Using Technology: Small Business Strategies

Technology has the capacity to help small businesses, but only when the goals of the business are clearly defined. Small businesses often turn to technology as a means to survive downturns in the business cycle.

The most pressing issues facing small business concerns:

• Lowering Operating Costs
• Attracting and Retaining Customers
• Enabling Employment of a Remote Workforce

Small businesses interested in using technology for one of these purposes might find it impractical, expensive and time-consuming to acquire and utilize the most advanced technologies available on the market. The needs of small businesses certainly vary by industry, but pervasive technology trends can help identify specific areas where small business owners are likely to invest their precious resources.

Business Server and Software

A small to midsize server can reduce costs and help the business to gain access to virtual customers as well as harness the expanding virtual remote workforce.

Software products designed specifically to address the needs of the small business operation are surging in popularity. Their excellent functionality and low maintenance provide new avenues for businesses to track various transactions, reach new customers and even prepare for the tax season.

Give us a call to see if this technology can help you!

Social Networking and Small Business: Marketing Choices

With the wide variety of applications and online platforms that businesses could potentially utilize to their advantage, sometimes it might seem that there are too many choices available. Every business decision is an investment of a resource; if it is not money, it surely is time. So, which media is right for your company?

There is no one solution that will work for all businesses; however, consider the following baseline concepts:

1. Show, Don’t Tell:
It is more effective to show your customers the end value of your product/service than to merely tell them about it. Why not outsource the creation of vimeos or animated videos that could easily be displayed on your social network?

2. Interactive Interfaces:
Inviting participation through the use of touch-sensitive devices allows users of social media to receive their most desired experience: Connection.

3. Maintain Brand Recognition:
Whether you decide to tweet, email or blog, it is important that your image and brand get reinforced so that you become a familiar sight to your customers.

It could be Facebook, Twitter, iPhone, Kindle Fire, or even article marketing and SEO. One of the keys to a successful marketing experience is narrowing the field to ensure that the tactics used are the ones most relevant to your business enterprise.

Have You Ever Wondered How Google Works?

We know technology can be really confusing to some.  Sometimes it gets confusing for us!  Google, for example is an interesting animal.  We don’t not fully understand how it works, but we know there are a lot of moving parts.  For those of you who want to gain a better understanding of how Google works, this may be a helpful thing to look at!

Infographic by the Pay Per Click Blog

Free Network Health Assessment!

Many companies who receive our newsletters, have not yet taken advantage of our free network assessment program.  When we assess the health of your IT structure, we probe the architecture of the network to ensure that your business is able to remain continuous in cases of catastrophic data loss, and that your day to day activities are being accomplished at a reasonable speed!

Some of the problems we may find:

• You think your data is protected and it is actually being backed up to a defective drive. (Yes, we have seen this!)
• Your computers are expensive and are drawing too much power and costing too much to run
• The firewall that you have installed stopped blocking trojans and viruses.
• Your E mail box is 95% full and in danger to crash any day

We also may find everything is in GREAT shape.  That is more rare, but you need to protect your data and computers if you are going to stay in business in Las Vegas!

Call us for a free no-obligation network assessment today!

Marketing is Effective … 1/2 of the Time

Are you looking to revamp your website?  Are you considering optimizing your website for the internet (SEO)?  Do you have a newspaper ad campaign planned?  Are you giving away pens and wonder if it is worth the money you spend? Are you getting ready to do radio ads?

Marketing and IT can work together to make your company successful!

Did you know you can have a tracking number placed on your ad or your website that can tell you how many calls you are getting?  This number can be as cheap as $6 or $7 a month.

You can track Adwords campaigns through a different number.  Ultimately, we can help you use technology to ensure you are spending money wisely.

ITS may be your Marketing team’s best friend, or worst enemy!

If sales is up and the Marketing team is doing a tremendous job, sales may be getting the pat on the back the Marketing team deserves.  Sales could be low and the Marketing team may be creating leads, but the process may be losing the sales.  In these cases, Marketing loves us!

If the Marketing team isn’t concerned about their budget or just want to advertise regardless of the results that occur, we may be their worst enemy.

If you are looking to implement Marketing Plans, and want to know how technology can fit in to make your company more successful, give ITS a call today!

The Kindle Fire – Hot Christmas Gift

Going to get a Kindle Fire proved to be a little different than we were expecting.  Of course the display looks really nice, like most tablets.  The interface is pretty easy, but when I started to read on the Kindle Fire, I didn’t like it as well as the regular Kindle.  It seemed to strain my eyes a little more than I expected, so that didn’t impress me.  Also, I do like the page turner on the right hand side of the standard Kindle rather than interacting with the screen.  So, the Kindle Fire is a strange mix between Tablet and Kindle Reader.  Did I get it, no.  But I can see where some people may like this device.

At $199, it is a great price point for a 7″ tablet PC and expensive for a reader.  For people who are looking at an iPad, this is a lot cheaper, but for those looking at a “old school” Kindle, it’s expensive.

