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Lessons from Web 2.0: Fast Track Innovation Process

Over the last few years, Web 2.0 has evolved to become not only a design paradigm, but also a development methodology that has become synonymous with innovation. Web 2.0 companies are able to innovate rapidly for four simple reasons: Low cost of innovation. You don’t need a bucketful of cash to prototype a Web 2.0 product or launch a Web 2.0 company. Costs of computing and storage have fallen dramatically, and services like cloud computing virtually eliminate the need for heavy IT infrastructure, reducing fixed costs. Case in point: Y-Combinator, a seed fund that invests an average of just $15,000 per venture, has helped many young companies get their start. Y-Combinator success stories include Reddit (acquired by Conde Nast) and Zenter (acquired by Google). Rapid bite-sized improvements instead of massive launches. The software that powers the Web services can be updated constantly, because it’s delivered over the Web. As a result, Web 2.0 companies often upgrade their services every day or every week, launching new features and fixing bugs. Ease of “measuring” user interactions with the service. Web services have the advantage that user interaction with the site or the service can be measured in a very precise manner. It’s easy to record the time spent by an average user on the site, the number of page views they saw, the trail of clicks and pages that helped them complete their task, and a lot of other such data. Because everything can be measured, Web companies have developed a philosophy of testing and measuring a lot more and guessing a lot less. Before any feature is launched to the entire audience of a site, it’s often tested on a small portion of the user base. An open innovation model. Web 2.0 companies have realized that some of their most innovative ideas might not come from within the company. Using Web-service application programming interfaces (APIs), they have exposed some of their most precious data to outside developers who can build innovative applications. Real-time search, one of the most used applications on Twitter, was developed by a company called Summize, using Twitter’s API. Twitter later acquired Summize. Taken together, all these methods are geared towards a new model of innovation — one that emphasizes rapid experimentation and serendipitous discovery. Since every idea is cheap and quick to try out with real users, and the results are easily measurable, Web 2.0 companies get to road test several ideas without spending excessive amounts of time trying to prioritize between them. Similarly, by allowing outside developers to use the company’s data to create applications without any restrictions, Web 2.0 companies are in effect launching hundreds of experiments simultaneously. This throws the traditional model of product development and innovation on its head. In the old days, companies performed exhaustive (and costly!) analysis to determine which one or two ideas would be most likely to succeed, and then invested accordingly. The Web 2.0 model makes it possible to experiment with a lot of ideas, without investing a lot of upfront cash or forcing assumptions about which idea will deliver the biggest upside. This new model is great for a world in which consumer preferences are difficult to predict and change rapidly. While your business might not have the same natural advantages as a Web 2.0 company, with a little bit of redesign of your processes, you could use elements of the same philosophy to fast-track your innovation. Here are some tips to get you started: Lower your cost of new product development. Be on the lookout for opportunities to reduce your costs of new product development. Using technology for knowledge management and outsourcing to low cost countries are among some of the ideas that innovative companies use. For example, in the electronics industry, Original Design Manufacturers (ODM) companies based in low cost countries like China have emerged as choice partners for prototyping and launching new designs. Create experiments that lead to continuous bite-sized improvements.If any aspect of your offering is a service, you can keep innovating by adding small features or by improving the workflow. In order to do that, you need to build a test-bed for trying out lots of experimental ideas. A few years ago, Stefan Thomke, a professor at Harvard Business School, published an insightful study detailing how Bank of America turned its branches into “Service Development Laboratories.” For instance, Thomke talks about an experiment designed to solve the problem that users perceived their wait times to be longer than the actual time. In order to remove the perception, the experiment involved testing user perception when televisions were installed over teller booths and comparing that with a standard branch without televisions. By measuring the improvement in customer satisfaction ratings with the television, the team was able to develop a case for wider rollout to some of the bigger branches of BofA. This is a great example of an experimental setup that leads to constant improvement in the quality of service. Measure everything and create feedback loops. You should aim to find opportunities for measuring user interaction with your product or service directly at the point of interaction, without relying on “marketing surveys.” Harrah’s is a great example of a company that invested in business intelligence solutions around its loyalty program, and made all of its marketing efforts highly data driven. Whenever a customer conducts a transaction using their Harrah’s card, the information is transmitted to a database, and used in a variety of ways to target the customer. The success of marketing campaigns is also measured using this data, and the campaigns are optimized accordingly. Soon after the program was launched a few years ago, its success made Harrah’s the most profitable company in its sector. Open up the innovation process to others and plug in with the ecosystem. In his book Wikinomics, Don Tapscott talks about how Goldcorp Inc., a struggling Toronto-based gold mine, opened up its sensitive geological data to the public to help the company get accurate estimates of the location of gold in its mines in Red Lake, Ontario. Within weeks, solutions poured in from all kinds of unexpected quarters, and identified more than 110 targets, half of them not previously identified by the company, with 80 percent of the new targets yielding substantial amounts of gold. In another example, Proctor & Gamble has developed a program called “Connect and Develop” with a goal of having 50 percent of its new products come from outside the company’s labs. The program also opens up access to P&G’s innovation assets. On the other hand, if you can’t find good ways of exposing your own data, you could instead think of using the data and APIs exposed by others — for example, Pure Digital, the manufacturers of the Flip Video Cameras, used YouTube’s APIs to make it easy to upload videos directly into YouTube, and in the process out-innovated the competition. It’s clear through all these examples that the new model of innovation is for everyone, and not just Web 2.0 companies. Find applications for these ideas in your business, and use them to change the world for the better. Vijay Chittoor is the director of product panagement at Kosmix, an exploration engine that offers a 360 degree view of any topic on the Web. A former McKinsey consultant, Vijay is a graduate of Harvard Business School and the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. He shares his thoughts on technology at his blog..

