Posts tagged Businesses
Reputation911.com Announces My Online Reviews for Businesses and Professionals … – San Francisco Chronicle (press release)
Apr 17th
|
Reputation911.com Announces My Online Reviews for Businesses and Professionals …
San Francisco Chronicle (press release) Innovative New Product Will Boost Online Presence and SEO Rankings while Protecting Online Reputation Boston, MA (PRWEB) April 17, 2012 Tweets fly like bullets as businesses and professionals are robbed of their revenue and reputation while review … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
How the iPad Is Revolutionizing Local Businesses
Apr 16th
It was dinner at a fancy restaurant in Boston. After the last sip of Scotch was polished off, the waiter came over with the check… and an iPad. It was to take a survey about the quality of service, but it just as easily could have been used to pay the bill.
Tablets, especially Apple’s iPad, are increasingly finding homes in restaurants and local businesses. They are changing how businesses conduct transactions and receive customer feedback. In a data-driven world, Main Street retailers are on the verge of a significant evolution.
Disrupting the Point of Sale
You have seen it before. You make an order at your local coffee shop or restaurant, or buy an item from a local merchant. The server or cashier punches a couple buttons on a static touchscreen, runs your debit card and hands you a receipt. Using these Point-of-Sale (POS) systems is now so common that consumers pretty much take them for granted.
The people who own the businesses do not take them for granted. They often have a lot of money invested in them. The top POS vendors, such as Aloha, Micros and POSitouch, charge thousands of dollars to restaurants and retailers to set up and maintain these systems. For a restaurant that seats 100 people, the owners likely paid anywhere from $8,000 to $20,000 to set up three or four terminals. The more amenities that the local business wants, the more POS vendors will gouge its pocketbooks.
Beyond the tremendous cost, most of these POS systems are horribly out of date. Many of them run on Microsoft’s .NET architecture and are prone to all of the same hiccups that any Windows PC will face over the course of its life.
Restaurant owners likely do not care how technologically out-of-date their POS systems are, as long as they work. According to Phil Beauregard from Boston-based Objective Logistics, the entire culinary industry tends to be about five to seven years behind technology trends.
“When they first came out, they were essentially glorified cash registers,” Beauregard said. “The [POS industry] has mimicked the entire PC industry.”
Like the PC industry, the POS sector is about to see a major change in how businesses are interacting with technology. “Everything is getting untethered,” Beauregard said.
The Evolution: Mobile + Cloud
“When you are carrying around a tablet, you are carrying a gateway to the cloud,” said Nebula CEO and former NASA CTO Chris Kemp in an interview last year.
The fundamental thing to know about mobile technology is that its primary computing power is done in the cloud. Yes, chip sets have gotten smaller, cameras are more compact and powerful, and batteries are more efficient than they used to be, but the biggest driver of mobile technology is the ability to offload the actual data and computing power to the cloud.
This is something that innovators and enterprises have known for some time. The average small business owner? Not so much.
“Cloud computing” is like an abstract theory to most people. They know the term, they kind of know what it does, but the full meaning of the cloud is lost on them. For the most part, they do not care. Consumers just want things to work. Local businesses just want them to work, but also be cost efficient.
This is where tablets are poised to disrupt the entire POS industry. They are cheap, collect data on customers’ purchases and make that data easily accessible across any type of computing system. They can be used to make payments, take surveys, provide coupons and notify consumers of offers.
The best part for local businesses: Tablets are a lot cheaper than traditional POS systems.
“For all new restaurant businesses, they’ll seriously evaluate some form of tablet as their POS. New locations of existing restaurants will probably stick with whatever tech they’ve got, but all brand-new businesses are going to be taking a hard look at the cheap/portable nature of an iPad or Android tablet solution,” said Seth Priebatsch, CEO of Boston-based SCVNGR, which provides a mobile payment tool called LevelUp.
The leader in the charge to turn the iPad into the new era of POS terminal is San Francisco-based Square. The company that released the original dongle for smartphones to swipe credit cards has also created an iPad app called the Square Register. It has the ability to turn an iPad into a POS system that works as well or better than anything from the traditional POS vendors. As a standalone product, the Square Register is a great option for local boutiques or coffee houses, where all that is needed is the ability to make transactions and provide receipts.
