Small Business Computing Staff

Small Business Trends: 65 Essential Small Business Mobile Apps A cornucuopia of small business mobile apps including many familiar products such as Salesforce.com and Skype, but many you may not have heard of, such as iSwipe, a free mobile credit card processing app, and Right Signature, an app that lets you sign contracts, proposals and […]

Wired: Roundup – Mobile Presentation Projectors Wired magazine reviews four pico projectors from four different manufacturers, priced from $400 to $450. They’re ideal for using with mobile devices to display digital slide presentations. Plug your smartphone into a portable pico projector and use any wall for movies, presentations, or life-sized Angry Birds. When these pocket-sized […]

PCmag@Work (Small Business): Analysis: Avoiding The Pitfalls Of Online Couponing Jill Duffy says you need to consider all the costs involved in offering a deal through an online coupon service, and whether participation fits in your business plan. “I’ve seen plenty of horror stories from blog posts to articles by other publications about small businesses […]

Small Business Trends: How To Make Your Online Content Go Viral Lisa Barone offers five suggestions for making viral Web content, including mastering the call to action, appealing to the merely bored as well as to your community and posting at the right time of day and week. “Thanks to social media, small business owners […]

Entrepreneur: Achieving Optimal Website Design Internet marketing expert Mikal E. Belicove comments on Oneupweb’s “Zen Triangle of Design,” a model for measuring and evaluating how effectively a website design balances text, graphics and white space. “For centuries, artists and writers have struggled to marry form and function. Click around online for a while and it […]

PCWorld: Review – HP Omni 200 Quad All-in-One PC The $960 HP Omni 200 Quad comes with a 21.5-inch (1920×1080 pixels) screen and 2.8 GHz i5 processor. It broke performance records for an all-in-one PC, but reviewer David Murphy wishes it had a touchscreen and better speakers. “If you’re interested in speed–and speed alone–the 21.5-inch […]

Small Business Trends: Why You Should Add Video To Your SMB Blog Lisa Barone says adding video to your small business blog makes sense because it’s a different way to express yourself, creates a more personal community, it’s another way to respond to customer issues, creates another searchable piece of content, and it gets you […]

PCWorld: Organize Your Outlook Emails With Single Click Liane Cassavoy says Single Click Filing for Outlook does one thing – filing Outlook emails in folders – well, but doesn’t add any other functions, including some it might. “I know that sorting my Outlook e-mail into folders will keep my inbox neat and tidy. But I […]

PCWorld: Roundup – 7 Ultraportable Laptops PC World magazine’s roundup of ultraportable laptops includes machines that weigh under 4 lbs. It includes four models from Lenovo and one each from Sony, Samsung and Apple. “You have to take only a couple of business trips or vacations with a 6-pound laptop in tow before you start […]

ITBusinessEdge: Beware Criminals On Phishing Trips Spear phishing exploits, where hackers target specific individuals or departments in a company with emails designed to get them to reveal sensitive information, are on the increase, recent research shows. “I wrote about the social engineering factor in security breaches a couple of weeks ago, highlighting how social engineering […]

Open Forum: Why You Need A Social Media Home Base Relying solely on social media sites for marketing may seem like a logical route, but it doesn’t work, says marketing consultant Lena West. You still need a website to send customers to after you engage them with social media. “I recently received an e-mail from […]

ITBusinessEdge: Amazon Outage Demonstrates Need For Cloud Contingency The Amazon outage over the weekend was localized and only affected some users, but those affected were irate. Paul Mah says SMBs must build contingencies, but that isolated outages are no reason to lose faith in cloud computing. “Technical glitches plagued the popular Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute […]