SMB

Buyers are naturally cautious when considering whether or not to make a purchase from unfamiliar merchants. Even if this anxiety is not justified, the effect on online retailers is often detrimental. Shopper anxiety creates a complicated challenge for online merchants, especially ones without nation...

More than 12 million small and medium-sized businesses operate in the U.S., and unlike larger enterprises, few of them have the cash to pay a marketing firm to launch an online advertising campaign. In world where the Internet has become perhaps the most powerful tool that companies can use to attra...

Digital music startup Lala.com has launched an iPod-compatible online music service that allows users to play songs online for free, the company announced Tuesday. In the future, it will reportedly allow users to download individual tracks without digital rights management protection directly to the...

It's time to add another IT category to the official IT lexicon: software development and deployment as a service, or SDDS. This one's a keeper. That's my conclusion after seeing a demonstration of Bungee Labs' new Bungee Connect offering, which combines the virtues of online Web application develop...

It is not unusual for small to medium business managers to emulate Lewis Carroll's Mad Hatter, wearing six or eight hats simultaneously in their business efforts. Sometimes, the hat hardest to wear is IT management. All businesses, large and small, run on information. When that information is lost o...

Right now, music fans around the world can choose from some 10,000 Internet radio stations, each one streaming a unique mix of music. Some of those stations are operated by industry titans; others are the Internet arms of traditional terrestrial radio; and many more are tiny operations feeding their...

Xerox's legendary Palo Alto Research Center said Friday it would license Internet search technology to Powerset, a relatively young startup that aims to build a better search engine than Google. PARC lays claims to some of the most important inventions of the digital era, including Ethernet, laser p...

Looking for a franchise opportunity? The World Wide Web is overflowing with Internet-based businesses for sale. Searching for "Internet Franchising" in your favorite search engine will reveal dozens of Web sites promising both online business and franchise opportunities in a variety of Internet-base...

The creators of the peer-to-peer VoIP network Skype and the controversial file-sharing site Kazaa have unveiled their latest startup: Joost, an Internet TV company that they claim will revolutionize Internet-based television. Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom formally announced Joost Tuesday, after m...

The first computers were programmed by electrical engineers moving jumper cables around in the back of a giant mainframe. This is how the concept of a "bug" in software got started. A bug crawled into some of these wires, shorted a couple of them, and changed the logic of a program. In addition to...

As the sensitive financial and identity data in corporate databases becomes increasingly valuable on the black market, mandates such as PCI, SOX and HIPAA are requiring businesses to protect, track, and control all access to and usage of sensitive information. This is forcing an evolutionary shift i...

For many online merchants, the holidays account for almost half their yearly sales. Small and medium-sized online merchants have a prime opportunity this gift-giving season to attract new customers and keep them coming back throughout the year. From browsing to buying, the Internet will play a large...

Unveiling a scaled-down version of its ID management software, IBM on Monday tapped into what it sees as a growing demand among SMBs for online collaboration and secure transactions with trading partners. IBM Tivoli Federated Identity Manager Business Gateway will allow authorized SMB users to secur...

The Internet has completely reshaped customer relationships. The transformation began with the dot-com boom, which spawned a new type of company whose entire business model was predicated on Web acceptance and usage. These companies -- Yahoo, Amazon, eBay and Google -- took advantage of the Web in a...

Yahoo Small Business, one of the most popular options for merchants to establish their first online presence, started to roll out a major upgrade Monday, revamping the way it gets merchants set up to focus more on immediate sales results. The e-commerce platform, known as Yahoo Merchant Solutions, g...