As one that uses Square on my iPhone for selling products and services using a customer’s debit or credit card in my business there’s a new announcement from Square that coincides with Apple’s hush, hush event in the next week.
Will Square And Apple Stores Announce Partnership On Monday?
Now we know why the business team members were added to the change over team starting on Saturday and Sunday, to get ready for a new retail experience for business customers.
What do you think?
Sporting new CPUs and Thunderbolt and other stuff, they’re looking goooood!! Check out the new iMacs at Apple’s web site.
One of the worst feelings any startup entrepreneur has is having their life’s work and life lost or stolen from them which resides on their Mac. I personally have not had this happen, but having worked selling computers to businesses I have come across any number of people that have had their computer stolen and they are not only devastated, but worried about the identify theft that can occur. Imagine being a graphic art studio and walking into your business and finding all of your hardware gone. It leaves a sinking feeling in your stomach.
First: Back up ALL of your files! Losing the files can delay doing business, so backup your files ensures you can meet deadlines and can still make money. Then you can begin locating your lost stuff.
But there is hope, here are 10 ways of getting your Mac and your life back.
- MobileMe – finds your lost or stolen iPhone or iPod Touch. Check out MobileMe’s Back to my Mac feature, here’s a story about it and getting a Mac back.
- Dropbox - Use Dropbox to Locate Your Lost or Stolen Computer is another way.
- LoJack for laptops - http://absolute.com/en/lojackforlaptops/home.aspx
- VigiMac - http://www.vigimac.com/
- PreyProject - http://preyproject.com/
- GadgetTrack - http://www.gadgettrak.com/products/laptop/
- Undercover - http://www.orbicule.com/undercover/
- Hidden - http://hiddenapp.com/
- Mac Calls Home - http://www.mark-up.com/store/MacBook-Call-Home/
- Viwer - http://stumpy.vuse.vanderbilt.edu/VUWER.htm
Once you know the IP address (and you can look it up here http://www.ip-adress.com/ ) you can now find a police officer and nab the thief.
Now, take some action before something happens.
A suggestion: One of the ways of helping out in such a stressful situation is to email this link to these various solutions to a Gmail account and keep it always “on file” to be brought up when such an event hits you. Or, bookmark (hide it so the average thief won’t know it) it so that your browser bookmarks are shared among your various Apple devices and you can access.
The Gmail suggestion means you can access it from anywhere, such as a police station, if needed.
Categories: 8 Operations, Apple, Hardware, iPhone, Mac, Maintenance, software, Tips, Tools Tags: dropbox, Gmail, iPhone, mobileme, Smartphone
Image via Wikipedia
Here’s some great tips on how to keep your Apple wires less tangled. In the article How To Keep Your Apple Device Cables Tangle-free they show you how to make it simple without paying bucks. Thanks MacLife.
As an entrepreneur you’re always looking to find ways of connecting with others, especially with customers and vendors. Some of the “old” technologies are still used by some well established organizations that just can’t seem to “cut the cord” and adopt the new, such as social media like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Email has taken over for most communications, but some companies still cling to faxes for some of their communications. How does a new company communicate with old companies?
Here’s a list of solutions that will help out with your Mac:
- Metrofax – has solutions for individuals, small business, and corporations.
- RingCentral – more than just the fax, but a complete solution.
- MyFax – has plans for personal, small business, and corporations.
- Maxemail – does faxes and email.
- Greenfax – does faxes and virtual faxes.
- PamFax – requires software to download to fax.
- PageSender software - With PageSender, fax or email anything you can print. Use the built-in PageSender Fax Center to manage and automate your fax activities.
- eFax.com – you can send and receive faxes anywhere you have an Internet connection.
- EasyLink – their fax web page has a lot of information, too much to show here.
- Fax.com – no software to download, but it is an online SaaS (Software As A Service) that you upload your information into. This idea would be helpful if you had a distributed office.
