What many small business owners don’t know is that there is free software that can help them operate smoothly – and professionally. I’m talking about email servers, HR software, word processing programs, graphic design software. Even antivirus programs.

Yup, all FREE.

Here are five open source software programs that are easy on the wallet and your operations.

1. OpenOffice

Kiss MS Office goodbye. This is your open-source alternative. It is FREE to download and use and it contains programs like word processing, spreadsheets, presentations – and more. It’s also available in many languages and works on common operating systems.

2. GnuCash

Get to know this software – fast.

GnuCash is a personal and small business accounting software that is FREE and available for GNU/Linux, BSD, Solaris, Mac OS X, and MS Windows. It’s easy to use and allows you to track bank accounts, stocks, income and expenses. Some have even called it “as quick and intuitive to use as a checkbook register.”

3. OrangeHRM

This human resource management software comes with rich features and a friendly UI.  The system is backed by professional support services as well as a fast-growing and knowledgeable worldwide open source community.

4. GIMP

This is your alternative to Adobe Photoshop.

GIMP is an acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Program. It has many capabilities including photo retouching, image composition and image authoring.

5. Clamwin

ClamWin is a antivirus program for Microsoft Windows 7/ Vista / XP / Me / 2000 / 98 and Windows Server 2008 and 2003. ClamWin Free Antivirus does not include an on-access real-time scanner. You need to manually scan a file in order to detect a virus or spyware – which could be a good thing for Windows users who are barraged with automatic scans and updates.

This, of course, is not an exhaustive list of free open source software for small business. There are dozens more.

The bottom line is that you’ll want to save where you can now so that you can invest in specialized computer software down the road – and really take your business to the next level.

You know those little Amazon ads you find in the corners of blogs? You know the ones that link to books that people recommend? They’re helpful, sure. But buy one, and you risk holding some Philadelphia bloggers responsible for getting a business license.

Yes, you read that right.

Since a percentage of that Amazon purchase – or any purchase from an enabled advertisement –  is money in the blogger’s pocket, the city of Philadelphia considers that business revenue. Thus it is demanding that bloggers who report even a meager $11 in revenue pay to get a business license.

The license is $300 for a lifetime or $50 a year. And, the city only knows about the ads bloggers are placing on their sites if they report that income on their taxes.

Why a blogger would report $11 baffles me, but still… something is seriously wrong with this picture.

Sean Barry, a Philadelphia blogger, writes Circle of Fits from his free Blogger account. He earned $11 in profit over two years and received a letter from Philadelphia city officials.

Barry writes:

I never expected Circle of Fits to “make money” or be deemed a “business”… I put ads on it as an experiment, and I don’t ever expect anyone to click on them..I don’t even know how to put the time in to learn how to control which ones are being presented.

Bloggers are just a subset of workers affected by this regressive tax. According to the city’s strict rules, any freelancer based in the city qualifies as a business and needs to get the license.

It seems to me that the city of Philadelphia is trying to set a new precedent for microbusinesses.

Should a person who bakes and sells homemade pies out of his or her home be required to purchase a business license? Yes – definitely.

But to call a blogger who makes less than $20 over two years a microbusiness owner is just ridiculous.

This is the time to promote economic growth, not hit workers and entrepreneurs where it hurts the most.

I was not cool. Far from it.

As soon as I set foot in Italy, I realized that, yes, Italians do lead a simple, slower lifestyle. But part of that lifestyle stems from their efficient use of mobile devices and the services provided to them.

The mobile culture among Italians, along with many other Europeans and beyond, is surprisingly well more advance than here in the U.S.

How?

Well, according to a mobile culture survey conducted by Sybase 365, Americans are simply not adopting mobile technologies as fast as other parts of the world.

Their key finding: The United States finished dead last in the use of text messaging and instant messaging. Only one in three U.S. respondents take advantage of these services. In comparison, nine out of 10 respondents in China text on their mobile phones.

Parents of US teenagers who spend the bulk of their days texting would probably disagree… but wait, there’s more.

