10 Technologies That Changed Business Forever

The way we carried out businesses went through many changes over the years. It was often under direct influence by technological breakthroughs. Of course, computers and internet, in broad sense incited changes in corporate ecosphere, but when condensed, among all, the following 10 technologies take cream of crop in changing the way we do our businesses, as compiled by cio.com.

    

#10 Adobe PDF

 Portable Document Format (PDF) is a file format used to represent documents in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating systems. PDF formats are amazingly prevalent on the Web, and you can create files easily using tools such as CutePDF. Invented by Adobe, the file format is now an open standard recognized by International Organization for standards. The documents, forms, graphics, and web pages, when converted to PDF, they look just like they would if printed. But it has upper hand over printed documents since PDF files can contain clickable links and buttons, form fields, video, and audio — as well as logic to help automate routine business processes. PDF makes it easy to share ideas and information.

#9 Bluetooth

Bluetooth is a wireless technology standard for exchanging data over short distances from fixed and mobile devices, creating personal area networks (PANs) with high levels of security. Created by telecoms vendor Ericsson in 1994.

The word "Bluetooth" is an English version of the Scandinavian Blåtand or Blåtann, the epithet of the tenth-century king Harald I of Denmark. The name was proposed by Jim Kardach who developed a system for allowing mobile phones to communicate with computers and he picked up the term while reading Frans Gunnar Bengtsson's historical novel The Long Ships about Vikings and king Harald Bluetooth.

Recent improvements, such as a low-power version Bluetooth 4.0,  that can works with heart monitors and gives out better audio quality gives it a lot of leverage in current times. And there's a new breakthrough, Bluetooth might even move into the financial sector and now there’s a credit card reader that connects to your Smartphone over Bluetooth.

#8 Wi-Fi

Wi-Fi is one of the most important enterprise innovations of the past 20 years. It allows an electronic device to exchange data wirelessly over a computer network, including high-speed Internet connections. Mobile users can now work remotely from anywhere, use Internet telephones, tap into wireless printers and, with 802.11ac standard, exchange files over a network at Gigabit speeds.

A device that can use Wi-Fi like PC, video-game console, Smartphone, or digital audio player can connect to internet via a wireless network access point called as hotspot. The range of Wi-Fi is about 20 meters indoors and a greater range outdoors.

The Wi-Fi Alliance is a nonprofit international association that promotes Wireless LAN technology and certifies products, defines Wi-Fi as any "wireless local area network (WLAN) products that are based on the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers' (IEEE) 802.11 standards". The term "Wi-Fi" is used in general as a synonym for "WLAN" and is a play on words with Hi-Fi (high fidelity).

#7 The LAMP Stack

LAMP is acronym for the first letters of Linux (operating system), Apache HTTP Server, MySQL (database software) and PHP (Perl or Python), the principal components used to build a feasible general purpose web server. Lamp solution stack comes free, and is open source software.

The software combination has become very popular, it’s free of cost, open-source, make it easily adoptable and when used together, they form a solution stack of technologies that support application servers.

Before LAMP, companies had to hire a group of engineers, many of them using the .NET Framework, and license technology from Oracle and Microsoft.

$6 E-Printing

E-Printing is a technology which took printing a step ahead; now users can print remotely using Smartphones and other mobile devices which are cloud connected, without needing a traditional PC or to be at actual place. The main advantage is flexibility, business travelers and remote workers can print on the go with some clicks and an email.   

Now, the devices like HP Officejet 6700 lets you print by sending the jobs to an email address. Even Google provides a service where users can send print jobs to the Google Cloud Print, where jobs are then transmitted to your printer.

#5 VPN

For a big business empire having multiple shops of offices across the country and around the world, to keep things running efficiently need a secure and reliable way to share information across computer networks. Virtual Private Network (VPN) is the one popular technology which accomplishes these goals. It is a private network that uses a public network like Internet to connect remote sites or users together. By using a VPN, businesses ensure security by communicating through encrypted data that the people with malice can't read it.

#4 Multi-Core Processors

The personal computers has become more prevalent both in corporate and personal lives, and a huge number of applications are being designed for them, so there’s increased need for parallel and faster computing. This goal can be achieved by Multi-Core Processors where a single computing chip has two or more independent actual processing units that are called "cores”.

Intel introduced multi-core processors and the impact goes well-beyond being able to run an HD video in the background while you check your e-mail.

#3 SalesForce.com

Salesforce.com is the enterprise cloud computing company that is the leader in Social Enterprise. Best known for its customer relationship management (CRM) product that helps employees collaborate easily and connect with customers like never before.

In Q4 of 2011 alone, SalesForce.com has processed 45 billion customer transactions and sports 100,000 customers worldwide.

#2 Amazon Web Services

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a collection of remote computing services, also called as web services that together make up a cloud computing platform, offered over the Internet by Amazon.com. It offers a complete set of infrastructure and application services that enable you to run virtually everything in the cloud be it enterprise, social games or mobile apps.

#1 Google Docs

Google Docs is a free, Web-based office suite and data storage service offered by Google within its Google Drive service. It is now one of the best ways to collaborate, share documents with co-workers and store business information in the cloud.

This means that there's no need to download and install software on a particular machine, any cloud connected computer can access Google Docs. And multiple users can make edits to the same files at the same time, it’s called online collaboration, and it could streamline teamwork over the Web. And another advantage is that Google Docs preserves earlier versions of documents, so no need to get fuzzy over the undesirable changes made in file.