Secure Any Public WiFi Hotspot

You know how it is. You’re away from the office and the enterprise grade security on your corporate LAN. Or you’re out and about with your personal computer and away from the security of your encrypted WiFi router. You don’t have a 3G or 4G service for your laptop, but that doesn’t matter. There is WiFi available just about everywhere. The only problem is how much do you have to worry about these unsecured WiFi hotspots.

Worry a lot. Certainly, there isn’t some malicious hacker lurking in the dark corner of every coffee shop and restaurant. But how can you be sure that there isn’t somebody running Firesheep or another spyware program just when you want to send some private email or sensitive corporate data?

You can never be sure. The problem is that cybercrime has turned into big business and the tools needed to lurk on your conversations wirelessly are easy to obtain. You may never get hacked or you might lose sensitive data this afternoon. Isn’t it better to be safe than sorry?

The threat of someone lurking nearby with a packet sniffer on their otherwise innocent looking laptop has made many of us a bit paranoid. You may not care who’s watching you read the news or check the weather, but do you really want to open your email or log-into personal services in that environment? You can either pay up for 3G and 4G cellular services, which are harder to crack but not impossible, just forget doing much online when you are out and about, or set up Private WiFi for your computers.

What is Private WiFi? It’s a service that creates a Virtual Private Network (VPN) for anything you send over the Internet. If you work from home, your company may have set you up with a corporate VPN so that you can securely access company data. Usually, this involves installing special VPN encryption software on your PC that only works with similar software in the corporate data center.

What’s different about Private WiFi is that it isn’t limited to any particular business or any business at all. This is a VPN that secures your Internet connection, even over public WiFi networks. The way a VPN works is that it encrypts or scrambles the data you transmit and receive while it is on the wireless link. That way it is nearly impossible to decode, and way beyond the capability of the identity thieves sipping a late in the next booth. This is why they call it a virtual private network. It virtually creates a private connection for you across a public network.

The way Private WiFi works is that you install the VPN software on your computer and it creates an encrypted tunnel for your data anytime you use the Internet. That encrypted connection is between your computer and the secure Private WiFi servers. Those servers connect to the Internet using high speed connections. Private WiFi uses industry standard 128-bit encryption, the same technology used by your bank or credit card company. Everything you do on any WiFi or other Internet connection uses this VPN to protect your data.

Private WiFi works with both PCs and Macs and costs about ten buck a month. That’s a lot cheaper than other wireless access if you already have WiFi readily available to you. There are also family plans and corporate discounts available. If you aren’t sure this is for you, why not take a free 3-day trial and see how it works? Go ahead and start your Private WiFi Free 3-day trial now and stop worrying about who’s lurking at your favorite WiFi hotspots.

Send Fax From Email On Your Computer or Smartphone

Remember the fax machines of yore? Yes, the ones with the rolls of thermal paper. Those fax messages always had kind of a funny feel to them and the nasty habit of fading over time. So, the thing to do was take your incoming fax messages and copy them onto plain paper with a laser printer. Then go wash your hands to get rid of that icky feeling.

Fax has come a long way since its early roots. Thermal paper has gone the way of photostatic copies. Even the ubiquitous business fax machine is now an endangered species. What’s replacing it? Electronic transmission and storage in the cloud, of course.

The thing to do now is send and receive fax messages via email. At first glance, this seems like one step too many. Since email can send and receive messages just fine on its own, what do you need fax for?

Fax messaging is still a staple of many business processes. The term “fax” is short for “facsimile.” A facsimile means an exact copy of something. Think of fax machines as copiers that are hooked together over a telecommunications link. Whatever you load into one machine comes out as a copy on the other.

This is the value of fax messages. It’s a way of sending copies of business documents with original signatures and hand written notations across long distances. Fax was originally implemented as a replacement for messenger services and overnight mail. An exact copy of the original document has more business value than a message about what is in the document.

Many businesses still have and will keep their stand-alone fax machines. Home office users and smaller operations may use an “all-in-one” printer that doubles as a copier and fax machine. What about when you are away from the office? You can’t haul that beast in the back seat of the car, can you? The traditional workaround has been to visit an office supply store or other business that offers fax service to send or receive a message. Now you can skip all that and use your smartphone or laptop computer.