According to Square spokesperson Aaron Zamost, 75% of small businesses will buy a tablet this year. Only 6% of retailers said they haved used a mobile POS device, but half of survey respondents panned to adopt such devices over the next 18 months.
Restaurants are another matter. When a server takes an order, that information needs to go to several different places within the establishment. Chefs need the ticket to know when and what to make (cooks call these “duckets”). Bartenders need the tickets to coordinate with the server on what drinks need to be made. In a restaurant, communication is vital and often that is handled through the POS system.
The Square Register does not yet fulfill all the needs of such an establishment. But other companies are working to turn the iPad into a fully functional POS system for restaurant use.
San Francisco-based Revel features a full suite of products designed to turn iPads into an effective POS system – including employee logins, order taking, payment processing and “cook view” for the duckets. It has customer relationship management (CRM) features and real-time reporting and inventory control. These are all capabilities a traditional POS could offer, but Revel does it for a third of the price, about $1,500 per iPad and a $100/month cloud service fee. Other services, like E La Carte, provide custom-built tablets without an upfront installation fee.
Image: Revel iPad POS
Untethered, Unplugged & Disrupted
In the chain of innovation, we are not talking about anything extraordinarily drastic. iPads have been around for three years now and the concept of cloud computing has been around much longer. The confluence of mobile and cloud technology has invaded enterprise organizations over the last couple of years and it is now starting to trickle down to the Main Street level. Smart startups have looked at the middle class of American businesses and seen that it is ripe for the plucking.
Square recognized it first, but any company focused on marketing, payments, offers and infrastructure will soon see that there are billions of dollars at stake.
Are you a local business owner? What do you use for a POS system? A classic register, a touch-based terminal or some type of mobile device? Let us know in the comments.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Dubai’s SEO Sherpa Helps Local Businesses Amid Google Panda Update Fears – Virtual-Strategy Magazine
Apr 13th
 Search Engine Land |
Dubai's SEO Sherpa Helps Local Businesses Amid Google Panda Update Fears
Virtual-Strategy Magazine With more Google Panda updates set to change the world of SEO yet again, many SEO companies are radically having to rethink their strategies. Yet Dubai based SEO Sherpa claims to have a way of staying ahead of the game. Dubai based SEO Sherpa has been … 11 Considerations For International SEO Google+ unveils new user friendly look Mention of 'SEOmoz' On My Google+ News Post – What's Happening? |
View full post on SEO – Google News
Free SEO Lead Generation Program Launched to Help Small Businesses, Start-ups … – EIN News (press release)
Apr 11th
|
Free SEO Lead Generation Program Launched to Help Small Businesses, Start-ups …
EIN News (press release) Free program to help Small Businesses with Online Marketing, SEO, Social Media Marketing, Lead Generation and automated Sales Process Follow-up has been launched. April 11, 2012 /24-7PressRelease/ — This "5 Day Marketing Turnaround" Program is ideal … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
8 Reasons Why Cloud Computing is Even Better for Small Businesses
Apr 6th
Sure, cloud computing offers benefits to companies of all sizes. But the clouds’ advantages apply even more dramatically the smaller and newer your company. At the same time, the standard objections to cloud computing matter less to small companies than to large ones.
On the plus side, the cloud’s economies of scale naturally make a bigger difference when your company is too small to generate similar savings and capabilities on its own. And on the flip side, many of the issues blamed on the cloud in large enterprises – security, integration, compliance and so on – often cause fewer problems in small companies that can’t properly deal with them anyway.
Sponsor
1. Economies of scale: This one’s obvious. The larger the company, the easier it can generate economies of scale on its own. Small companies, by definition, have more limited resources. Anything that can give them access to scale in purchasing and pricing is a big win!
2. Enterprise-class functionality. Big companies have the heft to create the custom functionality they need. Small companies simply don’t have the resources to do that. In the cloud, though, they can leverage development, maintenance and upgrades across many, many small businesses… And, increasingly, consumers as well.
