Innovation is crucial for the growth and sustainability of any business large or small.  Successful small business owners tend to be natural innovators, driven by necessity, opportunity and ingenuity.  Unfortunately, small businesses generally tend to have fewer resources to dedicate to innovation.

InnoCentive is one way to stretch your innovation dollar.  Modeled as the “world’s first open innovation marketplace”, InnoCentive uses the reach of the internet to help firms seek innovative solutions to their problems.  A company can sign up as a seeker to post their challenges or problems on the InnoCentive website and offer an appropriate cash prize for the best solution.  A network of solvers will then compete to win this cash prize.

Apparently over 400 challenges have been solved since 2001 in a wide range of fields covering technology, business processes and even economic development.  Some of these solutions have been scrutinized by independent auditors and have been shown to have impressive returns on investment and payback periods.  A big advantage that the InnoCentive approach enjoys is that companies pay for practical results rather than just effort.

Smartphone sales is set to surpass PC sales globally by 2011 according to RBC analyst Mike Abramsky.

While the total sales of mobile phones has actually decreased on a year-on-year basis in 2Q 2009, the smartphone segment has shown a healthy 27% growth despite the economic downturn.  Much of this growth can be attributed directly to the spectacular market gains by Apple’s iPhone.  RIM’s Blackberry range also contributed significantly to this growth.

Nokia, though a little late to this dance, has recently picked up the mantle again with the N97 model while the original smart-phone pioneers Palm are back in the game with the Pre and its spanking new WebOS platform.  Even traditional PC giants like Acer & Dell are  piling into this lucrative segment.

The good news for consumers is that many vendors are scrambling to produce cheaper smart phones.  These are designed to run on open operating systems such as Symbian or Google’s Android platform and targeted at the pre-paid subscription market.

We have just formally launched our first stand-alone web application – DocuBuzz – an on-demand document management solution specifically designed for small businesses and distributed teams.

The concept for DocuBuzz evolved from our experience in developing custom document & records management solutions for a variety of clients.  In the course of these projects, we realized that the core document management requirements are quite similar across most small businesses.  We also realized that most off-the-shelf solutions were simply not suitable for small businesses – being too expensive, too complex, or both.

DocuBuzz is our attempt to offer an alternative – a simple and affordable document management solution that leverages the benefits of the web-based, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model.  The current version of DocuBuzz aims to cover the essential document management needs of most small businesses.

Core features include:

• An intuitive multi-user interface
• Collaborative Notes & Tags
• Full text search with search filters
• Document versioning
• Built-in document viewer
• In-situ link & file sharing with variable shared-link lifetimes
• Flexible folder sharing permissions

Head on over to www.docubuzz.com and activate your fully-functional free trial account to check out DocuBuzz for yourself.  We are extremely eager to hear what you think about it.

Nothing signals that a technology has arrived better than a fight over standards.  The slug-fest that recently broke out over the “Open Cloud Manifesto” shows that the cloud computing concept is no longer simply hazy vapour-ware.

Cloud computing refers to the trend where computing power is becoming a utility that is generated remotely in the in the Internet’s vast backbone infrastructure (”the cloud”) and delivered as a service through the web.  The so-called Open Cloud Manifesto essentially calls on the major IT vendors to avoid erecting proprietary fences for the cloud platforms they are developing.  The hope is that with open standards, customers can easily port data, applications and services between different cloud platforms.

While few would argue against the benefits of such open standards, there is certainly going to be a bitter fight over exactly whose standards and conventions to adopt before the dust settles.  This a par for the course for any emerging technology.

Currently, IBM, SAP and Cisco appear to be driving forces behind the manifesto – these are services and commodity hardware providers who stand to benefit greatly when cloud computing really does take off.  At this stage however, the real pioneers behind cloud technology are absent from the list.  The likes of Amazon, Google, Salesforce.com and Microsoft are, not surprisingly, more cautious about potentially giving up any competitive advantage they have built up for the sake of altruistic openness.

The current flap is just a minor skirmish.  As cloud computing grows at its current pace, a full-scale standards war could well be on the horizon.

Download the Open Cloud Manifesto Draft 1.0.9 as pdf here.

The silver lining in the seriously diving economy is that it is apparently spurring entrepreneurship.  Discouraged by the shrinking job market, many laid-off workers and new graduates are turning serious attention to building their own business plans.  Indeed, many governments hope that this forced injection of talent and ideas into the entrepreneurial ecosystem can help turn their economies around as some of these new start-ups succeed.

