Small Business Computing Staff

Social Media Today: Five Social Media Marketing Mistakes, And How To Avoid Them There is a steep learning curve involved in figuring out how to use social media for marketing. Common mistakes include impatience for instant results, picking the wrong agency and going in without a plan. “Companies are quickly ramping up to integrate social […]

PCWorld: Review – Lenovo ThinkPad W701ds Power Laptop It’s huge (almost 9 lbs.) and expensive (starting at over $3,000) but this goliath among laptops gets the job done with its top-of-line features, including 2GHz Core i7 processor) and 17-inch, 1920-by-1200-pixel, main screen. It also has a pop-out second screen. “If Paul Bunyan were a geotechnical […]

PCWorld: McAfee Virus Update SNAFU: What Happened The full story isn’t in yet, but PCWorld says there is no question that McAfee simply screwed up. An virus scanner update item that was supposed to block a minor threat wrongly identified a Windows operating system file as being infected. “Yesterday was a tough day for corporate […]

Small Business Trends: Building A Quality E-Mail Marketing List The CEO of one of the largest e-mail marketing service providers, Constant Contact, shares tips on how to build up a list of contacts who might actually want to receive your messages. Tip one: you have to ask. “More and more people are getting the information […]

Smallbiztechnology.com: Mobile Payment Services Are Coming – Are You Ready? Smallbiztechnology focuses on Xipwire, a start-up that will make it possible for customers to pay by sending the merchant a text, but also links to other mobile payment services. “Right now your customers are quite happy using their debit cards for $2 bagels. However, as […]

Small Business Trends: E-commerce Growth Accelerating – Grab Your Piece Of The Pie eMarketer has revised its forecast for e-commerce growth upward after two years of subpar growth. Read the original marketing report. “eMarketer is forecasting U.S. ecommerce will grow rapidly over the next five years reaching $224 billion in 2014. The chart below is […]

PCWorld: Users Irate Oer McAfee Virus Update Screw-up The virus definition update resulted in a vital operating system file on XP computers being mistakenly quarantined as virus-infected. Solution: don’t download the update and if you already have, install the recovery patch from McAfee. “A flawed McAfee antivirus update sent enterprise administrators scrambling today as the […]

PCWorld: Need An Extra Brain? Try The PersonalBrain Mindmapper App PersonalBrain is not only intuitive, it looks nerdily cool as well and the animations in the interface help reinforce connections between ideas. “PersonalBrain (available in a Free Edition, as well as paid editions) is quite possibly most intuitive mind mapping utility on the planet. Beyond […]

AllBusiness: Weighing Options – Onsite vs. Hosted Office Phone System Ramon Ray argues that for many small firms, hosted phone systems make more sense, but it may not be an either-or decision – they may need to use and integrate both kinds of phone systems. “Every business needs a phone system. Some very small businesses […]

The New York Times: Livescribe Pulse Smartpen Gets Its Own App Store A New York Times reporter, who regularly uses the Pulse smartpen for note taking, tried out a few of the new apps – some free, some for fee, some from Livescribe, some from third parties – and wasn’t terribly impressed. “I’ve always liked […]

PCWorld: First Look Review – New 13-inch Apple MacBook Pros Performance improvements on the 13-inch MacBook Pros are not as dramatic as with the larger format models released at the same time – a scant 10% increase on processor speed tests. “When Apple announced its latest MacBook Pro laptops, not every model received the same […]

PCWorld: Leaked Info On Dell Tablet – An iPad Killer On The Way? Engadget, an online tech zine, claims to have received leaked documents showing marketing collateral for five-inch- and seven-inch-screen tablets from Dell running the Android operating system. “Forget about boring old next-generation iPhone leaks , more rumors are afoot about Dell’s aggressive moves […]