ReadWriteBiz

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.

Facebook has begun to roll out some of the features available with Facebook Places for owners of Pages, according to a post on Inside Facebook. Some business Pages that have a physical address listed are being given the ability to offer deals to customers and let them check-in to the location, just as business owners can with Facbeook Places set up.

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.

This week, Microsoft's search engine Bing launched a profile management portal for businesses much like Google and Yelp have offered for some time. The Bing Business Portal gives companies the ability to edit and enhance their business's listings on the site, as well as publish special offers and deals for customers.

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 each week, ReadWriteBiz rounds up the most important tech news and insights for small and medium-sized businesses.

On Thursday, we took a look at Flow, a new to-do list management Web app that offers collaborative features for small teams. Flow is still in closed beta, but its feature set and well-designed UI may offer real competition for popular tools like Remember the Milk and Things. There's also a really cool Easter egg hidden on their homepage, if you can find it.

The mobile payment processing space got a little more crowded today with the launch of Sage Mobile Payments, a product targeting small and medium-sized businesses.

Much like Square and Intuit's GoPayment system, Sage Mobile Payments offers a plastic credit card reader that plugs into the audio jack of a smartphone. How Sage is hoping to differentiate themselves is with their pricing structure. Rather than charging processing fees for each transaction, their plan is to charge customers a "nominal set-up fee" and a monthly fee starting at $10.95.

Google officially unveiled Honeycomb - version 3.0 of its Android operating system - earlier today, and there are already tablet-optimized business apps lined up for the brand new OS.

Of course, apps designed for previous versions of Android should work just fine in Honeycomb, so current users won't lose their favorite productivity tools. Here are a few tablet-specific apps just announced today.

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 each week, ReadWriteBiz rounds up the most important tech news and insights for small and medium-sized businesses.

In a story that is likely to have implications for small and medium-sizes businesses down the line, Starbucks announced this week that they're launching their mobile payments system nationwide in the U.S. Rather than using something like Near Field Communications to accept payments, the system utilizes smart phone apps, which display a bar code for the cashier to scan. The amount of purchase is deducted from the customer's Starbucks account.

This holiday season may be offering a glimpse of things to come in 2011 and beyond, as the number of consumers who have used their mobile devices to make purchases has exploded.

As TechCrunch reported yesterday, mobile payments made between Nov. 15 and Dec. 15 increased 300% from this time last year, according to PayPal. The total mobile transactions for the period came to $13 million, according to All Things Digital.

ROAMpay, a mobile credit card reading device and application similar to Square, is now available on Blackberry devices.

ROAM Data, the app's creators, tout it as the first credit card reader for Blackberry devices, adding that to a list of supported platforms that includes Android and iOS, as well as Mac and PC desktops.

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 every Friday, ReadWriteBiz rounds up the week's most important tech news and insights for small and medium-sized businesses.