Highly touted technologies that promise save time and boost profits often don't work for small businesses. One business owner, Gene Marks, still believes the sales pitches but, more often than not, comes away disappointed. He shares his list of the top-10 solutions that don't work for small business.
Read the full story on Businessweek.com: "Tech 'solutions' your small biz can't use"
Per my previous rant on Web start-ups that lack a Big Idea, here's one I appreciate, since it's trying to solve a real problem: NetBooks. This company has built a Web-based suite of interconnected apps designed to run a small business.
It's a noble effort, because the small-business market is murder. It's not that there's a lack of customers, it's just that they are so hard to reach and so different from each other. Building a universal small-biz app is a tricky balancing act.
It looks to me like NetBooks might eventually pull it … Read more
Who says magazines are dead? Not Fortune Small Business Magazine, Hearst Magazines, or Red Herring. And certainly not Olive Software, the Santa Clara, Calif., company responsible for creating the interactive digital twins of their print issues.
Like the best discoveries, I stepped into Olive Software's work by accident, while flipping through the digital leaves of Fortune Small Business Magazine. As a champion of downloadable and Web apps for consumers, I wouldn't normally seek out this kind of story, but the experience was too gratifying not to share. After all, would I hold back from you?
Click once and the magazine blooms in its self-contained online reader. Click again, this time on the right arrow, and the cover unfurls to reveal a faithful representation of the magazine's glossy, full-page interior, down to the shadowed hollow where the pages meet the binding. Flip through to read articles horizontally across multiple pages, each one adhering to the original layout, rather than dive-bombing into a vertical scroll that makes do with the Web's predilection for linear storytelling.… Read more
Although still in the shadow of its giant counterparts, small-scale wind turbines are slowly starting to reshape the wind industry.
AeroVironment last week said 18 of its Architectural Wind turbines are now installed at a new Kettle Foods Potato Chip factory in Beloit, Wisconsin.
The turbines are still in development, but the company has installed a number around the country. They were also used by students from Texas A&M University at the Solar Decathlon solar-home competition.
AeroVironment is targeting commercial customers rather than people's homes. But other companies have developed turbines suited for houses.
You probably think of Nikon as just a camera company, but it has been in the microscope business longer than it's been making cameras. To show how proud they are of that part of their business, Nikon started the Small World image competition in 1974, and it's still going strong today. Over the years, the competition has included microscopic views of all sorts of things, including carpet fibers, Velcro, neurons, and more. One of the best parts about the images are that they transcend the world of scientific imaging and exist as works of art in their own … Read more
Slimmed-down PCs are hot right now. But most of the innovation in tiny computers is taking place in the notebook and mobile-phone industries, not the stodgy enterprise desktop space.
No matter, Lenovo has announced that it will launch a tiny, 45-watt desktop computer the size of a phone book. It's called the ThinkCentre A61e, or "Blue Sky," and it will be primarily aimed at businesses and customers overseas--where they still buy desktops.
The company has bestowed the "Blue Sky" moniker to denote its green qualities. Lenovo says its power supply is 85 percent efficient, and … Read more
Apparently it's Miniature PC Release Week and nobody told me.
On Monday, Fujitsu officially announced the U810 mini-notebook, and on Tuesday, Stealth Computer released a mini PC that it says will fit into a human palm (well, sort of). Though I'm sure the results will differ for everyone, suffice it to say, this is a wee computer.
It measures just under 3 inches tall, 6 inches wide and 10 inches deep. The Little PC--not the most creative or specific name, but whatever--will have Intel's Pentium and Celeron M series processors, and lots of connectivity options: LAN, serial, … Read more
Small donors are having a significant impact on the amount of money that the Republican and Democratic candidates for president are raising. The Internet, providing the tools for grassroots activists to self-organize and conduct "p-commerce" by giving political money online, has clearly contributed to this.
The interesting story after six months of presidential fund-raising is that some candidates, notably Barack Obama, are doing much better at reaching small donors than others.
In a July 3 CNET post on what the Internet has done for presidential campaign fund-raising, I wrote, "the story technophiles should celebrate and fear how … Read more
Today, Dell announced two new small-business-oriented laser printers, in conjunction with the release of its Vostro line of small-business desktop and notebook PCs. The printer announcements include the Dell 1320c color laser printer and the Dell 1125 mono multifunction laser printer.
The 1320c starts at $300 for the base model and goes up to $350 with networking options. Dell rates the 1320c for 16ppm (pages per minute) black and 12ppm color, with a monthly duty cycle of 35,000 pages. The Dell 1125 mono multifunction includes prints, copy, scan, and standalone fax. It includes a 30-sheet ADF for batch copy … Read more
It seems like a long time since Dell introduced a brand new line to its menu of laptops and desktops, instead of adding onto the current lineup of Inspiron, Latitude, and XPS systems (the long-lived Dimension line was finally retired in June).
Dell on Tuesday revealed an entirely new family of systems, called Vostro (Latin for "yours"), aimed at small businesses with 1-25 employees who need business-level systems that don't require full-time IT people to manage.
"For too long, entrepreneurs have been forced to fit either consumer or large corporate solutions into their unique environments," … Read more
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