“We wanted a different way to get brand awareness for our new club,” says Jenkins. “Poggled came up during a Google search for options, so we decided to give it a try.” Jenkins contacted the service—a daily deals app that attracts clientele to nightlife establishments—and started offering a $120 bottle service package deal, valued at $250, on designated days of the week.

“We went with the product that has the highest markup and it’s worked out really well,” says Jenkins, who hasn’t tracked specific revenues resulting from Poggled, but has picked up a respectable level of both new and repeat business from the site, which takes a margin on the deals instead of charging upfront fees. “Anytime you can promote your brand and attract new customers without writing a check, it’s great for business,” he says.

Poggled co-founders Joe Matthews and Sean Strother, both 30, launched their firm in 2009 and now have 30 employees. The service, which is available on iPhone and Android smartphones, has become the Groupon version of nightlife. Its owners—high school friends who both attended Northwestern University for graduate school—altered their original business model and, with investors, were able to raise $5.6 million at a $33 million pre-valuation.

“The investors said, ‘Look, you need to do what Groupon is doing, but in the nightlife space because Groupon can’t do nightlife,’” recalls Strother. “There’s a totally different subscriber, to Groupon’s list, and many of its functions don’t work well for nightlife.”

The pair heeded that advice and spent the majority of 2009 figuring out the right way to sell deals in the nightlife space. This was the first step toward establishing their stake in the rapidly maturing daily deals market. The firm currently has 50,000 e-mail subscribers, and 25,000 iOS (Apple’s operating system) and Android installs. It works with more than 300 venues in a small-but-expanding crop of cities including New York, Chicago, Milwaukee, and Denver.

The service uses the geographical position of mobile devices and highlights deals based on proximity to where the user is at any given moment. “Users can also browse by deal category [sports bar, club, etc.], day of the week, and by bar name,” says Strother. Using the pay-for-performance strategy, Poggled takes a margin on the deals they negotiate with their clients, which negates the upfront costs that other services may require. In addition, in comparison to traditional daily discount sites, Strother and Matthews offer distinct deals. “The difference between Poggled and traditional daily deal sites … is that most daily deal sites offer “flash” sales, which are only available for a short time, whereas our deals are always available for purchase,” says Strother.

In engineering their app, Strother and Matthews avoided troubleshooting pockets by picking all-encompassing software. “We didn’t run into many technical challenges while developing the iPhone app,” says Strother. “The thing about iOS is you only have to develop an app for one phone. The Android platform is open source, so there is a litany of devices by several manufacturers. It’s tough to develop an application that works seamlessly across all of those devices on the first shot.

“The good thing about the Android marketplace,” Strother continues, “is that as soon as you push an update it automatically pushes to devices, so many of those bugs, we’ve cleaned up.”

Looking ahead, Strother and Matthews have their eyes on longevity in the market. “We’re in it for the long haul,” Strother says. “We don’t want to be this flash in the pan company, and we want the people that work here to feel like they’re at a company that has sustaining power.”

—Bridget McCrea and Dale Coachman

Creative Director Terence Saulsby: Once you get past the "wow" of a magazine's iPad app, you're going to want the info.

As the vice president/creative director of Black Enterprise, Terence Saulsby is responsible for the look and feel of the brand, regardless of the medium. But he will be one of the first to admit that print has been the primary medium of concern for BE during his tenure at the media company. Black Enterprise is only now nearing completion of a mobile site, which, by all accounts, makes them late to the handheld party.  However, as Saulsby has realized along the journey of creating the BE iPad app, what the brand is doing on the iPad gives them an undeniable opportunity to be a leader in the space.

How long have you been directing the look and feel of BE?
I’ve been on the magazine for about 12 years.

And is this your first time reproducing the monthly mag–or any content–for a tablet device?
Yes.

So what was this process like for you?
When we first started this a couple of months ago–it’s been a really quick turnaround process for us–the industry was touting the iPad as the savior of print magazines. So all of the things that came out before or had been touted–other than maybe like a Sports Illustrated, a Time Warner vehicle, where you’ve got extremely deep pockets to facilitate filling out the video content–most of the things we had seen before were pretty much one-to-one representations of print pages.  And that’s where we were initially leaning, basically kind of just porting the magazine over, as is, into the iPad, almost like a Zinio-like product. But after a couple of weeks of actually considering that, we decided to go the full route and redesign the magazine for the iPad and lay it out differently.