Collaborate via Your BlackBerry

Sure, you’ve outfitted your staff with BlackBerry devices because of its handy ability to provide push e-mail, instant messaging conversations, and Web access. But did you know that BlackBerry is also becoming a platform for mobile collaboration applications? Leading technology companies such as IBM, Intuition, and WICKSoft have developed applications for mobile employees to work together on projects in real-time, using their handset, regardless of where they might be on the planet. Here’s how your business can use mobile devices for collaboration. “BlackBerry is so popular with sales people, traders, and others that need to stay in touch while out of the office that one IT manager told us that he would have to pry the device ‘out of their cold dead fingers,’” says Ted Schadler, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research, a Cambridge, Mass.-based independent research company covering business and technology. “That kind of passion raises a different question: What else can we use BlackBerry devices for?” ask Schadler. “The short answer is to use BlackBerry devices as mobile collaboration tool,” says Schadler, who has authored recent reports such as BlackBerry: An Emerging Platform For Mobile Collaboration and Distributed Teams Need Real-Time Collaboration Tools. Schadler suggests that business users can bring content from Microsoft SharePoint to the BlackBerry with WICKSoft, add required training to it from a company like Intuition, and push instant messaging out to it with Lotus Sametime. Discovering new applications “What we do, in short, is give people access to all of the information they would normally use if they were sitting at their desk,” says Will Hickie, founder and CEO of WICKSoft, a two-year-old Ottawa, Ontario-based firm with customers in North America, Europe, and Australia. “Research in Motion has done a fantastic job at giving people access to their e-mail, no matter where they are — it’s a secure, reliable, way to keep connected to customers and coworkers. Yet for all of this success, there are still a few things that you can’t do from a ‘vanilla’ BlackBerry, and that’s where WICKSoft comes in,” explains Hickie. WICKSoft has created a solution to help people stay connected to all of the important things “that live outside of the inbox,” says Hickie, including file servers, Microsoft SharePoint, shared contacts and calendars, and document management systems. For the uninitiated, Microsoft SharePoint is a popular collaboration tool with more than 100 million users worldwide, offering customers access to documents, contacts, CRM info, wikis, blogs, and other data. Thanks to hosted providers, such as Integrated SharePoint Development, many smaller businesses are finding it easy to work with. But smartphone integration was not accessible to BlackBerry users until WICKSoft’s technology was introduced, offering true mobile integration with Microsoft SharePoint. “This means you can access a contact in a SharePoint portal, and then call that person directly from your BlackBerry,” explains Hickie. “Documents stored in SharePoint, like product brochures or presentations, can also be viewed on the phone, or e-mailed out as attachments to prospects and customers,” he adds. “All of the calendars, custom lists, agendas, tasks, everything, is accessible, and in a very mobile friendly way.” After all, a copy of a report isn’t much good if everyone else is reading the latest version while you’re stuck with something a few days old. “With WICKSoft, everything is done in real-time, so that if someone in the office were to modify a contact or update a PDF, those changes are reflected on the BlackBerry immediately,” adds Hickie. “No matter where you are, you always have access to the most up to date information.”

