Stream Yourself into More Customers – With Little Buffering!

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When starting a business like a restaurant or a speciality retail clothing outlet, the main goal of the owner is to entertain customers in order to get repeat business. While retaining customers is the goal, how to attract them in the first place is a goal of all aspiring business owners. Once the events and activities at your location have become old news, customers can always go down the street to get a beer. Using websites and other technology to make your business more interactive will attract more customers and keep your location fresh and alive.

By placing a webcam in the kitchen, visitors to the website can watch cooks chop, dice, fry, and set on fire the food being prepared in real time. If you have a staff of flamboyant bartenders, visitors to your website can watch them craft cocktails, set tequila on fire, and entertain guests.

A Webcam

The Boatyard in Panama City, Florida has live cams on both their bar and the ship dock so website visitors can see what kind of seadogs are pulling up to get their grog. If a potential customer visits your website and sees a vibrant and lively atmosphere on your stream, they will be more prone to check out your physical location.

An event such as a concert is a sure way to draw customers into your building while naturally increasing sales. The same theory will hold true if you post a video or stream of your concert to your website. By marketing through social media, visitors will visit your website for the video and stick around to find out about your business. In order to guarantee maximum stream quality, your business can use a cloud gpu to ensure your event has a seamless broadcast.

Offering live streaming video of your business on your website will help you gain ground in search engine results. Instead of relying solely on word of mouth and reviews from other websites, your page will rank higher in search results even when people use generic terms like “best local seafood” or “high-end retail.”

Streaming video can also be used in reverse to keep customers who are already at your business entertained. While waiting for friends to arrive customers can watch streaming content on television while enjoying a drink at the bar. In a high end fashion boutique you can stream video about how your products provide more benefits than the competitor’s. By using cloud hosting services you can ensure that your streaming video network operating system doesn’t interfere with the day-to-day operation applications you use for business.

There is no doubt that everyone you want to visit your business is on the internet. Instead of sitting idly by, make sure you catch more customers by making your online location as cool as your physical.

A change in UK copyright law

Until recently, if you lived in the UK, it would have been illegal for you to buy an album and then transfer the songs onto your iPod, due to copyright law.

If you don’t live in the UK, it may still be illegal, so you might want to research it!

So why the change in policy? Well recently a government commissioned, independent review, called the Hargreaves Review, which was carried out to investigate copyright law.

From the review, the Business Secretary Vince Cable concluded that because we now live in a digital age, people communicate differently and do business differently, so it is time to bring some copyright laws up to date.


The Copyright Logo - Copyrighted Content

He also said that if you buy a CD and download it onto your computer, even if just for personal use, it is frankly a silly idea that you could be prosecuted for it. You have purchased the CD, so therefore surely you should have the rights to listen to it how you want to?

Mr Cable also feels that it can also be very restricting on business, as sometimes it’s hard to trace original owners of copyrights.

Despite changing the law, the Business Secretary said that he still wanted to protect the property rights of genuine artists and creators.

If you did buy a CD and were then charged with a criminal offence for putting it onto your iPod, would you not feel slightly cheated? If it’s your CD, should you not own the rights to it?

Website blocking is also part of this reform. Before it was possible to ask service providers to block sites displaying copyrighted content, however this is no longer going to be the case.

The obvious benefits of the change in law, would fall with the consumer, however the economy could also potentially benefit too.

What do you think about this law, is it outdated? Should it still be in place, or are the changes justifiable?

Want to do your bit for science? LHC@home

What on earth is LHC@home?

LHC@home stands for Large Hadron Collider at home. LHC@home is a new project involving your PC and the Large Hadron Collider. But why do they need your PC?

Too much data

Basically, the Large Hadron Collider throws particles around a 27km tunnel underneath the Swiss Alps and then smashes them into each other. The process is much more complicated than that, but you get the idea.

All this creates astronomical amounts of data, far too much for the projects computers to cope with. So how are the scientists ever going to make sense of the data they have gathered? The answer: you.

LHC@home 2.0

Way back in 2004 there was the idea to use the computing power of willing members of the public, to help analyse the data collected from the collider. This project was called LHC@home. To say the least, it didn’t really work out as planned, which is why project LHC@home 2.0 is now underway.


LHC@home 2.0 is an improved and updated version of LHC@home. Home computers are now much more powerful than in 2004 meaning that they are more likely to be able to cope with the complexity of simulating highly complex particle collisions.

The public aren’t going to be doing all the work, the Large Hadron Collider has it’s own massive supercomputer network, however by harnessing the spare capacity on (hopefully soon to be) millions of peoples home PC’s worldwide, then data can be analysed much faster.

SETI@home

LHC@home isn’t the first project of it’s kind however. SETI@home is another project which users can get involved in. All you do is install a screen saver and then when you are not using your PC, it starts to help in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence!

SETI@home screen saver

The SETI@home project screen saver

Do your bit for science!

Why not do your bit for science and offer your PC to help the LHC@home or SETI@home project?