Pros –

• Cheap for a tablet at $199 – Most tablets in this class are $250 to $300 if they are on the Android platform.
• Nice interface to interact with all your media, not just reading.
• Children’s Books, etc in full color
• Basic internet features like browsing and Email are supported

Cons -

• No Bluetooth support (if you want to add a keyboard etc)
• No HDMI output (if you want to connect to your TV)
• No camera like other tablets in a close price point
• Missing the ability to download many aps from the Android market which would make it a lot cooler.

Ultimately, is the Kindle Fire for you?  If you want a reader that will be used as a tablet, it is great.  If you mainly are looking for a cheap tablet, spend an extra $50 or $100 and get the productivity features standard with many tablet PC’s.

Is Google Music for You?

We all like to have a lot of our music readily accessible on our portable devices.  It is handy for exercising and just to share songs as we are on road trips or with friends and family.  When Google released their music package, naturally our curiousity was piqued.

We had our staff member who owns an Android Evo try out this service.  Technically it can work with the iPhone, but getting a App is necessary or at least recommended and our thought was it would be better to test the program within Google owned and developed technologies.  We wanted to try this on an Android because of this thought.

So, 5,500 songs in this database, what was the experience?

First of all, the uploading time is brutal.  The 5,500 songs took our high speed internet connection over a day to upload all the music.  Way longer than we expected this to take and we can normally pull a 50MB file in under a minute…  the 40GB of music, we thought might take an hour or two and was shocked that it took just over 30 hours.  For an average user with home based cable, assume at least an hour per GB of music.  If you are an audiophile while 15,000 songs, you may want to set this computer aside as you may not see it for 3 or 4 days!

When the songs were loaded, an odd thing happens with the artists.  If you have a artist like Billy Joel doing “We Didn’t Start the Fire” on an 80′s hits CD, it will display that CD under the artist Billy Joel, but then when you click it, it shows all the song names, but not the artist in that list.  It’s cool in one way, as you can see all the albums and you don’t have to go to the “Albums” tab in order to get all the songs, but annoying if you are not sure what song you had from the 80′s hit CD.

Google Music has some other quirky things too, but it does work extremely well, and now there are over 6,000 songs on my phone (they give you about 500 for free…)  “I would recommend it as a cool solution, but not flawless” was our experience.

Data Recovery Means that the Infrastructure was Faulty!

Often people call a computer company like ours when their data needs to be recovered.  All of their company files were on a computer or a server and the company either didn’t believe that data backup was important or they had an older system like tape backups that failed to get all of their data back.

When looking at data recovery, it is key to understand a few details.

• It is always more expensive to “recover data” than it is to properly back up data
• It is critical to most businesses to not lose their data.  In fact, with a major data catastrophe, most companies will quickly go out of business (try “remembering” who owes you money…)
• Data recovery is something that can save your hide if your company hasn’t invested in the IT infrastructure to do consistent backups
• Tape backups often fail when servers and data need to be re-built.  (Have you ever tried a “data recovery test run?”  Pretending your systems went down and seeing what your IT team or company can get back for you?
• Repairing a hard drive properly is an extremely complex and stressful activity for a data recovery specialist.  One or two wrong steps in the process and all of the data is gone!

Data Recovery in Las Vegas is expensive, but the alternative…  losing all your data will wipe out most companies!

Sonicwall WXA for Las Vegas Companies With Remote Workforces!

If you are responsible for a company in Las Vegas with remote employees who are required to access data over the web, you may want to consider the Sonicwall WXA for business.  If you don’t want your valuable employees waiting around for valuable files, this appliance may be perfect for your Las Vegas business.

Where the Sonicwall WXA fits best:

• When an increase in bandwidth is needed
• When an increase in speed for file transfers is needed
• When a lot of the files are already on a server and the remote user is making modifications.

We were impressed by a demo we got from Sonicwall when we first started selling this solution.  We had a repository of .jpg files on another server.  These were high quality .jpg’s and the first file took about 35 seconds to transfer over.  Subsequent files of the same size and type took about 5 seconds each.

If you need increased speed for remote users in your organization, getting a demo on the Sonicwall WXA solution may be just the thing for your Las Vegas company!

Cloud Based Microsoft Office — Office 365

Microsoft Office 365 is the company’s foray into cloud based office applications. It’s meant for people who are constantly moving from platform to platform and want a fixed environment to work on their documents based on the tried and true MS Office platform. It is accessible through most web browsers on any major operating systems, including mobile OS’s.

It brings with it a subscription model that offers far more flexible pricing schemes to customers, allowing them to pay per user, per month, without ever worrying about purchasing a product that could be rendered obsolete within a year or two.

It eliminates practically all installation, deployment, and local maintenance costs, while providing up to 80% of the functionality that employees actually use. In addition, certain plans offer a desktop based application rental agreement as well, allowing customers to use a locally installed version of Office 2010 Professional Plus when available, and the cloud based Office 365 when not. It goes without saying that synchronization between the local and online versions of files is seamlessly integrated in all current Microsoft applications. Office 365 at least demands a review by all corporations. Your local service provider can help think through such a decision.