Tag Archives: Andrea Peiro

About 1908 days ago PCs, Laptops, and Notebooks

Not All PCs Are Created Equal — Part II

In the first part of my column, I reviewed how PCs designed for business purposes are different from consumer-oriented products in terms of reliability, via use of multiple hard disk drives, and security, thanks to hardware level protections. Beyond great reliability and ironclad security, however, businesses should also expect from their new PCs guaranteed levels of computing power and manageability. I explore these issues in greater detail in this second part of my column. In addition, I have some advice for the mobile business person: business-grade laptops are geared toward ensuring security and preventing the exposure of sensitive data — much more so than consumer-grade laptops. Sustainable computing power While most people associate the need for computing power with high-end gaming and multimedia applications, the current generation of computer operating systems offers productivity-increasing and security features that, while useful, run in the background and can be very taxing on the computing power of your PCs. An example is the indexing service in Windows Vista that allows users to quickly search with one query across all types of files on the computer regardless of the format or location — such as in e-mail attachments or PDF files. This service runs at all times, continuously reading all new files and the changes to old files, intensely using your computer CPU and memory. Other examples are anti-spam and anti-virus software that run in the background scanning your files before you open them. Even those neat rules that you establish in your e-mail client to automatically organize your mail as it arrives can take a toll on what is the total computing power of your PC. Today’s business computers need to be able to fully and easily run the most recent operating systems and software taking advantage of their features without becoming a drag on your work time. Multi-core processors, paired with enough RAM — 4 gigabytes is a good amount both for Macs and Windows machines — provide the type of performance business computers need, allowing for true multi-tasking. Cost-effective manageability One of the parameters that is often underestimated when purchasing new computing hardware is “manageability.” This is mostly due to the fact that it is an element that is difficult to understand and to quantify the value of. Nonetheless, it is very important. How easy is it to make sure that all PCs in your company carry the most up to date anti-virus? How easy is it to fix a problem one of your remote employees may incur in? Business grade PCs today can offer technology that allows for remote, unified management at hardware level. This means that computers can be securely accessed by your technicians through the network or the Internet and diagnosed, maintained, and updated — even if the computer is off or it has crashed and does not boot. If you decide to outsource your IT function, a growing number of IT support companies provide standardized remote management for a fraction of the cost of traditional on-site care. Your choice of business PCs should definitely account for the need to keep the cost of maintenance as low as possible. With the price point of good PCs well below $1,000, a few hours of a computer technician for an on-site call can easily make the total cost of ownership skyrocket. Think about it when you are deciding to spend a bit more for an easier to manage option. Efficient mobility For the mobile professionals, business laptops often incorporate innovative features, beyond RAID, hardware security, or extra power.  Common now in laptops designed for business use are fingerprint readers for ultra-secure login, hardware-level data encryption for total privacy, last generation WiFi (802.11n) or WiMAX  for extra-long range, and ultra-broad bandwidth Internet access on the go. Low-power consumption processors — such as Intel Centrino powered PCs — are more common in business laptops, as arehigh brightness screens, extended life batteries, and larger hard disk drives. These features add up to devices that respond much better than consumer options to the needs of a mobile professional. The bottom line is that you want your PC to work when you need it and how you need it. When choosing your next computer, consider that the true cost of technology is rarely in the upfront investment, but most often in addressing the consequences of bad choices. With that mantra in mind remember that your new PCs intended for business use should be secure at a hardware level, as reliable as possible, easy to manage, and powerful. Andrea Peiro is a recognized authority, author, analyst and speaker on high-tech marketing and use of information technology in small and mid-sized businesses. He has been frequently interviewed and featured in such media outlets as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Inc. He can be reached at us.andreap@gmail.com.

About 1999 days ago Setting Up a Website

2008: What a Mashup!

