“Google Meet Goes Free, Microsoft Flags Double Spaces…And Other Small Business Tech News - Forbes” plus 1 more
“Google Meet Goes Free, Microsoft Flags Double Spaces…And Other Small Business Tech News - Forbes” plus 1 more |
| Google Meet Goes Free, Microsoft Flags Double Spaces…And Other Small Business Tech News - Forbes Posted: 03 May 2020 04:17 AM PDT  (Photo by Muhammed Selim Korkutata/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images) Anadolu Agency via Getty ImagesHere are five things in technology that happened this past week and how they affect your business. Did you miss them? 1 — Google Meet is going free as it guns for Zoom and aims to fend off Microsoft Teams. Google announced this past week that it is going to begin making their video conferencing platform— Meet— free, as a way to stay competitive with video conference giants Zoom and Microsoft Teams. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Google Meet has received an influx of new users who are now having to work from home. Google plans to implement the feature slowly to more users in order to make sure that all goes smoothly. Users with a G Suite account will be able to opt-in for alerts in order to be notified of when they can start using Meet. (Source: ZDNet) Why this is important for your business: There will be many changes to our workplaces in the future because of the Coronavirus pandemic and one of them will be the increased use of video conferencing and collaboration systems. Zoom has been getting all the attention, but its rivals – Google, Microsoft, GoToMeeting, Citrix and others – are going to compete aggressively for your attention with free deals and other incentives. 2 — Microsoft Word now flags double spaces as errors, ending the great space debate. Microsoft Word will now highlight when a user puts two spaces after a punctuation mark, flagging it as an error and ending the confusion surrounding this practice in the past. Now— when users are typing— if they accidentally— or intentionally— put two spaces after a punctuation, Microsoft Word will provide the option to fix the double space to a single. Microsoft began troubleshooting the new update through Word's desktop version and also been providing recommendations using the Word app Editor feature. (Source: The Verge) Why this is important for your business: To double space or not to double space? That's been an age old question and now Microsoft is taking a stand. Get ready for lots of new grammatical errors in your company's communications (as if there aren't a lot already!). 3 —National Business League rolled out a $1.8 million platform to connect black businesses with technology amid COVID-19. This past week, the National Business League Inc. — also known as NBL— is going to utilize their new 1.8 million user platform to help minimize the divide that exists digitally due to the COVID-19 pandemic among black-owned small businesses. (Source: Black Enterprise) Why this is important for your business: If you're a black-owned company then pay attention: NBL rolled out their newest technology platform along with many other initiatives to help businesses like yours, which will include the creation of a new mobile app and website. NBL plans to utilize social media platforms, online virtual entrepreneurial and educational training, live streaming, and additional services to help the gap among black-owned businesses that exists regarding technology. 4 — Without cloud computing, businesses would now be in even deeper trouble. According to Canalys— an analyst firm— $107 billion were spent on cloud-computing services all over the world last year. That amount is 37% more than in 2018. It is predicted that public cloud services will rise to 17% this year, totaling $266.4 billion. With the COVID-19 pandemic changing the way businesses run and employees work, the investment in cloud computing has allowed the transition to working from home happen relatively smoothly for many companies. If the Coronavirus had hit in 2010, businesses would have been in even bigger trouble, with only $6,300 a year being spent on cloud computing during that time. (Source: ZDNet) Why this is important for your business: If you're not convinced that leveraging cloud is a good thing to do, the Coronavirus pandemic should have convinced you that the cloud is now and essential thing to do. Even if you have desktop or older applications, you can still move them to a managed server environment. The important takeaway is that you need to have a cloud strategy for your small business going forward. 5— Phishing scams are targeting SMBs seeking COVID aid. According to data shared by BleepingComputer.com, the relief provided for the coronavirus pandemic through the CARES Act (Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security) has opened new opportunities for scammers to take advantage of business owners looking for help.. (Source: Pymnts) Why this is important for your business: According to the data, those behind the scams try to trick business owners by sending out emails pretending to be the Payment Protection Program (PPP). The idea behind the fraudulent emails is to try and fool individuals in choosing relief options for their businesses using official-looking log-in pages in an attempt to lift important corporate information.  |