In doing that we realized that the information can be delivered in a different way. You can break the information up differently from a magazine and make it somewhat more interactive.  So it’s been kind of a learning process for us. This is the first time we’ve done this, and seeing what the device allows you to do versus what you’re allowed to do on the static page is kind of eye-opening.  So we’ve been playing with that as much as we can while still sticking to the Wealth for Life mission of Black Enterprise.

I noticed that the page layout changes when you switch between the horizontal and vertical orientations of the iPad, which not all apps do. Did this design choice make the process more difficult?
It’s much more difficult to do it that way because you have to lay the pages out twice. Everything has to be done twice. It has to be checked twice, it has to be proofed twice, and quite honestly, it’s a pain in the neck.  But I think it gives the user a better experience. Because no matter what orientation you’re viewing it in, you still get a well-designed experience.

What’s the normal turnaround time for the print versus the iPad edition?
We separate the processes because the magazine gets a final-final proof before it goes to print, well after it’s laid out in pages. If we tried to marry the two processes, then you’d have to proof the pages concurrently and make all the changes concurrently. So we get the print version complete first–which takes two to three weeks to get printed and delivered–and that gives us a nice little window in order to work on the iPad version. We strip the text out of the print version and reformat everything. And the proofing process goes a lot quicker because it was already finalized once.  Our copy team, at that point, is only checking for my mistakes.  It really only takes us about three days of focusing on the iPad to get all the layouts redone, and then another three days to proof everything and make all the changes, and get the assets ready for delivery. So that’s about a six-day turnaround whereas the magazine is generally about a three-week turnaround.

BE isn’t a fashion magazine but the photos really seem to pop in the iPad version.

The images look like they do when we’re laying them out on screen. My photo editor is extremely happy.  Everything is crisp and sharp, the color is how you want it to be.  On the other hand, when you print, there are a lot of considerations–quality of paper, how fast the presses run, what ads run next to what copy, etc.  Fashion magazines put a lot of effort and energy into getting those images right with those considerations, but as a small business publication, we can’t spend the same amount of resources on that as Vanity Fair.  So in the magazine there’s always a degradation of the imagery from where we want it to be.  With the iPad it’s a one-to-one deal.

The color-coded navigation in the app is identical to the magazine. Did you ever consider designing a different navigation scheme for the iPad?
We wanted to have the iPad app feel like the print version of Black Enterprise, so we took a lot of the same elements and reformatted them.  The color-coding is something we do in the magazine, but it also works well on the iPad because it’s just easy to hit the bottom nav and scroll through the color bars. It’s an eye mnemonic that just catches you, so you don’t necessarily have to read as much.  And I think that any time you can present a visual stimulant, an icon or color that goes along with wording, it just makes it easier on the viewer to actually get to the information quickly.

This app does seem more about the BE experience than the capabilities of the iPad. What would you say to folks looking for the “wow factor” in this app?
I’ve seen a number of applications that have a lot of “wow factor”.  The way they put these things together, I’m like ‘My god, this is absolutely incredible.’  It’s fun to play with, interesting to view, and highly interactive. However, after a few hours you’re like ‘Okay, I played the game. But where’s the info?’ Our mission is to get you the info.  Our viewers and our readers are generally busy people, so we try to present the information in a manner where you can get it as quickly as possible.

Now that the app is available, are you already thinking about what’s next?
I don’t think we’ve come close to exploring what things we can really blow out monthly.  The more we do, the more we see that we can change and play with. We’re–right now–working on our third version [of the app] and it’ll have a lot more screen interactivity than the July or the August versions.

Sharif and partner Ed Young formed F2F660 Digital shortly after the iPad's debut.

Ali Sharif is an industry veteran with more than 20 years experience as a communications/interactive professional. He has made vital contributions to everyone from AT&T and Mos Def to The New York Times. He has also racked up his fair share of awards throughout these years, including a few from The Society of Newspaper Design.

