Gerry Blackwell

The Wi-Fi digital cameras have arrived. Nikon recently began shipping its CoolPix P1 and P2 models (only narrowly beating Kodak to the punch). Both Nikons feature integrated Wi-Fi for sending pictures from camera to PC, as well as to a PC-connected printer, or directly to some printer models equipped with an optional USB/Wi-Fi adapter supplied […]

FileMaker Pro from FileMaker Inc. (now owned by Apple) has quietly grown over a 20-year span from being a fairly simple tool for developing simple databases to one capable of building very sophisticated systems that can run entire businesses. Yet the latest version, FileMaker Pro 8 Advanced ($500 for the application or $300 to upgrade), […]

Many small businesses rely just as heavily on information technology as large enterprises, yet too few bother to implement plans or technology for protecting their systems and data against disaster. What would happen if your servers went down, or you lost data for some other reason? How much business would you lose? How much productivity? […]

Point-and-shoot digital cameras have created a whole new do-it-yourself attitude in many small businesses. But low-end and mid-range consumer digicams are often limited in image quality and functionality. Small businesses that need to produce high-quality images — for catalogs, portfolios, Web sites, brochures and other applications — now have a better option: one of the […]

When Keith Spear first started selling bowling balls on the Internet back in 1996, getting product out to customers was a tedious, time-consuming, error-prone business. Today, Spear’s Bowlingball.com operation, a classic e-commerce success story, is totally automated. Much of the technology involved — for automating shipping, notification and supply chain management — came free, supplied […]

It’s amazing how much paper still floats around in many small firms, despite all the investments in information technology that were supposed to produce a paperless office. You can eliminate a lot of paper internally if you try, but what do you do about the paper that comes in the door or through the fax […]

Microsoft recently issued a free upgrade to its Business Contact Manager extension to Outlook, a small-business CRM solution. The upgrade makes Business Contact Manager (BCM) a somewhat more interesting proposition for sales professionals and small business owners, especially those already using other Microsoft components such as Small Business Server or Exchange servers or the soon-to-be-released […]

If you need to take your files on the road or need to transfer them to other computers quickly and easily, then the LifeDrive, a new type of PDA from PalmOne, could be exactly what you need. In fact, if you travel with a laptop more for its storage capacity rather than its computing capability, […]

Like many successful entrepreneurs, Debra Cohen, founder and proprietor of Home Remedies of New York Inc., a home improvement contract referral business, had to discover her own secrets to success. Unlike most, Cohen now shares her secrets with others — for a price. Her lucrative second business is The Home Referral Network (HRN), a company […]

On-demand webcasting is an increasingly important marketing tool. Instead of making live presentations, you can refer customers, prospects, partners or students to a Web site where they can view your Webcast whenever they want at the pace they want. It could be streaming video, animation or a narrated slide show. Webcasting can eliminate travel, and […]

If you’re shopping for a very lightweight laptop to use for traveling, Lenovo‘s ThinkPad X41 — not to be confused with the company’s X41 Tablet PC— should be a strong candidate — as long as money’s not an issue. It weighs a mere 3.27 pounds, but features a 12.1-inch LCD screen, 1.50 GHz Intel Pentium […]

Hand scanners like the IRISPen Executive from IRIS that let you copy text from paper to computer one line or a few lines at a time have been around for more than a decade. Optical character recognition (OCR) technology for translating scanned text into editable computer text has been around as long. So what can […]