Category: Small Biz Go Mobile

Re-up your social media game for 2013 with these tips!

by Mario Armstrong

This year, among other New Year’s resolutions, I decided to dedicate myself to increasing my following on social media, interacting more with followers, and inserting myself into more conversations online. But now that we’re in the middle of February, and things are starting to slow down and we’re all finding that we’re losing some of the momentum we had at the beginning of the year, it’s worth going back to those resolutions and offering you some tips I’ve discovered.

1. Create a schedule and stick to it.

Some days I have plenty of free time to engage and interact with followers on Twitter and Facebook. Especially when there are major events like the State of the Union Address, the Super Bowl, and the Grammy Awards, it’s easy to find huge audiences to connect with online. But other days there isn’t nearly as much going on and it’s a stretch to find content to share and discuss online.

One thing that I’ve found useful is making sure that I have a minimum schedule of the number of interactions or posts I’m making on my social media accounts. You can start with something low, even 1 or 2 tweets a day, when done consistently, can have a huge impact long-term. But the trick is not to simply have a schedule, but to review it every week and analyze what’s working and what isn’t.

Once a week I try and sit down to look back over my engagement and interactions on social media. I check to see how I’m doing against my schedule: did I meet my goal for my minimum Facebook posts and tweets each day? I also ask myself questions like: what topics sparked interest, and what posts fell flat? Which hashtags caught on and which went unnoticed?

By constantly evaluating and re-evaluating what you’re doing, as well as setting a schedule, you’re on the right track for social media success. You can read the rest of this post on AT&T’s Networking Exchange blog by clicking this link.

New $.99 Touchscreen Unite Hotspot from AT&T

by Katherine Elsasser

unite hotspotIf you’re truly a mobile power user, it makes sense to have all your bases covered when it comes to having internet access – there’s nothing worse than being stranded in a tight spot when you really need the connectivity. That’s where a hotspot can be a lifesaver: it uses your cell signal to provide access, but can also “broadcast” that signal to other devices, like your laptop or tablet: the new Unite hotspot can power up to 10 devices at one time.

Plus it costs all of $.99. That’s a contract price and it does involve a data plan, but if you’ve been considering purchasing a dedicated hotspot device, it’s hard to see how that could get more affordable. The Unite also boasts battery life of up to 10 hours while running or 10 days of standby. Plus it’s a touchscreen, so all the stats you could ever need are displayed conveniently: data usage stats and the status of your Wi-Fi network is displayed right on the home screen. For more info on the hotspot, check out AT&T’s website for Premier customers.

Have you thought about getting a dedicated hotspot device? If you’ve ever used one, what are your thoughts? Let us know in the comments!

Mario’s Take on the 4 Disruptive Technologies to Watch in 2013

by admin

This article is part of Mario’s series for AT&T Networking Exchange, a blog dedicated to small business. Go here to read the entire post.

blackberry q10
the future is mobile

Gartner, the well-known information technology research and advisory firm, recently released a list of its top 10 technologies and trends for 2013. The list covers a wide range of technologies that will most disrupt IT and business-as-usual over the next twelve months. Today I’m going to take a look at some of their findings and share my own insights and opinions.

1. Mobile devices

According to Gartner’s research, 2013 will be the year mobile devices completely take over the computing landscape. In 2013, mobile phones are expected to overtake PCs as the devices most commonly used to access the web worldwide and by 2015, Gartner is predicting that 80% of phones will be smartphones. These are absolutely wild findings, and, if true, mean big changes in the way we all do business.

Last year, I talked about how the world has gone mobile and how small businesses need to ensure they had a mobile-friendly website ready to go. This year, not only do you need a mobile website, but you also need to be thinking about how an app or a new, mobile-friendly business model could re-invigorate your bottom line. Whether you sell products, provide services, or are an individual looking to turn yourself into a brand, this is the year to ensure you have a strong presence on mobile devices through social media, a website, and possibly even an app, But that brings us to our next topic that tackles the platforms and technologies that may power your new mobile business.