Soon after the iPad debuted, Sharif and longtime friend Ed Young formed F2F 6Sixty Digital, a joint venture that combined the resources of both their companies.  The new entity would give them the resources and connections they needed to bring a quality app to market.

On the eve of the BE app’s launch on Thursday, August 19, Sharif took the time to explain how everything came together, and what he and the F2F 6Sixty team set out to accomplish with this app.

How did the F2F660 relationship with BE begin?
F2F was already doing a circulation piece for Black Enterprise–a subscription module that allows magazine publishers to offer the lowest price to their subscribers when it’s time for them to re-up. And it allows them to pass on savings to their friends once they’ve bought the magazine. So they were already dealing with Black Enterprise on that.

Ed and I had been friends for a bit and were trying to figure out what to do in the iPad realm. So it seemed like the perfect opportunity to approach BE about the iPad since we were already talking to them about the F2F stuff.

What were you looking to accomplish with this app? What was your goal?
As I started downloading magazine apps, one of the things that frustrated me was trying to read the magazine. I was inundated by all this animation and I was like ‘I just want to read the damn magazine!’ I’m not so interested in the title sliding in or funky ways to separate the text from the graphics–I want to read the magazine.  So for us, it was about finding a publisher or title that had content that was worth reading, and that was really how we decided to go to Black Enterprise, because they had good content.

If you have good content, and if it’s a business magazine like Black Enterprise is, then their demographic isn’t the demo for all the fancy graphic animation. You can do some of them, but they want to read the content. It’s vital, important, valuable content. So how do we create an app that really facilitates reading the content?

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If you’re reading content, you want to bookmark that content because you want to get back to it. You want to be able to create notes around it because you want to remember what your thought was when you were reading it. You want to be able to share this stuff with other people. There are things that you want to do with content that are aside from whether or not it slides on or off the page. Once it does that you’re still faced with having to read it. So we were like, ‘Lets get to the reading part.’

BE has this valuable content. It’s a great magazine. So how do we create an app that makes people feel like they want to read the magazine? That was our question and that was our goal.

Regardless of how you attempt to navigate through this app, getting to the information you want seems incredibly intuitive.  What, if any, steps were taken to account for all of the possible user scenarios?
I opened up the magazine and went to the table of contents, and I said to myself, ‘What does this TOC tell me about the magazine?’ or ‘What can I expect to read in the magazine?’ From a very physical standpoint, it allowed me to know where the content I wanted to access was, and that’s what the whole app is designed to do–to provide you with the content that you want to get to as quickly as you can get to it.

There are a number of ways you can get to that content, because nobody does it the same way.  So we tried to incorporate at least three main ways to get the content to speak to different people’s preferences. So you have the color bar and you can access the content by sections. BE does a really good job of sectioning their content, so we wanted to do that. We wanted to do a browser, but my idea of what content is is more than just the article or just the pages. Particularly on a device like the iPad, which provides you the ability to have content that wasn’t included in the print version of the magazine. So how do you access that content as well?  You can do it by going to the page and finding the related content–but there ought to be a way in the browsing functionality to deconstruct and get to all of that content.

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When you look at a lot of these magazine apps, they have this content panel where you can slide through pages, but I was unsatisfied with that approach because all I could get to were the pages. I wanted to get to the videos, I wanted to get to the photos, I wanted to get to my bookmarks. I wanted to get to the ads separately.

So my vision was ‘How do you create a deconstructed view of all the content?’ and that’s how you get to our two browsers. There’s the one browser where you can thumb through the different levels of content, but then there’s the browser where you really see a deconstructed magazine–from the pages down to the ads and your bookmarks. You can get to exactly what you want to get to with one tap.

The Reader Accounts are an amazing concept, possibly providing subscription-like info when Apple has yet to allow for a subscription model that satisfies all publishers. What was the genesis of this idea?
This is an interesting story. My wife, when she reads magazines, leaves them on the kitchen counter at the end of the night. I get up around 4:00 a.m. because I can’t sleep and I get a bowl of cereal every night. So I’m stuck with either reading the back of the cereal boxes or reading the magazines she left on the counter. So I read the magazines. And what I realized was that she’s got a bunch of pages bookmarked; she’s got a bunch of notes on pages. And if I find something in the magazine that I’m interested in, I’m almost afraid to bookmark that page because it messes with what she’s already done to the magazine.

