With small business getting on board the cloud-computing bandwagon, few have stopped to question if they are making the right software decisions.

WORKetc founder, Daniel Barnett, today claimed that small business and distributed teams were increasingly running into costly problems when signing up to multiple Software-as-a-Service offerings.

“What we are seeing time and time again are business owners that have read the latest review and signed up for web based CRM software.” said Barnett. “They have then decided they need project management software nd then billing software and any number of different offerings. But before they know it, they find their business is paying for 5 or 6 different software tools and are now facing expensive integration headaches. Any advantages that cloud computing are supposed to offer is quickly eroded.”

Frustrated with being unable to find the tools to manage a distributed team across his business, Barnett set about developing what has now become the WORKetc unified small business management platform.

“The questions that business teams must answer before signing up for a new service are very simple. Does your Project Management Software do CRM? And does your CRM do Billing? And is all this available on the single web platform? ”

“And it is not just about cost savings or efficiencies of doing everything on the single platform.” Barnett explained, adding, “When you combine key software tools like CRM, Project Management and billing, you have real-time insight into your business. For example, a single customer in your business may be a sales opportunity, have a project underway, a support request for their recent purchase and an overdue account. Try accessing all that information on the cloud without having to resort to a messy integration that might include Salesforce with Basecamp, Quicken and any number of other tools”.

WORKetc is a complete small business solution, integrating CRM with project management and billing in the single online platform. We want our customers to sit back at the end of the day and think “today was just a little bit easier than yesterday because of WORKetc”.

WORKetc CRM + Projects is available at www.WORKetc.com – 14 day free trial, no credit card required.

There’s a new player in the market of video conversion — and the good news is it’s free.

Freemake Video Converter enables fast and easy conversion to AVI, WMV, MP4, 3GP, DVD, MP3. The converter prepares videos to be viewed on devices: iPod, iPhone, iPad, PSP, smartphones, mobiles, and PC.

The range of input formats is vast: the program is capable of importing videos from DVD, mobiles, Internet, cams, PC. It is also possible to combine photos with background music or audio with visuals to create videos.

With Freemake Video Converter, it is easy to burn up to 20 hours of video to a standard DVD disc and apply different DVD menu styles. The converter tells if it is possible to write a high-quality DVD judging by the duration of the input files, not by their size.

Freemake Video Converter offers such editing options as cutting unwanted video parts, joining several videos into one file, rotating, and flipping.

It also makes possible to upload files to YouTube directly, without using the original YouTube interface. These can be converted videos, music with visualization, photos or even DVDs. The program will cut videos into 10-minute parts inserting them into one YouTube playlist, and save the account information.

In short, Freemake Video Converter is a new free program that can bring forward the functionality comparable to that of paid ones. Absolutely free downloading and upgrading, ergonomic and engaging interface, high speed of conversion allow users to fulfill tasks of different complexity, without time and money spent in vain.

Court records show that one company (Innovative Marketing) took in more than $160 billion worldwide last year for fake anti-virus programs. Ads for such “scareware” proliferate across the Internet.

Investigators say that Innovative Marketing was one of the biggest and most clever propagators of “scareware.” Scareware refers to programs that subject unsuspecting surfers to fake scans of their computers, and claim to find viruses — coincidentally, these viruses can only be removed by their software. The sticking point is that the viruses don’t exist — and the software you end up purchasing (at a pricetag averaging between $30 and $70) is at best useless, and at worst it will contain viruses that actually can infect your computer.

McAfee security software reports a 400% increase of scareware last year — with total infected computers totaling over 1 million.

Online promotions for fake anti-virus software increased tenfold in the first quarter of 2010, compared with mid-2008 figures, according to U.S. regulators.

Microsoft recently reported that its free Malicious Software Removal Tool cleaned scareware off of 7.8 million PCs in the last six months of 2009, vs. 5.3 million in the first six months.

The Federal Trade Commission says criminals create dummy ad agencies and place ads for big-name corporations without their permission. Anyone who clicked on the ad triggered a fake scan showing his or her PC to be infested with viruses. A sales pitch followed for a fake clean-up.

Innovative Marketing has reportedly closed its doors as of last year; however, the Interior Ministry of the Ukraine says it is possible that the company could still be operating under a different name from another location. While many of the scareware scams they were running appear to still be running, it is difficult to determine who is running the shell companies behind them.

Russian until leader Ruslan Pakhomov explains that while the Ministry has set up an anticybercrime unit last year, they are lacking the resources that they need to bring these cases to conviction.

The internet has enabled even small business owners to participate in a global marketplace. What you don’t hear about quite as often is how to deal with the frustration of offering products that are only offered in specific countries.

