How so? Here’s what you can expect of this remarkable app:

What Makes the Travel Expense Report From SAP so Stunnning

Rating: 4 1/2 out of 5 stars

Simply basic function. Something most entrepreneurs take for granted but never realize how important it is to hold dear. As efficient as every auto attendant and call center can be, it’s plainly obvious that an entrepreneur can go green with envy when the pinnacle of effectiveness and accuracy simply falls short for the fallible man.

I’m, of course, talking about logging in hours! Counting miles! Dear God, how much of a pain that is for an entrepreneur. Imagine having to drive millions of miles every year and then losing the darn scrap paper with all your counts, not giving it to your tax guy. The tax guy then shakes his head sorrowfully — like when a dentist finds a few hundred cavities in your mouth and gives you the naughty finger.

Bad entrepreneur.

Well, it’s this app, the Travel Expense Report (I know, long title for an app), that can make it a real breeze for the entrepreneur.

Like SAP’s regular software, the SAP Travel Management, this is a tiny little app that can do a number of things:

• Planning
• Online Booking
• Logging Travel Expenses

Obviously, the mobile app’s designed for an on-the-go mentality. Simply input in everything as if it were a text, so to speak, and that’s it. It’s been logged. You’ll know where it all is with a flick of a touch screen. Pretty handy.

Now all you got to do is make sure you never lose your smartphone….

Anything Bad About This App?

No, not really.

I can only say that this is a very specific app designed for a specific purpose. Not every small business will find it handy. It touches on an aspect of small business that really hasn’t been explored: travel management.

That could provide new ground for the world of mobile apps; but all in all, if you don’t need to worry about travel expenses, don’t waste your time with the SAP Travel Expense Report.

On the other hand, in general small businesses do some sort of travel — whether it’s in city or in state or in country, or even out of the country. So this is an app that can touch on a large demographic.

I’d say give it a shot if you’re a small business doing some travel here and there. When it comes to small business, you need all the tax help you can get, honestly.

Related Keywords: business tax deductions, independent contractor, business organization

But given that tablets are the wave of the future, particularly with small businesses and entrepreneurs, you’re looking at quite the new-wave app to stardom and productivity. So here’s the lowdown….

Why LogMeIn Ignition Goes Mach 3

Let’s break the sound barrier here, speedsters….

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

This handy little app basically allows your tablet to wirelessly access any desktop you like. Think of it as remote access control. Whatever’s on your computer back home, in the office, or just about anywhere — that can be viewed and used as if you’re there using the computer. Desktop and everything.

What’s funny is if someone happens to be at the target desktop, they’ll watch the computer start working as if possessed by some computer demon. No, it’s just you using your tablet to work the computer from miles away. All thanks to LogMeIn Ignition.

The obvious benefits are pretty self-explanatory:

• Utilize Your Standard Desktop Software Right on the Tablet
• All Files and Software on Your Desktop Are Accessible
• Be Your Own IT Team
• Tap Into Multiple Computers

Talk about convenience….

There’s Just One Problem….

That’s a hefty price for an app. $29.99 on Android Google Play. And, forgive me if I read wrong or if it’s simply a typo on Apple’s App Store, a staggering $129.99!

(Maybe it’s a typo?)

Either way, that’s a heck of a lot of dough to pony up for one little app. Except it’s a little app that does a heck of a lot. This is like space age stuff. And it’s pretty compatible with a lot of tablets, even smartphones! That’s a shocker right there. Can you imagine using your computer desktop in your dinky little phone screen? I can’t. But with LogMeIn Ignition, you can.

That can be another downside in all honesty. This app is probably only usable beneficially with a tablet. But that’s all fine and dandy. Just don’t lose your tablet, or someone might find it and start messing around with your desktop in really bad ways. Just sayin’.

3-2-1, Blast Off!

I said this app turns me on. It does. And when it comes to your handy call centers and auto attendants, a big hats off to this one. Entrepreneurs can take advantage of it in a big way, utilizing such things as e-mail attachments with ease and have them saved right in the handy hard drive back in the office. Safe and sound.

No worries about clouds and online docs or whatnot, the worry if the connection’ll be so slow that it’ll take your entire life to send an Excel document or something like that. That’s never fun. Simply patch in to your computer back home, get on e-mail, send the document, and that’s it.

For sure, Houston — and just about any race car as well — would not have any problem with this.

Related Keywords: e-mail fax, user account, database

While there are more than a few such items in the market space already, TenHands is looking to take on the biggest names like Microsoft Lync and WebEx from Cisco. The app itself is in private beta, so getting in on this one may not be easy, but for those businesses who want a way to connect with remote employees, it will be one to look into.

