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Living with Wireless Charging

When I left iPhone for Android back in 2010, wire-less charging was a feature set in the distant fu-ture, and it would not be until Nokia released two Windows phones with wireless charging in Sep-tember of 2012, before anyone was able to see it in action. Since then, the Nexus 4 by Google and LG, and the Galaxy S4 by Samsung have been equipped to recharge without the use of annoying wires. It is glorious. The wireless charging standard is called Qi (pronounced Chee) and it was developed by the Wireless Power Consortium to standardize wireless charging for all devices. Popular tech companies adopting this standard include HTC, Motorola, Samsung, Sony, LG, Nokia and many others. Many Android and Windows Phone devices are currently supported and available now. Apple has yet to join in the festivities.

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Technology as Easy as Turning a Key

Isn't it nice to have everything prepared for you? Of course it is. Whether it's having your dinner made for you when you get home, or having your car turned over to you fueled up and cleaned out, everybody appreciates having everything taken care of. In the world of technology, we take care of everything with our turnkey business management solutions. The idea of using a key may seem out of place with technology. You may use a key to lock up the server room or even the server

rack, but other than that, it's not like you need a physical key to access anything on your computers. The term turnkey is actually borrowed from the construction industry, today's leading market of key utilization. One of the biggest jobs that involve solutions is house building. Between framing, electrical, plumbing, flooring, cabinets, and dozens of other tasks, constructing a house involves the coordination of one solution after another. The developer is the one to take care of every-thing, sometimes even the financing. These completed houses are sold as "turnkey homes" because everything is included and finished, down to even the furniture, which means all that the buyer has to do is "turn the key." Computers and computer networks are like houses in their own right. IT networks can be a complex web of cables that can rival the electrical and plumbing systems of homes. Just like you would prefer not to buy a home that looks good on the outside, but on the inside the walls are stripped down to the studs, so too would you prefer not to buy a workstation with the parts and the OS, but lacking the applications critical to your business.


June 2013

TECHMinutes

Damon, his wireless charging mat, and 40” Screen

This Issue:



Be Sure to Count the Costs of the Cloud

6 Office Snacks That Take Forever to Burn Off

Have a Backup for Your Backup

Be Sure to Count the Costs of

the Cloud

Cloud computing is a hot business

technology. Research firm Gartner

surveyed businesses worldwide and

found that 60% have increased their

budgets for cloud services through

2014. Gartner also predicts that the

cloud services market will increase

18.5% this year. Are you looking to

migrate over to the cloud? Here are

a few considerations before your

business goes cloud crazy.

Due to cloud computing being such

a hot topic, you are likely getting

bombarded with different messages

about the cloud. Cloud advertising

promises that your business will see

savings from cloud services that


Qi supported charging stations will start turning up in many public places in the near future. The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf has stated they will install charging stations in select locations. Virgin Atlan-tic Airways, London’s Heathrow Airport and JFK International are also expected to be rolling out charging stations in the coming years. For me, there is no going back. Wireless charging is here to stay and I plan to have it on all future devices. If a device does not support wireless charging, I do not see it becoming part of my daily life. I love my Nexus 4 and I love wireless charging.

Living with wireless charging has changed the way I think about charging my phone. The days of worrying about whether or not I have a cable at the office or where my cable might be at home are gone. I am what some consid-er an “early adopter”, and I needed to have wireless charging as soon as I had my phone. The only problem was Goog-le’s wireless charging station was not available, so I bought one made by Ener-gizer. A flat, pad shaped device that sits on my desk, the phone rests neatly on top, and charges. Whether I am home or at the office, I walk in and simply place my phone on

(Continued from page 1) my power mat and it begins to charge. I have one device on my desk in the office and one on my nightstand. When I rest my phone on the pad, it starts to charge and I receive a little notification sound to let me know it is working. It is the easi-est and simplest way to charge my phone. However, it is not the fastest or most efficient way to charge a device. If we dig into the math, which we are not go-ing to do here, we find that this method is slightly slower than a cable, and it uses more energy to arrive at the same result. The difference is negligible to the naked eye.


6 Office Snacks That Take Forever to Burn Off

With office work, a lack of physical ac-tivity is often cou-pled with extra calo-ries from mindless snacking. Office snacks are great for your appetite, but bad for your waist-line. These extra calories require

extra physical activity to burn off. If you understand how much exercise a little snack will ask of you, then you might think twice about eating it. Using a metabolic chart, you can know precisely how much exercise it takes to burn off these snacking calories. It takes a 180-pound man 1 hour of moderately fast cycling (14-16 mph) to burn 750 calories, and 1 hour of fairly fast running (8 mph) in order to burn 1,000 calories. Based on this information, we can know exactly how much cycling and jogging it will take to cancel the calories from these 6 popular office snack foods.

Pretzels Even a seemingly light snack like a hand-ful of 10 pretzels will add up to 227 calo-ries.

18 minutes of cycling. 14 minutes of jogging. Microwave Popcorn Sure, popping a bag will make the office smell great and give you something buttery to snack on, but at a cost of 210 calories. 17 minutes of cycling.

13 minutes of jogging. Dry-Roasted Peanuts Peanuts, the healthy alternative to junk food, right? Nope, just half a cup of nuts adds up to 427 calories. 34 minutes of cycling.

26 minutes of jogging. Cookies For once we are not talking about the cookies downloaded from websites. A single chocolate chip cookie will set you back 196 calories, and we know that you cannot eat just one.

