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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.

Facebook announced Tuesday that it will be introducing a handful of privacy changes to their 750 million users. AllthingsD reports that the new privacy features will go into effect on August 25, initially to only one percent of all Facebook users.

Exactly how much the new settings are a response to longstanding user criticism or new competition in the form of Google+ is hard to discern. It does seem clear however, that without the new threat to Facebook, the company would have had little incentive to change its historically lax approach to user privacy.

All those pictures you’ve been posting to Twitter using third-party apps, such as Instagram or TwitPic, will appear on your Twitter profile starting Monday.

According to the announcement, the galleries will automatically display the 100 most recent images that a given user has shared through Twitter, pulling images from as far back as January 2010.

Skype, which Microsoft bought in May, said Monday it will buy the group messaging service GroupMe. GroupMe, created last year at the Techcrunch Disrupt Hackathon, went for a rumored $85 million, according to AllthingsD. For now, GroupMe will remain a standalone application, according to the company, but expect changes.

GroupMe messaging works by associating a number with each group. Users can text or push messages to that number, communicating with the whole group. You can use GroupMe as either a data or text-based service, and switch between the two. If you are at a concert or sports event where bandwidth is inaccessible, GroupMe will automatically prompt you to switch to the SMS version. Pretty nifty.

AT&T released a tool on Tuesday to help you measure the money and greenhouse gas emissions your business could save by taking actions such as cutting down on business trips. The Carbon Impact Assessment Tool takes into consideration the overall size of a given company including its number of employees, as well as travel plans. It then lets you know what you can expect to save by utilizing digital collaboration and communication tools.

Of course, AT&T is hoping you'll use their tools, which is why they built the carbon calculator. But you can always use this to figure out what solutions work best for you and your business.

A study from digital security company viaForensics paints a stark picture of the vulnerability of smartphone user data. viaForensics evaluated 100 popular consumer apps running on Android and iOS, and found that 76 percent store usernames, while 10 percent store passwords as plain text. Those 10 percent included popular sites such as LinkedIn, Skype, and Hushmail.

And while only 10 percent of applications store both username and passwords as plain text, leaving them vulnerable to hacks, even the 76 percent who store only usernames that way are vulnerable.

LivingSocial, the largest daily deal site behind Groupon, has rolled out an interesting way to purchase your next burrito, yoga class, or massage appointment. It’s called LivingSocial Instant, modeled after Groupon’s Now coupons, which are served to mobile users for short periods of time. If you’re walking by an ice cream shop, for example, a LivingSocial Instant coupon could ping your mobile phone, via an app, that you have an hour to get 50 percent off a banana split.

For the time being, it seems LivingSocial is using its new Instant deals to unload deals from its regular service. This is bound to change however, as you can bet that both LivingSocial and Groupon understand that the instant deal is the future of mass coupons. Why?

In anticipation of the fall release of iCloud, Apple this week set icloud.com live for developers. iCloud represents a revamped version of Apple's existing Mail, Contacts, and Calendar, and integrates the document sharing features of iWork.com.

With 5GB of space, the service is free. Upgrade packages are priced at $20 for an additional 10GB (15GB total) per year, $40 for an additional 20GB and $100 for an additional 50GB (55 GB total) per year.