Christopher Null

If you listen to the growing chorus of online chatter about the company, Google’s now-infamous “Don’t be evil” slogan is becoming increasingly inaccurate by the day. The company’s most recent move--a sweeping change that consolidated most of its privacy policies under a single umbrella--immediately drew umbrage from critics who felt that Google was on its way to taking all the data it has collected from its users through its dozens of services and building an exhaustive dossier on each of us that would be used mercilessly in efforts to sell us things.

Google wants you to keep using Search, Docs, and Google+, so it’s trying to play nice, and last June Google introduced a service designed to let you see, in part at least, what Google knows about you with a single click.

Once upon a time, it was considered insane to compete against eBay. If you sold custom-made goods like clothes or jewelry, you sold at flea markets on weekends, and eBay the rest of the time. The idea that anyone would shop anywhere else for your handmade merchandise was silly.

But anyone who’s shopped on eBay knows how tough it can be to find certain goods. A search for “vintage t-shirt” may turn up more than 300,000 results, very few of which are either vintage or t-shirts. As a merchant, sellers find themselves competing with a huge number of competitors, ranging from junk resellers to mass producers peddling knockoffs.

Consider the vacuum cleaner. It gets the job done, sure, but only if you haul it out of the closet, plug it in, and push it around like some kind of farm animal. Modern conveniences may very well help us get through the indignities of daily life, but it wasn’t until the digital age arrived that things really became interesting. The smartening up of our gadgetry has given everyday essentials--of both the low- and high-tech variety--new life. Here are nine devices that may have been okay when they were “dumb,” but are vastly more useful now that they’re “smart.”

Thermostats

Unless you’ve cracked open an old-school thermostat, you might not realize how primitive these devices really are. Until just a few years ago, thermostats contained a tube of mercury and worked much as a thermometer does: If conditions became hot enough for the mercury to rise up the tube, it would physically activate a switch and start the air conditioner blowing. Programmable, digital thermostats not only got rid of the hazardous materials but also let you set hourly heating and cooling schedules. The next generation, arriving now, is even smarter--the Nest Learning Thermostat adapts future temperature changes based on your tweaks, and you can access it online or via smartphone whether you’re in the house or on the road.

Making videos, much like Facebooking, blogging, and tweeting, is not an end but a means. It is a means of communicating with customers and marketing your wares. And it is increasingly a means of promoting yourself more visibly via search engines. On many a Web search, Google will place videos at the top of the results. This is common for many terms, and some have suggested that Web pages that contain embedded videos place higher in Google’s search results.

For the vast majority of businesses, producing and distributing videos is probably not a natural activity. Yet, while calculating the hard ROI of online video is a fool’s errand, the data suggest that video adds real value--and potentially lots of it--because users really do watch the stuff. RevZilla, a small motorcycle gear store in Philadelphia, jumped into YouTube on a whim in 2009; since then, its videos have received over 4.1 million views.

Want to publish a book? You can either kill a bunch of trees, or get with the 2010s and publish it as an ebook.

If you haven’t noticed already, ebooks are no longer a niche market. As of June 2011, ebook reader adoption had reportedly hit 25 percent in the United States, with the market growing at a phenomenal 169 percent year over year. Today, most new releases are being published in ebook format.

At some point, calling your tech-savvy friends and relatives for help gets old. Or rather, they stop answering the phone, and you're left on your own to figure out why your Wi-Fi doesn't work.

Designed for novices and businesses without access to on-site tech support, a new and growing breed of tech support services are ready to lend a hand. Using remote-control software, these services can troubleshoot your PC while you kick back and finish your latte--provided your Internet connection isn't the problem. And the best part is that you no longer have to cart your computer into a shop or even walk through a fix on the phone.

After Google, Twitter, and Facebook, Yelp is arguably the Internet company next in line to have its name converted into a verb. If you want to find a restaurant, a plumber, or even a lawyer, Yelp probably has you covered.

As a consumer, you likely use Yelp and similar services all the time; but as a business owner, you realize what a double-edged sword it is. Many restaurateurs have watched their free time vanish along with their hair as they tried to massage their Yelp star rating and appease every last customer unhappy with the crème brulee.

If you’re new to Web hosting, the bevy of plans available from many providers may confuse you. Here’s a quick primer on what’s what in the world of Web hosting.

Shared hosting: In this arrangement, a single Web server box usually handles hundreds or thousands of websites. This is possible because each of those sites is probably very small and uses minimal bandwidth--which is why providers can offer such a service for just $4 or $5 a month. We looked exclusively at shared hosting in our Web host roundup.

Websites don’t build themselves. They require a considerable investment of energy, expertise, and design know-how to construct and launch. But building a site is only half the story: Websites also have to be hosted on servers, ready for--you hope--the thousands of people who are dying to read your content, hire your firm, or pay for your services.

A comparison of the pricing and basic features of six Web hosts.Much like the servers that websites reside on, Web hosting services are rapidly approaching commodity status, as providers offer many of the same features while racing to the bottom on pricing. But although many Web hosting services look alike and cost about the same, appearances can be deceiving--there are nontrivial differences, particularly among higher-end plans. (Check out “Understanding Web Host Plans” for more details on what various terms mean.)

Of all the suppliers, customers, and other stakeholders with which the typical small business works, never does the list of favorites start with “the bank.”

And yet for every small business, a bank is invariably a necessary evil. Their most basic functions include simply having a way to pay the bills and keep paychecks going to employees, but banks can also help when it comes time to expand, by offering mortgage services or lines of credit. Eventually every small business owner will need to ask for money one way or another.

A new breed of services called virtual assistants let you outsource just about any task overseas, as long as the work can be done with a computer and a telephone.

Virtual assistants are contract workers, generally paid by the hour, who perform menial tasks. The more mundane the job, the better--finding flights and hotels, paying bills, or buying birthday gifts for relatives you'd rather pretend you didn't exist. Think of virtual assistants as old-school secretaries, except that they can't drop off and retrieve your dry cleaning or take your vehicle to the car wash because they live 7000 miles away.

The key to tracking down a fix is to remember that you are unlikely to be the first person to have ever encountered this problem, but it is probably rare enough that standard help files and Microsoft support won't be of use.