I’ve been using an iPad for that last 5 days. The model I’m using has 16gb with WI-FI only (no 3g wireless). During my time with the iPad, I’ve mostly used it  to connect to my corporate network via WI-FI and VPN. After the first hour of Apple induced euphoria, I came back down to earth and started to use it. Here’s what I concluded:

Pluses:

1. Size–its a lot smaller and lighter than my MacBook Air.
2. Battery Life– It can go nearly 2 days with normal use in WI-FI mode.(I didn’t have  the 3g model and I didn’t use bluetooth so those battery hogs could effect battery life if used). Its a lot longer then any laptop or even my iPhone, for that matter.
3. Screen. Crisp and Bright.
4. Applications. Lots of them, specifically for the iPad. You have the force of Apple behind it and, with that, tons of iPad specific apps.
5. App Store. The App Store is easy to navigate, and does a great job of differentiating iPhone apps from iPad Apps.
6. Email. If you like the iPhone email you’ll love the iPad Email

Neutral

1. Web Browser. The iPad size browser is great. Its easy to read, and pages display properly on it (with the exception of Flash*). On the other hand  some advanced web features don’t work on the iPad,  for instance, Regular Google Docs won’t work properly on the iPad, so you have to use the less powerful the mobile version.
2. Keyboard. It’s a lot better than the small touch screen keyboards, but you still wouldn’t want to type more than a paragraph on it.
3. iPhone Apps, Yes, they load and work, but they are the same size as the iPhone. If you want to make them bigger, all you do is zoom in. (Yes, they are bigger after you zoom, but they look hokey.)

Bad

1. No Camera (Supposedly coming later in the year). I would be nice to use Skype for with video.
2. No External Memory. You get what you get when you buy it, and its not easy to move data.
3. No Removable Battery. Someday you will need a new battery, but when you do you’ll have to send the whole unit away.
4. iTunes. You still have to manage the unit with iTunes. iTunes never made sense to me before, and still doesn’t now.

I think that the iPad is great tool if you understand its limitations. It’s great for entertainment, light web browsing, and checking email. If you travel frequently, but don’t need a full laptop, the iPad is very convenient.  Make sure, however, you test any sites you need to use before get one so you are not unpleasantly surprised.

* Flash refers to Adobe Flash, a tool often used to add interactivity and video to websites.  Apple does not support, or currently plan to support Flash  on the iPod Touch, iPhone, or iPad

I’ve now caught up with the year 2010  and created a mobile version of this site. (Thanks to the WordPress Mobile Edition plugin.) Mobile computing via a web enabled phones is one of the fasted growing consumer trends. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve be in the car looking up stuff on my iPhone (while my wife drives).  If you are in the retail business, a mobile site is a great way to get to your potential customers while they are actually looking for your business.

Anyhow, enjoy the mobile version of the site.

According to a one research study I read about recently, nearly 40% of small business do not have a website. If you are one of these businesses you are invisible to the nearly 220 million US Internet users. It’s like having a retail store with no sign, your ARE loosing potential business. Keep in mind that my Grandmother’s 85 year old boyfriend has figured out how to look thinks up on Google, so there are a lot more potential customers on the web then you might think. You need something, it doesn’t have to be large, expensive, or complicated, but you do need something. (Understand that having a website doesn’t mean you will be found — that involves advertising and specialized site design, but not having a site 100% guarantees that you won’t be found!)

Other than presence on the web, what are some of the advantages of having a website?

• It makes your company appear more legitimate.
• You can use your web address on marketing materials and advertising to point people to more information about your company.
• If you start listing your business in on-line directories, you can point to your site for more information.
• Someday (soon) the yellow pages will go away.

What do you do next?

1. Register a domain name. If at all possible get a .com, but .biz addresses are good too.

2. Find a web host. Microsoft Office Live will host your site for free  (yes, free). They also have templates you can use to build the site.  Currently I use GoDaddy.com‡ for my site and blog.

3. Design your site. Most hosting companies offer either free or paid packages to help you design your site.

(By the way,  when you setup your hosting, you can usually setup an email address that uses your domain name. Do that. Nothing screams ‘fly-by-night’ more than an @hotmail, @gmail, @aol, or @yahoo address for a business)

If you don’t want to do it yourself, hire someone to do it for you (like my company‡), it won’t be that expensive, and it will be worth it in the long run.