Magazines, when they come into the household, are generally shared by the people in the household. Back in the days when you had Ebony and Jet on every black coffee table in America, the whole family read the magazine. So that’s what we tried to facilitate–a sharing of the magazine and a sharing of the iPad.  Apple’s got this whole idea that they really want [the iPad] to be a family device. So how do you do that? There are no accounts on the iPad.  If you have an Apple computer, you can log in and create an account, but you can’t create an account on the iPad itself.

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So we said ‘Let’s create accounts inside the magazine.’ That way, multiple people in the household can read the magazine and not have to worry about disturbing what was left by the previous reader.

That definitely improves the experience for readers, but how did you envision the Reader Accounts creating value for advertisers?
If you’re really looking at how to market these things correctly and bring some sort of profitability or revenue to them, it’s really got to be done through some kind of advertising or sponsorship.  But if you have a device that’s in the house and it’s being shared, it’s not an effective targeting of the people who are reading the content. You can have three people reading the same magazine, but you won’t know who is interested in which particular articles or which particular products.  But when you’ve got these reader accounts, you can more clearly target and create demographic profiles with specific people who read the magazine. They’re going to be anonymous so you’re not going to know who is who, but you’ll certainly be able to say ‘This reader really got into the Shopsmart articles.’ And when that reader account pops up, you can target information to them that is based on what they were interested in reading, and you can target advertising to them based on what their affinities are.

So it was the idea of being able to share the magazine within a household, but then also to be able to create these demographic profiles within a household for better targeting of content and better targeting of advertising.

BE has never had an app for any platform and this is your first time producing one. How long was the entire process, from concept to creation?
It was about a 45- to 50-day build–that was from conception. So we had to design the entire app interface in two weeks, which was every single interface screen and how it worked. In two weeks. That was a monumental task. Then Terence and his team had to turn around pages, in both orientations, very shortly thereafter.  Then we had a really, really rapid build cycle. It was nuts!

The Black Enterprise iPad app is designed to enhance, not distract from, the magazine experience.

Black Enterprise isn’t the first business publication to produce an iPad app, but it is the first to get it right. The BE app for the iPad doesn’t offer live stats or business quotes that are easily accessible from the web or via text message to users already inundated with data.  Instead, it enhances the magazine experience, using the capabilities of the platform to add more depth to the content while also making that content easier to consume than if it were ported over to a simple web page.

The iPad can surf the web, so the BE app doesn’t recreate and charge for content a user could get on the web within the confines of the app. It zeroes in on the BE user, giving them more ways to make the content work for them and unique opportunities to create community around the content, which outweighs what could be done on a web page.

There are many features that make the Black Enterprise app stand out from the competition, but we’ve highlighted five of the most notable ones here.

1.    Reader Accounts – BE has introduced an amazing function in the Reader Accounts, one you’ll likely see become a standard among not just business magazines but any publication looking to reap the benefits of the tablet platform.  The idea takes its cue from print where circulation numbers are often augmented by a “pass-along” factor–readers circulating one purchased copy amongst other readers who haven’t bought the issue.  This is exactly the type of unquantifiable metric that advertisers are finding hard to accept when the Internet offers laser-sharp measurements down to the unique user.  But by limiting all in-app interactions to users who have created a reader account (enabling sharing, bookmarking, notes, etc. for each user), BE has not only given users reasons to create accounts, they have also given themselves and their advertisers an unprecedented view of the publication’s true audience.

The best example of this is to imagine an iPad sitting on a household coffee table.  Like a magazine, any household member or guest is able to pick it up and read a few articles. But whereas a magazine becomes worn and tattered after many reads, the iPad version is fresh for every reader.  There are no bookmarked pages to suggest what to read and no missing pages indicating what someone thought was a must-read that you’ll never get the chance to.  The Reader Account changes this by making every account logon a brand new experience.

The browser function deconstructs the magazine down to its bare elements of article pages, photos, videos, ads, and bookmarks.

