As a devoted Apple fan, as well as the owner of a Mac-technology consulting firm, you’d think I always drink from the Macintosh Kool-Aid™ ­fountain. And truth be told, I often do. Apple has proven time and time again that it usually knows what the market wants before most other tech companies, and often before the market itself knows what it wants.

Apple hasn’t hit a homerun with every product it’s produced, but it has a better track record than just about any other computer company still in business. If Apple played baseball, its batting average would be about .900 or so.

When the iPad was first introduced, it was poo-poo’d as a tablet computer that wasn’t really a computer. Apple educated us that it was really a media device—for email, web browsing, music, videos, and similar functions. The public responded by buying them in droves. By the third quarter of 2012, more than 80 million units had been sold—a hugh success by any measure.

Then came the iPad Mini. The questions beg to be asked. Why? Who needs a smaller tablet? Who needs a larger phone for that matter? If we listen to technology companies, it seems they think we all do.

We live in a world of strange divergences; our TVs keep getting larger, ya gotta catch Sunday’s game on that big 72-inch­ screen, yet we easily watch that next blockbuster movie on our phones.

Technology companies keep telling us what we need next, so, does anyone really need the iPad Mini? Yes, I think we do.

The original iPad is great, the kids love it to watch movies on it, I use it to check email, video chat with the family back east, but then it gets put back on the side table or the edge of the desk where it lives most of its life. For many, it’s just a little too large to put in a back pocket or in a wife’s purse. While some venture out, it often stays at home. (Of course, one trip to Disneyworld and you’ll see countless tourists using it for photos and videos!)

Increasingly, the world wants to be mobile. Business wants to be mobile. YOU want to be mobile, and the iPad Mini helps accomplish that.

Doctors can now comfortably fit one in their lab coats as they make rounds. Expect to see iPad Minis usage really take off in the medical community. I have a mental health client who has hundreds of direct care staff working in the field. The iPad in general, but the iPad Mini specifically will end up in their hands to provide a direct link to the main office with critical client related data and time critical communications.

Table staff at restaurants can now easily carry an iPad Mini on the floor to take orders, and still juggle a tray of drinks or hot plates. Sales reps can use it to show product, download intruction manuals, email orders, or a host of other activities, all from a device pulled out of their pockets. Warehouses can use cloud service software and iPad Minis to “pick and pull” from warehouse bins. Almost any retailer, for that matter, can use it for price checks, inventory control, and even communications.

So, are the iPad Mini, the Samsung Galaxy Note, Google’s Nexus 7, or the Kindle Fire HDX relevant? Yes, I believe they are, whereas a larger tablet is more of a gadget, albeit, a very cool gadget, I think a smaller tablet is more of a tool. I would even argue the iPad Mini is cool tool, as often only Apple can do, but a tool nonetheless. One that got its size right, got its functionality right, and got its price right. A business tool that will wind up in more businesses, doing more business.

In my mind, the only question is “how will your business use a mini tablet?” •

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Whether you are just opening a new business, or are already established and need to do some budget-crunching, there are several options to consider and decisions to make.

As a business owner who is constantly juggling and ensuring the right business decisions are made, your biggest goal is to have your products or services benefit clients and customers in a way that differentiates your company from your competitors.

These days, a new company is typically a one- or two-person operation that attempts to effectively cover all aspects of running a business. More often than not, this is the first step toward failure. Many of us know firsthand that a bad customer experience is extremely hard to erase. Delays in customer order deliveries, customer service phones that go unanswered, a website that does not represent a new company appropriately are all instances that make a bad, yet crucial, first impression. A great customer experience sets your new business apart from other companies.

An established company can face the same struggles. A large time-sensitive project, employee turnover, and/or extremely high overhead expenses will all have an impact on the work that must get done and the deadlines met. On top of all that, the revenues are not absorbed in the day-to-day operations. What needs to be done for both new and established companies is to provide a benefit to your customers that is not offered by your competitors.

Outsourcing many of your day-to-day operational functions can help resolve these issues.

Outsourcing Your Call Center

The support of an outsourced call center can provide consistent and continued customer service, no matter what size your company is. This allows you to devote your time and efforts to marketing and building your business. You can relax knowing that customers will experience prompt and professional service. The responsibility of hiring, educating and maintaining a professional customer service department in your company is eliminated; it’s now the responsibility of the outsourced call center management. Think about the expenses that are eliminated when contracting such a service:

No staffing and management wages. Salaries are one of the largest expenses incurred by business owners. This includes the time needed to interview, hire, educate and even replace employees. Employee turnover and absences result in this being a continuous cycle and expense.

