I would consider myself a gadget freak. One of the benefits of being an entrepreneur is that buying gadgets that are used for business purposes is tax deductible. However, getting the latest cool gadget, the iPhone 3GS-for free-is even better. Here's how I did it.

As your business matures to the point that you have begun to develop systems, processes and methodologies, your business will need to decide on tools to manage these processes and enforce the best practices.

For example, my business is a professional services company, so the following are key processes for us: performing estimation, authoring proposals, tracking time, invoicing for time. This is effectively the "Operations" of our business, and therefore the software that supports these operations could be referred to as "line of business" software.

If your business has any data associated with its operations (yes, this means 100 percent of you), you need line of business software. This software will, over time, accumulate the data that you will study and analyze to learn about your company's effectiveness as well as to identify shortcomings and opportunities for improvement.

For example, in my business, I might like to know the following:

In my first “Virtualization” post, I looked at the idea of a virtual office at a very high level, starting with some of Ubertor CEO Steve Jagger’s ideas and then outlining three distinct models. Today I will drill down a little more on the models and characterize them in a bit more detail.

Full: Totally Virtual with Zero Office Space

As the co-chair of Membership for EO Houston, I recently attended our Global Leadership Conference (GLC) in New Orleans, which is an annual summit for EO chapter board members from both North and South America. During one of the breakouts, Steve Jagger, founder and CEO of Ubertor (and several other companies) spoke about virtualizing and decentralizing your business using new technologies to manage the information.

In his talk, Steve covered several reasons that his company outsources/off-shores/automates everything they possibly can. And “it’s working for them, but could it work for me?” I began to question.

I rely on a combination of computers and devices at work, at home, and on the road. My collection consists of a Mac Pro at work and an iMac at home, both of which run Parallels, combining the Mac OS and Windows XP. I also have a Sony Vaio laptop that runs Windows XP, an iPhone, Apple TV, and multiple iPods.

Twitter certainly has received a lot of media attention recently, with the Kutcher vs. CNN battle to see who would be the first to have a million followers. Oprah also had a show about the impact of Twitter on people's lives. According to comScore, Twitter grew 131 percent in March 2009.

A guaranteed way to increase your company's sales is to have a system in place to manage your sales activities. Having a custom relationship management (CRM) system that is easy and gets used by the sales team is a great step towards that goal.

I went on vacation recently, and during that time I realized how dependent I have become on GPS applications to find what I am looking for. GPS devices maximize my vacation time by letting me drive less, since by using them, I never get lost. And driving less means I'm living a greener life, too.

I just finished listening to the audio CD of Outliers, the new book by Malcolm Gladwell. He makes a point that success takes more than just being ambitious, extremely smart, or working hard. We all know plenty of ambitious people who don't make it very far in life, or the hard-working person who makes just $10 an hour.

To start, I need to tell you that up until 2006 I was an avid PC user. Starting with my first computer when I was five, an IBM PS2 Model 30 (without a hard drive), I've been loyal. I started with DOS, then Windows 3, 3.1, 95, and then XP. Then came Vista. Before Vista, I spent a lot of time rebooting but it was more or less bearable. After Vista, which is by far the worst operating system ever made, I had to find another solution.

In the summer of 2006, I upgraded about 80% of my company's computers to Macs; we're a design agency, and so most people wanted Macs anyway. I kept hearing about their strengths - how the OS never crashed, how it just worked, how you don't need to reboot every day - and dismissed them as blind lust from googly-eyed Apple enthusiasts.