We live in a mobile world. In 2014 there were more than 6 billion cell phone subscriptions across the globe. That is almost one phone for every person on the planet. Because of this, companies are moving to mobile apps to help boost productivity in the work place. Do you want your business to communicate more effectively and have more collaboration? Use the business apps suggested by us to help do just that.

Tracking your expenses can be a huge pain. It takes a ton of time and you have to constantly remind yourself not to throw away all your receipts. With Expensify you can streamline this process. This clever app allows your to scan your receipts, upload and then sync them with Quickbooks, Salesforce and many other applications. It allows you to file your receipts in folders for specific projects or trips and then lets you submit your expense report by just pressing a button. It will automatically import all card transactions and can track your mileage, time and other reimbursable expenses. The basic version is free. You can also upgrade to Professional, Team or Corporate versions for a cost. The most expensive being $11 per submitter per month. 

Evernote

Branded as, “The workspace for your life’s work”, Evernote is more than just a note taking platform. Yes, you can write notes and create project plans with Evernote, but it does so much more. You can store research, share information with a group of people and present your ideas all on the same platform. It also syncs with your devices making it easy to keep all your information close at hand. Evernote comes in three versions, free, Premium ($5 a month) and Business ($10 a month per user). 

Things

Many small business run into issues with time management. With Things you can manage all your tasks in an easy-to-use interface. It will help organize your tasks by what you want to complete today, what you want to do next and what projects can be pushed off. Each day, Things will give you a daily review of the activities scheduled so that you never miss a project deadline. It has searchable tags so you can find entries quickly. It also syncs with your other devices so anything you change on your phone will show up on your tablet and vice versa. It can be used on iOS for $19.99 or on Mac for $49.99. 

30/30

Who says you can’t mix work with play? That is the the principal of 30/30. Focus on a single-task for 30 straight minutes and then take a mental break for 30 minutes. Wash, Rinse, Repeat. But that isn’t necessarily realistic so 30/30 does so much more than that. This app allows you to plan your schedule, and time it accordingly. Need an hour for your emails and a 5 minute break? Schedule it. You can focus on a task for as little as 1 minute or as long as 1 hour. And you can create as many as 10 days worth of tasks without ever repeating one. Tasks are assigned a special color, when it is time to do that task, the screen will change colors to alert you. 30/30 is a simple way to make staying on task possible.  By setting time restrictions and monitoring activity each person is kept on task because they know it’s only for a certain amount of minutes. This app is free and available to Apple users.

These four apps make increasing productivity easy. By staying organized, managing your tasks and making sure your expenses are up to date, you can ensure a more collaborative and efficient workplace. Have you used any of these apps before? Do you have suggestions on other apps that can increase productivity? Let us know in the comments below!

The cloud is something we have been hearing a lot about lately. It has quickly become a billion dollar industry and everyone, even if they don’t know it, is using a cloud service to save their data. From the iCloud for Apple products to the Google cloud, most major tech companies offer this service. On the surface the cloud seems like an easy way to save large amounts of information in one place. It saves money and can be accessed from anywhere. But is the cloud safe to use? The simple answer is no. No cloud system is completely safe. Find out what risks you take when you use a cloud service. Continue Reading

A few weeks ago we attended ISC East in New York City. It was a great experience for us as first time attendees of the trade show and we garnered some great insight into the security world. We spent the majority of the trade show at our booth discussing our current product offerings and launching our newest service, No-IP’s security solution. We were given a lot of positive feedback from the industry as well as ways we can improve our products in the future.

Tis the Season for online shopping and ECommerce sites are preparing for the onslaught of heavy web traffic. So how do you make sure your website doesn’t experience slow upload speeds, downtime or loss of customers? It’s simple! Follow these three holiday rules to ensure you are ready for whatever happens this year!

Beware of Typosquatting

Typosquatting is the practice of registering a domain that is eerily similar to someone’s current domain. Example www.someone.com and www.someon.com. When a user types in www.someon.com accidentally, they are a directed a site that looks very close to the site they were trying to reach. Unbeknownst to them they are at the wrong site, potential giving their personal information to an attacker. Avoid typosquatting of your domain by registering the domains that could be common misspellings of yours. These could including leaving the . off between wwwsomeone.com or forgetting the last letter as shown above. If you register these domains and redirect them to your site, you can decrease the risk of falling victim to this attack.

Outsource your DNS Management

If you are hosting your website locally and your primary host goes down you could face serious downtime. By outsourcing your DNS management you can ensure 100% uptime, because Managed DNS providers often have points of presence all around the globe. If one goes down, your traffic will be diverted to a different host. No-IP has a 100% uptime guarantee and 19 points of presence across the globe, giving you the security you need during this busy time.

Monitor…Monitor…Monitor

When your site goes down do you know right away? Server monitoring sends you an alert the second something goes wrong with your site. Then you get an additional service check every 15 minutes until the problem is resolved. This means you can fix the issue as soon as it happens, reducing downtime and increasing customer satisfaction!

Rely on Failover Support 

While your site is down what is happening to your business? Chances are they are going other places.  If you have failover support, your traffic can be diverted to another IP address, website or to a custom webpage stored on our servers. When your service comes back online, we will will undo the failover settings and normal operations will continue. Your site and customers won’t miss a beat.

Happy Holidays!

At No-IP, our biggest concern has always been providing the best, most reliable service possible. Over the years we have worked hard to mitigate the numerous risks posed by malicious actors on the internet, from collocating multiple DNS nodes throughout the world to purchasing advanced server technology to guard against threats.

We work hard to protect our 100% uptime record, and our DNS servers have never been down or unable to serve DNS traffic. However on June 30th 2014, we learned about a new type of threat from a direction we had not anticipated.

In response, we are proud to announce initiatives that will help to ensure our customer’s service will remain uninterrupted regardless of the outside influence of a single government or corporation.

We have recently released a series of European top level domain’s to our free domain name infrastructure. Users can not only enjoy the security of knowing that their hostname is on the largest and most stable Dynamic DNS infrastructure, but under a governmental authority of their own choosing.

In addition, we have also diversified nameservers, which allows us to spread the risk of a single registry/national breakdown to have less impact on the system as a whole.

Should we ever experience an outage for a domain, we have instituted a method whereby appending 7 characters to the end of an existing domain will allow that hostname to resolve, regardless of the status of the original domain. For example if host.noip.biz were to stop resolving, adding .noip.cc to the end of the host (host.noip.biz.noip.cc) would then allow it to resolve to the original location.

Additionally, No-IP has become involved in the legislation development process around cyber crime and malware as it moves through the United States Congress.

No-IP would sincerely like to once again thank all of you, our loyal customers. We hope we have been able to address any concerns you may have moving forward. Please reach out with your comments and suggestions on how we can better serve you.