This is the time of year when all sorts of predictions appear on old media, new media and not so new media alike: from what’s going to happen in the Presidential elections to what energy sources will replace oil and how much closer mankind will actually be to getting to Mars. Not to disappoint all my wonderful readers, here are the technologies that will be hot for small businesses in 2008. Writing about the future of technology is actually a cozy tradition for me, and this year it is my privilege to do it on IncTechnology.com. 1. Web 2.0 collaborative applications Small businesses need better, low cost and easy to manage tools to work collaborate within the company and to pool together resources across multiple businesses to better tackle large jobs. In 2008 you will see a proliferation of online tools that will make things a lot easier. Web 2.0 based applications are software tools accessible via any internet browser and are natively well suited for collaborations. A new crop of developers is taking full advantage of this capability to create great things, sometimes even offered for free! Office productivity suites that allow multiple users to work together, share information and collaborate in real time such as ThinkFree and Zoho. Project management tools such as Basecamp Messaging, communications and collaboration environments such as Zimbra and HyperOffice Don’t you think for a minute that the big guns like Microsoft and Yahoo, that have steeply increased their attention for the needs of small businesses in the past few year (see Yahoo! acquisition of Zimbra and Microsoft’s upcoming Office Live Workspaces) will just sit there and watch.  So expect a lot of competition for your attention and lots of low cost ways to leverage the web to collaborate. 2. Cached Web applications Ok, so what happens to all these wonderful Web tools if you cannot connect to the Web? Expect many of these applications to launch an offline “companion,” software that runs on your computer and replicates the online functionality. Wait a minute, what’s happening here? Software goes online and online applications go offline? Yes, that’s right. Traditional software is here to stay, but the new demands of the market are imposing more and more to make software available concurrently as a service and as a locally stored application, frequently with automatic synchronization of data files between the online and local storages. In a sense, Microsoft pioneered the concept at a Local Area Network and VPN levels with MS Small Business Server and Web Outlook . Now the concept is going mainstream and “on the Web cloud.” Expect tons of Web applications to come with offline companions or to work in “cached mode” without requiring Web connection; and expect more and more desktop software to become available as a complementary service, part of the software licensing fee. 3. Mashups Mashups are Web applications that derive data from different sources into one integrated tool. A popular example of a mashup, cited by Wikipedia, would be to combine the cartographic data from Google Maps with real-estate listing from Craigslist to get a new Web service that provides location information to those listings. Consumer mashups are becoming quickly popular, like iGoogle, mapmyrun.com or housingmaps.com. Expect the development of business applications that leverage this concept and bring you the best of all worlds. Currently the most common type of business mashup is the dashboard. There are tools like Serena that allow building mashup-based applications on the fly. Yahoo! has Pipes and Microsoft and Google are in beta testing with Popfly and Mashup Editor, respectively. Expect in 2008 many pre-developed mashup services bringing together your most commonly used business Web services. 4. 3g network connectivity Wireless operators are in full swing with the deployment of their 3G networks, offering data and voice connectivity almost anywhere at the sped of entry-level DSL. 3G data cards are almost free with contracts, all-you-can-use plans are as cheap as $30 per month and reliability has gone up to very acceptable levels. Watch for more and more laptops to come outfitted with wireless WAN cards. The technology is ready, the price point is affordable and the convenience is unparalleled for mobile workers. 5. Online data backup Internet connections are becoming faster everywhere and backup software is becoming smarter and cheaper. A new set of inexpensive online backup solutions that really work is emerging targeting small businesses. Some even have unlimited storage for a fixed fee. Online backup maybe a bit more cumbersome to setup and manage, but ensures a very high level of data protection. Check out some of these: Live.Skydrive.com, Xdrive, Carbonite, MediaMax, eVault, and Box.net. Surely one of them will meet your online backup needs. 6. Biometrically protected notebook computers Fingerprint readers and data encryption software will become very popular in 2008, as the technologies are mature and the costs have gone down. Look for tiny fingerprint readers on laptops and keyboards that unlock the computer instead of passwords. Also look for full hard disk encryption to become much more popular to safeguard the privacy of your data: Microsoft has made available BitLocker on Windows Vista Business and Premium versions. A good, easy to manage alternative is PGP. And what after that. Other technologies that in the next few years will land on the lap of American small business include: 4G mobile telephony Fully IP switched data/voice wireless networks that will deliver ultrafast connections to any mobile device. That is how small businesses will go online in a few years. Keep your eyes on Google. In-text advertising The new frontier of contextual advertising is in-text. Vibrant Media is the leader in the space, but look for more to start playing. RFID It is taking time for this new and initially costly technology to take foot, but the pressure of large supply chains, such as Wal-Mart Stores is forcing the adoption. Watch for RFID tags to appear on all sorts of retail goods. We’ll see at this time next year if I’m right! Andrea Peiro is a recognized authority, author, analyst and speaker on high-tech marketing and use of information technology in small and mid-sized businesses. He has been frequently interviewed and featured in such media outlets as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Inc. He can be reached at us.andreap@gmail.com..

