Bill.com has launched a new set of electronic billing features that help businesses and accountants make it easier for customers to pay their bills, online or offline. READ MORE
About a month ago I posted a story about two tech writers who decided upon opposite ways to deal with e-mail overload. IT World’s Dan Tynan vowed to deal with every message delivered to his inbox for a week, which he said worked pretty well. TechCrunch’s MG Siegler ditched e-mail altogether, pronouncing that if you wanted to reach him you’d have to get to him a different way. Siegler’s month is up and after ignoring the roughly 15,000 messages he received during that time, it’s no wonder he says never has he missed anything less than e-mail. READ MORE
It’s nearly impossible to imagine conducting business today without electronic mail. From the early 1970s, when an engineer, sitting at one computer, experimented by sending a message to himself on another computer right beside the first, email has become a crucial tool for communicating in the digital age. The equivalent of electronic letters, written without putting pen (or even printer ink) to paper, billions of messages traverse the globe daily from one computer to another in the same building, or across continents, almost instantaneously. Email use will nearly double in the next four years, as the number of active mailboxes increases from 1.4 billion users this year to 2.5 billion in 2010, according to the Radicati Group, a Palo Alto, Calif. market research firm. Radicati estimates that 183 billion email messages were sent per day by the end of 2006. “There’s no doubt that email in the workplace is the electronic communications tool of choice,” says Nancy Flynn, director of the ePolicy Institute. How email works Early email involved sending monochromatic text from one computer to another, and evolved to allow communication using images, photos, and sound (via attachments). Once relegated to computers running an email application, email is now readily available via Internet browsers, and hence accessible via portable devices including cell phones. The way email works is simple: someone types the address of the recipient, a subject, and a message, hits send, and the message is routed to its recipient. When the recipient logs in to his or her email account, or the next time the application collects messages, the message will appear in his or her email inbox. But how does the message get delivered? An email address is similar to a physical address: it indicates the person and location where the message will be delivered. In the address user@domain, for example, “user” is the intended recipient of the message, the @ sign separates the individual user’s name from the name of the server or domain, and “domain” is the site where that user’s mail is managed, similar to the street, city, state and zip code in old fashioned “snail mail” (sent using the U.S. Postal Service). Transmission facilitated by protocols The message is transmitted across wires (or wirelessly) from the recipient’s computer or device, to a business’s server, for example, or a server run by an Internet Service Provider. Software protocols direct the mail to its destination. A protocol called Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) forwards or directs mail from the sender to the recipient. Another protocol called Post Office Protocol version 3 (POP3) in essence pulls the message down from the server to which it was sent and into the application or browser interface on the recipient’s desktop (or PDA or phone). Internet Mail Access Protocol (IMAP) allows a local client to access mail on a remote server. Most applications support all three protocols, which do the background work to route messages to the correct destination. Besides an email address and email account, an email application is required for sending and receiving email. Writing a message requires an email application, like Microsoft Outlook, running on a PC or PDA, or an Internet browser that allows a user to gain access to email services running on a host — whether it’s a company’s mail server, or a free email service like Gmail or Hotmail. Regardless of the email application, one thing is for certain: email use has enabled small and mid-size businesses to better respond to customers, do business across long distances, and keep communication costs low.
Sometimes the simplest tools can make the biggest difference in how productive your business is. Every year, I pick five software or hardware tools that promise to make the biggest bang for the smallest buck and recommend them to business owners. These are tools that you don’t have to be a geek to use. This year, however, I see so many fabulous technology tools — or technology-related tools — that I couldn’t limit my list to just five. This year’s list has 10. Here are my choices for the top 10 tech tools for 2007. iPod Shuffle – The newest iPod on the market is a tiny inch-and-a-half long gadget that clips on your clothes for convenience. It has 1 GB of memory and stores up to 240 songs. And it only costs $79. Load it up with songs or business podcasts, and you’ll always be entertained and informed, whether on a plane, waiting in a doctor’s office, exercising — wherever. My question is: why wouldn’t you get one? Laptop wheelie bag – I used to think nothing of lugging a seven-pound laptop plus a couple of pounds of cords and gear over my shoulder while traveling. No wonder I often had a stiff neck for days afterwards. Then one day a friend gave me a beautiful leather briefcase on wheels — and I was hooked. If you do much traveling with your laptop, a wheelie bag means you arrive at your destination without feeling like you need a chiropractor. Bluetooth headset – If you watch much TV, you’ve probably seen the commercial with the guy who says, “Bluetooth! What is Bluetooth? I don’t know!” That’s how I felt for the longest time. But one day a colleague explained that Bluetooth simply let me have a wireless headset for my wireless phone. I bought a Bluetooth headset recommended by my cell phone provider, and life has never been the same. I can clip the headset on, walk into another room away from the phone and still continue my conversation. Ah, liberation. Free Google account – Have you noticed the growing number of free tools available from Google these days? You can get everything from email (over 2.5 GB of storage) to spreadsheet software, to image editing software and much more. Set up a