Sybase indicates that Americans have also been VERY SLOW to adopt the use of mobile commerce and mobile customer relations solutions. Want to pay your cable TV bill or buy office supplies? Most people here still get on the computer or pick up their land line phones to complete the transaction.  In other parts of the world, it’s quite the opposite.

According to Diarmuid Mallon, product marketing manager at Sybase, people in Africa can pay for goods with a simple text message and a payment card that acts as currency. That is, they don’t need a bank account. In the United States, however, most people have access to banks and ATM machines.

People around the globe are using their mobile devices to gather information, check finances, and manage their social lives. Here, well, we still use our mobile phones as… phones. Our problem, perhaps, is that we have too many choices; too many ways to buy things, communicate, and help us manage our personals lives and businesses.

Reflecting back on my trip to Italy, I realize that the Italians (and so many people in other countries) have it right. They value mobile speed, mobile services, and connectivity. While technologically advanced, their lives are still simple – easier to manage. Their mobile devices help them enjoy life a little bit more.

Of course, a bottle of Chianti doesn’t hurt either.

You ask yourself, what just happened?

It was the tone of your email, my friend. The recipient opened it, read it, and thought, “Who does this S.O.B. think he is?”

One wrong salutation, phrase or punctuation can – believe it or not – spark World War III via email. BUT, it can be avoided with a handy new tool I just discovered. It’s called ToneCheck by Lymbix.

With ToneCheck, a simple thought will no longer be interpreted as hostile, threatening or something far different than you intended. ToneCheck actually checks your outgoing email for any false “tones.”

Simply specify your “tone tolerance” and the program will flag any phrases or sentences that look angry – then, offers a substitute. And, get this, ToneCheck also flags lines that appear too “contented” or overly cheerful when you are actually trying to strike a tougher tone.

The program’s sensitivity can also be adjusted and it offers eight different ‘emotional ratings’  - like affection and amusement- to help you get the tone of your email just right. Anger, fear, and humiliation are generally the emotions users will try and avoid.

Lymbix has also developed a program which monitors your updates on Twitter for any unintentional deviation in tone. Brilliant!

You can download ToneCheck and use the service free for 30 days.

I’ve been using it for several days now and while I have ignored a few of ToneCheck’s warnings, the program has indeed stopped me from sending the wrong message on one occasion.

As the saying goes, impressions count – even when you’re trying to make one by email.

It was huge in the 80’s and 90’s with those little black cable TV boxes. You know the ones EVERYONE had in their house – illegally – that allowed people to get every cable channel imaginable without the cable provider knowing.

Well, jailbreaking is buzzing yet again. This time among Apple iPhone users. And, it has taken on a whole new meaning – literally.

iPhone owners will now be able to legally break electronic locks on their phones in order to download unauthorized software applications and – ready for this? – break access controls in order to switch wireless carriers.

The decision to allow the practice commonly known as “jailbreaking” is one of a handful of new exemptions announced this week by the Library of Congress. The exemptions are from a 1998 federal law that prohibits people from bypassing technical measures that companies put on their products to prevent unauthorized uses.

In addition to jailbreaking, other exemptions announced this week would:

- allow people to break technical protections on video games to investigate or correct security flaws.

- allow college professors, film students and documentary filmmakers to break copy-protection measures on DVDs so they can embed clips for educational purposes, criticism, commentary and noncommercial videos.

- allow computer owners to bypass the need for external security devices called dongles if the dongle no longer works and cannot be replaced.

Of course, these legal loopholes open up a whole can of worms about copyright infringement… but it sure is good news for those pirate techno-geeks who’ve been doing this – in secret- for years.

As for everyday iPhone users, you will have to be a technical wizard to know how to break those electronic locks. I bet, though, for more than a few people, being able to switch from AT&T to another wireless service provide is incentive enough to learn.

In some parts of the world, Facebook is more popular than search engines. That’s right, Facebook is bigger than Google!

That means, if you’ve ever had any doubt about what Facebook can do for your small business – it’s time to give the social network another look.

Here’s why.

