October is the calm before the season of nor’easters, ice storms and heavy snow. For a small business in New England, a single outage can mean lost sales, missed calls and frozen systems. The best time to prepare is now, while the weather is still mild and there is time to fix what a quick review turns up.

Protect Power to Critical Equipment

Even brief power flickers can damage electronics or corrupt data. Start with the basics:

• Put computers, network equipment and point-of-sale terminals on surge protectors at a minimum.
• Consider an uninterruptible power supply, a battery unit that keeps key equipment running for a short time and allows a safe shutdown.
• Label which outlets and devices matter most, so staff know what to protect first.
• If you use a backup generator, follow the manufacturer’s safety instructions, never run it indoors and have a licensed electrician handle any connection to building wiring.

Plan for Internet Outages

Many businesses now depend entirely on the internet for payments, scheduling and communication. Think through what happens if your connection goes down:

• Can your point-of-sale system process cards offline and sync later? Check its settings and limits in advance.
• Is a cellular hotspot or phone tethering available as a temporary backup?
• Do you know how to reach your internet provider’s outage information from a phone?
• Are your router and modem on battery backup so a short power blip does not drop the connection?

Keep Phones and Customers Connected

If customers cannot reach you, they may assume you are closed for good. Make sure your business phone line can forward to a mobile number. Prepare a short message for your website, social media and online business listings explaining any closure or changed hours. Write it now, so you only need to fill in the details during a storm.

Confirm Your Backups

Storms are a common time for hardware failures and water damage. Before winter, verify that backups of important files and systems are running and that you can actually restore from them. Keep at least one copy off-site or in the cloud, so damage to the office does not take your data with it. If laptops leave the office during storms, make sure they are encrypted and protected with strong passwords.

Write a One-Page Plan

A simple, printed plan is easier to follow in a crisis than a complicated binder. Include:

• Who decides whether to close and how staff will be notified.
• Contact information for your internet provider, phone provider, IT help and landlord.
• Steps to shut down and restart key systems safely.
• Where backups, passwords and important documents are kept.

Sign up for local emergency alerts from your city or town and follow official guidance during storms, including from the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency. An hour of preparation in October can save days of disruption in January.

Background

A nor’easter is a large coastal storm named for the strong northeast winds that blow in from the ocean ahead of it. These storms can form at any time of year but are most common and most disruptive from late fall through early spring, when they can bring heavy snow, ice, coastal flooding and damaging gusts to New England. Unlike a brief thunderstorm, a nor’easter can linger for a day or more, which means outages and travel problems can stretch out as well.

Winter weather affects technology in several ways at once. Wind and heavy, wet snow bring down tree limbs and power lines. Ice can damage utility equipment. Flooding can reach basements where servers, network gear or electrical panels are often installed. Even when the business itself is unaffected, staff may be unable to travel, and customers may stay home.

What it means for small businesses

For many small businesses, the most valuable step is simply deciding in advance what matters most. A short list of critical systems, usually payments, phones, email, scheduling and key files, makes it easier to spend preparation time wisely. A few additional ideas complement the checklist in the article:

• Test your battery backups. Batteries in uninterruptible power supplies wear out over time. Many units have a self-test function; use it before winter rather than discovering a dead battery during an outage.
• Move equipment off the floor. If network or computer equipment sits in a basement or on the floor, raising it can reduce the risk of water damage.
• Know what works without power. Find out whether your door locks, alarm system and phones rely on electricity or internet service, and what happens when either goes out.
• Plan for remote work. If staff can work from home, confirm they have the access and equipment they need before a storm, not during it.
• Keep paper copies of essentials. A printed contact list and the one-page plan are useful precisely when screens and networks are down.

After the storm

Recovery deserves a plan too. Power can return unevenly, sometimes with surges. Many businesses wait a short time after power is restored before turning equipment back on, then restart systems in a sensible order: the internet connection and network first, then computers and point-of-sale systems. If any card transactions were processed offline, confirm they synced correctly. Update your website and listings once regular hours resume, so customers know you are open again.

It also helps to write down what went well and what did not. A brief review after each significant storm improves the plan for the next one.

Key terms

• Nor’easter: A strong coastal storm with northeast winds, common along the East Coast in colder months.
• Surge protector: A device that helps shield electronics from sudden voltage spikes.
• Uninterruptible power supply (UPS): A battery unit that provides short-term power so equipment can keep running briefly or shut down safely.
• Offline mode: A setting on some payment systems that stores transactions and processes them once the connection returns.
• Off-site backup: A copy of data stored at a separate physical location or in the cloud.

What to watch

• When was the last time you actually restored a file from your backups?
• How long can your battery backups keep critical equipment running?
• Does every staff member know where the one-page plan is and who makes the call to close?
• Are your website and listings ready to display a closure notice quickly?
• Have official storm alerts been set up on the phones of the people who need them?

AI chatbots can draft an email, summarize a report or explain a tax form in seconds. To many users, they seem to understand. What is happening under the hood is both more mechanical and more interesting than it looks, and knowing the basics helps you use these tools well.

