Why Small Businesses Need to Spring for Business-Class Internet Access

Google is being accused of violating the FCCs Open Internet Order as a result of its policy toward servers. Essentially, if you run a server from a Google Fiber Internet connection, you’re technically violating the terms of service, and you could find your Internet access shut down. Google stands by that policy, but the reality is that this is only one of many reasons that small businesses should not run a server from a consumer-grade Internet connection.

The issue with Google Fiber stems from a clause in the terms of service that reads, “Unless you have a written agreement with Google Fiber permitting you to do so, you should not host any type of server using your Google Fiber connection.”

Google has been a proponent of net neutrality, but some were quick to note that Google seems to have changed teams now that it’s also in the Internet provider business. Google’s response to the FCC includes this explanation: “The server policy has been established to account for the congestion management and network security needs of Google Fiber’s network architecture, particularly given that Google Fiber does not impose data caps on its users.”

Bottom line: Google believes it has a right to ban someone from hosting a server on it’s Google Fiber network because of the potential impact it could have on the bandwidth for all of the rest of the customers. That seems reasonable.

You don’t really want to host your business server on a consumer Internet service anyway. Granted, Google Fiber delivers a 1Gbps connection for a very low cost compared to any other consumer or business service. However, Google Fiber is only available in a few select cities, and there are other reasons to choose a business-class Internet provider.

First, Google states explicitly that it doesn’t impose a bandwidth cap, but many consumer Internet services do. Comcast used to have a 250GB per month cap, but switched to a tiered-pricing plan last year for heavy users. The cap is now 300GB, after which Comcast charges $10 extra per month for each additional 50GB.

Another benefit of business-class Internet service is that you generally have a dedicated, static IP address, which makes it much easier to host and manage a server. Consumer Internet services use DHCP to randomly assign IP addresses, so your website or FTP server might be on one address today, and a different one tomorrow.

Most consumer Internet services block various TCP ports—for example port 25. It’s blocked as a measure to guard against or limit spam, based on the assumption that no consumer customer is hosting an email server (because it would violate the TOS). You want to have full access to all of the ports for your Internet access—including TCP port 25, so business-class Internet is the way to go.

Tech support is also different. Calling the consumer tech support line when you’re having an issue is typically an exercise in futility and frustration. If your business depends on the Internet connection, it can be that much more stressful. The technical support for a business-class account is generally more knowledgeable and more expedient, so you can minimize down time and keep your business online.

The operative word in the term “small and medium business” is “business”. In other words, regardless of whether your company has one employee, one hundred, or one thousand, it’s still a business, and it still needs to act like one. That is particularly true when it comes to choosing an Internet provider. 

Six ways to use virtualization in your small business

Virtualization. The word evokes complex, pricey technologies beyond the grasp of all but the biggest enterprises. But virtualization offers many benefits for small businesses, including cost savings and IT efficiency. And options such as Oracle’s VirtualBox and VMware Workstation have put the technology within reach of small business budgets.

Here are some suggestions for how you can leverage the power of virtualization in your small business.

It happens often enough: The developer of a niche software that you’re using goes out of business, or the software is no longer supported. The original installation files are nowhere to be found, and you aren’t sure of the configuration settings anyway.

Rather than spending money to replace a perfectly working app, or keeping your fingers crossed hoping the machine running it will last a couple more years, why not just virtualize the entire PC? That’s easy enough using software such as the free VMware vCenter Converter. This allows you to continue using the unsupported software on any desktop or laptop with sufficient RAM and a decent processor, albeit in a virtualized environment.

VMware vCenter Converter lets you easily virtualize an entire PC.
Obviously, running unsupported software is never desirable from a security perspective. Be sure to only run virtual machines (VMs) containing such apps behind a firewall.

Using the same method outlined above, you can make a “snapshot” of a server into a VM as a system backup. A VM backup can help your business quickly get up to speed after a catastrophic hardware failure. While a VM copy is no substitution for daily data backups (you will need the data backups to restore your server), having a recent image handy can keep business downtime to a minimum and buy you time to acquire and configure new physical hardware.

Are you looking to setup a Wiki for internal use or testing out a Jabber IM deployment within the company intranet? In such scenarios, virtualization makes it easy for businesses to setup an environment without cluttering up existing machines or having to purchase new hardware. If the initial deployment or trial is successful, the VM can be easily moved onto a dedicated virtual server machine or quickly expanded simply by tweaking VM parameters such as RAM and CPU allocation.

