For close to a year, rumors have been quietly circulating about the possibility that Amazon might expand upon its hardware offerings by introducing an Android tablet; on July 14^th, these rumors grew much louder, when a Wall Street Journal article claimed that the Amazon tablet will definitely be released in October.  According to the WSJ, the tablet would have a 9-inch screen, no camera, and would be entirely designed and manufactured by Amazon-contracted third-parties.  Early next year, Amazon is expected to release an additional tablet, designed entirely in-house by Amazon.  Questions, of course, abound:  Is this a smart move for Amazon?  What do they hope to gain from releasing their own tablet?  Can they honestly expect to best Apple in the tablet market? Read More

Well, here’s some good news for small business owners who’ve had difficulties integrating their company’s communications systems:  AT&T has just unveiled a new recommendation tool for small businesses, which specifically tailors its service recommendations based on the unique size and needs of your small business.

Rather than attempting to patch together a complete suite of telecommunications services from various providers, or getting lost in a miasma of mixed residential and commercial offerings, the AT&T Small Business recommendation system provides you with an array of integrated service options, which should suit the needs of practically any small business out there.  Not only does AT&T’s tool provide a thorough array of wireless, landline, and broadband options (including minutes-sharing programs with employees, wireless tethering, and support for multiple locations), it also provides options for technical support, data storage, web hosting, and even web design.

A brief video shows how the system works, but honestly, after using the recommendation tool for a few minutes, I found the recommendation system to be so intuitive and user-friendly that you can probably just skip the video and go right to the recommendation system itself.  After answering some general questions about your company (e.g., whether it’s an existing company, or one that’s just starting up; industry type; whether employees are on the road, or working in multiple locations, etc.), the recommendation system will begin to ask some specific questions about the needs of your company (Does your company communicate via text messages?  Do you email customers and employees from your mobile device?).  Once you’re done (and it shouldn’t take more than a couple minutes to enter all the information), you’ll be provided with a comprehensive breakdown of AT&T’s recommended services for your company, along with a full pricing schedule.
This is really a fantastic offering for any small business owner looking to stay on top of their telecommunications services.  Even if you company already has a full suite of telecom services in place, it’s worth taking a look at AT&T’s Small Business recommendation tool; you might discover some services you hadn’t thought of before, or you might find that there’s money to be saved by switching to a fully-integrated, single-carrier solution for your small business’s communications needs.

I’ve been curious about the Xbox Kinect system for quite some time, and last night, I finally bit the bullet and purchased one.  Simply put, it’s a fantastic device, with flawless voice recognition and an innovative use of physical gestures to control the Xbox environment.  My decision to finally buy a Kinect was largely spurred by a recent Wired article about how the Kinect has been a massive game-changer for robotics researchers, as the device can easily be hacked, turning the game controller into a sophisticated, integrated array of field sensors that previously cost close to half a million dollars.  Microsoft, in a decided break from its longstanding animus towards hackers, has embraced this secondary market for the Kinect, recently announcing that it will release a software development kit to allow users to integrate the Kinect with their Windows 7 PCs, and even more recently, announced that they would soon offer a full-fledged robotics software development kit, as well.

Microsoft’s attitude towards the Kinect is emblematic of a larger sea-change in the electronics industry, with an ever-growing number of companies handing consumers the keys to their previously “black-boxed” products.  Cellphone giant HTC, for instance, has pledged that all of its phones will ship with unlocked bootloaders, thereby allowing users to easily root their phones, and access features and functionality unavailable within the stock mobile operating environment.  All of these developments got me wondering; how do small businesses feel about “hacking” the products they use on a daily basis?

Perhaps “hacking” is too strong a term for the type of activities I’ve outlined above, wherein manufacturers themselves are opening their products to allow a far greater degree of user customization and control.  While such developments may be wonderful for individual end-users, it seems as though the implications of this “Great Opening” might be mixed for small business and enterprise clients, as this increased flexibility can bring issues of intra-system compatibility and compliance along with it.  If you’re a small business owner with five employees who are always on the road, rooting their Android work phones to allow free wireless tethering might seem like a great idea, but what happens if those devices no longer qualify for warranty replacement?

As a small business owner or employee, what have your experiences been with “hacking” and “rooting” work-devices?  Any success stories?  Any horror stories?  Tell us your experiences in the comments section, and we’ll include them in a future follow-up to this post.

The Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project released the results of a new survey yesterday, which finds that 35% of American adults own a smartphone.  Moreover, 68% of smartphone owners use their device to access the Internet on a daily basis, and 25% use a smartphone as their primary device for accessing the Internet.  With smartphones clearly on track to become a ubiquitous device, it’s worth thinking about what the current state of smartphone adoption means for small-business owners, especially those who primarily operate Web-based retail operations.

It’s probably no surprise that smartphone adoption is currently highest amongst the young and the wealthy, but it’s still worth taking a look at some hard numbers: 59% of adults in households earning more than $75,000 a year own smartphones, and 58% of Americans between the ages of 25 and 34 are smartphone owners.  Interestingly, it seems that age is a stronger indicator of smartphone ownership than income, as ownership rates among 18-29 year-olds living in households earning less than $30,000/year is equal to the ownership rate of those living in households earning the national average (which is roughly $45,000/year).  Smartphone users are, by and large, absolutely giddy about their devices, as evidenced by the word cloud Pew created based on their respondents’ descriptions of their devices (fig. 1).

So, for small-businesses who heavily rely on their Web presence to generate revenue, what does this all mean?  For starters, maybe it’s time to stop creating “mobile” variations of your website—which are often little more than stripped-down, functionality impaired versions of the full website—and focus instead on making the main website more easily navigable by small-format touchscreen devices.  Eschew the Flash-heavy splash pages and complicated drop-down menus, and offer a clean interface that scales seamlessly from Android smartphones, to iPads, to Windows 7 desktops.

If you’re thinking about creating mobile “apps” to allow users to access your online business, consider whether the development costs are truly worth it; if the app can provide features and functionality not readily attainable through traditional website (such as location-aware offers, or integration with other mobile apps), then it might be worth it. Otherwise, those development costs might be better spent streamlining and enhancing the main website (as argued above).  Even the venerable Amazon, for instance, has fallen into the mobile-app-trap, as their general Android app doesn’t really improve upon the Amazon experience available through the stock Android Web browser, and is therefore largely unnecessary.  BUT, Amazon’s MP3 Store and Kindle apps are brilliant, as they allow easy mobile access to particular portions of Amazon’s offerings, and integrate seamlessly with other apps and functions on users’ mobile devices (the MP3 store app, for instance, can download music purchases into whatever music player you might be running on your smartphone).

The takeaway: Pew’s research shows just how quickly and deeply smartphone devices are being integrated into our daily lives, and we can infer that, based on their relatively small touchscreens, these devices are being used more for consuming than producing (if you need to create and manipulate a large spreadsheet, you’re probably going to do it on a full-fledged laptop or desktop).  Throw tablets (another device category designed primarily for consumption) into the mix, and we’re suddenly talking about a majority of users’ online commerce experiences occurring through devices that (typically) can’t run Flash, have awkward text-input interfaces, and do a poor job of scaling large-format websites.  The mobile online experience is no longer a “developing market,” it’s now rapidly becoming the dominant path through which consumers are engaging in online commercial activity.  Stay ahead of the curve, and treat “mobile” as the new norm for website design and development.