New Ammo to Battle Online Fraud

When it comes to protecting customers online, small businesses can’t act small. Customers expect them to use the same safety measures employed by larger businesses. That’s why Terence Johnson didn’t wait for a customer at Scribendi, the Canadian editorial services company where he’s vice president of technology, to fall victim to a “phishing” expedition before upgrading his website security. Last year, Johnson upgraded to a newer security protocol called extended validation secure socket layer, or EV SSL, an improvement to existing SSL that requires certification requests to go through a more rigorous identity check and authentication process before being approved. EV SSL is one of a handful of measures security experts and industry analysts suggest companies of all sizes take to combat phishers, identity thieves, and others out to steal valuable personal information from unwitting Internet users. Acting before you need to is one way to keep the bad guys at bay, according to a December 2007 report on e-commerce fraud from The Aberdeen Group, a Boston technology researcher. According to Carol Baroudi, the Aberdeen Group analyst who wrote the report, all types of businesses that sell something or conduct financial transactions online can also prevent fraud if they: Authenticate new customers while they’re creating an account Add layers of user authentication, geo-location and device authentication Establish and enforce security policies Use anti-fraud directories Continuously educate themselves and customers on new types of security threats and protections Consortium created EV SSL to combat fraud A consortium of more than two dozen Web browser and security technology companies formed the CA/Browser Forum to develop and introduce EV SSL in February 2007. Since then, approximately 4,000 websites have been certified to use the protocol, says Tim Callan, vice president of SSL product marketing at Verisign, a consortium member. Seventy-five percent of those websites are VeriSign customers, and of that number, 80 percent are small businesses, Callan says. The thinking behind EV SSL: increasing the hoops parties need to jump through to be certified will weed out undesirables who create fake websites, and at the same time, make consumers feel safer when they visit legitimate online establishments, Callan says. To that end, when someone using Microsoft Internet Explorer 7.0 visits an EV SSL-certified Web site it turns the browser’s URL address bar green, much the way a green traffic light signals it’s OK to proceed. Upcoming releases of Firefox and Opera Web browsers are expected to work with EV SSL, according to industry reports. Appleisn’t part of the consortium and EV SSL doesn’t work with its Safari browser. EV SSL isn’t cheap. VeriSign charges $995 per server per year, with volume discounts, and a second version with even stronger server cryptography costs $1,499 a year per server. It’s not cheap, but it is worth it, says Johnson, the technology guru at Scribendi, in Chathan, Ontario, which has provided editing services to authors and other clients for 10 years and has a staff of 100. Customers appreciate businesses that go out of their way to provide them with security, Johnson says. And it pays off. In the four months after Scribendi started using EV SSL, the number of orders from Internet Explorer users who visited the website increased 27 percent from the four months immediately prior. “That’s an indication that people are learning to recognize” what it means, Johnson says. As New York City apartment dwellers know to use more than one lock on their doors, Websites should use more than one security system, business owners, security experts and others say. In addition to EV SSL, Scribendi uses security tools from the company’s Internet service provider, encrypts transmissions of manuscripts and other documents that editors are working on and authenticates payments in real time, Johnson says. “When it comes to security, being a small business doesn’t count,” he says. “You have to use the best tools you can.” SIDEBAR: Resources to Learn about EV SSL Here are some resources small businesses can use to learn more about EV SSL and other measures for stopping e-commerce fraud: EV SSL FAQ — Everything you wanted to know about EV SSL, from the CA/B Forum, the volunteer consortium of 27 security companies and 4 Web browser makers that created the security protocol. A primer on e-commerce security issues — published by Ecommerce-Digest.Com, an online publication that covers the Internet security industry. E-commerce white papers — A collection of research papers and other documents explaining online fraud and security measures used to combat it, from ZDNet, the technology trade publisher. The Anti-Phishing Working Group — A five-year-old industry association with 3,000 member companies that documents phishing activity and shares best practices for stopping it.

Wi-MAX: A Viable Alternative to DSL or Cable?

NewsCast, a British photojournalism company that specializes in photography syndication and online image libraries, has one less headache to worry about in its Manhattan bureau. Uploading and downloading images, a task that requires a lot of extra bandwidth due to the size of the files, has become a lot easier over the last year since the company switched to Wi-MAX to connect to the Internet. Wi-MAX — a loose acronym for Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access — is a telecommunications industry standard that can provide wireless connectivity over long distances. A related technology, Wi-Fi operates within a much smaller range. The standard is roughly divided into two solutions; Mobile Wi-MAX and fixed Wi-MAX. NewsCast uses fixed Wi-MAX as its broadband provider. “It’s the greatest thing since the invention of white bread,” says Jim Sulley, NewsCast’s director of photography. Before, NewsCast had a T-1 line that cost $800 a month for 1.5 megabits per second (Mbps) of