If you are a small business owner wondering if there are any apps out there that can help make your life easier, wonder no more! These days you can practically run your entire business through a tablet or mobile device. Your device can handle point-of-sale, time tracking, invoicing and much more.

Here are a few of our favorite apps for small business owners:

PayPal, one of the first online transaction companies, got into the mobile payment game with the PayPal Here.
Image credit: PayPal

Point of Sale

You’re probably already familiar with Square, the little plastic card reader that plugs into a smartphone. But Square is no longer the only card reader in town. Here are a few of the card readers currently out there:

• Square
• PayPal Here
• Amazon Register
• Intuit GoPayment

You can get all of these for essentially free (for example, the Square reader is $9.99 at retail stores, but it comes with a $10 mail-in rebate). The card reader companies make their money off transaction fees, which vary by device. You can read more about credit cards readers in this article.

Let’s talk about a different type of cards: business cards.

Business Card Readers

There are apps that will allow you to photograph, scan and store the information from people’s business cards, creating a digital Rolodex. There are two major apps. Abbyy’s is the tried-and-true original, Evernote’s is the new upstart:

• Abbyy’s Business Card Reader ($4.99 on Android and $5.99 on iOS)
• Evernote Hello (free)

Bookkeeping

A good bookkeeping app will not only connect to your various accounts and allow you to create invoices, but will categorize your expenses and income for tax purposes. There are a number of cool bookkeeping apps out there:

• Freshbooks
• Quickbooks
• GoDaddy Bookkeeping (formerly Outright.com)

Most of these charge monthly or yearly subscription fees. There is also a newcomer called Wave Accounting whose website is free to use. Wave also does payroll management for $4/month for the first 10 employees (and $1/employee after).

Productivity

You have two major options for productivity software. The first is Google Drive, which includes Google Docs and Google Sheets. This is free, but not as fully-featured as Microsoft Office. You can also get Microsoft Office 365, the cloud-based (read: online) version of Office. One user is $6/month.

Also, this is not exactly an app but we would be remiss if we didn’t mention Google Apps for Work. Do you want to have your own, custom email address that still uses the Gmail interface? Google Apps for Work can give you that. For instance, Ray@SmallBusiness.com could be accessed through Gmail and would also have full access to Google Drive.

Google Apps for Work is $5/user/month or $50/year.

Q: I’m looking at opening a food truck. I’ve seen other food trucks and hot dogs stands taking credit cards on their phones. How can I do that? What kind of phone do I have to have, and does it cost a lot of money?

A: Smartphones have opened up a whole new way for mobile vendors to accept credit card payments. Gone are the days of having to use one of those bulky carbon copy imprinters with hefty fees, high transactions costs and no way to prove if the credit card you were charging was even a real credit card.

You have a few different options that you can choose from, Norman, but the three most popular are Square, PayPal Here and Intuit GoPayment. All three are small devices that plug into the headphone jack of your iPhone or Android phone.

Square

Square pioneered mobile credit card processing with their small, square (hence the name) credit card readers. Once you get your Square reader and download and install the free Square Register app, you’ll be ready to start accepting credit cards. You can even add your entire inventory to the app, and use it as your point of sale terminal right there on your phone. Transactions you ring up before 5 p.m. are credited to your bank account the following business day. Square charges 2.75% per swipe.

PayPal

PayPal, the company that pioneered online credit card transactions, entered the mobile game a bit later than Square with their credit card reader, a blue triangle known as the PayPal Here. PayPal Here also offers a point of sale app to go along with the device. Money from real world transactions made using this device is sent directly to your PayPal account. From there the money can be spent online or transferred to your bank account. PayPal Here charges 2.7% per swipe.

Intuit GoPayment

Intuit, the company that makes Quicken account software, makes the Intuit GoPayment card reader and app. It’s about the same shape as a roll of quarters, but a bit shorter. While the GoPayment is physical the biggest one we’ve seen, it charges less per transaction than Square or PayPal Here: 2.4% per swipe. The Intuit QuickBooks GoPayment app also integrates with Quicken and many other small business apps.

