DEV Community: Adedeji Omotayo

7 Gadgets Every Start-up Must Have

Adedeji Omotayo — Fri, 29 May 2020 10:59:39 +0000

The start-up companies of the present time seem to have some great ideas to share in a larger platform. But the main problem in doing this is the lack of modern gadgets and technologies and being a start-up company, it’s not abnormal.

Why do Start-ups Fail to Opt for the Gadgets?

The start-ups have a fixed budget and to the lack of financial resources, they fail to upgrade their conventional gadgets to support the excellent and out of the box ideas of their employees.

What Is The Way Out?

We understand that having some people who can brainstorm and supply you with a number of innovative and creative ideas cannot be everything. You need to provide gadgets and technologies to help them in executing their ideas too.
However, having a limited budget does not mean you will be working in traditional ways and skip all the modern gadgets completely. With a limited budget, you can have a few gadgets too and set the ambience of your start-up up to a smart one.

Best Gadgets for Start-ups

7 gadgets exclusively for the start-ups are listed here. Go ahead and add these for better overall performance in your start-up:

#1. Ergonomic Mouse

If you want your employees to be more creative, the ergonomic mouse will be a must-have for your start-up. The ordinary optical mouse may give muscle strain to the employees if they work for long hours.

In a start-up, it’s not unnatural to find an employee working more than the duty hours just for the sake of the company. Naturally, it becomes the responsibility of the management or the entrepreneur itself to facilitate a little bit of comfort to the employee.

An ergonomic mouse is designed in such a way that the employee will have the least muscle strain after long hours of working. So adding the device will be great for your office.

#2. Google Jamboard

A start-up company has to encourage creativity. It is the factor that separates a particular company from the rest. Google Jamboard will help your start-up to be a prominent name in your genre.

It is called a whiteboard that enhances the inter-activeness during the business. With the help of this gadget, you can catch up with an employee for the conference even though he or she is not there.

We know teamwork is the secret behind the success of a start-up and Google Jamboard will allow you the facility of staying together throughout. The best part of the product is – it comes with the reliability of Google. This gadget will be a great way to connect your physical creativity with the digital world.

#3. Laptop Powerbank

Electricity and internet are the two main components depending on which start-up companies begin to flourish. Keep the supply of electricity throughout the laptop power bank.

When you are a part of the start-up, you have to provide a few facilities to the employees so that they can be even more creative. A power bank will be one such device and it will help the employees to keep working by charging up their laptop even during no power situation. It means their innovativeness will never be hindered.

#4. 3D Printer
This is also a must-have for the start-ups of recent times
as it too helps your employees to have more creativity by visualizing their
ideas in the form of a 3D painting.

A 3D printer will help the employees to brief a design or a product in a better way during the board meeting. Without the 3D printout, the brief will be incomplete and the design will appear to be a confusing one to the board members.

An ordinary printer makes a printout of the design, but a 3D printer will literally replicate that product in a miniature form. It will be very encouraging to see the design and complicated format to come out successfully and it can motivate the employees to work more on it.

#5. Dry Erase Desk

Most of the companies now promote greenery and for that purpose, they have cut the usages of paper a lot – it is definitely commendable. If your start-up is one of these kinds, you must use this gadget.

Maybe you have some excellent ideas in your mind regarding the next project but at that time you were working on some other project. Don’t worry! Now, you can simply write all your ideas on this desk to save papers.

It is very useful when you have multiple ideas in mind on which you have planned to work later. This desk will be saving your ideas and once you have taken note of the ideas in your PC, you can erase those from the desk.

#6. Soundproof Keyboard

Again, it is a device for the ease of your employees. The continuous noise created at the time of typing can be disturbing to others and also to the employee who is typing. As a result of this, new and innovative ideas will not come to him/her.

A soundproof keyboard will set the ambiance into a quiet one and your employees will be able to think and concentrate more. Soundproof Keyboard will be a productivity-enhancing device for your company and we would like to recommend this gadget to you.