Text Becomes Tokens

When you type a question, the system first breaks your text into small units called tokens. A token might be a whole word, part of a word or a punctuation mark. Each token is converted into numbers the model can work with. The model never sees letters the way you do; it sees patterns in those numbers.

Predicting the Next Piece

At its core, a large language model is trained to predict what token is likely to come next, given everything before it. During training, it processes an enormous amount of text and gradually adjusts billions of internal settings, called parameters, to get better at that prediction.

When you ask a question, the model generates a response one token at a time. At each step, it calculates probabilities for many possible next tokens, chooses one and adds it to the text. Then it repeats, using the new, longer text as input. A full answer is the result of thousands of these small choices made in rapid succession.

Many chatbots also go through additional training in which people rate responses, which teaches the model to follow instructions, stay on topic and avoid certain harmful outputs.

Why It Can Be So Good

Predicting the next word sounds simple, but doing it well across countless topics requires the model to capture a great deal about language, facts and reasoning patterns. That is why chatbots can:

• Rewrite text in a different tone or for a different audience.
• Summarize and organize long documents.
• Explain concepts at different levels of detail.
• Help with code, outlines and brainstorming.

Why It Can Be Confidently Wrong

The same process explains the most important weakness. The model is producing likely-sounding text, not looking up verified facts by default. If its training data was thin or contradictory on a topic, it may produce a fluent but false answer, sometimes called a hallucination. It may invent a statistic, a quote or a source that sounds plausible.

Some chatbots can search the web or read documents you provide, which can improve accuracy and let them cite sources. Even then, they can misread or misstate what they find. Most also have a knowledge cutoff, a point after which they know nothing unless they are connected to newer information.

Using Chatbots Wisely

A few habits go a long way:

• Give clear context and specific instructions.
• Ask for sources, then check them yourself.
• Verify any numbers, dates, names or legal and medical claims with official sources or a qualified professional.
• Avoid sharing private or sensitive information unless you understand the tool’s privacy terms.

Think of a chatbot as a fast, tireless assistant with a great memory for patterns and no built-in sense of when it is wrong. In the right hands, that is extremely useful. The responsibility for the final answer still belongs to the person using it.

Background

The chatbots in wide use today are built on a type of neural network known as the transformer, an architecture introduced by researchers in 2017. Its key idea is attention: a way for the model to weigh how much each part of the input relates to every other part. That made it possible to train much larger models on much more text than earlier approaches, and it is a big reason language tools improved so quickly in the years that followed.

Training typically happens in stages. A model is first trained on a very large collection of text to learn general patterns of language. It is then refined with examples of helpful answers and with feedback from people who compare responses. The result is a system that can follow instructions conversationally, though its underlying method is still prediction rather than lookup.

What it means for small businesses

For a small business, chatbots can save time on routine writing and organizing. They can draft a first version of a newsletter, suggest headlines, turn notes into a checklist or explain an unfamiliar term. The key is to treat the output as a draft that a person reviews, especially when it involves facts, prices, legal terms or anything a customer will rely on.

• Use it for structure: outlines, summaries and first drafts are strong uses.
• Keep humans on facts: verify names, numbers, dates and claims before publishing.
• Protect data: avoid pasting customer records, passwords or confidential documents into tools without understanding their terms.
• Set a house style: giving the tool examples of the business’s voice tends to produce more consistent drafts.
• Disclose when appropriate: some customers and industries expect to know when automated tools are used.

Key terms

• Large language model (LLM): an AI model trained on large amounts of text to predict and generate language.
• Token: a small unit of text, such as a word or part of a word, that the model processes.
• Parameters: the internal numerical settings adjusted during training.
• Context window: the amount of text a model can consider at once, including the conversation so far.
• Prompt: the instructions and information a user gives the model.
• Hallucination: a confident-sounding but false or invented answer.
• Retrieval: a technique where the system looks up documents or web pages and gives them to the model to ground its answer.

What to watch

AI tools are changing quickly, and a few questions help evaluate any new feature or product. Does the tool show its sources, and are those sources reliable? What does the provider say about how it stores and uses the information users enter? How does it handle questions it cannot answer: does it say so, or does it guess? Are there clear settings for business accounts, such as controls over data retention?

It also helps to watch how organizations around you adopt these tools. Schools, employers, professional associations and regulators are developing guidance on appropriate use, and that guidance is likely to shape expectations for businesses and their customers. Staying informed, and keeping a person responsible for the final result, remains the most dependable approach.

Two and a half centuries after Boston dumped British tea into its harbour, the conversation between Boston and Britain is about something else entirely: how to move people through old, beautiful places without letting cars take them over.

From George III to Charles III

Boston’s relationship with the British Crown began with a dispute about trade. The Townshend Acts of 1767 put duties on glass, paper and tea. The Tea Act of 1773 revived the argument over taxation without representation, and on 16 December 1773 colonists emptied 340 chests of East India Company tea into Boston Harbor. London answered with the Boston Port Act of 1774, which closed the harbour to commerce until the tea was paid for. (Massachusetts Historical Society)

The relationship today looks very different. The United Kingdom is among the largest foreign employers in Massachusetts (Global Business Alliance), and ideas now cross the Atlantic as readily as goods. One of the most interesting of those ideas concerns the street itself: who it is for, and how much of it the car should be allowed to take.