Many among this wave of start-ups are taking full advantage of the maturing Internet to market their ideas and find partners, suppliers and customers.  Increasingly, these start-ups are also leveraging on  the rise of web-based services to manage core operational functions efficiently and cheaply.  Everything from setting up your office IT network to invoicing and managing your books can now be managed easily and effectively through the web.

A recent New York Times article gives an interesting anecdotal view of this trend of forced entrepreneurship in the United States.

The Economist has just released a Special Report on Corporate IT detailing how information technology is turning into a global cloud accessible from anywhere.

The report argues that information technology is coming full circle and becoming increasingly centralized as more activity moves away from distributed devices into data centres. Cheaper and more powerful processors and speedier and more pervasive networks are making computing power ever more disembodied and commoditised.  This allows digital technology to be consumed where and when it is needed – enabling IT to penetrate ever deeper into all aspects of general social and economic activity.

This shift, claims the Economist, “will profoundly change the way people work and companies operate.”  Read the full set of articles in this Special Report for invaluable insghts into where this cloud phenonmenon is heading.

The global economic outlook is looking increasingly bleak; but local business costs seem to be defying gravity – rentals, utilities and transporatation costs all still appear to be heading north.  Now is the time to seriously consider running your company partially, or even fully, online.

BusinessWeek’s enligtening special report (To Expand Your Busieness, Go Home) examines how some small businesses have successfully cut expenses and boosted productivity by moving their operations online.

BusinessWeek has a special report on the shift to cloud computing in the business sphere.  More comampanies are obtaining their software and computing capacity through web-based models. A Merrill Lynch report estimates that the annual global market for cloud computing will surge to $95 billion by 2013 with about 12% of the software market moving into the cloud.

Read the full BusinessWeek article here: “How Cloud Computing Is Changing the World”

The iPhone has finally landed on our shores – more than 1,000 people descended on Singtel Comcentre at midnight yesterday to be among the first official owners of the 3G Apple iPhone in Singapore. Even before Singtel’s launch, though, there were an estimated 10,000 iPhone in use locally – mainly unlocked versions of the original 2G iPhones.

I myself have been using one as my primary mobile phone for the past three months. From my experience, the hype and excitement surrounding the iPhone is justified – mostly. Sure, it is not the most feature-rich of phones currently available: no SMS forwarding; no video capability; no stereo-bluetooth; etc. Overall, though, I must say that it has been the most competent and intuitive smart phone I’ve ever used.

In my opinion, the two areas in which the iPhone excels are accessing the Internet and synchronizing data. The iPhone’s web browser, which is a mobile version of the Apple’s Safari browser, is far superior to those found on any other mobile phone. It is no accident that a far higher percentage of iPhone users access the web regularly compared to any other mobile phone.

Having struggled to keep my personal information synchronized between my PCs and a variety of mobile devices over the past decade, I am also well and truly impressed at how effectively Apple has implemented this potentially frustrating process. Dock your iPhone with your Mac and your email accounts, calendars, contacts, music and photos are synced with minimum fuss – no messing about with complex configuration options or dealing with frustrating sync conflicts.

The iPhone will definitely evolve into a dominant mobile web platform fairly quickly. I believe it is already the best smart phone option for small businesses wishing to make their workforce more mobile and productive.

Dell has unveiled a new range of laptops aimed squarely at digital nomads. Speaking to BBC News, Andy Lark – Dell’s VP for Global Marketing – claims that more than two-thirds of India’s workforce is going to be entirely mobile.

With the majority of people buying their PCs online coming from emerging economies like India, it is no wonder that Dell is focussing on features that are being demanded by the footloose mobile worker. These include things like long battery life, easy connectivity, robust security, reliability and, above all, supreme portability.

Dell is wise to focus on mobility, but whether its revamped laptops are enough to stem its recent loss in market share remains to be seen. All the major PC makes from Apple to Toshiba are continually pushing the envelope on battery life and weights of their laptops.

I believe the real “game-changer” in the mobility space is the maturing of the cloud computing and web services concepts. The true digital nomads of tomorrow are those who do not need to lug their computing hardware around with them, regardless of how light it may be. Instead, their data, applications and processes live on the Web and are accessible practically anywhere through far tinnier devices that are not much larger than smart-phones.

An Economist article – “Nomads at last (April 2008)” – paints a far more compelling picture of how wireless communication can turn us into true nomads, sans most of the hardware.