.Roaring Mouse

Mike Speiser’s post on GigaOm is an interesting read. In it he talks about the opportunities that small businesses represent and why technology now allows entrepreneurs to target a relatively untapped market.

http://bit.ly/2cPcu3

You’ve probably heard the phrase “Cloud computing” being used in technology circles for a while now. For those of you unfamiliar with the term, cloud computing simply means that instead of having your software and data on your hard-drive, it’s located on a bunch of servers somewhere in the ‘cloud’. Your interaction with software is primarily conducted through your web browser and you access the software and your data through the Internet. (you can go here for a more detailed Wikipedia explanation)

Cloud computing in its rawest sense is not a new idea. If you had a Hotmail email account when it first launched years ago, you were an early adopter of cloud computing. After webmail, the next step in cloud computing was web photo-sharing. Web photo-sharing allowed you to upload your images to a server somewhere and display them without forcing you to learn how to create a webpage in HTML. Web photo-sharing was a big step in helping democratize photography, as it made it easy for people to share their photos with friends and family.

While email and web photo-sharing were the first cloud computing services, cloud computing wasn’t much of a hot topic until more recent times. It can be argued that the real fanfare over cloud computing truly began when commercially-focused pieces of software migrated to the ‘cloud’. The advent of Salesforce.com placed a spotlight on the promise of cloud computing to improve employee efficiency and productivity by providing them easy access to important information, at any time of the day. Salesforce.com’s online CRM offering led the way to prominence for other ‘cloud’ enterprise, productivity and storage offerings such as Netsuite (an Enterprise Resource Planning app), 37 Signals’s suite of software, Google Apps, Zoho and even Lenovo’s Online Data Backup service.

The advantages of cloud computing for a small business are manifold.

1.        Low cost: Cloud computing software companies charge a small monthly subscription fee instead of large per seat licenses. Now, instead of needing a large sum of money for capital expenditure, you’ve turned your software into a monthly operating expense, helping you lower your capital financing needs. In the event you don’t like the software, you can simply cancel your subscription and take a loss only on a month’s worth of subscription fees.

2.        Device independence: You’re not tied to a specific computing device, since all you need to run the software is a web browser. Use your smartphone, desktop, notebook or netbook on operating systems as diverse as Mac OS X and Linux to conduct business. Small businesses that don’t have a big IT budget can use a “bring what you got” approach to run their business.

3.        Anytime, anywhere access: Since your files are stored in the ‘cloud’, you can work on them even if you’re not close to your primary PC. You can leave your computer at home when you’re traveling and use a friend’s laptop or use the desktop at the library to do some work.

4.        Automatic backups: Cloud computing companies may provide multiple levels of redundancy to ensure that data you store in the cloud is safe. Data backups are automatic, and while you may pay for storage in the cloud, you don’t have to buy backup software and extra hard disk drives to store your data.

5.        Automatic and transparent software updates: You don’t have to spend your hard-earned money upgrading your software every so often, or bite your nails as you upgrade your software to the latest version, hoping that the upgrade doesn’t cause any instabilities or crashes in your system. Cloud-based software will update itself without you telling it to do so. The only time you’ll notice is when you see the nifty new feature you’ve been requesting for months suddenly appear in your browser.

6.        Email-less collaboration: Some cloud-based software such as Google Docs and 37 Signals’s suite allow you to collaborate in real time without having to email files back and forth to each other. Changes you make are updated immediately, eliminating the lag time between when you complete your edits or changes and when your business partner or employee has access to those updates. Add VoIP or video chats to the mix and you have a great collaboration platform.

7.        Security: Since your application and data files aren’t on your hard disk, the threat of viruses, trojans and worms corrupting your important information decreases significantly. You can now entrust your data to enterprise-class security, without spending the dollars to do so.

Cloud computing promises a lot of great things, but there are reasons why it has yet to become more prevalent. Here are some of the things I believe will need to exist in order for cloud computing to take off.

1.        Ubiquitous connectivity: Since all interactions happen through the Internet, being connected is a fundamental requirement for cloud computing to become successful. With the proliferation of smartphones and mobile broadband on notebooks and netbooks, we are making major strides towards realizing the positives of cloud computing.

2.        99.9999% Reliability: If you’re accustomed to your software always doing what you want it to do, you may occasionally be frustrated when your cloud-based software is down, even for a few minutes. The reality is that though not all cloud-based software suffers from any appreciable downtime, some do, and until everyone’s software works as consistently as their hard-drive-based counterparts, en masse adoption of cloud computing will not happen.

3.        Offline capability: While you may be connected to the Internet most of the time, there will be times when poor WiFi or cell reception will force you to work on a local copy of your files. Being able to work on your files while you’re not connected is an important requirement for widespread adoption of cloud-computing. Thankfully, technologies such as Adobe Air and Google Gears enable offline use of cloud-based software.

Cloud computing is changing the way we perceive software, allowing us to work and collaborate in ways we could never have done in the past. The addition of value-add, secondary services that are attached to cloud-based software and services changes that paradigm even more. I believe that the move to an all-Internet based software environment for most business software is imminent. Perhaps you’re an early adopter and have already made the switch completely. I’d appreciate it if you’d take the poll below and share your thoughts on cloud-based computing in the comments section.

