Business Mobiles - A Great Tool for Efficient Business Management

Business mobiles, and the packages that come with them, must be chosen with a lot of care. The needs of your business are entirely different from others. Quite obviously, your specific business needs are different from others. The mobile package that you choose must meet your particular business needs precisely.

Business mobiles come with a variety of features but not all of them might be useful to you. You might want to use mobile for communications as well as exchange of various forms of information. Business packages are charged according to their usage or on a flat monthly rate. You must spend time understanding the packages, the usability and the applications most needed for your type of business before you finalize on a handset or a package.

Business mobile phones can be a great time saver. You can communicate with your staff or managers across locations without the need to travel extensively to be physically present at sites and offices. Mobile phone manufacturers are quickly recognizing the need for designing phones that come in handy for businessmen for professional as well as personal applications. There are service providers who offer customized plans that are designed specifically for businesses so that they can share information across the globe effortlessly and exchange data without having access to a PC or laptop.

Business mobiles act as a good reminder service. You can store details about meetings, appointments and tasks that can sometimes be forgotten in the stress and strain of managing a business. You can get latest updates about sales from field staff on a daily basis, get stock positions, know location of sales executives and keep a tab on their targets and achievements without leaving the comfort of your office. Easy accessibility to your entire staff time saving are two of the important features of a business mobile phone.

Mobile phones, with the right business features, can also be used to make bookings and schedule appointments. If you need to travel out of the city for an urgent business task, you need not depend on your travel agent to get bookings for flights and hotels. The web access facility allows you to book tickets online and get that favorite room in your preferred hotel reserved much before you take that flight out of the city. You can even receive updates about flight schedules to make optimum use of your valuable time.

Business mobiles can truly change the way you manage your business. It can help you become more organized and efficient both at office and home.

If you are already on a personal or business mobile phones contract and you are not happy, Confusedaboutmobiles look at buying you out of your current business mobiles contract and putting you with another network, with you getting to keep the same business mobile phone number. We develop solutions for companies who want to keep pace with technology and complexities associated mobile phones for business.

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Highly efficient method for creating flexible, transparent electrodes developed

ScienceDaily (Nov. 22, 2011) — As the market for liquid crystal displays and other electronics continues to drive up the price of indium -- the material used to make the indium tin oxide (ITO) transparent electrodes in these devices -- scientists have been searching for a less costly and more dynamic alternative, particularly for use in future flexible electronics.

Besides its high price, ITO has several drawbacks. It's brittle, making it impractical for use in flexible displays and solar cells, and there is a lack of availability of indium, which is found primarily in Asia. Further, the production of ITO films is relatively inefficient.

Now, researchers at UCLA report in the journal ACS Nano that they have developed a unique method for producing transparent electrodes that uses silver nanowires in combination with other nanomaterials. The new electrodes are flexible and highly conductive and overcome the limitations associated with ITO.

For some time, silver nanowire (AgNW) networks have been seen as promising candidates to replace ITO because they are flexible and each wire is highly conductive. But complicated treatments have often been required to fuse crossed AgNWs to achieve low resistance and good substrate adhesion. To address this, the UCLA researchers demonstrated that by fusing AgNWs with metal-oxide nanoparticles and organic polymers, they could efficiently produce highly transparent conductors.

The team of researchers represents a collaboration between the department of materials science and engineering at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science; the department of chemistry and biochemistry in the UCLA College of Letters and Science; and the California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI) at UCLA.

The team was led by Yang Yang, a professor of materials science and engineering, and Paul Weiss, director of the CNSI and a professor of materials science and engineering and of chemistry and biochemistry.

"In this work, we demonstrate a simple and effective solution method to achieve highly conductive AgNW composite films with excellent optical transparency and mechanical properties," said Yang who also directs the Nano Renewable Energy Center at the CNSI. "This is by far the best solution: a processed, transparent electrode that is compatible with a wide variety of substrate choices."

Scientists can easily spray a surface with the nanowires to make a transparent mat, but the challenge is to make the silver nanowires adhere to the surface more securely without the use of extreme temperatures (200° C) or high pressures, steps that make the nanomaterials less compatible with the sensitive organic materials typically used to make flexible electronics.

