Dan Muse

Small and mid-size businesses are either spending more or will soon be spending more money on technology in 2004, according to Boston-based Forrester Research. According to the company’s report, “The State of IT in the SMB Market,” the 1,000 SMBs surveyed will increase IT spending 6.6 percent over 2003. Forrester defines small businesses are those […]

Last fall, FileMaker, the Apple Computer software subsidiary best-known for its affordable FileMaker Pro database management product, introduced FileMaker Applications. The four add-on products (Meetings, Tasks, Recruiter and Donations) are designed to provide specific functions out of the box for users who don’t have the time or expertise to fully exploit the features of the […]

It’s a fact of life: Small and mid-sized businesses face many of the same technology-related challenges that larger enterprises encounter. The difference is that SMBs can’t devote a lot of people, time or money to dealing with problems — or just as important to preventing problems. To help businesses that don’t have large IT staffs, […]

Many small businesses prefer to avoid relying on larger vendors whenever possible. After all, who understands their needs better than another small business? When it comes to e-commerce, the problem for some small businesses that are looking to expand their Web sites’ capabilities is that they may have to go a large hosting provider such […]

NetSuite was providing Web-based applications when it wasn’t cool. The San Mateo, Calif.-based provider of a turnkey e-commerce, accounting, customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) package has seen the hype, the fall and slow ascension of the application service provider (ASP) industry. Like other Web-based application providers, NetSuite has had to quell […]

In an ideal world, competent technical support would come for free with the purchase of a computer. In reality, it doesn’t always work that way. Regardless of what vendor or service provider you buy from, you have probably experienced elaborate voicemail systems and long waits on hold that you’d swear are designed to make you […]

If anything, small and mid-size e-commerce businesses have too much data these days. Thanks to Web analytics software — which allows you to track visitor behavior patterns in the most granular of detail — information abounds on where visitors came from, where they went, how long they stayed and so on. However, being able to […]

Firewalls, VPNs, intrusion detection are becoming as common in the business vernacular as balance sheets, P & L statements and chart of accounts. The more your business relies on the Internet as a tool to communicate with customers, suppliers and remote workers, the more significant computer security becomes. The challenge, of course, is that unlike […]

The CAN-SPAM Act, which came into law the first of the year, may not have done much yet to halt the widespread spamming that haunts the Internet. But while it may not prevent porno-packing messages sent from offshore IP addresses, it will have an effect on your business. Scary? A bit. But what’s really frightening […]

Do you know more about what’s going on in Hollywood and Washington, D.C. than you do about what’s happening in your business? Sound far-fetched? Maybe a bit, but it’s true that from a technology point of view sometimes it seems easier to track Britney and Bush than it is to keep tabs of your sales […]

The numbers are hard to ignore. According to the 2003 American Interactive Consumer Survey by The Dieringer Research Group, 80 percent of Americans expect to find product information online before they buy and 63 percent expect businesses to provide that information on their Web sites. The message to small businesses is a straightforward one. You […]

Click to go to the online ballot As the year draws to a close, we ask you put aside your 2003 year-end financials or tear yourself away from your 2004 business plan for a few minutes to reflect on the past year. Specifically, we’d like you to think about what products made the year a […]