ReadWriteWeb

After writing last year about cloud computing can help SMBs move out of the recession, the folks at Glowhost put together a nice infographic that summarizes some of our key points and provides a nice checklist for what they should demand from their cloud providers.

Square, the mobile payments company launched in 2009 by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, is the name most often bandied about in tech circles these days when it comes to talk of credit-card swiping attachments made for iPhone. But Square was never alone on the mobile payments battlefront, and now it has a new competitor backed by a well-known brand name: Intuit.

Today Intuit is making its two-year-old premium GoPayment service free - a service which comes with a magnetic stripe reader attachment that hooks onto the iPhone, similar to the one Square offers.

In 2010, it felt like the flurry of new startups and Web tools only accelerated, with more and more products popping up every week. For business owners, it's not always easy to stay on top of it all, let alone take each of these new offerings for a spin to see if they're worth using.

As 2011 approaches, ReadWriteWeb takes a look back at 10 of the last year's most useful or promising Web tools for small and medium-sized businesses.

Small and medium-sized businesses that sell online are expecting the remainder of this holiday shopping season to be strong, generally have an optimistic view of how their businesses will do in the near future, and consider mobile commerce an important part of that future.

This is according to Ebay's Online Business Index survey, which was conducted in the United States for the first time this year, after being done in Europe in Australia since 2008.

As the most recent WikiLeaks data dump continues to dominate headlines, one of the most striking aspects of the whole affair is how a low-level government operative was able to get their hands on so much sensitive data.

Apparently, the federal government isn't alone in being lax with data security. While the potential consequences are far less serious, small and medium-sized businesses are often guilty some questionable computing practices.

Edith Yeung has a knack for bringing smart people together.

For evidence of that, one needed to look no further than the fourth floor auditorium of the Metreon in San Francisco last weekend. It was there that Yeung and her team hosted a series of speakers, panels and product demos for a floor full of attendees, each of whom found the line-up tempting enough to coax them out of bed early on a Saturday.

All businesses have legal needs but not every company has the resources to hire a team of fancy, top notch lawyers.

For smaller companies and nonprofits who fall into this category, there's Rocket Lawyer, a Website that offers legal assistance on a small business budget.

The use of social media to connect with customers is growing among small businesses, according to the results of a semi-annual survey released last week by American Express OPEN, the small business arm of American Express.

Approximately four out of ten small businesses said they used social networking sites to communicate with customers and market their products, according to the Small Business Monitor survey. Not surprisingly, the vast majority of those companies prefer Facebook to other major players liked Twitter and LinkedIn.

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.

Web-based invoices that give the recipient the option to pay online result in payments being made twice as fast as those that do not, according to data from Harvest, an online time-tracking and invoicing product.

Based on a sample of data containing over 250,000 paid invoices from their system, Harvest found that the invoices that included the option to pay using PayPal were paid 16 days faster than those that did not, which took an average of 32 days.