Small Business

The Chromebook looks right now to the average laptop buyer like an all-electric car looks to the average car buyer: full of what-if questions and untested theories of living

Lots of people have been talking for months about what a new CEO for the maker of BlackBerry should do. Now's as good a time as any to compile that advice into one handy guide.

If you run a small or mid-sized business, server virtualization promises cost savngs and improved IT efficiency. To help ensure you understand the advantages, we drew up a list of the most tangible benefits that virtualization has to offer small and mid-sized businesses

Whether you run a business employing one person or work for a corporation of 250,000, you’ll need a social media strategy for 2012. As more people embrace Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and other networks, it’s time to make social media an integral part of your marketing strategy.

GoDaddy has raised the ire of the Internet--again. The Web domain registry firm is one of many publishers, studios, and other copyright holders who signed on in support of the Stop Online Privacy Act (SOPA), according to a list published by Gizmodo.

It may seem as if all Internet connections are the same, but some differences--beyond price--exist between Internet service providers, and between types of connections that a single ISP offers. This guide is designed to help you choose the ISP and the connection that best suit your small or midsize business or organization.

Small company, big ambitions. Sounds like the classic entrepreneurial dream -- but what if it means you bear the burden of big-company regulatory or standards compliance?

Just as enterprise tech has always trickled down to smaller businesses, so too are the benefits and challenges of big data.

Though VDI is most often associated with large deployments, small business has a lot to gain as well.

When you set up a Wi-Fi network, whether using access points (base stations) from Apple or another vendor, you're usually playing a guessing game. Where should I put a base station to get the best coverage and performance? Or multiple base stations? Apple provides some tools to help, including the somewhat hidden Wi-Fi Diagnostics program (buried in /System/Library/CoreServices/), but using them requires some expertise, as well as keeping your eye on ever-changing signal-strength numbers. NetSpot bypasses the technical in favor of the visual. This free site-survey software is a remarkable aid in laying out even a small-home network, using a Mac laptop as your survey tool.

Whether you're a small business relying on Google Docs for document sharing or an enterprise moving your global ERP system to the cloud, you should demand that some common security and compliance requirements are met by vendors providing applications and services over the Web. These requirements involve who can access your applications and data, as well as the systems hosting them; where the data is stored; and whether the data is hosted on dedicated, rather than on shared, hardware. They also ensure that you get detailed logs of who has accessed your data and applications so that you meet corporate and regulatory standards, and they verify that data is properly encrypted -- a factor that's more critical outside the corporate firewall.