About 2029 days ago Setting Up a Website

Web Development Done Right

In the many years I have followed American entrepreneurs, I have observed countless small business owners taking upon themselves the task of developing the company’s website. While some have successfully accomplished their objective by producing a usable online presence, the large majority ended up either abandoning the idea or seeking professional help. All of them, though, had to confront sleepless nights, intense frustration, and an incredible investment of time. Small business owners often consider their time a no-cost element, of which they can freely dispose. On the contrary, in most cases it is the most valuable asset: nobody can replace the expertise in the mind of founders, owners. That is why they should focus on what makes the business truly move forward and outsource or delegate every time-consuming, non-revenue generating task. If you think about it, it takes only about one hour to learn how to change the oil in a car, and the average person will have to take care of it well over 50 times in a lifetime. So why do most people opt out of learning how to change oil it and doing it themselves? Because it is cheap, more convenient, faster, and safer to have a professional do it. In the same respect, why would a small business owner want to invest more than 400 hours to learn how to develop a basic website once, may be twice in a lifetime, and never reach the results that a professional, budget conscious, outsourced approach would yield? Well, there really is no intelligent answer to that. Seeking professional help to develop your business site today is definitely the right way to go. Web development skills are readily available and a lot cheaper then they used to be. Quality design, programming, e-commerce setup can make or break your online image and operation. Save your time to guide a professional to achieve your online objectives rather than learning skills that have nothing to do with your core business competency. Finding the right candidates The design of your website should be a direct a result of your business goals. If you have not yet done so, now might be the time to write them out in a Request for Proposal (RFP). This is a document used to solicit formal proposals, in which you state in clear language what you intend to achieve through your site, your technical requirements, ideas, aesthetic preferences, timeline, and possibly your budget. This document will allow you to present your needs and goals equally to all candidates and obtain comparable responses. You can forward the document to a number of firms, developers, or even post it online on sites such as Craigslist.com and request a formal response. The style, depth, and quality of the responses will be very telling, and will allow you to perform a first screening of your candidates. With or without an RFP, before you confer with your prospect website designer, you should do a little homework: Determine the type of website you wish to build. Imagine the look and feel you wish to present to your target audience. Find existing examples of websites that you would like to emulate and note their URL address. Design a preliminary site map that shows your designer how you wish your site to work. Gather samples of the content you wish to post, including major text sections and pictures. This approach will enable you to get a more accurate estimate of the designer’s contract cost and will allow you to better test its skills as they relate to your needs. Selecting the right developer Since basic HTML, the main language used to develop websites, and basic graphic design are not too difficult to learn, many people have picked up the skills and call themselves developers. Like a dentist right out of dental school, they may have the rudimentary knowledge of what needs to be done, but you would probably prefer to have a seasoned professional working on your teeth. Often times to save money, people will solicit a less experienced developer and later find themselves needing to have their site redone within a short time. Additionally, sites created by inexperienced developers may not be scalable for the future needs of your company and hard to maintain. In general, when looking for website developers, make sure that they meet the following criteria: Have at least two years professional experience Have a portfolio of currently active sites available for review Have at least three references (and do check them!) Provide a development schedule and keep to it Respond to the clients needs Provide consistent, professional service Meet or exceed expectations Provide solutions at the agreed upon price Are geographically located in the same region Are willing to work for a fixed price instead of an hourly rate Are willing to sign a contract To increase the reliability of your project, I also advise working with small firms rather than individuals. Design firms with at least three employees are more likely to deliver on what they commit to and are more interested in cultivating a happy clientele. While there are some talented and professional individual developers out there, generally it is more likely to stumble upon people in between jobs or with limited level of professionalism. No matter how large or small the firm, always interview at least three good candidates, after sifting thru at least five or six options. Remember, it is your company site, and nobody knows a business better that its owner. Focus on contributing to the development at a business level and ensure that the final product will truly contribute to the prosperity of your venture. Andrea Peiro is president and CEO of the Small Business Technology Institute, a non-profit organization created to foster the adoption of information technologies among small businesses.

About 2060 days ago Online Marketing

How E-mail Marketing Works

our beautiful site

Less than 15 years ago, if you wished to directly alert your customers to a sale, you would have to design and print a flyer, organize the mailing, and pay for postal rates. Depending on the location of your customers, your message might have taken over a week to reach its destination. Your message could only show a few sentences, pictures, and a logo to motivate your recipient to respond. All this would take considerable time in planning and a sizable monetary investment. Today, with e-mail, at about 10 percent the cost of printed bulk mail distribution, you can reach the same prospective customers and more, quickly and precisely. You can trigger immediate responses, and obtain a surprisingly accurate feedback on your marketing investment. E-mail marketing is a form direct response marketing – advertising that solicits recipients to take immediate action. Despite the ease and cost-effectiveness that make it a great tool for budget-conscious small businesses, which desire to add new customers, it has been the large businesses that have most successfully mastered the art, generating billions of dollars in sales with very little overhead. The secret of most large companies success in their email efforts consists in making it part of a comprehensive endeavor, spanning multiple media and advertising methodologies. Small and mid-size businesses, while not always in a position to extend their brand over costly TV and radio ads, can find creative ways to combine emails with other forms of advertising to greatly increase the response. Integrating e-mail into advertising strategy While the advent of computerized communication has revolutionized the way small businesses can reach their customer base, it has not changed the underlying structure of your complete advertising strategy. Your approach might include newspapers, radio, some television ads, billboard signs, posters, and even store window art and packaging. In order for you to maximize the success of your e-mail campaigns, you need to consider how it will collaborate with, and augment these other efforts as a part of your complete strategy. How will you present e-mail that will reinforce the message from your billboard sign or follow up on your sales call? How can your e-mail campaign leverage your customer’s word-of-mouth activity to generate interest in your upcoming promotion? A good example of simple synergy between two marketing efforts within the reach of most small businesses is the combination of e-mail with traditional direct response postal mail marketing. Each mode can be organized to compliment the other: a postcard announcing a sale can persist on the recipient’s desktop for days, while e-mail provides direct access to purchasing your products and acts as immediate reminder. One way to structure dual mode mailing is to execute the mailing modes in sequence, by first sending your postal mail message to inform and “soften up” your target audience, then following up with emails to monetize the results. In addition to providing potential customers with more time to react to your message, this methodology presents a number of advantages: multiple ways to respond; lower over-all costs than separate efforts; greater ability to personalize your message; the ability to track more accurately the results of your campaign, and greater exposure to your brand. E-mail and the power of branding Multiple reinforcements of your message and identity through different channels, such as e-mail and postal mail, in fact not only tend to increase the overall return of your campaign, but are also very effective in developing “brand.” Branding is the subtle edge that gives fine businesses the advantage.  In a world increasingly driven by information, people know better than ever what they really want. For the most part they will have plenty of choices with similar prices and the primary differentiator will be your brand. In the world of small businesses brand matters just as it does for large corporations. E-mail marketing paired with offline strategies is probably the least expensive way to reinforce it and help you move it towards the “top of the mind” of your prospective customers. A few rules about email marketing Be it a part of your advertising strategy or just a one-time promotion, there are a few simple, yet important rules that will help you make the most out of your e-mail marketing efforts. Don’t spam. Use only permission based lists: opt-in, double opt-in. When possible always tray to create your own mailing list: it will always yield the best results. Be personal. Customize your message for different recipients; make them know you understand them. Create value. Give your customers something in return, such as information, which will help in their business. Use “viral marketing” techniques. Create opportunities and incentives for enthusiastic recipients to forward the information to other people. Test and measure. E-mail marketing allows for detailed measurement of results. Test different creative ideas, different text content, different promotions, and compare and go with what works best Andrea Peiro is president and CEO of the Small Business Technology Institute, a non-profit organization created to foster the adoption of information technologies among small businesses.

