Tweet I know from personal experience that good computer virus protection is vital. Lurking in the darkness of the internet and emails are deadly viruses that could wipe out your computer’s hard drive with no remorse. It is no laughing matter to see months of work disappear to a land of no return. With all the other expenses entrepreneurs have to endure it is good when you can find a reliable product to protect your [...]

Tweet The way people do business is becoming more and more mobile. With that in mind it was only an obvious solution for PayPal® to get in on the game. Just like the Square, the PayPal Here™ card reader allows any iPhone or Android phone to handle mobile credit card transactions. The only difference is that the payment is able to go directly into you PayPal account. What is PayPal Here™? PayPal Here™ is the [...]

Tweet So this was the year I decided I would take my business paperless. While streamlining my business I figured I would also be reducing my carbon footprint. My system for keeping up with passwords and taking notes had gotten a bit messy. It was a notebook of scribble on hundreds of pages. Whenever I needed to refer to a particular note I would turn through months (sometimes years) of notes to find that bit [...]

Tweet Ever needed to reduce the size of a large batch of images at one time so you could email them? Or have you needed smaller images for a gallery on your website? Need all your photos to be the same size? Here’s what you have been waiting for. The Shrink O’Matic!!! If this sounds like a spoof of low-budget infomercial it isn’t. Well it is but The Shrink O’Matic does actually exist.   What [...]

Tweet When I do Featured Freebie I try to find things that are 1) free(of course) 2) Useful for small businesses and 2) something that I would gladly pay for if there was a charge to it. The Square Card Reader is one of those products. Basically Square will turn your apple or Android mobile device into a mobile credit credit card reader. It’s ideal for businesses without a standard location, for salespeople who work [...]

Tweet Often, I have to train a client on using their CMS. Since it is not always feasible to do face-to-face training (due to distance or budget) I would have to conduct the training over the phone. Along with that I needed a way to share my screen so that I could make sure that both, I and the client, were following along on the same page. This is where Mikogo came in. I was [...]

Tweet I am the kind of person that is always looking for a way to make my business more mobile. As a solopreneur I need to have the same capabilities away from my home office that I do while I’m there since I have no one else to call on to do it. LogMeIn is one of the tools I use to make that happen. What Is LogMeIn LogMeIn is a suite of software services [...]

Tweet   This week’s featured freebie is Skype, another communication tool I found impossible to avoid. It took me a while to appreciate the benefits of Skype initially. I downloaded it and never saw any reason to use it until I got my first international client and she requested we conference via Skype. Skype allowed me to communicate with my client without any international fees. That’s when I realized the power of Skype and began [...]

Tweet Google Voice by far is my favorite freebie. I think so highly of it that I think this product could easily justify attaching a usage charge (although I hope they Never do). What Is Google Voice? Google Voice is a telecommunications service by Google launched on March 11, 2009. Google Voice had some 1.4 million users in October 2009, 570,000 of which used the service 7 days a week. The service is configured and [...]

Tweet Featured Friday freebie is a new Dogg Blogg feature where we present a free or low cost business tool for the small business owner each Friday (obviously). Today’s feature is Dropbox. I started using this tool only a week ago for file storage and sharing from the suggestion of a friend and colleague. What is Dropbox? Dropbox is a Web-based file hosting service  that enables users to store and share files and folders with [...]