Resources

Solutions4Tech for for Website Design (Thats me!)‡

GoDaddy.com for domain registration and hosting‡

Microsoft Office Live

As you know from my last post, I’ve moved a lot of my computer operations from my PC to Google. One of the downsides of doing this is that, if the internet is down, so are you.  That’s just what happened to me last week.  At 11 pm I turned off my computer and the internet was working, and at 8 am the next morning, no internet. I troubleshot the issue and established that I wasn’t getting a signal from my provider, called, waited on hold, and learned that someone would have to come out the next day to fix it. NEXT DAY.!… that’s at least 24 hrs without the internet!, so now what. Now its time for my backup plan.

My backup plan is simple and cheap. If nothing urgent is happening I can use my iPhone to keep up with email.  If I have a major project on the other hand, our local library has free Wi Fi,  so I can pack up my laptop and go there. Its not complicated, but I’ve thought it out in advance so I don’t have to panic.  (I just checked mail on my iPhone this time since nothing urgent was happening.) You need a plan too.

Options include:

• A list of internet cafe’s in your area
• A list of free Wi-Fi locations in your area
• Tethering your phone
• Dial-up
• A Wi-Fi modem from your wireless carrier
• Verizon’s MiFi cellular modem (It lets you setup a mini wireless network)
• Wi -Max (a long distance high speed wireless service available in a few large cities)

Consider these, and see what available and feasible for your  business — and make a plan. I recommend a two phase plan, since sometimes ‘Plan B’ fails, and you need to try ‘Plan C’. (For instance, if the phone and the DSL are both out,   dial-up as your ‘Plan B’ won’t work.)

Good Luck.

I mentioned in a post Friday that Microsft is no longer going to support MS Money after Jan 2011.  So now what do you do? This may be a time to re-evaluate  at your accounting software in order to figure out what will meet your needs, and how they can be  best met.

If you are like me, when you started your home business, you used your current personal financial software, I used Quicken, but both Quicken and Microsoft have business features. Now, you have a  couple of options, replace MS Money with an equivalent copy of another brand of financial software, or upgrade to a full-fledged accounting software package. Here are some questions you need to ask yourself to help make this decision:

1. Does your Accounting Software handle expense/revenue categories the way you want?
2. Is it difficult to enter transactions?
3. Are you able to easily get accurate reports on profit and loss, net income, and margin?
4. Do you need online integration with a web store?
5. Do you need customized invoices/easier email delivery?
6. Do you want to better segregate business and personal activities?
7. Do you need to track inventory?
8. Do you need to support double entry/accrual  accounting?

Some options to consider are (this is by no means a complete list)

Outright — Fee basic online accounting. (Well reviewed)

Quickbooks Online (Both Free and Paid Versions)- A next step from personal financial software. (I use this for my consulting business)

Quickbooks – Also free and paid versions — Also easy to transition to, lots of free templates and wizards

Peachtree – More advanced for a businesses that need full support of double entry/accrual accounting

If you have an accountant,  consult him or her, before you make a decision about acounting software (I’m not an accoutant so they will know better then I.) Also since this is in no way a complete list, so please feel free to add your own suggestions in the comment section.

One great thing about the Internet is the wide variety of information that is available at your fingertips. The bad thing is that anybody can publish anything (look at me), so you have to make sure that the the site has something of real value, and is not just a rehash of old dated information.  On the subject of marketing, there are two sites that I feel would be valuable to ANY small business owner. These sites consistently provide quality, timely, and useful information.

(OK, this site is called Irunabiz:Technology, and these sites are about marketing, so how do I justify this post. First, They are on the Internet, that’s technology, isn’t it? Second, sometimes they talk about technology subjects like Twitter and Facebook. Third, this is my blog and I can write about anything I want to, so there!)

• Copyblogger. While ‘blogger’ is in the name, this site is about a lot more than blogging. Its about good writing, with a focus on persuasive, and engaging copy. I pick up great tips almost every time I go to it.  It’s also organized very well, so it’s easy to get lots of information on a specific subject.

• The Duct Tape Marketing Blog. This blog is written by John Jantsch (who also has  books and related media on this subject). His blog has a lot of cutting edge information on marketing in general with a focus, lately, on Internet and social media marketing. I think I have referenced material from his blog more than any other. He is well worth reading regularly.

Take some time to let me know about any site you think are worthwhile below.

