Last night, Pocket Retailer moved into position as the #1 Paid Business App in the app store. We are extremely excited about the app’s momentum and are always looking for ways to improve it.

If you haven’t downloaded it yet, you can pick it up here for $0.99: http://bit.ly/7v6Z5A.

Please contact us with any suggestions or comments.

Pocket Retailer got an unexpected boost today when it appeared on Apple’s “New and Noteworthy” list of apps.

It is also quickly climbing the “charts”, currently sitting at #14 in the Business section.

It’s official. Pocket Retailer has finally hit the App Store and is now available for your iPhone or iPod Touch. Download it here for $0.99 (opens in iTunes).

What is it? A collection of 14 micro-apps designed to help you increase your bottom line. Micro-apps include calculators for: Turns, Break-Even Turns, GMROI, Sale Pricing, and much more.

I know this has nothing to do with retailing, but it’s a good cause. Drew Carey has agreed to give $1 to LIVESTRONG for every follower (up to 1 million) that he has on Twitter by the end of the year. Today, I launched DrewVsCancer.com so that you can watch his followers add up in real time. Why? It’s easier than constantly hitting refresh. Plus, people are going to get a whole lot more interested as his follower count gets close to the 1,000,000 mark.

I am currently developing an iPhone application that will consist of common retail calculators such as sale price, break-even turns, open-to-buy, and others. Which formulas do you use from day-to-day?

A website and blog can be one of the most direct and effective ways to connect with your customers. To maximize your return on this investment, you need to be able to collect and analyze data about where your website views are coming from, how your users interact with your website, and how many times each page (or blog entry) in your site is being viewed.

Google offers a free service called Google Analytics to make website analytics simple for websites large and small. Configuring Google Analytics for your website does not take much time and has a huge payoff. Here is how to get started (pass this on to whoever manages your website):

• Go to http://www.google.com/analytics
• Go through the sign up process – if you don’t have a Google account, you will need to set on up; note that Google allows anybody to sign up, regardless of your e-mail address
• During the sign up, you will need to provide some basic information regarding your website; if you have multiple websites, you can add more later
• At the end of the sign-up process, you will be given instructions on how to add the tracking code to your page; simply copy and paste the code right before the “</body>” tag of each page on your website

If you operate a blog, the instructions above may be slightly different. WordPress has plug-ins that can be installed to enable Google Analytics. For BlogSpot, you will need to edit the layout HTML.

Google Analytics includes additional tools for eCommerce sites that are also incredibly useful.

No matter the size and scope of your web presence, you should be taking advantage of Google Analytics. If you have a blog, I strongly recommend implementing Google Analytics there as well.

If you would like additional information or help in implementing Google Analytics, please Contact Us.

Nearly every business relies, at least partly, on some form of computerized storage. From spreadsheets to databases to marketing materials, you work hard to manage all of the digital content that drives your business. Use this guide to come up with a manageable and affordable backup plan.

Data Loss … a Matter of Time

Listen closely. This is the most important tidbit that I’m going to share with you: Your data will inevitably be lost or corrupted. That said, you should frame your backup plan in the context of “When I lose my data….”, not “If I lose my data…”. It is definitely worth taking some time to develop a thoughtful backup strategy.

The Big 3

In my experience, there are three major reasons you should be regularly backing up:

1. Hard Drive Failure: I’ve seen these fail anywhere between 0 and 6 years. If you have ever lost a hard drive, you know how painful this can be. There are firms that specialize in recovering data from a bad drive, but they are expensive and can’t guarantee results.
2. User Error: Oops! You accidentally just saved over the top of a presentation you’ve been working on for weeks. Or, you just accidentally ran a process against your Point-of-Sale database that had some unintended consequences. Now what?
3. Disaster: From fires to spills, bad things happen that can put your business data out of commission.

Protecting Against Hard Drive Failure

When it comes to hard drive failure, the best remedy is to keep an up-to-date copy of your files on another machine or hard drive.

If you are running a central server, you should require all business critical data to be saved centrally and then use a nightly backup program to save all of your data to tapes, hard drives, or other locations. Check out this post for a list of programs to assist in backing up.

When you are purchasing a new server, you should also look into configuring your hard drives in what is known as a RAID array. There are many flavors of RAID, most of which provide an additional layer of redundancy by utilizing multiple hard drives to store your data. Most computer manufacturers can pre-configure this for you.

For backing up data on satellite PCs or your own personal machine, I strongly recommend a product such as Mozy – a remote backup service that is extremely easy to use and is also very affordable. More on Mozy later.

Protecting Against User Error

There is no way to completely protect your data from user error. The best remedy is to backup often and maintain multiple backups to facilitate “point-in-time” recovery. One way to accomplish this is to have your nightly backup save to a different location for every day of the week. This gives you some breathing room in which you can catch an issue and also provides a number of options for recovering the data.

If you utilize any database software, this isn’t quite as easy. Most modern databases support something called a transaction log that can enable a skilled DBA to restore to an exact point in time without keeping multiple copies. However, keeping multiple copies is a good intermediate step.

Disaster Recovery

In the event of a true disaster, the only solution is to keep a copy of your data off site at all times. I recommend using MozyPro to take nightly incremental backups of your data. Depending on the size of your data, this may not be viable. That said, I know of a location that has 15 GB backed up offsite using MozyPro. Be aware that if you had to restore from MozyPro, it would be much slower than having a hard drive on site that you could plug in and transfer files from.

An alternative to MozyPro is to get in the habit of keeping a copy of your data on an external hard drive off site at all times.

Whenever you store data offsite, remember to be responsible in selecting which data to backup this way. Security and customer privacy should always be a top priority.

Conclusion

Every business will have different requirements with regards to backing up their data. Some have to consider databases. Some can afford more expensive technologies for making data storage more redundant.

Mix and match the above recommendations to meet your unique requirements and budget. A good backup solution will have multiple layers to provide adequate redundancy. For example, it is a good idea to implement a RAID array on your server in addition to performing nightly backups.

After you implement your plan, make sure that you actively follow up to make sure that it is running as expected. You should regularly verify that you are able to recover your data and that the data being recovered is up-to-date. I have witnessed first-hand the pain of losing data and finding out that the backup process that was supposed to be running actually wasn’t.

Soon to follow this post, I will upload a worksheet to help you evaluate your current backup plan and create a new one if necessary.

Note: This post is not to be used as an exhaustive reference. Please work with your IT department or professional or contact us for a free consultation.