Yes, it is possible to cram a fax machine into your iPhone or Android smartphone. Well, in the form of an app, anyway. How does it do the scanning? With your phone’s camera. You simply take pictures of your document pages and then send them to the fax number of your choice. You can create a cover sheet right on the phone if you need one. At the other end, the document copy comes rolling out of the office fax machine with no one the wiser that you’ve done it all on your smartphone.

You can also receive fax messages on your smartphone. In fact, with any computer and a broadband connection you can both send and receive faxes from the office, the coffee shop or wherever you happen to be. You send faxes as email attachments. You also receive faxes as email attachments. The person or company sending you the fax dials a local or toll free phone number that is just for your faxes. Their machine sends out the fax message and you receive it as an email attachment.

Would you like the freedom and versatility of doing your business faxing via the Internet? If so, then you’ll be interested in a free 30 day trial of paperless faxing by email. The software you’ll need for your computers is free to download. Be sure to also get the smartphone app for the ultimate in mobile faxing.

Put Some Sanity Back In Your Email

How are you doing with your email? Is it a loving relationship? Oh, sorry about that. For the amount of time you two spend staring into each other’s eyes, it seems like you should go together like a horse and carriage. Oh, a horse and road apple? That’s not so good.

Email is the abuse we just can’t live without. In the beginning it was the greatest thing ever. Perhaps even love at first sight. Somehow, over the years, it just got to be too much. At first, everything was important. Now it’s hard to even find anything important in that spewing stream of yakity yak yak.

Well, there are solutions... kinda. Spam filtering does some good but many a scam still sneaks through. Worse, something valuable, like a bill due notice, can wind up in spam jail and you’ll never find it before you’re headed to real jail. So, you’ve got to scan the spam constantly to make sure nothing has been wrongly diverted.

There’s always dumping the old email and starting over with a new email. That’s really desperation. When it gets to the point that only 1 out of 100 emails are fit to read, you’re justified in abandoning your email box in-place and starting over with a new address. What a pain that is! All your important contacts know your old email address. You get to spend days updating every subscription and account you want to keep.

How about prioritization? Even if you can beat the spam down to a dull roar, you still have the issue of over-popularity. Everybody wants you and they want your attention right this minute. How can you get anything done when the bulk of the day is spent sorting through the in-box?

My personal solution has been to have multiple email solutions and reserve one account only for those very, very special people and bank alerts. Newsletters come in somewhere else. Website mail goes yet elsewhere. This helps, but there are days when a guy could really use an assistant.

Well, now there’s just such an assistant available. It’s called the SaneBox. You know, sane as in sanity. The idea is to have an automated someone go through your email as it comes in and decide what to do with it. The really important stuff that needs immediate attention stays in your in-box where you’ll see it. Anything that can wait a couple of hours goes to another folder called SaneLater. SaneBox will send you a periodic summary to let you know what’s in the later folder so you won’t forget about it completely.

Ever send an email and realize weeks later that you never got a reply? That’s rough when you are trying to close new business or make appointments. SaneBox lets you CC a tickler file so that you’ll get a reminder of unanswered email in an hour, day, week or whatever.

How about subscriptions that refuse to unsubscribe or pestigating pests that just won’t go away with any level of hostility? Drag them into the SaneBlackHole and you’ll never hear from them again. They may have been stretched out to infinity or shot through to an alternate universe. Matters not. They won’t be bothering you again.

SaneBox is a new and clever way to manage the inboxes you have now with your current email services. It’s free to try, so why not give it a go? Start your free SaneBox trial with no credit card required. If you can’t live without it or at least realize that it pays for itself in time saved, then pony up the price of a latte and keep this handy gal or guy “friday” working for you full time.

Hosted Social Commerce Apps For Facebook

Just as e-commerce has become an established and accepted channel for business and shopping, the next wave of technology washes ashore. This is social commerce, an adjunct to and potentially more popular way to conduct business online. Social commerce is an outgrowth of social media, especially using the two most popular platforms, Facebook and Twitter. If social media is where people want to spend their time online, then social media is where you have to go to find customers.

