E-Commerce Blog

The world of online business communication has introduced two industry-changing elements for small business: more customers and more competitors. Circa 1999, you were ahead of the competition by simply having a Web site to preview your service or products. By 2004, Web transactions were the norm, and convenience was the king. Both those previous core competencies have become expected norms, with social interaction, immediate consumer feedback, and a live and evolving social network and Web presence the new differentiators for cutting-edge online small business best practices.

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Giving Your Site a Social Life

Small and medium-sized businesses are demanding the same level of quality and functionality for their IT Web infrastructure as larger enterprise IT organizations. Many SMB organizations are implementing their own application delivery optimization solutions; however, others prefer to outsource their application delivery optimization infrastructure to managed hosting providers. By outsourcing, customers are able to avoid the headaches associated with 24/7 monitoring, troubleshooting faults and assuring that they have the most up-to-date gear.

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A No-Brainer for SMBs

In the spring of 2007, Michael Sullivan was trying to figure out how to add some mojo to his startup, Affine Systems. As a graduate student in applied mathematics at Harvard University, Sullivan had cofounded the company in the fall of 2006 with classmate Bobby Impollonia. Working out of their homes, the two computer whizzes had whipped up a software program to let media companies know if their copyrighted videos show up on the Internet. However, like many engineers, they didn’t know much about business, and they hadn’t yet put together a business plan.

Source:
What I Did at VC Camp

Though their IT needs are fundamentally the same as larger organizations, small and medium-sized business owners may feel particularly challenged when it comes to rolling out a new operating system. The increasing complexity of IT system architectures combined with a relative shortfall of resources — capital, IT expertise, etc. — can make implementing a new or upgraded OS an anxiety-ridden experience. “SMBs have many of the same challenges as enterprises,” said Jeff Carlat, director of ESS software at HP.

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OS Implementations: A Guide for SMBs

The continuing growth of the SMB market is pushing vendors to adapt or lose sales. Vendors are tweaking their more costly enterprise-grade offerings to feature sets and price levels SMB customers can afford. The SMB segment makes up 34 percent of the entire notebook market, according to research firm IDC. About 35 million small and midsize businesses are operating worldwide. That number swells to an estimated 60 million if you include home-based businesses.

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Lean, Mean Machines: Tech for the SMB, Part 2