About 2060 days ago Online Marketing

How E-mail Marketing Works

our beautiful site

Less than 15 years ago, if you wished to directly alert your customers to a sale, you would have to design and print a flyer, organize the mailing, and pay for postal rates. Depending on the location of your customers, your message might have taken over a week to reach its destination. Your message could only show a few sentences, pictures, and a logo to motivate your recipient to respond. All this would take considerable time in planning and a sizable monetary investment. Today, with e-mail, at about 10 percent the cost of printed bulk mail distribution, you can reach the same prospective customers and more, quickly and precisely. You can trigger immediate responses, and obtain a surprisingly accurate feedback on your marketing investment. E-mail marketing is a form direct response marketing – advertising that solicits recipients to take immediate action. Despite the ease and cost-effectiveness that make it a great tool for budget-conscious small businesses, which desire to add new customers, it has been the large businesses that have most successfully mastered the art, generating billions of dollars in sales with very little overhead. The secret of most large companies success in their email efforts consists in making it part of a comprehensive endeavor, spanning multiple media and advertising methodologies. Small and mid-size businesses, while not always in a position to extend their brand over costly TV and radio ads, can find creative ways to combine emails with other forms of advertising to greatly increase the response. Integrating e-mail into advertising strategy While the advent of computerized communication has revolutionized the way small businesses can reach their customer base, it has not changed the underlying structure of your complete advertising strategy. Your approach might include newspapers, radio, some television ads, billboard signs, posters, and even store window art and packaging. In order for you to maximize the success of your e-mail campaigns, you need to consider how it will collaborate with, and augment these other efforts as a part of your complete strategy. How will you present e-mail that will reinforce the message from your billboard sign or follow up on your sales call? How can your e-mail campaign leverage your customer’s word-of-mouth activity to generate interest in your upcoming promotion? A good example of simple synergy between two marketing efforts within the reach of most small businesses is the combination of e-mail with traditional direct response postal mail marketing. Each mode can be organized to compliment the other: a postcard announcing a sale can persist on the recipient’s desktop for days, while e-mail provides direct access to purchasing your products and acts as immediate reminder. One way to structure dual mode mailing is to execute the mailing modes in sequence, by first sending your postal mail message to inform and “soften up” your target audience, then following up with emails to monetize the results. In addition to providing potential customers with more time to react to your message, this methodology presents a number of advantages: multiple ways to respond; lower over-all costs than separate efforts; greater ability to personalize your message; the ability to track more accurately the results of your campaign, and greater exposure to your brand. E-mail and the power of branding Multiple reinforcements of your message and identity through different channels, such as e-mail and postal mail, in fact not only tend to increase the overall return of your campaign, but are also very effective in developing “brand.” Branding is the subtle edge that gives fine businesses the advantage.  In a world increasingly driven by information, people know better than ever what they really want. For the most part they will have plenty of choices with similar prices and the primary differentiator will be your brand. In the world of small businesses brand matters just as it does for large corporations. E-mail marketing paired with offline strategies is probably the least expensive way to reinforce it and help you move it towards the “top of the mind” of your prospective customers. A few rules about email marketing Be it a part of your advertising strategy or just a one-time promotion, there are a few simple, yet important rules that will help you make the most out of your e-mail marketing efforts. Don’t spam. Use only permission based lists: opt-in, double opt-in. When possible always tray to create your own mailing list: it will always yield the best results. Be personal. Customize your message for different recipients; make them know you understand them. Create value. Give your customers something in return, such as information, which will help in their business. Use “viral marketing” techniques. Create opportunities and incentives for enthusiastic recipients to forward the information to other people. Test and measure. E-mail marketing allows for detailed measurement of results. Test different creative ideas, different text content, different promotions, and compare and go with what works best Andrea Peiro is president and CEO of the Small Business Technology Institute, a non-profit organization created to foster the adoption of information technologies among small businesses.

