Month: July 2019

Which Aussie Cities Are Most Attractive For Tech Start-Ups?

Australia is one of the fastest growing countries in the world, offering a fantastic lifestyle for its population. Findings from Better Living Index demonstrate that the country ranks in the highest position for civic engagement and above average for income and wealth, environmental quality, health status, jobs and earnings, education and skills, subjective well-being and social connections. Australia has a lot going for it, right?

There are so many tech start-up businesses popping up all over the world… it’s an exciting time to be an entrepreneur. But is Australia a good place for seeking success for your start-up? Let’s explore which Aussie cities are ideal for launching your new business.

Melbourne

If you are looking to establish a tech firm, Melbourne has recently overtaken Sydney as the best location for new business. In fact, Melbourne was named as one of the best cities in the world for emerging tech firms, despite the decision of both Google and Facebook to set up their HQ’s in Sydney. The findings were based on whether a city attracted enough new tech talents, the general work culture of the area and the readiness of venture capital. In an ever-digitising world, Melbourne has set the tone of becoming an innovative hub to support the firms which will fuel the future. Some great tech firms which began life in Melbourne include MYOB, who operate in accounts and payroll, supplying over one million businesses across Australia and New Zealand. Others include Curo, a firm which ensures care in later life through modern technologies, who recently secured a $1 million investment to take the new business to the US.

Sydney

Sydney still has a thriving scene for start-ups, where budding business owners take in the breath-taking environment and sweet smell of entrepreneurial success. With a population of 4.6 million, Sydney has nurtured a plethora of businesses up through the ranks, where a work culture unparalleled to anywhere else exists. The laid-back perception of Australia is simply not reflected in Sydney, as the hustle and bustle of the city have turned many new firms into instant revenue spinners. In 2018, CNBC listed their start-ups to watch, and Canva was crowned number one. The graphic design platform is used by businesses across the world, awarded the unicorn title in the same year, a mark of recognition for start-ups which are valued over one billion. In six years, the company has enjoyed an astounding growth in popularity and finance, with 13 designs being produced every second by 10 million users worldwide. Innovations such as the Sydney Startup Hub have prompted the growth of new communities, supporting prospective business owners through the daunting process of formalising their business concept. These centres provide continuous support for the current and future infrastructure of start-ups in Australia.

Canberra

The future looks promising for start-up businesses choosing Canberra as their home. The increase in co-working spaces is a positive marker for new businesses looking to set up shop in Canberra, such as Entry 29, Good Work Canberra and Wotso Workspace. They are all setting the scene for a flourishing new lease of life in the capital, with creatives set to redefine Canberra. Various schemes function to provide assistance for those looking to start out, and government programmes such as Innovate Canberra sets out to assist new businesses in pursuing their ventures, providing information on marketing, planning and funding grants. A non-government alternative is the Canberra Innovation Network, which provides a similar service as well as business mentors. Their ever popular ‘GRIFFIN Accelerator’ program welcomes successful applicants into an intensive three-month initiative, whereby they invest in and develop hopeful business owners, aiming to ensure that they finish the program as fully sustainable business owners.

Got a business idea? Make it into a reality, Australia is certainly the place to be for transforming your pipeline plans into a successful venture.

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Beginner’s Guide To Choosing Right Web Hosting

Buying a domain name isn’t the only thing that takes your website to the Internet. You also require a host to provide the site with essential resources. In addition, it decides how people will access your site and purchase your services through the online platform. If you are still confused about web hosting, then this guide can help you to find out its purpose and suggest methods to choose the best web host.

  • What Is Website Hosting? Why Do You Need It?

In a layman’s language, hosting is a kind of service that makes your website accessible on the Internet. It gets all those resources that help it to make its content available to people on the Internet. Technically, a website hosting package is a set of services that decide a website’s speed, bandwidth, storage space, security, and many other elements associated with it.

As discussed earlier, you need web hosting services to make your website available on the Internet. When you purchase the best hosting plan from a reliable service provider, you get a website that quickly loads on the World Wide Web and allows users to explore through it in an efficient manner. In addition, the hosting services help to manage the traffic flow on the website and provide the site with security features.

  • How To Buy Hosting?

Now that you have understood what is web hosting and why do you need hosting services, the next step is to choose a suitable hosting service provider for your site. However, choosing a hosting type and a service provider isn’t easy. There are different types of hosting plans that feature different services from each other. Apart from that, there are many hosting service companies that offer these services at different prices.

