Category: Small Biz Go Mobile

What We’ve Been Reading This Week [weekly roundup]

by Song

Google Voice recently opened to everyone in the US. Lifehacker has a great list of Google Voice tricks that can save you money.

Be careful of how you use social networking to find an employee, it can lead to unintentional discriminatory hiring.

Have you ever thought about doing a company culture audit?

Businessweek is looking for America’s best young entrepreneurs, know anyone?

This is a list of obvious, but fatal mistakes that hold back start-up businesses.

Here’s how you can turn personal posts into good business blogging.

Is your small business exporting? It might be a good time to consider exporting if you aren’t.

Join Web Conferences Easily with the GoToMeeting iPad App [appsauce]

by Song

Video conferencing sounds sexy, but it will be a while before the new iPhone makes it accessible enough to be a part of everyday life. As a small business owner, maybe it makes more sense to focus on things that will help you sell your product. GoToMeeting is a web conferencing tool that makes it easy to set up and lead web-based presentations or product demonstrations in a matter of minutes. Attendees watch in real-time on their computers what the meeting leader is demonstrating on their computer and GoToMeeting makes it simple to set-up appointments through Microsoft Outlook containing info like a link to sign into the meeting and a number for a group phone call.

They’ve recently released a free app for the iPad, so you can join a meeting at no cost. The iPad version is very nice as it allows you, somewhat out of necessity, to use the tablet’s built-in speakers and mic to talk in a meeting without having to use your hands to hold a phone. Another nice feature is the ability to pinch-in to zoom on content so you can get a clear view of what’s on the meeting organizer’s screen. Click below to get a quick video demonstration of the iPad app.

Download the GoToMeeting app for the iPad.

Spell-check—Friend or Foe in the Office?

by Jean Westcott

We’ve all done it.  Ran a quick spell-check on an email and just accepted the changes.  Then you find out you have auto-corrected your phrase from something that makes sense to something completely different.   Instead of getting to the ‘heart of the matter’ you have gotten to the ‘hearth’ of it because you mistyped hearh instead of heart. 

Or perhaps you didn’t change a misused word because it passed your spell- and grammar-check.  Grammar check might be smart enough to know ‘effect’ from ‘affect’ but you are smarter than your spelling or grammar checker (at least some of the time).  If you don’t add certain technical terms or less commonly used words to your personal dictionary, you will be prompted to change it to the incorrect word.

Take the time to read your emails, text messages and documents and do a proper proofread before hitting the send button.  One trick I use is to compose longer emails in my word processing program before cutting and pasting into my email.  I even change the font using ‘Paste Special’ so that I can look at it in a different frame of reference.  Sometimes it is easy to miss mistakes when you get used to looking at it on a screen in a certain format. 

Remember—mistakes do make an impression.  We are all human and we all will make mistakes.  Keep in mind, though, when you are trying to present a professional face to the world and our written word is all our reader has to judge us by, those mistakes will stand out.  These software tools can make it easier to avoid errors, but use them with care.

Ribbon Hero – Learn Office programs by playing games

by Jean Westcott

Microsoft’s OfficeLabs has created a new way to learn Office 2007 and Office 2010’s workhorses:  Word, PowerPoint, Excel and OneNote.  It’s called Ribbon Hero and basically it is a downloaded add-on to your Office Suite that gives you challenges to learn new skills and earn points.

We all have our ways of learning how to use office software, but most of the time many of us just keep humming along with the skills we learned when we first started out.  We might watch a video or two, attend a one-day training class or buy a book.  More likely we just ask around the office to get the answers to overcome whenever we can’t remember how to get the ‘thingy’ to do that ‘thing’.

Each of us learns in different ways, but the genius of this approach is that it challenges you to try new things—taking advantage of the new capabilities of these tools.  Instead of cursing the changes each time your software is upgraded, you can find out how to use the new features.

Imagine signing up some of your colleagues to see who can get the most Ribbon Hero points in the office.  Or provide incentives to your employees when they hit a certain number of points.  You can share your achievements and points ranking with Facebook.  The game is there for you to use—how to use it is up to you.

Portable Storage Revolution—A terabyte (or more) of storage for under $100

by Jean Westcott

Over the past few months, a quiet revolution in external storage devices has been taking place.  USB-pluggable external hard drives have gotten cheaper and cheaper, making the threshold of the under $100 TB storage device thoroughly broken.  CNET reviews list 34 USB external hard drives that meet or exceed that amount of storage.

