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're like most modern professionals, you conduct a lot of discussions over email. We don't often realize it as we go about our day-to-day, but the information contained in some of those emails can have some long-term value to the organization.

Even with a system of stars and labels such as what Google Apps users are accustomed to, important emails can easily get buried several pages deep. In the event that an employee leaves the company, that knowledge can disappear with them.

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

The Google Small Business blog continued to highlight the products that are newly available to Google Apps customers, including Alerts, YouTube, Google Translate Toolkit, and the 3D design program Google SketchUp. In each blog post, Google explains how these tools can be used by businesses both large and small.

As most business users of Google Apps know by now, Google recently added dozens of new services to Google Apps, including AdWords, Analytics, DoubleClick, Feedburner, Reader and Voice, among others.

The update gives Google Apps customers access to a whole suite of applications that were previously only available to individual users.

Memeo Connect, an app for managing and sycing Google Docs across multiple devices, got a significant upgrade earlier this week.

The app is targeted at small and medium-sized businesses as a means to create, share, edit and manage Google Docs both online and offline.

In its latest move targeting small to medium-sized businesses, Google launched a new blog yesterday called the Google Small Business Blog, which promises to offer tips and tools for SMB's.