QR Codes Expanding Into Emergency Services

Another usage of QR Codes emerges with medical information

 
QR Codes have been seeing a growing usage over the past year as they have expanded from some of the beginnings for them. We have seen the expected usage in stores where someone scans a QR Code and they are taken to a mobile web site where they are given some coupon discount or other valuable information. That was seen as having the most promise for QR Codes and their interaction with mobile customers. As we have seen this year, they are expanding to many other options, some rather strange, but none the less expanding. We have seen QR codes used on grave markers so that people could get more information about the person who is buried there. So, what other usages can there be for QR Codes?

With new ideas popping up, a new one involving Emergency Services has shown up recently and is being undertaken in Northern California. Just north of the Golden Gate Bridge in Marin County, a Pilot Program with a Silicon Valley start called Lifesquare is underway and QR Codes are at the heart of the 1 year program. The goal is to get residents to put their information into a web site which would include personal and medical information. The process starts by picking up Lifesquare stickers at the CVS pharmacy in Marin County which gives them a unique QR Code. They would then enter their information on the web site and when an emergency responder sees the QR Code for Lifesquare, they could scan the code and immediately get all the relevant information about the patient.

Lifesquare is providing 50 iPhones to responders to use for this purpose, which is expected to go live by the end of the year if everything gets set up correctly and tests prove how valuable it will be. Between now and then, they are facing a number of challenges for the pilot program. The biggest hurdle is getting a sufficient number of people signed up through the program and getting them to enter all their medical information. That is going to be a challenge at best because of the primary age group they may be dealing with. Those over 50 are often not as comfortable using technology as those under 50 and thus the challenge. Privacy concerns are another challenge they are going to have to deal with as those over 50 are not as trusting of technology when sharing personal and medical information.

If they are able to overcome those issues, there becomes an even bigger one where keeping the information current and updated will be critical to the emergency responders. Without up to date information, they may take actions which are not the correct ones. The key to this program is going to be doctors and hospitals keeping the information up to date for their patients so first responders know they have all the necessary information. With that in place, this pilot program could lay the ground work for rolling this out on a much broader scale. This kind of a program will provide first responders with information very quickly after scanning a QR Code rather than playing 50 questions with the patient or family members. Time is of the essence in these kinds of situations.

If Lifesquare can get all the avenues of communication working effectively and participation by a large enough group of people, they will have the potential for a very valid study which will have broad implications. Just how willing different age groups are to participate in this kind of a study is the obvious first question to be answered out of it. There are many others which will help gauge the effectiveness of using QR Codes as a method to assist first responders. It will be some time in 2014 before there are any meaningful results from this which can indicate the viability of such a program.

With this pilot project, you start to see that QR Codes can be expanded to far more if you just use your imagination.

Small Business Needs To Look Beyond Print Media

Decline of print advertising requires other options

 
There are changes ahead which small businesses must pay attention to in order to keep up with a changing market. The communication methods of the past are not the ones that a small business owner should be focusing on in the future. While they will be around for a while, they will eventually fade out as newer technologies replace them. That does not necessarily mean that the newer technologies are better, but just changed. There are many signs of the coming changes and these should be obvious to everyone.

We have been observing a shift for years away from print media to electronic. While some seem to transition themselves others do not. Take for example the Yellow Pages which have seen declining revenue for years. Some cities are now requiring them to only be delivered to households which specifically request a printed version. Since there is always going to be an electronic version of the Yellow Pages, it can continue to be considered as a way to communicate your business.

One of the ways to share information about your business was newspapers from 20 years ago. But that is becoming a dying art and is slowly being reduced as a way to get the word out about your business. Small home town newspapers are becoming a thing of the past because of rising costs and dwindling readership. Consolidation of newspapers large and small as been going on for the last 20 years and probably longer. Costs associated with printing and delivery of printed media are forcing a change in the industry to try and stay alive. One of those changes has been the attempt at using paywalls as a way to prop up dying revenue from printed copies. The electronic versions of printed newspapers has not been going as well as expected because there are too many other free sources for news.

Even many of the larger newspapers provide their electronic version for free, so attempting to change to a paywall will drive people away. So, what are you as a small business owner to do when the historical methods you have used in the past no longer are working? Even the US Post Office is looking to down size because of slowing mail delivery revenues. By now, you should have been thinking about other methods to get the word about your business or products. Just reading this articles shows that you are aware of how technology is shaping the future. There are a number of things which you can do and here are a few.

Social Media - With the huge popularity of Facebook, you now have the ability to use Facebook Brand pages to promote your product. The whole idea of Facebook is to create a following of your brand and with that there is a sense of loyalty to those who may be following you. These can be used by both small and large business alike. Even with the recent Facebook Timeline changes, you can leverage them to promote your business. There are many methods and strategies described to leverage Facebook for your small business. And Facebook is not the only Social Media game in town. Google+ is another one of the avenues out there to be explored.

