Elsa Wenzel

Dave Rusenko, Weebly CEOPCWorld Business Center's "In Your Bag" series takes an intimate look at the essential tech gear that small-business leaders carry with them.

Nearly half of small businesses still don't have a website, but David Rusenko aims to change that. He's the CEO of Weebly, a do-it-yourself website-building service that PCWorld named one of 2011's top 100 products.

PCWorld Business Center's "In Your Bag" series takes an intimate look at the essential tech gear that small-business leaders carry with them.

Noah Lehmann-Haupt founded Gotham Dream Cars in New York City, offering rentals of luxury cars to drivers with exotic tastes. His menu includes models from Ferrari, Bentley, Aston Martin, Maserati, and Lamborghini. After the 2004 launch, Gotham expanded with a South Florida office. Now with a 10-person staff, it brings in some $3 million a year.

Claire Chambers, CEO of JournellePCWorld Business Center's "In Your Bag" series takes an intimate look at the essential tech gear that small-business leaders carry with them.

Claire Chambers is the founder and CEO of Journelle, a luxury lingerie brand with stores online and in New York and Miami. Launched in 2007, the store's famous clientele includes Michelle Williams and Stephanie Seymour. Chambers expects revenues to climb past $4 million in 2011, double from last year. Here's a hint at what makes her 31-person company tick, judging by the tools she transports.

Whether you're running a business out of your den or from a penthouse in the sky, you don't have time or money to waste on second-rate tools. These well-designed services and resources are among the best the Web offers for small and midsize businesses. Some include apps for smartphones and downloads for your desktop, but all of them provide the bulk of their features within a Web browser.

Productivity

Watch out, PowerPoint. Here comes SlideRocket.In the land of full-featured productivity suites, the battle royal rages on between Google Apps for Business and Microsoft Office 365. Upstart Zoho, meanwhile, has a loyal fan base of its own. We tend to prefer Google's tools for lean companies with little need for the desktop Office applications included with Office 365.

The tools used to ring up sales have come a long way since the cash register. The first point-of-sale (POS) software for Microsoft Windows emerged in the early 1990s. POS systems have since evolved from souped-up cash registers that did nothing more than record sales into hubs for business management, operations, and analysis. The past decade has seen the rise of touchscreen interfaces, customer self-checkout stations, and payment kiosks.

Technologies on the horizon include smart RFID chips for tracking merchandise wirelessly, and thin-client checkout terminals at that feed into a beefier central device. While such shifts will push retailers to upgrade their in-store systems, the rise of mobile e-commerce will challenge telecom providers to upgrade their infrastructure.

Tablets are creeping into the workplace, whether workers bring them from home or IT departments roll them out en masse. This development isn't altogether new, however; tablet PCs appeared two decades ago in such industries as healthcare and high finance. By and large, though, the earlier tablets ran Windows, and users mostly relied on custom pens and keyboards rather than fingertips to control them.

Yet the rise of consumer tablets--the iPad and its Android rivals--is changing how workers at small businesses tackle their jobs and interact with customers, clients, vendors, and each other.

Google confirmed that it's planning to roll out business profiles to its new Google+ social network. The news is bittersweet for small to midsize businesses (SMBs). Bitter, because it takes time to create new profiles and learn a new ecosystem. Sweet, because what Google can potentially offer through pages for SMBs is significantly more compelling than Facebook's Pages. That's even despite Google+ just getting off the ground, while Facebook counts more than 750 million users.

Why? Since Google's inception in 1998, the company has concentrated on building all the services we already utilize for both personal and business purposes. All it needs to do now is tie them all together.

Access to the Internet is vital for doing business, but without safeguards in place, malware and data leaks can be a mouse click away from disaster. Network firewalls and antivirus software are common in workplaces, but more small companies are increasingly turning to Web filtering tools for additional protection.

Setting limits on what Web content employees can access can be essential for businesses involved in health care, high finance, or government work bound by regulatory requirements. Even mom-and-pop retailers must meet strict standards concerning credit card data.

Were you more of a freak or geek than a popular kid in high school? Are you always looking for a way to fight "the man"? Do you express your individuality with, say, safety-pin earrings? Maybe you're just a savvy shopper who doesn't believe all the hype you see in commercials. In any case, these alternatives may turn your head.

Whether you're looking for a better word processor, a new shopping method, an end to iTunes headaches, an iPad rival, or a way to escape your phone bill, you can find plenty of great services and tools besides the old standards.

Cell phone radiation might cause cancer, according to the World Health Organization, which until Tuesday has said that there were no known health risks associated with cell phone use. The WHO's International Agency for Research on Cancer has now tied mobile phone radiation to an increased risk for glioma brain tumors.

The judgment doesn't stem from new research. Instead, a panel of 31 scientists from 14 countries, including the United States, spent a week poring over existing studies.

Gone are the days when running a small business meant outfitting each worker with a desktop PC, then loading up each one with individually licensed software. Thanks to services that live on the Internet, there's a swifter way to empower workers with productivity and communication tools.

Google and Microsoft are the major players in so-called "cloud" suites designed for a mobile, always-online workforce. The flexibility, portability, and low maintenance of their services appeal to a growing number of small businesses. In a best-case scenario, either Google Apps for Business or Microsoft Office 365 can improve productivity and reduce such costs as software licenses and paid IT help. Both packages include e-mail, calendars, live chat, word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, collaborative editing, and much more.

Livescribe smartpens are getting shortcuts for sending notes to popular Web services, as well as the capability to make interactive “pencast” PDFs than animate recorded handwriting and synced audio.

The company is also introducing a $99 2GB Echo pen on Monday, $50 less than the 4GB model, to a trio of pens that hold up to 8GB of notes and apps.