Mobile devices have allowed business users to work from virtually anywhere, but there are times when an employee will need to access a PC-only app from the road or use a desktop browser for websites that won’t load properly on a mobile one. Fortunately, Remote Desktop Protocol-clients for iOS, Android, and Windows RT enable users to connect to their office workstations in these situations.

Rather having employees connect directly to their desktops, set up a VM to serve as the RDP host, making sure to configure only the services that they need. Keeping work machines segregated this way adds an extra layer of security.

The prevalence of cyber attacks targeting Web browsers puts your business data at increased risk. An easy, inexpensive way to combat it is to limit Web browsing activities to a virtual environment that has no access to sensitive files. Should a hacker break through the Web browser, a quick restart will conveniently erase any malware or modified system files (assuming the VM was started in read-only mode).

Apps can also be packaged and distributed within a VM image. This is a great method for transporting your favorite apps on a flash drive between home and work, and is also a way to ensure that your software demo will not fail due to missing drivers and code libraries. Finally, this tactic can also be used to run multiple instances of an application such as Yahoo Messenger and Skype, with different instances mapped to different accounts.

Amazon Reports Small Loss as It Focuses on Investments

But with revenue up 22 percent, Amazon showed that it could still deliver the sales growth demanded by investors, who have lifted the company’s stock 21 percent this year. So far, those demands do not include an insistence on big profits.

Until it does, Amazon seems content to pour money into initiatives aimed at gobbling up an increasing share of spending by consumers.

For the quarter that ended June 30, Amazon said it had a net loss of $7 million, or 2 cents a share, compared with net income of $7 million, or a penny a share, in the same period a year earlier. Amazon’s revenue was $15.7 billion, up from $12.83 billion the year before.

The results were slightly below the estimates of analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters, who expected Amazon to report earnings of 5 cents a share and revenue of $15.73 billion.

The miss did not seem to trouble investors too much. The company’s stock dropped less than 2 percent in after-hours trading after the release of its earnings report.

A good illustration of Amazon’s long-term bets is online video. The company is spending hundreds of millions of dollars on licensing rights to build a large library of video that its customers can watch through their Kindle tablets and other devices. These agreements are critical as movies, music and other media — which account for 28 percent of Amazon’s total sales — shift from physical to digital form.

The company recently cut its biggest such deal ever, with a multiyear agreement to license television shows from Viacom, including children’s shows like “Dora the Explorer” and “SpongeBob SquarePants.”

As a result, Amazon spent almost 47 percent more on technology and content in the quarter, for a total of $1.59 billion — roughly 10 percent of its total revenue. Included in that spending is the company’s investment in Amazon Web Services, a lucrative business through which Amazon rents capacity in its data centers to independent companies.

“We’re investing for the large opportunities we have in front of us,” Tom Szkutak, the company’s chief financial officer, said in a conference call.

While Amazon is feared as a seller of physical goods, it faces several formidable rivals in the digital content business, including Netflix, Apple, Hulu, Microsoft and Google.

Still, Amazon is also spending aggressively on the warehouses it needs to deliver physical goods, building them in locations that have been inching ever closer to big cities with the goal of offering next-day, or even same-day, deliveries to shoppers. This year, Amazon began selling groceries in the Los Angeles area, using its own trucks to shuttle fruit, meat and boxes of cereal from a new warehouse in the city to customers’ doorsteps.

The effort is expensive and risky, though Amazon would not say whether or how much money it was losing on it. The grocery business has killed Internet retailers before — Webvan was the most notable casualty — so Amazon chose not to expand the service beyond a test in Seattle until recently.

“The challenge we’ve had over the past several years is how to make it economically viable,” Mr. Szkutak said.

All the spending on warehouses and other projects has led to a surge in hiring at the company. Its head count swelled to 97,000, up more than 40 percent from 69,000 a year ago. The hiring earned the company a plum position as the backdrop for a speech on middle-class jobs that President Obama is expected to deliver on Tuesday at an Amazon warehouse in Chattanooga, Tenn.

A big part of Amazon’s allure for investors remains its pre-eminent position in e-commerce, which is expected to rise 14.8 percent to $248 billion in American sales this year, according to eMarketer. That is far better growth than the single-digit growth expected for retail sales over all in the United States this year.

Kerry Rice, an analyst at Needham & Company, said investors believed that Amazon could keep stealing market share from Walmart and other physical retailers, and that eventually its profits would improve.

“On some level, I think some people are buying the stock because they’re hoping for that investment cycle to begin to reduce,” Mr. Rice said. “If they pull back on spending, you’re going to see that operating margin tick up.”

Mr. Rice added: “I don’t think that’s going to happen for a long time.” 

