Dan Muse

Around the time Adobe PageMaker first hit the street, Howard Adkins was starting a small business to design and produce catalogs for educational publishers. Howard Adkins Communications opened its doors in Austin, Texas in 1986. In the 18 years that followed, Adkins witnessed dramatic shifts that would change the industry as whole and his own […]

Microsoft Office is a fixture in most small businesses, but it has company. The other fixture is Intuit’s QuickBooks. Even though QuickBooks continues to maintain a near stranglehold on the small business accounting market, Microsoft isn’t about to concede to Intuit. In a move that appears squarely aimed at QuickBooks, Microsoft today announced the availability […]

The great thing about having an eBay Store is being part of a network that includes millions of buyers. The downside is that the stores themselves don’t necessarily offer the professional look and feel you want for your small business. That fact is apparently not lost on eBay, and — to help make its stores […]

Few products are as universally embraced as Intuit’s QuickBooks. Whether you’re talking about an autobody shop, a print shop, a real estate firm or any other type of small business you can imagine, there’s a good chance the back office is running QuickBooks. Of course, Intuit has hardly sat on its laurels and has expanded […]

Small and mid-sized businesses are a big deal to Hewlett-Packard, especially when it comes to servers. Vince Gayman, director of SMB programs at HP, said that about 50 percent of all HP servers sales come from SMBs. With its enterprise hardware sales sagging, HP has seen demand for its ProLiant line increase. HP also seems […]

Whether it’s a hard drive crash or a hurricane, small and mid-sized businesses that aren’t prepared for disasters could be headed for one. There’s been no shortage of vendors trying to get that message across to SMBs. The latest is Verio, an Englewood, Colo.-based hosting provider. In a move to help small businesses manage off-premise […]

Many companies offer turnkey online application suites, but perhaps no one has been as ambitious as San Mateo, Calif.-based NetSuite. The company began with what was largely an accounting application, added e-commerce and Web-site building features, and later tacked on inventory management, CRM and ERP components. Today, the company announced what it describes as the […]

Looking to help small and mid-sized businesses combine secure and speedy copying, printing, faxing and scanning in a high-volume multi-function device, Xerox today announced the WorkCentre Pro 123 and 128. The WorkCentre Pro 123 and 128 operate at either 23 or 28 pages per minute, respectively. Also new, according to Joy Lipari, manager of product […]

Not long ago, if someone needed a plumber, an electrician or a landscaper, he would pick up the Yellow Pages and let his “fingers to do the walking.” But that’s old millennium thinking. Today, savvy small businesses know that search engines are a key to Internet success. Yellow Pages are still an important advertising vehicle, […]

The jargon has changed a bit over the years. There’s ASP-delivered software, software-as-a-service, Web-based applications, hosted software, software on-demand … the list goes on. Whatever you call it, the hosted application model — in which you pay a monthly fee to access via a Web browser applications and data that resides in a data center […]

Big corporations aren’t the only companies that need to worry whether their employees are using instant messaging applications. If you own an SMB and have enough employees to the point that you’re not sure what programs everyone’s using, you need to wake up and pay attention. Businesses that think their employees aren’t using IM or […]

Web conferencing — technology that allow businesses to conduct online meetings, deliver presentations and collaborate with colleagues — hasn’t yet trickled down to the ranks of the typical small business. Macromedia hopes to open SMB’s eyes to its Web conferencing platform with new pricing policies announced today. The two benefits of Macromedia Breeze Live for […]