Advances in technology are revising notions of what the typical workplace looks like. Once a central location where management and staff gathered daily to plan and complete the tasks of the business, the office has become a much more fluid concept as companies permit employees to work remotely.

When people think about extreme reactions to changes in technology within a company, what most often comes to mind is the older worker, the one who is not a digital native. These are the people for whom change has come too quickly and demanded retraining for positions that otherwise were following a simpler and established routine.

When we think of technology, there are two main ideas that come to mind. The first is hardware, the tangible products that we directly experience such as a smartphone camera or a cloud server. The second is software, commonly known as apps, which are not tangible but of which we do see the results.

In the United States and many other countries, the small business is at the heart of economic growth and sustainability. Though the definition of a small business may vary, one thing is clear: the number of people employed by them greatly outnumbers that of the largest corporations.

You have probably heard more than you care to about social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter, their popularity and the viral nature of people’s posts that claim to “crash the Internet.” Dramatics aside, social media serves many valuable functions in the company business plan, particularly how it relates to your customers.

Crowdsourcing, a term coined by writer Jeff Howe, is the act of designating tasks usually performed by a specific person, such as a contractor or employee, to a large pool of workers who handle these individual chores on a freelance basis. Since these workers are independent contractors, the usual expenses of hiring, training and even keeping track of payroll taxes are unnecessary, and since the people in the “crowd” could be anywhere in the world, it’s possible to get the simpler and more repetitive tasks done at a very low price.

You are opening up your own business, or your small business has decided to start accepting credit cards to make purchases more convenient for customers. What steps will you take to garner your customers’ trust that their credit card data are secure and remain confidential?

PCI Data Security Standards

First, as a new business accepting credit cards, it is imperative to understand that you are subject to the scope of the PCI Security Standards Council (PCI).

The PCI offers assessments to your business, as well as compliance information.

So which is right for your business: virtualization or cloud computing? Do you know the difference? No? That’s okay; a lot of people who don’t work in IT don’t know the difference either. The word “cloud” is thrown around so often that sometimes people aren’t sure how “virtualization” fits in, and the two get confused pretty fast.

GoogleNow’s service has now been listening to, learning from and directing people for nearly three years, and the newest round of improvements reflects all of that time spent collecting information. As GoogleNow continues to develop, the goal is that it will become more and more like interacting with a human.

You might not want to keep up with technological advances, and that’s understandable. Everything changes so quickly that sometimes it can be quite overwhelming, especially when you have a business to run and employees to manage. However, sometimes a technology will make running your business so much easier that passing it up would be a tragedy.