  • Compare Host Types

The first thing to consider while looking for the best hosting plan is the host type. There are different types of hosting plans- including shared, dedicated, cloud, Virtual Private Server, and WordPress hosting. They are different from each other in terms of storage space on a server, bandwidth, support, security, and the price.

Shared hosting includes many websites on one physical server. They share space and resources with each other. Load on the server by one website can affect the performance of other sites sharing the physical server.

On the other side, a dedicated or VPS hosting plans provide a website with dedicated resources. These hosts come with customizable features that allow you to add more applications to your website to improve its performance. Apart from that, your website gets its own resources and tools to perform effectively.

A WordPress web hosting plan is an effective plan for WordPress websites. Here, a service provider takes care of the website to ensure that it works smoothly on the Internet.

  • Choosing The Best Hosting Plan

Although all the hosting types are different from each other, you can choose a web hosting plan considering your requirements. For example, a shared host is an ideal host when you do not want to make frequent changes to your website. It’s a cost-effective hosting package that only marks the presence of your business over the Internet.

If you have a business website or an e-commerce store where you want to sell your products, then get a VPS of a dedicated host for your website. A WordPress plan is a suitable one when you are the owner of a WordPress website.

In addition, you can compare your needs with the services a web hosting company is offering you. All these things come together to help you to decide on your best hosting plan for your site.

Call Center Outsourcing: Everything You Need to Know

From product warranties to payment issues, call centers handle a wide range of customer service issues on a daily basis. For businesses both big and small, call center outsourcing can help save time and money while improving productivity, boosting customer satisfaction rates, and promoting overall business growth. If you’re a business owner interested in outsourcing call center services, here’s what you should keep in mind.

Inbound versus outbound call centers

Outsourcing your business’ call center requires choosing between an inbound and outbound call center. Inbound call centers handle inbound calls from both current and potential customers regarding questions or issues related to your products or services, while outbound call centers focus on making outbound calls to drive in potential business.

Since inbound call centers are the primary method of communication for many businesses, it’s crucial to consider a number of call center software companies before choosing outsourcing services. Inbound call centers can benefit greatly from an interactive voice response system (IVR) software, which uses dual-tone-multi-frequency (DTMF) tones on the phone keypad to automatically route callers to the appropriate agent. IVRs boost efficiency and customer satisfaction by helping customers avoid lengthy queues and the need to repeat themselves to multiple agents.

Outbound call centers make outbound calls and are focused on sales and marketing to drive business, make sales, and bring in new customers. Outbound call centers require a competent and thoroughly trained sales team in order to make successful warm and cold calls. Bright Pattern’s call center software provides features to track agent performance, average call times, and levels of customer satisfaction. In addition, the software offers tools for training to ensure consistency across all interactions.

Cloud-based call centers

Since it can be difficult to know how many agents are needed during the expansion of a business, hiring remote agents is a preferable option for many businesses. By integrating cloud-based communications, you’ll be able to build remote offices and hire agents at your own pace.

Cloud-based call centers require little overhead cost and allow you to hire the agents best suited for the needs of your business. Bright Pattern’s cloud-based call center platform can integrate with other systems, enabling business owners to outsource call centers quickly and efficiently with little to no downtime. Business owners can also choose to receive software updates, maintenance, and online support without any disruption in the operation of the call center.

Choosing the right call center for your business

Whether your business should outsource an inbound or outbound call center depends on the volume and needs of your current customers. If your business needs to focus on offering better customer service, an inbound call center can help boost customer satisfaction rates while providing technical support. Meanwhile, if your business is looking to expand and drive in new customers, consider an outbound call center.

Regardless of what type of call center you choose, you’ll need the right call center software in order to guarantee a successful operation. Make sure to choose call center software that will enable you to maintain consistency and quality throughout all customer interactions. Additionally, features like call monitoring, call tracking, and data analytics can help you measure agent performance, trends, and call outcomes.

All in all, it’s important to keep in mind that the success of any call center depends on the right software. When outsourcing your call center, remember that the ideal call center software should not take a “one-size-fits-all” approach to the operations of your call center.

Since each business has unique needs, your call center software should be able to scale to fit your operations. Whether you choose to implement an inbound, outbound, hybrid, or cloud-based call center, make sure to choose an efficient solution to help promote the growth and success of your business.