bandwidth and the service was riddled with technical difficulties disrupting the flow of business. “It was that last mile that was killing us. There were so many problems with the T-1 line. I couldn’t be happier with WiMAX,” Sulley says. “It’s much more reliable. It’s faster. And the cost is much lower. We’re on the ‘Five for Five’ plan. We get up to 5 mbps for $500 a month.” Sulley says his business often needs that extra burst of bandwidth due to the nature of what they do; they move large numbers of image files online. Does it sound too good to be true? If your business is located in one of the major metropolitan areas in the country where fixed Wi-MAX is available (New York City, Chicago, and San Francisco, to name a few), then this technology can be a viable alternative to other forms of Internet service, such as DSL, Cable, or T-1 lines. Otherwise, you may have to wait. Wi-MAX: sooner or later “Wi-MAX is extremely limited in the United States right now and that’s not likely to change anytime soon. It may have some effect by 2010. Mainly it will compete against that last mile of DSL and Cable typically in suburbia where they still aren’t fully rolled out,” says William Clark, a research vice president from Gartner. Mark Tauschek, a senior research analyst from Info-Tech, a research firm based in Ontario, Canada, is more optimistic. He agrees the real rollout won’t happen until 2010, but does believe 2008 will be a big year for Wi-MAX. “There are a few things coming together this year that are going to make Wi-MAX ubiquitous,” says Tauschek, who points out the following: Sprint is committed to Wi-MAX.Sprint has already committed itself to the 2.5 GHz spectrum with the FCC, with the understanding it would be used for WiMAX. So despite recent headlines of Sprint’s delayed deal with Clearwire (the other company heavily committed to creating a nationwide Wi-MAX network in the United States), upheavals in upper management, reports of expected layoffs and even the possibility of moving its corporate headquarters back to Kansas from Virginia; don’t count out Sprint’s long term commitment to Wi-MAX. Industry support for Wi-MAX. By mid-year, laptops will be shipping out with Intel chip sets that support Wi-MAX. Competitive pricing. It’s an industry standard, which means no royalties. “It also makes it very cookie cutter to stamp out in volume. Prices will drop fast,” points out Tauschek. From Sulley’s story, it’s clear it’s already beating out T-1 lines handily in pricing. A technology that’s worth the wait According to Maravedas, a telecom research company based in Montreal, Canada, there are some 500,000 Wi-MAX users in the United States right now. Maravedas predicts that number will grow to 10 million by 2013. Those figures exclude the Sprint deal, which if it goes through would mean a coast-to-coast Wi-MAX network available to 100 million users. In addition to competitive pricing, here are some other possible advantages to using Wi-MAX as a fixed broadband provider. Covering the last mile — and 69 other miles. Wi-MAX carries at a range as far as 70 miles. Critics complain the signal weakens the farther out it goes and is really optimal up to about 10 miles. Even so, as a broadband solution it would be advantageous for businesses divided among several floors in one building, across a corporate park of buildings, or connecting employees who live in relative close proximity to the office. Here, there and everywhere worldwide.Wi-MAX has already hit critical mass in some countries and is quickly gaining steam in others. Eighty percent of Canadians have access to Wi-MAX now. Gartner predicts there will 48 million Wi-MAX connections globally by 2010. For the overseas business traveler, a universal standard across borders for connectivity could make life a lot easier on the road. Positive response where deployed.Sulley’s story about his experience switching to Wi-MAX is just one man’s opinion. But here are some numbers that indicate he’s not alone in his satisfaction with his new broadband choice. Clearwire serves the town of Kirkland, Wash., a suburb of Seattle and only a couple of miles from Microsoft’s Redmond, Wash. corporate headquarters. It has picked up no less than 90,000 subscribers in just the past six months. Drawbacks to Wi-MAX Clearly the biggest drawback to Wi-MAX right now is availability. But there are others to consider: If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it.Very few businesses are without a broadband option. For the most part DSL and cable lines have been dropped down to the last mile. The telecommunications and cable companies aren’t going to walk away from years of investment deploying that infrastructure. Since it’s already in place, that means adding a new user is virtually free for them and pure profit off the customer. Traditional broadband providers can afford to get in a pricing war when the time comes. Security. Since penetration is still low, it remains to be seen just how easy or difficult it will be for hackers to target Wi-MAX networks. Industry watchers see potential vulnerabilities in the standards making it possible for “man-in-the-middle” attacks, denial of service attacks, as well as weaknesses in encryption that could contribute to data leaks. Other emerging options.The first option that comes to mind would be a fiber optic network (FiOS). Because it involves rolling out that last mile of fiber building by building, deployment is slow. But a “lit building” is highly coveted office space. The fiber optics lines are already wired into the building and very user friendly for tenants, who receive lightening fast, reliable connectivity. Verizon is heavily pushing FIOS. Despite those obstacles, “I’m bullish on Wi-MAX,” says Tauschek. One thing he may not be taking into account is the bears: the ones plaguing Wall Street these days. A slow down in the economy could easily turn that last mile into the long mile for any new broadband provider trying to break into that market.