About 2090 days ago E-Commerce

It’s Not Too Late to Try eCommerce

For the first time since I started tracking how small businesses leverage the Internet five years ago, I have noticed that a growing number small American retailers are starting to pass on the idea of creating their own ecommerce outlets, believing that the prime time to establish an online brand has passed and the window of opportunity is now closed. Well, the truth of the matter is that the age of ecommerce is still at its very dawn and the expansion of the online retail market in the future is poised to be faster than anything we have seen before. Let’s examine a few factors to understand why. 1. Less than 20 percent of the world’s population is online. While it may seem to us that the Internet has become such part of our lives — some of us do not even remember how we used to find movie listings, the weather forecast, or our checking account balance before DSL worked its way into our homes and businesses — most of the world’s population is still not connected. According to Internet World Stats, in fact only 17.8 percent of the global adult population makes use of the Internet. Comparatively, in North America, the penetration of the Internet is about 69.5 percent of adults. 3. eCommerce is still representing only about 3 percent of retail volume. According to data from the Census Bureau of the U.S. Department of Commerce, only 3.1 percent of the retail revenue in the United States is generated online. This is growing at a steady pace of about 0.5 percent per year. 2. eCommerce is growing at about 20 percent per year. According to the eMarketer benchmark in 2006, the growth in U.S. ecommerce retail revenue over 2005 was 23 percent. For 2007, this number is forecast to be around 23 percent, based on comScore statistics for the second quarter of 2007. 4. Only 70 percent of Internet users has ever purchased online. According to a Pew Internet in American Life Project report, only about 70 percent of adult Americans currently online have ever made an ecommerce purchase. Since the United States is a good indicator of what is happening in most of the “connected” world and a likely indicator of what will happen in emerging markets, this data gives us a good outlook at the potential magnitude of the ecommerce footprint worldwide. What does this all mean though? This data denotes that there is a huge opportunity for serious businesses to succeed selling online, tapping in the about 85 percent of the potential market that is still idle, with absolutely incredible possibilities for many newcomers with the right offerings. It also tells us, though, that ecommerce today needs to be considered strategically, with at least a 10-year outlook, logistically developed for the long term, based on goods that are globally appealing and supported by global reach in marketing and fulfillment. In order to succeed in capturing some of this potential, a few fundamental paradigm shifts need to occur among small online retailers: Appeal to current online buyers, but make things simple and understandable by newcomers. They are the most and there is where the money will be for the next ten years. European and North American consumers have clearly demonstrated that online businesses are valid destinations for all kind of shopping. With the world becoming flatter and flatter every day, the next decade will undoubtedly see the fast growing numbers of new Web users participating a global level in purchasing activities. Selling from the U.S.  vs. selling to the U.S . The ecommerce growth is global, but the fastest pace of expansion is occurring and will keep occurring in emerging markets. Emerging markets tend to bypass legacy behaviors displayed by mature markets. In the case of ecommerce, this means finding direct access to goods not available in physical retail stores. U.S. entrepreneurs going online must to focus on the needs of the global market and sell from the U.S. rather than to the U.S., developing simple processes allowing for the fulfillment of orders regardless of what country they’re coming from. “Niche-bust” Focus on one niche and sell products that nobody else sells. Then, stick to it. Fewer items, all related, all associated with a specialty activity or need are what can mean the difference between success and failure. Maintaining a wide variety of goods and diverse inventory can be very taxing and difficult to sustain for the small retailer. “Niche-busting” can drive high profits, simpler operation, and easier to optimize marketing. The numbers are quite clear. Even using conservative predictions, there are great opportunities to succeed for well-planned ecommerce sites, allowing any small business to gain access to global markets while requiring very limited start up funds. Andrea Peiro is president and CEO of the Small Business Technology Institute, a non-profit organization created to foster the adoption of information technologies among small businesses.

