Technology Management

Business Tech

SBOCTeam — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 14:02:00 GMT

These five high-tech products make a lot of low-tech sense

By Max Berry

It seems that there is always some new gadget to buy, some new breakthrough that you, the small business owner, supposedly can't live without. It can be hard to separate the essential business tools from the latest tech novelties. Here, to help you make some sense of the deluge, are five innovations that will truly put your business on the cutting edge.

1. Looking for an ultra-thin laptop at a reasonable price? The folks at MSI Computer have granted your wish. The MSI X-Slim X340 Notebook ($899; see us.msi.com for retail information) weighs in it a svelte 2.86 pounds and is only .78 inches thick at its widest point, making it ideal for easy travel. It is also the first notebook to utilize the Intel ULV CPU, which requires just 1/6th the power of a standard mobile CPU. The LCD monitor offers HD resolution and you'll have 320 GB of storage at your disposal. And did we mention it costs less than $900?

2. For office work on the go, Brookstone's Laptop Essentials Kit ($50, Brookstone.com) provides all the standard accessories of your desktop computer in a zippered travel case. The kit includes a USB numeric keypad, retractable optical mouse, and gooseneck USB light. Earbuds with an integrated microphone allow you to use Skype and other Internet-based phone services and a retractable high-speed Internet cable will help you log on even when doing business in a place without wireless access. A four-port USB hub is also included for additional peripherals, so you can utilize all the gadgets and accessories standard to your office no matter how far from home your business takes you.

3. Metal staples are flimsy, eco-offensive, and often lead to annoying nicks and scratches. Get rid of them altogether with an E3 Living Staple Free Stapler ($6.95; e3living.com). The contraption may sound like a contradiction in terms, but the staple free stapler punches out tiny strips of paper and uses them to sew together as many as five sheets. In addition to the environmental benefits and low likelihood of personal injury offered by E3 Living's product, you'll also save money on staples and have an easier time recycling paper since there are no metal scraps to deal with. If you're looking to fasten more than five sheets of paper, might we recommend jumbo sizes paper clips or reusable binding clasps?

4. If you're a serious techy, chances are you already have an iPhone. Why not soup it up with some applications designed with the small business owner in mind? PC2Me allows you to connect remotely to your Windows desktop and costs $29.95 for the year. QuickBooks Online gives you access to your QuickBooks data. The monthly cost of $9.95 covers you and your accountant. The Splurge app keeps your spending in line by tracking and organizing expenses while Billing Manager, free from Intuit, is great for easy invoicing on the go. Doing business internationally? TokTok Translator provides quick translation between Chinese, Japanese, English, French, Dutch, German, Italian, Spanish, and Arabic, among other languages. And, naturally, you'll want to stay abreast of all the latest gadgets to help your run your business. Get All The Tech is a preconfigured RSS reader that sends you feeds from tech sites like Engadget, Gizmodo, Slashdot, Techcrunch, and Wired.

5. It might not be a gadget, per se, but YouTube is an excellent technological resource for marketing your business. Simply transferring your local television spot to the web might be a good idea for your own web site, but YouTube presents a different kind of challenge-and opportunity. If you're a craftsman, make a video of yourself at work, documenting your process from beginning to end. Stone Brewery, of Escondido, California, has posted a dozen or so videos on YouTube offering an inside look at their brewing process-a craft beer aficionado's dream. Just remember that the site is a community of users looking to be entertained, not pitched to. Feature your product or service in a quirky way, like Orem, Utah's Blendtec did by producing a series of videos in which the high-powered blender manufacturer put its product to the test by attempting to blend odd items like glow sticks and hockey pucks. It all adds up to an innovative marketing scheme and-best of all-it's free. Participate in the site's discussion forums and comment on other videos to start getting your name out there. And don't forget to include your e-mail address and URL in your video. YouTube can bring people who wouldn't normally hear about your business directly to your door, or at least your inbox.

Play It Safe

SBOCTeam — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 17:19:00 GMT

How to Protect Your Customers' Confidential Info

By Christopher Freeburn

Customer data may well be your business's most critical asset. Unfortunately, there are plenty of thieves who would like to gain access to it. Identity and credit card theft are burgeoning problems. Customers' names, addresses, and credit information are valuable commodities that thieves not only steal, but actually trade among themselves. Today's profusion of computer technology and online connectivity has proven not only a boon for business, but for thieves as well. Protecting your company's information is as vital as locking your office doors.

The World Wide Web of Hackers
There's almost no way to isolate your business from the Internet these days. Even the smallest businesses usually have web sites and email is now virtually a business requirement. That usually means that the computers you use for business are likely connected, either directly or through your company network, to the Internet. While there is no question that the Internet has been a huge boost to small business, it comes with serious security risks.

