In the current world, it’s almost impossible to imagine that someone can live  without computers. Computers have become an electronic device of almost every day use for individuals of every age. They are essential in almost all the business dealings that are made nowadays. The most that any industry has gained from the discovery of the computers is the business industry because of its nature. Computers have gained significance as they have improved the efficiency and productivity of work done. Large amounts of information in industrial and business sectors as well as in the personal lives are stored on computers.

Computers can help businesses by making their staff efficient and productive and also save their valuable time in any business or office. Computers in schools will help the learners to comprehend the basic concepts better with the help of video or audio examples. Computers in higher learning institutions will help the professors and researchers to do their work very fast and in an efficient and better way and also help them to share the same knowledge with their other members of staff. Computers become a vital gadget in several sectors; railways, banking, electricity, telephone departments, shopping carts etc are just but a few of them. Computers are also used in the medical industry to help doctors in diagnosing the diseases quickly and efficiently. All the administrative systems, whether private or public are now using computers and this practice can be evident in every part of the world.

Computers have also helped the media and the entertainment industries. Be it a multi-million dollars movie or a two minutes commercial, computers have changed the usual concept of providing entertainment to the public. With the computer business growing so fast, the computer industry has also brought about an invention. Tablets, palmtops, and laptops have replaced the desktops. With the decrease in size, it has become very easy to carry the computer and use them anywhere you are to the fullest.

The importance of computers in our daily lives can be judged by the number of people using them each single day. Computer is not only used by professionals, but also by the little children and grownups at our homes.

Today, everything related to your everyday life can be done using computers. You can order your breakfast online using your computer, you can read newspaper online, you can work from the comfort of your home with the help of your computer, you can watch movies and videos through your computer, you can listen to music through your computer, you can read novels and books through e-books, you can play games, you can also contact people and talk to them through your computer etc. These are just but a few things that can be done with the help of your computer.

Why do you think some individuals are much obsessed with music? Music has been the language of many people. It delivers and interprets a unique feeling that translates into something meaningful and has message. Many lyrics within songs have meaning to some people, it can restore a memory or make you think of a certain person or event when you last or first heard the song or part of music. Music has also been considered as an art that allows you to express your freedom of interpretation.

These are just few of the many reasons why people are very much obsessive with it. Moreover, music without technology is incomplete. Music technology is an applied technology using various mediums or tools or instruments to produce it, from an actual instrument to a computer program. There is no mistaking that music technology has evolved since the early years from the old style LP’s up to the recent and most advanced form of technology of today which is downloading.

The use of technology within the music industry has been ground changing and has made huge steps forward making the sound quality even more enhanced and to make the whole music smooth and kinder on the ear. The latest technology has an important link between technological creativity and art.

Since the early age, we have seen unparalleled advancements of music technology that has made various changes on the way we relate with and create sounds, music and tunes. Now tracing the advances in music technology and recording, it started in the early 1870s when Thomas Edison & Emile Berliner created experiments in recording sound, this technology was used right up until the year 1935, where a magnetophone – magnetic tape recording was developed in Germany. Max Matthew introduced the first digital synthesis in the year 1957-58 along with the Music I and Music II at Bell Labs. During the year 1970’s to 1977, music technology keeps on evolving to its most advanced form in year 1982, where the new Compact Disc system was introduced. With the fast paced advance of the music technology industry, people have used a MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface), rolling to the Cmix, Csound, High quality digital audio work stations for PCs or personal computers until the early years in 1990s using digital multi-track systems.

The ontological range in the technology of music has been known to be highly and a most cutting-edge in the recent years that have led to its vast increase of various applications and systems. You have the software application concepts that make it fast and convenient for you to record, download and upload different songs from its main source. You can also make some changes or do some editing/adjustments on the sounds and song interpretations. Some music enthusiasts have been developing intricate music applications that will produce an array of music results. They have collaborated these interesting and advanced systems linking with other applications to earn and produce more copies and trends. Every now and then, music technology keeps on changing into something new as people have been inventing new ideas to make the technology of music more developed or highly advanced.

EBay is one of the largest e-commerce websites in the world and has a given other major competitors like Amazon a run for its money. Founded in the year 1995, its growth has been phenomenal since its inception and it has now reached a stage where it is capable of handling millions of transactions in every part of the world on a daily basis. EBay is a virtual marketplace where anybody can become a member and sell their merchandise. In addition to that, you can also conduct auctions on products and sell it to the highest bidder. The ease of conducting commerce online has allowed several businesses to script their own success stories and the number just keeps growing with each progressing day.