Talk about leaving money on the table!

With just about any web site in just about any niche, there are different products available in the marketplace that can be offered to people from different countries… heck, even Google AdSense ads can be shown when nothing else is available.

If the product that you promote (whether it’s an affiliate product or your own) is only available to say, people residing in the U.S., what do you want to do for the people that land on your site from say, Canada, the U.K. or Hong Kong?

Instead of turning them away with a rude “sorry pal, you don’t belong here” message, why not automatically (and transparently) display a related product, or some eBay auctions, or even AdSense to them? You can do just that with this geo-targeting country script and the accompanying step-by-step quick-start guides for WordPress and other PHP based web sites.

Keith James Lock has created a script that brilliantly solves this problem — and it can be up and running in just 5 minutes.

Here’s a few things that this script can do for you:

• Set unique ads for any or all countries and convert your web site into a global money making machine.
• Make more money from your affiliate web sites by automatically displaying country specific CPA offers.
• Show friendly country-specific messages, such as “Now available in COUNTRY NAME” or “Hello to our friends from COUNTRY NAME”, to make the visitors to your sites feel warm and welcome.
• Increase the value of your web site if you decide to sell it down the road.
• Have geo-targeting capabilities on each and every web site that you own with your unlimited license.
• Finally stop ignoring customers of other countries that are ready to pay for what it is you are offering.

To learn more about this script, visit Keith’s website.

If you ask a small business what’s one of the most difficult operational tasks that needs to be dealt with, staying on budget with monthly expenses will likely be a top contender, especially in these challenging economic times. And chances are your business faces the same obstacle every month.

It seems every time you turn around, there is another expense, a delay in payment, or some other circumstance that has a negative effect on your cash flow. So instead of putting a little something away for an even rainier day, you find yourself sweating it out until it’s time to flip to the next page of the monthly calendar for a fresh influx of cash.

If you want to make the money and the month line up better, you may need to rethink some of your business assumptions – including what constitutes a must-have expense. Following are a few ideas that can help improve your overall cash flow.

Get rid of your business land line
According to CTIA -The Wireless Association, 23 percent of US households are wireless, meaning they no longer have a traditional landline phone. One of the driving forces behind this epidemic is the desire to cut costs, especially in today’s down economy.

Now you might think what works for households won’t work for your small business. But believe it or not, there are simple technologies available today like virtual phone services for small business that will help your company run more efficiently than it would through the use of a landline.

With a virtual phone service, you receive your choice of a toll-free or local phone number that goes to a phone you already have. It allows you to assign extensions to all your employees, whether they are full or part-time, in the office or virtual. When customers and prospects call your my1voice business number, the service’s virtual receptionist allows them to select the extension they need. The call is then forwarded to that person’s mobile. Your mobile number still works independently too, so any incoming personal calls will still be routed directly to you.

In addition to the one-number convenience, virtual phone services come equipped with robust features such as smart call forwarding, enhanced voicemail, call screening and more.

Virtual phone services for small business provide all those big-business capabilities while costing as little as $10 per month. Compare that to just the base cost of a landline for your business and the savings are worth noting. But add in the cost to maintain the lines, taxes and the cost to purchase and maintain telephone equipment and the savings add up quickly.

So in short, there’s no real reason to keep your business’s traditional landline anymore. It’s money you don’t need to spend.

Take your office virtual
Office space is usually one of the highest fixed costs a small business has. While it’s nice to have an office where everyone can gather and work more collegially, if you’re looking to reduce expenses, taking your landlord off the payroll is a good way to do it.

Of course, sometimes you do need a formal office – particularly if you need a place to meet with customers. If you can’t travel to your customer, you can always look into renting a common conference room area from a local business and have your customers come directly to you. Even then, a virtual office strategy helps you keep that expense to a minimum, freeing up more cash for other aspects of the business that have more impact on your success.

A virtual phone service can help also help your small business if you decide to reduce costs by going virtual because it is not location-dependent. In other words, phone extensions can be assigned to anyone anywhere on any phone, so a customer calling the single business phone number can reach the person they want whether that employee is in Paris, Texas; Paris, Canada; or even Paris, France.

Eliminate specialty or limited-use business tools
Look around your office, or through the applications on your desktop computer. How many things do you own that have only one function? Can that function be performed by something else?

A fax machine is a good example of a piece of office equipment that is only capable of performing one task. All it does is send and receive faxes. Yet there it sits, costing you money for a dedicated phone line, paper, toner, even the power to keep it running and ready to receive an incoming fax.