The Internet connection that brings the world to your business's front door can also let unscrupulous thieves dive right into your company hard drives and gain access to vital customer and business data. "The best way to prevent that is to make sure that your company network and computers have a robust firewall and use the latest Internet security software available," says Cambridge, Massachusetts-based computer security expert Dan Smith. "This applies even if you outsource your company's online services to a web hosting company." If you don't know how to enable your firewall and security software properly, hire a network or computer expert to do it for you. "Your firewall is the first and best line of defense in keeping unwanted people out of your system," Smith explains. "If you don't pay enough attention to it you can find your network crippled and your data stolen."

A wide variety of Internet Security software packages are available for small businesses. Additionally, personal computers and network servers come with some form of internal firewalls that will work in concert with third-party Internet security software. Most of these programs feature an automatic update feature that allows the software to contact its manufacturer online and check for software updates. Since the battle between hackers and security software is never-ending, keeping the update feature active is crucial to receiving updates meant to combat the latest threats.

Isolate Data
Your company data can be threatened not only from the outside, but also from within your business as well. Last January, news organizations reported the story of a Florida architectural firm whose office manager, erroneously believing she was about to be fired, deleted seven years worth of company records, including millions of dollars worth of blueprints and drawings from the firm's computer. The company was able to recover much of the data, but only at great expense. In order to prevent accidental or deliberate loss or theft of data, it is a good idea to restrict access to the company network-or at least to the most sensitive data-to a few trusted, high-level employees. Most network software packages offer a variety of different password-based levels of access to the network and its assets.

Make sure that employees guard their individual passwords and that the passwords of employees who depart the business are deleted immediately.

Shredding to Security
Keeping your company's critical data secure often means more than simply keeping your computers free from hackers and the office doors securely locked. Too many companies forget that documents tossed out with the trash become instantly vulnerable to thieves or competitors.

There is no privacy in garbage, according to a 1998 Supreme Court ruling, which means anyone can grab a garbage bag from your firm left at the curb and legally sift through it. That means your competitors can legally acquire sensitive information about your business if you aren't careful enough to properly dispose of it. It also means that identify thieves might glean enough personal information regarding your customers to open credit cards accounts in their names, causing them substantial financial harm.

In order to protect your company and your customers, you should consider creating a formal company policy regarding document disposal. And then make certain that all employees understand and follow through with its implementation.

Any paper that contains customer names, account numbers, or billing information should be shredded. The same is true of company documents that provide employee names, social security numbers, payroll, medical insurance, home addresses, or salary information. But you should also be shredding any documents containing information valuable to your competitors. Sales numbers, financial analysis, marketing plans or reports, web site usage figures - all of these could be of potential interest to competing companies. Legal documents as well. In practice it's a good idea to shred any document that sheds light on your company's internal practices or arrangements.

Document shredder machines are available in a wide range of sizes and prices, with small units running under $60, making it easy for a small business to have several such machines where needed. Traditional shredders rend documents into narrow vertical strips. Newer cross-cut shredders slice the documents two ways, rendering them into confetti that is almost impossible to reconstruct.

Wireless Vulnerability
Once upon a time, connecting the computers in a small office meant running wires all over the place. Today, setting up a wireless network for a small or home-based business can take little more than a few hours work. But for all their convenience, wireless networks face a serious downside: security. Your wireless router broadcasts your network's data indiscriminately over a certain area (anywhere from a 100 to 300-feet radius from the router). Any computer equipped with a wireless network card within that area can receive the signals and access your network.

"The number of businesses that forget to install some level of encryption in their wireless networks is astonishing," says Dan Smith. "People who are scrupulous about installing Internet anti-virus programs just blank on wireless access security." But the consequences can be serious. "There are people who set up their laptops outside office buildings and shopping malls looking for vulnerable wireless networks," Smith explains. "Once they find one they can penetrate they'll poke around until they find some useful information." That can include customer data like credit card numbers and billing addresses or employee data like social security numbers. "Once they have anything like that, it can be used for theft or identity fraud, or sold to others for that purpose."

In order to prevent unwanted intrusions, wireless equipment manufacturers have developed a variety of encryption programs. Most wireless network equipment comes with two basic encryption systems: Wired Equivalence Protection (WEP) and (Wired Protected Access) WPA. These encrypt your wireless signal, requiring any wireless-capable computer to have the right encryption key to decode the signal. WPA is the more robust encryption protocol. Keeping firewalls enabled on all networked computers and changing network passwords is also recommended.