Still Have a Cash Register? It’s Time to Upgrade

It’s been a busy year for Earth Garden in Wilton, Conn.. The high-end floristry, gifts and home furnishing accessories store recently opened a new storefront in its hometown dramatically expanding its product mix and amount of inventory while growing out its customer base at the same time. One of the many new products flying off the shelves is a line of trendy reading glasses called eyebobs. “We know they’re hot. What we don’t know is which designs are our best sellers,” says Rachelle Bernabei, Earth Garden’s accountant. Bernabei says it’s just impossible to keep track of them without a point of sale (POS) system. “Yes, we’re still using a cash register,” admits Bernabei, who is quick to point out that eyebobs are just one of a thousand different product lines they carry that are impossible to monitor as closely as they’d like without some new technology. At the mention of upgrading to a point of sale (POS) system, Bernabei starts ticking off all the features she longs for not only to make her job easier, but further grow the business itself. “If we had a POS system we could store all of our customer data, keep better track of inventory, store financial data, and aggregate reporting that would help us track which products are moving faster than others and when and what to restock. We could get a better look at all our different segments of the business,” says Bernabei. The end of cash registers “When you think about it, the concept of a cash register is pretty archaic. It’s basically a cash box with a big calculator on top,” says Mark Tauschek, a senior research analyst from Info-Tech based in Ontario, Canada. Archaic wouldn’t be too strong of a word. The cash register was invented over a hundred years ago back in 1883. Perhaps it is time to retire it to the Smithsonian along side the typewriter while leaving room for the fax machine that is undoubtedly soon to follow. In today’s digitally connected world, data is only as valuable as it is accessible and exportable to other applications. Earth Garden’s cash register is a perfect illustration.” Well, it sort of does some things. It’s just that the information doesn’t go anywhere. It spits it out on a paper tape at the end of the day and all the sales data has to be manually inputted into our accounting system,” says Bernabei. Upgrading to a POS system So why not chuck those cash registers once and for all? The biggest reason is the cost, of course. Tauschek says the most basic system for a small, one-terminal shop could cost as little as a thousand dollars, likely it will be more like $2,000-$2,500 by the time an owner adds on things like bar code scanners and credit card capabilities. That may not sound like much until you consider stores like Staples and Office Depot still sell cash registers for as little as a couple of hundred dollars. The other reason, says Tauschek, is that “10 years from now, you won’t be able to find a cash register anymore. But right now, although we are really talking about the really small, one-store Mom and Pop shops, some businesses just don’t need a POS system yet. They’re doing fine without one.” Those businesses are increasingly a rarity; Tauschek offers the following advice to businesses who do find its time to integrate a POS system: Shop for simplicity. Make sure the system has an easy-to-use interface that requires minimal training. Most people that staff a terminal are typically the low-paid and, therefore, less educated employee. Check the vendor’s references. “Whether it’s the guy down the street, a vendor on eBay or a more established seller, talk to at least three or four customers,” says Tauschek. Consider the platform. Tauschek says, by far, most systems are Windows-based. However, Linux is making huge inroads in the POS space and contends they’re more secure systems. “The vast majority of attacks are against Windows. So that alone means Linux inherently has fewer security risks,” says Tauschek. Check the service contract. If the system goes down, how long can the business get by without a service call? The answer depends on the nature of the organization. Some businesses demand no less than a half hour wait for service, others two to hour hours. Waiting 24 hours for service is likely a revenue killer for most companies. Read the fine print before making a commitment. Response time could be a deal breaker. Start small. One of the biggest mistakes businesses make is buying more than they need. “All POS systems are scalable,” says Tauschek. Don’t add on things like bar code scanners, back end integration, gift card redemptions, and credit card and debit card signature pads until they are needed. Deciding factors Choosing a POS system is one of the biggest technology commitments a retail or service business can make. When it works well, the return on investment (ROI) can be dramatic. When it doesn’t work, it’s a nightmare that can bring the entire business to a crippling standstill. Other tips to consider before taking such a big step include the following: Be clear on why the POS system is needed for the business. What will it do that really helps the bottom line? How long will it take to pay for itself? Choose the software first. Make sure it is compatible with other hardware or applications the business is already using on the backend. For example, will it work with the accounting software already in use? Choose a vendor and software package designed for the type of business being outfitted. A book store shouldn’t buy POS software from a company that specializes in serving restaurants. Beware of the independent contractor with the homemade system. It would be great to have the right person just down the street, always available, reasonably- priced, and able to tailor the software specifically to the business. But what if that person botches the job or moves on without notice? Factor in the labor cost of implementation and training. For the business trying to find enough capitol to commit, this has to be considered. Paying someone to install the system, debug it, maintain it and train all the staff to use it can cost as much as the system itself in some cases. SIDEBAR: POS System Vendors The startup costs for a POS system can vary quite a bit, depending on the level of sophistication a business requires and the number of employee stations involved. For the small to mid-sized business just starting out, the best advice is to start small and build out the system as needed. There are literally thousands of POS system vendors. It’s not unusual for first time buyers to go through two or three providers before finding the right solution. Business owners would be wise to avoid such costly mistakes and do their homework first. Here are just a few POS vendors to start with that caters to smaller businesses: AccuPOS This well-established vendor has been around for twenty years and sells both the software and hardware to build highly scalable POS systems. Software packages start below $1,000, with at least another $2,000 for the hardware. AccuPOS fully integrates with all the major accounting programs, including Peachtree, QuickBooks and BusinessWorks. AccuPOS has systems customized for both retail and restaurants. Dell Point of Sale Solutions The familiar name may be reassuring for some businesses. There are three complete POS system packages offered for smaller shops, starting at $2,800. Dell bundles in QuickBooks POS software into its systems, another familiar name that would be attractive to many businesses that already use QuickBooks’ accounting software. Bernabei from Earth Garden, who’s been doing her research, offers one warning about QuickBooks POS software, however. “The largest font is 12 points. At our shop, we’re all over 40 and just can’t read it,” says Bernabei. CAM Commerce Solutions It’s one of the best known names in the business, founded in the 80’s and publicly traded on NASDAQ. All of its solutions are Windows-based. CAM Commerce Solutions offers a varied palette of scalable software packages and hardware catering to growing companies. Everest Software The Dulles, Va.- based Everest not only sells POS software for the front end of the business, it sells everything a small to midsize business needs for the backend too. It sells the accounting software, CRM, dashboard analytics, inventory control, shipping and receiving, along with payroll and marketing/ROI analytics. Everest consistently gets high marks from reviewers, although it is known to overwhelm users with a complex interface and data overload.

