Services Tailor Apps for Small Businesses (Programs Are Seen as Good Marketing Tools for Regular Customers, but Less Useful in Attracting New Clients)

Barbara Heinrich says she isn’t computer-savvy, but last month the owner of Local Motion, a clothing boutique in Minneapolis, went online and built her own mobile-phone application. It was worth a try, she figured, considering how cheap and easy it was to do and how addicted to iPhone apps young people like her daughter were. [...]

Tools for Tweets (New software lets small businesses get the most out of Twitter)

Twitter is changing the way small businesses market themselves. Now a host of software companies are trying to change the way small businesses use Twitter. The Journal Report These companies are flooding the Web with thousands of tools—many of them free of charge—that simplify a number of common tasks on the microblogging service. Some software, [...]

Squeezing Web Sites Onto Cellphones (Businesses Try to Shift Online Communities, Consumer Forums to Places Tailored for Wireless Users)

When a group of engineers at National Instruments Corp. modified a 1988 Oldsmobile so it could be controlled by an iPhone, the company was quick to share the project on its online forum for customers. A spouse “might not care about it, but our community eats it up,” said Deidre Walsh, community and social media [...]

Business Can Use Twitter to Predict Sales

There’s a new tool that can help companies predict sales for the coming weeks, or decide whether to increase inventories or put items on sale in certain stores. Social-media sites such as Twitter have made it increasingly easy to find out what consumers think and want without the limitations and bias associated with older market-research [...]

Home-Energy Plan Spreads Out Costs

BABYLON, N.Y. — Town employees have fanned out across this Long Island suburb this summer, armed with free water bottles and beer cozies and a simple pitch: going green can save green, especially with low-interest financing from the town. Empowered by recent changes to local, state and federal laws, municipal governments from Long Island to [...]

An Internship From Your Couch (Working at Home Opportunities)

Virtual internships, while relatively rare, are becoming more common, career experts say, fueled by improving technology and the growth of social media. They are most popular among small to midsize companies and online businesses. More than one-fourth of 150 internships posted on UrbanInterns.com, a site that connects small businesses with part-time workers, are labeled virtual, [...]

A Translator Tool With a Human Touch

HOW hard can it be, as the joke goes, to speak Chinese? (Six-year-olds do it all the time.) Yes, it turns out that learning languages is one of those skills that humans, even relatively young ones, master seemingly magically. It is all enough to make a mainframe computer jealous. At I.B.M., a team of nearly [...]

Recovery Act Announcement: DOE to Invest $18 Million in Small Business Clean Energy Innovation Projects

U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu today announced more than $18 million in funding from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to support small business innovation research, development, and deployment of clean energy technologies. In this first phase of funding, 125 grants of up to $150,000 each will be awarded to 107 small advanced technology firms [...]

Marketers Find Web Chat Can Be Inspiring

International Business Machines and a handful of other major marketers, including casino operator Harrah’s Entertainment and software giant Microsoft, are experimenting with developing ad campaigns based in part on what consumers are chatting about on the Web. For decades, advertisers have relied heavily on sometimes-dated consumer surveys and focus groups to provide grist for their [...]

Marketing Small Businesses With Twitter

For many mom-and-pop shops with no ad budget, Twitter has become their sole means of marketing. It is far easier to set up and update a Twitter account than to maintain a Web page. And because small-business owners tend to work at the cash register, not in a cubicle in the marketing department, Twitter’s intimacy [...]