ReadWriteBiz

In announcing plans to buy Demandforce, a marketing Software-as-a-Service provider, Intuit is signaling its intention to grab a bigger share of the high-end of the small business market.

With its market-leading Quickbooks product, Intuit is already the dominant force in sales of accounting and payroll software for small businesses. In an attempt to expand its portfolio - especially in the fast-growing SaaS segment, the company said Friday it would acquire Demandforce in May for $423.5 million in cash, making it the company’s most expensive purchase under chief executive Brad Smith.

Everything is moving to the cloud, including phone systems. Today, RingCentral.com is launching new features for its completely cloud-based small-business phone system called Cloud Presence. The new system keeps track of where you are, even if you connect using multiple devices such as a mobile phone, tablet and laptop.

The folks at Flowtown have put together a quick reference guide to six different social media services. Called the SMB Social Media Cheat Sheet, it contains basic stats on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Google+, Tumblr and Digg. What, no LinkedIn? That is perhaps the biggest missing service, but otherwise the infographic, reproduced below, is worth bookmarking for those noobs in your company that are looking to learn more about each service.

Wanna win $5000 for your favorite non-profit? All it takes is to post a slide deck on Sliderocket for this contest called Make an Impact. Your presentation needs to be posted before March 28, and probably as soon as possible so you can begin promoting it and get some views. The four presentations with the most unique presentation views and judged to have the best storyline, composition and compelling cause will each win a $5,000 donation to their non-profit.

You don't have to be employed by the non-profit to enter: just designate who is going to get the dough if you win. The winning entries will be based on the strength of your story, presentation composition, and your non-profit's potential to make an impact.

Good luck! It is a great idea, and showcase's SlideRocket's process to collaborate too.

Back in the day; back when we still did telephone interviews, mall intercepts, and door to door product placements, i.e. before the Internet, it used to take weeks, sometimes months, to get results from marketing research projects.

To test a package, for example, we would contract with a field service that had a mall facility and recruit shoppers to compare the package designs and tell us about their preferences. Generally it would take two to three weeks to get the artwork and approvals from the client, two weeks to actually conduct the interviewing, a week to have the questionnaires coded and tabulated, then another week to prepare the final report and present it to the client.

MasterCard and Microsoft announced a new strategic initiative to market and sell Microsoft's cloud productivity service, Office 365. You can get an automatic 10% discount when you buy through their easysavings.com discount program and use your MasterCard. There are several plans that start at $6 per user per month for less than 50 seats (undiscounted).

If you are feeling a bit of a credit crunch around this time of year, it might be a good idea to check out the reviews of business credit cards on NextAdvisor.com here. The reviews site is trying to bulk up its business offerings, and now covers business VOIP services, some basic recommendations on cloud computing, online meeting providers and Web hosting services, in addition to its consumer offerings that it cut its teeth on such as best dating sites and diet programs.

We last wrote about them earlier this fall, looking at their reviews of online backup service providers. They add oodles of content each week, and their comparison charts are very well done, giving you the implications of features and pricing options for each service covered. All the content is free and well organized.

The latest semi-annual State of SMB IT report from Spiceworks was released last week. It contains some interesting mobile and cloud computing trends, culled from 1,300 users of the SaaS-based IT management software. They found that the "growth engine is well warmed up and on a path of continued growth and investment" for SMB-related IT spending. Budgets grew nine percent year over year, the largest increase in two years.

There are dozens, if not more, vendors offering Web conferencing services. They mostly fall into two price tiers: $50 or more per month, with various fees, and next to nothing that offer few features. The higher-priced spread is great on features but requires some setup, the low end can be quick to use but not very robust.

That middle ground is where YourOfficeAnywhere.com is trying to claim, and while I haven't used it for very long, it has some promise. For $10 per user per month, you get a combination of three separate services:

• A cloud-based file storage
• Web conferencing, including Web camera, screen sharing, audio conference bridge and whiteboarding
• Text chat, group messaging, and activity streams

If you can't afford big-time analytics price tags, you might want to take a look at the CaptureSMB service from 44Doors. The company announced this lower-priced SMB version today that is easy to use and set up campaign management tools. You can create individual micro-sites with a variety of tracking tools and automatically generate QR codes and short URLs to analyze your visitors' behavior and traffic patterns across mobile browsers and various social networks.