ReadWriteBiz

For small businesses and startups, the selection of Web-based tools available for things like communication, productivity, finance and IT is seemingly limitless, with new products launching left and right each week.

In a recent survey, business app advice startup BestVendor asked 550 startup executives and managers which tools they most preferred for a variety of business-related functions.

If you are trying to collaborate on a confidential document or presentation, the last thing you want to do is be emailing it back and forth over the Internet without some form of protection. There are numerous technologies that can help you, from general email encryption products to more specialty software solutions that are designed for this purpose. Let's take a look at the alternatives.

Keeping up with every tech headline is hard enough for anybody, let alone busy professionals. To help, ReadWriteBiz rounds up the week's most important tech news and insights for small- and medium-sized businesses.

Our most-read post here on ReadWriteBiz in the past week was How to Optimize Your Brand's Facebook Page for Search Engines. More than 70% of major brands don't have their Facebook page optimized enough to turn up in the first 20 search results for their company's name, according to one recent report. Fortunately, the process of making one's page more SEO-friendly is pretty straight-forward on Facebook.

Acknowledging a "major shift" in the way the working world operates, Adobe announced today the release of two cloud-based tools designed to help people collaborate and manage files across multiple devices.

Adobe SendNow is a service that allows coworkers to share large files with each other and keep track of them via a centralized dashboard.

Keeping up with every RSS feed item, tweet and emailed link is hard enough for anybody, let alone someone who's trying to run a business. That's why each Friday, ReadWriteBiz rounds up the week's most important tech news and insights for small and medium-sized businesses.

Twitter revealed the latest piece of its monetization puzzle Monday by announcing that it would be rolling out a self-service advertising platform for small businesses next year.