Gerry Blackwell

It’s a story as old as evolution: the hunter becomes a farmer. Many marketers are making that transition now as they begin to understand that with the Web, farming is way more effective than hunting.  At the same time, Huelsenbeck started targeting bean counters rather than IT types. “[The software] shows companies how to save […]

Simulscribe, one of a few speech-to-text transcription services designed primarily to let mobile phone owners receive their voice mails as text in e-mails, could be a godsend for some people. Others will scratch their heads and wonder why they would ever want to pay this much for the dubious benefit of being able to read […]

Vidéotron, the leading cable TV provider in Canada’s French-speaking province of Québec, recently introduced Softphone, a unique SIP-based softphone service that promises full POTS functionality and voice and connection quality—plus video calling. The service, launched in October, costs existing Vidéotron customers just $20 for unlimited local calling, a handful of popular call-management features—call display, voicemail […]

Mac OS X version 10.5 or Leopard, the latest upgrade to Apple’s Macintosh operating system, created quite a stir when it was released in October. Pictures of excited Mac-heads lining up at mall outlets to buy the new release (for $130) appeared in newspapers and on TV. For a platform that traditionally has accounted for […]

Mobile PCs aren’t like the three bears’ chairs, beds and porridge anymore. You can always find one that’s just right for you, especially now with the emergence of a new category of ultra-mobile PCs, also known by the acronym (because we just don’t have enough acronyms), UMPCs. Fujitsu’s LifeBook U810 (priced around $1,000), a convertible […]

The notion of the wireless office is starting to take hold, with many small businesses replacing wired Ethernet LANs high-speed with Wi-Fi networks. Products like the Lexmark X6570, a Wi-Fi-enabled All-In-One (AIO) printer, make the wireless office a very compelling proposition. The 6570 does just about everything except manufacture and sell your products for you. […]

Comenity, a Seattle-area custom audio-video installer, may or may not have built the money-is-no-object home theater in Microsoft chairman Bill Gates’ gazillion-dollar mansion. Comenity president Mark McCracken isn’t telling. “We’re not supposed to talk about that stuff,” McCracken said coyly. But how else do you explain that Comenity now uses Microsoft’s Response Point IP (Internet […]

How much storage capacity will be enough for your small business or office down the road? The beauty of a network attached storage (NAS) product like the NSA-2400 from ZyXEL Communications Corp. is that you don’t need to answer that question now. You can start small when your business is small and grow your storage […]

The temptation to goof off or fudge time sheets and gas mileage is apparently irresistible, at least to some field workers. And even the best employees often end up estimating their hours long after the fact, introducing costly errors.  At R&J Construction Inc., a renovation firm in Danville, Calif., keeping track of where workers were […]

Imagine trying to drive a car without dashboard displays. You’d never know how fast you were going, when you were running out of gas or if the car was overheating. You’d never chance it with a vehicle, so why take a similar risk with your business? Dashboards for customer relationship management (CRM) programs and other […]

A picture, they say, is worth a thousand words. Michael Turner, CEO of Marketing Max, a nine-month-old marketing outsourcing firm based in Jacksonville, Florida, is a great believer in that, especially when it comes to communicating with his clients. Turner knew the minute he saw SmartDraw, the template-based business graphics program from SmartDraw.com, that it […]