Most restaurant and bar owners we work with have no idea this is a problem until they get a letter. So let’s get this out of the way: playing your personal Spotify, Apple Music, or YouTube account through speakers in a business is a copyright violation. Doesn’t matter if you pay for the premium tier. Doesn’t matter if it’s background music. Doesn’t matter if you’re a small place. This isn’t hypothetical. Performing rights organizations actively audit restaurants and bars, and the fines for unlicensed music can run from $750 to $30,000 per song, per...

Five years ago, choosing a security camera system meant calling a low-voltage contractor and paying for a 16-channel NVR with coax cabling. Today, you can put a Ring camera up yourself in twenty minutes. So which one should your business actually buy? The short answer: it depends on how big you are, how much you care about owning your footage, and how many monthly subscriptions you can stomach. The longer answer is below. What “cloud” and “local NVR” actually mean Cloud cameras (Ring, Nest, Eufy, Wyze, Arlo, Verkada) record to a server you don’t own. You pay a...

It’s 7:42pm on a Friday. The dining room is full, three servers are stacked at the bar waiting to ring in tickets, and one of your terminals has gone dark. You reboot it. It works for ten minutes. It dies again. If this sounds familiar, the problem almost certainly isn’t your POS software — it’s the network or hardware around it. And that’s why your POS vendor’s helpdesk has been unhelpful: they support the application, not your router, your cabling, or the receipt printer that’s been slowly failing for six months. The five things that actually cause...