One user might read an issue, bookmark a few pages, take notes, and even link their Facebook and Twitter accounts so they can share articles with people within their social networks.  But when he or she logs out of the app and the next user picks it up, they’ve got to create a Reader Account if they want to do anything more than just read.

The current version of the BE app doesn’t ask readers for any demo info, but the in-app traffic patterns of the users alone will be valuable. If the app knows which Reader Accounts frequent which sections, it can serve more relevant advertising for that reader. If it asks for more demo info, it might discover that the young adults of the family are finding as much value in certain sections as their parents.  The possibilities are endless.

2.    Browser – The magazine cover may attract the casual passerby who finds him or herself intrigued by the cover photo or a snappy headline, but the table of contents is where any real reader is going to find the “meat” of their favorite magazine. In an instant, the browser function in the BE app delivers the goods up front.  This function deconstructs the magazine down to its bare elements of article pages, photos, videos, ads, and bookmarks, with an extra personal touch.

The article pages are presented as a clean view of what the page looks like, complete with text and/or images.  Readers can see how many pages of text a story has and decide if they’re in a position to engage in such a heavy read at the moment or choose to watch a related video instead.

The photos are a real surprise and look somewhat like a black “hall of fame” when you’re just scrolling through them.  In a small business publication, the quality of the photography isn’t a selling point and, therefore, is often overlooked.  But on the iPad, it’s impossible to ignore the effort that’s gone into making these images a key part of the experience.  What’s ingenious is that if you’re a visual person and you find yourself going directly to this view first, the photo captions link directly to the story.  The videos are presented in the same way.

Apple’s iAd initiative is going to contribute to advertisements becoming significant experiences of their own within apps, which makes it fitting for ads to also have a separate section in the browser view.

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Here, thanks to the layout, ads are given a chance to compete with content for a user’s attention in a way that would never happen in a standard table of contents.

An interesting caveat about the Browser feature is that if you don’t have a Reader Account, you’re only going to see media and none of your bookmarked selections. However, once logged in, the browser view presents you with a row of your bookmarked content, whether they are articles, photos, or videos.

3.    Search – The search function within the BE app opens up each issue of the magazine to granular searches–something unprecedented in a magazine experience, digital or otherwise. Most “digital magazines” are just PDFs that don’t allow for actual searches of the text. But since the pages of BE aren’t just images, all of the content can be searched. The app prioritizes headlines first, before going to in-article text, but can find everything from company names to the names of the story subjects. Imagine being told by a colleague that they’re featured in a certain issue and being able to find them by simply searching for their name or looking for mention of a certain product.  The search function makes it easier than ever to find this information.

4.    Notes – Imagine that you’re reading an article about how to maximize the value of your 401k and you suddenly get a great idea about how the information can be directly applied to your personal situation.  If you were reading a traditional magazine, you would have to take out a pen and scribble a few notes in the margin of the page or on a piece of paper. If you were at a desktop or laptop computer, you would have to open a word processing program, create a document, and then save it somewhere that you would hopefully remember when you were ready to act on it.  But the BE app lets you create the note within the article; so the great idea you suddenly had is right next to the information that inspired it.

5.    BE Live – In business, it’s often said that it’s not what you know but who, and the BE app gives readers an incredible opportunity to get to know like-minded business professionals through dialogue around BE content.  Through BE Live, all users of the BE iPad app who have created Reader Accounts can participate in real time conversations with BE personalities in a forum much more similar to a business conference than an open chat room or comment section of an article on the web.

For example, if BE were streaming an exclusive live video from its annual Women of Power Summit through the app only, interested users unable to attend the conference could participate in the question and answer sessions via logged in Reader Accounts. The reach of the Summit would be expanded exponentially and the value of actually attending in person would be proven to off-site participants who realize that the discussions don’t end when the live broadcast does.

Fun? Yes. But business-savvy, too.

There’s been a lot of brouhaha about the iPad, Apple’s attempt to revolutionize the tablet game. Though some 4 million iPads have been sold in the U.S., many consumers are still on the fence–wondering if this latest gadgetry is just a bigger iPhone or iPod Touch, or whether it’s a toy with practical and advantageous uses for everyday life.

