5 New Tech Devices Making Mobile Work Easier

At one point, the model for work was that an employee left his or her home, went to a specific location at a certain time, and then returned home at the end of his or her designated shift. Now, the work environment is much more fluid, with some people still following the traditional model in the way they perform their tasks, while others are working from home or other locations. Technological advances have made it easier for mobile workers to work from any virtual office location, and as tech devices become more sophisticated, the number of people who can take advantage of this type of flexible work arrangement is likely to increase.

Motorola Elite Silver Headset
This headset connects to your existing handset and features HD-audio and dual microphones to block out distracting background noise. Other attractive features on this $129.00 unit which will specifically appeal to mobile workers include the MotoSpeak Android app which can read SMS messages aloud and allow the user to reply or initiate a text by speaking. This device's case can be used as a charger, which keeps it safe and secure when not in use.

Plantronics Calisto 835 Speakerphone
The Plantronics Calisto 835 allows you to rout all of your phone calls to a single unit. This desktop unit allows a user to connect a cell phone (using Bluetooth), computer (through USB) and phone line (with a wall socket) to the device. A clip-on microphone allows the remote worker to take calls no matter what he or she is doing.

Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga 13
Rather than carrying a tablet and a laptop, mobile workers will soon be able to combine features of both devices by choosing the Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga 13. This 13-inch device's battery will run for about eight hours before needing to be charged. At about $1,000.00, this two-in-one device definitely won't be on the low end of the price scale.

Highrise
When workers who are on the same team are scattered in different locations, it can be challenging to keep track of assignments. Highrise, a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) subscription service, can be used to assign tasks to different users and track history of correspondence. It is free to use for one person, and multiple users can be added at a reasonable cost.

Tungle Scheduling App
The Tungle app makes scheduling meetings a quick and easy process for people on the go, even across multiple time zones. Mobile employees and entrepreneurs can share their availability (without disclosing any client or personal information) on their public profile when the app is synced with their calendar. Tungle looks after keeping their schedule up to date, and others can request a time to meet without having to register for an account.

There are a number of hardware and software options available to help make the lives mobile workers easier and more efficient. As this way of earning a living becomes even more mainstream, expect the type and variety of options available to virtual office workers to increase over time.

Virtual Offices Can Bridge the Gap for Home Based Businesses

Working from home was a rare situation before computers allowed some of the first telecommuting in the 80’s. Now, the number of home-based businesses has exploded, thanks to the Internet. According to Businessweek, more than half of all businesses in the U.S. are run from home. There are now more than six million of these businesses providing at least half the income for the business owner’s household.

Cost Benefits
As the benefits of running a business from home become better known, the number of these businesses continues to climb. Workers who once spent part of their day commuting now only travel as far as their home computer when there is work to be done. And instead of paying for travel expenses and business suits, they largely pay for little more than their own computer and an Internet connection.

While studies show that home businesses take in less money on average than their brick-and-mortar counterparts, they keep a higher percentage. Because of the lower overhead cost of running a business away from the high costs of an office full of employees, they keep an average of 36 percent of the net receipts as their own income. Traditional businesses set in physical offices average only 21 percent. That difference has made it possible for businesses owners to live better without running an enormous enterprise.

Home Business Problems
Just as there are many benefits to running a business at home, there is also a downside. Being in the comfort of your own home means that there are also a lot of the distractions that working at home can bring. Personal calls, visitors and household diversions are just a few of the problems of running a business from home.
Then, there are the professional challenges. When a company is completely run from a house, there may be no place to meet with clients. The situation can also cause an image problem. Clients expecting to visit a brick-and-mortar business may find a home setting unprofessional. It may even cause some to question whether the business owner is entirely serious about the business.

Using a Virtual Office
With so many small businesses being built, and so many problems running them from home, the virtual office has sprung up to bridge the gap between the home office and physical office. With this option, business owners can take advantage of the benefits of having a fully staffed office without having to pay multiple employees or rent a complete office.

When the business owner has clients to meet, these offices provide a convenient place. When there are phone calls that need to be routed, a receptionist can take the calls and forward them to the owner as needed. Mail services give the business a professional address, such as New York City, adding to the professional reputation of the business. And because these spaces are shared with other small businesses, the cost is far less than renting an office to use full time. These hybrids between the workplace and home office give small business owners the best of both worlds.

Virtual Office Space: Is Google Drive Worth Your Time?

Virtual Office Space: Is Google Drive Worth Your Time?: It seems like the online business community can’t go a month without seeing the release of a new tool or platform that is supposed to rev...

