Rise and Shine: Your Dose Of Business Tech Inspiration

Do you manage a Facebook page? Meta might require you to turn on Advanced Protection to keep managing it. Some people have had difficulty enabling the protection, though. Today's episode explores this. ✅ Why Advanced Protection might be needed ➡️ Where do you turn it on? ⚡ What could go wrong during setup? ⭐ What can you try if it won’t complete? For your business, there’s value in understa...

AI can help a small business produce more work, but that doesn’t automatically make the business better. Chris Dyer, former CEO, four-time bestselling author and leadership keynote speaker, joins Charly to look at what happens when AI changes how much work people can generate: ✅ Greater output can place more pressure on the people expected to deliver it ➡️ AI works better as a thought partner tha...

Choosing a task or business process to automate means understanding what’s involved, the cost and whether the benefits justify the investment required. In today's episode, Charly discusses: ✅ What makes a task worth the cost of automating it ➡️ How much do you need to understand about the work before automating it ⭐ A manageable approach to implementing longer or more complex workflows ⚡ Wh...

Blindly following tutorials you find on the Internet can leave you exposed. Whether that’s an AI crypto trading bot or a WordPress function, you need to know what you’re putting into your systems. Crypto Traders were tricked into sending scammers their trades after following a YouTube tutorial for a Claude built AI trading bot. Today, Charly discusses: ✅ How a crypto trading bot was really just a...

Looking for an alternative to the subscription based M365 Office? LibreOffice is a free, open source office suite that's worth considering if you're looking for an alternative to Microsoft Office for your business. Lots of features but is it compatible enough with Microsoft Office to do the job? There's more to that decision than whether it can open a Word document or an Excel spreadsh...

When someone says “just automate it”, do you know what you’re agreeing to? Business automation can save you time, but there’s more to the decision than the work you’d like it to take off your hands. Advancements in tech, including AI, has made the idea of connecting your tools and automating your workflows even more appealing. The benefits are worth considering, along with the work and decisions b...

There’s more to protecting your WordPress website than keeping it updated. Your login habits can leave opportunities for an attacker, while your hosting provider’s security controls can limit how far an attack reaches. A recently patched WordPress vulnerability called Click-To-Shell could allow access to the actual server. Understanding how it worked helps answer: ✅ Whether your login habits are...

You’ve fixed an image on your website, shared the page again, and Facebook is still showing the old one. The Facebook Sharing Debugger can help you find out what Facebook sees when it reads your page. Charly walks through a real page to show you: ✅ Why changing an image on your website may leave the Facebook preview unchanged. ➡️ What the debugger can reveal about the page you're trying to sh...

A small hardware store facing a new Bunnings across the road went on to have the biggest two years of its owner’s career. It didn't try to win by lowering its prices, the owner changed the game. Direct response marketer John Dwyer joins Charly to share practical campaigns that helped smaller businesses attract leads and compete without discounting: ✅ A value-added incentive gave customers a r...

A system can handle routine work every day and still leave your business struggling when something goes wrong. A duplicate payment, an unusual refund or a failed connection between systems can interrupt the usual process. That’s when you find out how much your technology can help your team recover: ✅ Why routine success can give you a false sense of reliability. ➡️ What staff need to know before...

Your website can be secure, fully updated and working exactly as expected, while code from a trusted supplier puts your visitors at risk. That’s what happened when an exposed API key allowed Brevo, the service behind marketing forms, website tracking and customer chat on more than 100,000 websites, to be compromised. Visitors loaded the attackers’ code directly into their browsers, and anyone logg...

Do you use your AI Chat as a glorified search engine? Many of us do because it's an effective way to collate data and analyse it. What happens when you ask for information, your AI "interprets" the request differently and presents you with a confident answer? That's what Charly discusses in todays episode. ✅ A confident answer can still be answering the wrong question ➡️ The sho...

