small business

Apple shows how it empowers small-business success

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With National Small Business Week upon us, Apple celebrates how it helps entrepreneurs.
With National Small Business Week upon us, Apple celebrates how it helps entrepreneurs.
Image: Apple

With National Small Business Week starting Sunday, Apple profiled three small businesses Wednesday, describing how they harness Apple products to grow.

In addition, the company will feature “Grow Your Business with Apple” Today at Apple sessions next week in select U.S. cities.

Dashlane launches first-of-its-kind scoring tool for business password health

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Dashlane's new dashboard for scoring password health can inform businesses' security strategies.
Dashlane's new dashboard for scoring password health can inform businesses' security strategies.
Photo: Tyler Franta on Unsplash

This password security for businesses post is presented by Dashlane.

We often report on proper password management as an easy and cost-effective way for folks to secure their online lives against threats. Now Dashlane has gone and made it even easier for businesses to make the most of this vital step by offering the industry’s first password health score dashboard, released Monday.

With hacks crippling small businesses, defend yours with Dashlane business plans

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When small businesses don't prioritize online security, they may pay the ultimate price. Dashlane for Business can help.
When small businesses don't prioritize online security, they may pay the ultimate price. Dashlane for Business can help.
Photo: Artem Beliaikin/Pexels.com CC

This cybersecurity post is presented by Dashlane.

When you run a small business, you often wear a lot of hats. The strategy hat. The customer service hat. Even the “those floors aren’t going to mop themselves” hat.

Unfortunately, sometimes the network security hat is left on the hook by the door, and that’s just what hackers hope for — lax security and plenty worth stealing, from your cash reserves to customers’ credit card information.

Put Your Best Business Foot Forward With The Startup Handbook [Freebies]

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CoM - Startup Handbook

I’m in the midst of launching my own business, and while I’ve spent a ton of time online and have built up a body of work I still have questions. I have an idea of where to begin, but I haven’t been able to fill in all of the blanks. What I need is not more resources – I can find those scattered all over the Internet – but what I need is one resource where I can look to as a touchstone.

I’ve found it in The Startup Handbook, which is the latest Cult of Mac Deals offer. And it’s free.

Step Up Your Startup Efforts With The Ultimate Entrepreneur Bundle [Deals]

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CoM - Entrepreneur Bundle

It’s incredibly rare to get everything you need to start off a new business right, let alone get it at a price that won’t use up a lot of your startup costs. Considering you need to wrap your head around customer support, sales conversions, marketing efforts, and effective communication with your team, trying to get a grip on all of that and run a successful business while doing that is going to be tough…if not impossible.

The Ultimate Entrepreneur Bundle consists of 13 essential products to help launch and accelerate your business or startup. And you’ll save a whopping 97% off the regular retail price for a limited time thanks to Cult of Mac Deals as you can get everything for just $50!

FileMaker iOS Apps Are Easy To Build Alternatives To Native Apps

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FileMaker pitches its product line as an alternative to native iOS app development.
FileMaker pitches its product line as an alternative to native iOS app development.

Last week FileMaker launched a new campaign to encourage businesses to adopt the company’s flagship database product line as an app development platform for the iPhone and iPad. The move is unique and the idea of FileMaker as an enterprise development solution does have its appeal – creating FileMaker apps requires no software development knowledge or experience and it can deliver native performance and functionality that HTML 5 web apps can’t.

Three Critical Business Dilemmas The iPhone 5 Will Create [Feature]

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Even before its launch, the iPhone 5 is creating concerns and challenges for businesses and IT departments.
Even before its launch, the iPhone 5 is creating concerns and challenges for businesses and IT departments.

Apple will launch the next iPhone (presumably named the iPhone 5) along with iOS 6 tomorrow. The new iPhone is expected to pack a range of updates that will make it a much more significant release than last year’s iPhone 4S. The biggest expectation is that the iPhone will include 4G LTE support and that, unlike the new iPad, it will support LTE bands used outside of North America.

