As online video- and music-streaming becomes more and more advanced, many service providers and media portals have begun to roll out offline caching for videos and music. From Soundcloud to Spotify to Amazon Prime and Google’s brand-new YouTube Music Key, service after service has started to allow its users to store media locally, allowing for its later consumption. This feature turns out to be especially important for users on slower or bandwidth limited connections, who can locally store media on a WiFi connection to avoid long waits or bandwidth surcharges.

With just about every service rolling out offline caching in some capacity or another, it seemed only a matter of time before the 800 pound video streaming gorilla in the room jumped on board. We’re talking about Netflix, of course. For a while now, rumors had been swirling that Netflix was planning to launch their own offline caching options.

Now, in the bright light of the New Year, these rumors have been unceremoniously dismissed by Netflix Public Relations Director Cliff Edwards. Techradar reports that Edwards bluntly stated that offline storage was “never going to happen.” Why is this?

Netflix, it turns out, treats the non-ubiquity of bandwidth and connectivity as a short term problem, one for which offline caching is nothing more than a quick band aid. Instead, Edwards predicts that within five years, bandwidth will be so cheap and universal that users won’t even remember that they ever wanted offline caching in the first place, and will regard local storage as an outdated and obsolete concept for technology.

This is a contentious stance for a company to take, since it essentially implies that Netflix is willing to offer an inferior service on the short term to save resources. Netflix seems willing to lose customers to whom offline storage is especially important. Amazon Prime streaming has been quick to affirm its commitment to providing consistent and universal service to its subscribers. Currently, offline viewing is available for Fire tablets, and Amazon has announced plans to extend this functionality to more of its devices in the future.

Perhaps the case is that Netflix sees itself more and more as a content creator in addition to simple media provider. Like a more traditional TV station, Netflix is devoting more and more of its resources to the creation and curation of original video content, and perhaps sees its future as focusing more on this division of business. Netflix has already announced aims to debut at least 20 more original series in the next five years and is currently heavily promoting its new period drama called Marco Polo, following the adventures of the medieval Italian explorer.

No matter what you make of it, Netflix’s surprising decision about offline streaming belies a confidence that internet infrastructure will continue to be developed. Based on history, this is a safe bet, though it also shows a surprising self-confidence in their place in the market. Netflix seems to believe their position is unassailable. It will be interesting to see if this is the case.

Nick Rojas is a business consultant and writer who lives in Los Angeles and Chicago. He has consulted small and medium-sized enterprises for over twenty years. He has  contributed articles to Visual.ly, Entrepreneur, and TechCrunch. You can follow him on Twitter @NickARojas, or you can reach him at NickAndrewRojas@gmail.com.

My wife and I recently took a drive in the countryside, where we encountered an otherwise beautiful colonial farmhouse. It was in the process of being painted hot pink with purple accents and trim. Our first thoughts were sympathy for the neighbors and a renewed appreciation for the fact that our closest neighbor is a quarter mile away. Afterward, this encounter reminded me of just how critical the selection of color can be when trying to convey the proper impressions regarding a business.

Big Businesses Cannot Afford to Stumble

When it comes to color, no successful business has ever left those decisions to chance. If you go into a Sherwin-Williams or Benjamin Moore paint store, you will not see hot pink among the residential exterior color swatches. Simply put, the color is inappropriate for that type of application. The fashion industry, with billions of dollars on the line and outsourced production requiring months of advance production time, spends an enormous sum of money financing the Pantone Color Institute’s projections of color trends in fashion. The Spring 2015 Fashion Color Report was released during New York’s Fashion Week in September of 2014. Click here for an advance look at the colors that you will be seeing on the best-dressed people this spring.

Color, and the combination of colors, is far from limited to the paint and fashion industries. It is a commanding presence in the world of advertising and corporate branding. If your campground is part of a franchise, your colors will have been painstakingly researched and selected, referencing Pantone color standards that ensure consistency across applications. If your business, like most, is independently owned and unaffiliated, you will need to put a good deal of thought into making sound color choices, hopefully with the assistance of a marketing professional.