16 minutes of cycling. 12 minutes of jogging. Energy Drinks A popular solution for an afternoon pick-me-up, energy drinks are loaded with sugar which translates into big calories. For example, a single can of Rockstar Energy Drink contains 280 calories. 22 minutes of cycling. 17 minutes of jogging. Doughnuts It is difficult to turn down a doughnut when a kind coworker brings in box, but knowing that one chocolate glazed doughnut is packed full of 260 delicious calories may give you enough strength to resist. 21 minutes of cycling.

16 minutes of jogging. While none of these snacks will break your belt in and of themselves, the prob-lem comes from our habits of grazing and eating multiple snacks throughout


Have a Backup for Your Backup

maintenances remotely in order to keep computers running smoothly. We also feature remote support in the event that a problem does arise. We're able per-form a complete maintenance from our end. Computer maintenance from Ground Swell also comes as a service plan so that you are not hit with an un-expected repair bill. Even with our stellar remote service and Help Desk support, computer hardware does fail. When PC hardware goes down, then there is nothing that Ground Swell can do about it remotely. We'll then have to send our team over to physically take care of the issue. The good news is that by going through our managed ser-vices checklist, we will know what the problem is before we head out. The bad news is that a physical trip still counts as downtime. We strive to fix your PC problem as fast as is humanly possible, but in times like this, having an extra PC around will save you downtime. Switching out a broken PC for a spare one will be a snap. A Back-up and Disaster Recovery solutions….

We often talk about the need to back up your data, but did you know that it is

also a best practice to back up your hardware? Backing up your hardware works differently than data backup; whereas data backup involves network devices and a cloud, backing up your hardware is a simple matter of having extra computer components on your premise. If your IT budget is tight, then the thought of having a closet full of spare equipment may seem a bit impractical, but when you consider the cost of down-time, then having extra computers on hand begins to make sense. Businesses experience downtime when a task that is critical to operations cannot be worked on because of equipment failure. Downtime costs twice as much as you would think. Not only do you have a loss of revenue associated with the time lost,

but you also have employees on the clock and getting paid whether they can do their job or not. Even if a PC is down for only one hour, it will still be a major expense. To help you calculate the cost of your company's downtime, we want to share with you our trusty downtime math formulas: Productivity Loss Formula P = (Number of users affected) x (% of Productivity Loss) x (Average salary per hour) x (Duration of downtime) Revenue Loss Formula R = (Number of users affected) x (% of Revenue Loss) x (Average profit per em-ployee per hour) x (Duration) Overall Loss Due to Downtime P + R = $$$ Take this final downtime figure into con-sideration and suddenly the cost of hav-ing an extra PC on standby to prevent downtime seems like a bargain! One more additional downtime expense that you have to consider is the comput-er repair bill. Ground Swell has a great PC remote monitoring and maintenance service that will take every precaution possible to prevent downtime. This in-cludes taking care of updates and


ing everything taken care of in one easy turnkey solution. Additionally, you may not really be saving money if you buy all of your technology solutions separately because purchasing everything in bun-dles may qualify you for a discounted rate. With Ground Swell's turnkey business management solution, we can provide you with all the technology that you need to get the job done. No matter

Don't get us wrong, you very well could purchase just a barebone PC and then take the time to shop for and install all the applications that you need. You may look at the price of going this route and think that this will save you some dough, but anybody who has spent any time having to paint, wallpaper, shop for ap-pliances, and do any of the other dozens of jobs that it takes to make a house ready to live in, will see the value of hav-

(Continued from page 1) what the job is, big or small. Whether we build you an IT network from the ground up, or hook up a new employee with a new workstation that is ready to go, we will do all the work that it takes so that all you have to do is power on your tech-nology and turn the proverbial key. Call Ground Swell at 609-487-9100 and let us take care of everything!

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Technology

Justin Tinel, President

the work day, while having no intention of exercising for the 1 hour+ that it takes to burn off these extra calories. If eating like this without exer-cising is part of your daily rou-tine, then all of these small snacks may be the reason you can't fit into the outfit you wore to the job interview. What are your favorite snacks

(Continued from page 2) to munch on around the office, and how much exercise does it take to burn off all of these calories? Share with us your office eating habits in the comments, and then go out-side and take a couple of laps.

Snacks That Take Forever to Burn Off

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Be Sure to Count the Costs of the Cloud

may not be the best approach for every

company.

Before you talk with a cloud service pro-

vider, you will first want to know what

your IT needs are. You will also want to

peer into your IT crystal ball and have a

good understanding of your company's

upcoming technology needs. This is be-

cause many cloud services are offered as

a contract, and once your needs change,

then you will have to renegotiate your

cloud contract.

Many of these contracts charge by how

much data is used. This means that you

will need to have some measure of con-

trol in place in order to regulate how

sound almost too good to be true; and

then there is another marketing message

that says you need to migrate as much of

your IT infrastructure to the cloud as pos-

sible.

As is the case with the implementation of

any new technology, the more time that

you take to understand the cloud, the

better that the technology will be able to

meet your needs. When you break cloud

computing down, there are multiple mod-

els and different types of cloud services.

Cloud computing is also not a one-size-

fits-all solution. Every business has unique

computing needs and migrating every-

thing over to the cloud in one fell swoop

(Continued from page 1) much data your company puts into the

cloud so as to not go over budget. To

save costs and space, you will also want

to make sure that the data you're storing

in the cloud is necessary and not redun-

dant.

If you are poised to fly into the cloud, and

this is your first trip up, then we recom-

mend that you take a hot air balloon and

move over gradually; instead of taking a

supersonic jet and immediately going all-

in. One way to make this gradual transi-

tion is to migrate over only the right data

and applications. Generally. . .

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