GetOptiwatt.com, founded by software developer Casey Donahue, helps save Tesla owners money on their electricity bill while reducing CO₂ emissions in the air.

The first electric car was invented back in the 1800s, however, the Henney Kilowatt — the first electric car in America — was first produced in 1959. Unfortunately, the Henry Kilowatt had a lot of deficiencies that delayed its popularity. The car had a max speed of 60 mph and needed to be charged every hour. Until recently, the speed of EVs were not able to keep up with the needs of the average car owner.

The rise in battery powered electric vehicles has been substantial over the past few years. One of the biggest social pushes for EV use is the public’s realization of how bad gas-powered cars are for the environment. According to statista, 4.79 million vehicles in the world were electric in 2019. That number is up over 1.5 million from the year prior.

Environmental Impact

Optiwatt’s mission is simple, save Tesla owners money by lowering their charging costs and using electricity more effectively.

The app is designed to save Tesla owners both time and money by charging their car during off-peak hours, meaning not only will the user be getting the cheapest electricity rates, but they can also help save the environment.

“By shifting people’s charging schedule to off-peak times, Optiwatt can educate people to understand when renewables are generating the most, as well as when the fewest people are using the grid. This essentially saves users money on cheaper electricity rates” says Donahue.

The advantage of using the Optiwatt app to charge your Tesla boils down to energy rates. Tesla’s software has no way of determining when your electricity rates are cheap or expensive. Therefore, the user is faced with lost potential savings by charging their EV during peak hours.

Optiwatt determines when your rates are the cheapest and will automatically start charging your Tesla. While there is certainly a chance that electric rates will go up with the rise of electric cars, Donahue believes there is a new wave of smart infrastructure to support it.

“We can smartly charge cars when energy is being produced at a high rate on the solar side without having to use more generators,” says Donahue. “What electronic vehicles bring to the table is not only a way to smartly charge at different times, but a way to store that energy. Once all these cars come on the road, we have a new way to store energy more efficiently.”

The big downside to gas powered cars is the burning of fossil fuels. Electric cars are the start of reducing our carbon footprint and are a small step towards keeping our planet green.

“We know the roads to make electricity cleaner,” Donahue says. “You have hydro, you have renewables, and you have solar. There is a lot of progress being made on that front. Between electricity and gas, electricity is really the only one that has potential to be clean.”

Optiwatt will not only lower the peak load on the grid, but also help utility companies coordinate their usage to reduce the amount of power plant emissions.

. He admits that Optiwatt is in its early stages, but is working to position the company for when electric vehicles are the main source of transportation.

“\At Optiwatt we’re making sure we have a good understanding of user behavior preferences when it comes to charging electric vehicles,” says Donahue. “That way, when electric vehicles do take over, we’re positioned well to understand how consumers want to interact with their electric vehicle.”

Optiwatt Helps You Save Money

The positive impact electric cars have on the environment are evident, but it can also help the users save money. According to Optiwatt data, users save around 70% when they use the app to charge their vehicle if they have time-of-use rates. One of the biggest advantages Optiwatt has is that the user does not have to pay for any hardware, as opposed to smart chargers. The difference between smart chargers and the Optiwatt app is the app has no extra costs associated. The app is completely free to use.

Affording an electric car is not attainable for everyone. The average cost of an EV is just over $55,000, almost $20,000 more than a gas powered car.

The cost to recharge versus fueling up your car is where people can make their money back. The average driving distance per year is 13,500, which translates to around 33 kWh. If you drive 13,500 miles, the cost of charging your vehicle would be about $445 a year. Miles per gallon can vary but the average is 25. Combine that with the average gas cost of $2.32  — driving a gas powered car costs $1,253 in gas each year. While that doesn’t seem like a huge difference, you have to realize the price of gas fluctuates, and Optiwatt will guarantee lower than average rates.

Optiwatt’s app shows users how much money they spend when they charge their car. This gives them an understanding of how much money they should be spending every time they recharge, and essentially serves as a benchmark of what they should be paying. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, residential charging costs $0.10/kWh while a third party charger costs $0.60/kWh.

