September is traditionally an exciting month for Apple and Apple addicts. The Apple new product release this week was similar to years past and did not disappoint. This shining light came through as the uplifting news that 2020 needed. The spotlight this year had a much needed focus on health and affordability. I think we all can agree that affordability and health is a breath of fresh air that we all are craving. The newly released products included fitness, health monitoring and power without a hefty price.

“If you don’t know where you’ve come from. You don’t know where you’re going.” This quote by Maya Angelou was not explicitly quoted regarding technology, although the relevancy is powerful. Technology progresses exponentially, and so to understand how far we have come, we need to understand where we began. This week, in 1956, the very first commercial hard drive was released. It was the IBM 350 Disk Storage Unit Model 1, and it was the size of two refrigerators. This ground-breaking technology weighed around a ton and could store about 4-5 megabytes of data. Today, a device the size of an old compact disk case can hold over 10 Terabytes of data. That is over 1,000,000 times the storage of the originally released hard drive. Although hard drives aren’t as vital as they used to be now that we have cloud storage, it is an essential piece of history to learn where we came from and where we are today.

The Global pandemic of which we are living has changed the world in so many ways. It has altered the way we work, the way our children learn, and most everything we do in our day-to-day lives. One thing it hasn't put a damper on is innovation. We are continuing to see incredible technology pop-up everywhere. Some of the innovations are in response to the current world we live in, and others are brand new, entirely out of the box thinking that is popping up in new devices, software, and applications. Today we are looking at a few of the new devices that are blowing our minds.

September has traditionally been the month when Apple releases the new iPhone and many other exciting technologies. As we near the month of September, it seems irresponsible to not discuss Apple’s rumored announcements. We have seen hints about a new Apple Watch, a more cost effective iPad and high-end headphones.

2020 has been a year of change. For better or worse, we have seen a great deal of transformation. When we heard that Channel Futures was altering their judging criteria for the prestigious MSP 501 list, we were intrigued. As a five of five year winner of this prestigious award, we were eager and hopeful the new criteria would incent us as well as other MSPs to push themselves to the next level. We were pleasantly surprised. To take a look at how this has changed, let's first examine what the MSP 501 is and the original judging criteria.

The world has changed, so has our view of business and office space. More and more companies are announcing that their employees will be working virtually for more extensive amounts of time or even forever. Yesterday, Google announced that all full-time employees will be working virtually until at least the summer of 2021. Our offices look different and so do our meetings. To make the virtual office experience effective, we need various options for meetings as there is no one-size-fits-all model. Thankfully, in addition to announcing Together Mode, Microsoft announced a variety of other Teams meeting options to fulfill all your virtual meeting needs.

Do you find yourself even more exhausted at the end of day after a day full of virtual meetings? You are not alone. Microsoft Teams saw a 200% increase in Teams meetings from March 16, 2020, to April 9, 2020, with close to 3 Billion meetings in a day. “Zoom Fatigue” is a real thing, and it is affecting us more than ever with the increased need for virtual meetings. When on a video meeting, we process information differently. To show that we are engaged, we must stare directly into the camera for extended periods. Unlike an in-person meeting, it is uncomfortable to glance away or briefly look out the window. We fear that if we do, the other participant will have the impression we are not listening. Also, the necessary focus on a virtual call is much higher. To follow who is talking and attempt to understand a conversation without being able to view body language and the non-verbal cues is extremely taxing. Luckily, Microsoft has a better solution to combat “Zoom Fatigue,” and it will be generally available in August.