| AWS, Azure and Google see usage soar, but tech investment delays hobble revenue growth - ARNnet Posted: 03 May 2020 03:11 AM PDT  Credit: IDGAs lockdown orders force billions of people to work, learn and play from home during the novel coronavirus outbreak, usage has surged for the cloud computing services that power video conferencing, streaming television and online games. The world's three leading cloud services providers — Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud — have all seen demand for their services jump. In particular, peak daily usage for Google's Meet videoconferencing tool has shot up 30-fold since January while the number of daily users for Microsoft's Teams chat system has more than doubled to 75 million since early March. But at the same time, the companies have seen a drop-off in new contracts from big clients for server storage and to overhaul technology, company executives and analysts said this week. The massive, multi-year deals normally account for a greater portion of revenue than contracts for workplace software such as Teams and Meet. Delays in setting up new servers and generous free trial offers also capped sales growth in the first quarter. For instance, Microsoft said it put limits on how much cloud computing new customers could consume because of equipment shortages due to lockdowns. "We're generally utilising servers and infrastructure that we'd already bought...because the ability to get tons and tons of new servers in with the supply chain out of China was constrained," Microsoft CFO Amy Hood said. The cloud provider sector saw first-quarter revenue growth of about 34 per cent, less than the 37 per cent growth in the fourth quarter, according to research company Canalys. It added there had been little change in market share for the top three in the US$31 billion global industry. "Cloud investment in the worst-affected vertical segments, such as hospitality, aviation, construction, tourism and manufacturing, is being scaled down or delayed," Canalys said in a report on Thursday. "This has offset some of the short-term growth enjoyed during the quarter." Whether the cloud providers see a boost to overall revenue growth from the pandemic in the current quarter or later this year remains unclear. Businesses and governments have begun to transition from rolling out emergency measures to preparing for re-opening in the coming months, but their virus-hammered budgets could curtail spending and force cloud providers to extend giveaways. Market researcher IDC last week downgraded its forecast for global IT spending in 2020 to a 2.7 per cent decline compared with a previous estimate of a 3.6 per cent rise because of the pandemic. Delays abound Microsoft Azure, which is No. 2 in cloud revenue after Amazon Web Services, saw its sales growth rate slow the most, at 59 per cent in the first three months of the year from 62 per cent in the prior quarter, company data showed. One of Microsoft's biggest sources of revenue is large businesses tackling complicated technology problems, like moving entire financial software systems to Microsoft's cloud from their own servers. Microsoft executives said this week that while large companies like Anheuser Busch InBev NV are continuing with these migrations, growth in consulting revenue that often accompanies these complex projects had tapered as customers postponed projects. As much as a fifth of Microsoft's cloud revenue could face volatility in the coming quarter because of those delays, the company said. Google CEO Sundar Pichai also said this week that it is taking longer to close cloud deals but did not offer revenue guidance. In the first quarter, revenue for Google Cloud, which includes sales of storage services as well as workplace software, grew 52 per cent from a year earlier compared with 53 per cent in the prior quarter. John Dinsdale, a chief analyst at Synergy Research Group, said though some buyers are delaying, their plans to adopt more cloud services have not changed. "The signs for the leading cloud providers remain very positive," he said by email. Amazon, which saw Amazon Web Services revenue growth drop to 33 per cent in the first quarter from 34 per cent a quarter earlier, pointed to an increase in future spending commitments from customers as evidence its business remains healthy. But pandemic-related restrictions and shortages may crimp future revenue growth. Google said it could face delays on developing new data centers, and Microsoft's Hood told Reuters that construction delays for data centers will persist. "We'll just continue to follow government guidelines and get back to construction when it is safe to do so," Hood said. (Reporting by Paresh Dave and Stephen Nellis in San Francisco; Edited by Greg Mitchell and Edwina Gibbs)   |
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