Keeping up with every RSS feed item and tweet is hard enough for anybody, let alone someone trying to run a business. That’s why at the end of every week, ReadWriteBiz rounds up the week’s most important tech news and insights for small and medium-sized businesses.
The Web conferencing service DimDim was acquired by Salesforce this week, marking the beginning the end of an affordable service favored by small businesses. DimDim users were notified that their free accounts would be disabled by March 11, 2011, as Salesforce prepares to integrate the technology into Chatter, their real-time collaboration product. Our own Alex Williams used the occasion to discuss the inherent risk in using a free service and outlined some of the logistical details of DimDim’s impending demise.
We may be one week into 2011, but the predictions for the upcoming year keep rolling in. This week, Forrester and Gartner both made predictions about the future of analytics in business. Analytics will increasingly be built into business operations, with a focus on mobile, social, cloud-based and real-time analytics. Klint Finley wrote a thorough run-down of the predictions over on ReadWriteEnterprise.
Here on ReadWriteBiz, we took a close look at Google Docs for iOS, which we found to be sufficient solution for basic document editing on the go, but the product still has a long way to go. Audrey Watters looked at 10 data security trends for small and medium-sized businesses in 2011 and reported on a study demonstrating that Gmail’s Priority Inbox feature shaves off 6% of time spent managing email.
Yelp has been around for awhile, but it can still be a challenge for local businesses who aren’t sure how to make the most of the user-generated review site. We spoke to Luther Lowe, Yelp’s Manager of Local Business Outreach about how small, bricks-and-mortar businesses can do exactly that.
What were some of the biggest tech stories for SMBs you read this week? Let us know your must-reads in the comments.
