Small Business Computing Staff

ITBusinessEdge: Some Secure USB Flash Drives Not So Secure Entrusting your small business’s vital data to an encrypted USB flash drive might not be such a great idea – unless you pick one like IronKey that avoids the mistakes made with hackable (and now recalled) SanDisk and Cruzer products. “In the past year, many vendors […]

ZDNet: Sony Pushes Laptop As Fashion Accessory ZDNet laptopist Sean Portnoy riffs on Sony’s new Signature line of Vaio laptops. Would you pay extra for a prettier-looking laptop? If you lease a BMW to impress the clients, maybe one of these babies makes sense. “Remember when all laptop cases were a slab of plastic or, […]

InformationWeek SMB: Google Voice – Open For Business Google Voice offers users a telephone number that will ring at three different regular telephone numbers. Calling is free in the U.S. and Canada, at discounted rates overseas. “Google on Tuesday said that Google Voice, its online voicemail and telecommunications service, is now open to everyone. Launched […]

PCWorld: Preview – New External Hard Drives From Iomega The new products also include 1TB and 2TB versions of existing models and new compatibility with the Apple Mac. “Iomega has announced a new line of 500GB, USB 2.0 portable drives featuring one of three colorful and edgy designs from Skin Industries. The new Iomega Skin […]

Engadget: Preview – Acer Aspire X3, M3 Desktop PCs Compact tower PCs with choice of AMD or Intel processors (Athlon II, Phenom II, Core i3 or Pentium E6600), ATI HD 5450, NVIDIA GeForce 9200 or integrated Intel graphics and up to 1TB of storage. (Link to press release.) “Sure, you can get an eye-catching all-in-one […]

InformationWeek SMB: Salesforce.com Goes Social With Chatter Collaboration Tool Chatter, which works inside SF.com, uses Facebook- and Twitter-like features such as profiles, status updates and real-time feeds to help employees collaborate on documents, business processes, projects and application data. “Salesforce.com Tuesday unveiled Chatter — nicknamed the “Facebook for business” — a communication and collaboration tool […]

PCWorld: Review – HP Z200 Workstation SFF Desktop PC With a 3.33GHz Intel Core i5-660 processor and 8GB of DDR3 memory, this compact $2,000 desktop offers all the power most users will ever need, but value for price isn’t what it could be, the reviewer says. “HP’s Z200 Workstation SFF desktop is a compact system […]

InformationWeek SMB: How To Manage Your Mobile Devices A primer on mobile device management for SMBs. Recommended steps include: inventory employees’ devices, determine security needs, match security features to needs, etc. “Employees have been falling in love with devices, such as Apple’s iPhone. Increasingly, they are using them to generate and store corporate information whether […]

Smallbiztechnology.com: Social Media Tools For SMB E-commerce The suggestions here range from the fairly obvious – how to use Facebook, how to use a blog – to the not-quite-so-obvious, such as YouTube video integration and Social bookmarking. 3DCart makes software to help online retailers sell online. They have a lot of experience with social media […]

InformationWeek: Security A Growing Concern For SMBs A surprising number of SMBs surveyed report they have been victimized by attacks and have suffered direct losses as a result, and more companies say they are concerned and taking steps to protect themselves. “Small and midsize businesses are waking up to the threat of online attacks and […]

InformationWeek SMB: New iPhone Operating System – Good & Bad Better camera functions, the introduction of folders (for storing documents or apps) and multitasking, among other improvements, are partly offset by shortcomings such as the failure to improve iPod functions or add support for e-mail attachments. “The latest version of the iPhone operating system became […]

PC Magazine: The Cloud Reconsidered – Intuit Outage Aftermath PC mag’s Samara Lynn wonders if the Intuit outage, notwithstanding its president’s apologies, means the cloud is an iffier proposition than experts had maintained. The consensus: no, it’s still a good bet. But just in case, here’s how to protect yourself against the worst. “Intuit’s service […]