The time’s right to start your online business

Sunday, April 24th, 2011

The Retail Sales Figures for March have been published by the Office for National Statistics, showing a tiny rise in sales over the past year. Some industries were up (mainly non-food) and some down – perhaps surprisingly including DIY sales. All very ordinary, very boring and slightly depressing. Except that hidden within the numbers is a very surprising statistic.

You see, I’ve got only a passing interest in the overall figures. It matters not a jot to me whether B&Q is doing better or worse than last year. I mainly focus on my own companies’ turnover, but I’m also interested in the overall trends in online sales. Fortunately, the ONS presents these figures at the end of its Statistical Bulletin.

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The nightmare of Patch Tuesday for small businesses

Thursday, April 21st, 2011

More and more businesses are dreading that Tuesday every month when Microsoft release a bunch of security patches and updates.

Patch Tuesday should be a thing to look forward to, of course, seeing as it’s when the latest round of application and operating system vulnerabilities get a nice big sticking plaster to protect your systems and data from exploit. The trouble is that when, as with the latest Patch Tuesday, there are no fewer than 17 security bulletins (nine rated as critical) covering a whopping 64 vulnerabilities –  many of the patches requiring a full system restart – it all starts to become something of an IT management nightmare. Especially for the smaller business where there isn’t an IT manager or even an IT department to handle such things.

The vast majority of smaller businesses that I talk to are not IT savvy, they get by and rely upon the systems and software they are supplied to do their job. They don’t switch browser to Firefox or Chrome, they run Internet Explorer because that’s what everyone else uses and it came with the box. What’s more, they often run an older version of Internet Explorer as they apply the “if it ain’t broke” rule. Wrongly in the case of older versions of IE, of course, which are broken from a security perspective.

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£400 of freebies? Pull the other one, Microsoft

Thursday, April 7th, 2011

StartUp Britain is an initiative to help startup businesses in the UK. Clearly this is a good thing in principle though some have suggested – not least my Real World Computing comrade Kevin Partner -  that some of the sponsors and backers of this Government-applauded but privately backed venture are rather in it for themselves, judging by the help and offers that have been made public.

However, things hit a new low with Microsoft’s offer: it is offering “free technology resources worth up to £400 per company”, which sounds pretty good to me at first glance.

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Designing for the iPad – or any other tablet

Friday, April 1st, 2011

It’s rare that a book comes along that profoundly changes the way I see the world. I shan’t bore you with a list here but my latest revelatory experience came from an unexpected source.

I fully acknowledge that the iPad, in either guise, is a superb piece of design and the £399 price tag for the base version of iPad 2 is extremely competitive compared to the prices of other tablets, or even the launch price of the original iPad. For me, however, I simply cannot justify the cost and don’t fancy the prospect of being locked into the Apple/iTunes dimension (knock another £100 off, on the other hand, and I’d grin and bear it!)

My interest lies in developing Android smartphone applications and apps for credible Android tablets (should any emerge), so you might imagine that a book called Designing for the iPad would hold little appeal for me. Indeed, it’s a sign of my desperation for any guide to Android tablet development that I was prepared to give it a go. I’m glad I did – it is without doubt the best tech book I’ve read in the past couple of years.

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StartUp Britain – business advice or marketing machine?

Tuesday, March 29th, 2011

One week after the Government focused on big business with a 2% cut in the main rate of corporation tax (which doesn’t apply to small businesses) it’s seeking to make up for this by supporting StartUp Britain.org. This website, which features a picture of David Cameron levitating and a very red-faced Richard Branson, purports to “make it easier for new companies to flourish” and, perhaps, is the planned replacement for BusinessLink.

The essential difference with StartUp Britain is that it’s been developed and run by private companies rather than the Government. This gets around BusinessLink’s obsessive focus on regulation rather than the development of business. However, the Government’s much vaunted idea – that private individuals and companies will philanthropically fill the gap left by their withdrawal from public services – is immediately exposed as pie in the sky by StartUp Britain.

The site is little more than a series of links to other sites (how original) along with “up to £1,500 of great offers”. Sadly what these offers amount to is a set of promotional vouchers, many offered by the founders of StartUp Britain. For example, Glasses Direct (whose founder Jamie Murray Wells is one of the backers of StartUp Britain) offers a £15 discount voucher.