Why British towns need a different kind of mobility

Many British cities and market towns were laid out long before the car. Their streets are narrow, their centres are protected, and every surface car park or new gantry competes with the character people value. Congestion is real: INRIX’s 2025 Global Traffic Scorecard found London drivers lost 91 hours to traffic, with Bristol (64 hours), Manchester (62) and Leeds (59) close behind, and the average UK driver lost 59 hours, at a cost of about £822 each. (INRIX)

At the same time the vehicle fleet is changing. Under the UK’s zero emission vehicle mandate, 33% of new cars sold in 2026 must be zero-emission. Sales of new pure petrol and diesel cars are set to end in 2030, with hybrids allowed until 2035, although the 2030 trajectory is currently under review. (GOV.UK) By 1 July 2026 there were 121,171 public charging devices in the UK. (DfT)

The question for British towns is therefore not whether cars will change, but where they will park and charge without cluttering the streets people want to walk on.

The King’s long argument about the street

Few public figures have argued about the built environment for as long as King Charles III. As Prince of Wales he told the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1984 that a proposed National Gallery extension was “a monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend”, and in 1989 he set out his principles in the book A Vision of Britain: human scale, local character, and places designed around people rather than traffic. (RIBA Journal)

Poundbury: the experiment

Those ideas were tested at Poundbury, an urban extension of Dorchester in Dorset built on Duchy of Cornwall land. Léon Krier was appointed masterplanner in 1988 and building began in 1993. Irregular street layouts slow traffic, every neighbourhood is designed to be within about a five-minute walk of its centre, homes sit alongside shops and workshops, and utilities run underground rather than on poles. (Institution of Civil Engineers) The Duchy has since applied similar principles at Nansledan, near Newquay.

Poundbury has its critics, and the evidence is worth taking seriously. A 2023 Centre for Cities review found that residents still rely heavily on cars: only 17% of households have no car and 55% drive to work, largely because there are not enough local jobs. (Centre for Cities) Good street design, in other words, changes how a place feels, but it does not by itself remove the car. The car still has to go somewhere.

Stewardship, not endorsement

The King has also spent decades on environmental causes, from the Sustainable Markets Initiative launched in 2020 to the Terra Carta of 2021. As monarch he has said he can no longer give his time to those causes as before, and he remains politically neutral. Nothing here suggests he endorses any company, including ours. What we take from his work is a design principle: infrastructure should serve a place quietly, not dominate it.

Smart parking as the invisible grid

That principle points to a practical conclusion. If historic streets are to stay walkable while the fleet electrifies, parking and charging need to move off the kerb and into places that are dense, safe and largely out of sight. That is the problem Boston Made is planning to work on in the UK.

Boston knows something about hiding infrastructure. The Central Artery/Tunnel Project, the Big Dig, replaced an elevated highway through downtown with tunnels, created more than 300 acres of open land including the Rose Kennedy Greenway, and, according to the state, cut vehicle hours of congestion by 62%. (Mass.gov) It was also famously expensive and late, which is its own lesson: invisible infrastructure pays off only when it is planned carefully.

Our concept combines three layers:

• Booking and hospitality. Drivers reserve a space or EV charging slot in advance, priced in pounds, so fewer cars circle looking for a space.
• Sensing. Pressure-sensitive flooring and cameras confirm where vehicles are and that people have walked clear before any automated equipment moves.
• Automated storage. Caster-based guided vehicles move cars into dense storage, so a site can hold more vehicles in less space, and charging bays can be monitored for heat and isolated automatically.

The details, including the UK rules we would build around, are on our UK smart parking page.

A roadmap for working with British places

Public-private alignment

Any UK site starts with the local planning authority and, where relevant, heritage and conservation guidance. Private parking in England also runs under the industry’s Private Parking Single Code of Practice, which sets grace periods, signage standards and caps on charges, and which all existing sites must meet by 31 December 2026. We would design every site to those standards from the outset, and treat parking charges as a last resort rather than a business model.

What we would measure

We are not going to promise numbers before a single site is built. These are the outcomes we would measure and publish for each project:

• Kerbside spaces and surface parking returned to pedestrians, trees or trade.
• Time drivers spend searching for a space, before and after.
• EV charging sessions delivered and the share of electricity from renewable tariffs.
• Footfall and spending on nearby high streets.
• Complaints and appeals as a share of visits, as a measure of fairness.

The new bridge

The first transatlantic argument about Boston was about who controlled trade. The next one can be about how two old places, each proud of its streets, make room for the future without losing what makes them worth visiting. We think the answer is infrastructure that serves quietly, and we would like to build it with British partners.

If you own or manage a car park, hotel or venue in the UK, or work in planning or mobility, talk to us. UK readers can also find prices in pounds and shipping details on our UK page.

Boston Made’s UK parking services are in development. This article reflects our plans and publicly reported facts as of September 2026; it is not legal or planning advice.