About 2182 days ago Telecom and Wireless

The Future of Small Business Telephony Is Here: And It’s VoIP

our beautiful site

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia — It is 8:30 a.m. The phone in my hotel room is ringing. Not the one connecting to room service or the bell desk, but the other one. The one I brought from the U.S.; the one that follows me wherever I go, ringing anywhere in the world to my old faithful ten-digit California number. Yes, my normal office phone is now sitting on my desk in my hotel room, ringing for me to answer an incoming U.S. domestic call. Voice over Internet Protocol service (VoIP) simply and effectively allows me to bring my phone service with me everywhere I go at no extra charge. VoIP is a technology that allows you to make voice calls using a broadband Internet connection instead of a regular phone line. VoIP services allow you to call anyone who has a telephone number — including local, long distance, mobile, and international numbers — either over your computer, using a special VoIP phone, or using a traditional phone connected to a VoIP adapter. The newest generation of VoIP phones can even connect directly to any wireless access point (WiFi) router you may have access to, eliminating the need for external adapters and allowing for use through public wireless access points. While things may be poised to change, the telephone is still the most relevant tool in business today, and our dependency on voice communications is clear. During the last couple of years VoIP has moved from being a complex, unreliable, low quality service to a mature, competitive, simple to manage and high quality offering. VoIP service affords a number of advantages over traditional telephony providers that make it an overall better choice for small businesses and particularly for the millions of people that travel or work away from their office for a substantial portion of their time: Your phone number travels with you; Anywhere you can connect to the Internet you can have your phone for incoming and outgoing calls; If you obtain a U.S. phone number and travel abroad you can bring the phone or IP adapter with you and make/receive calls at U.S. domestic rates; Overall rates are quite lower that traditional telephony services; And high-end services such as voice mail to e-mail and multi-party conferencing are often bundled in at no extra cost. The competition is heating up and a roster of VoIP service providers is blooming. Some of the ones with small-business friendly offerings are Lingo, Vonage, Vonics, Skype and Packet 8. While each service provides different options and plans, the basic features are all the same, and all offer the lower cost and higher flexibility advantages of VoIP. If your company’s telephony needs are more complex than what can be provided by single-line services and require multiple lines, extensions and attendant features, you should consider hosting your own company VoIP telephony server. Either via a custom-built solution, or a pre-configured appliance, your small business can host its multi-line, telephony server for a very limited budget. Features like multiple extensions, call transfers, conferencing, auto-attendant (IVR), voice mail to e-mail, operator panel, music-on-hold, call forwarding and name directory are all included in preconfigured systems that sell between $1,000 and $3,000. IP phones that cost from $30 to $150 each. Quality, affordable VoIP servers are made by various companies, including Fonality and Zultys. At the higher end, top products are available from Cisco and Avaya. In-house, server-based solutions take as input regular phone lines and distribute the service to extensions via Internet protocol (IP) and data wires instead of phone wires. This allows for incredible flexibility of internal communications, allowing for extraordinary things such as having your phone attendant seamlessly work at home, or speaking with your manufacturing office in Vietnam at no cost at all and by just dialing its extension number. These solutions also allow for PCs, such as your salesperson’s laptop, to act as virtual handsets by using software that mimics the behavior of a regular phone. A number of “soft phones” are available on the market from vendors such as Cisco, Avaya, and Nortel, or you can download a very popular and effective free one at SJ Labs. The benefits of VoIP are incredible for small business. Switching to VoIP, in most cases, provides a quick return on investment. Old fashion telephony is on its way out and business voice communications are quickly shifting towards the VoIP paradigm worldwide. Empower your small business to take advantage of this first mature wave of benefits and write “Switch to VoIP” on top of your to-do list. Andrea Peiro is president and CEO of the Small Business Technology Institute, a non-profit organization created to foster the adoption of information technologies among small businesses.