It’s Time for Small Businesses to Move to Windows Server 2012 Essentials

Last week, Dell stated that it has discontinued selling Windows Small Business Server. Microsoft is no longer making the popular small business platform, but thankfully Microsoft didn’t just pull the plug and leave small business customers with nothing to fill the void.

Windows Small Business Server (SBS) may be coming to an end, but it’s not really dead—just rebranded. Microsoft officially moved it into the Windows Server family, and changed the name to Windows Server 2012 Essentials. It’s basically the entry-level offering for Windows Server 2012.

For Loyal fans of SBS, though, moving to Windows Server 2012 Essentials is more than just a name change. Customers often balk at change of any kind, but in this case some are upset that major features and capabilities their businesses depend on are lost through the transition to Windows Server 2012 Essentials.
Windows SBS was a great platform because it contained all of the elements a business might need in one box—the server operating system and management tools, along with Exchange Server and SharePoint Server. The problem with SBS, though, is that it maxed out at 25 licenses, and was a dead-end that didn’t provide an easy path for companies once their needs grew larger than what SBS could handle.

The biggest complaint about Windows Server 2012 Essentials is the lack of Exchange and SharePoint. They’re not integrated with Windows Server 2012 Essentials itself, but Microsoft enables customers to run applications on premise on a separate server (physical or virtual), or connect with the services online using Office 365 or a hosted version.

Windows Server 2012 Essentials running on the right hardware can provide small business customers with everything they need to continue managing an entire IT infrastructure in one box. It may not be as simple to set up, but Windows Server 2012 Essentials offers greater flexibility for small business customers to choose on premise or cloud-based solutions, migrate from one to the other, or rely on a hybrid of both. The management is still done through Windows Server 2012 Essentials, though, so administration is still simple and doesn’t require an entire IT department.

The move to Windows Server 2012 Essentials recognizes that small business customers often turn into medium business customers, and some even eventually become large enterprise customers. Windows Server 2012 Essentials lays the foundation, and gives customers the freedom to grow smoothly from 10 users to 10,000 and beyond. 

With the arrival of its first mobile app, IFTTT is ready for small business

Keeping up with the growing list of social networks, essential apps, and incoming data streams that have become part of modern online life is difficult for even a Web dabbler. Getting them talking to one another is even tougher, which is where tools like “If This Then That,” or simply “IFTTT,” have become invaluable.
This hacker’s dream of a Web service was developed to help ease the translation of data from one network to another, and now IFTTT has released its first mobile app, for the iPhone platform. The mobile app enhances the utility of IFTTT for all of its users, but its release is also a good time to take a hard look at whether IFTTT can now be put to use in the business world.

IFTTT is so valuable because certain networks, like Facebook, are famously closed off, so doing something that should be simple—like saving your photos to your hard drive or republishing videos on YouTube—can be extremely tedious and time-consuming.

Some of the site’s most popular recipes are mostly personal in structure. (If my Facebook profile picture changes, change my Twitter profile picture to match. If I take a photo on my iPhone, send me a copy of it via email.)

IFTTT remedies this by revolving around a simple design conceit. Using an abbreviated scripting language, users develop “recipes,” each of which takes a single data input and does one single action to or with it. For example: If I like a photo on Instagram, then save that photo to my Dropbox folder. That’s it. It sounds simple, and it is, but it saves you the hassle of doing it for yourself. You don’t even have to write these recipes from scratch. Tens of thousands are available for download from the site’s database. (You can get the Instagram to Dropbox recipe here.)
But an increasing number of recipes have a serious business bent. Want to
back up your mobile device contacts to a Google Docs spreadsheet? Auto-send starred Gmail to Evernote? Link a Blogger account to a Facebook Business Page? There’s, to borrow a phrase, a recipe for that.

And of course, you can always script your own recipes to do more. Savvy businesses might use IFTTT to send a text message to the customer support team if the company receives a mention on Twitter. Or IFTTT can be used to simplify the hassles of keeping various networks up to date. Tumblr, Instagram, Flickr, and more can all be synced up—one at a time, of course.

The iOS version of the IFTTT app doesn’t really do anything the Web version of the system doesn’t do already, but it does make recipe creation and management a more flexible, do-it-anywhere activity. One of the curious things about digging into IFTTT is that you never know where the idea for a killer recipe will strike. But as more and more of both our social and business lives becomes mobile, that serendipity is less and less likely to occur when you’re sitting at your desk. 

