Google, along with its partners, is helping small business owners build a free three-page website; provide a free custom domain name and hosting for one year; and list the business on Google Places at no cost. It’s supposed to be really easy, too.

Once you sign up, you will be given access to an online website design program powered by Intuit. After choosing a template, you can change colors, add photos and information, and complete basic customizations. The site will then be published at your chosen domain for all to see. Other tools — both online and in-person — are also available to help business owners make the most of their new websites. There’s information on how to integrate the site with AdWords, Google+ and mobile phones.

As of this writing, Get Your Business Online is available to small businesses located in Vermont, Michigan, Oklahoma, Utah, Minnesota and a few other states, but Google plans to roll out the program nationwide. To see if you qualify, you can check the program website. You can also signup to be notified when your state becomes eligible.

If your business is not yet online, this is the perfect opportunity to launch it into the 21st century. So get with Google and get your business online now. Click here to visit the site and check if you are eligible.

Did you know that 52% of nine year olds and 95% of 15 year olds have a mobile phone, and that by 2020 most of us will connect to the internet via our mobile? Remember why you first agreed to get your child a mobile? Apart from their nagging, safety probably had something to do with it – you could check on where they were and what they were up to.

Mobiles come with new concerns for parents – namely internet safety, theft, bullying and who your kids are chatting to without supervision (never mind why their phone runs out of credit faster than you can top it up and always goes to voicemail when you really need to talk to them).

Now smartphones, such as iPhones, have upped the ante considerably. They’re essentially handheld computers, so worries about your child stumbling across pornographic or violent content, or being groomed in chatrooms, via their computer now apply equally to their phone. No matter how clued up you are about internet safety on your home computer, you need to get similarly clued up about your child’s phone if you want to keep them as safe in the cyber-world as you try to in the real one. Click here for a parent’s checklist for their child’s mobile phone.

Despite big changes in technology over the past couple of decades, IT departments and the duties of their staffers have stayed pretty consistent. The classic IT operation involves help desk agents, desktop support staff, systems and network administrators, DBAs and developers, and managers at various levels reporting to a CIO or technology director.

It’s a system that’s worked pretty well, surviving the arrival of the Internet and related shifts in both technology and culture, with very little change to the actual duties of staffers and the running of a department.

Until now.

A combination of forces — the move to mobility, the arrival of a new generation of employees and the bring-your-own-device (BYOD) trend — is changing the world of IT with a speed that might have seemed impossible a few years ago. The same is true of technology and how users interact with their smartphones and tablets, computers and even personal cloud services.

At its most basic level, the integration of technology into users’ everyday lives — both at home and at work — is forcing IT pros to reinvent themselves, what they do and how they do it. Click here to have a look at how these forces will be reshaping IT for years to come.

It is difficult to create a must-have app list due to the overwhelming options in the Android Market. Where we used to suffer from scarcity, now we are burdened by the tyranny of choice. If you just got an Android phone and want to know the first 10 apps you should download, this story is for you.

Deliberate omissions from the list are the most obvious such as Angry Birds. Also left out are no-brainer Google apps, such as Google Maps – if you are an Android user, you should already have it installed. And, this goes for the native Gmail client as well. Google+ and Google Music are neat apps, but they have a way to go before they could be deemed essential. The list is also light on social media apps – no Facebook or Twitter clients made the list. Most people probably don’t need to tweet from their phone, and those that do already know to download the client. So which apps made the list? Click here to find out.

Online sellers are constantly making decisions away from their computers – whether deciding to purchase inventory at an auction or choosing their shipping options at USPS. Now, sellers can be better informed when making those decisions. Outright, the leading streamlined, online accounting solution, today announced that it has released a mobile application that online sellers can use on their mobile devices to keep track of sales and expense data while on the go.

“It is critical for our online sellers to be able to manage their businesses from wherever they are, and the Outright Mobile app lets them do just that,” said Steven Aldrich, CEO of Outright. “Now, they can make decisions about buying inventory while they are actually in the store, and, in the next version of our app, they will be able to record cash transactions immediately on their mobile device.”

“Entrepreneurs need to know if they’re profitable or not. I spent years fighting with confusing accounting software, but Outright has simplified this for me,” said Outright customer Monaica Ledell. “It’s so easy – it’s addictive. And, now, it’s even better with their mobile app, I can see how my business is doing on the go or even on the couch.”

The Outright Mobile app is available in the iTunes App Store or at offers.outright.com/mobile. The solution features a business overview/snapshot, account lists and balances, income transactions and details, “In The Know” alerts, and expense transactions and details. “Add / edit” features to allow the input of cash-based transactions will also be launched shortly. Click here to read more or click here to download from the Apple App Store.

