It’s been a hectic week what with jitters in the financial markets and strained relationships between great power nations. If all this disconcerting news has made you want to re-evaluate some of your more expensive arrangements with your business’ software platforms, we at Tech Essentials are here to help.
In our ‘news-you-could-use’ Tech Essentials article last week, we discussed a simple way to modernize your agreements to make them well-suited for e-signatures (and RSign). We presented to you the legalese, the magic (albeit sleep-inducing) words that make e-signatures a legal affirmation for your prized documents. It was such a hit that we thought we’d deliver a follow up.
File this article under the ‘news-you-can-use’ category. We know some of our RSign customers use big-name law firms that can transform any simple legal concept into complex legalese that can make any non-lawyer nearly doze off (or break out in a cold sweat) after reading the first few lines. We also know many of our small customers may simply want to follow a model that has already been used via re-using some other legal clause.
In places where there are indoor mask mandates like where I live in California there is the phenomenon now of loud talking. What used to be the punchline of a Seinfeld episode is now very much the reality for millions of people here in the LA area and beyond.
Earlier this week, a house party in Beverly Hills, California made national headlines, as hundreds of revelers went maskless and practiced virtually zero social distancing. Worse still was that gunfire erupted later on in the party, and three people were shot. Parties like this are hardly limited to California, as it’s clear that people all over the nation (and world) are using rented ‘party houses’ as a substitute for the nightclubs that have been shut down due to the pandemic.
15 or so years ago, ‘the cloud’ was considered the next big thing in business and personal technology. No longer did each machine you used need to have files or applications stored on it locally. When you worked on a document in the office, you now didn’t need to email it to yourself so you could work on it from your home PC. If you wanted to do online banking or instant messaging, you no longer had to load the actual applications onto each machine you wanted to use. The possibilities were transformative. Your music could be accessed anywhere from any device. Movies could be rented via download or streaming instead of via using cracked DVDs that skipped, etc.
We first wrote about Ransomware attacks in Tech Essentials in 2017 – back when a Bitcoin was valued at $1800 (oh, the good old days). The crux of the article was that many victims were paying their ransom to the cyber perpetrators, but they did not have an easy way to track and reconcile who paid, and many who did pay the ransom never got the decryption key to unlock their files. Imagine this happening in the analog world with kidnapping cases!
What do Napoleon, Robert Oppenheimer, and Abraham Lincoln have in common (aside from being famous)? Allegedly, they were all horrible multitaskers. In fact, multitasking, or the ability to deal with more than one discrete task at once, is not necessarily something we humans were ever naturals at.
You may recall that our June 2020 Global User Conference was all about optimizing business processes with more digitization. At a time when there was a vast shift to working from home and shifting to electronic delivery of documents and communications, I’d like to think we were at the vanguard of new movement.
As I write this exactly at 10:40 on April 15, I instinctually feel like there’s some important deadline I’m missing, a day where I feel should have already done something. Is it someone’s birthday or an anniversary? Do I need to get an oil change? No, it’s the traditional tax filing deadline in the US.