If you follow the guidelines set up by eBay, you will find that it is very easy to conduct your business without any problems or whatsoever. Failing to adhere to these guidelines might result in your online store getting blacklisted and you will not be allowed to sell your goods anymore through eBay. To become a successful eBay entrepreneur, you need to showcase yourself as a trustworthy person with whom consumers can do business with. The trust factor is the one which makes consumers repeatedly come back to make purchases in your store. If you are not going to behave in a trustworthy manner with your consumers, you can forget about succeeding in eBay. Likewise, there are no shortcuts to enjoy success in eBay. You need to work the hard and build your business up from scratch.

With consumers increasingly spending more time shopping online, the time is just right for you to start developing your business via eBay. Never compromise on the quality of the goods that you sell because consumers never like to be cheated. If you are selling a product which is worth £10, make sure that you give the consumer quality worth £10. Reveal all the details pertaining to each and every product that you sell. Consumers value and appreciate honesty. By revealing the details of your products, you are not hiding anything from the consumers and they know exactly what they are buying. Apart from that, this will also help you to avoid misunderstandings with the consumers so that in case of any issues with the product, you will not be liable for it.

It takes time for you to establish yourself as a major player in eBay and it can’t be achieved overnight. Try to be patient and focus on the job at hand. As you continue to expand your business, consumers will start giving you positive feedback and this will give you greater visibility when compared to your rivals. A positive feedback will help distinguish your business from those which are not that consumer friendly. Respond to the feedback, suggestions and complaints of your consumers. Ignoring them will spoil your reputation and it takes a great deal of effort to earn it back. So don’t harbour the false notion that you can get away by not responding to the pain points faced by your consumers.

Anyone can trade on EBay and other online platforms like this, it allows the sole trader or part time trader to compete with big corporate businesses on a level playing field. This is a great way to earn some extra cash to either subsidise your income or to make extra money for life’s little extras such as holidays etc.

Join the internet revolution and start trading online today……

The modern technological advancement has instilled a new era of civilisation in the information technological sector. This is clearly demonstrated by the number of applications that is hosted in electronic devices. By the end of 2013, millions of applications had been developed and distributed in both the Google and the Apple stores. Both stores recorded over fifty billion download marks. The presence of applications has been felt across a swathe of sectors from the publishing sectors, to the entertainment and games industries. It has attracted big financial ventures that has propagated lucrative acquisitions and made revenues worth billions of dollars.

Although there has been a widespread positive outcome with the introduction of apps, it has also spurred hot debates on issues regarding regulation, privacy and the question of whether it is encouraging another era of dotcom- style bubble.

Studies reveal a number of trends, brands, developers and start-ups popping around apps in this New Year. There are a number of brands that have been identified as some of the best apps in both mobile and computer technology.

In the entertainment section, some of the best technological applications found on both Android and iPad tablets include BBC iPlayer, which shows television shows from the BBC. Similarly, users can download these shows offline; Spotify, which allows users to stream a vast catalogue of music, share playlists and get customized radio stations; Kindle, that supports various reading applications from Amazon through synchronizing user’s e-books over all devices; Netflix, which operates like the Spotify application but only specialises with films and television shows (Dredge, 2013).

Technological applications have also been developed for the games category. Examples of this include the Minecraft – Pocket Edition, which is a crafting game appropriate for both the adult and children.

The Room’ app is a delightful puzzle game that sees its users exploring 3D objects in a room while solving puzzles.

Clash of Clans is an intensive and fulfilling technological app that prompts users to make and fortify a village while raiding other players.

Real Racing 3 on the other hand, is a console quality application that gives users the ability to race their Facebook friends even in they are offline (Dredge, 2013).

For the kid’s category, a number of applications have been developed to enhance their critical and learning skills. Toca Hair Saloon 2 for instance, turns the little children into hairdressers and allows them to make the character’s hair. Endless Alphabet on the other hand, is an application that makes spelling activities fun through the aid of a band comprised of mischievous monsters. BBC CBeebies Playtime app is comprised of mini games of characters featured in television shows including Octonauts, Tree Fu Tom, etc.(Dredge, 2013).

The greatest achievement in the advancement of technological application is the incorporation of social tools in the electronics gadgets. Here, some of the apps include Facebook app, which is a slick program with user friendly software allowing users to message and interact with each other; Twitter app which is similar to face book but users’ tweet using only 140 characters or less, flippboard, wunderlist and quip, are great tools significant for word processing (Dredge, 2013).

