Applying Computer Forensics To My Business

Obtaining personal and credit information is very appealing to people in today's society who are interested in taking someone's money or other assets. The ease of doing this has risen due to the integration between personal information and computers. Being someone who runs their own business, I am sure that my information would be all the more valuable to someone looking to steal money or hack the business's system. Therefore I will need to take strict precautions when it comes to digital security of information on all computers.

My first priority will  be to make sure every employee is educated on what information he or she should release over the internet, as well as be warned about risky internet activity. Every employee should know to read each and every email with the utmost scrutiny. No employee should ever disclose any credit card numbers, customer information, social security numbers, etc without having one-hundred percent certainty of who will be seeing it.

Aside from that, I will make sure my employees are educated in computer forensics. It is important that employees know that even when information is deleted from a computer it can still be recovered. This is important when it comes time to discard of computers or just simply a hard drive. If someone one looking for company information for malicious use, they could simply take a computer if thrown into the trash, and use a program to recover the information. The information is still there, it is just marked as that it can be reused. When it comes time for a computer to be discarded, it must be sent somewhere reliable where it can be destroyed.

Employees must be educated to the fullest extent in these issues. A slip up in withholding information could blow up very quickly and be devastating to the company. 

Applying Excel to My Business

Using a spreadsheet application on a computer is a useful task in most businesses, as it will be in this business. Because I am most familiar with Microsoft Excel, this program will be the spreadsheet application I use. Spreadsheets serve multiple purposes that will make organizing any and all information easier and more orderly.

The most basic task I will take on with Excel is recording customers names, contact information, and necessary financial information (payment method, payment amount, etc.) Because the application will be the same price for each and every customer, once I have one customer's payment amount down, I will be able to use Excel's "drag" function to automatically fill in other customers' payment amounts. 

The same is with any business at first in that there will be a low initial membership so information is easy to take on manually. But once the application becomes more popular, I will need to take advantage of Excel's various services and functions.

Something I believe to be useful will be organizing information or new purchases monthly. By doing this I will be able to compare revenues or losses between months. By using the "AutoSum" function, I can easily add up the totals that I receive monthly. To make the information even more viewer friendly, I will use conditional formatting to indicate whether I have a positive or negative month based on a constant goal.

One service that Excel offers which I believe I will find to be most helpful is creating charts and graphs to really provide a brilliant visual aid. I will be able to also use charts to organize my monthly financial information, and one time gets going I will also be able to make yearly charts. Excel makes chart making easy by just selecting desired information then entering the chart wizard. This is the easiest way to organize and compare records.

Laundry View iPhone/Android Application

As a college student living in the dorms, I have a strong idea for the hassles that most students go through. Considering that most students have to balance class, outside homework, having a social life, and then maybe even sports or an actual job, I'm positive that all students would love to cut back on any tedious tasks that the college life entails. One of these tedious tasks is doing laundry.

Having to take the elevator down 8 floors to go put your clothes in the washer, then an hour later having to come down and put it in the dryer, and then an hour later having to come back and retrieve the clothes is tedious enough. But then mix in getting to the laundry room and having no available washers nor dryers can make for an awful experience. Then there is what always happens to me, forgetting what time my clothes will be done.

Laundry is a very stressful task, but what I am about to present will make it that much easier. There already exists a website that serves as a basis for my application, but the application by far improves upon this service. The Laundry View Application for the iPhone and Android Markets provides a very user friendly look into any college laundry room that is registered. Now from anywhere on campus, you can simply open up an application and view and monitor the status of all washers, all dryers, and obviously your own laundry. Never again will someone arrive to the laundry room with no machines available, and never again will someone forget when it is time to retrieve their laundry, no matter where they are located at the time.

As with any new idea, take off for the application is going to need some assistance. There are all different types of advertising that I know can benefit the take off of this new service, but being the technological and social society that we live in today, I believe that online advertising should be my initial route to take. And being an application designed for college kids, this all the more proves to be the right way to go. Having the knowledge of how much time and influence social media sites provide students of today's generation, I certainly believe that sites such as Twitter and Facebook should allow this application to become hot quick.

Having previous experience with both of these sites is going to be beneficial in knowing how to spread the word on this application. I will broadcast to friends on both Facebook and Twitter the birth of this application and suggest them to forward it to more friends. Also on Facebook I will begin a group that promotes the application, and I will open it to everyone. On twitter I can tweet about the app, and try to get as many people as I can to try to make it a trending topic. I also will try to follow more people and gain more followers myself so that I have that much more influence over twitter.

Through advertising on these social media sites, I expect this application to receive quick recognition and to soon be helping students throughout all college campuses get their laundry done.