- Faxaway – does Internet faxing and voicemail, outgoing email to fax, and fax broadcasting from email service, FREE inbound fax and voicemail to email service, outgoing Web site to fax utility, no software to download, no system requirements to meet, if you have an email account, you can use Faxaway.
- jConnect (j2.com) - Send and receive faxes using email, click on the attachment and it opens like any other similar format document on your computer, and open, sign and return it, easily forward faxes to other email addresses, printers and fax machines and send faxes from your favorite desktop applications via email or a Web browser in over 45 formats.
- Send2Fax - Send a fax online securely, no hardware to purchase, no software to download, no fax phone line required, and get a toll-free number at no extra cost
- SmartFax.com – local fax number, international faxing, fax archives, email to fax, fax to email, online admin panel.
- TrustFax - US local or toll free fax number, 250 send/receive pages per month, additional pages only $0.10 each, faxes sent to your email, digitized signatures tool, secure online fax storage, international faxing
While other forms of communication are readily used, faxes provide a different measure of connectivity with others as well as volume sending of your communications.
When it comes to the environment we all want to do our part as entrepreneurs and startups to reduce waste, one aspect is to go paperless. Here are some of the issues:
- Hardware: Scanner
- Hardware: Storage
- Hardware: Shredder
- Software: Paperless Office Software
- Software: Productivity Tools
- Analog tools: Paper Organizers for when you HAVE to have real paper.
So here are the sequential steps to go paperless:
- Analog and Digital Analysis. Here is where you need to look at your business processes and see what analog processes can be digitized. See page 201 of my book How to Start a Business: Mac Version for a more detailed analysis.
- Digital Workflow. Here is where you purposely use software that will do things digitally, such as signing contracts online, see the next section to understand some of these solutions.
- Never Print, Print to PDF. The first part of going paperless is never print anything out, unless you have to. In this case, send a Print > Print to PDF (lower left hand corner button) and send the document as a PDF to someone if all they need is a copy of a document, not something which needs to be edited and collaborated on.
- Save Online Web Receipts as PDFs. Under the Print to PDF menu button you choose to send a PDF to a previously set up folder, such as a default one called “Web Receipts” (Or, make a new PDF folder somewhere and then Print > Print to PDF > Edit Menu to edit the menu and add your new folder to the list).
- Request Digital Copies/Bills. Nowadays, most companies want to be green so they’re asking us if they can send us bills and other documents as digital version of the paper ones.
- Scan to Mac. If you do get paper documents, have a scanner scan them as PDFs onto your Mac.
- Outsource. You can outsource some of your paper documents, such as tax information and receipts to CPA firms, that will create digital files of your papers for you.
- Go to the Cloud. Having digital files off site, upload to a backup directory on your web site, or sent to Google Mail as a “backup” in case of the need to access them.
- Archive your digital files. This is a huge aspect of going paperless, since you may NOT have the paper versions of your documents, and I would recommend you DO have critical documents in paper form, preferably wrapped in plastic (to prevent water damage), and in a fireproof container.
Here is a list of potential products and processes that will help you clean out your wastepaper basket.
Here’s some reviews or links of others ways of going paperless using a Mac:
There you have it, what are your thoughts about going paperless? Do you have any solutions that you like?
Apple has recently announced that they’re discontinuing their XServe hardware for businesses on Jan 31st, 2011 and letting them move to either a Mac Pro or a Mac Mini running Snow Leopard Server. Some people in the tech industry just cannot connect the dots.
Apple is probably moving toward a Amazon S3 server approach with their own version in their new server farm in NC. Why? Because there are a number of reasons for businesses to move toward this.
- Businesses don’t have to worry about hardware issues, i.e. where to host the server.
- Offsite location so the server is protected from most natural disasters (tornados are the largest issue, but not likely).
- Scalable as needs come up.
- Location not an issue for sys admins, developers, etc.
And if you’re looking for a server for your business, you can figure a lot more reason why.
So let’s see if my connecting the dots shows up correctly by next year.
Your thoughts?