Sometimes it is hard to wrap our heads around how much data each of our files uses.  A terabyte is 1,000 GBs.  If you understand that a standard DVD can hold just under 5 GBs, imagine that a TB hard drive can hold well more than 200 times that.

External hard-drives can be one of the smartest investments any small-business owner could make in protecting their business.  From a handy back-up storage device, to using it as a one-stop storage place for your photos, music and video files, an external hard-drive is portable, easy to connect and great for taking along with your smaller devices for access to your most important files.

Next week we will be looking at some online storage solutions.

eBay Buys RedLaser Barcode App to Encourage Online Buying and Selling

by BrothaTech

Do you have an Ebay business?  Wouldn’t it be cool to look up eBay prices for products your are selling (or thinking about selling) by scanning barcodes with your iPhone?

Well eBay was thinking along those same lines by buying the uber-popular barcode scanning RedLaser app developed by Occipital in hopes to encourage users to scan barcodes to find and buy the item on eBay.

The RedLaser app was originally designed for shoppers to scan barcodes of physical products to compare prices in surrounding brick and mortar stores. And it was a hit too, getting downloaded over 2 million times since it was put up in the Apple App Store. eBay is looking to duplicate that success with giving users the ability to not only search for the best price at local physical stores, but to expand that search throughout it’s 200 million listings on eBay. RedLaser will be a free app from eBay and will be integrate listings from all the eBay iPhone apps (including StubHub and Shopping.com).

RedLaser was originally a $1.99 app, but by dropping the price to a whopping free.99, eBay hopes to get that money back by way of increasing the number of shoppers using its app to scan barcodes of physical products and finding a better virtual prices online. As more people recognize the power of mobile technology and feel more secure with buying items online, the RedLaser app by eBay should bring in some BIG numbers for eCommerce businesses looking to expand their customer base to those mobile pros, as well as casual shoppers just looking for a better deal.

Skywriting? Try Google docs and Microsoft Office’s Web Apps for Cloud Collaboration

by Jean Westcott

When we talk about working in The Cloud, what do we mean?  Web-based software applications are the fastest-expanding Cloud technologies.

The first of these applications to gain a significant share of users was Google Docs with a four-year head start.  Google has documents, spreadsheets, presentations, drawings and forms.  You can create, share, and collaborate on any of these tasks with co-workers, friends or members of your organizations.  You can control if you want your work to be public or just shared with designated individuals.  And it is all free.  Want to give it a try but need an idea for a project?  How about trying a family calendar?  Google Docs has lots of templates that users have uploaded and rated.

Just this past week, Microsoft joined the Cloud-based Aps world with its new Office 2010 Web Apps beta.  The idea of the dominant business technology provider giving free access to their software was unimaginable up to now, but here we go with easy-to-use, easy-to-share and easy-to-access software that will be recognizable to anyone using Microsoft products in their work life.

The website Lifehacker gives a program by program comparison.  Try them out—life in the Cloud is getting interesting.

What We’ve Been Reading This Week [weekly roundup]

by Song

13 small business lessons from Rework, one of the best business reads of the year.

Are you the most innovative person at your company? This is why that’s a problem.

Want to nail a sales call? Here’s 8 steps that can help.

According to a new study, $62 billion is how much net neutrality would cost us.

Here’s 5 ways to get more out of local search.

Are you a workaholic? Quit it.

Give your small business some credibility on the web.

This is how much each of your Facebook Fans are worth.

How do you handle late-paying customers?

LinkedIn: The Gold Standard of Business Networking [AppSauce]

by Song

How do you prefer to trade information? Business card (only to be scanned later)? napkin? bumping?

For online professional business networking, LinkedIn is still the gold standard. It recently topped 70 million users and has been adding a ton of new features including: deep twitter integration allowing you to follow your linkedin connections privately, tracking movement in industries by seeing recent hires and departures at specific companies, and integration with Microsoft Outlook.

This free LinkedIn iPhone app gives you access to much of the functionality of the site, allowing you to update contacts with your status, send invites, accept invites, message, as well as connect instantly with nearby LinkedIn app users with the “In Person” feature. Download the app for the iPhone here. LinkedIn also offers free apps for the Blackberry and Palm Pre.