the two terms are interchangeable. However, the Deep Web has much less nefarious connotations, since it simply refers to all websites and other online resources that are not indexed by the search engines. As such, the Deep Web includes all private information behind password-protected accounts, such as online banking and email. It also includes webpages and other online services that are intentionally hidden from the search engines, such as those...

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Humans versus Robots – The Race is on to Save Humanity

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That raises the question of when exactly is “eventually” and how can we plan for it. In February 2017, Bill Gates suggested taxing robots as a way of compensating humans for jobs lost to machines. He didn’t elaborate on how the tax revenue might be collected or how it might be distributed to the people made redundant by machines. In any case, that would tackle just a small part of the problem. The bigger part, recently addressed by Elan Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla Inc. concerns machines becoming smarter than humans – maybe even becoming conscious. Conscious...

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