The web-based nature of the TenHands service gives it a lot of flexibility, and the ability to support a variety of different programs. Right now, TenHands supports Box.net, and plans to bring in other service like DropBox and Google Drive in the not too distant future. Further customization will also be on hand, according to the word from TenHands. Even better, it will also boast video conferencing capabilities said to be on par with any of the greats, and that combination of video conferencing and collaboration capabilities should make this one one to watch.

In terms of pricing, the current word is that they’re planning to go on a freemium model once the beta phase ends. Every user will get three hours of use free every month, with the whole program available. Those needing more time than that will have to get on the subscription model, at $10 every month.

The software can handle an unlimited number of users, but in its current beta form it’s got a soft limit of ten at any one time.

And while this kind of collaboration software can go a long way toward keeping everybody together, so too can cloud-based telephony tools. Meet-me conferences and support for Google Apps are two great tools that can keep everybody on the same page, even when they’re not in the same room. Or the same building. Or even the same state.

Taking advantage of talent pools in other markets beside your own can open up the possibility of new perspectives, as well as new potential solutions to current problems. With a good collaboration tool at hand, the ability to bring in new, distant workers is more available than ever before.

Related keywords: cloud-based telephony, telecommuting, collaboration software, beta version

Unfortunately, it seems with this digital age and mobile apps for business, injecting some Matrix-y cyberspace action into your everyday effective call center and auto attendant, the classic vintage of the important whiteboard has taken a backseat in Corporate America.

Guess what — the whiteboard is back with a vengeance — thanks to the hot Android and iPhone app “Whiteboard Capture,” a nifty little gadget on your smartphone allowing you to take photos of whiteboards and then clean up the pictures with features that remove ‘artifacts’ to make them look like actual ‘whiteboards.’

The Benefit of Whiteboard Capture(?)

Rating: 3 1/2 out of 5 stars

Now I know what you’re saying…. Any camera phone can do this! And what sucks about this is you’re paying .99 on your Google Play account to utilize this app on your Android Ice Cream Sandwich device. Or even worse, $2.99 for it on an iPhone.

So I get it. It seems pointless. Seems like a waste of space. Today’s boardroom would probably already require the use of smartphones with their high-profile cameras to capture the whiteboards and be able to send those pictures to other team members for reference. So why spend the money? Why waste the memory on your phone?

Let’s Look at It From a Different Angle….

On the other hand, while there are similar features on regular camera apps for phones, the honest truth is that Whiteboard Capture is able to practically mimic the look of an actual whiteboard!

Try this for a moment: take a picture of a whiteboard. If by chance you have a lot of reflectives in that boardroom, you’re going to catch a lot of mirrored images. For some reason, these apps and this digital age would call them artifacts. They can sometimes get in the way of what you’re looking at on the whiteboard through the eye of the camera phone.

Now this makes some sense to me. Take an entrepreneurial presenter or speaker. How he or she would use a whiteboard — now, if someone out there in the audience just happened to have a camera phone with the ability to brighten and even sharpen the contrast, great. But what about windows reflecting off the surface of the whiteboard? Or large panel ceiling lights with the fluorescent gleaming down? No matter how you slice it, a regular camera phone will capture all of that. Whereas Whiteboard Capture can be designed to eliminate all of that!

Granted, that wouldn’t always be the case. Sometimes the lighting is so good that a regular camera phone will pick up the image on the whiteboard quite nicely. But that’s not always the case, I wouldn’t think. Would you?

Nifty App, But Definitely Not Necessary?

It depends, I guess. The good thing, though, is that such a camera app would benefit on a large scale, not just for businesses. So it may be worth the tiny amount of money for it.

Who knows…. Only the One would know. Right, Neo? There is, after all, no spoon.

Related Keywords: Microsoft Excel, presentation software, laser pointer

They’ve pretty much got the whole mobile payment thing down pat pretty nice. What can this app named Venmo do for small businesses?

What Venmo Is All About

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

This is a tricky review. I’ve got to be honest with you.

Why? Because the main point of Venmo was simply to offer a more social aspect between mobile money. If a friend wanted to gift another friend some money, that friend could do it easily with the use of Venmo. And it happens literally in moments.

There’s no delay, no authorization, nothing, not like in PayPal where you have to wait a few days before it shows up in the account.

Thanks to Venmo, users can simply send ‘texts’ with the money amounts, and within moments the other user has that money in the account.

That’s convenience!

It utilizes an effective social mindset through text-style to make payments easier. That’s something falling in line with every auto attendant and call center — efficiency, convenience. Fast. Oh, and let’s not forget that it’s free!

Hold on a Second, Though….

Is Venmo really good for business? Can entrepreneurs really use this “trusty” version of payments?

Part of the reason why such services like PayPal, iSwipe, and Square are so reliable is the amount of security involved. The idea that you can walk into a restaurant, eat your food, and simply walk out knowing the restaurant has access to your Venmo account is a shaky idea (but convenient, obviously).