We won’t know all the details of the iPhone 5 until Apple’s unveiling at the Yerba Buena Center. There are, however, three important issues that business users and IT managers will need to in mind during and after following tomorrow’s launch event – all three of which could have a significant impact on bring your own device (BYOD) programs that encourage users to bring their personal mobile devices into the office.

Parallels Launches Crowdsourced “Apple In The Workplace Barometer”

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Parallels uses crowdsourcing to compare the Apple/BYOD friendliness of companies.
Parallels uses crowdsourcing to compare the Apple/BYOD friendliness of companies.

Ahead of the launch of Parallels Desktop 8, Parallels has launched a crowdsourced “Apple In The Workplace Barometer” that allows businesses or individual employees to see how their workplace ranks in terms of BYOD readiness for Macs, iOS devices, and other technologies. The site offers a quick and simple questionnaire that asks workers (or managers) about their work computing tasks, resources, and company-provided options. At the end of the survey, their company is plotted on a grid that measures active adoption of Apple technologies and active IT support for Macs, iPhones, and iPads.

Waiting For FDA Approval For Humans, This iPhone Heart Monitor Is Helping Pets Instead [Video]

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AliveCor's Veterinary Heart Monitor for the iPhone helps vets diagnose heart disease in dogs, cats, and horses.
AliveCor's Veterinary Heart Monitor for the iPhone helps vets diagnose heart disease in dogs, cats, and horses.

What do you do if you’re a medical technology startup while waiting for the FDA to approve your flagship iPhone-based product?

If you’re AliveCor, you launch a veterinary version of it.

The product in question is AliveCor’s iPhone ECG heart monitor, which the company showed off nearly two years ago, at the CES in 2011. The device allows a medical professional to assess a patient’s heart rhythm, providing more data than a stethoscope or manual check of their pulse. Although the device has broad potential, it has yet to be approved by the FDA.

Evernote Finally Announces A Service For Businesses [Video]

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Evernote finally expands to offer true business and enterprise features.
Evernote finally expands to offer true business and enterprise features.

Evernote has become an indispensible tool for people all over the world. The incredibly versatile “save anything” tool is used at home, school, and work. One nagging issue has been that although Evernote is an amazing productivity tool and has tons of business applications, it has never been good at sharing on a large scale – like the level of sharing that a business of a few dozen people or a few thousand people needs.

All that is about to change. The company announced a new workplace edition of Evernote for business customers.

Did PayPal Just Win The Mobile Payments War Before Apple Even Entered The Fight?

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PayPal take a significant lead in mobile payments race by partnering with Discover.
PayPal takes a significant lead in mobile payments race by partnering with Discover.

If you thought the heat of the mobile payments industry might cool a bit after weeks of major announcements like the Square/Starbucks partnership, the launch of a new mobile payment company dubbed MCX by several national retail chains, and PayPal’s trial of in-restaurant payments at McDonald’s locations in France, think again.

PayPal announced the biggest partnership yet in the U.S. mobile payments market today – a deal with Discover that will bring PayPal in-store payment to seven million locations next spring.

Apple Quietly Embraces The Business To Business App Market

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Business to business app development is likely to be a growing enterprise trend. Apple has a solution, even if it isn't yet a perfect one.
Business to business app development is likely to be a growing enterprise trend. Apple has a solution, even if it isn't yet a perfect one.

According a study released earlier this month, Apple’s iOS is becoming the most popular platform for enterprise app development – with 53.2% of developers picking iOS for corporate app development compared to 37.4% of developers standing behind Android. RIM’s BlackBerry, the old guard of enterprise mobility, came in a distant fourth behind Windows Phone with only 2% of developers supporting it.

That’s great news for Apple and the iPhone and iPad in business and enterprise environments. Apple even makes enterprise distribution possible outside of the App Store. Mobile App Management (MAM) and enterprise app store solutions provide efficient and effective distribution and update methods for enterprise apps.

Business to business (B2B) apps and solutions, however, present a different kind of challenge – one for which Apple has a solution, even if it isn’t a perfect solution.