For small business owners, entrepreneurs, and professionals, there are definitely clear advantages to making the iPad part of your work life. Check it out.

WATCH: Introducing the Black Enterprise iPad app

Stop carrying pounds of paper: Yes, your laptop may let you read and write on the go. But with 10 hours of battery life and virtually zero minutes spent booting up, you can compile all your favorite papers, magazines, and business documents on the iPad. Third-party apps allow users to read PDFs and .doc files. Other apps, such as Ideate, allow users to sketch out ideas on a virtual white board, save them as images, and e-mail them to business partners.

Engage your creative side: It’s great to have the information you need at your fingertips but what about when that info ignites a spark of genius? Some iPad apps come with built-in notepads that allow users to jot down notes. With virtual push pins that appear right in the text, representing your notes, you’ll be reminded of what you need to look up or develop. No need to navigate away from the content, open up a separate notepad app, or pull out a pen and paper.

Interact with your information: With embedded video, users can watch short clips that accompany text without navigating away from the original content. The functionality is much more seamless than other platforms, giving you the ability to listen to audio and view slideshows, along with other multimedia elements and larger text pieces, all in the same pane. Say sayonara to having to click through browsers and tabs.

Video demonstrations: Though one of the major drawbacks for many iPad users is its lack of flash capability, it does allow users to integrate their own video projects, i.e., hire wire presentations. Let’s face it—adding video and graphic content can make a good presentation great. With its sizable screen and compact size, you can always have your presentation ready to go—just in case you run into that potential client or investor in an elevator.

Renita Burns is a writer and content producer for BlackEnterprise.com.

Black Enterprise is already a magazine, a website, two television programs (Black Enterprise Business Report and Our World with Black Enterprise) and three annual events (Women of Power Summit, Entrepreneurs Conference, and Golf & Tennis Challenge). Now it’s an app for one of the most ambitious and innovative technologies to date.

Here’s an exclusive look at the Black Enterprise iPad app.

(BlackEnterprise.com only reviewed the paid versions of these applications. Many of the apps have free versions that have fewer features.)

Small Business Guide: As a small business owner, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed with the amount of information you need to know in order successfully operate. With Small Business Guide ($29.99), created by Intersog, learning the basics is a lot easier. This interactive app includes a course book, flash cards and self-test covering subjects like power marketing, managing human resources and debt and equity financing. If this reads like gibberish, then this pocket teacher might be a good study-buddy.

GotExpenses: Keeping track of your expenses is vital, but it is very easy to get lost in the mountains of transactions happening on a daily basis. GotExpenses ($2.99) by app creators Meiwin Fu allows you to create a fully customizable monthly budget as well as monitor how much of your budget you have exhausted. And when the month ends, the data can be synced with Google Spreadsheets in order to export all of your budgeting information. A free limited version of the app is available.

Credit Card Expense Manager: This app ($3.99) by Atinco is another great budgeting app. For some small business owners, when cash is low, credit is king. Of course, being knowledgeable and responsible about your credit cards can ensure costly fees don’t trump your spending and that your credit score is a winner. Users can stay abreast of payment due dates, credit limits and a ton of other specific information. The number of cards that can be managed through the app is limitless and all information garnered can be emailed. Both Credit Card Manager and GotExpenses have security settings to ensure that sensitive information is protects.  A free version of the app is available but does not include all of the features of its full-price counterpart.

Bill Minder: For the person who needs help managing their bills, Bill Minder (99 cents) by return7 is just what you’ve been looking for. This app lets users set up recurring bill reminders for up to 17 months, view a calendar with all of your bill due dates and see the total amounts for unpaid bills, paid bills and the grand total for all of your bills for each month. Users can also email a backup version of their information, manage account and bill information and secure everything with Bill Minder’s password protection feature.

Gas Cubby: If you have vehicles for your business, staying up-to-date on the needs and expenses of each of them is key. Apple has a number of applications that can assist in sharing the load. Gas Cubby ($4.99) can create charts that display the MPG, gas and service expenses of all your vehicles. Created by the team at AppCubby, users can also store important information like your vehicles VIN, insurance and license plate numbers and receive maintenance reminders.

