The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘small-business’

Alex van Someren is a “Dealmaker” with the Global Entrepreneur Programme at the department of UK Trade and Investment. A serial entrepreneur specialising in IT software and hardware product development businesses, he’s had two exits through IPOs and is now Entrepreneur in Residence at Judge Business School. Below, he answers our recent guest post which attacked the way UK business regulation authorities treat small but fast-moving startup businesses in the same way as regular, slow-moving ones.

Azeem Azhar’s article about UK small business bureaucracy doesn’t tally with my own experience running businesses in the UK. In fact, from what other entrepreneurs are telling me it’s a lot easier here than in most developed countries.

Businesses using Twitter; there’s something to this idea. Even Twitter itself realizes it, as it’s expected to be a part of its own business model launching soon. In the meantime, other companies continue to jump into the ring. The lastest is American Express, which today unveiled Pulse, a Twitter stream focused on small businesses.

Pulse, which is a part of American Express’ Open Forum site, uses Twitter’s API to display the public tweets from small business owners. This stream can also be broken up into different small business industries, such as auto dealers, cleaning services, restaurants, and many others.

The service also has its own Trending Topics area, and highlights the top shared links on Pulse in the right hand column of the page. And if you click on the “Links” hyperlink near the top of the stream, it will show you all the top links being shared. There is a little star icon next to these to allow you to pick which ones you think should receive higher placement. These are all little nice features.

Front and center on the page is also a way to search for any business you think may be a part of the Pulse stream. And if you’re a small business owner not yet a part of it, you can sign up and nominate your company to be included.

We’ve reached out to ask American Express if there is any kind of financial agreement with Twitter to use these tweets, but it would seem that they’re just using the public API. This is a similar concept to what Federated Media has been doing with ExecTweets, a curated stream of tweets from business executives.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Gmail is furthering its offline strategy today with the announcement of the ability to include attachments in composed emails when offline. Google says this was one of the most requested features for Offline Gmail and starting today, you be able to attach files in offline mode the way you would in online Gmail.

You’ll be able to attach all types of files except inline images, which are images in the body of the email. When you have Offline Gmail enabled, Google says that mail now goes through the outbox when you’re online or offline, allowing Gmail to capture all attachments regardless of internet connections.

Earlier this year, Google rolled out a Google Gears version of Gmail, which detects when you are offline. It caches your e-mail so that you can read it, respond to it, search it, star it, or label it. When you are connected to the Internet again, it sends all the messages. Google also introduced an offline version of Calendar.

Offline access is a big part of Google’s strategy to chip away at Microsoft’s Outlook’s hold on business email. For promotional purposes, Google now wants Gmail users who are using Offline features to take pictures of themselves while accessing their email from an unusual place, such as a submarine, without internet access. Google will post the most interesting photos on the Gmail Blog. I guess a picture is worth a thousand words.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Iomega just announced the latest addition to their rapidly growing NAS line, the ix2-200.

More: 
Iomega announces new StorCenter ix2-200

Popular document sharing service DocStoc just launched a collections feature, which lets users package documents around a particular topic. DocStoc has already created close to 50 collections, including “Starting a Small Business,” “Advertising Online,” and “Traveling on a Budget,” and is opening up the platform to users to add to existing collections and create their own.

The feature is just another way to organize your documents online and can be a pretty useful tool to manage large amounts of documents that relate to different topics. Competitors Issuu and Scribd both have similar offerings. Scribd’s “Group” feature allows users to organize documents around a theme and tries to connect users to other people who are interested in the same reading and topics. Issuu recently launched a collaborative Groups feature, where people can collect, organize and discuss publications related to any topic. DocStoc’s feature appears to focus more on the organization of documents around a particular theme than connecting users around that theme.

DocStoc is steadily growing, with 3 million documents uploaded and 1.6 million unique visitors a month in the U.S., according to comScore. (The company’s internal Google Analytics shows 4.8 million unique visitors worldwide). Docstoc recently took off its “beta” label with a homepage redesign, open APIs, and a new revenue-sharing model called DocCash.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

MoFuse, a service that will take your website and instantly create a mobile version of it, is launching a premium version of its mobile website development service for the enterprise space. MoFuse’s existing platform, which spares websites the development costs of formatting the site by hand, creates customized iPhone versions of sites in addition to the standard versions for basic mobile browsers. MoFuse is offering TechCrunch readers 50% off any premium plan for Website owners who use the promotional code “TechCrunch” when signing up before May 1.

MoFuse Premium for Business is a completely separate platform from the site’s original service, which will remain intact and will be known as MoFuse for Blogs. The premium service creates higher quality mobile sites for businesses with more features, including the ability to nest topics in the site with drag and drop technology, search functionality, Google Maps integration, color customization, a local weather app, and more. The pricing for the premium site development starts with the “Basic” plan, which is $39 per month with a 50,000 page view limit for one site; “Small Business,” which is $89 per month, creates 3 sites with a limit of 125,000 page views per site; and “Ultimate,” which is $199 per month, creates up to 10 sites with a limit of 1 million page views per site.

Founded in 2007, MoFuse has become popular with publishers—the service has helped nearly 25,000 organizations create mobile websites. Several of our colleague publications in tech news use MoFuse for their mobile sites including GigaOm and ReadWriteWeb. In addition to converting a web site for mobile consumption, Mofuse also allows publishers to monetize their mobile websites via revenue shares with Google AdSense and AdMob. Jag.ag also provides a simple service to help less tech-savvy consumers create their own mobile presence in a few minutes but doesn’t offer some of the same premium features yet. Zinadoo and Wirenode also provide similar services.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.