Fire-Wired Blog

This article was first published by  iowabusinessjournals.com If you employ millennials it is a near certainty they are using their personal smart devices to conduct business. It is likely the case with most generations, but our youngest professionals use every shortcut and tool available to do what needs to be done. As a liability minded entrepreneur chances are this situation concerns you, but without the resources to handout company devices (a practice with an entirely different set of headaches) there are few roadblocks you can erect to halt it. The best practice is to side step it with portable hotspots. People do stupid things to establish a data signal. Besides hoisting devices into the sky, we rountinely walk into windows, crash our cars, and of course drop and break our devices all in the name of connection. Investing in a handful of wireless hotspots immediately eliminates this foolishness but it is so much than that. At a few hundred dollars initial investment for ...

This article was first published by  dmcityview.com Manuals are the bane of nearly every man’s existence. Doesn’t matter if you’ve purchase a “some assembly required” set of shelves, a brand new computer, or a car; reading a manual is about the dullest thing in the world. Plus manufacturers don’t make it any easier. For instance if you buy a top shelf, professional mirrorless from sony, the A7R III, finding online support for the device means you need to know the production name of the device as well; i.e. ILCE-7RM3. Reading the manual for that camera isn’t bad enough, just reading that production name out loud will put you to sleep. I wish this were a column about the end of manuals and all knowledge were ready to be consumed in pill form, alas that is not meant to be for some time. But if there is one small piece of relief to share in this arena, it is that one of the most egregious production naming fiends on the planet has decided to make the marketplace just a bit more frien...

This article was first published by  iowabusinessjournals.com In the world of small business management the one budget that lives up to the moniker is in IT. As imperative as technology is do modern business, day-to-day operations and providing actual services requires a great deal of capital. Sure you'd like to give every employee brand new iPhones, laptops, and unlimited cloud storage but being an entrepreneur means being thrifty and prudent with every dollar. However if I may play devil's advocate, if there's one IT area you might want to spend a little extra on it's email. As counterintuitive as it sounds, investing in email early can be one of the smartest decisions you can make. I know, you probably remember one of the perks of your website was something like 25-100 included email accounts. That is a great deal, but who owns those emails? Are they stored on some unaccounted server your service provider leases space from? If they suffer a breach or data loss, w...

This article was first published by  dmcityview.com Everyone has that awfully frustrating experience of sitting close to someone with awful headphones. Not headphones that are unstylish but an set of stone-age ear covering headphones that seem to send audio in all directions. This encounter always seems to happen during inescapable situations such as on a packed plane or on a family vacation. Addressing the offender can result in hours of tension, so if you truly can't escape there is only one surefire remedy; noise cancelling. All kinds of headphones claim to be “noise cancelling,” but few truly neutralize the world at large. Since the technology entered the consumer market in the mid-1990s, the company synonymous with noise cancelling has been Bose. At a premium cost, audiophiles could pickup a set of Bose over-the-ear headphones and hear practically nothing but the music they were hoping for. The word “practically” is key. See while the first few generations of technology ...

And thus the sunset has set on Palle Amorevoli 's time on the screen. That's right, the Des Moines 48 Hour Film Project season has come to a close for 2018, and our latest and zaniest film is officially out in the wild for general audiences to enjoy. Each year is a roller coaster. Some years you know you have some special, some years are a little more shaky. This year I knew we had some thing... special*. Yes you're reading that right; italics and an asterisk. If you have yet to see the film, Palle Amorevoli is a romantic musical set inside a bitter bowling anti-romantic comedy. The quick synopsis is "A delusionally romantic bowling alley chef falls for his musical whims and discovers two of his alley's balls have found love; however, just as their romance buds, bitter bowling rivals threaten to end it." I'll save the musical portion of it for you to discover inside the film. Once again, we didn't win any judges awards. Instead we walked away...

This article was first published by  iowabusinessjournals.com If you are privy to the sways of pop culture and technology, you are probably aware of how uncool LinkedIn is. Don't buy into that. Yes, LinkedIn isn't “cool,” but when it comes to business cool is only a priority in marketing. While LinkedIn is part of the social media marketing universe, it is in very far off galaxy from the cool social networks. Your business use for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and potentially even YouTube is all about marketing your business as something to admire, envy, or desire. LinkedIn is only about that for one reason, attracting talented job seekers. Now if you're hoping to attract in demand creatives who could possibly rebrand your company as culturally cool, chances are you wont be finding them on LinkedIn; however, LinkedIn does have its role and never in the history of the website was it worried with what TMZ or any late night hosts said about it. The reason you s...

This article was first published by  iowabusinessjournals.com If there is one piece of technology your office needs to invest in as soon as possible it is a document scanner. Unless your business is super ahead of the curve, you undoubtedly have piles, drawers, and cabinets full of old documents. It doesn’t matter if you’re a 100 year-old business or a 1 year-old business, the paper storage and paper waste struggle is real. Thankfully there is very few instances where you need to keep hard copies of anything. Of course if you’re a lawyer or immigration official you might say otherwise, but on the whole 95% of the paper sitting around our offices is superfluous. Now you might be thinking “we have a copy machine with built in scanning functionality, why do I need a dedicated, uni-tasker piece of technology.” See all-in one machines are fantastic; they allow for more floor space, fewer places to go if you need to print, scan, or fax, but that all demands getting up and going somew...