3. Money Matters. Startups and small companies are often undercapitalized and pay-as-you-go cloud computing solutions typically don’t require lots of upfront cash. Even if they don’t end up saving much as the monthly fees add up over the long run, avoiding capital expenditures can be a make-or-break issue for cash-strapped small businesses.
4. Infrastructure vs. Applications. For the enterprise, cloud computing often means complex Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) projects that have to be installed and integrated into a company’s existing systems. For smaller companies, cloud computing often means complete cloud-based Software as a Service (SaaS) applications and application suites. No IT required.
5. The Legacy Issue. A common enterprise objection to cloud computing is how will it work with the company’s legacy applications. Small businesses – and especially new businesses – typically have fewer and less complex legacy apps. Taken a step farther, that means startups and small businesses have less installed infrastructure they’d need to throw out to move into the cloud. As for new businesses, why would you actually buy anything you could “rent” instead?
6. Security Problems. I’m not saying security isn’t important to small businesses (though many don’t take it as seriously as they should). I’m saying that while security in the cloud may still be shaky by enterprise standards, it’s almost always far better than what small businesses are able to provide for themselves.
7. Compliance. Because you don’t necessarily know where your data is stored in the cloud, IaaS can cause confusion as to whether it complies with local, national and international regulations. That’s a huge issue for multinational corporations, less so for most small businesses.
8. Reliability. The cloud is more reliable than most people think. When widely used cloud services and applications have outages, it makes national news. When an individual company – large or small – has a similar problem, they work hard to make sure you never even hear about it. The bottom line, though, is that even accounting for network connectivity hiccups, the cloud is probably a lot more reliable than what small businesses can afford to provide for themselves.
When it comes right down to it, cloud computing seems made for startups and small businesses. It’s the best way to get enterprise class – or better yet, consumer class – functionality without having to develop it yourself or lay out a big chunk of cash to buy it. And even though cloud computing still isn’t fully mature, its remaining issues simply carry less weight when viewed from the perspective of a startup or small business.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
3dcart Debuts New Ecommerce Marketing Packages to Help Small Businesses Grow … – San Francisco Chronicle (press release)
Apr 3rd
|
3dcart Debuts New Ecommerce Marketing Packages to Help Small Businesses Grow …
San Francisco Chronicle (press release) SEO, PPC and More for Less than Half the Cost of Outside Consultants TAMARAC, FL (PRWEB) April 03, 2012 Online retail marketing takes a lot of work, know-how, time and money. To help ease the stress of marketing for online retailers, … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
Google Places ranking data now provided by gShift Labs to help businesses fine … – San Francisco Chronicle (press release)
Apr 3rd
|
Google Places ranking data now provided by gShift Labs to help businesses fine …
San Francisco Chronicle (press release) New functionality tracks local SEO search rankings in Google Toronto, Ontario (PRWEB) April 03, 2012 gShift Labs, the creator of web presence optimization software that is giving marketers and agencies control over their SEO campaigns, announced today … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
Top 4 Reasons Businesses Don’t Get Backlinks – MarketingProfs.com (subscription)
Mar 30th
 PR Web (press release) |
Top 4 Reasons Businesses Don't Get Backlinks
MarketingProfs.com (subscription) by Chris Sheehy Website links that point to your business website are one of the most important search engine optimization (SEO) factors that influence the online visibility and search engine ranking of your business. Those backlinks signal to search … Updated Tool for Web Visibility—SEO Recon 2012 Edition Released |
View full post on SEO – Google News
Cybersquatting A Concern for Businesses with ICANN’s new Top-Level Domains – International Business Times
Mar 26th
|
Cybersquatting A Concern for Businesses with ICANN's new Top-Level Domains
International Business Times Regional TLDs may also offer geo-targeted SEO value as other location-specific domains currently do. However, challenges include the high cost of applying for such a new TLD as well as the threat of cybersquatting as the number of available domains … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
FREE SEO Report by Sigma Infotech to Help Businesses Take the First Step … – PRWire
Mar 24th
|
FREE SEO Report by Sigma Infotech to Help Businesses Take the First Step …
PRWire To help businesses that want to rank high on SERPs but don't know how to go about it, Sigma Infotech is offering FREE search engine optimisation report to make them understand SEO better. Many modern business owners understand the power and the … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