Why Business Users Will Love iOS 6 [Feature]

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iOS 6 has some great features for business users.
iOS 6 has some great features for business users.

The release of iOS 6 just weeks away. The new release includes a range of new features. Some seem tailor-made for business use like the new VIP contacts feature in Mail. Others are clearly designed for a mass-market consumer audience. Even those consumer-oriented additions have a lot of potential for use in the office, however.

Working On An Ebook Using iBooks Author? These Template Packages Can Make It Look Like A Masterpriece

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Template packs for iBooks Author, help make your ebooks look unique and professionally designed.
Template packs for iBooks Author, help make your ebooks look unique and professionally designed.

Although Apple pitched iBooks Author as a tool for educators, the company fully supports anyone who want to create an ebook using iBooks Author to do so. Apple also lets anyone that creates an ebook with iBooks Author to distribute it through the iBookstore – the catch being that the iBooks Author edition of an ebook can’t be published using another company’s store (though the text of the title can be repackaged using other apps and sold elsewhere). As usual, Apple will take a 30% cut of any sales.

There are, of course, plenty of non-education uses for iBooks Author.

Why Apple’s iMessage Isn’t A Home Run For Businesses

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imessage
iMessage has a lot to offers a secure messaging platform, but it isn't without flaws.

When Apple unveiled iMessage, one of the first thoughts for many IT professionals and business users was that Apple had come up with a secure messaging platform that could rival RIM’s BlackBerry Messenger. While iMessage has a lot going for it as a secure messaging platform, there are still some reasons that it may not be an ideal business solution.

Jumsoft’s New Clipart Package For iWork And iBooks Author Is Great For Students And Small Businesses

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Jumsoft's latest clipart and pattern pack delivers plenty of impact.
Jumsoft's latest clipart and pattern pack delivers plenty of impact.

App and template designer Jumsoft announced a new collection of images and patterns for Apple’s iWork suite. The new package, known as Elements for iWork, is the company’s eleventh collection of professionally designed images, templates and stationary designed to help businesses, students, and consumers create stunning documents and projects using a range of Mac apps.

Biting Back At Startups, Retailers Announce Their Own Mobile Payment Plans

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post-184831-image-c9449591dd5eb1dcdd362e1eea50399d-jpg
Major retails join forces on mobile payments system to fend of Google, PayPal, Isis, and other potential digital wallet competitors like Apple.

In a move that makes the Square/Starbucks partnership announced last week look like small potatoes, a group of national and international retailers announced plans to develop their own mobile payment network complete with mobile apps and digital wallet functionality. The move seems almost certain to shake up the nascent mobile payments market where a wide range of companies and organizations have been trying to figure out the secret sauce that will turn mobile payments into a mainstream retail system for the past couple of years.

The Merchant Customer Exchange or MCX, as the new company is known, plans to deliver a solution that offers convenience in both making purchases and in receiving customizable offers from retailers. Development of a mobile app and payment network are underway, but MCX has yet to announce any details about either the app or its network.

Thunderbolt + Lightning = Fast And Easy Mountain Lion Installs For Business, Education [Video]

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FileWave's new free app makes deploying Lion/Mountain Lion incredibly easy.
FileWave's new free app makes deploying Lion/Mountain Lion incredibly easy.

FileWave launched a new free app called Lightning this week. The new app makes quick and easy work of deploying Mountain Lion (and Lion) to multiple Macs, particularly recent Macs with Thunderbolt. It can be used to roll out existing master images that a business or school has already created as well as a base OS X install that can be customized with a range of files and applications.

Study Shows Most IT Departments Fail To Explain Or Enforce iPhone/iPad Security

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A new study shows that IT departments are dropping the ball when it comes to explaining and enforcing mobile security.
A new study shows that IT departments are dropping the ball when it comes to mobile security.

Another study of the bring your own device (BYOD) phenomenon concludes that the trend of employees bringing the personal iPhones, iPads, and other devices into the office shows no sign of slowing down. It also confirms previous reports that indicate many personal devices being used in the workplace don’t have even basic security features enabled.