To meet this challenge, Rui Zhu, the paper's first author, developed a low-temperature method to make high-performance transparent electrodes from silver nanowires using spray coating of a unique combination of nanomaterials.

First, researchers sprayed a solution of commercially available silver nanowires onto a surface. They then treated the nanowires with a solution of titanium dioxide nanoparticles to create a hybrid film. As the film dries, capillary forces pull the nanowires together, improving the film's conductivity. The scientists then coated the film with a layer of conductive polymer to increase the wires' adhesion to the surface.

The AgNW composite meshes are highly conductive, with excellent optical transparency and mechanical properties. The research team also built solar cells using the new electrodes and found that their performance was comparable to that of solar cells made with indium tin oxide.

The research received support from the Office of Naval Research and the Kavli Foundation.

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University of California - Los Angeles. The original article was written by Jennifer Marcus.

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Journal Reference:

Rui Zhu, Choong-Heui Chung, Kitty C. Cha, Wenbing Yang, Yue Bing Zheng, Huanping Zhou, Tze-Bin Song, Chun-Chao Chen, Paul S. Weiss, Gang Li, Yang Yang. Fused Silver Nanowires with Metal Oxide Nanoparticles and Organic Polymers for Highly Transparent Conductors. ACS Nano, 2011; : 111104125342002 DOI: 10.1021/nn203576v

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New lightning-fast, efficient nanoscale data transmission

ScienceDaily (Nov. 15, 2011) — A team at Stanford's School of Engineering has demonstrated an ultrafast nanoscale light-emitting diode (LED) that is orders of magnitude lower in power consumption than today's laser-based systems and is able to transmit data at the very rapid rate of 10 billion bits per second. The researchers say it is a major step forward in providing a practical ultrafast, low-power light source for on-chip data transmission.

Stanford's Jelena Vuckovic, an associate professor of electrical engineering, and Gary Shambat, a doctoral candidate in electrical engineering, announced their device in a research paper in the journal Nature Communications.

Vuckovic had earlier this year produced a nanoscale laser that was similarly efficient and fast, but that device operated only at temperatures below 150 degrees Kelvin, about minus-190 degrees Fahrenheit, making it impractical for commercial use. The new device operates at room temperature and could, therefore, represent an important step toward next-generation computer chips.

"Low-power, electrically controlled light sources are vital for next-generation optical systems to meet the growing energy demands of the computer industry," said Vuckovic. "This moves us in that direction significantly."

Single-mode light

The LED in question is a "single-mode LED," a special type of diode that emits light more or less at a single wavelength, similarly to a laser.

"Traditionally, engineers have thought only lasers can communicate at high data rates and ultralow power," said Shambat. "Our nanophotonic, single-mode LED can perform all the same tasks as lasers, but at much lower power."

Nanophotonics is key to the technology. In the heart of their device, the engineers have inserted little islands of the light-emitting material indium arsenide, which, when pulsed with electricity, produce light. These "quantum dots" are surrounded by photonic crystal -- an array of tiny holes etched in a semiconductor. The photonic crystal serves as a mirror that bounces the light toward the center of the device, confining it inside the LED and forcing it to resonate at a single frequency.

"In other words, it becomes single-mode," said Shambat.

"Without these nanophotonic ingredients -- the quantum dots and the photonic crystal -- it is impossible to make an LED efficient, single-mode and fast all at the same time," said Vuckovic.

Engineering ingenuity

The new device includes a bit of engineering ingenuity, too. Existing devices are actually two devices, a laser coupled with an external modulator. Both devices require electricity. Vuckovic's diode combines light transmission and modulation functions into one device, drastically reducing energy consumption.

In tech-speak, the new LED device transmits data, on average, at 0.25 femto-joules per bit of data. By comparison, today's typical "low" power laser device requires about 500 femto-joules to transmit the same bit.

"Our device is some 2,000 times more energy efficient than best devices in use today," said Vuckovic.

Stanford Professor James S. Harris, former PhD student Bryan Ellis and doctoral candidates Arka Majumdar, Jan Petykiewicz and Tomas Sarmiento also contributed to this research.

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Stanford School of Engineering. The original article was written by Andrew Myers.

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