The IT Experts

How the Times Square Ball Drop Began

Before clocks were standardized, “midnight” was subjective. Back then, the New York Times offices, located in Times Square, marked the New Year with fireworks. However, this tradition ended in 1907 due to safety concerns. Not wanting to abandon the celebrations, Times publisher Adolph Ochs commissioned metalworker Jacob Starr, an immigrant from Ukraine, to design a safer display: the Times Square Ball.

Inspired by Nautical Time Balls

Starr’s creation was inspired by time balls, used since 1818 to help ship captains synchronize their clocks at sea. These devices dropped at specific times each day, allowing sailors to reset their instruments. The first Times Square Ball, a 700-pound iron-and-wood orb illuminated by 100 25-watt bulbs, debuted on New Year’s Eve in 1907. It was lowered manually using a stopwatch for precision.

Standardized time zones, introduced by railroads in 1883 and later codified by law in 1918, ensured that celebrations like the Ball Drop could be synchronized across the country.

The Changing Look of the Times Square Ball

Since its debut, the Times Square Ball has undergone multiple transformations:

1920 - A new ball made of wrought iron weighed 400 pounds.
1955 - Aluminum replaced wrought iron, reducing the ball’s weight to 150 pounds.
1980s - A festive redesign added red bulbs and a green stem for New York’s “I Love NY” campaign.
1995 - The ball received rhinestones, strobe lights, and computerized controls, retiring the manual lowering process.
2000 - Waterford Crystal and Philips Lighting collaborated to create a stunning ball for the new millennium.
2007 - The Centennial Ball introduced energy-efficient LED lights capable of displaying vibrant colors.

The current permanent ball, unveiled in 2008, weighs nearly six tons, spans 12 feet in diameter, and is admired year-round.

A Tradition Enhanced by Technology

Over the years, technological advancements have made the Ball Drop more spectacular. Innovations include computerized countdowns, confetti cannons, synchronized noisemakers, and dazzling light shows. Last week, over a billion people tuned in worldwide to witness this iconic celebration.

As technology continues to evolve, we can expect the Times Square Ball Drop to grow even more dazzling, symbolizing the endless possibilities of the year ahead.

Prioritize Communication Tools

Remote work means that you’ll need tools to help your team stay in touch. You should implement solutions for messaging, video calls, and collaboration. Be sure to establish clear ground rules for responding to messages in a timely manner, as well as scheduling meetings and check-ins.

Implement Cloud-Based Collaboration

Without the right resources, no team can be successful—including remote teams. You might consider providing laptops and other hardware, and as long as your team has reliable Internet connections, you can deliver just about any solution they might need through the cloud. Also consider security, as it’s easy to forget about in the excitement of remote work and new technology solutions.

Consider Your Company Culture

A company culture is easy enough to maintain on-site, but it’s a different beast altogether for remote teams. You need to foster a company culture through online activities, virtual check-ins, hangouts, and so on to make sure all employees feel seen and connected. Flexible schedules are also a helpful way to build a company culture, provided you have built up trust that your team can carry out their responsibilities. 

Build Your Operational Strategy

A strategy for online training can help to alleviate many of the stressors that come from remote work. Be sure to establish clear policies that cover home office expenses and work hours, too, as they are important parts of the equation. And then there’s the customers, who you will need to accommodate via video calls or chat services, so they can feel connected to your business.

KB Technologies can help you build a remote workforce and operations to back it up. Learn more by calling us today at (954) 834-2800.

What Does It Mean to Be Proactive?

Cybersecurity is all about mitigating potential threats to help you avoid situations where your business would be compromised should an attack land. It’s all about proactivity. The more you can get out in front of issues, the better positioned your organization will be in avoiding them or reducing the impact of them. This is the obvious goal. Unfortunately, it’s not always so easy.

This is why a determined, deliberate strategy to combat threats is so important. Not only does every organization need the tools in place that will make a comprehensive cybersecurity platform work, but they also need to have the strategies to arm their staff to effectively mitigate would-be threats. 

How to Reduce Your Risk

Let’s take a look at a solid multi-faceted effort to reduce the organizational risk that comes from cyberattacks.

Deploy Tools

There are specific tools that every organization needs to keep cyberattacks at bay. They include:

Firewalls

A firewall functions as a barrier between your network and external threats. Firewalls monitor and control incoming and outgoing network traffic. This means that you get the data you need, while blocking a lot of the other stuff that can be a threat to your business.

Endpoint Protection

Endpoint protection platforms and Endpoint Detection and Response basically replace the old antivirus and antimalware platforms that you may use on a personal computer. These systems work to prevent viruses and malware, identify irregular activity, and offer robust remediation of issues to help keep your business’ network and infrastructure secure. 

Have a Proactive Strategy

One of the best ways to reduce your risk of threats is to have a proactive strategy. A couple of things you can do to stay proactive are:

Keep Software Updated

You will want to keep all of the software that your business depends on updated and patched with the latest updates. Developers are constantly patching potential vulnerabilities and providing new security updates to their software; not to mention additional functionality. Having a patch management strategy in place will ensure that your software is regularly updated and will be less apt to be a vector of attack.

Back Up Your Data

Having a strong data backup strategy in place can save your organization a lot of headaches. There are quite literally billions of phishing emails sent each day. If one were to negatively impact your business, you could be in a world of hurt if you don’t have a reliable backup and recovery strategy. 

Train Your Staff

Your staff is on the front lines of your business’ cybersecurity so having a training strategy in place is mandatory for today’s digitally-run businesses.

Passwords

Every person should know some of the password best practices, such as having unique and complex passwords for each account, using upper and lower case letters, numbers, and symbols in your passwords, and how to store passwords so that the associated accounts won’t be compromised. 

Phishing Detection

As we mentioned above, there are billions of phishing emails sent each day around the world. That means that everyone in your organization will likely encounter some type of potential phishing attack. You need to train your staff on how to identify a phishing message. Some tips include misspellings in the text of an otherwise official-looking email, an urgency to act from the content of the email, and the sender's address that doesn’t match up with the organization that is supposedly sending you the message. Teach your employees to spot signs and verify the sender of the email (or text message) so that you don’t fall victim to the scam.

Cybersecurity demands vigilance, but KB Technologies can help. Our team of dedicated IT professionals understand how to protect your business from the perils lurking online. For more information about how we can help your organization improve its cybersecurity efforts, give us a call today at (954) 834-2800.