#7. Wireless Router

Come on! Its 2020 and if you are still using the traditional ways to get internet access, you are being so hard. You need some up-gradation, especially, when getting a wireless router is not at all a big deal.

In case you are using the Ethernet, you have understood that it makes a mess in the place. The best wireless router will free you from the mess of multiple wires. Also, it has a better range and it is a portable one as well. It will actually put a stop to your daily struggles of connecting too.

Wireless routers are reliable and safe – people can get a satisfactory speed and sometimes they will get even better speed in the routers than ethernet. Additionally, you will get the user-friendly interface which will make the handling of the router very easy.

3 Labour-Saving Tools: Put a Stop To Click Fraud

Adedeji Omotayo — Fri, 29 May 2020 00:18:32 +0000

Prevention is currently the best way to mitigate the risk of click fraud. Advertisers continue to pile millions into the online advertising industry to create an unprecedented wave of ads. However, click fraud keeps growing at the rate of an average percent every year.

Due to the complexity of the online advertising ecosystem and lack of transparency towards click fraud. This has created a growth incentive for fraudsters to hijack the fast-growing $316 billion global digital advertising budget.

However, combining the right information and due diligence can mitigate risk and safeguard long-term profitability. Although there is no hard and fast way to identify click fraud, yet, there are ways to put stop to click fraud.

If You Are Going To Invest or You Already, In The Digital Advertising Industry, Then Click Fraud is Your Concern.

With a whacking great investment in the digital advertisement, do you know that the level of Click fraud is expected to reach the addition of $30 billion in the coming 24 months?

To every investment in Pay Per Click (PPC) or Cost Per Click (CPC) advertising, over 8.3 percent of this investment is exposed to click fraud and financial loss. Yes, financial loss.

Click fraud occurs due to the large, and sudden increase in money spent on click ads. Click fraud costs ad networks billions – advertisers were estimated to lose $19 billion due to click fraud in 2018 alone. With fraudsters coming up with more sophisticated ways, it simply has become an overwhelming task for many business owners.

Can Click Fraud Be A Problem To Your Business?

Click fraudsters operate on the internet underground and actions can be very hard to track. Sophisticated technology is used, taken with the advantage of the unintegrated internet infrastructure, and the distance in digital ad space between buyer and seller.

The digital advertising industry estimated digital fraud overall to range between $6.5 billion and $19 billion. The large range suggests one thing only: no business owner should experience how big of a problem click fraud is.

Click fraudster’s aim to open up budget caps and costs of performance ads of any business. As they generate excessive revenue by clicking on ads, which brings no profit, rather decreases the financial value of any business.

These Clicks, Where are They Coming From?

Click fraud is a type of fraud that occurs as a threat to the online advertising industry. But, however, these clicks are not just by itself, where are they coming from?

Competitors: competitors are the most obvious perpetrator. A competitor intentionally clicks on ads or promotions to drive the marketing costs up for a rival. Before you know it, the competitor has blown up the activity cost of an ad while generating little to no income for the associated business

Website Owners: due to the opportunity given to website owners to place an ad on their website for exchange of money, some website owners have dedicated their time to click on their own website ads and therefore make their own site more attractive for more ad placement.

Customers: Customers can accidentally add to click fraud. Some regularly click through on paid search ads to regularly access a site, rather than using the search or a bookmark.

However, either they use the Automated method or manual method. Automated click fraud uses software to repeatedly click on ads. Manual click fraud is done by actual people, either from a rival or outside to physically click-through ads.

Preventing Click Fraud

Click fraud is a pressing concern and if left unattended, can result in a total financial disaster. With several signs such as a sudden spike rate of spending, daily budget hitting quickly, and conversion rate skyrocketing, however, this is to tell that click fraud is playing already.

To completely eliminate click fraud, below, therefore, are tools to stop predatory Click Fraud practices.