About 2213 days ago Computer Security

The Future of Business Data Storage

While you drink your coffee and listen to the morning news tomorrow, try an experiment to see how important the data stored in your laptop is to your business. Instead of placing your laptop in your briefcase, as you would normally do, put it in a drawer, lock it, and leave it there for the rest of the day. How well do you think you will be able to do run your business? Probably not as well. In the same situation, most of us would probably not be able to professionally function at all, not because of the hardware locked in the drawer, but because of the impossibility to access the invaluable information stored in it: winning proposals, financial plans, emails from employees and customers alike, and — hidden somewhere special — sensitive data such as your frequent flyer account and credit card numbers. Information rules our world, and digital data is the how most of the information we use today is organized and stored. Locking the laptop in the drawer is an experiment that helps illustrate how that data is at the core of the professional lives of business owners and entrepreneurs. The collection of data we use every day to run our businesses composes our “business intelligence” and the importance of being able to find it and retrieve it is quickly increasing. Imagine a restaurant that cannot access its dinner reservation files for a month, or a furniture importer that cannot access its shipping documents for an entire container of goods, or an accountant that cannot retrieve its customers’ electronic tax files. In order to maintain business continuity by ensuring ready access to data, here are a few suggestions on up and coming ways to address your data storage needs. 1. Outfit all your important PCs with RAID technology. The most common way to store data today is on hard disk drives (HDDs). With capacities of over 750GB each, and quickly increasing thanks to a new technology called “perpendicular recording,” HDDs store huge amounts of data for a very low cost. HDDs, however, are still subject to possible failure, and in some cases retrieving data from a damaged hard disk is impossible. A technology known as Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks (RAID) offers a good solution to the HDD reliability issues for critical data. RAID has been available for over 20 years but only recently it has become inexpensive enough to be used outside specialized applications. In its basic configuration, RAID allows a user to replicate, or “mirror” data over two regular HDDs in real time. If one fails, the other has a full copy of the data available for use. Most desktops can be easily outfitted with RAID technology and the first generation of laptops with built in RAID has recently made its debut on the market. 2. Extend your storage capacity with high-speed external drives and share critical information using simple network attached storage solutions. Even with larger and larger storage disks inside our computers there never seems to be enough space to store everything we need for business. The simplest solution to expand your everyday data storage capacity is to add one or more external hard disk drives. USB 2 or Firewire connections allow for blazing data transfer speeds making this type of storage perfect for data that does not need to be accessed as frequently. Portable external drives reach up to 200GB in capacity in form factors that fit in a shirt pocket and often do not require external power supply. To protect the privacy of data stored in an external drive you should consider utilizing software that encrypts it and decrypts it on the fly when you need to retrieve it. If your business needs to share data among multiple users, the newest generation of Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices — external hard dives that can connect directly to a network — have become affordable, simple to setup and use, allowing for multiple users to concurrently access them, in some cases even wirelessly. 3. For long term backup or data archiving consider recordable HD or Blu-Ray DVDs As mentioned, HDDs are generally subject to possible failures due to wear and shocks, making them not ideal for long-term data archiving or long term backups. To simply archive data for long-term preservation, one great option is using writable DVDs. Sturdy, inexpensive, with a long shelf life, they can store 4.7GB for the single layer type or 8.5GB for the dual layer type. On the horizon, two new DVD standards that have reached the consumer market for high definition movies are just now becoming available as data storage devices within the next few months: HD DVD (15 GB single layer and 30 GB dual layer) and Blu-Ray DVD (25 GB single layer and 50 GB dual layer). Writable DVDs provide a reliable means to archive critical data, and these new standards offer the capacity that businesses require today. Our electronic data is becoming the most relevant source of information for all types of business decisions. The capability of storing and retrieving data has become for most small businesses a “mission critical” task, the continuity of which must be assured. The higher the value of our business data, the more critical it becomes and the more attentive our choices on how to store it, protect it and access it need to be. Andrea Peiro is president and CEO of the Small Business Technology Institute, a non-profit organization created to foster the adoption of information technologies among small businesses.

