The lack of phone calls, texts or social media postings from missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 has raised a number of questions about how cell phones work on airplanes. A U.S. official told CNN a cell tower in Penang, Malaysia, detected the co-pilot’s cell phone searching for service before the flight vanished. Here’s a quick primer on how and when phones can make a connection from the air: How high in the air can a cell phone work? Despite the urgings of flight crews to turn off all phones or put them…

Read More

Dropbox has long provided a solid cloud storage platform for individuals. Now a new subscription option improves the platform’s offerings for small businesses. The new version of the service, dubbed Dropbox for Business, adds better security and additional ways for administrators to manage employee accounts. It costs $795 per year for a five-person team, and an additional $125 per year for each additional user. Subscribing means your business can use Dropbox for collaboration and file backup, with less risk of private and sensitive data being compromised. Dropbox for Business also makes…

Read More

Whether it’s a pre-roll ad on YouTube or some original promotional content, online video advertising can offer value to businesses of all sizes. Small businesses in particular have found that digital videos can boost awareness, website traffic and sales in a cost-effective, budget-friendly way. “Almost everyone watches online videos in some form today,” said Tim Jensen, senior Web strategist at digital marketing firm Overit. “You can reach people at a fraction of the cost of traditional TV advertising, with much more segmented opportunities for targeting. You can target videos based on…

Read More

Cloud-based customer resource management (CRM) can be complex when providing CRM services on a global scale. From managing tiered administration of supply chain portals to creating user roles for employees in disparate locations and providing multiplatform customer support, the configuration options present a complex set of alternatives. Three technologies simplify the number of configurations and data handling required to facilitate global CRM in the cloud: clustering, user roles, and social networking capabilities. Clustering  Clustering facilitates parallel, distributed computing by linking multiple computers together so that they operate as a single computer. As…

Read More