P.S. This is a list of cloud-based software that I’ve personally found useful.

TO DO LIST: Remember the Milk – www.rememberthemilk.com

PROJECT MANAGEMENT: Basecamp from 37 Signals – www.37signals.com

CRM, including Inventory Management: ZOHO CRM – www.zoho.com/crm

PERSONAL FINANCE: Mint – www.mint.com

Several  years ago, the choices for notebook PCs were somewhat limited. In general, you’d find notebooks that had display panels that spanned in size from 12″ to 15″. Anything outside of this range was unconventional, and hence, expensive. Today, though, a plethora of different display sizes has become mainstream. You’ll just as easily find an 8.9″ notebook at an online computer store as you would a 17″ system, all at prices that are significantly cheaper than they were even 3 years ago. In fact, notebooks are so affordable now that more than half of all PC sales in the US and Canada in the most recently closed calendar quarter were comprised of notebooks (55.2% in the US, to be precise). However, with choice comes confusion, and the recent entry of the ‘netbook’ category of devices into the mix complicates matters even more. Aside from working on the ThinkPad SL, I’m also the product manager on Lenovo’s IdeaPad S-series netbooks and I’d like to summarize some of the major differences between netbooks and notebooks so that you can make a more informed decision about which the right system for you is. Some of the information isn’t universally true, but it’s safe to assume that the information is valid for sub-$500 netbooks. Please feel free to ask me questions about these systems in the comments section and I’d appreciate it if you would also participate in the accompanying poll.

Today we have a guest post from David Churbuck, VP of Web Marketing for Lenovo. Take it away David

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The greatest challenge of working from home – even when one works for a global Fortune 500 corporate like Lenovo — is do-it-yourself technical support, a reality for most small business owners and freelancers who operate with out much in the way of a support staff to keep things like PCs and peripherals running at full potential.

While I certainly believe that self-support is easier on a ThinkPad platform thanks to the ThinkVantage technology suite, there are times when I manage to shoot myself in the foot or run into a glitch caused by a combination of user errors, bad computing hygiene, or plain old-fashioned unexplainable weirdness in my system.

The biggest revolution in self-support is the power of a search engine and a search on one’s issue to see if anyone else has posted, written, or complained about the same error code or general state of brokenness.

A couple weeks ago I was refreshing my system with the ThinkVantage System Update — reflashing my BIOS with a new version, pulling in and installing new device drivers, downloading the latest Vista updates — when I realized I had broken my audio capabilities. This is not a show stopper, just an inconvenience, but I knew from long experience that it would probably take me hours to identify a solution to fix the issue on my own.

Earlier this year Lenovo’s service and support team launched the Lenovo Forum, a peer to peer support community that permits people like me to ask for help on tech and customer service issues. The forums now have over 20,000 registered users and deliver a good experience in terms of quickly getting feedback from other users on common (and not-so-common) issues specific to Lenovo PCs.

Anyway, I posted my problem and gained some good advice which helped me narrow down — but not solve — my audio glitch. This experience — of “walking a mile in the customer’s shoes” — is pretty instructive to crafting our total Lenovo ownership experience, especially from the vantage point of an independent proprietor who may only have tech support when it comes from technically adept friends, Google, or local paid services like Geek Squad or a local retailer.

I’m very interested in how we can improve the customer experience for those of you who are your own IT staff. I believe our ThinkVantage Technology suite is unparalleled for keeping a system backed up, stable, and current, but only to the extent people use it. For example — my recent audio issues made me wonder if my backup strategy (or lack of one) was a recipe for heartbreak. So, first thing I did this morning was crack open a stack of new recordable CDs and burn recovery media (the installation discs that no longer ship with your system but which should be made first thing out of the box). A dozen discs later and at least now I have a viable copy of Vista and all the ThinkVantage software sitting in a drawer.

So, what can we do better to give you peace of mind when it comes to a stable and error-free computing experience? Please check out our forums when you get a chance, create an account, and by all means, create your product recovery media today.

Reading this post on the Duct Tape Marketing blog inspired me to think about how technology has not only really changed how businesses conduct their day-to-day tasks, but how it has altered the fundamental expectation of what a small business is. Gone are the days when small business = local business. Technology has allowed a geographic and temporal shift, making it easier to reach customers and collaborators who sometimes live in completely different continents and time zones.

An example that I’m personally familiar with is a small natural beauty products company that friends of mine run. One of the owners is in Los Angeles, on the West Coast of the United States. The other lives in North Carolina, on the East Coast. They collaborate using the regular tools of phone and email, but also employ VOIP to save on phone bills. Online collaboration tools from Zoho and 37 Signals allow them to share and edit documents in real time and track the progress of their projects. A company website and online advertising helps reach their customers, Paypal handles invoicing and payment, and online estimation and tracking tools from the United States Postal Service and UPS get estimates for shipping.

This has allowed them to run their business more efficiently and extend the reach of their business beyond their respective towns, enabling them to reach customers they may never have been in contact with otherwise. (As a side note, isn’t it amazing that email is now commonplace when just 15 years ago, its use was still relatively limited?)

How has technology helped you expand your business beyond the confines of your local geography? What technology products do you use to run your business more efficiently? What technologies do you wish existed to allow you to achieve your geographical expansion goals? (yes, teleporters are fair game, but you heard it here first!)