Hire outsourced IT support for your small business firm

Every company in Toronto needs a skilled team of IT support services because nowadays every firm runs on computers and many other types of electrical equipment. This equipment helps in elevating the output of any firm as well as help in providing better and convenient services to the customers. But, it is obvious someday or sometime, there might be occurring issues in this equipment and in that case, you will need a skilled technician to resolve those issues to maintain the quality and flow of services.

If you are an SME then it would be a large cost for you to hire a whole team of experienced technicians and engineers. In such a case, you can easily hire an IT outsourcing company in Toronto. They are not just cost-efficient but also their wide range of services will serve you great help.

Here are a few benefits of outsourcing your tech support services:

Managed IT services – These professionals will manage all your IT services and that means it includes everything from solving technical issues of PC, Mac and other devices to software installation, etc. They can also manage your onsite IT services that you provide to your customers. Also, to ensure that everything works fine in your firm they will proof all the equipment, devices and software with proactive services, so there will be least chances that would be facing any sort issue after hiring them.

Network security – In the highly advanced era, it has become very necessary that you have complete network security in your framework and these service providers will do that for you too. From installing antivirus in all the computers to securing your office network, they can do everything. With their remote services, they can fix all kinds networking or software issues even from their location i.e. you neither have to go to their office nor have to wait for them to arrive, issues will be solved at that very moment.

Use registration check software in your company for many reasons

In today’s world of fast internet connectivity, most of the companies prefer to manage their business in a paperless manner. This process not only saves you a lot of time but you can also retrieve a file effectively when you need it for references. The same ideology goes for visitor and employee management where many companies have started to acquire the impeccable facility of registration check-in software – iLobby. This software provides you an opportunity to track the whereabouts of a visitor or your employee inside your corporate firm.

Why this facility is the need of the hour?

Emergency warning

In many unfortunate events like fire incidences, companies use sirens and warnings through loudspeakers so that every other person inside the premises can evacuate in a safe manner. Contrary to this, when you use registration check software then all the people will get a direct warning to evacuate the place as soon as possible.

Access control

Through this software service, one can also make a visitor or an employee access certain parts of the organization. This service will protect you from internal theft incidences and secure the interest of your organization. You can event track a temporary staff who is working in your organization in an efficient manner.

Create a watch list

Through registration software, you can effectively get the whereabouts of a person who is visiting your organization. Thus, you can easily recognize a person who is charged with various criminal charges viz. theft, municipal demeanor, criminals and sex offenders. This provides you a chance to keep an eye on their every movement or prevent them from entering the premises altogether.

Lets you make a great impression

With this innovative service, you can win the heart of your prospective business partners and investors when they visit your organization for the very first time. This service will give you a chance to provide better quality service to your prospective clients which will make you win their confidence.

Federal Trade Commission Tips About Public WiFi Security

If you’re like most people, not only do you have your office at work, and your office at home, but you have an office at your local coffee shop. Who could blame you? It’s always fun to get in a little people watching in between putting together that report for your manager. However, what you may not realize is that logging onto any public network anywhere is like showing up to the wild wild west of computers. In fact, it can be so dangerous as far as your personal information that the Federal Trade Commission believes you should be aware of the following things…

1. Any time you share anything via the internet or a wireless network, that information should be encrypted in order to protect yourself from vulnerability. Encryption is essentially a code that your data is turned into while being sent and then decoded at the other end. Look for an “s” at the end of every website’s “http” so that you know that the website is secure and sending your information only through an encrypted packet if you are on public WiFi.

2. Mobile apps do not share the same encryption standards as sites do, and thus a mobile app may not be encrypted properly. Make sure that if you are sending very vulnerable information via a mobile app that you are not on public WiFi or just go to the website version of the app so that you can see if there is an “s” in the website.

3. Not all WiFi hotspots are secure, some of them do not encrypt the data at all and thus could be just as vulnerable as a public network. It goes without saying that if there is no password then the network is not secure, but even with a password, you might not be entirely safe. If you are going to use a WiFi hotspot, it’s worth checking to see if it’s safe, like this company for example that secures the WiFi.

In this day and age, you are never quite certain of how protected your data is. Even the tips provided above are just a basic guide on protecting your information, and can still be circumvented with the right tools. There are hacking tools available for free to the public for download that could make anyone a threat.

Next time you’re working at your coffee shop office, just keep in mind what websites you are visiting and what sort of information you are transmitting, because you just never know!