Related Posts

• Figuring out Twitter when you can barely figure out email.
• Fast Read: Sales and Marketing

As you probably figured out from my last post: The Economics of Ebay, I’m going to try and sell stuff that most people would normally sell on eBay without using eBay. The Goal is to do it for less then what I would pay on eBay.

One of the most critical things I am going to need is some type of store to sell stuff. In comes an email from Auctiva with an offer to use the “pre-release” version of their new web store application–Auctiva Commerce . I looked at the store and and the promotional offer, which means that in my case it will be essentially cost free until April, and decided to try it out. (Markters let this be a lesson to you that sometimes timing is everything.)  Auctiva is a company that specializes in tools for ebay sellers. I’m guessing that with the change in the way the eBay does business with its eBay Stores sellers, they tried to create a product that better meets those sellers’ needs. The product has a number of nice features (like sophisticated sales tax setup, and shipping integration) and is still missing some stuff  (an About Me page or a Terms and Conditions Page) All of these issues are being worked on in some way or another, and are to be expected in a new product, none of them are show-stoppers and the product is very usable in its current state.

See my Store as its built here: solutions4tech.auctivacommerce.com

There are two major free Office Suite Zoho Office (zoho.com) and Google Documents (docs.google.com) that I am aware of.  Both are competent suites but they have limited functionality. Google Documents includes a word Processor, spreadsheet and presentation application.  Zoho has the same as well as a number of other applications including an organizer, invoices, and CRM. The office applications are free but some of their other applications are subscription based.

Having worked extensively with the Google Applications, my general feeling is that it is good for basic word processing and spreadsheets, but if you are interested in slightly more sophisticated formatting, you will be disappointed.   Google Does not allow you to create columns, and embedded table formatting is quite limited. 

I’ve looked at Zoho as well, and tried some basic formatting on it as well and came to the same conclusion. While the tables have more formatting options, it also doesn’t support columns. Overall, I think that Zoho has better features than google, and its worth a look.

While I don’t do the most sophisticated formatting on my documents, I do like to have a certain level of features,  and I don’t feel that either of these free suites will suite meet my needs. If you choose to use them for your primary office application make sure that they will do what you need before you throw away your PC based software. I think I’ll stick with OpenOffice for now.

If you know of any other suites, please feel free to let me know in the comments.

This is the third post in my series on Cloud Computing. Click here for the introduction and index.

Email is the obvious place to start with cloud apps because its both one of the oldest cloud based applications, and because its one of the most common. Almost every email provider has a web based email program, so its pretty easy to get your mail on the web. the problem with most of those web based applications is that they only allow you to read one email account at at time. Since I have personal email address, a business email address, a blog email address, and an email address that only my in-laws use, I don’t want to be going 4 different places each time I check my email.  PC based email programs like Outlook Express, and Mozilla Thunderbird let you pull and send from different accounts in the same program, I want to be able to do this on the web too.

This is the first post in my series on Cloud Computing. Click here for the introduction and index.

What is cloud computing?

Cloud computing describes computing where the Internet and Internet technology is a major portion of  an application. Examples of Cloud Computing include Web Mail programs, like Gmail, and photo sharing applications like Photobucket. Typically cloud computing only requires a web browser on the users’ computer, and an Internet connection.

Why is it called cloud Computing ?

Cloud computing got it name because about 15 years ago when people created diagrams of network connections they decided to make the Internet look like a cloud. (Don’t know why, but its always been that way.–they could have used a mushroom and called it mushroom computing…much more interesting.)

Why would you want use cloud computing

With cloud computing you don’t have invest in top of the line hardware to run sophisticated programs, the powerfull hardware is on on the server. All you need is a computer with a web browser, and an Internet connection. There are many applications that are free, and other applications can be used via subscription and may be more cost effective than purchasing an application for your PC . (This pay as you go method of prvoiding sofware is sometimes called Software as a Service or SaaS.) You also don’t have worry about updating your software and your data is stored on the server so you don’t have to worry about a PC crash destroying your data.

How about a picture of cloud computing ?

Cloud Diagram

What if I want to see real pictures of clouds ? 

Click here

How about a Cloud Computing Haiku ?

Why clouds and not rain/Rain makes the computer wet/Clouds block the sun’s glare 

Cloud computing sounds great so far.. but wait for  my next post where I talk about the advantages and disadvantages of cloud computing. (Storm clouds on the horizon perhaps.)