The big challenge is how to you leverage the power of social media? You can flail around trying different approaches. Perhaps you can build a website, launch an e-mail campaign or write a blog. All of these do-it-yourself approaches are now old school as far as the Web is concerned. You won’t be need to be learning new software on your PC or deploying more of your own servers. What you need to be working with are hosted solutions. Facebook itself is a hosted solution, although it should be considered just the basic platform for your social commerce efforts. To get the social performance you are after, you’ll want to add some advanced apps to your Facebook page.

What sort of apps are we talking about? How about apps that give you the ability to create deal shares, fan offers, fund raising donations, viral messaging, photo showcases, RSS feeds, add Twitter feeds, recruit volunteers and so on. Can you build these apps yourself and have them work flawlessly on your Facebook page? Can you even find these functions here and there around the Web? Even if you could, they’ll never have a consistent look and feel.

What you need is an “app buffet” from North Social. The apps are part of a large collection that you choose from to power your Facebook page. Each app has its own content management system. You set preferences, upload images, links and text. No need to learn or write any code.

What kind of results can you get with the North Social app collection power your Facebook page? Here’s an example to give you an idea what’s possible:



Anxious to give this a try? You should know that every account comes with a 14 day free trial. Accounts range from starter to enterprise level. All of the apps are unlocked and ready to use for every account? What differentiates the account levels? It’s based on the number of fans you have. The starter account has a limit of 1,000 fans. The professional account moves that limit up to 50,000. The Enterprise account has unlimited fans and up to 5 Facebook pages. All other accounts are for a single page only, although you can always sign up for more accounts if you need them.

The future of social commerce is already here. Learn more, watch demo videos on each of the apps, and then pick the account appropriate for the size (and social popularity) of your business and start your 14 day free trial.

Try Internet Fax For Free

In these days of hyperactive texting, fax machines may seem a bit quaint to the uninitiated. But fax messages are a staple of business and used to exchange contracts and other important business documents. So, does that mean you need to buy an armada of dedicated fax machines and run to the office when you need to send or receive a fax message? No way. You can do it all online from wherever you happen to be. That is, if you have the right fax plan.

What’s better than a fax machine in this business environment is a fax service plan. A fax machine is a one task dedicated piece of equipment that sits in a designated space, tethered to its own phone line. A fax service plan lets you receive and send faxes by email and online account. It works on your desktop PC. It works on your laptop computer.

Oh, I know. You remember those early fax software programs that ran on your computer. You needed a special fax modem and they tied up both your computer and your phone line. This service is nothing like that. You don’t need a fax modem or even a phone line. This is an Internet-based fax service that you access over your broadband Internet connection like other online applications.

Here’s what you get when you sign up for a RingCentral Internet Fax Service Plan or take the free trial offer. You get your own toll free or local phone number. What’s that for? It is so people can send fax messages to you. Remember that fax machines send and receive messages over telephone lines. RingCentral gives you a virtual fax machine, but it still needs a number for those other fax machines to call. Those incoming messages will be stored in your online account and sent to you via email. You can even get text messages on your cell phone or PDA alerting you to new faxes so you never miss an important message.

How about sending faxes? You can send a fax right from email. Your email message becomes the cover sheet. The attached documents become the fax pages. That’s the simple way to fax. You also get a free software application that adds a fax button to your Microsoft Windows applications, such as Outlook and Word. Click the button and you can send your document out as a fax message. You can electronically sign faxes using a bitmap of your signature. No need to print documents, sign them with a pen, and then scan them back in as you would with a standard fax machine.

The RingCentral Internet Fax is as powerful as a large dedicated fax machine. You can create groups of contacts and easily send faxes to the whole group from your computer. You don’t tie up any phone lines. You’ll be notified by the system when your faxes have been sent. Both the software app and online account let you create custom cover sheets. Over a dozen different page styles are included with the service. If you are having a problem with junk faxes, you can block those so they won’t come in.

By the way, your computer doesn’t even have to be on for you to get a fax message. The sender never gets a busy signal when someone is on the phone, either. Remember, this is a virtual fax machine that is hosted online.

How much does it cost for all this faxing goodness? Plans start as low as $7.99 a month for 300 pages with a small charge per page over that. If you regularly deal with high fax volumes, other plans will push that up to include 2,500 pages per month. That includes your toll free or local fax number. You can pay that much just for a toll free number from other suppliers.