According to the analysts at Hitwise, Facebook’s overall web traffic pulled ahead of Google’s for the first time in the U.S. in March of this year. They also found that people in the UK are visiting social networks more than they’re visiting search engines.

When compared to the Web as a whole, Google gets around 9.3% of all web traffic, while Facebook captures just over 7%. BUT, in the UK, Hitwise stats show that social networking sites accounted for .55% MORE traffic than search engines. An unprecedented finding.

Check out the graph below. Long term stats from Alexa show global page views for Facebook and Google are neck-and-neck.

What does this mean for you?

It means that not only are people using Facebook to socialize and network, but they’re using it to FIND CONTENT and LEARN about it.

Facebook’s “like” feature is a brilliant way to spread the word about businesses, products, and services. And, quite frankly, if no one “likes” you on Facebook – you’re out of the game.

Search engines are by no means on their way out. But, just like Facebook, they’re morphing into something different… something bigger. Both entities will probably look very different – again – in another five years. Until then, do yourself and your business a favor, and join the fray on Facebook. Set up a Fan Page and get yourself seen.

These stats speak volumes about what’s to come.

In fact, some say the mobile app today is what the website was ten years ago –  one of those tools that’s almost a necessity for all businesses.

Of course, unlike a website, developing and designing an app is easier said than done. There are factors to consider. What kind of platform is involved? How will it be used? Who will use it? Is geo-location necessary?

These are all questions you – as a business owner – must take into account.

Thanks to Christina Warren’s article on designing mobile apps here are 5 things to consider before you begin the design process.

1. Mobile app or mobile Website?

Do you need a mobile application, a mobile website, or both? Before even starting the design process, you need to figure out what format or formats are best suited for your goals. Sometimes this can be really easy. For example, if you want to build a utility or game, you may be better served building a native application rather than worrying about how different mobile browsers will interpret your content.

Other times, the distinction isn’t as clear. For instance, at Mashable, we have both a mobile optimized website and applications for the iPhone and iPad. The mobile optimized site is available on a variety of devices, while the iPhone and iPad apps are designed to provide a more full experience to our users on those platforms. Because Mashable has a tech savvy readership, it makes sense for us to have our own standalone mobile app. However, depending on the app idea or business at hand, a mobile app may not be fitting.

Here are some questions to think about when deciding between an application and a mobile-optimized website:
Do you already have a full-featured website? If the answer is yes, how many of those features are you looking to integrate into the app? If your app is going to be largely a re-creation of your website, you may want to focus on creating a mobile site first.
Is this an app that can be used without an Internet connection? Some examples include note-taking or calculator apps. If so, a mobile application makes more sense.
Are you going to be integrating with other parts of the mobile operating system, like the dialer, the GPS and the mail client? If this is the case, consider building a native app.

2. Consider where the app will be used.

Once you’ve decided to make a native mobile app, you’ll want to consider where your application is most likely going to be used. This is important because where and how an application is used can directly impact how it can be designed.

For instance, if you have an application that is going to be used while walking around  a geo-location app or an app that takes advantage of a device’s GPS  making sure that core app functions are easy to see and access is very important.

Likewise, if your app is used to sell products or services, make sure that the price and the “buy” or “add to cart” buttons are large enough so that they can be easily accessed.

If you have designed an app that may be used while sitting on a train or in a stationary spot, make sure that text is readable and legible and that it is easy to move through content.

3. Be mindful of screen sizes.

Even on the same mobile platform, screen sizes and resolutions can vary based on device type. For instance, the screen size and resolution on the HTC Incredible is different than that on the HTC EVO 4G. Consequently, for an application to have a consistent look and feel across both devices and across a variety of other devices, user interface elements and graphics need to be scalable.

Likewise, the iPhone 4 sports a higher resolution screen than the displays on the iPhone, iPhone 3G and iPhone 3GS. However, because the big difference is in pixel density, the same amount of screen real estate is used. Basically, two pixels on the old iPhone displays equals one point on the new retina display. Josh Clark, author of the fantastic new book Tapworthy: Designing Great iPhone Apps, has written a must-read post about designing for the iPhone 4’s retina display.

