Keeping up with every tech headline is hard enough for anybody, let alone busy professionals. To help, ReadWriteBiz rounds up the week’s most important tech news and insights for small- and medium-sized businesses.
Facebook has begun to roll out some of the features available with Facebook Places for owners of Pages, according to a post on Inside Facebook. Some business Pages that have a physical address listed are being given the ability to offer deals to customers and let them check-in to the location, just as business owners can with Facbeook Places set up.
Need to take notes at an important meeting but don’t want to fiddle with paper and a pen? Minutes.io is a new and very simple Web app designed for exactly this purpose. It works on desktops as well iPads and other tablets, making it an ideal solution for taking notes at meetings, assuming you can keep up with the conversation while simultaneously typing on that touch screen keyboard.
Speaking of using the iPad for business purposes, ReadWriteWeb’s own Klint Finley rounded up a couple new tools in his weekly iPad For Business Round-up. This week, he looked at two office suite apps, a patient registration app for doctors a new report on enterprise adoption of tablets and more.
In its ongoing war against content piracy, the American music recording industry is now reportedly taking aim at online file storage services like Box, which is a bit like Dropbox but geared more toward business customers.
Despite past snafus on the user privacy front, Google wants to offer expanded privacy to users of its search engines, shielding their search activity from the eyes of employers and ISPs with the SSL-encrypted version of its search engine. This feature has been around for about a year now, but Google recently began a renewed push to make folks aware of it, using this particular angle as a way of doing so.
The mobile payments space continues to heat up with mobile credit card reader Square reportedly now processing $3 million, according to Techcrunch. The mobile payments startup, which was recently invested in by Visa, is one of a few companies offering plastic credit card readers that let businesses take payments from mobile devices without incurring hefty transaction fees or dealing with merchant accounts. For small businesses, the appeal of these products is obvious. Previously, cost-prohibitive point-of-sale systems were simply not an option for many small businesses, who now have viable options to choose from like Square, Veifone’s PAYware Mobile, iZettle and Intuit’s GoPayment.