Business systems are complex and when something goes wrong, trying to work out what it is and how to fix can be an exercise in futility. It becomes even more frustrating when there are multiple providers involved and each say their system is working correctly. Todays episode discusses that and asks four questions: ✅ Why is it so difficult to identify where the problem sits? ➡️ What do you need to...

Revolut handed approximately 680 customers’ personal information to a bad actor after receiving requests from a compromised Italian government account that appeared lawful. It appears the company wasn’t hacked, and the emails passed the checks designed to confirm where they came from. Today's episode discusses: ✅ Why Revolut handed the information over ➡️ The legal and regulatory environment...

WordPress website holds about them, do you know what to do? WordPress has built-in privacy tools for handling these requests, including confirming who's making the request before you hand over or erase their information. In this walkthrough, you'll see the process from both sides: ✅ What the person requesting their data sees ➡️ How WordPress confirms the request before you action it ⚡ Wh...

Recurring technology problems don't always bring a business to a complete stop but they can cause interruptions that end up costing the business. You may not even recognise that it's happening but you'll find yourself saying things like “Give it a minute” or “It always does this” multiple times a week, if not a day. When you do, you're likely: ✅ Repeating tasks because of lost wor...

You can’t include a system in a security and access review if you don’t know your business is using it. An enquiry reaches your CRM, a payment appears in your accounting system or a document moves into the right folder. You see the result, but do you know what’s making it happen and who controls the account behind it? Everything may work perfectly until you need to change something, recover access...

In Episode 739, I show you how to use Filters / Rules for Zoho Mail. A viewer asked whether Zoho Mail allows filters to be set on a shared mailbox. The short answer is, it does but the functionality is more limited than a full inbox and the settings aren't in an obvious place. Shared mailboxes have their own controls, permissions and tags and this episode walks through how you can find them. I...

How can business owners make informed technology decisions if they cannot personally understand or verify everything their business relies on? This is a question every business owner should ask, because of the Trust Gap. That's the gap between what you can verify and what you have to trust exists across every part of a business. In today's episode, Charly explores: ✅ The importance of a t...

What do arsenic in beer, faulty computer chips and a supply chain attack have in common? A problem can reach you through a product you trust, from a supplier you’ve never heard of. An AFP investigation prompted Charly to look at how far back these problems go: ✅ A brewery’s ingredients brought something nobody ordered into the beer. ➡️ IBM found itself dealing with a problem in Intel’s chips. ⚡...

Starting a business and want an email address on your own domain without setting up your full email system yet? Cloudflare Email Routing gives you a useful and inexpensive place to start. Today, Charly shares how to create a branded business email address and have anything sent to it forwarded to an inbox you already use: ➡️ Why you would use Cloudflare Email Routing ✅ Set up Cloudflare Email Rou...

AI search is changing how customers find businesses but it doesn’t make your website less important, it just changes how you use it Jenna Hannon, founder of Hatter, joins Charly to explain what the move from SEO to Answer Engine Optimisation means for your content and your leads. Their conversation covers things like: ✅ Customer questions matter more than keyword density on a page on your site ➡️...

Running AI locally can keep private information on your own computer instead of sending it to an AI provider. That privacy advantage sounds straightforward until another application exposes your AI to the Internet and allows a malicious website to take control and leave poisoned instructions behind. Cyera Research achieved exactly that in a proof of concept involving Ollama and third-party AI agen...

Running AI locally can keep private information on your own computer instead of sending it to an AI provider. That privacy advantage sounds straightforward until another application exposes your AI to the Internet and allows a malicious website to take control and leave poisoned instructions behind. Cyera Research achieved exactly that in a proof of concept involving Ollama and third-party AI agen...

Google’s Campaign URL Builder gives you a way to create a tracking link for a website, QR code or marketing campaign. In this Walkthrough Wednesday, Charly demonstrates how to use Googles free Campaign URL Builder: ✅ Overview of the tool ➡️ Examples of source, medium and campaign parameters ⚡ The importance of a consistent naming strategy ⭐ Copying the completed tracking link ready for use Use...