Six BlackBerry Shortcuts for Business

If you’re one of the millions of mobile businesspersons who use — and rely upon — a BlackBerry smartphone from Waterloo, Ont.-based Research in Motion (RIM), you might not be getting the most out of your handheld device. Oh sure, you take advantage of its reliable “push e-mail,” phone, document viewing and perhaps GPS functionality, but there are a handful of keyboard shortcuts and other assorted tips that can help save you time and aggravation. “When you think about the fact that people often use their BlackBerry for brief and intermittent tasks throughout the day, it’s easy to understand why they want it to be super-intuitive — after all, technology should make your life simpler,” says Mark Guibert, vice president of corporate marketing at RIM. “Some of the most commonly used BlackBerry shortcuts are the ones that make it easier to type messages faster or help you find information quicker.” Richard Shim, research manager for personal computing at IDC, a Framingham, Mass.-based market research firm, says BlackBerrys are productivity tools, and anything you can do to enhance productivity is a benefit to the user. “Navigation, for example, is important on a device with a small screen, so shortcuts that help you navigate easier are a plus.” “Similarly, e-mail on small keyboard could also be a challenge so any shortcut you can build in is a bonus.” The following are a few good shortcuts to consider. Unless otherwise specified, these tips should work with all newer BlackBerry models (8700, 8800 series) but might also work with older handsets, too. When in doubt, check your handset’s documentation or RIM’s website. Easily lock the BlackBerry How many times has your BlackBerry accidentally called someone when slipped into your pocket or purse (or worse, at 1 a.m.)? While we’d still like to see an iPod-like switch on top of the BlackBerry to lock its keyboard, try this as a next-best-thing. A small Stand-By button lies at the top of the handset (near the power button). It might look like a speaker with a slash through it. Hold it down for a second and it will say “Entering Standby Mode,” and your screen will go dark. Essentially this locks your keyboard until you press the Stand-By button again, and yes you will still get incoming phone calls and e-mails. Speed dial If there’s a business contact, family member, or friend you call regularly, you can assign them a speed-dial letter, which is a breeze to use. On QWERTY- and SureType-based BlackBerrys, simply hold down a button from the main screen, such as F, and you will see a pop-up window that says “Assign a Speed Dial to the F key?” After you select “Yes,” it opens your address book to select the contact you wish to assign to that letter (such as home for “H”). If you want to call into your voice mail, the fastest way to do it is to hold down the 1 key. E-mail reading shortcuts Navigating through all your e-mail can be a time-consuming process. Ever stepped off a long flight, turned your BlackBerry on, and found 75 messages in your inbox? Here are a few cool shortcuts: When inside an e-mail, click the N button to go to the “next” message. This is much faster than exiting the e-mail and then scrolling down to open the next one. Press the P button to go to the “previous” e-mail. To jump down a page in a long e-mail, press the Space (spacebar) button. To move up a page, press Shift button and the spacebar at any time. If you’re at the end of a lengthy message and want to quickly go back to the top — don’t scroll all the way up — instead press the T button to move your cursor back to the “top” of the screen. When reading an e-mail, reply to the message quickly by pressing the R key, reply to all by pressing the L or forward the message by pressing the F key. Faster e-mail addresses If you’re manually typing in an email address — such as one that’s being read to you over the phone — you don’t need to enter the symbols area to type “@” and “.” as in mary@smith.com. Instead, when typing an e-mail address into the To, Cc or Bcc field, simply press the spacebar where the “@” and “.” symbols should go and your BlackBerry will automatically place those common symbol there. On a related note, anytime you want to type a period when drafting an e-mail, you can do it quicker but tapping the spacebar twice. Switch between applications quickly “One of my favorites is the ALT-ESCAPE shortcut for switching applications,” adds RIM’s Guibert. “Try sharing that shortcut with a BlackBerry user for the first time and you’ll gain a friend for life.” Delete e-mails quickly You’ve got an inbox full of read messages on your BlackBerry, dating back a week or two. Time for some spring cleaning? There’s a speedy way to do this opposed to clicking on the first e-mail message, holding down the Shift button, and then scrolling to the last one in order to highlight them all. Instead, select a date field, visible in between your emails, such as “Sun, Jan 27, 2008″ and then choose the option to “Delete Prior.” As you might guess, all e-mails sent prior to this date will be deleted from the BlackBerry.

Touch Me, Babe: Computing’s Next Trend

Who could forget the famous scene in the film “Minority Report,” where mid-21st century detective John AndertonÂ – the Tom Cruise character — is using his hands to quickly manipulate data on computer screens? Given the popularity of our modern-day “gesture-based” gadgets, such as the Apple iPhone and HTC Touch, and innovative new computer interfaces, such as HP’s TouchSmart PCs and Microsoft’s “Milan” Surface tabletop, perhaps science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick’s vision of future wasn’t so far off after all. The question, however, remains: Are “touch” applications relevant for the small business market? “Touch screens these days are enjoying the consumer and enterprise spotlight more than ever before, thanks largely to the success of Apple’s iPhone,” says Carmi Levy, senior vice president for strategic consulting at AR Communications, a Toronto-based marketing communications firm. “The device’s innovative multi-touch features have focused new attention on an interface technology that up until this year had been flagging because of flatness in the PDA market.” Now that Apple has seemingly struck gold with its interface, Levy says competitors that weren’t too keen to go touch are suddenly investing in the technology. For example, Research In Motion, the Ontario-based manufacturer of the BlackBerry, which has long insisted it had no plans to integrate touch screen technology into its handheld devices, is reported to have begun work on just such a technology for its next-generation mobile platform after seeing the success of Apple’s iPhone, Levy says. Jupiter Research’s vice president and research director, Michael Gartenberg, mirrors Levy’s admiration for the iPhone. “Touch-screen devices have been around for a long time but Apple went back to the drawing board [and made] touch the primary interface, designed for your fingers to do the walking, instead of trying to add touch to applications designed for keyboard or mouse.” “This is the future — expect a lot more of ‘touch’ in 2008 and beyond, and from many different companies,” adds Gartenberg. Simplicity is ‘name of the game’ Levy says small business is keenly interested in doing more with less because owners don’t have massive IT budgets and they don’t have the time to learn complex new technologies. “Their staff, assuming they even have staff to begin with, is already so multitasked that whatever technology they use just has to work the first time they turn it on,” explains Levy. “Simplicity is the name of the game, and complex interfaces and applications run counter to this need,” continues Levy. “Staff can get up to speed faster on a well-designed touch screen application than they can on a touchless one because features are more easily found and accessed.” Touch is an intuitive human response, Levy says. Software designers who understand this and manage to integrate this thinking into touch-enabled applications will gain advantage. Will Windows offer ‘touch’ A Microsoft engineer recently leaked the new that the next version of the Windows operating system — currently code-named Windows 7 — will also have integrated touch features. Not surprisingly, Microsoft recently showed off a prototype for its Surface tabletop computer, which lets users navigate through data and media using fingertips. “Touch-screen computers can have a productivity advantage but the applications must be optimized for the interface and not trying to fit a square peg in a round hole,” says Gartenberg. “One of the problems with the first Tablet PC applications, for example, is they never felt quite right.” The advantages of touch screens for small businesses tend to fall into two broad categories: employee-enabling and customer-facing, says Levy. “Employee-enabling advantages include more capable mobile applications for in-the-field employees, richer applications in internal-mobile scenarios, such as tablets in warehouses and on medical wards, as well as staff training initiatives,” Levy says. “Customer-facing scenarios include kiosks, retail, and restaurant point-of-sale and customer self-service.” An example of the latter includes self-checkout machines at supermarkets, where consumers use a touch-screen and barcode scanner to pay for products.