Google account and access everything from one account. A “must have.” Kate Spade notecards – Today, 80 percent of my correspondence is electronic. But to stand out in an electronic world, go counter-culture and send handwritten paper thank-you notes. Choose something stylish, modern and classy, like Kate Spade Classic cards. You will be memorable, I guarantee it. U.S.Postal Service website – And when you are sending those handwritten notecards, remember the dramatically improved U.S. Postal Service website. You can calculate and purchase postage online; print mailing labels with postage; schedule a pickup of a package, and track delivery. You can even create direct mail campaigns from start to finish, all from your computer. You may never need to set foot inside a Post Office again. Accounting software – Statistics say that over 50 percent of small businesses do not have accounting software, but still use paper ledgers or spreadsheets. Accounting software tracks and organizes your finances; makes it much easier to get prepared for tax time, and lets you run sophisticated reports that help you stay on top of your business. Without accounting software, I would not have half the reports and insight that I have currently — it would just be too labor intensive to run reports by hand. Intuit’s Quicken and QuickBooks are popular and used by six million small businesses. Microsoft is now offering its Microsoft Office Accounting Express 2007 as a free download. Virtual Switchboard – My business is a virtual one, in the sense that everyone who does work for the company does it from their own locations and my “headquarters” is really just the place where I happen to be working that day. With an inexpensive, software-based virtual switchboard, we are able to have one business phone number for all of us, even though we are spread out over the country. Customers and others can call one number to reach us all, and we can forward messages back and forth. The price is right, too, at just a few hundred dollars a year. PayPal -- Millions of small businesses — including mine — would find business a lot more expensive and laborious without PayPal. PayPal is the shopping cart that I use on my websites. I use PayPal to make purchases, especially on eBay and other places where I may not feel comfortable giving out my credit card information. I even use PayPal to do much of my invoicing, and receive payments from a number of customers. It is now an essential part of my business processes. Smartphone – Smartphones combine the features of a wireless phone with a personal digital assistant (PDA). You have more choice that ever and today’s smartphones are coming down in price. Smartphones and similar devices are the best choice today if you want to send and receive email regularly from your phone. Technology is no longer only for the tech-savvy among us. It is a necessary component of every small business today. It saves money and time, and gives your business a competitive edge. Embrace it and your business can move ahead farther and faster in 2007. Anita Campbell is a writer, speaker and radio talk show host who closely follows trends in the small business market at her site, Small Business Trends.
Following is a sampling of the major players in the wireless data-collection industry, listed alphabetically. For more information, please visit the companies’ Web sites. Company: HHP (Hand Held Products, Inc.)Headquarters: Skaneateles Falls, N.Y.URL: www2.hhp.com/hhp/index.tplSpecialties: Makes image-based data-collection solutions for mobile, wireless, and transaction-processing applications. Serves retail distribution, warehousing, logistics, and manufacturing markets, among others. Major customers include the U.S. Postal Service, Federal Express, Coca-Cola, and Continental Airlines. Company: ICS, Inc.Headquarters: Jacksonville, Fla. URL: www.icsfl.comSpecialties: Develops and implements software for supply-chain management, including wireless applications. Products include LogiMax warehouse logistics-management solution. Company: Intermec Technologies Corp.Headquarters: Everett, Wash. URL: www.intermec.comSpecialties: Makes integrated data-collection products, including bar-code scanners, wireless LANs, and development software. Customers include: Dee Electronics, Davis Cookie Co., Bass Pro Shops, and Shenandoah’s Pride Dairy. Company: Psion Teklogix Headquarters: Mississauga, Ontario, Canada URL: www.psionteklogix.comSpecialties: Makes handheld, vehicle-mounted, and speech-directed wireless data devices. Products used for warehousing, distribution, transportation and logistics, and by repair, inspection, and field teams. Specializes in solutions for companies with multiple sites, complex operations, and large inventories. Major customers include Great Lakes Cheese, Port of Corpus Christi Cold Storage, Lego, and Toyota. Company: The Ryzex GroupHeadquarters: Bellingham, Wash. URL: www.ryzex.comSpecialties: Develops and services integrated bar-code, data-collection, and wireless technology solutions using hardware and software from many vendors. Offers rental and leasing options as well as less-costly refurbished equipment. Company: Symbol Technologies Inc. Headquarters: Holtsville, N.Y. URL: www.symbol.com Specialties: Makes bar-code laser scanners and data-capture devices, mobile and handheld computers, and wireless networks. Serves retailers, logistics and transportation businesses, manufacturers, health-care providers, and hospitality companies, among others. Through agreement with Xplore Technologies Corp., Symbol recently began marketing a rugged tablet PC. Company also makes module transforming any Handspring Visor into a bar-code scanner. Company: TAL Technologies Inc. Location: Philadelphia URL: www.taltech.comSpecialties: Makes variety of data-acquisition and bar-code software products for wireless networks; also manufactures bar-code scanners. Analysts suggest considering the following questions when investigating wireless data-collection systems: Do you need bar-code scanning capability? How big an area must the wireless network cover? Can the vendor accommodate your needs if your company grows or moves into larger space? How will the system work with your existing IT environment? How rugged are the handheld computers? Have they been tested to withstand being dropped, and if so, what were the test results? What other options are offered for mobile devices? For instance, can they be mounted on vehicles or worn on the body?
