This article was written by Allied Time

Biometric time clock systems are all the rage these days. A biometric time clock is one that uses an attribute of the human body to identify the employee. There are three main types of biometric time clocks on the market: fingerprint systems, hand readers, and face recognition time clock systems.  The face recognition time clock system is the most advanced of the three by far, offering companies incredible efficiency, security, and flexibility.

If you’re in the market for a new face recognition system, you might have a few questions. If you’re new to advanced time clocks, you might wonder whether this technology is right for your business. Do you need a face recognition system or a fingerprint time clock system? To help you make a well-informed purchase decision, here’s a brief look at the features and benefits of the face recognition time clock system.

The Features of Face Recognition Systems

The specific features of a face recognition time clock depend on the brand and model. But the following is a list of features that are common on most units. As the name implies, a face recognition time clock system identifies employees by scanning the face. Unlike fingerprint or hand-reader systems, a face recognition time card machine is sanitary and doesn’t involve dirty prints or germs. Along with tracking total hours worked and overtime, this type of model offers many advanced features, including optional automatic lunch deduction,  work codes collection, two level of overtime, archive features, manual recording of various hours, and language configurations.

A face recognition time clock system can be installed on a single PC or multiple computers. The data can be integrating with multiple payroll providers, and provides a wide variety of reporting capabilities.

The Many Benefits

There are many advantages to purchasing a face recognition time clock system for your company. It’s ideal for companies that want a simple yet effective way to track employee time. Since it offers many automatic features, a face recognition machine can help improve workflow by allowing managers to focus on other areas of the company.

A face recognition system also provides incredible compliance. Many systems provide instant back up of vital data, and can retrieve the information is a fraction of the time compared to manual data retrieval. It also offers incredible security. With extreme security, businesses can have protection and peace of mind. Finally, it doesn’t require a lot of software to run.
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Allied Time offers employee time tracking systems and supplies, including employee time clock software, biometric time clocks, and traditional time clocks.

This article was written by Ted Dhanik

Keeping your display advertising relevant to the keywords and campaigns that you are bidding for is the key to closing more conversions. Just like SEO, relevance determines the effectiveness of your ads. Break that chain of relevance, and you risk alienating users and losing them. There are several cues that you need to be aware of when you are designing banner advertising. Use these tips to keep yourself focused on possible points of disconnect.

Adhere to Sizes

The International Advertising Bureau has established uniform rules for banner sizes on a webpage that you need to follow. These sizes are meant to help you place an ad on a page, and for webmasters to plan for ads that won’t clutter the content. However, some networks require a specific size to serve pop-up ads to the user, so be sure that you conform to those standards so your banner advertising will show normally.

Test for Variations

You should test your campaigns frequently, but the amount of time and effort varies depending on the expectation. You need to make sure that your campaign is spending enough to gain traffic to it, but that you are not “blowing up” a particular placement with an influx of traffic.

Cohesion

The user has certain expectations by clicking on your ad, and assumes he will get what he wants in a timely manner. Do not try to force upsells on a user out of context, just deliver what he wants and then focus on complimentary offers.

Bio: Ted Dhanik is a media buying expert. As the president and co-founder of engage:BDR, Ted Dhanik has been using display media to turn more visitors into paying customers. To see how media buying can grow your business, visit Ted Dhanik online.

Using Wi-Fi for mobile calls and data are becoming increasingly popular and save money for users. Big wireless carriers have spent billions of dollars building networks and spend billions more to upgrade the service. It requires expensive and scare electromagnetic spectrum to send signals. However, Wi-Fi is already a router based network that one can access without costing too much money. Almost every home in the U.S. now has a router at home creating a web of Wi-Fi. Since Wi-Fi does not require a license from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) service can be provided at much cheaper rate.

According to Cisco Systems more than one-third of data traffic in 2012 used Wi-Fi or went through a router and it is expected to grow to more than 50 percent by 2017. More and more are relying on Wi-Fi to avoid expensive data fees charged by carriers. AT&T is the only U.S. carrier that widely uses Wi-Fi saving money for its customers and it has more than 32,000 hotspots under agreements. Cable providers in the US are sitting on a readily available vast Wi-Fi network if they chose to enter into voice and data services.

This article was written by Ted Dhanik.