“Optiwatt tracks how many kilowatt hours you’re using and how much it costs,” says Donahue. “It really helps you understand how not to get ripped off by the third party providers.”

With electric cars becoming increasingly popular, Optiwatt is a step ahead of their competition and will help its users save the environment and their paychecks. Register your Tesla for free with Optiwatt.

The post Optiwatt is the Future of Charging Electric Vehicles appeared first on Get WakeField.

CMIT Solutions are affordable IT consultants to achieve all your technology goals within budget. They handle IT solutions with expertise to protect your business data with encrypted data storage. They have all the technical resources to ensure professional grade managed IT services. The value of IT consulting companies is unquestionable as they have specialized knowledge and real world experience. Most businesses lack in depth technical expertise and are unaware of the latest IT trends. Hiring IT consultants is therefore the best investment to grow your business and upgrade technological systems.

1. Enhance Productivity

Having an IT consulting professional to monitor and fix all your neglected IT needs can increase productivity at work. The experts in IT deal with similar situations every other day and solve major issues in no time. It is best considered for the employees to focus on the tasks they can do best rather disengaging them to fix IT related issues. Hiring an IT consultant allows non IT professionals to carry out core business functions and bring in more revenue.

2. Significant Savings

Many companies are unwilling to accept the high hourly rates of IT consultants although their charges are justified. Consultants are outsiders to assist you whenever needed and provide organizations with innovative solutions. They make companies save significantly by remaining out of vision after upgrading systems and overlook the need for hiring full time employees. Companies can make flexible payments on an hourly basis or by project depending on the consulting services to save overhead expenses.

3. Third Party Review

Getting a third party to review your company performance allows a new set of eyes to reinvigorate company’s goals. The IT consultants’ overview network operations and identify organization’s software issues. Small and medium sized businesses usually cannot afford to manage an in house IT department thereby needing outside professionals to solve technical software issues.

4. Maximize Uptime

Small businesses suffer tremendously when the internet servers are down or other systems fail. It can be really frustrating for the employees to carry on with work during downtime or system maintenance. An IT consultant provides a planned approach to maintain system and backups to recover from losses. Nowadays, companies strive really hard to minimize downtime so the unnecessary costs can be eliminated. The technological prowess of an organization plays a very important role in attracting top of the line talented employees. Employees can be more productive in a working environment with smooth business operations rather facing constant downtime at workplace.

5. Expertise Provides Great Return on Investment

Expect to get maximum return on the investment made on technological advancements in your company when you hire an IT consultant. They guide you to take the best possible path to achieve objective perspective. The IT consulting companies work on road maps to reach goals and make most from the technology related investments.

The post 5 Compelling Reasons to Hire IT Consultants for Your Business Needs appeared first on Get WakeField.

Founded in 2019 by Braddock Gaskill, a visionary research scientist, Ascender AI LLC has the potential to make waves with its radical user-interface and game-changing search engine.

In the 15th century, Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press and redefined how we interact with information. Today we browse the world through our printing press simulator – the modern web browser – in a way that would be recognizable to scholars reading books and pamphlets four hundred years ago.

Typefaces may change, but typesetting remains an inert, mechanical process devoid of meaning.  Our search engines produce lists of printed pages for us to scour for relevant information. Things must change.

“It is time to bring about the much-needed change.” says Braddock Gaskill, “It is time for the text we read to be permeated with meaning and interactivity – a type of intimacy that artificial intelligence can now provide.”.

He further adds, “We should not have our energies drained, looking at the first ten hits of a search result.  We should be empowered by our relationship with AI to explore the first thousand or first million.”

Ascender AI LLC is here to open the doors for more visual ways of information exploration by infusing media with an AI-based understanding of world knowledge.

Instead of reading “pages,” Ascender AI introduces “bubbles.”  A document, video, or post is displayed in a Bubble. The bubbles organize themselves by the AI-determined topic.

The screen is full of bubbles, and the user can pan and zoom as needed. An AI dynamically dictates the content of the bubbles.  A small bubble only displays a key image, the most distinct entities, or keywords at an instance.  As the ‘bubble’ is zoomed, more text scrolls in to provide an AI-generated summary. 