Click here to continue reading this article at Network Exchange.

What is Pheed? Can it Help You Build Your Brand?

by Katherine Elsasser

Believe it or not, there’s a new social network coming up that’s already popular enough to deserve your attention. It’s called Pheed, and it combines some of the best features of Tumblr and Twitter to create a real-time media stream (as if you weren’t surrounded by enough media already).

new social network pheed brand building
Pheed in action

Like Twitter or Tumblr, the way you see Pheed content is by following others: when you sign up, Pheed will offer you choices about who to follow and ask you to pick 3 to get started. The content those users create is called their Pheed. (In case you’re curious, I chose users “Airstreamin” “Mulletvision” and “Chef Pasquale.” Fun.) The content I see so far is super heavy on pictures, complete with watermarks of the user’s url at the bottom. Pheed gives your the option to copyright your images and can automatically add the watermark, a great idea for both advertising and to help solve the ongoing image attribution drama that plagues just about every social site on the web. It’s also constantly streaming in real-time, and between the emphasis on speed and the visual, it’s clear this is not the right forum for your 3,000 word thinkpiece on the state of…anything.

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Are New Phones, a New OS and a New Name Enough to Save BlackBerry?

by Katherine Elsasser
blackberry q10
the new BlackBerry Q10

Yesterday’s huge announcements from Research in Motion begs two big questions: will the new offerings be any good, and will they be good enough? The company announced that they will officially be changing their name to BlackBerry, showing that they’re willing to put everything they’ve got into the BlackBerry product line, for better or worse. So what did the BlackBerry company show off?

First up, there are two new phones, the Z10 and the Q10. The z10 should look familiar to you, insofar as it could be a phone from any manufacturer, with a 4.2″ touchscreen and matte black finish. Which isn’t to say that the design isn’t nice — it is, it’s just not that revolutionary. The Q10, on the other hand, preserves what so many of us loved about BlackBerry in the first place: it’s a got a physical keyboard (in addition to a touchscreen). That’s huge. Most of the major manufacturers have followed Apple’s lead and abandoned the keyboard altogether, but there may still be a market for that keyboard yet. Unfortunately, we won’t find out for another few months, since the Q10 isn’t scheduled for release till April. The Z10 should be available from all the major carriers (except Sprint) in March.

But what about the OS? BlackBerry (fka RIM) is neither a hardware nor a software manufacturer, and it’s important they get both parts of the new BlackBerry experience right. So far, the most revolutionary idea of the new BlackBerry 10 OS is the notification hub, which aggregates email along with SMS, BB messages, and notifications from apps like Twitter into a centralized “inbox.” The idea is that it is more convenient to respond to all of your incoming communications from one place, and that functionally it doesn’t make a lot of sense to treat emails differently from Twitter notifications.

Why is all this so important? RIM’s market share has been dropping for some time, and most of their offerings seem to be on life support. Their last major offering, a tablet called the Playbook, didn’t get a lot of positive press. It takes a lot of time and money to release a new product onto the market, and these new offerings have already been delayed many times. This could be a last stand for BlackBerry, but we have some time to see whether they will be able to generate enough excitement to make a real comeback.

Who is Huawei? Meet the Major Cellphone Maker You’ve Never Heard Of

by Katherine Elsasser
Huawei Ascend D2
Huawei Ascend D2

Huawei was big at CES. And that’s especially crazy, because a lot of the big guys (Samsung, Apple, Nokia) weren’t. So it was a great time for a less familiar brand to introduce itself. So who is Huawei?

Huawei is a telecom founded in China in the late 80s and still based in Shenzhen. It has offices around the world (including the US) and had a profit of 3.7 Billion in 2010. Yeah, 3.7 BILLION. It’s got a huge market share in China, but the company is also making huge inroads in Russia, India, and North America. They’re also trying to get into the U.S. market. According to CNET, they’ve hired a consulting firm that will help them raise their profile in the US.