How to Select a Virtual Office Location

With a virtual office, it doesn’t matter where in the world your work takes you. You can do business with people in your hometown or across the world through one of these shared workspaces. For many businesses, one of the biggest benefits of this arrangement is that you can choose a prestigious location to house your temporary office. While most of your business may be done at home or on the road, you still benefit from a prestigious address and a stylish office space.

Choosing a Location      
               
Once you make the decision to use a virtual office solution, the next decision is location. As they say in real estate – it’s all about location, location, location. Take into account the place where you are most likely to be when you are in the office. Is it in your hometown? A nearby city? Somewhere that you travel to frequently?

Another consideration is the location of your major clients. If they are grouped in an area far from your home, you might consider using a virtual office location that is nearer to your clients than to your home. This makes it convenient for clients to meet with you when needed. It also gives them a sense of comfort knowing they are doing business with someone with an office close to theirs. That type of local accessibility is likely to be important to many of your clients.

Business Potential

In addition to considering your own location and the location of your major clients, also consider areas that hold the most business potential for you. There may be an untapped market that could yield many new clients for your business. Setting up a virtual office in a place that you have never done business before may help you tap into an entirely new market.

Think about your target audience, and where they live and work. Even if it is far from your home, you can still benefit from the address and phone number that you are afforded by using this virtual location. And by traveling there occasionally for meetings, you also have a physical presence in the area.

Using Virtual Resources

With a prestigious location, perhaps on a well-known street or near an important local landmark, your business gains instant credibility. This is particularly useful to those who work from their homes or vehicles. The stability of having a prestigious office gives your business a professionalism that is difficult for many entrepreneurs to gain. It shows clients that your business is there to stay, and it’s ready to meet them with professionalism.

The reception desk is one of the many resources afforded by these locations. Your guests can be greeted and shown to your temporary space as with any professional office. You will also have access to the necessary office machines that will make your office time convenient. Set up your computer, give a Power Point presentation and fax documents wherever they are needed. You can do all of this and more in a shared space and still do most of your work from home or the road.

Is Google Drive Worth Your Time?

It seems like the online business community can’t go a month without seeing the release of a new tool or platform that is supposed to revolutionize the way that we do business. The latest entry is Google Drive, an online collaboration studio and storage suite. Before you invest the energy to begin using Google Drive for team collaboration, it’s important to ask “Is Google Drive worth your time?”

What is Google Drive?
Google Drive is a place to create, share, collaborate and store all of the important online documents that help you get business done. It is an efficient and effective way to work with virtual teams especially when utilizing a virtual office.

Google Docs is part of the Google Drive platform, so you can work with others to create documents, spreadsheets and presentations within Google Docs and store them. Although Google Docs currently allows sharing and collaborative editing of documents, Drive takes your capabilities one step further. In the new platform, you can add and reply with comments on any media – including PDF, image and video files, as well as receive notifications when comments show up on shared items.

Google Drive allows you to store up to 5GB of documents, data and other digital “stuff” – all for free. Larger storage space options are available – 25GB for $2.49/month, 100GB for $4.99/month and 1TB for $49.99/month. Images, spreadsheets, docs and other documents are searchable together. You can tag items by keywords to make searching easy. In addition, Google Drive can recognize text in scanned documents using a special technology that locates words within an image file.

Google Drive is a native application – it installs right on your computer and is compatible with Mac or PC. In addition, if you have an Android phone or tablet that you can also use Google Drive. There are plans for on iOS app in the future so Drive will be accessible on the iPhone and iPad.

Should You Use Google Drive?
Google Drive can be a valuable collaborative tool that fits a niche that isn’t exactly met online. DropBox and Evernote are similar tools but they don’t do quite the same thing. DropBox allows people to share documents across the cloud, but there aren’t live editing capabilities. Evernote can help you save notes, scan in documents and create saved pages and posts online, but doesn’t have the collaborative capabilities that are part of Google Drive. If your team is already using Google Docs, Drive may be a good add on to your arsenal. Since you can browse through existing docs and engage with them in a new way, Drive will integrate almost seamlessly into your existing method of working.

The search functions along may make it a good option even if you already use DropBox or another solution (there are 10 current competitors). If you and your team create a large amount of documents each month, the search features will help save time when you need to pinpoint the exact conversation, scan or document you’re looking for.

5 Keys to a Successful Lean Start Up

If your business is starting small and wants to test and refine their products as quickly as possible, you fall into the category of “lean start-up.” The term, coined and trademarked by entrepreneur and author Eric Reis, has become a Bible of sorts to many young entrepreneurs hoping to launch the next Groupon, Facebook or InstaGram. But the principles can apply to you no matter what your age or your market.