Eventually, at full zoom, the ‘bubble’ fills the screen with the text.  But even then, the AI understanding of the content dictates the typography, lending emphasis to keywords, allowing the human to skim and digest quickly.

Here’s a short clip of how the search engine renders pictorial results and allows rapid research through its platform.

Ascender AI is leading the way into a post-Gutenberg future.  Modern AI understands language and understands the spoken word; it understands foreign tongues, knows placenames and institutions, knows parts of speech and proper nouns, and even detects sentiment and semantics.  Ascender AI infuses all of this awareness into its interaction with the user.

AI goes further with our dataflow infrastructure.  A middle-eastern broadcast TV news segment is transcribed by speech recognition in Arabic. The Arabic text is translated into English, while the video is scanned using facial recognition to find politicians and celebrities of interest.  The video is now searchable in English or Arabic, with full video playback in a bubble. 

If you are researching large bodies of text without Ascender AI, you are reading it wrong. With Ascender AI, the possibilities are endless.

Try the live beta at ascender.ai.

Ascender AI LLC was founded in 2019 by a visionary research scientist and two well established AI entrepreneurs.  Braddock Gaskill, the CEO, has over 25 years of experience in AI and machine learning.  Co-founders Mudar Yaghi and Mohammad Shihadah have spent the past 30 years bringing a family of pioneering AI-driven companies to life.

Ascender AI
443-854-4691
contact@ascender.ai

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From stable businesses to newly formed startups – all should be concerned with the issues of data security and privacy, but well-established businesses can use their immense resources to recruit or hire an external professional with expertise on data security, whereas new startups need to address these issues in the form of time rather than money.

Startups which focus at the beginning of their way in developing an MVP and in initial growth need to invest their time and some amount of money, that naturally depends on the project itself, in order to be secure from the outset and not be exposed to any lawsuits or technological difficulties that may arise.  

Here are several solutions that will help you realize the matter in your startups:

1. Appoint a Head of Security in the company and be open with him/her

Whether it is a small startup company with a CTO who’s supposed to be in charge of the said matter (being the technological chief within the company) or a company in the post-recruitment stage that needs a CSO (Chief Security Officer) – that responsible body needs to be aware of the data which passes within the company, as well as the employees’ doings with the company’s data, which tools they are using and where the different data is stored.

There needs to be an ongoing sharing and synchronization between the different bodies – employees to the CSO and vice versa. As the company grows, it gets harder to track the data flowing in the company and the lines between the different devices (from a smartwatch to a tablet or laptop), all of which are the company’s property, get blurry.

If we share clients or e-mails via the cloud, we need to make sure that there is a security layer on that same cloud. Also, if a certain device is connected to one of the company’s devices, there needs to be a security layer that examines the transferred data. Because if there isn’t – the distance from an infected file to spreading a virus or malicious content within the company and on its servers, is short.

2. Create a data security policy and chart vital assets that may become susceptible

Each company or project – big or small, needs to set a data security policy.

It is recommended to spend time to chart the digital assets of the company and our most vulnerable sources which the cybercriminals will want to identify and take advantage of. Every such asset needs to receive proper protection with a unique key that will be held by a person in charge. It is also recommended to have more than one such person, in order to not “put all your eggs in one basket”.

3. Brief your employees and make sure they understand the importance of the subject

If there is a Head of Data Security in the company, the cost is naught. If there isn’t – it is better to hire a professional data security person for an entire day in order to cover the critical aspects in the company in regards of data security and make it so our employees get a foundation in the world of social security for the organization in which they’re employed.

They will have to be instructed about the use of:

• Devices
• Data transfers
• Identifying malicious links
• Phishing attacks
• Password management, etc.

4. An established startup company but not sure how to keep your company’s data? Outsource

There are freelancers as well as data security companies who know how to cover the security subject in end-to-end projects, starting from the diagnosis stage, through finding the existing problems and up to implementing the solution within the company and its employees.