You can eliminate almost all of those additional costs that are making your small business go over budget by moving to an Internet fax service that allows you to send and receive faxes on your PC or mobile phone. Not only will this keep a little more green in your wallet, it also adds convenience since you can send and receive faxes anywhere you can get an Internet connection.

When it comes down to the software you are using to run your small business, consider a pay-as-you or Web-based service model. With this model you pay a small monthly fee rather than buying the software up-front at a cost that is certain to make you go over your company’s monthly budget. You then gain access to feature-laden applications that have the sophisticated capabilities normally found only in expensive software packages.

For example, for roughly $10 per month you can access applications that help you design, manage, send and track promotional emails to your customer and prospect lists. With these applications you can build high-value email campaigns that look like they were created by high-priced professionals, but were actually created by you on your own PC or laptop.

Let’s face it. While operating a small business is challenging even in good times, it can be particularly difficult when the economy is taking a beating. But with a little creativity and some unconventional thinking, you can help ensure the month runs out before the money does.

About the Author:
Kevin Baker is the Product Marketing Manager for my1voice (www.my1voice.com) the cost-effective, feature-rich virtual phone service for small business. my1voice is a part of a suite of services from Protus, provider of the highest quality Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) communication tools for small-to-medium businesses (SMB) and enterprise organizations, including thethe award-winning MyFax, the fastest growing Internet fax service and Campaigner, an email marketing solution with advanced automation features.

The Replay Capture Suite contains seven incredibly handy software programs that provide all the tools you need to capture media from the internet. You can record radio, save music as MP3 files, download video and convert and edit your recorded files.

The highlights:

• Capture All Kinds of Streaming Video & Audio.
• Save Streaming Video, Radio Shows, Music, Podcasts, XM/Sirius and More.
• Convert Recorded Files to 36 Popular Formats.
• Edit Audio and Video Files Easily.
• Encrypt personal video files on your PC.

Here’s some of the amazing things you can do with the Replay Capture Suite:

• Record thousands of radio shows.
• Capture video from Online TV stations.
• Instantly convert your recordings to many popular formats, including several iPod options.
• Download streaming video clips from Windows Media™, Real™ and Flash™ formats.
• Download audio archives.
• Copy Podcasts to your PC or MP3 Player.
• Save Podcasts or Radio shows as bookmarkable files on your iPod.
• Make MP3 files or CDs from any captured audio.
• Record from radios or any other device attached to your PC.
• Record Sirius™ and XM™ Radio.
• Record playlists from Digital Music Services, and save each track as a separate MP3 song file or CD with artist, album, title and genre information.
• Trim, chop, and split audio and video files.
• Make screen capture videos.
• Record Skype calls.
• Convert captured Windows Media™ and Real™ into MP3 files.
• Record and pause recording from the microphone, and save to high quality MP3 files.
• Skip over the ads when listening to recorded radio shows.

High-Logic B.V., has just released Scanahand 3 — a font generator that creates fonts fast, simply by using your own handwriting.

New features include the ability to make signature fonts, set font style by going bold or italic, as well as full Unicode support. There’s a brand new multilingual user interface that supports English, French, German and Dutch and the tracing method used by Scanahand has been further improved to generate even more stunning fonts.

Used across letters, greeting cards, notes and more, it offers a way for the whole family to add their own personal touch to their creations. For business owners, Scanahand offers the ability to easily create ‘handwritten’ thank you notes for clients, creating digital signatures, and more. All that is required is a black marker pen, a template print out and a scanner. Scanahand builds fonts and installs them, ready to go.

Scanahand generates fonts with multilingual character sets covering over 15 languages. The premium edition features a template editor that allows users to create fonts that support numerous languages not available in the standard edition.

Erwin Denissen, High-Logic CEO comments, “We are delighted to bring this new enhanced version of Scanahand to market. Our engineers have made numerous improvements and we believe the new features will give even more font-creating fun to our customers.”

Although Scanahand only runs on Windows 7/Vista/XP/2003/2000, the generated fonts can also be used on Mac OS X and Linux, ideal for sharing from PC to laptop. No other graphics software is needed, but Scanahand works alongside the major graphic drawing software to create and modify individually created characters.

For more information, visit http://high-logic.com. A free trial version is available.

Since Google rolled out its personalized search feature for all users, SEOs have raised concerns about its affect on tracking rankings for their companies and clients.

Minneapolis-based web design agency Internet Exposure has developed and launched Google Camo, a Firefox add-on that allows SEOs to easily and automatically opt out of Google’s personalized search when signed out of their Google account.

