Hide The Cards : Debit and credit cards are tempting to use, and even easier to abuse: leave them at home when you don’t need to overspend to resist impulse buys.

Set Limits : Carrying too much with you can sometimes let you get ahead of yourself. Set a daily, weekly or monthly cash flow limit for yourself so you don’t leave the house with lots and come back with none.

Skip or Improvise : Most of us business workers need that morning coffee or tea to get started, but that doesn’t mean you have to buy it. Make a cup at home and take it in to work in a mug and skip the trip to Starbucks in the morning, you might be surprised how much money you could save by avoiding one stop!

Needs Before Wants : Everyone wants those Dual Quad Core Mac Pros, but do you really need it? Let’s be honest, not many users need that kind of power. Only spend what you need to in order to get what you need; those unneccesary purchases add up and could result in extra dead weight for you and your business!

That’s all I’ve got for now, but hopefully you’ve seen something that’ll help you save some cash while starting your business!

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While, on the outside, Snow Leopard looks almost exactly the same as the previous version of Mac OS X, Leopard, it brings with it a lot of business friendly new features that are definitely worth investing $30 in, the biggest being out of the box support for Microsoft Exchange.

Microsoft Exchange, as most business users will know, is heavily used in the business world to keep employees and their offices connected. Mac OS X Snow Leopard delivers out of the box Exchange support in all of Apple’s big built in apps, including Mail, iCal and Address Book. This functionality keeps your contacts, your calendars and your mailboxes all integrated and in sync, and this key feature alone is reason enough to upgrade to Snow Leopard if your Mac’s been kept out of your workplace due to it’s lack of Exchange support in the past.

In addition to Exchange support, Snow Leopard brings massive speed increases and decreased application and OS footprints to your Mac, freeing up anywhere from 7-20 GB of hard drive space and giving even older Macs a well needed speed boost.

If you haven’t yet grabbed your copy, Mac OS X Snow Leopard is only a $29 ($35 Canadian) OS that’s definitely worth every cent, but as with any new OS, beware of broken workflows, plugins, etc!

You can buy it directly from Apple at http://www.apple.com/macosx – happy upgrading!

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First, let me point you to the following Engadget article: http://www.engadget.com/2009/07/10/editorial-taking-the-iphone-3gs-off-the-job-market/

Now that you’ve read this, you may understand what this blog post is about. For the past 9 months I’ve been a fairly satisfied iPhone user, and I’ve always plugged the iPhone as being a business-centric device.

Now, let’s refer back to that Engadget article. Mr. Topolsky, in his post, brings to light the most upsetting flaw in the iPhone: it’s inability to multitask. Now, with the release of the iPhone 3.0 firmware Apple has tried to diminish the lack of this feature by adding it’s Push Notification system. Unfortunately, what is even more upsetting to me here is that developers are either having an incredibly hard time utilizing this Push system or they aren’t.

Or they can’t. There are just too many things that cannot work in a Push environment. What are Push Notifications? Basically, whenever an internet based application like an IM client or newsreader gets a new update or message, it pushes the message to you (for example, you’d recieve a message whenever you got a new IM).

But, say, how does an Internet radio application use this push method to continue playing music? Or a blogging application to keep your draft open while you refer to an email?

What it comes down to in the end is the apps that can have their background tasks pushed, and those that can’t. And there are a lot of applications that can’t, and that is one of the key reasons I’m beginning to doubt the iPhones business capibility as well.

Especially during the summer, when I’ve been working 10+ hour dayshifts at work, coming home, eating and heading out again, I’ve been finding it incredibly infuriating to use the iPhone as a business device.

For example, I wrote a blog post about the social mediasphere a little while back for my personal blog that I will soon be posting here on this blog, and, as I was on my break at work and sitting outside enjoying a cup of coffee, I was naturally on my phone, in iBlogger, typing away. About 5 or 6 paragraphs into the post my girlfriend sent me a rather important text message, but iBlogger doesn’t have a draft save option (bad design choice by them, but Apples folly nonetheless in this case). In order to reply to her text, I’d either have to finish the post or delete it and start again. I took a half and half way out and copied the entire post into the built-in Notes application so I could work on it at anytime now, but again, this was very irritating. Had the iPhone been multitask-capable, I simply would’ve been able to leave iBlogger open, jump into Messages, text my girlfriend back, and go back to my writing.

Another example just occured today: my client and I were conferring over Facebook and I was out of the house. It was of the essence I stay in contact with him throughout the day, and I had emailed myself notes to pass along to him during our discussions. I began typing a message to the client in the Facebook mobile app but forgot one of the points I had to send him, so I copied and pasted the whole thing into Notes and continued working there, flipping between Notes and Mail. But then I needed to refer back to his message, but I can’t copy and paste his message at all. And everytime I wanted to look back at his long message, I’d have to relaunch the app, watch it hang for a minute, then reload the message, read, hop out, go back into Notes, back into Mail, repeat. This process of application surfing, believe me, is a very painful one.

This is, by far, and all firmware bugs aside, Apples greatest mistake and the iPhones greatest weakness. Unfortunately for the end user, the iPhone is the only phone out there with the applications to truly enable mobile businesses. I honestly don’t think I could live without the ability to access the apps I have on my iPhone, but the way in which I use them together doesn’t make sense.

