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. It also dovetailed with other online marketing efforts —her Web site and e-mail blasts—aimed at bringing regular customers, collected over 25 years, back to the shop. So she built a free app to display her hours, location and pictures of new arrivals using BuildAnApp, a Web site from Mobile On Services Inc., of Minneapolis, and submitted it to Apple for inclusion in its App Store.

“I kind of jumped in and did it, and now I just need to figure everything out. But I think it will be great,” she said. “I think that everybody’s going to be doing it.”(By RIVA RICHMOND, The Wall Street Journal, DECEMBER 9, 2009)

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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, for instance, lets you automatically search for Twitter posts, known as tweets, that mention your company. Other programs let you easily organize the tweets that you follow, or manage how multiple employees use a single Twitter account.

What’s more, Twitter says that by year’s end, it will launch several new features of its own for commercial use, such as a directory of business users.

Of course, companies of any size can use these services. But they can be particularly important for small businesses, which can ill afford to spend lots of time and resources figuring out how to make the most of Twitter. Tools for improved filtering and automation of Twitter tasks are “a particular boon,” says Laura Fitton, co-author of “Twitter for Dummies.” (By RAYMUND FLANDEZ, The Wall Street, JULY 13, 2009)

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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 manager for National Instruments, a supplier of automation and computer measurement tools.

The Austin, Texas, company has a fostered dedicated online group of 125,000 engineers and scientists with do-it-yourself projects. Its strategy illustrates how companies have increasingly turned to Web communities to build their brand, address customer service problems and unveil new products.

But as people spend more time on their cellphones, many companies are considering taking their message boards, user forums and blogs to mobile devices. National Instruments is considering ways to build a mobile site, Ms. Walsh says but has to resolve issues such as how users can share programming code, which are large files. (By ROGER CHENG, The Wall Street Journal, DECEMBER 2, 2009)

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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 tools such as surveys and focus groups. With Twitter, users broadcast what they are doing or thinking via “tweets,” short messages of 140 characters or less. People can “tweet” about anything at any time—from the long lines at the grocery store to a great sale at the mall to a new restaurant or movie—which allows for word-of-mouth to spread at astonishing speed. Anyone can follow a user’s messages, and tweets are easily searchable using keywords.

We believe executives can make accurate predictions about sales trends by analyzing tweets that mention their products or services, and we have created a model based on Twitter’s keyword-search function to help them do that. (By HUAXIA RUI,ANDREW WHINSTON And ELIZABETH WINKLER, The Wall Street Journal, NOVEMBER 30, 2009)

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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 the Bay Area are launching programs to help residents purchase efficient furnaces, weatherize their homes and put solar panels on their roofs. Homeowners often balk at the upfront costs of such improvements because the energy savings typically takes years to pay off.

These local officials think they can overcome this hurdle by helping residents spread the costs over a decade or more.(By NOAH BUHAYAR, The Wall Street Journal, AUGUST 19, 2009)

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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, where the work typically involves researching, sales, marketing and social-media development.

“In the last 10 years they’ve gone from being almost unheard of to being something almost every college student has at least considered,” says Steven Rothberg, founder of CollegeRecruiter.com, a job board for students and recent graduates. Mr. Rothberg says he first saw virtual internships in the late 1990s in information technology and software development—industries, he says, where virtual internships are still the most common today. Other growth areas include the sales, marketing and social-media departments of companies across various industries. (By JONNELLE MARTE, The Wall Street Journal, SEPTEMBER 29, 2009)

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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 100, including mathematicians and software developers, is working on a project to create an automatic translation tool, so-called machine translation, that has the speed and accuracy to be used in instant-messaging between speakers of two different languages. (By NOAM COHEN, The New York Times, November 22, 2009)

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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 across the United States.

“Small businesses are drivers of innovation and are crucial to the development of a competitive clean energy U.S. economy,” said Chu. “These investments will help ensure small businesses are able to compete in the clean energy economy, creating jobs and developing new technologies to help decrease carbon pollution and increase energy efficiency.” ( November 23, 2009)

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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 ads. Now, some are using new technologies to scan the Web for key words to find out what consumers are—and aren’t—saying about their brands. (By EMILY STEEL, The Wall Street Journal, NOVEMBER 23, 2009)

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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 suits them well.

“We think of these social media tools as being in the realm of the sophisticated, multiplatform marketers like Coca-Cola and McDonald’s, but a lot of these supersmall businesses are gravitating toward them because they are accessible, free and very simple,” said Greg Sterling, an analyst who studies the Internet’s influence on shopping and local businesses.

Small businesses typically get more than half of their customers through word of mouth, he said, and Twitter is the digital manifestation of that. Twitter users broadcast messages of up to 140 characters in length, and the culture of the service encourages people to spread news to friends in their own network. (By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER, The New York Times, July 22, 2009)

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