“Anyone who chooses to opt out of personalized search for SEO research purposes will benefit from this add-on, especially those who regularly delete their cookies” says Internet Exposure.

Since Google rolled out its personalized search feature for all of its users last month, SEOs have raised concerns about its affect on tracking rankings for their companies and clients. Extensive competitive research or even personal browsing can trigger search personalization and push frequently visited sites to the top of a results page. This is problematic for SEOs who are evaluating a new market or trying to track their progress.

Although users are able to opt out of the feature, deleting cookies automatically returns users to Google’s default setting, which optimizes search results according to the user’s web history. Google Camo solves this predicament by allowing users to automatically opt-out of personalization every time they clear their cookies. Google Camo’s simple color-coded icon also lets users know when Google’s search personalization is enabled and altering search results.

Developing this Firefox add-on is just one of the many ways Internet Exposure is constantly evolving with trends in search engine optimization, which affect its existing and prospective clients. Internet Exposure is a full-service Internet marketing agency that designs, builds, markets and supports its clients across multiple web platforms.

For more information visit: http://www.iexposure.com/googlecamo.

Italy-based eDisplay srl has announced the newest version of their flagship email marketing software, SendBlaster 2.

The release includes a renovated interface, an improved bulk email sending engine, and new robust features to make email marketing easier for beginners to advanced marketing professionals.

Along with 100 professional HTML templates SendBlaster 2 offers dozens of feature enhancements based on users’ requests, including:

• Email campaign scheduling – users can create a mailing and let SendBlaster 2 send it later automatically, at a specific day and time.
• Spam checking – perform a spam-score check on the fly while editing a message; spam score checking is based on the SpamAssassin engine, one of the most common antispam filters for e-mail servers.
• Advanced analysis tools – built-in support, wizards and panels for Google Analytics, Google’s campaign monitoring free service, and for TrackReports, our advanced tracking and reporting online service.
• New, easier-to-edit templates – around 100 new professionally designed templates, using flexible layouts which can be easily customized.
• Snapshots – Snapshots extend the concept of “profiles” to a new level – almost every group of related settings in SendBlaster can be saved as a snapshot.
• More speed – supporting up to 50 connections. SendBlaster now gives users the option to not interrupt a mailing should the Internet connection temporarily stop working, which may help with unattended mailings.
• New, powerful data filters – let users fine-tune their mailing by selecting and enabling or disabling records matching some conditions.
• Support for external plug-ins – Users can download free plug-ins from SendBlaster web site, with many more to be added in the future.

These new features allow SendBlaster users to create impact emails, manage their distribution lists, and analyze results of their mailings in a matter of minutes and avoiding expensive web based services.

A free version of SendBlaster 2 is available for download at: http://www.sendblaster.com/

Both free and premium versions are fully localized and available in 15 languages: Italian, English, Spanish, French, Czech, Greek, German, Dutch, Swedish and Portuguese, Bulgarian, Russian, Norwegian, Polish, and Turkish. SendBlaster 2 is fully compatible with Windows 7.

Write Brothers, Inc. announces the launch of Outline 4D, a powerful outlining program with timeline views and element tracking. Outline 4D launches on February 1, 2010 exclusively on Amazon.com for the month of February.

Write Brothers, Inc. announces the launch of Outline 4D, a powerful outlining program with timeline views and element tracking. Originally branded under the name Storyview, Outline 4D includes additional support materials such as a new training site, www.LearnOutline4D.com and importing capabilities. As one happy user says, “Outline 4D is an outliner on steroids.”

“We realized our software’s usefulness extended beyond the writing community and wanted the name to reflect that. Outline 4D is a powerful tool and useful to anyone who needs to plan or outline,” says Chris Huntley, Vice-President of Write Brothers, Inc.

Outline 4D is for everyone using outlines to organize projects. The unique features of the software make it flexible and customizable to fit the specific needs of your project. Its patented method of displaying and editing an outline along a timeline makes Outline 4D the perfect tool for project planning and outlining visually. And the unique tracking feature lets users track any aspect of a project, providing quick visual references and benchmarks.

Outline 4D launches on February 1, 2010 exclusively on Amazon.com for the month of February, and is compatible with all version of Windows 7, Vista, and XP.

ABOUT WRITE BROTHERS:
In 1982, Write Brothers Inc. (formerly called Screenplay Systems) invented the first screenplay text processing system, Scriptor. For 27 years the company has been the world leader in developing software for screenwriting, film and television production, and creative story development.

Write Brothers is the only company to win an Academy Technical Achievement Award for the development of screenwriting software. Write Brothers’ software is sold worldwide, and has been used by the industry’s most demanding professionals for the development of film and television shows.