Here’s a small tip – store your data on a cloud solution which may incorporate data security as well as application-level security, meaning security on the client-side, the server-side, and the application side. It is mandatory to maintain a security layer in all of the 3 mentioned areas. It is possible to use Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services (AWS), etc., which give a suitable answer for the issue.

5. Identify your weak spots and encrypt them

Are you handling a project dealing with e-commerce? Great, but make sure your credit card information is stored behind a few layers of security that stand by all possible standards.

Is your project dealing with collecting users’ data? Great, but make sure that you stand by the GDPR and other required parameters concerning security.

According to the segment in which you act, you need to check your competitors’ doings, consult a professional lawyer or data security person, and check what needs to be covered tightly.

• Implement a system that checks your code and finds security breaches
• If you’re using clearing – use a gateway to do that and do not store payment details directly on your servers.
• Any data stored on your system or servers should be encrypted with AES or TDES encryption methods.
• Make sure that the client-side code is encrypted to avoid the possibility of being injected with untrusted data

6. Do frequent penetration tests

There are companies as well as different tools (for example, KomodoSec, Spirent, Berezha Security) that know how to perform penetration tests on various systems. The purpose of those tests is to check how and which things have advanced technologically and can now hack your system. This is the time to figure out what needs to be blocked or overly secured in order to be up to date with today’s new hacking methods.

It’s recommended to spend money and time to identify your company’s specific needs and find a specific tool to answer your business needs that can be managed every once in a while. After all, startup companies need to be able to expertly use all of the tools invested in them.

Despite their limited budgets, startup companies cannot afford themselves to risk a data breach.

7. Store your code in SVN

The code of your website, system, or application needs to be saved in SVN, as it makes the code encrypted, can reroll it backward as well as view changes that happened and by who. It can be done by dedicated software such as TortoiseSVN or even be copied onto the company’s Google Drive or Dropbox.

The content of the article was written by Ido Yaakov, CEO of Omnis Digital Agency, an agency which manages and performs end to end digital services, starting from building a business and marketing strategy, through company branding, UI/UX and developing for the company’s website/system/application and up to launch services, digital marketing, and data security for companies.

The post How to Secure and Protect Your Startup’s Digital Assets (Website, Application, System) appeared first on Get WakeField.

Boost customer satisfaction

Most companies these days can be found online via a simple Google search, but there are plenty of companies without contact info. According to  United World Telecom surveys, this is one of the main problem customers encounter when they are looking for a service online.

A toll free number ensures your customers and potential customers can call you at any time, for free. This greatly improves your credibility and encourages them to return to your company each time they need the same service.

Easy to remember

Toll Free Phone Numbers are customized, which makes them easy to remember. It is easier to remember 1-800-Carpenter than it is remembering a complete phone number. This makes toll free phone numbers a powerful marketing tool, as you can customize them to suit your needs and generate more profit.

Different place, same number

Most companies, especially startups, get to relocate at one moment. When you open your small business in a small garage and then it outgrows the place, you need to move out to a bigger, better place. And that place might be anywhere; when you have a toll free phone number the calls are forwarded so your customers won’t even know that you’ve relocated. The same thing is valid for changing the provider. Keeping the same phone number, especially a customized one, is very important for your business.

Better marketing campaigns

Toll free numbers can be used to increase the efficiency of your marketing campaigns, because they can be set to show the location of the caller. This way, you will be able to track from where your customers call. In return, this will allow you to provide better services for them, based on their specific needs. You can also create different marketing campaigns with different phone numbers, so you can track down which campaign was the most successful.

Affordable pricing

As said before, the idea that toll free phone numbers are just for big companies is a myth. The same is valid for their pricing. Toll free phone numbers are affordable, which makes the startup-friendly. Moreover, when you check the ROI they provide, the costs of getting a toll free number is going to be covered in a short period of time, which makes them a great option for small businesses.

Nowadays we live in a high tech world, so being able to reach out to a real person, not a robot is very important. For your business, this can mean a lot, as customers who want to talk to someone are able to reach out to you at any time, for free, which is an important reason for them to stay loyal to your brand.

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