There is no question that there is a psychology behind each color that evokes a wide range of either positive or negative emotions. Some of these emotions are universal, and other color emotions vary from one culture to another. For example, the color yellow conveys varying emotions in Western cultures – everything from happiness and joy to cowardice and caution. It is considered sacred in most Eastern cultures, but it is the color of mourning in many Arabic cultures. Clearly, if your marketing is intended for primary consumption in your home country, the cross-cultural challenges are lessened.

Professional design is rarely limited to the primary (red, blue and yellow) and secondary (purple, orange and green) colors that make up the basic color spectrum. Looking at the Pantone Spring 2015 Fashion Color Report, your choice in green might very well be Treetop, Woodbine or Lucite Green, and your choice in blue might be Classic Blue, Dusk Blue, Aquamarine or Scuba Blue. These specific shades of color – and their combinations – will determine the color identity of your business, but the basic color emotions should influence your overall choices. With that in mind, the following is a listing of primary and secondary colors (plus black and grey), along with the highly generalized emotions that are associated with those colors in Western cultures.

• Red: Energy, excitement, action, and passion. Tempered with anger and danger.
• Orange: Visibility, refreshment and creativity. Tempered with caution.
• Yellow: Happiness, joy, and hope. Tempered with caution and cowardice.
• Green: Nature, environment, regeneration, and luck. Tempered with greed, envy, and inexperience.
• Blue: Peace, trust, quality, authority, and calm. Tempered with sadness and depression.
• Purple: Bravery, authority, power, and sophistication. Tempered with mourning.
• Black: Power and strength. Tempered with death and mourning.
• Grey: Wisdom and strength. Tempered with grief, boredom and depression.

Even if you have been aware of the psychology of color all along and have been giving it consideration when painting structures, ordering apparel, and designing both your online and print advertising (which, incidentally, use two separate sets of color formulas), you may want to give it even greater consideration from this point forward. Importantly, once you have made some informed decisions, use them consistently and precisely. Avoid settling for a “similar” color that will not serve to advance your identity. Above all else, do everything possible to avoid becoming that pink house that becomes a blight on the neighborhood.

Acronyms and abbreviations surround us and have become a part of our everyday lexicon. You are familiar with acronyms: words that have been formed from the initial letters of a series of words and are then pronounced as words themselves. Abbreviations, on the other hand, are also formed from the initial letters of a series of words but are not pronounced as words themselves. For example, NASA is an acronym for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and KOA is an abbreviation for Kampgrounds of America.

Many acronyms originated with military jargon, including RADAR (which stands for radio detection and ranging), AWOL (absent without leave), and SNAFU (which I will leave undefined). More recently, a whole new generation of acronyms and abbreviations has been generated by the proliferation of technology and the Internet. Many of these terms have become part of our everyday conversations, but how many of us really know the definitions of the words that we use?

It is the start of a new year, and I thought that we could take this opportunity to have some fun with a little quiz that will allow you determine whether you are a true geek or simply a nerd in geek’s clothing. I will throw in a few easy terms, just so nobody feels totally discouraged. I will provide you with the acronym or abbreviation, along with a brief definition. See if you know the words that provide the origins for the terms. Have fun and see how you do, checking for the correct answers at the end of the quiz.

1)    RAM – Usually found in pairs of “sticks” that fit into “slots” in a computer, these allow a computer to perform calculations quickly. Variations include SDRAM and VRAM. Not to be confused with an early solo record by Paul McCartney.

2)    PDF – These are pages of content that can be downloaded online and will always render identically on every display and print consistently on every printer.

3)    DSL – This is a form of high-speed Internet access over telephone lines that replaced the screeching sound and excruciatingly slow speed of dial-up modems. The next breed of this will use fiber optic cable.

4)    CPU – This is to your computer what your brain is to your body. Without it, your computer would be nothing but a case full of components.

5)    BSOD – This is the last thing that a Windows computer user wants to see on his monitor. It is also known as a stop error or bug check, and it displays a memory dump that typically includes thousands of characters of text that are totally undecipherable to the average human being.

