Small Biz Technology Advisor Blog

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.