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Amazon's Beanstalk Eases Climb to the Cloud January 19, 2011 
Amazon wants to make your cloud computing simple. The company announced Elastic Beanstalk on Wednesday. The application makes it easier to use Amazon's cloud computing platform, Amazon Web Services. The new application lets developers quickly deploy and manage Web services such as storage, computing clusters, application health monitoring, load balancing and auto-scaling.
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OpenERP Aims to Bring ERP to the SMB Masses January 18, 2011 
OpenERP has rolled out version 6.0 of its open source ERP product. It is the first upgrade of OpenERP in close to two years, with significant enhancements to its business applications. Going forward, the company has committed to more frequent releases of its major versions and point releases.
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A CRM Lesson From Sesame Street December 30, 2010 
This Christmas, I was sitting around with the in-laws after the presents were opened, when my father-in-law asked me a question that has probably been nagging him for a long time. "What is it that you do?" he said. Well, I'm a writer, first off, but what is it that I write about? CRM. Explaining what that acronym is and what it encompasses was pretty tough.
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Choosing the Ideal Board Member December 02, 2010 
Having an actively engaged, independent board is a must for the long-term viability of any corporation. Unfortunately, there are still many management teams that feel that their prospects for long-term employment, as well as generous salaries and perks, are dependent upon a "friendly" board of directors composed mostly of friends and associates. History has proven the opposite to be true.
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Nutshell Takes a Crack at Mid-Market November 29, 2010 
Nutshell CRM officially launched earlier this month. It is, like many startup CRM applications, focused primarily on the sales piece. Nutshell is quite different from other CRM startups in one respect: It is focusing on a long-ignored niche -- the mid-sized company. "There are different considerations for this segment of the market, and I do think it is very underserved," said CEO Guy Suter.
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HTML5's Potential as an SMB Superweapon November 29, 2010 
The rapidly changing and fast-growing opportunity for more businesses to reach their customers and deliver their services via mobile applications is at a crossroads. Over just the past two years, the demand for mobile applications on more capable classes of devices, such as smartphones and tablets, has skyrocketed. Now businesses need to figure out how they can get into the action.
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SMB E-Commerce Gets a Little Help From the Cloud November 13, 2010 
Businesses are increasingly using cloud and e-commerce to improve how they do sales, marketing and online transactions. One smaller company, Tampa-based MarkMaster, has quickly moved to nearly all-paperless sales transactions, found new customers via online networks, and increased the amount of product it sells to its existing clients.
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What Makes So Many Startups Fail November 11, 2010 
According to the Small Business Administration, fewer than 30 percent of startups are still in business after 10 years. This is a pretty startling failure rate -- over 70 percent. Let's take a look at some of the causes of startup failure and what can be done to improve your chances of making your new business a long-term success.
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Nothing Ventured, Nothing Taxed November 08, 2010 
Previously in this space, I've discussed the collapse of the venture industry since the bloodbath began with the collapse of two Bear Stearns funds. While publicly traded stocks have been hammered, the private market is undergoing its own painful restructuring. As of the first quarter of this year, available venture capital had collapsed to 2003 levels.
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The Fascinating Things Web Crawlers Can Tell You November 04, 2010 
Have you ever held a magnifying glass to your computer monitor and counted the pixels one by one? That's the level of detail revealed about your website by search engine crawlers: every word, title, image, meta tag and load time for every page. They know more about your site than you do.
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Tech Titans Create $250M Kitty for Social Startups October 22, 2010 
Venture capital group Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers has launched a $250 million fund aimed specifically at startups that are developing social applications and services. Other investors in the "sFund," as it's called, include Facebook, Amazon,
Zynga, Comcast and Liberty Media.
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Bantam Live: Social CRM for the SMB Crowd October 15, 2010 
Bantam Live principal John Rourke remembers well one of the first glimpses the tech industry got of what was possible with real-time activity streams for the corporate environment. He was sharing the stage with a Salesforce.com executive at an industry event focusing on that subject in 2009. They weren't talking about Salesforce.com's now popular Chatter networking application, though.
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Google Adds Another Brick to Its Communications Monolith August 25, 2010 
Google has rolled out a new service that allows Gmail account holders to make voice calls to any traditional phone number from their Gmail account. It will require the installation of a voice and video plug-in, but users won't need to have a special phone number assigned to them.
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Whamcloud to Put New Sheen on Lustre August 24, 2010 
The founders of Lustre software technology company Whamcloud opened for business in June with a lot of potential and years of experience working with high-performance computing. What they lacked from their first day was any signed contracts. Whamcloud Cofounder and CEO Brent Gorda still is waiting to sign the dotted line with his company's first customer.
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The Subscription Prescription: Q&A With Zuora CEO Tien Tzuo July 14, 2010 
Zuora, a provider of on-demand subscription billing and payment services, was cofounded in March 2008 jointly by Tien Tzuo, who serves as its CEO; Cheng Zou and K.V. Rao. It received $6.5 million in Series A funding later that month and $15 million in Series B funding in October of 2008. It has been profitable since.
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What Makes a Successful Entrepreneur? July 01, 2010 
Have you ever considered whether you have what it takes to be an entrepreneur? You might think that there aren't many objective ways by which you can assess your entrepreneurial ability. Actually, there are. One of the quickest ways by which you can get some idea of your innate talents for entrepreneurship is to do a Google search with the key words "personality types."
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Socializing the Storefront, Part 2: Navigating the Scene June 28, 2010 
Incorporating social media strategies into your marketing plan is no cut-and-paste job. You've got to know your clientele and what appeals to them, and you have to engage them in a conversation rather than simply spew offers at them. In fact, if you don't have the desire to commit yourself to social marketing, don't even bother, says small business marketing expert Jay Ehret.
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Socializing the Storefront, Part 1: Give Them Something to Talk About June 21, 2010 
Social networking platforms can be powerful tools. Twitter strikes fear into the hearts of repressive regimes, and Facebook was nearly single-handedly responsible for the revival of Betty White's career. So how can something with that much influence be easy and unintimidating for a small-business owner to use?
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Analytics 'R' Us June 11, 2010 
A growing recognition of the business benefits predictive analysis provides is positioning newcomer Revolution Analytics into a key role to help adopters of the R programing language migrate from legacy offerings. Until a recent funding infusion and a refocus of marketing goals, the startup did business under the name "Revolution Computing."
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How to Run a Business Without the Office Space June 01, 2010 
Empty office space litters skylines, freeways and office parks. Once-busy hives of cubicles have become empty steel and concrete caverns. Their previous occupants met with a variety of fates: Some were victims of a deep recession; others were washed away by tsunamis of cheap labor in foreign lands; still others were unleashed by virtual technologies.
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