Studies also forecast the coming of a potential apps crash. In the year 2013, Apple released its figures which were paid out to iOS developers. This cost was stipulated at approximately $8 billion (USD). Since the firm made more than a million apps, the average cost of apps was about $ 8k per app. While a considerably small number of apps are generating big revenues, a lot of apps are generating small amount of revenues; which is no problem since some of them apps are spare time projects (Reynolds, 2014).

The problems is however, stipulated in the middle app market, where the crash of apps is predicted to come from. For instance, the start-ups that financed ventures but did not break even and/ or ventures that managed to find users but are struggling to generate money for them. Health tracking tools, photo sharing apps, fermium games, messaging apps and other apps that have demonstrated an overstuffed trend is predicted to curl by the end of year 2014. As the advancement continues to grow so will the numbers with research analysts predicting that most innovative apps will be centralized to few hundreds or thousands of users since, the apps shall be developed for organizational purposes (Reynolds, 2014).

Reference:

Dredge, S. (2013). Best Apps for Your New Tablet Computer. The Guardian News and Media Limited

Reynolds, K. (2014). App Trends for 2014: Privacy, Education, Wearables and More. The Guardian News and Media Limited

Without being too nostalgic I can clearly remember the days before mobile phones, the days when if you wanted to call someone you had to use a landline phone or even a payphone box and if you wanted to receive a call you had to hang around and wait for someone to call you. Make no mistake the mobile phone and smart phone has certainly changed many aspects of our daily lives. The days before mobile phones seemed a little less hectic, and maybe even peaceful. How many times have you been on a bus or train and made to listen to some random person’s conversation?  Where you are forced to endure everything from a domestic argument to some love struck idiot broadcasting his love life to all in earshot, its cringe worthy!

As with all technology it has a good side that helps us through our daily lives and makes things easier and also a dark side too, with the advancement of mobile phones there are plenty of arguments for both-sides. One thing that you can’t get away from is how complicated these devices are becoming. My first mobile phone was a Philips, not a great phone by any stretch of the imagination and a far cry from my I phone I use today but the good thing was its simplicity… it made and received calls and that’s all I ever asked or expected from it, nice and simple phone calls.

Phones or smart devices as they are referred to these days  are now a device first and a phone second which means that we use our phones/device’s for many other things first and the fact that it can also make calls is a secondary bonus. If, like me, your aged between 20 and 45 years old you will no doubt remember when a mobile phone was a mobile phone for calling and if you were lucky it had a game called snake or similar, snake itself was considered a real novelty must have back then, it was also hard to lose your phone as it was so bulky and heavy that you noticed immediately if wasn’t weighing your pocket down, I bet there was a few back injuries that can blamed on carrying the big brick of a phone around.

Today’s smartphones come preloaded with a simple OS or operating system like Apple or Android, this system will operate the very basics of the device, to customise your device you need to download apps or applications. What is an app? According to wiki it is: A self-contained program or piece of software designed to fulfil a particular purpose; an application, especially as downloaded by a user to a mobile device. ”Apparently there are these new apps that will actually read your emails to you”

Basically the smart phones of today can log onto a website and download an app for pretty much everything. You can buy apps that wake you up on a morning, count your calories from your meals, monitor your heart and health, socialising, control your central heating at home, play games, the list truly is endless. If you are using an android or “droid” phone you can download millions of apps to your phone and Apple have a similar system too simply called apps store.

Having apps on your phone is not just about making your life easier or giving you more options to communicate with the rest of the world using apps like Facebook or Twitter nor is it about any other of the apps we mentioned above it is also about making money. Many of the apps carry advertisements and in app purchases which make lots of money for the app creators. Apart from all this your new shiny smart phone also comes with an inbuilt GPS locater, this could be useful if you needed to down load a sat nav app but it is also used to track your location, this information can be used by all manner of agencies as well as for sending you advertisements too. If you happen to be walking passed Mc Donalds your phone has the capability to text you and say” Hey did you know that McDonalds have a deal on today and you can buy a cheeseburger for £1” Like it or hate it this is defiantly the way it is going, in fact in many cases its already on its way. Some people may find this helpful and useful but many like me find it an invasion of our privacy….. If I want a burger I’ll buy one and don’t need to be coaxed in by a smart arse phone.

This advancement in technology genuinely concerns me, today it’s used to sell me stuff but what else are people learning about me by gleaning information from my smart phone?

As much as I love my little Iphone I am seriously considering going back to a non-smart phone, ok I won’t be able to use Facebook etc. on the move and I won’t know what rate my heart is beating or what setting my central heating is on but big brother will also not be able to track my every move and use me as a cash cow by ramming text into my inbox.