Google Places - Here is another opportunity for you to explore as a way to drive traffic and people to your location. There is even a Google Places for Business which you can take a look at. With this, your business will show up on local searches and puts you in the public's eye. Take a look at the link for a slide show presentation on this topic.

QR Codes - Another option for some small businesses is the idea of utilizing QR Codes in the promotion of your product is a possibility if it fits. Not all businesses can leverage the growing popularity of these little square boxes. If you are not familiar with them, here is a QR Codes for Small Business 101 article to help you. These should be part of your Mobile Marketing Strategy going forward. At the link, there is a white paper which can help you understand the move towards mobile. With the fast growth of smart phones, this is another opportunity you should be considering.

As you can see, there are a number of technology related areas where you can promote your business outside of trying to use AdWords advertising. The future is going to be ever changing and you need to leverage both the past and the future to grow your small business.

Is Your Wordpress Site Prepared For Mobile Users?

Desktop browsers are not the only place to display your site

 
The desktop used to be the only thing that mattered and up until a few says ago, that seemed to still be true. But with the recent proliferation of tablets and smart phones, the whole environment has altered and mobile must be part of your considerations for the future. If you do not look at mobile, you will be missing out on a growing segment of the market. And that segment is growing quickly and will continue to do so, especially with the improving smart phones which we are seeing this year. And they are only going to be getting better. The question is what have you done with your Wordpress site to prepare for the the coming mobile wave?

On some of my sites over the past few years, I have been using Wapple Architect which I have been very happy with under various sites. It has served me well and displays sites very nicely on a smart phone. It is very easy to set up and use, so there was no excuse to not have it on my sites to take advantage of. While I have used this Wordpress plugin, I am always open to considering other options for getting a mobile displayed web site. But, here at TechieDiy, we have found another one we are using for this site and it meets out needs very nicely.

In looking around, we here at TechieDIY have moved to WP Mobile Director as a different option for handling our mobile traffic through the same web site as our normal web site. As with other plugins, it detects the device, whether a computer or a mobile device. If it is a mobile device, it determines whether it is a smart phone or just a normal cell phone and handles it accordingly. There is both a free version and a paid version of the product available with the paid version providing advertising support. You should take a look at WP Mobile Director to see whether it will fit the needs that you have for handle mobile devices on your site.

These two are not the only ones available which can provide you with a mobile display from your Wordpress site. One of the popular ones is Wordpress Mobile Pack which many are using for their sites. This one provides a complete package to help you with your site and the ability to display varying displays and as with all of these, the ability to switch between the mobile or desktop version on a mobile device.

Another Wordpress plugin is MobilePress which has similar features as other leading plugins to render your browser based site on a mobile device. There are the expected capabilities for advertising as well. There are many other Wordpress plugins available for your Wordpress site where you want to display to a standard browser and to a mobile device. If you only want to have a mobile site, there are a number of mobile themes available for your to take advantage of.

For the world of mobile, it is important that you look at this now. With the changes to how mobile devices are working, in particularly the recent and coming smart phones, it is important to realize this shift in technology. With Siri from Apple, it has forever changed search options from purely text based to now voiced based. Now, with S Voice from Samsung and coming on their Galaxy S3, we are seeing an expansion of the methods for searching the web and you must consider the growing traffic. Even Yahoo's Axis, which has just been announced, is changing the mobile platform to use thumbnails as a way to navigate instead of entering text.

With GPS on smart phone, the ability to return search results based on where a smart phone user is located will further alter the mobile search world. There are so many others related to search which will be changing how mobile browsing is going to evolve and it is important that you make sure you are a part of it.

Take the time now to look at your mobile strategy for your Wordpress site. As more people get smart phones, where will your business be?

Are Browser Wars Returning For Mobile?

Yahoo introduces Axis as a new mobile browser

 
We have seen browser wars for a long time ever since Microsoft went after Netscape in the 90's in a fight to see who controlled the desktop browsers. We have continued to see those wars continuing on the desktop through Chrome which has grabbed a large share of the market. They are continuing now with Yahoo adding Axis to the mix. But Axis is really an add on to desktop browser and not a true desktop browser. But, when you move to mobile devices, the browser wars are just now beginning to shape up. There is no big winner on mobile yet and the battle is in early stages right now. If you have a mobile device, you know that it is early on right now.

In the mobile browser world, desktop versions of browsers have been ported to mobile devices and there have been some which are specific to mobile. Now, it looks like things are starting to heat up and we can expect to see browser wars on mobile devices. The most recent entry is for Yahoo's Axis app for mobile devices which offers a unique view of web sites far different than the normal desktop browser interface which many are used to. It is this change which we are going to see far more of in the future.