6)    CMYK – These represent the colors that comprise four-color process printing, as opposed to the RGB colors of digital displays. Most folks read out the letters in this abbreviation, but other people pronounce it as the acronym “smick”.

7)    Wi-Fi – This is a means of connecting to the Internet without the use of cables. Everybody at your campground wants this available at their particular campsite, and it better be fast and free.

8)    USB – Before this was adopted as a standard, there seemed to be a different type of cable for every device connected to a computer, each with a unique plug and computer jack. Of course, as devices got smaller, there is now mini-USB and micro-USB found on things like smartphones. Thanks to USB, you probably have a box full of old cables that you cannot even give away.

9)    URL – This is the address of your website or any other particular page on the Internet. It is even more precise than a 9-digit zip code.

10) HDMI – This allows a single cable to transfer video and audio between devices such as computer monitors, video projectors, and digital televisions. Thanks to HDMI, almost nobody uses two tin cans and a string anymore.

11) HTML – The websites that you see online work because this allows text files to be “tagged” in a manner that allows them to display specific fonts, colors, graphics, embedded content, and links. Some people think that this is magic, but it is really some form of HTML.

12) JPEG – Probably the most common means of compressing and decompressing digital images. When saving an image, the amount of compression can be selected. Too much compression leads to serious loss of image quality.

13) IMAP – A protocol that allows e-mail to be retrieved from a mail server, it offers added functionality over the POP3 standard, including an improved ability to synchronize your e-mail among multiple devices such as your office computer, laptop computer, tablet and smartphone.

14) FTP – This Internet function allows for the upload and download of files, sometimes using a cloud service, from one computer to another. Many people try to send large files as e-mail attachments because they are unfamiliar with FTP.

15) SQL – If a website runs some sort of structured database, that database will be programmed using some form of SQL.

16) DVD – This storage format replaced the CD due to its greater storage capacity and its ability to play high-resolution audiovisual material. Thanks to the DVD, your VHS tapes are in a box with your old 8-track audio tapes and you no longer see “Be kind. Please rewind.” stickers.

17) GPS – This provides the ability for drivers to get from point A to point B without opening their glove box and unfolding a large, confusing piece of paper.

18) ICANN – When you want to register a domain name, you perform a “whois lookup” at an accredited registrar to see if it is available, but it is this organization that keeps the Internet running by allocating IP addresses and managing the domain name system.

19) GIF – Another means of saving graphic files, dating back to CompuServe and the early days of the Internet, it is pronounced “jiff”, not “giff”. If photos are saved using this format, they will have a blotchy appearance due to the limited number of colors represented. The animated version of this format is responsible for all those annoying little graphics that you don’t use on your website, right?

20) MIDI – Not a skirt length, this term also goes back to the early days of the World Wide Web, when it was commonly used to include songs on websites. Thanks to MIDI files, people quickly learned to turn off the sound on their computers. It was more annoying than Muzak, and copyright enforcement put the final nail in its coffin.

Well, how did you do? Scroll down below for the answers. You are probably happy that I did not include EXIF, FQDN, FLOPS, GUID, PPGA, TWAIN, SOAP and TCP/IP. In all honesty, I cannot identify most of those myself. On the other hand, I try not to think of myself as a geek. Let’s hope you had fun!

Stop scrolling here, until you want to see the answers!

The answers:

1)    RAM = Random Access Memory

2)    PDF = Portable Document Format

3)    DSL = Digital Subscriber Line

4)    CPU = Central Processing Unit

5)    BSOD = Blue Screen of Death

6)    CMYK = Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black (or Key)

7)    Wi-Fi = Wireless Fidelity

8)    USB = Universal Serial Bus

9)    URL = Uniform Resource Locator

10) HDMI = High Definition Multimedia Interface

11) HTML = Hyper-Text Markup Language

12) JPEG = Joint Photographic Experts Group

13) IMAP = Internet Message Access Protocol

14) FTP = File Transfer Protocol

15) SQL = Structured Query Language

16) DVD = Digital Versatile Disc

17) GPS = Global Positioning System

18) ICANN = Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

19) GIF = Graphics Interchange Format

MIDI = Musical Instrument Digital Interface