Surface RT can help small businesses reduce IT costs

Microsoft caved to market pressure and sagging demand this week by slashing the price of the Surface RT tablet by 30 percent. The Surface RT is better-equipped for business than rival tablets, and at $350 ( $470 once you add a Touch or Type keyboard cover, which it requires to be truly functional) it straddles the line between tablet and PC, and could help business customers rein in IT costs.
The Surface RT isn’t for everyone. It can’t run traditional Windows software, so businesses or users that depend on specific applications or custom software can’t just toss out their PC and use a Surface RT. For a variety of use cases, however, a device with email, Web access, and Microsoft Office is sufficient.

The Surface RT can replace a Windows PC for many users. The Surface RT includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote. With Windows 8.1, the Surface RT also gets Outlook, and Microsoft just updated the OneNote MX app to allow it to connect to Office 365 accounts. Microsoft has also made many of its tools available across iOS and Android, but the integration of the Surface RT with Microsoft software and services sets it apart from other mobile devices as a business tool.
It's true a business can supply users with standard Windows laptops—with the full Windows operating system, more internal storage, a real keyboard, and possibly a DVD or Blu-Ray drive—for roughly the same money. But when it comes to weight and battery life, no $500 laptop can come close to what the Surface RT has to offer.
Many businesses are purchasing tablets for users to use in addition to their standard desktop or laptop PC. In that case, you have to consider the cost of both the PC and the tablet. A Surface RT, on the other hand, can conceivably function as both and allow the business to cut IT costs while giving employees greater flexibility and mobility at the same time.
Let’s face it, small and medium businesses need professional-grade networks and PCs, but most don’t have dedicated data centers and many don’t even have full-time IT staff. They rely on simple, cost-effective technology. The Surface RT can augment a Windows PC better than other tablets thanks to Windows 8 and the tight integration with Microsoft software and services, and—for the right users—the Surface RT can be a primary device that fills the role of both PC and tablet in one. 

Review: OWC's Envoy Pro EX SSD impresses with its speed, small size

What’s smaller than a portable hard drive, larger than a thumb drive, and really fast? OWC’s Envoy Pro EX, an external solid-state drive (SSD).

Typical SSDs have the same form factor of a 2.5-inch notebook hard drive, but the Envoy Pro EX uses the OWC’s Aura Pro SSD that is built more like a RAM module than a drive mechanism. OWC pairs the fast 6G Aura Pro with a Sandforce controller and wraps them in a sleek, anodized aluminum external enclosure with USB 3.

Weighing 3.8 ounces and measuring just 0.4 inches thick, 2.1 inches wide and 4.5 inches long, the bus-powered Envoy Pro EX is perfectly portable. Very similar in size and shape of the iPhone 4S, the Envoy Pro EX is a bit thicker, but weighs one ounce less than that iPhone.

The Envoy Pro EX performed admirably in our speed tests. (We tested the 240GB model.) For file and folder transfers we connected the drive to a 2012 MacBook Pro with a quad core 2.7GHz Core i7 processor, 8GB of RAM and an internal SSD. The Envoy Pro EX wrote our large 10GB file at 216.8 MBps and read the same file at 181.5 MBps. The Envoy Pro wrote a 10GB folder full of smaller files at 197 MBps and read the folder at 176.2 MBps.

Connected to a 2013 custom 13-inch MacBook Air with 8GB RAM and faster PCIe-connected internal flash storage, the read speeds were much higher, reading the large file at 423.5 MBps and the folder at 318.7MBps.

The AJA System Test scores were also impressive. With speeds of 371.8 MBps writes and 410 MBps reads, these are the fastest AJA USB 3 write speeds we’ve seen and faster than any single-drive Thunderbolt device we’ve tested.

Small, stylish and swift, the bus-powered Envoy Pro EX is an extremely portable drive. It offers 240GB of solid state capacity and some of the fastest AJA write speeds we’ve seen.

Corner Office: So Who Says a New Business Has to Be Small?

A. I did. My parents were entrepreneurs. They ran a small ad agency in upstate New York.

Q. What were your high school years like?

A. I never did particularly well in school, but I did get really into things. I used to build robots, and dove right into computers to the point where my schoolwork suffered. Then I really became inspired by people like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. In high school, I started my first company, called M Cubed Software. We named it that because it was me and two other guys named Mike.

Q. So did you bypass college?

A. My dad died from cancer when I was 18, and my mom was in a really tough spot. So I wanted to try to help at home. I had started doing some technology consulting. Then a friend of the family got me an interview at I.B.M. They hired me basically as an intern, and they told me not to plan on being there beyond the internship. They also said they don’t hire anyone who doesn’t have a degree.

But I was determined to make sure that I became so valuable that they couldn’t let me go. And that was what happened, and they eventually hired me full time. I.B.M. was my college education, effectively. They were very good at teaching you management.

