We recently had an opportunity to play around with the newest Windows 7 phone from Verizon Wireless, the HTC Trophy.  The key features (as listed on the Verizon website) are as follows:

• Windows Phone 7
• Bluetooth Stereo Support
• Camera 5.0 Megapixel
• HTML Web Browser
• Global Ready

As with any product we didn’t think taking the manufacturer’s word for it was sufficient so without further intro here’s our thoughts on the product. Read the rest of this entry

Please help me in welcoming a new member to the Acroment team – Marketing & Sales Assistant, Brandon Sonich.

Brandon is a senior at Ashland University pursuing his degree in Business Administration with a major in Marketing and a minor in Entrepreneurship Management.  Brandon comes from an entrepreneurial background and is looking to augment his historical perspective with real world experience.  Brandon will work with the Acroment team on a variety of projects including developing new sales contacts, updating the Acroment website and blog and various other sales and marketing tasks.  We are excited about the enthusiasm and excitement  that Brandon brings to the Acroment team.

Welcome aboard Brandon!

I’ve been a user of an online money management site called Thrive (http://www.justthrive.com/) for some time now.  It’s marketed as “Free online money management, just for you.”  I’d previously used their main competitor Mint.com but had a couple of bad experiences which is why I went with Thrive.  As I was going through my email this morning, I saw this subject line which concerned me: “URGENT: END OF SERVICE NOTIFICATION”.

Here’s the content of the message: Read the rest of this entry

Cloud computing is all the rage these days.  Every time you turn around you’re hearing something about how it’s the wave of the future and how it’s cheaper, better, faster, etc.  For some businesses, the “move to the cloud” can be a good thing, but in other cases it can be a very risky proposition.  You need to ask yourself – can your business rely on the cloud?

Recently, Amazon’s EC2 cloud server service went down for more than a day.  If you are/were an Amazon customer using this service you lost service.  In some cases you lost data and in some cases the data that was lost was NOT recoverable.  Some major players in the social media landscape (Foursquare, Reddit, Quora, Hootsuite and Moby) were completely unusable.  Additionally portions of CNET’s functionality was compromised.  CNET’s response?  “We’ll be back shortly, we hope. Sorry, it sucks for us too. We’d point fingers, but we wouldn’t be where we are today without EC2.” Read the rest of this entry

Small businesses (especially new businesses) often struggle with getting paid.  Bank accounts, checks, credit cards, cash, etc.  The payment options seem endless.  For ease of use for the end user many businesses choose to accept credit cards.  For a small business this can lead to some roadblocks as you typically need to have a merchant account, a payment gateway, etc.  For the non web savvy out there this can be a daunting task.  Luckily there is another way: PayPal.

Read the rest of this entry