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The iPad 2: looks nice, plays ugly

Wednesday, March 9th, 2011

The dust has begun to settle on the announcement of the new iPad 2 and first reaction has generally been positive. Not everyone’s persuaded, however. Darien Graham-Smith’s objection – The iPad 2: yes, but still, what’s it for? – is that it’s still just a cross between a glorified smartphone and cut-down netbook, so what’s the fuss?

Darien’s right: tablets are just another form of existing computers, but I think that they are as revolutionary as Apple claims. In particular I think they will come to provide our main platform for consuming web-based content. Key to this is the tablet’s new, book-like, handheld form factor which allows computers to become truly personal and enables their users to move on from merely browsing content to actively and immersively engaging with it (the activity previously known as “reading”).

Apple, as well as pioneering the tablet format, currently produces the best implementation of it and the iPad 2 will raise the bar even higher. Moreover, by providing a superior system for the same price, end users will clearly be getting more for their money.

However, I won’t be buying an iPad for the foreseeable future. And I don’t think that you should either…

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Cloud security: is Android the weakest link?

Monday, March 7th, 2011

Much has been written about the security of data in the cloud, and even more about the insecurity of the same. Until now, things have been somewhat quieter when it comes to how we access cloud-based data on the move. That, I suspect, is about to change.

Plenty of effort has been poured into securing online data stores, and plenty is made by the providers of those cloud services in making sure potential customers know about it. Which is why the bad guys are understandably looking for the soft targets, and at the moment that would appear to be Android apps.

I’ve said it before, and I will say it again: the smaller your business, the bigger the benefits of cloud computing. That rings especially true at the ‘free’ end of the cloud scale where the attraction of services such as those provided by Google can offer real bottom-line savings for hard pressed small business concerns. Security within the free or low-cost cloud isn’t somehow automatically weaker than that found at the expensive end of the cloud provision market either.

You can be sure that Google has invested heavily in securing the data at rest within those cloud bases, incorporating all the multi-layered protocols and synchronous replication processes you might expect. But perhaps it needs to invest more at the other end, the smartphone to be precise. What you need to ask yourself is whether Android could be the weak link in the cloud security chain?

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Does hacker insurance make your business a bigger liability?

Monday, February 28th, 2011

It’s a scenario that every small online business fears: site security is compromised, hackers steal customer data including credit-card details, and your brand and your reputation are left in ruins. No wonder then, that many small online businesses are looking to insure against hackers and the resulting financial impact of a security breach. But is insurance really the answer and could it even be part of the problem?

The insurance brokers are, naturally, presenting such insurance as pure common sense. A chap who works in the insurance business used car insurance as a counter argument to my suggestion that surely the best IT security insurance policy was to remain secure in the first place.

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WordPress 3.1 review: first look

Thursday, February 24th, 2011

WordPress 3.1 has just been unveiled, with the usual mix of immediately useful changes to the interface and structural improvements that give more options to theme builders.

The first thing you’ll notice on upgrading your site is the Admin Bar at the top, bringing standalone WordPress installations in line with those hosted on WordPress.org. The Admin Bar provides quick access to regularly used functions to any logged-in user with appropriate permissions. Initial reactions to this have been mixed but I like it.

I create sites for clients, many of whom want to update their site themselves and the bar provides a much more obvious and easy to use method to create new posts and pages. The feature can be disabled in your profile if you really don’t like it, but I suspect the next minor update will include an option to disable it globally.

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The plummeting price of stolen personal data

Thursday, February 17th, 2011

How much is your data worth? You may think that the customer database your business has built is priceless, and individuals probably regard their online data as being rather valuable as well. After all, that’s why we put so much effort into securing it. Unfortunately, the basic economic laws of supply and demand exist within the criminal marketplace just as they do elsewhere.

Which means that our perception of value is hugely over-inflated when compared to the reality of the online underground economy. That reality is that as malware production and exploitation has rocketed, and stolen data has flooded the marketplace, so the price has plummeted to pretty unbelievable lows.

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