This new way of networking also means a new approach in marketing. Successful marketing depends on understanding what customers need, want and expect, and social networking allows their voices to be heard by fellow customers and the company itself. If a customer finds a product poor or unsatisfactory, he or she can voice this opinion online and possibly affect the decisions of other customers. Businesses can use this part of information technology to study what works, what doesn't and how best to market their products to potential customers.

Networking has always played an important role in business, and information technology makes communication and sharing of ideas with colleagues around the world almost instantaneous. In addition, more recent social networking sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter allow businesses an unprecedented level of contact and communication with their customers. By harnessing this part of information and communication technology, companies can share information virally. This means as each customer or worker shares information about the company online, the number of people who are exposed to the information grows exponentially.

Cell phones have become small business necessities for owners and employees. These devices are lifelines for staying in touch when on the road and responding to customer inquiries in a timely manner. Smartphones raise the bar with access to the Internet, email and business applications in a small hand held device. Email, text messaging and social networking is the other advances in communication that keep small businesses connected to their customer bases and improve internal communication within the company.

Finances

Keeping a close eye on income and cash flow is an integral part of managing a successful small business, but this process can quickly turn into a time suck if you don't have the right technology.

Software and service-based technologies can help identify and reduce bloated spending. For example, print management services can dramatically reduce an expense that typically eats up 1-3% of your revenue by setting controls and offering recommendations. Another example: the cloud. Cloud computing leverages off-site, virtual-based technology to store data and software applications that can be accessed from anywhere.  It allows you to keep hardware costs to a minimum during times of expansion or contraction and can give you a great boost in security.

Employee Productivity

City Safety is one of the most advanced standard crash prevention offers you can find in a modern car. City Safety is a driver support system to help warn the driver to pedestrians, cyclists, and other vehicles that may emerge in front of your vehicle without much warning. Volvo can alert you with a visual, sound, or automatically breaking if the driver is not able to respond quickly enough. The City Safety function can help the driver avoid a collision when e.g., there is a sudden change in the traffic ahead if the driver's does not take action. The function assists the driver by applying the brakes automatically if there is an imminent risk of a collision and the driver does not react in time.

City Safety triggers brief, forceful braking in an attempt to stop your vehicle immediately behind the vehicle or object ahead. This braking may be perceived as being very sudden. City Safety activates in situations where the driver has not applied the brakes in time, which means that the system cannot help the driver in all situations. City Safety is designed to intervene as late as possible to help avoid unnecessary activation.

City Safety can help avoid a collision with a vehicle or cyclist ahead by reducing your vehicle's speed by up to 30 mph (50 km/h). In the case of pedestrians, City Safety can reduce speed by up to 28 mph (45 km/h). If the difference in speed between your vehicle and the vehicle ahead/pedestrian is greater than 30 mph (50 km/h) or 28 mph (45 km/h) respectively, City Safety's auto-brake function cannot prevent a collision but it can help mitigate effects of the collision.

Honda’s Collision Mitigation Brake System (CMBS) is a radar‐based autonomous emergency braking system.    At speeds above 15km/h, moving and stationary vehicles are detected along a path some 100m ahead of the vehicle.   When the system senses that the car is likely to hit one of these obstacles, a three stage process is initiated.    In the first, typically around 3 seconds before impact, the driver is alerted by visual and audible warnings.  In the second stage, when the system senses that a collision is still likely (typically some 2 seconds before impact), three sharp tugs are given on the seat belt and the car automatically starts to apply some braking.    Finally, when a collision is unavoidable, CMBS tightens the front seat occupants’ seatbelts (using reversible tensioners different from the pyrotechnic devices used during the collision itself) and applies a high level of braking force.    This braking can be supplemented by the driver up to the maximum that the car is capable of. All of the actions taken by CMBS are reversible: if an accident is averted (for example, if the vehicle moves out of the way at the last moment), the tension is removed from the seatbelts and the visual and audible warnings stop.

CMBS is not switched on by default at the start of each journey.  CMBS can be switched on and off by the driver by means of a dashboard mounted button. CMBS will remain active as long as the button is in the ‘on’ position. CMBS relies on radar detection of the obstacles in front and is constrained by anything which limits its ability to detect, such as dirt, mud or snow covering the radar sensor. In such circumstances, the on‐board monitoring system would notify the driver of impaired radar detectability. CMBS was one of the first autonomous emergency braking systems to be developed and uses a single radar sensor which, in normal circumstances, will detect all vehicles from a small motorcycle upwards.  Bicycles are usually not detected.  Conversely, the system may sometimes detect metallic objects which pose no threat.  More recently, multiple sensor systems are being applied by industry to overcome such issues.    However, Honda has carefully balanced the sensitivity of CMBS to maximize its effectiveness when needed and to minimize irritation to the driver when it is not needed.

Blind Spot Information System (BLIS), a system of protection developed by Volvo. Volvo's previous parent, Ford Motor Company, has since adapted the system to its Ford, Lincoln, and Mercury brands. Ford’s Blind Spot Information System with cross-traffic alert is a driver assist feature that helps detect vehicles in blind spots during normal driving and traffic approaching from the sides when reversing out of parking spots.

The feature uses two multiple-beam radar modules, the same used with cross-traffic alert, which are packaged in the rear quarter panels – one per side. The radar identifies when a vehicle enters the defined blind spot zone and illuminates an indicator light on the corresponding side view mirror, providing a warning that a vehicle is approaching.

