Small Business Computing Staff

Engadget: Review – Samsung QX410 Laptop The QX410 competes nicely with the Dell XPS 14 and highly-touted HP Envy 14, this reviewer says. It doesn’t equal its more expensive competitors up in every department, but the price makes it a contender in the premium laptop race. “Just $799? Wait, really? Indeed, it’s quite hard to […]

PCWorld: NEO Pro: A Better Way To Manage Outlook E-mail? NEO Pro makes it easier to organize and find e-mail and offers a coversation view for viewing all the messages in a thread that is better than the native Outlook feature. Is it worth $50? Try it free for 60 days and find out. “E-mail […]

Entrepreneur: CRM For Small Business With Capsule Capsule is user-friendly, relatively affordable at $12 a month per user and offers a combination of task-management systems, sales-pipeline technology and calendar tools. “The economic downturn has prompted many business owners to look for more efficient ways to stay connected to customers. While most customer-relationship management (CRM) software […]

PCWorld: Symform: A Crazy Online Backup Scheme That Works Symform’s service architecture isn’t as crazy as it sounds. The company gets around the obvious concerns about security and availability by breaking data up into chunks, encrypting it and saving it at multiple locations. “I can think of a lot of words to describe small-business data […]

Smallbusinesstechnology.com: Data/Internet Security The Wrong Place To Economize A survey of small businesses by PC maker Lenovo found that an alarming 40% of respondents backed up data to thumb drives and 23% admitted to using free Wi-Fi access to conduct business. It’s a recipe for disaster, this post warns. “As small business owners we try […]

ITBusinessEdge: 2011: The Year Of Virtualization For SMBs? New software and NAS (network attached storage) products will make 2011 a turning point for SMB virtualization, according to one industry spokesperson quoted here. Mah predicts a second wave of implementations from SMBs that gave virtualization a pass the first time around. “Next year – 2011 – […]

Small Business Trends: Is This You? 1 In 7 Small Businesses Have No Internet Security Internet security is crucial, the author of this post stresses. It requires planning and partnering with the right people and using the right products. (The post includes links to the study and to educational resources at the AVG website.) “There […]

PCWorld: Use AlwaysVPN To Stay Data Safe At Wi-Fi Hotpsots The Firesheep Firefox browser plugin that lets even unskilled hackers steal your identity when you’re surfing the net at hotspots is just one reason why your employees need to use a VPN when connecting to public Wi-Fi services. AnyDVD, an on-demand service, is one good […]

Entrepreneur: Creating Content And Making It Go Viral Writing by-lined articles about your small business and its industry is one way to build your credibility as an expert, but how do you get people to read the content you create? “Ever heard of article marketing? It’s a type of content marketing in which businesses write […]

Engadget: Free Calling On iPhones With Viber VoIP App Engadget is touting this upstart free VoIP provider as a challenger to Skype and other VoIP providers that cost more to use over 3G networks. Free text messaging is part of the deal. “You know those voice minutes you’ve been coaxed into buying for, like, ever? […]

PCWorld: Win7 Laptops Outperform MacBook Air If your road warrior employees are agitating for a switch to Apple’s sleek and sexy MacBook Air ultraportables, consider this analysis showing that similarly-priced Windows 7 laptops outperform the Apple computers by most but not all measures. “Recently, after testing two MacBook Air models running Windows 7, we published […]

Smallbiztechnology.com: Google Cloud Connect – Use Word To Edit Google Docs Smallbiztechnology.com makes the case for using Google’s new Google Connect plugin for Microsoft Office that lets you to access and edit Google Docs documents from Word. “Most of us have grown up using Microsoft Office. It is the leading application for creating business documents. […]