Gerry Blackwell

For many small companies, a telephone system is the most important technology investment they will make. The phone system is their main point of contact with customers. It had better be good. Luis Contreras, president of AmeTrade Controls Inc., a Miami-based export company specializing in industrial automation equipment, had been looking for a new phone […]

When William Eldridge left a management position at IBM and started his own small business two years ago, the change came as a shock. No more armies of support staff, no more legal, accounting, HR and IT experts to back him up. He was on his own. Which is why finding Smart Online, a provider […]

In this day and age of Swiss-Army-like gadgets that cram 17 functions into a box the size of a pack of Tic Tacs — whether you need them or not — is there room for a device dedicated to a single task? Happily, yes. The Olympus DS-2 Digital Voice Recorder is that rare thing in […]

LCD monitors are fast becoming a commodity item, and as prices drop, 17-inch flat panels becomes the new 15 inch, and 19 inches the new 17. However, you can still find products that differentiate themselves with innovative features and superior performance. LG Electronics claims its 19-inch Flatron L1980Q fits in this category. The L1980Q is […]

Small business owners rarely think about the physical characteristics of the personal computers they buy. PCs are a commodity item. In fact, they’re usually quite impersonal. Office chairs elicit more emotion. PCs come in three standard form factors — laptop, desktop and tower — and a range of neutral colors. Take your pick. But in […]

For many small businesses, Acrobat, the document exchange tool from Adobe Systems Inc., is mission-critical. Lawyers, engineering consultants, architects and publishers, to name just a few, use it routinely to create PDF (Portable Document Format) files to secure documents for electronic distribution and collaborative editing. With the release of Acrobat 7.0 Professional, Adobe has created […]

Web developer Dave Smith wasn’t entirely surprised when one of his clients, a small clothing e-tailer in southern California, came to him recently and said the site Smith developed for him had been hacked. Smith is not his real name, and he won’t tell us his client’s name — even off the record. “It would […]

Many small companies don’t spend a lot of time agonizing over decisions about buying PCs anymore. As important as computers are, most SMB owners view them as a commodity items and buying them’s pretty much a no-brainer. It’s easy enough to go over to a Circuit City or Best Buy and pick up a PC […]

In this day and age of PDAs, mini-notebooks and pocket PCs, it might seem strange that a digital pen could find a home in the business world. When they first appeared a few years ago, they seemed nothing more than a misguided attempt to marry industrial and information age technologies. What was the point? If […]

It is sometimes hard to remember that Google, the most dominant and popular Web search engine, burst into online consciousness only six years ago. In that short time, the company’s name has practically become part of our everyday language. When I was young and asked my father a tough question or one that required too […]

Can you sell a client without ever sitting across the table from him, using nothing more than a high-speed Internet connection and Web conferencing tools? Probably not, but as Desire2Learn Inc., a small software company based in Kitchener, Canada, has discovered, you can pre-qualify customers and start the selling process in a Web conference. Desire2Learn […]

It’s not possible to over emphasize the importance of regularly backing up data, especially for SMBs that don’t have their own information technology personnel. Lost data equals lost business — or in extreme cases, the loss of the entire business. If you own or manage a small firm, you need a simple, reliable and — […]