Author Archives: Stephanie Faris

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Stephanie is a freelance writer and young adult/middle grade novelist, who also works in information systems. She has won contests for her unpublished novel-length fiction. She lives in Nashville with her husband.

Intel SBA: Helping The State of IT Security for Small Businesses

Intel is helping out small businesses with the introduction of a new chip that has advanced security features already embedded. Called Small Business Advantage (SBA), this new technology manages your system’s security without additional software having to be installed. Included with many new systems using Intel Core i3, i5, and i7 processors, Intel SBA is [...]

5 Ways You Can Increase Your Office’s Efficiency

Large businesses have a full team for every aspect of daily operations. That, unfortunately, is a luxury small business owners don’t have. But today’s small businesses have a wide variety of tech tools to help make the job a little easier. HP recently released its tips for using technology to increase small business efficiency. We’ve [...]

Five Mobile Rating Services That Can Help Spread the Word About Your Local Business

In the past, if a customer dined at a restaurant he or she enjoyed, that person would just tell a few people about it. Word of mouth would spread and business would increase. Today, word of mouth is electronic. Someone “likes” your business on Facebook and everyone sees it. People share information on businesses they [...]

Five Steps to Make Your E-mail Marketing Campaign Take Off

Gone are the days when companies bombarded consumers with postal mailings. Filling e-mail inboxes with spam no longer works, either. Today’s consumers look right past marketing messages to find the content that stands out. To capture consumer attention, you have to find a way to engage them. “E-mail marketing is one of the most powerful [...]

Small Business Owners More Stressed Than Ever: 3 Tech Tips That Can Help

Twenty years ago, experts were predicting technology would make our lives easier. So why are we all so stressed? A new survey shows small businesses owners are stressed, while at the same time eager to take on new challenges. If this seems like a contradiction, it only further highlights small business owners’ insistence on pushing [...]

Cross-training Employees Is Essential In Small Business. Here Are Some Great Tools To Help You Start Training and Keep Production Flowing

When office and school furniture manufacturer OFM wanted a way to make employees more efficient, it turned to its own resources for internal cross-training. Creating “OFM University,” the company began cross-training employees on such operations as accounting, inventory, graphics, and shipping. This reinvigorated workers and created a workforce prepared to take over each other’s responsibilities. [...]

Four Cloud-Based Solutions To Help You Create More Powerful Presentations

The core of your financial success is to be able to sell your services using presentations. But for a small business, creating an eye-catching, fully interactive presentation experience can be a challenge without an in-house marketing staff. PowerPoint presentations have lost their luster as presentations with sound, video, and artsy graphics increasingly become the norm. [...]

Eventbrite Introduces Mobile Card Reader: Now Selling Tickets and Tracking Sales Is Mobile and Convenient

Credit card readers for smartphones are taking off in the industry and we’ve covered the topic fairly extensively lately, including Ramon Ray’s coverage of PayPal Here. But with Eventbrite’s release of a new card reader for event organizers, ticket sales at the door using an iPad are now possible. Here’s how it works. For $10, [...]

Perch: The One Stop Social Media Tracking App for Small Businesses Is Coming Soon To Your Neighborhood!

If a small business wants to keep up with online mentions of local competitors, services like Google Alerts can search the web and send notifications. But what if a small business only wanted to know what its local competitors were posting on social media sites? Now there’s an app for that. Perch aims to help [...]

Why Microsoft Exchange May Not Be the Best E-mail Solution for Your Small Business

When people think about e-mail solutions for business, they generally think two words: Microsoft Exchange. However, as with all software solutions, no one option is the right choice for everyone. In fact, for smaller businesses, a more customized solution can save hundreds of thousands of dollars in the first year alone. According to Info Tech [...]