Working in conjunction with Blind Spot Information System (BLIS), cross-traffic alert warns the driver of impending traffic while backing out of a parking spot Cross-traffic alert utilizes the blind spot system’s two multiple-beam radar modules. It can pick up a vehicle moving at least 5 mph within a 45-foot range – or five parking spaces – from either the left or right side of the vehicle. When cross traffic is approaching, three warnings are given: an indicator lights up in the corresponding outside mirror, an audible alert is sounded and a message center warning is displayed. The radar also works when backing out of angled parking spaces because its view is wider than just strictly sensing traffic coming at a 90-degree angle.

A hybrid cloud is a computing environment which combines a public cloud and a private cloud by allowing data and applications to be shared between them. When computing and processing demand fluctuates, hybrid cloud computing gives businesses the ability to seamlessly scale their on-premises infrastructure up to the public cloud to handle any overflow - without giving third-party data centers access to the entirety of their data. Organizations gain the flexibility and computing power of the public cloud for basic and non-sensitive computing tasks, while keeping business-critical applications and data on-premises, safely behind a company firewall.

Cost efficiency – depending on your use, public cloud tends to offer a more cost-effective solution than private cloud. Hybrid cloud adopters can balance their need to be cost efficient with the security of keeping their most sensitive and critical workloads on private cloud.
Scalability – private cloud is not necessarily un-scalable but public cloud will always be able to offer more in this regard. By moving those workloads that most benefit from scalability to the public cloud, you also reduce the demands on your private cloud.

Private Cloud: the cloud services used by a single organization, which are not exposed to the public. A private cloud resides inside the organization and must be behind a firewall, so only the organization has access to it and can manage it.

Public Cloud: the cloud services are exposed to the public and can be used by anyone. Virtualization is typically used to build the cloud services that are offered to the public. Example for public cloud are Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), IBM’s Blue Cloud, Sun Cloud, Google App Engine and Windows Azure Services Platform.

Hybrid Cloud: the cloud services can be distributed among public and private clouds, where sensitive applications are kept inside the organization’s network (by using a private cloud), whereas other services can be hosted outside the organization’s network (by using a public cloud). Users can them interchangeably use private as well as public cloud services in every day operations.

Cost:In case of an outage, the organization has to rely on the internal IT for any support to handle the outages in the hybrid environment. One of the ways to reduce it would be to create redundancy across its data centers. In order to mitigate the risks, the company may have to use multiple cloud services.

Security : Cloud computing is not inherently any less secure than traditional computing, and in fact faces fewer attacks, but there are still considerations to take into account when building out a hybrid cloud. The proper precautions must be taken to ensure data is properly protected and that control is maintained by the right people. Additionally, depending on the industry, there may be certain regulatory requirements that prohibit data from being stored off-site, which would prevent the use of a public cloud entirely.

Data and application integration: Applications and data exist in a symbiotic relationship, with each one being useless without the other. Oftentimes they’re chained together. So when considering where to store each of them, it’s essential to ask whether the infrastructure they’re placed on matters. For example, if an application lives in a private cloud and its data lives in an on-premise data center, is the application built in order to access the data remotely? Technologies like copy data virtualization can decouple data from infrastructure and make this problem less of a headache.

Compatibility: Compatibility across infrastructure can prove itself to be a major issue when building a hybrid cloud. With dual levels of infrastructure, a private cloud the company controls and a public one that it doesn’t, the chances are that they will be running different stacks.

Networking: Will very active applications be living in the cloud? It’s necessary to consider the bandwidth usage they could take up on the network and whether or not it could cause problems in bottle necking other applications.

Irrespective of its drawbacks, for many organizations the Hybrid cloud model may still appear to be the best option when compared with the Public and Private cloud model. Given that Security and Uninterrupted smooth transfer of data remain of paramount importance, Hybrid cloud model may be exactly what they are looking for.

The era of digital transformation is driving significant change in how organizations use and rely on technology – there is no doubt that cloud computing will continue to fuel advancements in the enterprise arena for years to come. Hybrid cloud is the next major leap in the evolution of enterprise IT.

Benefits include:

In addition, robotic technologies enable more reliable monitoring and management of natural resources, such as air and water quality. It also gives producers greater control over plant and animal production, processing, distribution, and storage, which results in:

Use of machines on farms:

Now a farmer can cultivate on more than 2 acres of land with less labor, and can cut costs even more when they are looking for a used tractor and other harvesting technology, versus new equipment. The use of planters and harvesters makes the process so easy. In agriculture, time and production are so important; you have to plant in time, harvest in time and deliver to stores in time. Modern agricultural technology allows  a small number of people to grow vast quantities of food and fiber in a shortest period of time.

This helps in making products available on markets in time from the farm. With modern transportation, consumers in Dubai will consume fresh carrots from Africa with in the same day that carrot lives the garden in Africa.

These are used by farmers to deliver tomatoes and other perishable crops to keep them fresh as they transport them to the market. These cooling facilities are installed in food transportation trucks, so crops like tomatoes will stay fresh upon delivery. This is a win-win situation for both the consumers of these agricultural products and the farmers. How? the consumers gets these products while still fresh and the farmer will sell all their products because the demand will be high.

Genetically produced plants like potatoes, can resist diseases and pests, which rewards the farmer with good yields and saves them time. These crops grow very fast they produce healthy yields. Since they are resistant to most diseases and pests, the farmer will spend less money on pesticides, which in return increases on their (RIO) return on investment.