Five of Our Favorite Small Business Apps

It is hard to keep track of all the startups that are emerging daily from apartments, hackathons, and incubators. And from within the ranks of unemployed workers, many are cranking out business plans and working out sales projections at their neighborhood Starbucks.

We are definitely in a new era of entrepreneurship. One factor that makes starting your own less of a dream and more of a practical reality is that the costs of IT infrastructure have dropped significantly in recent years. It’s just cheaper than ever to buy a phone system, establish a web presence, and build out administrative functions for sales and marketing.

I’ve come up with five web-based apps that bring IT for little or no cost to IT-less companies.

The big theme connecting these apps is of course “the cloud.” Not that long ago, it would have been unheard of to implement a small office phone system without special customer premises equipment—read a PBX or key system along with something called a phone handset,how quaint!

But with, for example, onSIP’s cloud-based system, there’s really nothing physical to buy. You most likely have everything you need: the office network does the local switching and existing laptops and PCs act as your endpoint devices. OnSIP’s cloud does the hard part: providing  global intelligence and maintaining the physical gateways to the PSTN.

And of course with the cloud you’re technically accessing a service through a browser—there’s now not even an “app” to download. Subscribers pay recurring fees for access to an amazingly deep set of IT software tools, which were  formerly required to be owned and maintained by end-users.

It is a good time to be a small business.

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