The Palm Pre, the most reknowned iPhone competitor, has an app store similar to Apples, a weaker developer base, but multitasking. If multitasking doesn’t end up on the iPhone soon, the Pre will inevitably overcome the iPhone with it’s easy and seamless multitasking system, but until it’s developer community grows exponentially, the iPhone’s app base is a thousandfold stronger then Palms.

So it really comes down to what your willing to deal with; those that want multitasking but are willing to give more to do less can get the Pre, and those that are willing to endure lots of headaches to accomplish their business on the go can choose the iPhone.

For now I’m sticking with the iPhone, but when it comes time to get another phone in 2 years time, I’m not so sure I’ll be taking that well designed and all so prestigious Apple path again.

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You can place a link on your site, people can follow and you can setup modules for discussion, photos and much more…. or just leave it for a place to occasionally place a bit of news and a link.

Also I noticed within a week the facebook page for my business appeared on google. So another way to find my business. Quite nifty, did I say it was free?

http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php

Do you already have a facebook page for your business? Drop us a note in the comments and a link to share.

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First, Twitter is community based, and this means if the community likes what they see they can share (“Re-tweet”) your content with their friends. Through Re-tweeting your posts, news and content shared through Twitter can be spread through not just your friends and followers, but your follower’s followers, etc. Depending on the content of your tweet and how impressive it is (for example, breaking news or a beautiful piece of artwork), the number of Re-tweets it receives will broaden your contents impact. This also applies to things such as blog posts and articles – sharing these through Twitter is also a good way to increase your blog audience.

To demonstrate the so-called “Twitter effect”, I have screenshots of 2 different pieces of artwork I submitted yesterday around the same time to my DeviantART page. The first of these artworks I posted to Twitter, and the other I did not. The difference in hit counts after 1 hour of being submitted is large.

The piece I submitted above wasn’t linked on Twitter – instead, it was simply left to be navigated by fellow DeviantART users who watch my new pieces.

Now, this 2nd piece submitted, as you can probably tell, has quite a big difference in views compared to the un-posted piece.

Now, why is this? Well, Twitters timeline effect is similar to the “Digg effect” – where an article submitted to Digg recieves such a large number of hits that it could possibly crash the articles web server depending on the amount of traffic it receives. Twitter has the same basic effect as Digg does – the audience that your posted links and messages reach is extremely large, and this makes Twitter an invaluable marketing tool. The amount of people that your tweets can reach through search engines, Twitter’s own search tool, and the public Twitter timeline will vary depending on certain variables such as the time and day of the week and the amount of active Twitter users at the time, but regardless, the exposure your business can get through this method of marketing is monumental and, even more so since Twitter is a free service with millions of users, should be an automatic part of every bloggers, artists, freelancers and small business owners advertising arsenal.

Twitter is one of the most powerful networking and marketing tools you can use that is available for free, and I highly suggest that everyone makes use of it to leverage your business and promote your brand. The results will not disappoint!

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LinkedIn is a social networking service for the business world. An essential service for any business person. We’ve mentioned it before briefly on this blog, but now go into more detail.

LinkedIn is easy to use and feature rich, even just for the free version. Indeed the majority of people I doubt need the current paid offerings (unlimited searching and more). Some key features of LinkedIn:

• Find old and current contacts on the service and connect.This enables you to stay in contact, regardless of new contact details and changes in locations.
• Invite people to join LinkedIn and connect with you.
• Provide recommendations and receive recommendations from contacts.
• Ask the community questions on many subjects and provide answers.

My list of features probably doesn’t do it justice. There are also other features such as looking for jobs and there are many recruitment people and execs using LinkedIn as a recruitment database.

Do you need help or want to answer a question or two?

The question and answer section of LinkedIn is a key feature. It allows you to easily ask the community questions covering many different categories such as marketing, telecoms etc, there will be a business category you will find interesting. It is also a great way for people to connect with others, but be aware that even if someones answered, their advice could be biased or incorrect.

The LinkedIn main screen is very well layed out. You will notice they have advertising (dark blue box on this screen in the above example), but it never takes away from the user experience. You will find that LinkedIn doesn’t require much of your time to learn how to use and become beneficial.

LinkedIn does by default make people searchable via search engines, but this is limited information and you can easily turn this feature off. Also you can share as much or as little education and work history as you want in your profile. So you can setup your LinkedIn account quickly and then add to it when you have a free moment. Once I had initially setup LinkedIn I found myself spending anything from five minutes to twenty minutes a day for a while updating my profile, adding contacting and primarily reading and answering community questions. Then once in a while I write a recommendation also.

So LinkedIn can mean many things to different people. A simply way to stay in touch, a means to recommend colleagues or generate opportunities. Perhaps be offered an interview for a job or participate in the excellent Q&A section…and more. If your not signed up to LinkedIn take five minutes to get the ball rolling today. www.linkedin.com

Stephan Spencer wrote a good post on LinkedIn also. Well worth a read: http://www.stephanspencer.com/community/deriving-value-from-linkedin

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