Very minimal small businesses want a dedicated IT department and even fewer can actually validate one on if you take the price element to account. What used to occur in the past was that they would make use of a friend of one of the employees to handle their IT function. This worked well until IT started becoming more and more complex and more and more significant to the smooth running of the business. This is the reason why so many SMEs are nowadays begins to outsource their IT needs to a professional company providing Small Business IT Support.

To maintain a devoted IT department is extremely costly. You need to pay the salaries and perks of the staff in spite of of whether they were employ to the full extent during any particular month. If your IT services were outsourced, you might only have to pay for the work that was truly done or time that was really spent on a job.

Another advantage of using an external IT firm is that a lot of of them focus in a certain field, like estate agents, insurance companies or legal firms. This means that they are well versed with the software and lingo of your industry. You can hence acquire specialist help at a part of the cost of a full-time IT department.

It seems complaint after complaint were lodging for Apple, as Nokia has extended its patent infringement claims against the former to included the new iPad. The latest complaint was filed in the United States District Court in Madison, Wisconsin following other lawsuits by Nokia that include the broad swath of Apple products violate Nokia patents among many others.

In a press release statement, Nokia said the disputed technologies help reduce the size and costs of electronic gadgets, as Apple had also responded with several infringement complaints against Nokia. It seems the problem has no end as they fight back to grapple patents.

These type of lawsuits aren’t new in the technology industry. Although, in most cases it would take several years or even decades to solve the issue, often it would end with some kind of licensing agreement. But consumers need not worry as the products in question are still available for purchase.

Among of the notable similar lawsuits filed by Apple, includes that of Taiwan’s HTC Corp., one of the leading manufacturers of cell phones that run on Google Android’s platform, a potential challenger to Apple’s popular iPhone. Apple said HTC Android violate iPhone patents.

In the technology industry, this usually happens due to the increasing competition I the fast paced market for smart phones. Technology companies are scrambling to win over growing number of consumers buying cellular phones that comes with email, chat, browser, games, organizer among many others.

Meanwhile, Nokia is the world’s largest cell phone producer. Though it is more dominant in Asia and Europe, they have a good amount of market share in the United States. They face intense competition from the iPhone and Research in Motion’s Blackberry.

Their lawsuit are mostly targeted to iPhone and the iPad 3G, the version of the device that can connect to the web using cell phone networks. Also, Apples shares drop to 10.39 dollars or 42 percent lower this week, where market turbulence was seen.

Over two decades ago, world renowned cable guy John C. Malone failed explicitly on his venture on trying to replicate his U.S. Cable TV successes in Europe. But despite losing money, he is ready to try again. This is mainly the attitude of many entrepreneurs – they don’t believe that they have failed, and continues to try over and over again until they will succeed. And John Malone is just one of those guys.

Earlier this year, Malone’s Liberty Global bought Germany’s no. 2 cable operator Unitymedia for a whopping 2.7 billion U.S. dollars. As he was able to gain liquidity in cash on the sale of a Japanese subsidiary with nearly 4 billion U.S. dollars in cash, Liberty is still looking for many possible opportunities in the European market.

And as a means to steal more of European market, he may again bid on Germany’s no. 3 cable operator, Kabel Baden – Wurttemberg and Aster City Cable in Poland. Moreover, he will also try to acquire carriers in Denmark, France and Sweden.

Obviously, the winner will stand out. They will dominate newer digital technologies both on TV programming and internet access. Although paying TV subscribers composed only for 33% in the market, they generate half of all revenues in the business. And as statistics would tell, European market home TV subscribers would be projected to double in the coming years.

It was a long journey for Malone. He sold his American cable business to AT&T in 1996 for 54 billion dollars. His U.S. based flagship business, the Liberty Media owns TV shopping channel QVC, Sprint Nextel, Sirius XM Radio and Time Warner.

Today, the company accounts for more than 16 million subscribers in Europe. With the addition of Unitymedia, it has now expanded operations in 11 countries in Europe. For sure, this will be a journey worth taking for Malone.

It is still on its early stages, but they are showing signs of potentials most especially when they are getting fueled by venture capitalists of Silicon Valley. As the market are battling out as to who will own the future of cable television, here are the top-ten alternatives to it:

Sezmi

Sezmi is a subscription video service. It provides a DVR which records free over-the-air broadcasts, plus brings in video from Internet sources. For an additional fee, Sezmi makes available additional channels which are delivered via encrypted subchannels on existing channels such as KRCA.

Netflix

Netflix is a service offering online flat rate DVD and Blu-ray disc rental-by-mail and video streaming in the United States. It has amassed a collection of 100,000 titles and approximately 10 million subscribers.