Running a lean start up encompasses a lot of basic principles, but chief among them is capital efficiency. Rather than spending a billion dollars doing market research on the coupon phenomenon, the founders of Groupon tested the idea out in their own office complex first.
According to Reis, being lean isn’t about being cheap. “It’s about being less wasteful and still doing things that are big.”

Even if you’re an established business, you can start bringing some of the lean start up principles into your business, so you’re more innovative, more appealing to customers, and more profitable.

Focus on reducing waste – The prime goal of Lean Thinking (which fuels the Lean Start-up model) is reducing waste wherever possible. By increasing the frequency of connecting with customers, testing new ideas, and launching products or service with a minimum of features, it’s possible the time, money and resources spent on a typical start-up can be greatly reduced.

One of the most basic ways start-ups are reducing their overhead these days is by utilizing a Virtual Office or Coworking facility. By reducing their short and long term obligation to rent and facility amenities, they are slowing their “burn rate” while tapping into the intellectual ideas and collaboration a community of entrepreneurs provides.

New ideas are the lifeblood of your business – It’s important to always generate ideas to work with. Lean start-ups look for ways to innovate what they are doing and not just improve upon it. If a spark of an idea means you need to rethink your entire target market, it might be just the idea that will take your sales from ho hum to skyrocketing. If it means abandoning an old project or creating a new product that competes with your existing products, it may be worth the risk.

Pull your customers in, don’t push them into buying – Starting with a proven customer need is the best way to innovate a solution that will be successful and profitable. The result is better products that speak directly to the needs of your market. Instead of trying to manipulate people into buying, find ways to create the exact solutions to specific problems.

Let your customers define your value. – If someone buys your product and never uses it, do you consider it a win or a loss? In the Lean methodology, it’s a loss and needs to be fixed. Resources were spent but the value wasn’t achieved. Letting customers define the value – and focusing on use rather than just the sale – makes it easy to create a body of raving fans who evangelize your product. Look for the reasons why the product was never used and make changes in future generations to fix those problems.

Continuously improve the system that creates your business – It’s not just about maximizing the results. Success with a lean start-up means that you’re focused on improving the system that gets those results. You’ll need to focus on the processes, steps and systems that get you the results for which you are looking.

With these lean start-up ideas, you can innovate your current business, or be set to tackle a new venture without the bloated budget associated with many start-ups.

How to Collaborate with Mobile Workers

According to industry statistics, nearly 90% of companies have a mobile workforce of some kind. Mobile workers are using smart phones, pads and tablets to perform business functions in and outside of normal office spaces, or even in tandem with them. No matter the situation, all mobile workers have the same focus- using technology to stay connected with their work.



Sales people are traveling with virtual offices to meet clients, give presentations and share digital documentation. They are offering capabilities such as digital payments and paperless signature pads on mobile devices like tablets or smart phones for unparalleled ease in meeting client’s needs and closing sales in any location. Web-based payroll and HR platforms offer streamlined mission critical tools that employers can offer their mobile workforce. And email and social media remain the most used methods of connecting mobile workers. Staying connected anywhere, anytime is the key.

Advantages of Mobility

Employing a mobile workforce lends itself to remaining competitive in the marketplace. Many companies are using the latest devices and tools to empower their workers to increase productivity. Employees are even electing to bring their own devices (BYOD) of choice to work, and integrate them into their business systems. Companies are finding this advantageous in recruiting and retaining younger workers.

Business owners may also find additional ways to save capital by employing and empowering mobile employees. Mobility allows employees to work from anywhere and at anytime. This built in flexibility can be a benefit to both employers because it offers advantages such as saving money on leasing/purchasing office space, equipment, utilities, etc. Using on demand office spaces for meetings and allowing employees to use their own mobile devices to connect to their work can impact the bottom line significantly.

Trending Mobility

With ever increasing sales of mobile devices, consumers and employees alike are saying they want to stay connected. Business owners must respond by staying connected to industry trends as well. Understanding your mobile worker’s technological needs keeps you in sync with your growing business needs as well. Staying connecting and meeting the needs of the mobile workforce increases productivity, collaboration and effectiveness. This also increases your ability to compete in the digital marketplace, and to change to meet its ever evolving technological needs.

Creative Collaboration

Understanding your employees has always been important, particularly to small business or emerging business owners. Having the right team in place to jump start your business, build its infrastructure and grow its potential is part of successfully establishing any endeavor. Knowing how to help those employees do their best work and giving them the best tools they need to get the job done is the key. Younger employees are using social media as a large part of their mobile business work mode. Yet other employees need incentives to embrace new mobile technologies in the workplace. Meeting your employees where they are in the mobile workspace offers a better opportunity for creative collaboration and success in adapting your business to meet the demands of the market.