Keeping up with every RSS feed item and tweet is hard enough for anybody, let alone someone trying to run a business. That’s why each week, ReadWriteBiz rounds up the most important tech news and insights for small and medium-sized businesses.
This week, Google’s local business recommendation service Hotpot made its way to the iPhone in the form of a new Google Places app. The Yelp-like recommendation service, which originally launched in November, is also now being featured prominently on Google Maps.
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Mobile information-sharing app Bump raised $16 million from Andreeson Horowitz, having just reached the milestone of having 25 million users. Bump can be used to wirelessly share various types of data with others, be it photos, social networking info or contact information. For business users, the app can come in handy as a 21st century replacement for the business card, at least for those who have the app.
Here on ReadWriteBiz, our most-discussed post was Audrey Watters’s look at the hidden dangers of free themes for WordPress. According to one blog post, searching the Web for free WordPress themes can return results that are out of date, or worse, contain security exploits. This is especially important for small businesses, who often opt to use an open source publishing platform like WordPress to build their sites and instinctively start hunting for free design themes to use with it.
Speaking of security, we covered a survey on Tuesday that showed that half of small businesses do not have a disaster recovery plan in place, and that most SMBs wait until the unthinkable happens to implement any such plan. Another report, this one from non-profit Identity Theft Resource Center, showed that businesses accounted for 42.1% of data breaches in 2010. The organization counted 662 data breaches in all, underscoring the importance of data security moving forward into 2011.
Have you started using Quora yet? On Monday, we discussed how small businesses can use the up-and-coming Q&A site for everything from market research to solving the most obscure-seeming problems day-to-day.
Did you come across any must-read tech stories for small businesses in the last week? Let us know in the comments.
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