No employee benefit expenses. The cost of employee benefits equals an average of 29% expense over and above the actual wages paid.

No office space, telephone, or systems overhead expenses. To effectively manage customer calls, a system is required that can direct and manage large volumes of calls.

No excessive customer wait times during high-volume call periods. ­Centers have the flexibility to increase staffing during peaks in call volumes much easier than you adding staff in your business.

No lost calls during emergency ­situations. An effective outsourced call center maintains business continuation during emergency situations.

Outsourcing Product Fulfillment

Another valuable outsourcing option is product fulfillment. Whether your business is brick and mortar or an online business, your product orders MUST be shipped in a timely manner in order to provide a benefit to your customer. Once more, think about the expenses that are eliminated or reduced when contracting such a service:

Reduced warehouse expense for housing your product. Normally the charge for floor space in an outsourced warehouse is far less expensive than you would pay to lease or purchase your own warehouse. This is a result of expenses being shared across all of the outsourced fulfillment clients.

Reduced shipping expenses. An effective outsourced fulfillment center will provide the best options for shipping your product. They can protect against any losses due to damage of lost shipments. The outsourced center is able to order shipping materials in bulk, thus reducing your cost of raw materials and postage.

No mailroom staff wages. You pay for the processing and shipping of orders. When there are no orders, you won’t have employees sitting around on the clock waiting for something to happen.

Reduced or eliminated customer compaints due to unfulfilled orders. A quality fulfillment center normally ships orders on the day they arrive or the next business day. While some fulfillment centers will have an early afternoon cut-off time for processing orders, look for the fulfillment centers that will ship orders up to 4 p.m. PST, so the majority of the orders received are out the door the same day.

There are multiple savings in time, money and stress from outsourcing operational functions. Can you think of good reasons why you should NOT outsource those day-to-day functions that can take you away from your successes? •

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Go to My PC” is a product that allows people to sign in to their office PCs from other locations, and is being aggressively promoted through advertising. This tool may sound like “wow” technology, but it isn’t. In fact, it really reflects the antithesis of what current technology is able to do for businesses. While many point to it as a form of “cloud computing,” cloud technology has come a long way.

Despite the outdated technology, older cloud-type products are still used in many businesses. Let’s take a look at a typical business ­scenario, one told often in today’s business world.

Does this scenario sound familiar to you? Should businesses really be perpetuating outdated technology that assumes the comfort of having all your eggs in one desktop basket called your PC?

Now let’s contrast it with the emerging scenario, this one fictitious but based on actual experience with clients implementing new cloud technologies.

This could be your business: A business not held hostage to a growing IT department, and non-budgetable IT spending. A business with a bottom line that has improved with changes to process and technology. Migration to this kind of business model isn’t simple and it isn’t always a happy process, but it is a growing trend among businesses everywhere as improvement, control and better profitability become increasingly important. Quite frankly, unless you’re in the IT business, it’s time to get out of the IT business.

Cloud Computing Facts

These facts help demonstrate why cloud computing has enabled businesses to become better at what they do and achieve greater profits at the same time:

Businesses that focus more on what they do best are usually better than their competitors. Focusing on the latest IT crash or departing IT director should not present much risk, yet today, it does. The solution is not having IT managed by internal IT departments.

People are constantly connected to the Internet, and as a result the lines between being connected to work and to personal matters are blurred. Employees love flexibility and want to work from anywhere, anytime. This is a permanent change, particularly with our society’s generational shifts. Cloud computing seamlessly fulfills this need.

IT spending comprises hardware, vendor products and services, and most importantly, IT personnel. These expenditures are becoming increasingly expensive.

IT is one of the most ill-managed areas of most businesses. This is because most CFOs and CEOs are not IT specialists, skilled at IT governance, and just don’t have time to focus on it. Consequently, IT is always present, but isn’t well positioned in many organizations.

Cloud computing—particularly in the form of Software as a Service (SaaS) which is software delivered by a publisher via an internet browser, is becoming wide-spread, and represents a way to make businesses less dependent on IT, and more focused on its core mission.