The tools that you incorporate into your banner advertising campaign can have a huge impact on conversions. Without tools it becomes difficult to monitor competition and come up with new ideas. The right tool set can provide you with new ideas for ad copy, or find new opportunities to sell.

Keywords

Google’s keyword tool is a good place to start, but it is not available to users without an AdWords account. There are others around the Web that will compare home pages and show display advertising history for a particular keyword from a particular competitor. Keyword tools are also useful for discovering which long tail keywords are actually useful.

Try to resist high competition keywords in favor of anything low to mid-tier.

Analytics

Good analytics will tell you what customers are actually doing when they get to your page. You can use Events from Google Analytics to determine when a customer clicks something or which page a customer came from before visiting your home page. Analytics will also tell you which pages have the highest rate of retention, an important factoid if you’re trying to increase conversions. Look at the most popular pages, and then push some of that copy out to the campaigns that aren’t working as well. Perhaps you’ve already stumbled upon your winning formula.

Networks

The actual network that you use can be a huge benefit for you, if you know what to ask or look for. You should speak with your network representative and find out where the traffic is coming from. Then use that information to view your ads in the wild. When you know what the user sees, you stand to improve your copy with better results.

Ted Dhanik, provider of display advertising and high performance marketing solutions. Ted Dhanik is the CEO of marketing company engage:BDR. Ted Dhanik mentors business owners interested in start-ups.

The Korean behemoth, Samsung Electronics has found a way to kill a smartphone or tablet remotely. Smartphones such as iPhone grabs are on the rise and last year alone device users lost more than 1.6 million mobile units. The technology would have given some comfort to phone and other mobile device owners in the event their phone or device is lost or stolen. Unfortunately, U.S. wireless carriers are refusing to sell mobile devices containing kill switches from Samsung.

Law enforcement officials and consumer advocates are promoting the idea of a kill switch. Then why wireless carriers are objecting to it? Wireless carriers argue that it will add an additional burden on its customer service staff. Reinstalling a kill switch after an accidental mistake of a use is not a task for a lay person. Instead, wireless carriers and their trade group, CTIA, are working with law enforcement and others to implement other measures to prevent or reduce mobile device thefts. CTIA is launching a nationwide effort to create a tracking database and advocating heavy fines for convicted traffickers. Carriers are looking for technological innovations other than kill switches. However, Apple has succeeded introducing software to remotely deactivate iPhones.

Written by Phin Upham,

For a long time, scientists believed that it would be impossible (or very nearly improbable) for groups of people to reside in the Amazonian rainforest. Not only was it difficult to mount an expedition to uncover any ruins, the poor soil quality seemed to hint that the food needed to support civilization simply could not have come from the jungle.

But the discovery of ancient roads and earthworks seem to suggest that a group of people once thrived there. Those seeking further proof need only look at the ground. The secret was a treatment the natives gave to the land that turned the ground black.

So called “terra preta” is a black soil with bits of charcoal and Columbian pottery mixed in. Archaeologists estimate that the soil was made over 2500 years ago, before the Columbians ever set foot in the jungles.

What scientists found about the soil placement was also telling. The groups seemed to prefer settling on bluffs overlooking rivers, or the Atlantic Ocean. Civilizations did exist in the western portion of the Amazon, near the Andes where runoff from the mountains brought minerals organically to the soil.

Skeptics argue that the evidence is inconclusive. The absence of terra preta does not mean the absence of civilization. Because the original findings came from heavily trafficked sites, it’s arguable that we merely weren’t looking for civilizations before we stumbled upon them.

How these civilizations thrived is still a mystery, but their food sources no longer have to be. It appears people did once live in the Amazon, but what the region looked like before we found it is an image thus far lost to time.

Phin Upham is an investor from NYC and SF. You may contact Phin on his Phin Upham website

Article submitted by Space Friender.

Traditional computing giants including Hewlett-Packard (HP) are under attacked by newcomers equipped with new technologies for storage, networking and servers. Due to the enormous pressure from newcomers such as Open Computing from Facebook, traditional computing giants like HP are fighting back. Recognizing the threat from Facebook, HP is introducing a new server and networking system known as Moonshot.