As the mobile payment industry keeps growing, more and more companies are starting to jump in. Amazon recently debuted a mobile credit card reader. Almost all of the traditional credit card processors like BluePay, Verifone and Chase have also launched their own readers. Even office supply retailer Staples has gotten in on the action.

You have a lot of options to choose from, Norman, and you can get just about all of them for free with no contract. Our advice is that you try all of them until you find the one that fits your needs the best.

Deemable Tech – Episode 11 – Call Me (Internationally), Maybe

The Deemable Dozen:

1. Apple’s attorney’s are on crack? 
   As the legal smack-down in California heads into its final stretch, District Court Judge Lucy Koh’s patience appears to be wearing thin. With Samsung having rested their case and Apple left with only a few hours to wind up theirs, they submitted a massive 75-page document detailing 22 separate witnesses that they supposedly intended to call. Judge Koh reportedly told Apple’s attorney, ?Unless you’re smoking crack, you know these witnesses aren’t going to be called when you have less than four hours.? Apple’s lawyer protested that he was not smoking crack, but agreed to pare down the list. The trial is expected to wind up this week, which will give everyone a brief reprieve before the inevitable appeal process begins.
2. Motorola-Google fires first shot at Apple, seeks ban of all major devices in US.
   In other tech lawsuit news, Google’s Motorola Mobility division, which Google purchased for its extensive patent portfolio, is seeking an injunction from the US International Trade Commission against just about everything Apple makes. Motorola claims that Apple has violated patents it owns regarding email notifications, location reminders, and phones that can also play video. Siri, Apple’s popular voice-recognition software, is also implicated in the lawsuit.
3. Apple rumored to be in talks with cable companies.
   The Wall Street Journal reports that Apple is apparently in talks with cable companies to add cable service to their set-top box. Although AppleTV has been something of a hobbiest’s toy up until now, being able to get cable through it would definitely be a game-changer. On the other hand, after seeing what Apple did to the music and publishing industries, the cable companies probably aren’t going to roll over easily on this one.
4. HP turns Palm into Gram.
   Fans of the old Palm WebOS rejoiced last week with word that HP was forming a subsidiary called Gram to manage the now fully open-source mobile platform, which they own. But don’t get too excited guys, because HP has also created another mobility unit which will apparently work on Windows tablets. At this point HP’s strategy appears to be: ?Yes, let’s do something with mobile… stuff.? They are also rumored to have ?the cloud…”
5. Square’s flat rate.
   In a bid to court small businesses, mobile payment provider Square has announced that it will begin offering flat rates for companies that are processing less than $250k in transactions through the service. Square normally takes a 2.75% cut of each transaction, but are now offering smaller users the option to pay $275 a month. That sounds like a lot to me, but people don’t offer me their credit card numbers a lot, so what do I know?
6. Facebook’s stock fall.
   Facebook’s stock took a huge hit Friday, tumbling to $19/share, half of what it was at the company’s Initial Public Offering in May. The plunge comes a day after the expiration of a lock-down period where early investors and insiders were required to hold onto their shares. Apparently once they were free to dump them, they did. Since Facebook went public it has taken a real beating in the stock market. I wonder if Mark Zuckerberg has updated his Linked In profile recently?
7. Washington state to enable Facebook voter registration.
   Washington state is poised to allow citizens to register to vote through Facebook. Washington was the second state in the US to allow online voter registration. I suppose this is the next logical step. At least half my Facebook friends already seem to think that ?Liking? Obama or Romney is equivalent to voting for them.
8. iPhone SMS spoofing.
   ?White hat hackers? (those are the good kind) have discovered an iPhone bug that allows someone to send text messages masquerading as any phone number. ?Black hat hackers? (those are the bad kind) might be able to use this technique to impersonate friends and extract personal information from iPhone users. So play it safe: when your friend starts texting you and asking for your credit card number and SSN, don’t give it to him.
9. Adobe announces Flash for Android is dead!
   Flash is dead. Long live Flash. Adobe pulled the Flash Player from the Google Play store this week, meaning it is no longer available for download for Android devices. For nearly a decade Flash was the technology of choice for doing things like animation or streaming video on the web. Things took a turn for the worse for Adobe’s platform after Apple spurned it by refusing to allow it on iOS. Last Christmas Adobe apparently saw the writing on the wall and announced that it would begin focusing on other technologies. If you already have Flash on your Android phone or tablet, it’s not going away, but many websites and apps are already steering away from using Flash towards sleeker, more reliable mobile-friendly technologies such as HTML5.
10. eBay to officially ban ?intangible? items, such as including ?spells, curses, hexes, conjuring, magic, prayers, blessing services, magic potions, healing sessions?.
    Bad news for enterprising Hogwarts students: Ebay has updated its selling policies to ban sales of “advice, spells, curses, hexing, conjuring, magic, prayers, blessing services, magic potions, [and] healing sessions,” beginning in September. In related news, Magical Ebay has reportedly banned sales of ?useless muggle items such as cars, power-tools and digital wristwatches.? This just in: this may be the nerdiest news item we have ever reported.
11. Publishers fight over whether or not to sell DRM-free (Digital Rights Management) eBooks.
    E-books outsold traditional hard-cover books for the first time in the first quarter of this year. They are now officially Big Business. Tor, the world’s largest science fiction publishing imprint announced in April that it would release all of it’s books without any Digital Rights Management. That announcement didn’t sit well with British publisher Hatchette UK, who this week sent out a letter to its authors gently suggesting that they are not okay with having books they sell with DRM sold DRM-free in another territory. Science fiction author, Boing-Boing editor and opponent of all things DRM Cory Doctorow lashed out at Hatchette, saying ?Hachette has balls the size of Mars if it thinks it can dictate what other publishers do with titles in territories where it has no rights.?
12. Cloud gaming service ?OnLive? has been sold.
    Cloud-based gaming service ?OnLive? announced Friday morning that it had laid off all 200 or so of its employees and sold all of its assets to a new owner. OnLive later issued a press release claiming that it would continue to offer all its services, that nearly half of its employees would be hired back, and that everything was ?business as usual’. Dissolving your entire company only to re-form it hours later doesn’t sound like ?business as usual’ to us.

