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.
We heard quite a bit of news coming out of the PayPal X Innovate 2010 Developers Conference, which had a heavy focus on the future of mobile payments. PayPal X is a new initiative that opens up PayPal’s platform to developers, enabling them to build new tools and applications on top of it.
The event included a number of announcements that should be of interest to the small business community, including new PayPal X integrations with Zoho, Outright, Freshbooks and a number of other Web tools for SMBs.
Project management and collaboration app Wrike pushed out an update this week that makes it more akin to social networking sites, with real-time update streams and a redesigned interface. GigaOm’s WebWorkerDaily had a thorough review of the new Wrike UI.
Also on the collaboration app front, here on ReadWriteBiz we discussed a recent change in the pricing of Basecamp, which saw the cheapest subscription option dropped from its sign-up page, at least for the time being. 37signals founder Jason Fried chimed in in our comments to clarify the changes, and the discussion has continued in a thread over on Hacker News.
Another item that generated a lot of discussion here on ReadWriteBiz was Wednesday’s story about a survey showing that businesses waste nearly five hours per week scheduling meetings, a problem that can be alleviated through the use of online scheduling apps like Doodle, Tungle and SkedgeMe.
As has been increasingly common lately, Google made a few announcements this week that should be of interest to small and medium-sized businesses. On Tuesday, the Google Docs team announced that Google Spreadsheets will soon include a tool for creating charts, taking that product another step toward being able to seriously compete with Microsoft’s venerable Office suite.
Perhaps a bit more significant was the previous day’s unveiling of Boost, a new advertising program from Google that uses artificial intelligence to recommend keywords and bids to businesses advertising across Google’s search and Maps products. The program is only available in San Francisco, Houston and Chicago for now, but may well be expanded to other locales if things go well.