Moonshot runs on extremely low-power consuming chips in a small server. HP claims that it consumes 89 percent less power to operate and takes up 94 percent less space than traditional servers. Many think that it is the company’s answer to competition from newcomers and take the company in a new direction in regard to chip efficiency for data center operations. It is also introducing new water cooling technologies for servers and it is less complex to operate. HP is relying on Project Moonshot for turnaround in computing. Three new ARM-based Moonshot cartridges will be made by Applied Micro, Texas Instrument and Calxeda next year and many others are waiting to hear from HP. The new modules open new ways to do cloud computing and social networking based on ARM-based servers. Dell is more critical of Moonshot and coming up with its own to fight back.

By Ted Dhanik 

Advertising is a necessary part of running any type of business.  While some small businesses rely on word of mouth referrals, it’s still a good idea to look into advertising to the general public.  There are a few reasons for this.  First of all, advertising allows companies to grow their client base exponentially.  Also, advertising helps to achieve one of the most important elements of running a business: brand awareness.

Many companies stick with traditional advertising because they either aren’t sure how online ads work or because they believe it’s cheaper.  Traditional advertising includes putting an ad in a newspaper, magazine, billboard or on television.  While this can be a good option for certain types of businesses, there are some disadvantages.  With these types of ads, it can be difficult to monitor whether a large number of viewers are exposed to the ad.  For example, if an ad is placed in a magazine, there is a big chance that viewers graze past the ad.  If an ad is on television, it’s crucial to have the ad or commercial play at times of the day when viewership is highest.

Online advertising can be expensive, however, it’s not typically more expensive than other types of ads.  There are some definite advantages online ads offer over traditional ads.  For example, one benefit to display ads is that they can easily be updated and changed without a lot of time, energy, or money.  Obviously, traditional advertising doesn’t offer this same convenience.  Another big perk of internet ads is that they can be tailored for a target audience more easily.  Particularly category and contextual ads are placed on websites that line up with the correct demographic.  This unique tailoring is what makes display ads successful.

Author bio: Guest post is submitted by Ted Dhanik, the president and co-founder of engage:BDR.  engage: BDR is a leading media company that offers marketing solutions for direct response marketers and advertisers.  Ted Dhanik has his bachelor’s degree in Business Administration and Marketing from California State University, Hayward.  Ted Dhanik was previously the VP of Strategic Marketing for Myspace for over five years.

Traditional corporate data centers are moving out of expensive data storage and computing and moving into much cheaper and efficient subscription based clouds. Companies that are benefitting from the new trend includes cloud based storage behemoth Google and Amazon.com, chip makers for cloud based storage Advanced Micro Devices and Applied Micro Circuit, networkers Ciena that provide fast connecting fiber-optic equipment and Splunk, and service providers such as Verizon Communications. Biggest losers will be those enterprise software companies such as SAP, Microsoft and Oracle.

Verizon Communications and Amazon Web Service are making new programming tools that make it easier to transition software from old school company data centers onto clouds. Companies such as Advance Micro Devices are also helping Verizon Cloud by providing them with processors. Verizon Cloud expected to be in operation by 2014. Network gear maker and the leader, Cisco will face problems in coming years because its gear doesn’t fit new cloud equipment. That is why Verizon Cloud using switches from the newcomer Arista Networks that run Linux. Data storage specialists such as EMC and NetApp will not be affected by cloud revelations. However, they are under constant threat from new comers such as Violin Memory and Micron Technology.

By Samuel Phineas Upham

Researchers have known for a while that our brain releases natural painkillers when an individual experiences physical pain. However, Science Daily reports that a new study reveals that the brain releases the same chemicals when a person experiences social rejection.

In addition to being released during social rejection, the study found that opioid was also released in the brain during social acceptance. “The opioid system is known to play a role in both reducing pain and promoting pleasure, and our study shows that it also does this in the social environment,” said Hsu.

The findings of the study will be helpful to researchers who are studying depression and social anxiety. Senior author of the study, Jon-Kar Zubieta, M.D., Ph.D., told the paper that, “”It is possible that those with depression or social anxiety are less capable of releasing opioids during times of social distress, and therefore do not recover as quickly or fully from a negative social experience.”

Read more: http://www.sciencedaily.com/

About the Author: Samuel Phineas Upham is an investor at a family office/ hedgefund, where he focuses on special situation illiquid investing. Before this position, Phin Upham was working at Morgan Stanley in the Media and Telecom group. You may contact Phin on his Samuel Phineas Upham website or Facebook.