In fact, there is such a restaurant utilizing Venmo as a source of financial management. Customers come in, hand over the access of their Venmo accounts and everything’s good to go. The restaurant’s called The Simple Kitchen. I’ve heard it’s a great restaurant.

But is the small business arena ready for that kind of thing? Typically, when it comes to entrepreneurs, contractors, that sort of thing, the idea that someone can pass you money (or vice versa) with a simple text is sort of scary! There’s no accountability. There’s no ability to ‘invoice.’ It’s basically a text service! That’s really all it is!

Still, Maybe the Industry Is Ready for This Sort of Thing

That makes for good business, though — especially when it concerns entrepreneurs. Business relations are very much like social relations. You have good rapport, maybe even a good ‘friendship,’ you have a long-lasting client on your hands. In effect, that’s small business 101. If you’re able to be a human being and relate to another, you’re actually quite the amazing salesperson!

That’s what Venmo seeks to accomplish with small businesses. A sense of trust. A deeper level of customer management. The idea of this revolutionary…idea…really does make me hungry, though!

How about some Simple Kitchen for lunch? You pay. Through Venmo.

Related Keywords: Freshbooks, receipt, inventory

Postmates, you see, started out as an idea to augment local businesses by offering them a short-range courier service to deliver their various goods in the immediate area. In this case, the immediate area was San Francisco. And while that worked out pretty well for Postmates, they decided to kick things up a notch by providing pre-paid debit cards for their couriers. These weren’t a performance bonus for the valiant couriers, but rather, a way for them to purchase goods, and then deliver them promptly to the person that purchased them.

The result was the Get It Now app, recently launched in private beta. And considering how well the private beta’s doing, it looks like Postmates is going to have to get hands on a lot more prepaid debit cards. The app has so far brought in a thousand users so far, in just the four weeks that the private beta has been online. And those thousand users are, on average, spending $116 a month.

The big market for this service, so far, has been other tech companies, and counts users in Twitter, Square, and Yelp, among others, as their primary user base. And considering that the average time from order to delivery for Postmates’ Get It Now service is about 30 minutes, it certainly implies possibilities.

For instance, there’s the great possibility for restaurants to suddenly offer delivery without the need to hire delivery staff or otherwise maintain a vehicle–or pay for staff to maintain theirs. How about the prospect of businesses that formerly weren’t delivery ever–gift shops, hardware stores and the like–to suddenly add an important new service? Imagine being able to receive parts for your car without going into town, or have that very last-minute holiday gift–Christmas, birthdays, anniversaries, the recently concluded Mother’s Day–in hand in a matter of minutes.

But it’s not just about speed. It’s also about a quality customer service experience. And if your small business is planning to offer delivery, then a set of cloud-based telephony tools for easy contact will be a smart move indeed. Things like a toll-free number or hunt groups can make sure your customers can contact you as rapidly as you can then in turn get them the things they’ve ordered.

With people wanting what they want in the least amount of time possible, an opportunity has emerged in the retail sector for businesses to do something they may never have done before. And in the process, they can take advantage of the need for speed in retail.

Related Keywords: cloud-based telephony, debit card, courier service, delivery

Primarily, the updates at Google Docs are cosmetic in nature. Google added on 60 new templates and 450 different fonts, most of which were previously found on Google’s Web Fonts site geared toward web designers. But that’s just where the new updates begin, not end; Google also put some extra punch in their support for screenreaders in Docs, as well as an increased array of options for thing like adding images to documents, bringing in images from the LIFE photo archive, and added support for Google Drive, as well as webcams.

Apps Script picked up an array of improvements as well, including an improved ScriptService for publishing scripts and determining when they run, and increases in sizes for attachments–from five meg to 25 meg–and the total size of docs files from two meg to 50 meg.

For those out there that depend on collaborative services to manage remote workers, the improvements in Google Docs will be a welcome treat. Substantially boosted numbers of fonts and templates are a big step, but they’re just cosmetic changes, really. The increase in file size is what will give users a true cause to celebrate, as it will take more files, and larger files, to butt up against that ceiling than in previous versions, allowing more work to get done more efficiently. Much has been made of the bottom-line value involved in telecommuting, and there’s no reason that many small businesses can’t take advantage of that trend as well to save money on facilities space and increased morale and productivity that properly managed telecommuting can bring.

And it’s not just improvements in Google Docs that can help improve small business results, but also cloud-based telephony tools like call hold and transfer services, as well as toll free number services, to make sure customers can not only reach your business easily, but also get who they need to speak to as rapidly as possible.

So Google Docs’ improvements may not seem all that valuable from the outside, they’re going to provide not only better aesthetics but also improved efficiency. And that’s enough to make any small business sit up and take notice.

