SMB Tech Roundup: Tablet Growth, Mobile Payments and New Apps Reviewed

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.

On Thursday, we took a look at Flow, a new to-do list management Web app that offers collaborative features for small teams. Flow is still in closed beta, but its feature set and well-designed UI may offer real competition for popular tools like Remember the Milk and Things. There’s also a really cool Easter egg hidden on their homepage, if you can find it.

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Another app we reviewed this week is Sparrow, a desktop Mac client for Gmail that’s intuitive, well-designed and well worth the $9.99 price tag.

Small and medium-sized businesses looking for an alternative to mobile payment options like Square and GoPayment now have yet another option in the form of Sage Mobile Payments, which launched this week. Sage enables businesses to accept credit card payments on mobile devices with or without its external plastic card reader. The key difference is Sage’s pricing model, which forgoes the usual per-transaction fee in favor of a monthly payment.

A report released by Elance this week shows that SMBs are hiring more than previously expected, and they’re focusing more on mobile programmers, WordPress developers and content creators. The increased demand for things like HTML5 and iPad and Android development is a good sign in light of the impending growth of tablet computer adoption and what it may mean for business Websites.

Not only are consumers buying up tablets at a rapid pace, but we’re beginning to see how the iPad and similar devices can be used by businesses. Our own Klint Finley took a look at 10 business intelligence tools for the iPad.

Prefer working from home? Next week is National Telework Week in the United States and it’s not too late to pledge that your business will participate.

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