Safeguard Your Brand Reputation Online

Think you know what’s being said about your company? Don’t be so sure. There are billions of searches conducted on the Internet on a daily basis and what is being said about your company, or your products, can make or break a sale, says Blake Cahill, vice president of marketing for Visible Technologies, a reputation monitoring company. You may not want to believe it, but first impressions matter. Negative comments about your company online can be detrimental to getting business and keeping business, not to mention scaring away prospective employees. How can you keep a lid on what’s out there? Know what’s being said Most business people either don’t take the time to monitor it or don’t want to look. Take your head out of the sand and at the very least do a Google search of yourself and/or your company. Also, set a Google Alert to let you know when something is being said about you or your company. Both are free options. Peter Kim, an analyst at Forrester Research, suggests other good — and free — options include checking certain blog search engines, such as Technorati and BlogPuls. You can also download a piece of software, called the Buzzmonitor, an open source aggregator conceived and sponsored by the World Bank, of all places. The caveat, of course, is as with anything, especially free anythings, is that you get what you pay for. In the above cases, what you’re getting is free alerts, which are good for a thumbnail sketch, for getting a sense of what’s going on, or getting into the conversation. But these alerts don’t offer any help for devising a strategy to correct misinformation. Have a communication strategy in place Someone on your staff — or, if you need to, hire someone — to handle participation in online conversations. If something happens online, such as a negative post about your company, there should be a reactive post on it. It should take the writer of the post into a direction where they feel that their concerns are being met. To that end, it may mean admitting a mistake and taking whatever corrective measure to satisfy that audience. Next, put out a correction. If there is misinformation out there, you have to put out the correct version, says Joseph Fiore, a vice president at Canada’s CoreX Technology and Solutions Inc., in Milton, Ontario, a reputation monitoring company. Bring in outside help When should you bring in a professional monitoring firm? “When free tools are just aren’t doing it well enough,” says Fiore. “That’s when a paid service is something to consider. Once, a client who was using 31 different tools came to us. She said, ‘I know there’s something I’m missing.’” Monitoring services make the most sense if you have business in different countries. Many, like Fiore’s company, are aware of different language nuances. Even if you do hire an outside firm you shouldn’t just “hand it over” to them, says Fiore. The company should keep you informed, even if it’s just on a macro level, say, when the comments are turning positive or negative. Many of these companies use artificial intelligence to monitor these kinds of patterns, and they can receive alerts. How much does this outside help cost? Typically, they run for as little as $2,000 a month to about $90,000 a year, says Kim. The disparity is largely because monitoring companies work differently. Some formulate strategies for dealing with the negative comments and create dashboards for their clients, instead of just creating an e-mail alert. Part of what the dashboards do is aggregate the comments and enable you to jump into the online conversations more easily and directly. Get promoted What the outside firms can also do for you — although you could do this too, yourself, but its time consuming — is to promote content that you want promoted. Ideally, you’d want that kind of positive and correct information to come up on the first page of a search. Says Cahill, the majority of people only look at the results on the first page. The only way to promote the news/message you want out there is to make sure it shows up on the first page. One example of this is to have a Wikipedia.com page, or to correct one about you that may have incorrect information. Wikipedia.com is an example of a site which shows up very high in search rankings. One caveat: Be wary of firms that say they can eliminate negative content on you. When it gets beyond writing a “please remove this post letter” this can get into a murky area that may backfire, experts say.