Using SaaS solutions allows CFOs to budget for the use of technology as they do for rent or electricity. This is because SaaS is paid for based on how much of it a business uses, similar to a utility.

True SaaS products include software upgrades and maintenance in the fixed monthly or annual fees they charge. This means no surprise budget-killing expenses that normally accompany running IT departments and in-house hosted software.

Security is always a concern. In most cases, having employees work from a SaaS environment is safer than the security provided by in-house networks and labor-heavy IT departments. It only takes one disgruntled internal IT staff to delete all of a business’ confidential data, trade secrets, and financial and personnel records.

CEOs and CFOs of growing businesses really don’t like to be held hostage by anyone, but frequently they feel this way by their IT leaders. SaaS products can be managed by business managers that oversee their use in a company, rather than an IT department.

Technology should be seen as a way to enable employees to do their work more effectively. True SaaS products are often the most advanced in terms of functionality and beneficial processes for the tasks that they are intended to handle. This is because they are newer and the publishers can write an ideal software tool from scratch. Most non-SaaS product publishers are forced to constantly deliver upgrades to their clients, and these clients typically have to manually upgrade their systems for an additional cost, and deal with business interruption.

It is proven that SaaS products deliver large company-level process and functionality such as financial reporting and customer marketing at a fraction of what it would cost to implement and support similar technology in-house, on in-house servers.

How Do Businesses Move Into The Cloud?

We are often asked how a business should move to the cloud. “One bite at a time,” is often the best way, kind of like the “elephant-eating” joke we’ve all heard. Start with an assessment of what business processes are most vital for managing your business and then determine if there are options available in the SaaS marketplace.

Next, determine if the SaaS options can provide greater functionality and benefit, regardless of the technology, compared to your existing computing tools. Additionally consider the cost of switching to a SaaS solution versus keeping your existing solution. After all of this, if you determine that SaaS provides the better options, you may find it is a good time to dip your toes into the cloud world, and migrate to a SaaS solution.

Your firm should also consider if you really need to be serving your employees with email, calendar, contacts, and word processing/spreadsheet software from servers that your IT department manages. Most often the answer is no. Managing email is usually not your business’ core competency. This is usually the first place businesses take advantage of the cloud. You can still have your employees use Outlook if that’s what they are used to; however, even that experience can be internet-delivered quite inexpensively, yet securely, by reputable 3rd third party providers. The return on investment from doing this can be remarkable.

Any migration of a computing process to another way of processing is challenging and comes with hiccups, regardless of whether it is cloud-based or not. Prudent and professional planning and execution of any migration is imperative. Be careful to manage these migrations well, and create clear expectations among all parties. In exchange for long-term success, buy-in and transparency among your employees is key, as well as realistic visions about the need to take extra time to make these migrations happen.

It is also critical that you pick a SaaS vendor that you can rely on. Security is a concern, since SaaS publishers hold important information about your business. Reputable SaaS publishers provide you with assurances as to their information security practices that they employ. They also guarantee your “uptime” and may even pay you for time when and if they are “down” for an extended period of time. Many SaaS publishers also allow your business to limit the specific Internet connection locations (like an IP address) that can access their programs on your behalf. If you don’t want people to connect from home or somewhere in particular, you can allow mandatory confirmation of the location from which someone is using the system, before he or she can log in. Password changes can be forced or required, and some products make users answer security questions before they use the program on a computer that has not yet been connected to that program. Tantamount to all of these practices is that a quality SaaS vendor who, by default, also gives you peace-of-mind by enabling a disaster-preparedness contingency benefit for your business, since they back up the systems and data for you, in more than one place. The security of reputable SaaS products is more often far stronger than the security of software and information that you host in your server rooms.

As you consider how you can improve the efficiencies, effectiveness and bottom line of your business, consider how cloud computing and especially SaaS, can help you get there sooner, more securely and more sustainably. Cloud is real, it’s popular with employees and it reduces your risk profile in many ways. Most importantly, it allows a business to think more about its mission, and less about IT. •

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Valuation

FACEBOOK AT $90+ BILLION

As of our release date for this issue, Facebook was in the final prep stages for its initial public offering (IPO), and puts valuation on the social media site a little north of $90 billion. Investment experts are predicting this will add about $17 billion to Mark Zuckerberg’s personal worth.

