Small Biz Technology Advisor Blog

Found this in the Sept 22nd issue of Long Island Business News: For all those small business owners who can’t afford an assistant to proof their work or simply can’t bring one along on business trips, this software is for you. NextUp’s TextAloud can convert text to speech, but unlike the those utilities built into your operating system, this software doesn’t sound like HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

TextAloud reads text from email, web pages, reports and more, aloud on your PC. TextAloud can also save your daily reading to MP3 or Windows Media files ready for playback on your iPod, PocketPC, or even on your TV with Tivo’s Home Media Option.

It’s also a great piece of software for those who have to plow through lots of material. Once the documents are converted to mp3s you can get your reading done at the gym, in the car, even the shower.

At $29.95 it certainly is worth a try. TextAloud is compatible with all flavors of Windows and can purchased/downloaded right from their website.

by Christopher Erckert
Small Business Technology Advisor

As discussed in a earlier blog post the recent battery recalls affecting Apple and Dell laptops has finally rattled the airlines. Despite the fact that these exploding/melting laptops are hardly a threat to bringing down an airline of any size. Virgin Atlantic and Korean Air have instituted battery bans on their flights.

For Virgin Airline and Korean AirTravelers: Owners of Dell (Inspirons and Lattitudes) or Apple (iBooks, PowerBooks, MacBooks or MacBook Pros) must remove the battery from their laptops and place it in a separate compartment in their laptop bag or carry-on. You will still be allowed to use your laptop by plugging into seat side outlets, but you’re out of luck if your economy seat doesn’t come with one.

We advise you call your airline before you head out expecting to finish a presentation on the plane.

Businesses big and small have been using Google AdWords for search/keyword advertising for many years. Now Google and Intuit, maker of QuickBooks, the most common accounting program for small businesses have joined forces to get over 3.7 million QuickBooks users into the search advertising game. Basically if you buy/upgrade to the upcoming QuickBooks 2007, your business will have instant integration with many Google technologies.

For example, customers will be able to find the locations of businesses that use the new version of QuickBooks via Google Maps as well as enable QuickBooks customers to create keyword searches for their products, so that their advertisements pop up whenever someone searches for one of their products on Google.

Merchants should also be able to integrate information about their inventories with Google, allowing customers to see what they have in stock.

QuickBooks 2007 is expected to be released fall of this year.

Law Office of Perry Zivley, a husband and wife law firm in Houston, decided to launch themselves into the 21st century within 30 days. Best of all, the whole process is being documented for all the world to see.

Their marketing and technology consultant Jamie Parks has set up a blog to report on the progress, and has posted the first of what looks to be several video interviews on YouTube.

Hopefully in the next few posts, he will feature the highs and lows of getting the firm to the technical level they want to be. Right now the blog posts have focused on the firm’s requirements. We found the most interesting feature of the blog to be the the audio of one of their early technology strategy meetings.

Last Thursday, RIM, maker of the BlackBerry announced their latest phone, the BlackBerry Pearl. The significance of this release is the addition of a 1.3 mega pixel camera (new for blackberries), and maybe for the shallowest of reasons, it actually looks good. The biggest draw back we saw so far was the lack of a full qwerty key board. For those new to a BlackBerry it should be a similar experience to txting, but for those already accustomed to full sized BlackBerries or Palm Treo smart phones, it may just cramp your style. The phone launched with service from T-Mobile.

BlackBerries got their start in Large Enterprises, but now small businesses can get a full BlackBerry Solution, that they can pay for as a service, integrate with their existing Microsoft Exchange server, or add to one of our Data Center Express Solutions which includes Microsoft Exchange server.

A new version of the Palm Treo 700w was released, now dubbed the Treo 700wx. The release came on the heals of users experiencing navigation lags and the need to constantly reset the original 700w, which runs Microsoft Windows Mobile. The new Treo 700wx aims to correct this by including additional internal RAM (64MB vs the original 32MB). Users of the new 700wx have acknowledged that the additional RAM has remedied the problem. In short, if you’re going for a Palm Treo, go for the 700wx(Windows OS) or 700p(Palm OS) as it seems the original 700w was flawed by design. Right now only Sprint carries the new 700wx.

The Hybrid Solar Lighting (HSL) technology from Sunlight Direct, uses a solar concentrator to collect and distribute sunlight into the interior of a building via plastic optical fibers. The optical fiber runs through special hybrid lighting units that manage the mix of fiber lighting and standard florescent lighting depending on the solar concentrators ability to deliver certain light levels. To see the system in action click here.

The benefits are major decreases in lighting costs, and the associated environmental benefits of being less dependent on the grid. It also has all the benefits of sky lights with regard to human working conditions and yet none of the heating issues associated with them. Right now the major draw back is that the fiber used in these systems are made of plastic, not glass as in telecommunication applications. This was to make the technology affordable, but plastic fiber will only transmit the light far enough for it to be used on the top floor of a building. This still makes it viable for large single story commercial spaces. Staples is apparently beta testing the system in some of their stores.

We were at first conflicted about writing about a technology that will not be available until 2007, but we felt that the technology was in a late enough stage of development and with initial pricing starting at $10,000, still within a small business’ budget. To further offset costs all of Sunlight Direct’s Hybrid Solar Lighting units now qualify for a 30% federal tax credit for units installed in 2006 and 2007.

The U.S. Small Business Administration has gone high-tech and is now offering podcasts for entrepreneurs on a variety of business topics.

The current list of podcasts includes:

• Is entrepreneurship for you?
• Selecting a business that fits
• Disaster preparedness for business owners
• Financing a small business
• The SBA training network
• Creating a Business Plan

Each broadcast is under 10 minutes and includes interviews with SBA experts and Service Corps of Retired Executive partners. The SBA has an additional series of podcasts in the works, and said it expects to update its library often.

To download one of the free podcasts, visit www.sba.gov/podcast.

On a personal note, we highly recommend the SCORE program. Their advice has helped guide our business with free information and insight that we would otherwise not be able to afford even if we were lucky enough to find such talented business veterans.

There are tons of books and resources out there on computer security best practices, but when we ran across Stephen Colbert’s take on the matter we thought we should share it with all of you. Click here to view 4 minutes of satirical glory!

If you haven’t heard, there has been quite a bit of battery shenanigans going on with Dell and Apple laptops/notebooks. It all stems back to certain lithium-ion batteries containing cells manufactured by Sony Corporation of Japan. They pose a safety risk that may result in overheating under rare circumstances (pr from dell and apple). What this really means is that the battery can overheat, melt the computer, start a fire, and or explode.

I already saw a teaser clip from Fox News about how this could be a new threat for air travel, but the reality is that when these things defect, it’s much more of a snap, crackle and pop. Think hot rice crispies, not C4.

Over 4 million batteries are part of the recall, spanning multiple production years and models so don’t take any chances and go to Dell’s and Apple’s respective battery recall pages. With such a highly publicized recall, business owners will surely face litigation if they fail to check their laptops and a employee or customer gets burned. Not to mention the bad press if your laptop goes up in flames at the next corporate event (see picture).

At Evo Networks, we use both Apple and Dell laptops. We ran a check on our batteries and while we had models that could possibly be affected we lucked out, because our specific battery serial numbers were not part of the recall.