The Offsite Office: Manage IT with a Remote Staff

Alvin Toffler was right. The literati’s most famous futurist nailed it back in 1980 with the publication of The Third Wave, the best-selling book that at the time made the bold prediction that we’d all one day gravitate towards what he called “the electronic cottage”. Toffler’s vision of a home-centered workforce enabled by a word that would take 20 more years to work its way into our daily lexicon – telecommuting — read like science fiction at the time. Now, it is as ubiquitous as microwave ovens and minivans. What Toffler wasn’t able to explain at the time was how it would all work from a technological standpoint between boss and employee. Twenty-seven years later, with three quarters of small to midsize businesses managing at least one employee or more remotely according to the Computer Technology Industry Association (CompTIA), those details are still being worked out. For example, a recent CompTIA report found that 80 percent of organizations now allow data access to the company network by mobile workers. However, only 32 percent have some sort of security training for those employees. By far, security is one of the greatest concerns facing small to mid-sized businesses that on average have at least 10 percent of its staff working from somewhere else, the study found. But, that’s not the only challenge. There’s also IT support, issues of who supplies the equipment and connection, and which technologies are best-suited to accommodate both the employee and employer. Outsourcing IT support “If you’re going to formally allow it, you have to be able to support it,” says Mark Tauschek, a senior research analyst from Ontario, Canada-based InfoTech. Most small to midsize businesses tend to have a very small or even no full-time IT staff. At the same time, employees working remotely also tend to work at odd hours especially if they’re logging in from other time zones. This means it’s absolutely essential to provide 24/7 tech support even though its virtually impossible for most smaller companies to provide it. The solution: outsourcing tech support. Advantages: There are many tech support vendors available. Depending on the size of the company and the complexity of its needs, pricing is very competitive and is usually packaged offering different levels of support. It can be as simple as a 24-hour call center functioning as a round the clock help desk. It can scale up to a remote access support vendor that not only supports users, but that lone IT staffer in-house who needs help remotely changing access levels, settings, and configurations. Disadvantages: There are many tech support vendors out there. However, like anything else, you get what you pay for. So buyer beware: bad support is no support. Also with outsourcing, there is always a loss of control and less understanding of the employee’s needs and the priorities of the business. Bottom line: the IT staffer is going to do a better job, provided he or she exists in the first place and is on the clock when problems occur. Also in the case of a remote office, chances are any company big enough to have a remote office is also big enough to have a decent size IT staff. At that point, maybe the company can provide its own tech support. At the very least, send someone out to make a routine house call at least a couple of times a year. Let the employee supply the connection In most cases, work from home employees supply the gear and the connection and just log in. Chances are they have it all set up anyway for their own after hours personal use. ”It’s not like 10 years ago, when there wasn’t the kind of high bandwidth connection available at the consumer level. Back then, employers had to supply the T1 lines to ensure executives had the access speed to get their work down,” says Todd Carter, author of the Wireless-All-in-One Desk Reference for Dummies. Those days are gone, so why reinvent the wheel? Advantages: Let the staffer’s Internet service provider of choice service the connection. Work it out in advance to either come up with a fair split of the bill deciding what’s appropriate to expense back to the company. Another option for a willing employee is to just take the write-off of an un-reimbursed business expense and call it a day. Disadvantages: The biggies are loss of control and security risks. If the employee is providing their own gear and connection to dial-in, the company has no say in what technologies are being used and may not be happy with how well they integrate with the company network. Even with a secure VPN, allowing someone to dial-in with their own connection and their own gear is a security risk opening the door to viruses, worms and other “weapons of mass disruption” that can wreck havoc. Business owners may save a few bucks from letting the employee pick up the tab, but pay more heavily in the end by not keeping it clean separating work gear from home gear. Best technology: SSL VPN It’s a given that the connection between a home office or remote office and the company network has to be secure. And there are many options to choose from these days. The simplest and increasingly popular choice is a Shared Socket Layer (SSL) Virtual Private Network (VPN). Advantages: It’s relatively inexpensive, web-based (and therefore a user can login from anywhere with a login and password for security), and it’s encrypted to boot Disadvantages: An SSL VPN is only as good as the vendor selling the service. They also tend to be one size fits all. An SSL VPN may not be the best choice for a business with industry specific security needs and other kinds of specializations (like the financial industry or health care). For some organizations, other types of in-house VPNs maintained by the IT staff or a wide area network (WAN) may be the best way to go. Deciding factors and conclusion It really boils down to the size of the company and its capacity to handle IT support for remote staff. Cheap outsourcing solutions, employee-provided connections and gear, and a Web-based SSL VPN are likely the most sensible options for the at-home worker. In-house support, perhaps combined with a help desk vendor, along with a WAN connection from the main office may be the most responsible choice for a remote office with multiple employees. SIDEBAR: Remote Access Solutions There are a whole host of companies online offering remote access services. Most are modestly priced with some costing as little as $10 a month. Functionality is generally tiered with stripped down versions for the user who just wants to do simple things like shift around documents or use certain applications from a distance to more sophisticated features for IT professionals who need to take control remotely of a computer and troubleshoot problems or change configurations. Here are a few companies to check out: GoToMyPC is an increasingly popular online start-up company that offers remote access to any PC. Services are tiered for single users up to corporate accounts that can accommodate up to 50 users. This is a handy solution for road warriors who need to access their work computer remotely, as well as IT professionals who need to take remote control of an offsite employee’s computer for maintenance or to fix a problem. Dell Computers If the business uses Dell computers or is contemplating making the investment, then look no further for a remote access vendor. It’s just one more service Dell now bundles into the sale (for a price, of course). Instead of frustrating calls with tech support describing the problem and then being walked through the solution by a faceless techie over the phone, Dell support can simply take control of the PC and fix the problem keystroke by keystroke on their own. LogMeIn Similar to GoToMyPC, LogMeIn not only offers remote access tech support, but remote automatic backups and instantly configured VPNs connecting multiple PCs.

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