A press release published by the OPEN from American Express talks about a recent study that says 81% of small business owners are satisfied with the amount of leisure time they get.  Are you one of them?  These stats seem a little off-base – unless I just happen to know only the 19% of other small business owners that are constantly juggling work-related activities. 

Forget about becoming more productive in your business so that you can grow your business for a second… shouldn’t we also be striving for more enjoyment from our lives?  That’s one of the reasons why you went into business for yourself, isn’t it?

Take a moment and think about all of the repetitive things that you do each day that are taking way to much time.  If you’re doing the same task over and over, there is almost certainly a way to automate it and free up a good chunk of your time.  What are you doing that’s wasting your precious leisure time?

Even if you don’t know how you would automate it, there is probably a way with custom software.  Developers can look at a problem from an entirely different angle and often see quick solutions that the person doing the task hasn’t considered.  I don’t mean to make a sales pitch here, but isn’t freeing up some of your valuable time worth considering building a custom software app? 

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Most of our readers are small to mid-sized business owners that have to make tough choices about doing things themselves or hiring a professional. You probably want to save the hiring of a professional for complicated tasks like software development or specialists like attorneys and accountants.

For all the stuff in between, Sclipo is a cool new video tutorial site that we found where you can watch and upload all kinds of different “how to” videos for free. In addition to learning how to create video email, watermark your photos, or create different Photoshop effects, you can also go outside of the computers/business category and learn how to do all kinds of miscellaneous things like how to open a beer bottle with paper or moonwalk.

What do you want to learn today?

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Just after Microsoft declared that it would finally get on the bandwagon and start putting more focus on developing SaaS (Software as a Service) applications, Google announced that it may partner with the SaaS leader and innovator Salesforce.com.

This was one heck of a smart move for SalesForce.  Now all of the search engine marketers, who spent approximately $35 billion last year, have a serious incentive to integrate SalesForce into their operations. 

According the Sales Force, the merger would:

The new offering delivers seamless integration with the leading advertising platform, allowing users to buy keywords and instantly create ads directly within Salesforce that are compliant with Google’s editorial policies. With Salesforce for Google AdWords, companies can easily correlate ad clicks with sales metrics such as leads, opportunities, deals, and revenue. Customers can deploy Salesforce for Google AdWords to:

• Simplify the process of search marketing
• Track and correlate clicks to leads, sales opportunities, and deals
• Measure exactly which ads and keywords are generating leads and results
• Increase the ROI of their online advertising programs
• Easily manage the entire process directly within Salesforce

We knew SalesForce was going to become more important to businesses in the future, which is why we began in-depth training and offering implementation to our clients over the past year.  But we had no idea that SalesForce was in talks to partner with Google and couldn’t be more pleased!

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Raise your hand if you’ve ever purchased anything from Amazon – or if you’ve ever found yourself reading customer reviews on Amazon before making a purchase. Amazon has been wildly successful in the area of making shopping online easy, fun, and downright addictive through their highly intuitive related products search.

The news that Amazon will soon begin selling downloadable music has the industry wondering – will Amazon seal a slice of Apple’s pie?

Amazon will offer its music in MP3 format – meaning it will work for the iPod, the Microsoft Zune, and just about every other music player out there. Amazon is already the largest online retailer of CD’s, so it seems inevitable that they will likely rule the digital world as well.

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According to a recent survey by the Business Software Alliance, 35% of all software installed on computers is pirated software. The theft, they say, amounts to $40 billion in global losses.

It seems that the more expensive software is, the more likely people are to steal it. Although they say only 35% of software is stolen, they also state that for every $2 worth of software purchased, $1 worth of software is stolen.

Do people want to steal software, or are they backed into a corner by the high cost? The exorbitant prices of critical business software like Microsoft office is beyond the budgets of many people in wealthy countries, let alone those in countries where poverty is rampant and business owners are doing whatever they can to stay on top.

This isn’t to say that stealing software is acceptable – it’s not. But is there another way to create quality software without charging people more than they can afford?

Many companies are moving to the SaaS (Software as a Service) model of profiting from software. With SaaS, software isn’t sent via CD or downloaded, it’s accessed online and users pay a monthly subscription. This cuts down on piracy drastically.

It also cuts down on up-front costs for users and can increases profits for vendors. Using software as a service, customers quite often pay more that they would have for software over time in monthly fees than if they would have purchased it up front. But because monthly subscription costs are more manageable, subscribers can easily make the payment.

As we’ve mentioned before, SalesForce.com has been one of the most successful SaaS companies. At first, the idea seemed ridiculous and foreign to many, but now it’s become apparent just how forward-thinking SalesForce was from the get-go.

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