In Yahoo's Axis app, it provides some other advantages which attempt to make things seamless. You can go from your desktop to your iPhone to your iPad and pick up where you left off on the other device. That is the future that we are headed towards where your activities move from device to device and you continue as though you never left. This will more than likely be available on Android devices in a few months and represents the way of the future for browsing.

Graphical interfaces are the future for mobile and with Yahoo's Axis, they are altering things from the text based displays we are used to on the desktop and changing things up to be a series of thumbnail pictures to help guide you in your browsing journey. That's right, your search results will be pictures instead of text. That will simplify the visual display on mobile devices for your ease of use and that is what it is all about on mobile devices.

Not to be left out, there are rumors of Facebook purchasing Opera in an effort to create their own browser. Opera already has a mobile specific browser which is very popular and performance is quite well on mobile devices. This would give Facebook a huge step up in the mobile browser wars rather than building their own. If that rumor has validity to it, Facebook will jump into the middle of the browser wars. We can expect they will take a large portion of the market share.

The question of what we can expect to see this year is up in the air. Due to so many different devices and options, it is difficult to guess where things might be headed. As an example, the browser which Amazon has created for their own browser for the Kindle Fire is a possible item. Their Silk browser may be expanded to other devices in the future and potentially could cut into the market share of other devices as a result. Whether Amazon makes a decision to expand the usage is an unknown and there is a lot of competition coming.

With mobile device growing this year, especially smart phones, we can expect to see growing competition for mobile devices.

Reddit Problems - Cannot Submit Articles

Advice on how to resolve the submit issue

 
Reddit is an excellent source for driving traffic to your site. It is one which has a large number of users and a wide variety of topics on it. It is because of the active users of Reddit that you can see a bump in traffic when you add a topic to the site. There are the usual items of getting the correct title and subrdedit associated wtih the article you are adding. One of the issues which many are reporting is that after a time, they are blocked from adding new articles to Reddit to their site. This may happen after a few adds or weeks later. When you may actually see the message if they consider you a spammer may vary. But the message you receive once they see you as a spammer is the same.

You've submitted too many links recently. Please try again in an hour.

At that point, you are not able to add a new article. I have tried to add articles at varying times, but it still would not let me add an article. I have spent time participating by adding comments to articles so that they would see me as a valid user and not a spammer. But that did not change the situation. Nothing I tried resolved the problem where I could not add a new article at all.

I have had the same experience which many have been reporting where they essentially are locked out from adding any articles and only able to add comments to existing ones. No matter what you have done, you are not able to get reddit to accept a new submission. Given the value of reddit as one you truly need, then the ability to be able to add items to direct traffic to your site is very important. Without it, you do not get the added traffic.

Since I was encountering the same issue, I have spent quite a bit of time researching the problem and what the solution is to the problem. What I have found is that it is related to how I am adding the entries for title and url. As with anything, you want to do it the easiest way possible. For me, this involved using the copy and paste features which I am familiar with.

And therein lies the problem. After all the research and testing that I did, the problem was the cut and paste that I was doing to get the items in for title and then submitting it. Reddit is trying to make sure and block those automatic submissions that it is recognizing as doing a paste into the title field. It does not know that I am an individual who is adding an article.

What I have found is that if I paste the title, reddit sees me as someone trying to automate the submit process. If I manually type the title, it sees me as a legitimate user adding an article. That is the solution for what many have been reporting. I have been testing this for the past few days and find that for my situation, this is the solution. I have been able to submit 2 articles today for reddit pointing back to my site.

That would tend to resolve the problems which I have been experiencing where I thought that my account had been block because they considered me a spammer. This may not apply to the problems which others are experiencing, but it does appear that it is an answer for many.

One of the things you must do when working with reddit is that you need to participate in the process. You cannot just be adding items no matter how you do it as you will still be considered as a spammer. When you are on reddit, participate by reading the items which others have posted and add comments. That is what the site is designed for.

While there may be other issues with adding things to reddit, this one particular item which stopped me cold in adding things, has now been resolved.

More Captcha Options For Wordpress

Increasing options for using Captcha with comments

 
In the last report, we provided information about how to deal with spam from comments and one of those options was to include Catpcha to eliminate automated comments from flooding your posts. While comments is not the only place where you might see spam being included, it is the one which we are focusing on here to provide some examples of ones you might want to consider. As with any Wordpress plugin, you want to make sure that it is part of the approved list of plugins. That will help to insure that you do not have any issues or problems with the plugin.