Proxy Detection

Pinpointing the true location of a user is a critical element in fighting click fraud. The modern proxy does much more than forwarding web requests, all in the name of data security and network performance. Companies use them for security and network performance purposes, individuals use them for privacy concerns and some other cool functionalities.

Most click fraud occurs on compromised IP addresses that are proxies, sometimes VPNs. These fraudsters hide their IP addresses through Proxies, or VPN connections to conceal their location and true identity.

However, Proxy Detection is most comprehensively used to identify IP address connections with a high probability of malicious intent. Likewise, undesirable connections that are highly inclined to engage in fraudulent activity. Proxy Detection prevents fraudsters with anonymized or spoofed IP addresses from accessing important pages and stops them from creating the headaches of advertising click fraud.

Geo-Targeting

Today, it is very important to physically locate customers and visitors in order to do effective marketing geo-targeting, comply with localized legislations, eliminate business fraud, or maximize profit per visit.

Knowing the location of your customers, preventing click fraud is as good as placing your ad being in the right place at the right time.

In internet marketing, geotargeting is the method that focuses on the personalization of online content based on the geographical location of potential buyers.

However, targeting is simply defining who your ad pops to and market being measurable, sufficiently large, and reachable.

This technique allows you to offer content of interest to the users, according to the place where they reside. You can also exclude your ads from displaying in various geographic regions by country, region, city, or postal code. The technology is not infallible, as a buyer could make a purchase while traveling outside the country. However, geolocation-based tools are a helpful data node in the fraud scoring process.

Device Fingerprinting

Device fingerprinting is helpful for targeting and inherently benefits advertisers and marketers. The uniqueness of the fingerprint shows several requests– albeit through a proxy or even using a fake IP address.

Device fingerprinting works by uniquely identifying computers, tablets, and mobile phones based on various attributes-browser version, screen dimensions, list of installed fonts, etc.

This gives you the ability to block devices associated with bad actors. For example, If a fraudster commits clicks activity using a particular fingerprinted mobile phone, it would be difficult for that fraudster to commit another transaction from the same device.

To Round-Up,

Tracking a variety of detailed metrics will help better target your users. This will enable you to better identify fraud warning signs. Target your ads effectively to ensure they appear only on quality, trustworthy sites, and try to exclude certain locales within reason. Lower-quality sites tend to attract more fraud.

3 Worth Ice Security Metrics and 2 That’s don’t Matter

Adedeji Omotayo — Thu, 28 May 2020 10:51:36 +0000

Every area of business has specific performance metrics that should be monitored.

These metrics are key performance indicators that display a measurable value that shows the progress of a company's business goals. Security is supposed to be automatic, but actually it requires the act to push the button.

Too much technical jargon is being presented to the chief executive and the board. Indeed, security leaders and their organizations have used a myriad of metrics over the years. But still, many executives and board members have complained that those measures failed to provide them with adequate insight.

As security gains greater visibility in boardrooms, security professionals are increasingly asked to provide metrics to track the current state of a company's defenses. But which numbers really matter and which don’t?

3 Valuable Metrics

Business goals are rising, just as having a true business outcome. However, security management advisors say they still see value in many metrics historically used by the security team. What’s more important is measuring the effectiveness of your systems to protect against those and to protect against their impact on the business. Here are 3 valuable metrics that you can use to provide that much-needed context.

Time to Detect

Using metrics like mean time to detect – the measure of how long it took from the time of a successful attack to the time of detection, because that, too, indicates how well a security program works and can be tracked to show improvement.

Penetration testing

Like simulated phishing attacks, metrics around penetration testing indicate how well an organization can resist such events and can track improvements over time.

Time To Recover

How quickly the security team resolved the issue, and whether that time meets, exceeds or falls short of targeted times based on the organization’s established appetite for risk.

2 Metrics To Abandon (Patches completed and Vulnerabilities identified)

While these measures might make sense as an internal measurement of work done or be required to confirm an organization is compliant with certain regulations, they have little to no value in and of themselves. One can be lull into a false sense of security.