Links we mentioned on today’s show:

• http://speedtest.net/

Bumper Music

• Violin Super Mario!!!!!
• Skrillex – Scary Monsters And Nice Sprites – Ferro Version (piano tutorial with sheet music)

This week Ray Hollister, Tom Braun, Kevin Clark, and Aaron Edelson we introduced a new segment of the show that we’re calling “The Deemable Dozen”, the top twelve tech news stories in under 12 minutes, and then talked about how Gizmodo reporter Mat Honan’s digital life was destroyed, and then we did the Two Step Verification, baby. (You’ll have to listen to understand.)

…all that and more on this episode of Deemable Tech.

Deemable Tech – Episode 10 – The Two Step Verification, Baby

The Deemable Dozen:

1. Sprint reduces iPhone 4S to $149.99 and Apple prices matches.
2. 3 guys try to buy cheap iPads off Craigslist and get robbed instead.
3. Google Nexus Q production postponed, but you’ll get it for if you already placed a pre-order.
4. Before Apple went nuclear on Samsung, Apple offered Samsung a licensing agreement: $30 for every smartphone and $40 for every tablet.
5. Google Listen is dead! Long live all the other podcast apps in Google Play!
6. Microsoft asks everyone to stop calling it Metro; call it Windows 8.
7. Square and Starbucks partnered up,  and ordered Orange Mocha Frappuccinos for everyone!
8. Everyone else in the mobile payments industry except for Square or Starbucks (including AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, Verizon, Google, Intuit, ISIS, PayPal and several banks) joined the Mobile Payments Committee of the Electronics Transactions Association.
9. OUYA ended its Kickstarter campaign 8.65 million over their goal! Now OUYA has started accepting preorders.
10. Apollo 13 was really saved by a hippy at MIT?
11. WikiLeaks is under attack.
12. Mat Honan got hacked.

Links we mentioned on today’s show:

• http://www.androidcentral.com/5-better-podcast-options-android-now-google-listen-dead
• http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/08/apple-amazon-mat-honan-hacking/all/
• http://support.google.com/accounts/bin/answer.py?hl=en&topic=1056283&answer=185839

Bumper Music

• Black Eyed Peas – I Gotta Feeling (8-Bit)
• The Beatles – I Am The Walrus (8-Bit Remix)