Related keywords: Google, telecommuting, cloud-based telephony, collaboration service

There are many different varieties of mobile payment systems, some requiring dongles, others depending on near-field communications, and still others using a variety of apps. And while Harris’ poll, taken with 2,000 users, revealed that there was a healthy number of people using mobile payment systems–20 percent of all respondents, in fact–there was an even larger contingent that never had, and determined that the ability to use mobile payments in their devices was “not at all important”. That number? Fully 62 percent of all the respondents in the Harris poll came back with that answer.

Now, here’s the interesting part. The Harris poll was taken among 2,000 respondents, as I mentioned previously. But out of those 2,000 respondents included both smartphone users and regular phone users. Considering that the poll included regular phone users, they almost certainly have never used the service before. Thus, the discovery that many poll respondents wouldn’t use mobile payment systems isn’t surprising. They likely wouldn’t have in the first place.

But what does this mean for your small business? It means that, in considering whether or not to add mobile payments to your repertoire, you’ll want to consider your market. If you have a younger clientele, or one that’s heavily involved with smartphones, then you may want to add some kind of mobile payment system to the options you have for having customers pay for your goods and services. And if your clientele is mainly older, or on the lower end of the tech spectrum, you may not need to be in such a rush.

Naturally, an amenity like mobile payments is useful in terms of making customers happy, but cloud-based telephony tools can also go a long way toward improving the customer service experience. Using things like digital fax receiving and call answering services to keep your customers in contact with you, and happy too.

The decision to add mobile payment systems isn’t an easy one, but when you consider your market fully, you’ll have a much better idea as to whether or not to bring in a mobile payment app to handle at least some business.

Related keywords: cloud based telephony, mobile payment, smartphone, retailing

Punchcard, a free app on both Android and iOS, offers up a great way for you to buy your customers’ love in a more modern era. While many of us are familiar with “those value club cards”, slips of paper that you get punched every time you buy something or a certain dollar value of something leading to the point where you get something in return for all those punches, Punchcard looks to streamline that process and make it all available on a smartphone or tablet.

When a shopper uses Punchcard, they take a picture of their receipt to verify the purchase. And then, the verification is uploaded to Punchcard’s servers, and collected until a certain point defined by the business working with Punchcard is reached. Then Punchcard notifies the user about any rewards received as a result of Punchcard use.

There are better than 13 million businesses using Punchcard, and an as yet unknown amount of users. But one thing is quite clear: this represents a whole lot of people who are interested in buying things, the kind of things your small business may well already be selling. Advertising, marketing, crossing your fingers and hoping for good word of mouth, public relations, even an attempted publicity stunt or two to get the news blogs and the like in and talking–people have tried all of these, and as any marketer will tell you, it’s much more art than science. Not all art, of course, but even the best-designed campaign can still fall flat. Offering free stuff, however, is the kind of thing that transcends most any economy, because people always want it.

But free stuff alone isn’t all a good customer service program needs. Solid cloud-based telephony tools like auto attendants and toll-free numbers can help your customers reach who they need to speak to within your business and do so quickly.

An app like Punchcard may be the thing to help perk up business, but it won’t be the only thing, so it’s well worth considering as part of your standard marketing mix.

Related keywords: Marketing mix, brand loyalty, cloud-based telephony, mobile app

While, admittedly, a mobile website isn’t necessary for every small business–many can indeed get by with their standard equivalent–but when you consider that many restaurant web pages aren’t built for the mobile web, that becomes a problem. For instance, many restaurants like to lace their web presentations with Flash animations and music to attempt to set a mood. And while for regular desktops and laptops, this isn’t so much a problem, trying to access these services on a mobile browser that doesn’t usually come equipped wtih Flash, trouble can arise for users. And users who find a web site too much trouble to access often won’t, meaning a lost potential customer.

But the primary opportunity being missed, based on studies by Restaurant Science, is that when most people are looking for a restaurant website on their mobile devices, they’re looking for one thing: a menu. This is the primary point that a restaurant can use to advertise itself. People are already out. People are already interested in a meal while not at home, or possibly to take back home with them. They are right where you–as a small business–want them.

Basically, if you’re doing business as a brick-and-mortar operation, where people need to be out of the house in order to gain access to your goods and / or services, a mobile web presence is simply a smart idea. If you’re serving food, post your menu. If you’re selling items, let people know what your specials are. It’s the kind of thing that can help get you some business, and with the way the economy is, business will keep yours afloat.

Naturally, it’s not just good marketing that keeps a business afloat, but also a top notch customer service experience. Bringing in some cloud-based telephony tools like hunt groups and find-me, follow-me service can keep callers happy by reducing their wait times and helping them find just the right person to help them.

Keeping a mobile web presence is very important for most any small business these days, some more so than others, but it’s the whole experience that will make or break a business, so consider bringing the mobile web into your promotional efforts.

Related Keywords: marketing, mobile web, restaurant, cloud-based telephony