About 2364 days ago Business Software

How to Choose Office Productivity Software

our beautiful site

When choosing office productivity software — the suite of functions, including word processing, spreadsheets, presentation software and an e-mail program — the knee-jerk reaction is to first look at Microsoft Office. After all, it is the most ubiquitous. But popularity doesn’t matter to everyone. Derek Featherstone, founder of Further Ahead, of Ottawa, a Web development firm, uses a combination of Apple’s iWork on his Mac, which includes the Pages application for documents and Keynote for presentations. He also uses OpenOffice, an open source office productivity suite, “because it was free, compatible with pretty much every other office suite out there.” Featherstone says that he works on three computers at a time — a Mac, a Windows-based PC, and an open-source Linux machine. “I wanted to be able to have a tool that worked no matter which computer I happened to be using at the time and not to have to pay for three licenses,” Featherstone says. “As a small business, minimizing costs is essential. OpenOffice lets me do just that.” Featherstone is one of a new breed of entrepreneur who believes that when it comes to office productivity software there’s more than one choice out there. Small businesses miss out on upgrades Right now Microsoft Office dominates the small and mid-size business market. However, many of these packages were purchased years ago, and were not upgraded, even though Microsoft refreshed the offering in 2003. What that means is that small businesses using an older Office version may be missing out on features enabling them to increase productivity. As it is, many small businesses don’t use many features beyond the basic functionality. “Ninety percent of MS Office’s higher functionality isn’t used by most users, who simply want to keep track of finances, write office letters, and put together small presentations, etc.” says Adam Braunstein, senior research analyst at the Robert Frances Group, a business advisory to technology executives. “That’s too bad,” Yankee Group analyst Gary Chen points out, “because Office comes out with cool things that people almost never discover — such as support for tablet PCs, collaboration tools, and locking down sections in a Word document that can’t be edited.” And yet, Microsoft has been spending a lot of time focused on the small business market, and currently has a free product out for small businesses. In addition, Microsoft is coming out with its newest version yet, Office 2007, with even more updated versions of its features. The bottom line is that the customers still aren’t getting everything they could out of their product. “That left the door open for other start-ups to get in there,” says Chen. One of those is the commercial version of OpenOffice, the free office suite and Open Source project that Featherstone uses, called StarOffice. StarOffice is spear-headed by Sun Microsystems. It’s a neat alternative, says Chen, and supports much of what’s available on Microsoft Office. Sun is trying to lure people in with snazzy features, such as multiple toolbars, migration aides, Web publishing tools, etc. It’s giving Office a run for the money. CFOs are happy with it, though; StarOffice is a fraction of the cost of Microsoft Office. Battle of the productivity programs “With the many different formats out there you can send a file and the receiver can’t open it or if they do it looks weird,” says Chen.  Right now, Microsoft is the format that everyone can open. OpenOffice is a cross platform. It can run on Linux. So, people can use whatever platform they want. And it’s free. Also, the online versions are not tied to an install on a particular computer, says Forrester analyst Michael Speyer. “You can use them anywhere that has Internet access.” Another thing to consider with the Open Source products is that there is an emphasis on introducing new, exciting features. There are a lot of OpenOffice choices and more coming. Look out for Google to make some waves in the area. Right now, Google offers some business applications over the Web, and considering the huge cash hoard that the company is sinking into research and development,  their products will only get better. Right now, their offerings are free, and in the get-what-you-pay-for kind of way, there are lots of ads. Reading distracting ads, however, isn’t the ideal situation to increase productivity at work. The areas where the rival products still trail behind Office, says Andrea Peiro, CEO and founder, Small Business Technology Institute, are mostly related to collaboration — such as documents version control, integration of the revision process with -email programs and interaction with some server-side technologies.  “In a multi-employee environment with highly structured document management processes, these features can be extremely important, but for most other situations these alternatives represent excellent low-cost options,” says Chen. How to figure out what suite is right for your business Chen recommends that small business owners ask themselves the following questions: How much do you use the office suite? Which features and functionality do you use and need? Take a look at the complexity of the documents you use and produce and look at what level of support you need. Something to consider if you use free products is that if you want support you’ll need to pay extra. What is your budget for the product and for support? Office is much more expensive than its competition, running several hundred dollars per computer. If you are looking for something else to cast your vote for, Peiro suggests considering the following, which offer a high degree of compatibility with Office in terms of file formats: OpenOffice This is a free multiplatform office suite and an Open Source project that’s compatible with all other major office suites. WordPerfect Suite This old standby — remember WordPerfect anyone? — costs about $250.00. 602 PC Suite Low-cost alternative started in the Czech Republic. It includes a word processor, spreadsheet, photo editor, and photo album organizer. ThinkFree Web-based office application. It’s free but doesn¹t include a database application.

About 2394 days ago Computer Security

Why You Need a UPS

It should be apparent to anyone who suffered through the blackout of 2003. And it should be apparent to any business impacted by the brownouts that are increasingly a fact of life during summer months, ice storms that knock out power lines in the winter, and other disasters, such as Hurricane Katrina. A power outage can wreak disaster on a business. It can shut a company down for days. It can zap your data. It can disappoint your customers. And, ultimately, it can run you out of business. That’s one reason that businesses need to invest in a device called “uninterruptible power supply” (UPS). This is an intermediary device between a power source and the machinery for which the power is being provided, typically a computer. That device can apply to anything from a battery to a generator. There are three kinds of UPSes — one that’s always on, the most common type, one that’s on standby, going on as soon as power is cut off, and one that’s really a hybrid of the two. A backup power supply Think of a UPS as a backup power supply, says Cal Braunstein, the chairman and CEO of the Robert Frances Group, a Westport, Conn. technology consultancy. That’s the advice he gives to small business owners who are considering UPS. “Some alarm clocks today have the ability for a battery to be plugged in so that when power is lost, your alarm clock continues keeping time,” Braunstein says. “A UPS is just a much bigger version of that for computers. This way if power dies, systems and disk drives don’t crash, which could cause real data corruption or file corruption problems.” On a basic level, the UPS is some energy that provides the user with a few extra minutes of power, in the case of an emergency, so that they can save what they were working on, print it out, and turn all the machines off.  More powerful ones, says Andrea Peiro, the CEO and founder of the Small Business Technology Institute, a non-profit organization that promotes technology usage by small business, can be used to actually continue working for several more hours while the user is waiting for the grid power to return. Tips for buying UPS When buying one or more UPS devices for your business, there are several factors to consider. “The primary factor that influences how many pieces of hardware can be supported by a single UPS and for how long is the capacity of their batteries,” says Peiro, noting that the capacity is measured in Volt-Amperes (VA). “The bigger the number, the better.” Costs for buying a UPS can range from less than one hundred dollars to a few thousand dollars. But in the long run whatever you pay will be small compared with what could happen if one’s data disappears. If cost is a concern, however, consider that today’s prices represent a decrease from where they used to be, and also that laptops usually do not need a UPS, since they can operate on their own internal battery in case of power failure. However, no matter what the price is, a UPS should be part of any small business office, says Peiro, who considers them a very important investment, especially when they are connected to the company’s networking equipment.  “UPSes are a critical element for the reliability of any computing environment, allowing for non-disruptive shut down of workstations, servers and peripherals.”