Everybody loves apps but when selecting apps for your device it is important to look at what you are authorizing when you install them.

Apps are from third party developers, and not all of the apps on the marketplace can automatically be assumed to be safe.

The screenshots below show the difference between Facebook Messenger and Debit Payoff Planner applications. The permissions shown illustrate what the apps are able to access within your device. As you can see in the pictures the Facebook Messenger app has two pages of items in the phone that it can access, whereas the debit payoff planner has only two items.

Bad applications can be a source of malware or viruses, and smartphone users need to remain aware of the access they grant to applications to help reduce viruses and spam.

I am an irregular coffee drinker. I don’t need it to get up in the morning, but I do need it after a rough night or a heavy lunch. I am also, though, an irregular sleeper. Some nights I find myself wide awake at 3 a.m. Could it have been that cup of coffee I had after lunch? Should I have had tea instead? Would that have been enough to get me through the afternoon?

Well, now, as they say, there’s an app for that: Caffeine Zone, based on research on the “pharmacokinetics of caffeine.” You enter how much coffee or tea you’ve had, when you had it, and how quickly you drank it, then the app sends you an alert when you might need another cup to keep you sharp. It also warns you when the coffee you’re about to have might keep you up at night. On a graph, it maps the amount of caffeine in your body against color-coded zones corresponding to the compound’s metabolic effects.

According to Frank Ritter, the Penn State cognitive scientist who thought up the app, one of the lessons it teaches is that, like many other daily drugs—antibiotics, for example, or nicotine—caffeine is most effective when intake is front-loaded. The first coffee of the day should be the biggest, and drunk the fastest, for a big bump, and the rest of the day’s doses should be smaller and ingested more slowly. You want to stay in that optimum range. “You don’t want to have these big pulses of a whole cup,” he emphasizes. “I say cold coffee is good.” It’s trajectory management: Launch rocket, achieve desired altitude, maintain orbit with tweaks. Click here to read more, or click here to download from the Apple App Store.

Mediating messy business disputes takes patience, psychological savvy and a knack for intense negotiations. What’s been missing, says Fort Worth lawyer and alternative dispute resolution expert John Allen Chalk, is accessible historical and mathematical data on how these mediations are resolved.

“We old veterans always have kept up with the numbers on a legal pad,” Chalk says. “It’s not always been efficient and user-friendly.”

Deductive reasoners will predict this next line: Now, there’s an app for that. San Antonio mediation lawyer Donald R. Philbin Jr. has developed Picture It Settled, a mobile phone app that helps negotiators calculate offers and graph trajectories to settlement.

Lawyers and mediators can plug in information on dollar moves and time intervals between offers, and the app creates an infographic of possible outcome scenarios — all based on data collected from past cases.

“Don has created a software that has captured time and money data without identifying parties. There are clear patterns here, and this app helps add the element of factual outcomes with the emotions and psychology,” Chalk says.

Picture It Settled is available for free on Android and iPhone devices. Click here to read more, click here to download from the Android App market, or click here to download from the Apple App Store.

Even though I love Siri and how you can have quite a bit of fun with it, Google Voice actions are clearly faster.

Motorola pit their devices using Google Voice Actions, against iPhone’s Siri. They show off how Google’s version of speak recognition is a lot faster and can manipulate Google’s amazing built in apps to get things done super quick. You may be able to talk to Siri to have a small conversation or a bit of banter but that novelty wears off quickly. I use Siri to get tasks done and after using Google Voice Action’s I’ve found Google’s version is quicker.

The only thing I’d say Siri beat Voice Actions at were at reminders and searching for something like “world’s tallest building”. In Siri it will show the data within the app quite quickly, Google Voice Action’s will instead search it in Google and then you will have to click on a link to find the data which is time consuming. Click here to read more.

Visa on Monday announced a “one-stop” mobile payment solution that looks to compete directly with Google Wallet and the carrier-backed ISIS payment system.

After a consumer purchases a “Visa-certified” NFC-equipped smartphone, he or she can contact the company and activate the handset for mobile payments. The device will be securely linked with a user’s bank account and can then be used to make mobile payments anywhere Visa’s payWave system is accepted.

“In the same way we have enabled the secure provisioning of payment cards for decades, we are now using mobile technology to securely provision mobile payment accounts over the air,” Visa’s Head of Mobile Products Bill Gajda said. “Financial institutions, mobile network operators, and even transit operators now have a simple, secure process to activate payment applications at scale and make mobile payments part of everyday life for consumers around the world.”

The company announced that Intel Atom-powered smartphones and tablets will be the first Visa-certified devices to allow mobile subscribers to securely make NFC purchases. Click here to read more.