The Android Developers site has a great guide for supporting multiple screens on Android and a look at how to best achieve screen independence so that your apps will run and display properly on a number of different display types.

The Android Developers site also has tips for how to test your app in different resolutions with an emulator.

4. Don’t stray from existing user interface conventions.

On desktop computers, there are certain user interface elements that make a Windows app a Windows app or a Mac OS X app a Mac app. There are user interface conventions tailored for mobile apps as well. While you don’t have to follow these guidelines 100% of the time, sticking with consistent methods of displaying data and interacting with content will make your app easier to pick up by end-users. Following these conventions will also ensure that your app is consistent with the other applications already on a mobile device.

Each major mobile platform has documented user interface guidelines. Apple, for example, has a very extensive overview of iPhone Human Interface Guidelines, detailing and offering examples of standard UI conventions that should be considered when building an iPhone app.

While not nearly as complete, the Android UI team has its own User Interface Guidelines, complete with overviews of icon, widget, menu, and activity and task design guidelines.

Likewise, RIM has a complete section on its site for UI Guidelines for BlackBerry devices, including sections on touch screen BlackBerry devices, the different theming systems available for BlackBerry, and how to handle the trackball or touchpad.

5. Design for touch.

In almost all cases, mobile apps are going to be used while in someone’s hand. Therefore, designing your mobile app around touch and ergonomics is very important.

Think about how you hold your phone in your hand. Now, think about where you thumb sits. That’s why many applications have main menus and selectors at the bottom of the screen and content near the top of the screen. Apps with that type of layout are designed for touch, and yours should be too.

Beyond button layout, think about how you want to indicate touch feedback  physically or visually. While the BlackBerry Storm tried the whole clickable screen thing, the truth is, haptic feedback (such as vibrations), while great for games or for alerts, doesn’t usually work very well for touch-based devices like mobile phones.

Instead, use visual cues to show that an item is either touchable or has been touched. For instance, think about how the various keys on the iPhone keyboard grow in size when you touch them. That increase in size is feedback.

Lastly, designing your apps so that they take advantage of gestures, like swiping forward and back, pinching to zoom and pulling-down to refresh, can add a lot of usability to your applications without taking up tons of space for a designated button.

Sure, when it comes to developing mobile applications – anything goes.

But with a little careful planning and ingenuity your next app won’t only be “new”…. it’ll be killer!

I use it … and so should the rest of the Internet-using world.

Why, you ask?

Well, speed for one. The browser is super fast. No dinking around waiting for a page to load, like you would on other browsers (ah hem, Internet Explorer).

Second, I like Chrome’s architecture. It’s different.  For instance, when you close a tab, you are virtually terminating a process. This is good because if you corrupt the tab’s memspace then you will crash only that particular process. The browser and all other tabs should continue working just fine like nothing ever has happened.

Third, I love Chrome’s privacy feature. You can literally browse incognito. Just switch into incognito mode and nothing – I mean nothing – gets logged.

Fourth, with Chrome you can get anywhere on the Web with one box. The address bar that sits at the top of the normal Google Chrome window simplifies your Internet experience by doubling as a search box. Simply setup the browser to default to your favorite search engine and viola – you’re in business.

Fifth – and lastly – I think Chrome’s extensions are terrific. There are a number of popular extensions designed to make your Internet experience more interesting.  Ultimate Chrome Flag is one, for example, that displays a country or region name, Geo, Google PageRank, Alexa Rank and WOT info for the websites you’re visiting. WOT and the Web2PDFConverter are also pretty cool. For Internet dawdlers, there two extensions worth noting: StayFocused and Chrome Nanny. Both work like any other digital nanny in that they will block sites you DON’T want to visit – or sites you inadvertently spend too much time on (ah hem, Facebook). All of these extensions are FREE and worth every second it takes to download and install them.

Sure, I’ll be honest. Chrome isn’t the end-all-be-all of Internet browsers. It has its flaws. BUT it’s still in its BETA phase. It has room to grow.

