The growth of the Internet has marked a rapid rise in the use of cloud computing services and apps. Just check out our list. There are cloud-based solutions for storage, for online presentation, for file syncing, for note-taking (like our favorite, Evernote), for accounting and finance, for pretty much anything. There are also cloud-based solutions that are purely for backup. One of them is Mozy, which we’ll look at and briefly review here. Mozy Review Mozy is an online backup service for Windows and Mac, with features for backing up data continuously, manually, or according to a user-defined schedule. The data and files are stored in offsite servers, which basically means that if your laptop was stolen in a café or if your desktop computer died a terrible, virus-caused death, then your most important documents are still safe and sound – and can be retrieved anytime from the Internet. Getting started with Mozy is easy, although you do have to – Read the full article
At this day and age it’s not unusual to be using multiple computers at once – one desktop at home, another at the office, a laptop, a tablet computer, even a mobile phone. But it can be quite tiresome to have to back up or synchronize all your folders and files from these computers – regardless of whether you’re using a USB disk, an external hard drive, or a stack of blank CDs. Sure, E-mailing the files to yourself might be a pretty cool idea (since everything is stored online), but when you’ve done it more times than you can take, and when attaching files takes more time than you actually have, it’s a definite sign that you should be looking for a better solution. Enter Dropbox – a service for automatically syncing, storing, and sharing files online. Launched in late 2008 for Windows, Linux, and Mac, Dropbox makes it simple and easy to access your documents from anywhere, from – Read the full article
Tracking time and invoicing clients are important office tasks that you may often wish you don’t have to do. If only, right? But regardless of whether you’re a freelancer, a consultant, a small business, or a corporation, you just have to have some form of system to keep that income stream running smoothly – plus, of course, a staff member employed specifically for the purpose of managing that system. Enter FreshBooks, a web-based accounting, time billing, cost estimate, and invoicing application that has been dubbed “the leader in online invoicing”. It’s designed to help users save time and money in performing such accounting tasks as tracking income, managing estimates, creating and sending invoices, receiving customer payments, and generating accurate year-end financial reports. It’s definitely a great concept, but does FreshBooks perform better than if you just hired an accountant or a third party? Our answer: yes. A resounding one. We here at Lakeshore Branding have recently incorporated FreshBooks into our – Read the full article
If you’ve been reading this blog regularly, you’ll know by now how much Lakeshore Branding loves Magento eCommerce. We’ve been gushing about how awesome it is, but at the end of the day, of course, it’s just our recommendation. There are literally hundreds of e-Commerce platforms and shopping cart solutions to choose from – aimed at retailers of varying sizes across a number of industries – and we thought that on this post, we’ll look at one of the notable non-Magento ones. Hey, we’re all for fairness. Established in 2006, Shopify is a hosted e-Commerce solution designed expressly for small online retailers. It’s been generating plenty of buzz recently for its ability to get startups and home-based merchants up and selling – quickly, easily, in a matter of minutes, even. Shopify boasts of a rich feature set that’s accessible via its elegant, easy-to-use interface. Almost everything is drag-and-drop, making store management a breeze. To get started, you choose a theme – Read the full article
Reliability, speed, support, and pricing: these are the things that one looks for in a web hosting provider. And while there are plenty of hosts who have put their names and services out into the market, none are perhaps as popular or widely talked about as GoDaddy. You’ve all probably seen the Super Bowl ads. But loving the commercials doesn’t automatically mean being familiar with the product or service. Does GoDaddy live up to the hype? Or are you better off with lesser-known domain registrar and web hosting providers? Services: GoDaddy offers a variety of hosting types – Economy, Deluxe, and Ultimate – each of which comes with unlimited bandwidth. Economy gets you 10 GB of space, 100 E-mail accounts, and 10 MySQL databases. Deluxe, meanwhile, offers the best value with 150 GB of space, 500 E-mails, and 25 MySQL databases. An Ultimate Plan gives you unlimited space, bandwidth, and domains, plus 1,000 E-mail accounts, unlimited databases, and a free – Read the full article
One of the most tedious tasks that we’ve all hoped we could do without is tracking receipts. It doesn’t matter if you’re a young corporate hotshot, a one-man startup, a small business owner, or a high-powered on-the-go executive: at one point or another, you’ll have to gather those receipts for office expenses, keep track of those credit card and online payments, and spend time – hours, sometimes – on entering data into your financial records. Bo-ring. It can keep you off working on what really matters, too. But do any of us have a choice? We want to be spared tax-related hassle. We need to stay on budget. Enter the app called Shoeboxed, which basically combines free online software with a paid scanning service to literally digitize and organize your receipts. Shoeboxed is the secretary we all wished we had, the receipt tracker who would never mind the time-consuming task of collecting receipts and doing the math for us busy – Read the full article
On 28 January 2011, Twitter published a monumental blog post which detailed their censorship plan (or rather, lack thereof). The logic that representatives of Twitter utilized was both practical and easy to understand: the company simply lacked the manpower to review one hundred million tweets per day, and furthermore, they believed in the free flow of information and thus would only remove from Twitter illegal tweets and spam. In fact, Twitter in 2011 believed that discussion of topics in geopolitics made Twitter “fun” and “important”. Country-Based Censorship Needless to say, the alterations to this open-information policy just one year later came as a shock to Twitter users. On 26 January 2012, Twitter published a post on the same blog which explains their alleged need for selective, country-based censorship. This approach to sharing information is, according to Twitter, informed by certain countries’ views on free information. Content Control Specifically, Twitter will not be preventing content from being published. They will simply remove content retroactively, – Read the full article
Social media is the phenomenon of this century, and along with huge advances in mobile technology, the Internet has changed our lives beyond compare in an amazingly short time. The tipping point is approaching where more business will be done online (than offline), and companies will have to quickly adapt to these new markets or suffer the consequences. However, along with these vast new markets come some downsides. The free and almost instant communication social media brings means that good ideas can spread quickly – but conversely bad reviews can just as quickly spread and ruin a business. The anonymity it affords means that people are no longer afraid of saying what they think, or going over the top. In the leisure industry, prime examples are review sites, the biggest of which is undoubtedly TripAdvisor. There are few other sites that rely so heavily on good reviews for their continued business, so here are some interesting ideas adopted by some – Read the full article
