Every business owner knows it: If you could just talk to prospects one-on-one, you could convert them to customers.

Click-to-chat and click-to-call features, of course, have existed for years, but now there’s a new, more viral twist. Starting today you can test out a new service that attempts to combine the best of social networking with Internet-based telephony. In short, it gives visitors to your Web site or a blog a free local number to call from virtually anywhere. All you have to do is add a widget to your site, blog or e-mail signature.

Jaxtr has been in private beta testing, but now you can see and hear it for yourself as the company today announced the launch of the public beta of its service. After you sign up for a free Jaxtr account, you can link your mobile or landline phone with your online network. And while it’s not strictly an e-commerce tool, it could prove itself to be a new way for you to interact with your customers. For example, the VoiceBlast feature allows you to record your own voice to automatically greet and update customers who visit your blog or Web site. By adding a “Jaxtr widget” to your online profile or blog, you can take calls from prospects worldwide while keeping both parties’ phone numbers private.

Ecommerce-Guide

EZPay, a Chehalis, Wash.-based financial services firm, has launched an application that enables small businesses to have checks printed and mailed online.

EZPay Small Businesses Solutions eliminates the need for business to print checks in the workplace and mail them to customers, clients or suppliers separately, saving time and resources, the company said.

“This is the first of several new products designed for small and medium-sized businesses who have been traditionally unwilling to take advantage of electronic payments due to a lack of IT resources and the inability to seamlessly integrate with their accounting software,” Ronald Ehli, CEO of EZPay, said in a statement.

Jim Blasingame

As a small business owner, it often feels like everyone is trying to sell you something. But sometimes, companies give stuff away.

That’s the case with the online resource offered by Hewlett Packard Small Business.

Granted, they hope you’ll eventually buy something when the need arises, but the information and services can be a boon to business owners—and all of it’s free.

Hewlett-Packard Small Business has a wealth of free tools, tutorials and templates on its site geared toward small business customers.

One of the main attractions of the site is the Business Templates area (not surprising for a printer company), which offers about 700 pre-built designs for Microsoft Office, CorelDRAW, QuarkXPress and more. Most interesting to small business owners is the collection of agency-quality graphic design templates from StockLayouts, where you’ll find great-looking brochures, letterhead, flyers and so on.

But templates are just part of the story. Beneath the Learn & Use banner is a link to free online classes in HP’s learning center. These have the feel of genuine online college or post-graduate courses — complete with lesson breakdowns and even recommended prerequisites — and are taught by well-qualified instructors. You need to register and enroll for a given course, but all are free of charge.

HP offers a few dozen courses in all, broken down into specific areas such as Software & Technology, Business Skills and In-house Marketing. Recent additions include an introduction to using Adobe Photoshop CS2 and understanding Microsoft Vista Business Edition.

You’ll want to bookmark the page and check back often, as HP conveniently flags which lessons are new or updated and shows which new courses are coming soon.

Small Business Computing

3.5 billion wire hangers are tossed into landfills every year, and that’s just in the United States. While the hangers are light, inexpensive and sturdy, they’re not exactly bio-degradable. Hanger Network has developed an alternative: a dry cleaner’s hanger made entirely from recycled paper. EcoHangers are sturdy and cheap. And because they’re paper, they can be completely covered in full-colour advertising.

Everybody wins: Hanger Network creates a media network of up to 3.5 billion in-home ‘views’, and advertisers gain valuable entry into consumers’ bedrooms for less than the price of a stamp. Dry cleaners get free hangers (wire hangers are about USD 0.08 each), and consumers no longer have to struggle with awkward tangles of wires. And on top of it all, it’s an earth-friendlier solution. What’s not to love? ;-)

Hanger Network has a distribution deal with Cleaner’s Supply (’America’s largest direct supplier of dry cleaning products’) and currently has network capacity of over 50 million hangers per week. The company just raised USD 8 million in venture capital, which will allow it to expand from the New York area to the rest of the US. One to partner with and quickly set up in other countries!

Springwise

“Leave the driving to us” was a clever slogan for Greyhound buses - but Sebastian Thrun foresees a day when it’ll work for the auto industry.

The 39-year-old Stanford professor of electrical engineering is the world’s most successful manufacturer of self-driving vehicles: He and his graduate students built Stanley, the first car to complete the DARPA Grand Challenge, a 131-mile robot car race across the desert near Las Vegas organized by the research arm of the Pentagon.

That historic success in 2005 netted Thrun a $2 million prize. He reinvested some of it in an even more intelligent Stanley, which will be unveiled at the next iteration of the robot car contest - one that takes place on city streets. Obstacles include stop signs, lights, and cars driven by humans.

Thrun is confident that Stanley is the Model T of self-driving cars. “It might take 20 years, but people said we would never fly massive numbers of people over the Atlantic,” he says. “There’s an enormous waste of productivity in commuter traffic. We could increase the capacity of highways with precision driving.”

That means the auto industry gets to sell us more cars, not to mention safer ones - there were 43,443 U.S. highway fatalities in 2005, and Thrun thinks self-driving vehicles, equipped with cameras and motion sensors and all networked with one another, could reduce that number by 50 percent.

Read complete story here.

A weekly look at the latest products and services designed to help you run a better business.

Now that we can do virtually everything online — shop, bank, communicate — most people have a laundry list of passwords to access their multitude of personalized accounts. For those of us with imperfect memory, it can be easy to forget which magic word will grant access to each site. A new software program may keep you from ever again being locked out of your shopping cart, banking site, or personalized news site.

Actioneer, a Cambridge, Mass.-based software firm, has developed a password-management system, which requires users to remember only one master password. After the user enters a single password, the Invisible Password Manager securely provides access for all other password-protected login sites.

The Actioneer system automatically extracts needed user names and passwords from triple-DES encrypted storage. Because users are not entering individual passwords via the keyboard, the Invisible Password Manager can help prevent identity theft by keyloggers and snoopers.

The Invisible Password Manager, which can be used on a desktop, laptop, or carried around on a USB thumb drive, is free.
CNN Tech

Good business is about good decisions. Good decisions are ones made after serious research and data gathering. One of the decisions that must be made by ecommerce people is choosing the right shopping cart for their business. The problem is there is a lot to choose from.

Mark Baartse, a man who, among other things, researches and reviews shopping carts, has identified 137 different shopping carts. Baartse tries to identify which are the best for the myriad applications required in the ecommerce industry. Baartse posts his review results at shopping-cart-reviews.com.

practicalecommerce.com