I guess it all boils down to preference. And today, I prefer to tell you that if you haven’t started using Google Chrome yet – at least check it out. Once you go Chrome, you probably won’t go back.

Did I mention that Chrome can run Web pages and applications on a Mac too?

But, let’s say you’re already an iPhone owner. What do you do with your old one?

The answer: sell it!

… and not on eBay or Craigslist either. Several websites are offering CASH for your used iPhone. And, they will tell you upfront exactly what they’ll pay.

NextWorth and Gazelle say they will offer up to $100 for iPhone 3G models and $200 for iPhone 3GS – in good condition, of course.

Considering the new iPhone 4 starts at $199 with a two-year contract – that’s a hell of a deal.

Now, if the thought of selling your iPhone over the Internet sounds iffy, you can head over to RadioShack instead. It too is offering the same trade-in values, BUT for in-store credit. You can also – on the spot- trade in your old iPhone and sign up for the $199 upgrade. But,  don’t expect o walk out of the store with your new iPhone in hand. Those phones go out to smart people who pre-ordered.

Bummer, I know.

Yes, these new iPhones are hot tickets right now. I predict they’ll be even hotter when the Verizon iPhone is introduced in January. C’est la vie AT&T. A lot of people won’t be sorry to see you go.

]]> http://blog.staturesoftware.com/2010/06/30/buying-an-iphone-4-sell-your-old-iphone/feed/ 0 http://blog.staturesoftware.com/2010/06/23/business-blogging-platforms-besides-wordpress/ http://blog.staturesoftware.com/2010/06/23/business-blogging-platforms-besides-wordpress/#comments Wed, 23 Jun 2010 10:00:42 +0000 Erin http://blog.staturesoftware.com/?p=422 There is life outside WordPress.

According to those who voted at Lifehacker, there are three other business blogging platforms that serve as good stand-ins if you’re adverse to WordPress or its plain stepchild, Blogger.

As any small business or powerhouse company will tell you, blogging is an ideal way to spread knowledge and ideas. It’s also a great marketing tool. And, most importantly, it’s cheap!

If you haven’t started a blog yet – like some people I know – do it NOW for the sake of your business.

Here are three other blogging platforms – besides WordPress – that’ll get your blog up and running in no time.

1. Tumblr

Tumblr is an interesting fusion between a full-fledged blog and a Twitter feed. Known as short-form or micro blogging, the style of blogging on a Tumblr blog is focused on short and frequent posts that are normally longer (or more focused on media like images or video) than Twitter updates but not as involved and formal as a regular blog post.

It’s a style that appeals to a lot of people and the ease of setup coupled with the informality of Tumblr is a winning combination for people who aren’t looking to commit to a blog as an involved and time-consuming project.

2. SquareSpace

SquareSpace is a commercial blogging platform with packages ranging from $8-50 per month. One of the nice things about their pricing schedule is that it’s based almost entirely on volume.

Aside from a few features, mostly focused on volume and big site management, the user experience from the smallest users to the biggest power users is consistent. SquareSpace’s strongest focus is on making good blog design easy for design/coding newbies. They’ve built their system around a modular design so building a brand new blog is as easy as snapping the pieces you want together.

3. Posterous

This is the no-fuss and zero-stress way to blog. You don’t need to sign up, you don’t need to know any code, you don’t need to know how to do anything but send an email to set up your own Posterous blog and start sharing your ideas and media. Simply email post@posterous.com from any email account and Posterous will create a YourName.Posterous.com blog for you.

You can write posts and long as you want, attaching photos and media files. (You can use the site’s rich text editor to create or edit posts, but its by-email updating is what its best known for.) The only micro part about Posterous is the amount of time you’ll spend setting it up. While email-based blogging might not be for everyone, it’s impressive how much you can do through the Posterous system with a single email.

If you already have a blog set up, chances are you’re probably deep into WordPress and wouldn’t even consider giving another blogging platform a shot. But check out these others – at the very least, for peace of mind in knowing that you wouldn’t be happier using anything else.