But the problem with Huawei is that even though they have plenty of devices, they don’t work with any of the major carriers in the U.S. And they need to, because the major carriers have the power to sell phones at a discounted rate on contract: it’s those price points that consumers have come to expect, and any manufacturer would have a hard time moving units at an unsubsidized price.

But that’s only half the question: Huawei will also need phones that Americans want to buy. At CES they were showing off two devices that could have some appeal: the Ascend Mate and the Ascend D2. The Mate is a gigantic Android (4.1 Jellybean) device, with a 6.1 inch screen that pretty solidly qualifies it as a “phablet,” one of my absolute least favorite tech words. The Ascend D2 has a lot of similarities, but has smaller, more reasonable 5inch screen and a 13MP camera. Both resemble other phones on the market, like the Galaxy SIII and Droid DNA.

They might not be the most creative offerings, but they’re certainly on-par with some of the phones on the market and selling in the US. It’s not like all the phones we currently have to pick from are the most innovative either. So what do you think – would you welcome another phone maker to the market?

Mac Calendar App to Try: Fantastical

by Katherine Elsasser
fantastical app screengrab
Fantastical’s “natural language” in action

The Mac calendar app, iCal, is fine. But it’s only fine: it could be a lot better. I actually prefer Outlook, but it’s not worth the trade-off to me to have to work on a PC. Fantastical is actually better than both.

Fantastical’s real advantage is in something they call the “natural language engine.” What that means from a practical perspective is that it can parse the general info entered into an event. In other words, you type in the basics of the event (Lunch with Mario at 53 Front Street at noon) into the main input area. Fantastical will use that info to complete the rest of the event’s fields, like date and time. It can even invite people from your contact list if you include them in the general info.

Other highlights include that you can incorporate all your calendars into one spot: Google, iCal, etc. It also lives conveniently in your menu bar for easy access. And it almost goes without saying, but of course there’s an iPhone app that goes with it.

I especially like that the app feels familiar, but the design aesthetic is nicer than iCal. There’s something about iCal that, in addition to being slightly counterintuitive, is also just kind of ugly. It feels dated. Fantastical is just better designed.

This is Mac desktop app, which means you can download it from the Mac app store. It’ll set you back $20, but you can try it free for two weeks. That should be enough time to figure out if Fantastical is right for you!

Check out Fantastical at the Flexibits website.

What Facebook’s New Social Graph Search May Mean for Small Businesses

by Katherine Elsasser

facebook open graphMuch has already been made of Facebook’s big press conference yesterday where Mark Zuckerberg unveiled new Social Graph Search. But what is it, exactly?

In a lot of ways, Facebook Graph Search makes a lot of sense intuitively: enough that it’s almost a surprise that we haven’t had it before. Basically, it’s using the ties between us all and all the data Facebook has to spit back out search results. Given how much data Facebook has, it’s easy to imagine that Graph Search could be pretty powerful.

Facebook itself gave several examples of how this kind of search will work. One idea was using interests or likes of your friends to find compatible invitees for a movie night. But for a less personal (but more far-reaching) example, Facebook point out how a journalist might use the Social Graph. You can read their official post here for a thorough explanation, but the basic idea is that journalists will be able to use FB as a Rolodex. You could look up people by where they worked when, or if Facebook Places has them at the scene of a big event.

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Austria’s Telekom-Presse Posts Hands-On BlackBerry Z10 Video

by Katherine Elsasser
hands on with blackberry z10
the BlackBerry Z10 in action

 

Seems like we were just talking about this, but looks like an Austrian site called Telekom-Presse has a hands-on video with a new BlackBerry called the Z10 well in advance of the January 30th announcement. It’s in German, but the video is embedded below. This video is labelled as “Teil 1” (Part 1 auf Deutsch) so stay tuned for more updates! Via BGR.