E-mail, without doubt, is the Internet’ s killer app. It is among the first services users get hooked to when they log on to the Internet. During the past few years, as people have started e-mailing everything from letters to greeting cards to colleagues, family and friends, the world has become a smaller place. As this volume of e-mail explodes, the amount of mail being sent through the postal system – or snail mail, as it is derisively called – should decline, right? Well, yes and no. The relationship between the two is more complicated than many people realize. Take America Online, for instance. As the provider of Internet access to some 28 million subscribers around the world, AOL facilitates billions of e-mail exchanges. And yet, the company is also the fastest-growing user of direct mail in the U.S. How did AOL get its 28 million subscribers? In large part, by pooling together direct mail lists and using trusted, reliable snail mail to ship several million CDs containing its free software to potential customers. And each time AOL upgrades its software – it recently launched version 6.0 – this deluge of direct mail continues, offering a windfall to the postal service. In fact, the signature message “You’ ve got mail,” which AOL e-mail users know well, could apply with complete accuracy to AOL’ s snail mail. That insight into the complex relationship between e-mail and paper mail comes from Michael J. Critelli, CEO of Pitney Bowes, a Stamford, Conn.-based provider of mail and document management services. With $4 billion in revenues derived from activities that include providing postage meters to businesses that churn out massive volumes of mail, Pitney Bowes stands at the turbulent intersection of technologies that threaten to transform the world’ s postal services. As such, Critelli has thought hard about the impact of technology – and especially the Internet – on the business of mail. He discussed some of Pitney Bowes’ experiences in this regard at a conference in Philadelphia organized on April 6 by the Reginald H. Jones Center for Management Policy, Strategy and Organization. A couple of years ago, in the heyday of the dot-com boom, Pitney Bowes looked like an old economy dinosaur that web-enabled upstarts would easily drive to its knees. The Internet, according to Critelli, threatened Pitney Bowes’ s business in three ways. First, the company’ s core postage meter business was under attack from purveyors of Internet postage. After all, why should anyone rent a clunky meter from Pitney Bowes when stamps could be downloaded much more conveniently over the web? The second threat, more long term in nature, came from the possibility that e-mail would gradually supplant letter mail. And the third threat stemmed from the growing view that the Internet would finally usher in a paperless society. So have these threats become real dangers for Pitney Bowes or have they proved to be bogeymen? Says Critelli: “Like virtually every major player in the technology sector, Pitney Bowes stock is down about 50% from its all-time high. [ It closed at $34.78 on April 10.] But though I clearly have no occasion to celebrate success, we continue to survive despite these apparent threats.” Critelli argues that though the Internet has changed Pitney Bowes’ s business, it has certainly not overwhelmed it. That, however, is hardly true of the company’ s would-be rivals. Consider the first threat – web-based postage. When companies such as Stamps.com and e-Stamp came along some years ago, they bragged that they would revolutionize the mail business by allowing users to download postage from the Internet and print stamps on every printer. “Today, e-Stamp has exited the business and Stamps.com is on life support,” says Critelli. “Even our own Internet postage product, Click Stamp Online, has not produced big revenues.” Why not? Critelli argues that online stamps failed to take off for two reasons. First, its advocates failed to realize how long it takes for change to occur in the heavily regulated postage business. The U.S. Postal Service, like postal authorities around the world, regulates the mail industry closely to ensure the prevention of counterfeit postage. Operating in this highly regulated environment adds considerably to business costs. “Great technology, even if it is affordable and promises real value to consumers, will not succeed if government regulation significantly lowers value or increases its cost,” says Critelli. “The U.S. Postal Service will ultimately find a way to balance its need for revenue security with the need for mailers to have a user-friendly Internet postage product, but that effort will take time and further innovation and may involve deep process changes.” In other words, the market for web-based postage simply did not develop as fast as e-Stamp and Stamp.com had expected. The second reason, notes Critelli, is that for any business to succeed, the cost of acquiring customers and providing them with services must be lower than the revenues generated from transactions with those customers. In the case of Internet postage, “the cost of acquiring a single customer was very high – it involved tremendous advertising expenditures – and revenues were very low.” Critelli claims that some companies paid as much as $500-600 to acquire a single customer, while the net revenues they got from those customers were in the $3.50 range – clearly not a sustainable business model. “The broader lesson here is that even well-accepted technologies will fail if the cost of getting them to the customers and supporting them is too high,” Critelli says. Online stamp companies