Going Mobile

Global Cellphone Subscriptions: 6 million

Mobile Web Users Worldwide: 1.2 billion

Percent of Global Website Hits from Mobile Devices: 8.49%

Global Mobile Advertising ­Revenue in 2010: $1.6 billion

Global Mobile Advertising Revenue in 2015 (est.): $20.6 billion

* Source: mobithinking.com

Ones To Watch

TUMBLR.COM

This microblog social network platform is a real up-and-comer. Launched in 2007, Tumblr is now averaging 13 billion views per month (yes, billion with a “B”). Why do people like it? Users say it’s like all the others rolled into one easy-to-use site, it’s app friendly, and best of all, it’s cool.

PINTEREST.COM

Pinterest takes the ease of photo posting from Instagram and combines it with the posting of comments like the Facebook “wall,” to create a surprisingly new and fun social experience. On paper, it doesn’t sound like much (what social media does?) but users seem to get addicted very quickly. You can “pin” images, websites, and just about any content to your “pinboards” in a virtual bulletin board environment. Companies are quickly jumping on the Pinterest bandwagon, and while not confirmed yet, some Internet reporting agencies are indicating Pinterest, which was a startup in 2009, may already be the third largest social network in the U.S.

Global Social Media

­­WORLD’S BIGGEST SOCIAL SITES (estimated users)

Facebook: 900 million

YouTube: 789 million

QZone (mainland China): 480 million

Twitter: 300 million

Habbo (global, launched in Finland): 200 million

Google+: 170 million •

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The iPad was launched with much poo-poo’ing from the PC crowd and a lot of head scratching from their own Mac crowd. Was it a tablet laptop? Was it a new form of  “netbook?” Or was it just a big iTouch for people with bad eyes?

Despite a lot of questionable press, the iPad sold more than a million units its first month, and it sold more than 3 million in less than 3 months. Its launch was a huge success by any standard.

What the world quickly learned was that the iPad is not a laptop. It is not a tablet as the PC world knew it. It is, instead, a multimedia device that is both easy to use and cool to have. Through either a wireless communications plan or a local Wi-Fi network, the iPad connects you easily to the web. Through any one of the millions of apps available, you gain productivity. And lastly, it’s an entertainment device allowing you to listen to music, watch TV and movies, read books and magazines, or play countless games.

During the first week of release, iPads began showing up in business meetings. Granted, it was mostly by early adopters who did it for the cool factor as much as anything else. But within a very short time, business professionals began to see additional benefits.

For some reason, laptop computers never really became a mainstay of business meetings. Some have postulated that the screen was obtrusive, making meetings less personal as people were “hiding behind” screens. But more and more, business people needed to connect to the Internet in meetings, and it was not easy or convenient. This may have been due to the security issues of wireless networks in corporate environments and the fact that cellular connections not taken off yet and become commonplace. Also, not all laptops owners carried around a cellular network device (Mi-Fi).

iPads seemed to blow past laptops, and surprisingly, a lot of “pad and paper” people have made the migration to them. While not quite as fast as a paper and pen, the Notepad application, or “app,” is generally sufficient for taking basic notes. Programs such as Documents To Go, Office HD, and iWorks give the user access to documents as well as some advanced tools such as word processing and spreadsheet software. Calendars are even easily piped into iPads now.

Another key factor toward its success is that iPads work very well with most corporate Exchange servers, making business email a breeze to send and receive through your iPad.

So, next time you’re looking for a pen and paper to bring to the meeting, try taking your iPad instead. There are many iPad stylus’ that you can purchase if you can’t seem to leave the pen. And hey, if the meeting is ever boring, there’s always the Netflix app! •

On The Horizon

Apple has never been good about releasing any information regarding new products before they come out, but the rumor mills are buzzing about several anticipated iPad items.

iPad 3

The newest version of the iPad is rumored to be almost here. Mac bloggers are going crazy about this, with lots of chatter about new Retina displays, faster processors, and a higher megapixel camera.

iOS 5.1

Apple is will be releasing a highly-anticipated new system software (iOS) for the iPad, iPhone and iTouch. While features of the new software have been kept hush-hush, it is believed that it is not a small upgrade but a pretty significant jump in functionality. While no firm date has been announced, it will be sooner rather than later.

Microsoft Office for iPad

Business users and consumers alike are anxiously awaiting the inevitable release from Microsoft. If the rumors are correct and Microsoft introduces and Office version for iPad to coincide with the iPad 3 release, the business and educational communities will surely make it a best-seller. •

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