A new trend in Captcha is the move away from the letters in words displayed in a graphic. I admit that I have some difficulty at times with what I consider unreadable characters which I am trying to type in. This is because machine readable captcha is catching up with the original intent for it. As an example of the new way of Captcha is the idea of playing a game as part of getting validated that you are in fact a human being and not a machine adding the comment. A good example of this is AreYouHuman.com which displays varying games where you have to drag items which are moving around and place them on something else. The first one I saw was to put items related to pancakes on top of the pancakes. There was a saw included, which obviously would not work on pancakes.

This is a new trend which makes using Captcha more fun rather than straining your eyes to try and read what is there. Another one that relies on pictures is Sweet Captcha which displays 4 pictures on the left and on picture on the right. You are asked to pick one of the left hand pictures that matches what you are being told to do. You are then to drag it onto the right hand picture as part of the validation process. It makes this a much easier method of verifying that you are a human being and not a machine.

Another one that is very simplistic and very popular is simply called Captcha. It does not use pictures or images to get you to validate that you are a human. Instead, it wants to have you answer a mathematical question. You can vary between words and numbers and exactly where you have to fill in a value as shown below. This comes from BestWestSoft. As you can see, things can vary as to how they are displayed and exactly where the values can be entered. This one might be easier to crack by those desiring to add spam in your comments, but it is very simple.



While there are many others out there, I did not include any which are not currently supporting the current Wordpress version of 3.3.2. You can find others which support prior versions, but we do not recommend that you seriously consider them. You want any plugin which you might use to work within the current Wordpress version. If not, you are asking for problems with your Wordpress site.

Are there any Captcha plugins which you have seen which are part of the new easier to use method? Add them here in the comments so everyone can benefit.

Malware Problems Impacting Small Business Owners

Hackers are going after small businesses

 
In this world where small business owners are trying to build up their business, there are growing concerns about the web and how hackers are going after businesses. There are a variety of ways this is happening and it is all related to connectivity to web and all that lurks out there. There is more information about the problems which it presents and just how easy it is to get infected with some malware or trojan which can expose the finances for your business. This is something which you as a small business owner need to be aware of. Being aware is the first step towards taking action to protect yourself.

As a small business owner, connection to the web exposes you to potential harm. If you are not connected to the web, then you are not reading this and therefore have nothing to worry about. But for everyone else, you need to review what you are doing on the web and with web connected devices. Some of the great new technologies for small business are fantastic, such as Square which lets you accept payments on your smart phone. That let's businesses be mobile and not tied to the old technologies. Having to have a land line to dial up and process credit card payments is becoming a thing of the past. But, it is that new technology which has the potential to cause big problems.

For the past few years, the idea of malware on smart phones has been lurking out there as a growing problem. This year, it has moved from lurking on the fringes to roar into visibility as a huge problem for mobile devices. Reports are beginning to emerge showing that this problem has become much worse than anyone has expected. In a report from McAfee, they are showing a 1200% increase in malware in the first quarter this year as compared to the 4th quarter of 2011. This should cause a small business owner to take a much harder look at how to protect yourself against malware.

We know that there is an increase in targeted malware against mobile devices. There is also the Android apps which have been reported which already contain malware before you download them. The move to Google Play is expected to reduce that problem and you should only download apps from trusted sources. It makes it tough to know what to do. If you have employees who click on attachments in any email you receive, you have probably been hit a few times. Keeping AntiVirus software up to date is critical for computers. But mobile devices are something which has not received the desired attention from providers. That is stating to change and you will hear a lot more about AntiVirus software for smart phones. You must take a serious look at this area.

Part of the reason for that is because there are many out there who are now starting to target small business specifically. And this applies even if you are exclusively using Apple products. It seems that there are specific groups targeting Macs, iPads and iPHones. We know that groups are already specifically targeting Android devices, so this should not come as any surprise to anyone. At a speech at the San Francisco Small Business Week, one speaker was warning about attacks on Small Businesses and you need to be very careful with mobile devices.

“Eight out of ten mobile banking apps have security flaws, but Apple and the banks don’t want you to know that. I’ll wait another 20 years to stick my toe in that pond.”

One recommendation is to not use mobile banking apps because that is something hackers are targeting right now. Once they have your bank information, along with the access to your bank, they can begin to pull money out of your accounts. And for a small business, that can create some big problems. It appears that once the crimes are committed against a small business, most law enforcement agencies are unlikely to do a lot of investigation for electronic crimes like this. This can be a real problem when it cross jurisdictions, such as cities, counties or states. An even bigger problem is trying to figure out where the crime actually was committed. Most law enforcement agencies do not have the tools or the manpower to investigate these kinds of crimes.

There are things which you can do, but they require you to alter your current way of doing things. As an example, do your online banking on a different computer than your work computer. Do not do it on your smart phone. Or get some encryption software for your mobile device and computers. All of this should raise your awareness that things are quickly changing in our mobile world and you must adjust to it in order to protect yourself.