The study by Coalfire, a company the specializes in IT risk management services, paints a particularly grim picture of the lack of security for iOS and Android devices in the workplace. With the BYOD trend show no signs of slowing or ending, Coalfire CEO Rick Dakin, notes that companies cannot afford to keep ignoring mobile security concerns.

MacTech Conference 2012 Registration Opens With Early Bird And Education Discounts

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Pre-registration open for this fall's MacTech Conference 2012.
Registration is available for this fall's MacTech Conference 2012.

Registration is now open for MacTech Conference 2012. The annual conference, which is a great learning and networking experience for IT professionals and developers, will be held October 17 – 19 in Los Angeles. A pre-registration discount is available for anyone who registers by the end of August.

The conference is sponsored by MacTech magazine and was launched in 2010, the year that Apple chose to focus its annual Worldwide Developers Conference solely on iOS. Since then, the conference has grown into a major event for IT professionals that need to support Macs and/or iOS devices in business, enterprise, and education environments. The conference has also become a serious event for Mac and iOS developers.

1Password Proves It Can Stand Up To Password Crackers

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1Password goes head-to-head with password cracker and shows why complex passwords are important.
1Password goes head-to-head with a password cracker and shows why complex passwords are important.

 

1Password by AgileBits is a an incredible tool for keeping your data safe. More than just a password manager, 1Password allows you to encrypt and organize a wide range of data (website passwords, non-web digital accounts, credit/debit card numbers and financial account details, software licenses, and files containing confidential information.

Those features are all well and good, but the biggest feature is 1Password’s ability to keep all that data secure in the face of brute force attacks – the kind of attacks where a piece of software simply tries combination after combination of possible passwords. Password cracking software that rely on such attacks can easily try thousands of potential passwords each second.

To find out whether or not 1Password can withstand such attacks, AgileBits tested one 1Password against John the Ripper, one of the most well-known password cracking tools.

Will Dropbox’s New Security Measures Kill Or Limit Functionality In iOS Apps?

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Responding to a security breach, Dropbox plans new security tools, but they might be too burdensome for iPhone and iPad users.
Responding to a security breach, Dropbox plans new security tools, but they might be too burdensome for iPhone and iPad users.

In the aftermath of a data breach that it announced this week, Dropbox says that it will begin implementing new security measures. Those measures include new automated techniques for spotting suspicious behavior, a page where you can examine all active logins to your account, password update requirements, and two-factor authentication.

All of those are reasonable steps to take. That Dropbox hasn’t implemented most of those items before is a bit surprising. Only one of those items – two factor authentication – really puts a burden onto Dropbox users, but it could put a very big burden on iOS users and app developers.

Many Companies Supporting Employee iPhones And iPads Ignore Mobile Security

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A growing number of companies embracing BYOD are ignoring mobile security issues.
A growing number of companies embracing BYOD are ignoring mobile security issues.

The number of companies investing in mobile management and security solutions related to bring your own device (BYOD) programs is growing, but not nearly as fast as the number of companies that are actually offering BYOD to their employees. The result is that many companies are putting themselves and their data at risk by jumping onto the BYOD bandwagon too quickly and without properly securing employee iPhones, iPads, and other devices or the business data that is stored on them.

Enterprise Device Alliance Announces Mountain Lion Support

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The enterprise integration vendors of the Enterprise Device Alliance have announced universal support for Mountain Lion.
The enterprise integration vendors of the Enterprise Device Alliance have announced universal support for Mountain Lion.

The member companies that make up the Enterprise Device Alliance announced earlier this week that all of their products have either been updated already with support for Mountain Lion or will be within a few weeks.

The Enterprise Device alliance is a consortium of companies focused on integration Apple technologies in the business and enterprise environments. The solutions offered by those member companies include Active Directory integration, Mac and iOS device management, advanced file and print integration options, mobile backup, Windows virtualization, and help desk operations.