Hulu

Hulu is a website offering commercial-supported streaming video of TV shows and movies from NBC, Fox, ABC, and many other networks and studios. Hulu videos are currently offered only to users in the United States. In order to ensure that no international users outside the US have access to the videos, Hulu blocks many anonymous proxies and virtual private networks.

Boxee

Boxee is a cross-platform freeware home theater PC (HTPC) program with a 10-foot user interface and social networking features designed for the living-room TV. Boxee is initially a fork of the free and open source XBMC media center software which Boxee uses as an application framework for its GUI and media player core platform, together with some custom and proprietary additions.

Slingbox

The Slingbox is a TV streaming device that enables users to remotely view their home’s cable, satellite, or personal video recorder (PVR) programming from an Internet-enabled computer with a broadband Internet connection.

If anyone of these interest you, you may Google the term and go to their respective websites.

During the boxing fight dubbed as “The Event”, where Manny Pacquiao clearly beat Joshua Clottey, I purportedly did not pay for a pay per view viewing subscription. Like Pacquiao’s previous fights, I was thinking I could watch it online for free.

First, second, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth undercard bouts, I thought that I could literally see it for free. But sooner, during the final two undercards, I could no longer see the fight live. I did have a hard time finding another free live streaming of the sport. It reached to a point where I would be redirected to the main free live streaming site where they would ask you to pay a certain fee.

Truly, if you think online TV will be free forever, think again. The cable companies have a plan to keep control and stick you with your bill. Once upon a time, a bunch of small companies in Silicon Valley thought the future of television was theirs. Soon the thinking went, TV would be everywhere by just browsing through your laptops and smart phones you can easily watch your favorite stations.

Although the network suits well, the cable guys just didn’t have the detail chops to make it happen. But today, fueled with venture money tech companies with names like Boxee, Roku, and Sezmi pursued their dream of untethering viewers from their TV sets—and owning a piece of the advertising revenue.

As the big picture comes into focus though, it looks like the cable guys are playing the lead roles, using the $32 billion they pay content providers each year as leverage. The alphabet soup of newbies is still waiting in the wings for a moment that might never come. But still, viewers can watch shows for free, but only if they’re cable subscribers first.

It was once said that video and search may work effectively when separated. You know, nowadays, the two will always be separate and just cannot be mixed because there are two different niches. For one, search engines are perhaps for people looking for a document for a school project or report evidence while the video, might just be for people who wants hands-on experience. Different, isn’t it?

Not so long ago, Google sealed the deal on video search capabilities for its YouTube portal, saying it would provide auto-captions for all of its uploaded videos using a proprietary Google’s Speech Recognition Technology.

The plan actually began last November with a handful partner channels including PBS, Stanford University and National Geographic. As a matter of fact, it would be compatible in several worldwide languages in a few months from now.

The news establishes Google as the frontrunner in the internet programming arena. As a company who prides itself with effective search engine with accuracy hits of nearly 90 percent, they are now able to capitalize on its investment in speech to text technology to index videos, target ads, and create actual profit for YouTube.

But the most important news has yet to be told, the process is just simply deaf and hearing impaired friendly. They will be able to understand dialogue on uploaded videos, as this group of people had to constantly rely on the goodwill of YouTube users to manually add captions to their videos, which eats too much time.

Further, Google has now been removed from any ill will associated with Internet programming issues. This is truly one of the milestones of their company. And we do hope more innovations would come along the way.

According to a research, online film demand is cooling down, thus causing a massive decline. Now Hollywood’s dream to built around movies in digital downloads has been in danger. The film industry has been banking so much on digital distribution, where they hope it would replace the income it generates from sales of DVD’s.

But it just didn’t happen as the past two years saw a massive decline.

This is perhaps due to the culture of movie watchers I believe. They want to spend movie time with families, which apparently watching it on your personal computers could not give. Watching the digital format means lesser fun and lesser of those happy moments munching some popcorns in between. The market seems to be just cooling off, which practically wasn’t caused by any other economic factors. The level of interest just isn’t there any more.

While sales in digital films rose sharply in 2007 and 2008, growth stuttered in 2009 according to a report sent by Screen Digest. The media research company forecasted total online movie sales in US for 2009 at 360 million dollars, based on the sharp growth from the previous two years.

Moreover, the media research company believes consumers have been deterred by an array of competing online platforms that prevented viewers from watching digitally downloaded films comfortably at their own place too. Say for example, a consumer buying a film from Apple’s iTune Store is unable to watch it on their MS Xbox Console.

