Gerry Blackwell

The cost and convenience of network attached storage (NAS) keeps getting better and better. At $400, Western Digital‘s breakthrough 500GB NetCenter Network Drive offers both superb value and easy set-up. It also comes with Retrospect Express 7.5 backup software from EMC, which is all the backup software many small businesses and consumers will ever need. […]

Good quality, easy-to-use multi-function printers (MFPs) that combine printer, fax, scanner and copier functions have never been cheaper. Hewlett-Packard‘s new OfficeJet 4315, which sells for $99.99, is a good case in point. The 4315, a compact unit that can fit on a book shelf, is a long way from HP’s top of the line MFP, […]

Big companies run their entire businesses with enterprise resource planning (ERP) software that integrates all the key functions — manufacturing, logistics, distribution, inventory, shipping, invoicing, accounting. The most important aspect of the process is the integration. Too many small businesses, especially very small businesses, end up using individual programs for each function. The software isn’t […]

A digital camera make a lot of sense for small businesses; you can take employee ID pictures, add photos to brochures or Web sites, document insurance claims or create a visual inventory. But not everyone can snap photos like Annie Liebowvitz, so we appreciate anything that helps us take better photos — especially when it […]

Network attached storage (NAS) — hard drives that you attach directly to your network rather than to one computer on the network — make good sense as a solution for sharing files among co-workers and for backing up computers in a small office. Most hard drive vendors and many network vendors now sell NAS appliances […]

If you’re a small business or independent professional searching for a relatively painless and inexpensive way to establish a Web presence, look no further than SiteKreator, a subscription-based service developed by NetClime Inc. SiteKreator offers impressively easy-to-use online tools for creating Web sites from templates and also hosts your pages. SK Business Edition starts at […]

Skype and Skype watchers have been saying for some time now that a surprising proportion of the low-or-no-cost VoIP service’s customers are using it for business. This is probably truer in Europe and the Far East where phone companies often charge for local calls, and long distance typically costs more than it does in North […]

More small businesses are discovering the benefits of virtual PBX — a technology that provides even very small firms with telephone system features such as auto attendants, voice-mail, unified messaging and find-me-follow-me capability. Big corporations typically pay thousands, or tens of thousands, of dollars for the exact same features. Small businesses can use a virtual […]

Actiontec Electronics Inc. was one of the first companies out of the gate with hardware products aimed at Skype customer market, which the company hopes will be huge. I recently reviewed the VoSKY Call Center ($70). It’s one of several new Actiontec products, all of which are in one way or another designed to integrate […]

As much as we might all love a stylish, high-performance notebook with all the bells and whistles, that premium price tag brings most of us down to Earth pretty quickly. Still, you can buy perfectly fine laptops now for well under $1,000 Lenovo, the Chinese company that purchased IBM’s ThinkPad and ThinkCentre lines, entered this […]

The Canon model, which supports both WEP and WPA for security, will perform additional wireless tricks eventually. With new firmware scheduled for release in May 2006, you’ll be able to make peer-to-peer wireless connections with other SD430s — or, presumably, future Canon Wi-Fi cameras — and transfer pictures from one to the other. We’re not […]

The $450 Coolpix S6 is a second-generation Wi-Fi digital camera from Nikon. It lets you send pictures to a computer or printer over a standard home (or office) wireless LAN. We reviewed the first-generation Coolpix products, the P1 (8 megapixels, $550) and P2 (5.1 megapixels, $400), last year. This one is a 6-megapixel model with […]