have paid the price for disregarding these principles. E-Stamp announced last November that it was leaving the Internet postage business to focus on supply-chain execution. In February it announced that during 2000 it had lost $112.8 million on revenues of $5.3 million. Stamps.com in 2000 lost $122.7 million on revenues of $15.2 million. The company announced in March that it is liquidating its business-to-business subsidiary, Encryptix. Neopost, a European company active in the same business, has also had its share of problems in its online postage activities. Critelli points out that the second threat – that e-mail will kill snail mail – has also proved less daunting for Pitney Bowes than it had initially appeared. “Total mail volume is still increasing, although some segments of the mail stream are being affected by e-mail substitution,” he says. In his presentation, Critelli analyzed the mail market by breaking it up into segments and evaluated the impact of e-mail on each segment. The household-originated letter mail market, he says, constitutes some 10% of the mail stream in the U.S. This market has been heavily affected by the growth of e-mail, but its decline has had almost no effect on Pitney Bowes, which concentrates on the business market. Business mail is of two types: It includes transaction mail (bills) and marketing mail (catalogs, brochures, etc.). Transaction mail – which makes up 40% of the U.S. mail stream – has not declined as a result of e-mail. The reasons include the increase in the number of households in the U.S. as well as an increase in transaction activity among consumers. While payment of bills online is growing, this impact has been offset by the increased volume of transaction mail. “The deregulation of energy utilities, telecommunications, and Internet and television service providers are driving a greater number of messages targeted at each customer,” Critelli says. In addition, while electronic bill payment is growing, its growth has been relatively slow. A major reason for this, notes Critelli, is that when companies send out bills to their customers, they usually include a marketing pitch in the same envelope. “Billers look at billing statements as a part of their customer relationship management.” Critelli points out that companies are unlikely to let intermediaries consolidate the bill payment business unless they can figure out a way not to lose control over their communication with customers. Marketing-oriented business mail, which accounts for another 40% of the U.S. mail stream, continues to grow despite the proliferation of e-mail, says Critelli. “The Internet and Internet-based customer relationships are actually stimulating growth in direct mail and will continue to do so,” he explains, as the AOL example clearly shows. The Internet has also spurred an increase in another type of snail mail: Package delivery. Companies such as Amazon are shipping out more packages as e-commerce allows them to serve customers in remote locations. Moreover, some 15% to 20% of goods sold online are returned, which adds to the demand for package delivery. Households, too, are shipping more packages than before, in part because web sites like eBay permit more person-to-person transactions. In all these instances, the coming of the Internet has stimulated the demand for traditional postal services rather than supplanted it. As for the future of paper and the impending paperless society, Critelli maintains that this is a complex phenomenon. “When I joined Pitney Bowes 22 years ago, people were discussing the paperless society,” he says. “I believe paper has a long future.” The ways in which consumers interact with paper may change as a result of technology. For example, stand-alone fax machines have declined in use – a factor that has affected Pitney Bowes’ s fax business – and copier sales have slowed down. Still, printer sales volumes have been growing fast, largely because business users often send documents as e-mail attachments that are printed out from desktops, and because many people print out their e-mail messages to review or file them. Summing up the ways in which the Internet has had an impact on Pitney Bowes, Critelli says that the web has dramatically transformed “how we communicate internally and externally.” The company uses the web to communicate more and more with its customers. It is a myth, however, that an increase in web-based communications will reduce the need for human contact. “We haven’ t seen declines in call-center services,” Critelli says. “On the contrary, as products become more complex, customers want high-tech and high-touch contact.” Charles Schwab, the online brokerage firm, has had the same experience. “When Charles Schwab went online, the company believed that the 1,400 employees in its call centers would eventually go away. Schwab now employs 2,800 people in its call centers to support the volume of customer questions about its new products and services. The broader lesson from all this is that the ‘ virtualness’ of an Internet-based or enhanced business model is anything but virtual.” As Critelli navigates Pitney Bowes through these uncertain times, he often remembers a maxim he heard from Ian Morrison, a consultant and author of books such as The Second Curve – Managing the Velocity of Change. “Morrison told me long ago that in any revolutionary technology, the pace of change is overestimated in the short run, and the magnitude of change is underestimated in the long run. That is absolutely true of the Internet.” All materials copyright © 2001 of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