There are so many restrictions, which is all about viewers cannot do, rather that what they can possibly do. This stirred a problem in Hollywood, which is obviously making ways on how to address the digital distribution issue.

The sad story though is there is no immediate solution to the issue, which would obviously make Hollywood concerned about the issue.

In general, tough convincing might be needed for consumers that they need an iPad. With the introduction of the new gadget, that is like a tablet-computer smartphone packed-in-one, it immediately appeared in the front pages of newspapers in at least 47 states in the United States. It also appeared in front pages of no fewer than 24 other countries such as Uruguay, Turkey, Bulgaria and Portugal.

But releasing this new product isn’t like a bed of roses of after all. It possesses different challenges to Apple, its manufacturer. First off, it the challenge of building a new market. It would be hard for them to transform consumers who were already so acquainted with iPhone and iPod in their daily life. To many, an iPod simply makes their digital entertainment lifestyle better, the same goes for iPhone. Take this scenario – when iPhone was released there were already billions of people who had cell phones.

It even got a not-so-good feedback from broadcasters. For one, Seth Meyers said, “This week Apple released a thing that does stuff that its other stuff already does.” And consumers are not excited about spending $500 more where they don’t have to spend a single penny with their smart phone and laptops.

Another challenge that is hounding them is the missing software. Remember, the success of iPod came about what people can do about it such as having a digital bookstore and library in it.

As what analyst Charles Wolf said, “The device will need to capably handle content that would ‘otherwise provide an inferior experience on smaller devices, or more traditional products,’ like phones and laptops, he said. And that will mean unique software that takes advantage of the hardware features like the large screen.” In one way or another, the iPod became interesting when music was added with iTunes.

But it is still on its very early days. We really don’t know what is going to happen in the days to come. After all, Apple excels in educating consumers.

Small business owners and possible small business owners are lucky because the windows of funds/ finances are opening up for them on a daily basis – provided they (small business owners) meet up with the stringent requirements of the business enterprise capitalists and business angels.

Venture capitalist in most country is a limited partnership formed by rich investors. They operate more like a co-operative society where every member signs to make an initial investment/ contribution then followed by a series of additional investment to the tune of maximum allowed contribution by a single partner (this is often enshrined in the partnership agreement). A general partner known as the venture capitalist is typically appointed and saddled with the responsibility of producing investment and investment decision. Carried-interest is the phrase used to describe the extra incentives that the general partner gets together with a yearly management fee.

The aim of seeking finance at this point is to attain increased sales so as to breakeven, assuming the business has not done so yet.

Business angels are rich individuals that finance establishes businesses. It is the responsibility of Business angels to carryout due diligence on small businesses before furnishing them with finances and fund and after that monitor them.

The difference between a business angel and venture capitalist is that; while a business angel is an individual, venture capitalist is the representative of wealthy individuals. Most seed money and startups are originally offered by business angels before involving venture capitalists when they find themselves in tight corners. Business angels normally have close ties with VCs.

When you transfer hundreds of photos from your flash drive to your computer before, it might take well over five minutes to finish the process. That was before when the technology used was still USB 2.0. Today, the world of storage devices have changed as Intel introduced the SuperSpeed USB 3.0.

Likewise, the move effectively opened the specification to hardware developers for implementation on future products. The first USB 3.0 ports were featured on the Asus P6X58 motherboard, but was cancelled before production.

A new major feature of the product is the SuperSpeed bus. It provides a fourth transfer mode at 4.8 gigabytes. When operating in SuperSpeed mode, full duplex signaling occurs over 2 differential pairs separate from the non-SuperSpeed differential pair. The device establishes a communication pipe between the host and each device, in a host directed protocol. In contrast, USB 2.0 broadcasts packet traffic to all devices.

USB 3.0 extends the bulk transfer type in SuperSpeed with Streams. The extension allows a host and device to create and transfer multiple streams of data through a single bulk pipe.

In terms of its availability, the USB 3.0 Hub would be made available in 2010. It was demonstrated using the VIA VL 810 chipConsumer Products. Commercial quantities are expected to be produced no later than the first quarter of 2010. NEC is aiming to product its first USB 3.0 last June 2009 which was initially priced at $15.00. And has reached close to 1,000,000 units late last year.

Meanwhile, Asus also did release their first USB 3.0 motherboard under the model P7P55D-E Premium, as well as a PCI Express x1 add-on card for existing motherboards to provide USB 3.0 and SATA 6Gbps support.

If the USB 3.0 goes full blast, connecting to digital cameras, printers, personal media players, flash drives, and external drives would definitely be the fastest of all-time.