Technological innovations: Top 5 ones for businesses

When it comes to company growth, innovation plays the key role in shaping the organization’s future. In today’s extremely competitive business environment, organizations must focus on developing innovative products or services. OneDesk recognizes this and has developed an innovation and ideas application in order to help companies outperform their competitors.

With this in mind, we thought it would be fun to recap some technological innovations that have made the business world what it is today.

Top 5 technological innovations for businesses (according to us)

E-mail
E-mail has come a long way since its invention in 1971. Around 1995 the popularity of e-mail and the Internet skyrocketed, and companies increasingly started using it to communicate internally and externally. Today, email is one of most inexpensive and easiest forms of communication. It has reached a critical mass, where one can expect almost everyone to have an email address.

Instant messaging
Instant messaging dates back to the 1990s when “chat rooms” were first created. For the first time, a group of people could join a “room,” talk about the topic in question, and have their comments seen by everyone else in the room, in real-time. Chat rooms evolved to instant messaging software such as ICQ (remember that?), through which people could talk to friends and family around the world through their computers. Today, instant messaging is built into many software and websites, and is used by many companies as it allows employees and customer to communicate and help each other out promptly.

Social networking
Sixdegrees.com may not have survived long, but its birth in 1997 allowed users to gain a new type of experience; for the first time, users could create their own profiles, view other user’s profiles, organize groups and invite friends. When Friendster and MySpace were launched in the early 2000s, the concept of “friends” and “circle of friends” became standard talk among social networkers. The introduction of Twitter and Facebook took that to a new level. The idea of letting your friends know what you are up to right now took communication one step further. Twitter and Facebook now dominate the business social media world and allow companies to interact with customers and promote their brands.

QR codes
Move over barcodes – QR codes can carry up to several hundred times the amount of information carried by ordinary bar codes. QR codes can now be decoded using a smartphone; this has provided companies with more opportunities to advertise their brand. McDonalds utilizes them to display nutrition for it is food products. It is a quick and simple way of getting the nutrition info for the burger on your telephone and saves thousands of dollars annually on printing expenses.

Collaborative software and services
Collaborative software such as wikipedia and Google docs changes the way documents are shared and enable more effective team collaboration. Using software that includes wikis, real-time collaborative editing, email, calendaring and chat creates a collaborative working environment, where people in different geographical locations can work together.

OneDesk: A technological innovation for your company to use

Since we believe these to be some of the best technological innovations for businesses, we have built them all into OneDesk…well, minus the QR code. OneDesk has e-mail, instant messaging, wikis, real-time editing, discussion forums and a social media monitoring tool built-in. Try OneDesk for free today, and start innovating.

We want to know: What are some of your favorite technological innovations? Share them with us!