Q. And the next big step?

A. I left I.B.M. in 1989, when I was 22, to start a company called Paper Software.

Q. What did you learn from that?

A. The first lesson was that I’d bought all these business books because I hadn’t gone to school. And I really got into the theoretical aspects of starting a company. Then what I finally realized after about six months is that I just needed to do it. I just needed to actually build something. And that was a good lesson — do something, build something and everything will happen from there.

I was able to recruit three really awesome I.B.M. engineers. I had to pay them a lot of money to join. One day, two of them said, “Hey, can you come outside and go for a walk with us?” They told me they were going to quit and start a company that was basically going to do what we were doing. I had two other guys working for me who were up-and-coming engineers, and I was paying them a fraction of what I was paying these guys. I came back to the office and I pulled my small team together and said: “O.K., I have good news and bad news. The bad news is, we just lost half of our engineers, but the good news is we kept the best half.”

And that was a great moment, when I learned how you rally people around hardship, and give them the opportunity to step up. You can actually get better output from people when you give them more than what they normally would be expected to handle.

Q. You eventually sold Paper Software to Netscape and moved to the West Coast to join Netscape. Lessons from that experience?

A. One of the biggest mistakes I made at Netscape was to focus too much on competition. Microsoft was trying to kill us. And that caused us to think about what we were going to do about Microsoft. What we really should have been thinking was: How do we focus on what our users want? Why did they love our product? How do we make it more of something that they love? So my advice is, every time you have a thought about the competition, replace that with a thought about your customer and you’ll do far better as a business.

Q. Other lessons for would-be entrepreneurs that you’ve learned over the years?

A. I think a lot of entrepreneurs go into building a start-up thinking they should focus on a niche, and do the simplest thing that can be done. But there is a problem with that approach. In fact, it may be even harder to build that kind of niche company than it is to build a giant company that might someday be able to change the world. It’s going to take the same amount of life force. You’re going to get up in the morning, work 12 to 15 hours every day. You’ll make huge, hard decisions, hire and fire people and build teams. It literally takes the same amount of energy.

So what I think is counterintuitive is that if you focus on the big idea, the biggest thing you can possibly do, that’s actually somewhat easier, because you can attract more investment that way. You can attract more talent that way. It’s more fun, and you have way more room to maneuver.

Q. How do you hire? What qualities are you looking for? What questions do you ask?

A. I ask people what’s driving them, and what’s motivating them. I’m looking for answers along the lines of: “I want to be a part of a great team. I want to learn from really great people. I love the people I’ve met here, and I’d love to just be part of this.” I also look for people who are into doing something really meaningful and great. So I’m looking to see if their answers are centered around those two pillars. I’m trying to build a culture that’s focused primarily on the camaraderie of the team, because we’re going on a really big, important and giant journey together.

I don’t hire anyone who doesn’t genuinely share that motivation, no matter how good they are on paper. Because you have to have a durable team so that when you do hit hard patches, people are just as motivated to continue to drive forward. The team sticks together. That’s what is really required in building a company. You’re going to hit those hard spots, and you’re actually defined by how you come out of those at the end.

Q. What other questions do you ask?

A. I’ll ask them about the hardest situation they’ve ever been in, and how they navigated through it. I’ll ask: What’s your greatest triumph? What’s the thing that you’re most proud of that you’ve done in your career? And then: What are some of the core lessons you’ve learned? You can have a 90-minute conversation just with those questions.

Gunshot causes small fire in Eden

EDEN — In light of a small fire caused by a stray round of ammunition at a gun range, officials are warning residents to use caution as fire season heats up.

Weber County Fire Warden Travis Peterson said the fire started around noon Friday, just beyond a gun range near Avon Road. A round from someone shooting at the range sparked the blaze, which ended up burning about a half-acre.

The fire could have been much worse, Peterson said, if it hadn’t been stopped by a fire break that was installed a few years ago because of the high risk of fires in the area.

“It’s fortunate it wasn’t worse,” he said. “There’s a deceptive green up there. It looks green, but we’re getting signs of fire activity already. Crews did a great job putting it out today.”

Peterson said the person who fired the round wasn’t breaking any laws or fire restrictions but was still responsible for the fire. He urged people to be cognizant of fire danger, both when firing guns and when lighting fireworks.

“People need to take the fire risk into account,” Peterson said. “People need to be aware of where bullets or fireworks could land — not just where they think they’ll land, but where they could.”

Shifting winds, ranging from two to 10 miles per hour, helped spread the fire, Peterson said. Three engines from the Weber Fire District, one state engine and one helicopter from the Forest Service responded to the scene.