Right Signature: For the small business needing an easy way to accept credit cards while out of the office, a number of apps turn your iPhone into a wireless credit card terminal. Whether you need to accept different currencies or you just need a basic terminal, there are a number of options to fit your needs, including the free Right Signature by RightSprite. When you’re on the go, signing important documents can be problematic. If you’re a busy small business owner, sitting by your fax machine waiting for documents to sign may not be the best use of your time. With Right Signature, you can sign documents no matter where you are. Using your touch screen to sign your name, your signature will appear as if you used an ink pen. This free app also has photo integration that enables users to include a photo of themselves along with their signature.

Fuze Meeting: Need to make a conference call while you’re away from your office? With Fuze Meeting (free) from Call Wave, users can attend mobile online meetings for free. Host audio conferences from your iPhone and view supporting video, images and presentations in HD. Users can also attend Web meetings with live desktop sharing. To register for a demo of Fuze Meeting, visit http://tr.im/fuze4.

For more information on these applications as well as others, access the App store via your iPhone, iPod Touch, or the iTunes store.

When comparing the 3GS and 3G side by side, we were impressed by the improved camera quality. The three-megapixel camera on the 3GS has a noticeably clearer picture than that of the 3G’s two-megapixel option. In addition, the new autofocus feature and the ability to record video make the new camera much better all around.

Another improvement is the introduction of voice control. Now you can make a phone call or play songs by a certain artist or from a particular playlist simply by speaking. In our testing, we found a 10% error rate in the voice-activated phone dialing. When using voice control for music, however, we had a 30% error rate. That’s still pretty solid, but the phone dialing is obviously the stronger feature.

The battery life of the 3GS is slightly improved over the 3G, but not by much. Additionally, like past iPhone models, the battery is still not user-replaceable. Furthermore, although the included storage (16GB or 32GB) is good, you cannot add extra storage.

Overall, however, the iPhone 3GS is a solid improvement over the previous model. Compared with the Palm Pre ($199.99 with Sprint) and the G1 ($149.99 with T-Mobile), the 3GS shines. One caveat: The iPhone is still exclusively offered by AT&T and will be until at least 2010.

A slew of business apps are available for the iPhone.

Among them is the iSwipe Credit Card Terminal. Designed for the entrepreneur, this app turns the phone into a credit card swiping machine. It accepts all major credit cards and gives users instant feedback on whether or not a card has been accepted. ($29.99; http://appninjas.com/iswipe/).

If you’re looking to keep track of your investments, check out PortfolioLive 1.2, a comprehensive portfolio manager that enables users to create and monitor multiple portfolios and to receive real time market data and stock and mutual fund quotes. ($5.99; www.turingstudios.com).

This article originally appeared in the September 2009 issue of Black Enterprise magazine.

Wakeman used technology to replace a costly office.

When Vanessa Wakeman left corporate America to start her own business in 2003, she did so with a bang. She rented office space in midtown Manhattan for her full-service events management and public relations firm, The Wakeman Agency. “In hindsight, it was not a smart move,” says Wakeman, 40. In fact, she admits it was an “expensive learning experience.”

Wakeman duly nixed the pricey offices and turned to SaaS (Software as a Service) solutions. “I wanted to share documents, I wanted to have meetings, and I wanted to be able to find freelancers and subcontractors.” Fortunately, Wakeman found all of that with SaaS. Software as a Service works like on-demand cable TV. The provider licenses a particular application to customers for use as a service on demand and customers may host the application on their own Web servers and disable it after use or after the on-demand contract expires. This benefits the entrepreneur since it’s generally low-cost relative to purchasing a software license and often offers seamless integration and easy access to product upgrades.

Wakeman says InfoStreet’s (www.infostreet.com) StreetSmart platform stood out from the crowd. InfoStreet’s customizable offerings include calendar and e-mail service, an employee portal, and CRM (customer relationship management) tools among other services. With an annual investment of roughly $2,000, she works with a core team of five and a roster of roughly eight to 15 freelancers on a variety of PR and fundraising projects for clients.

“InfoStreet allows us to control what information employees have access to while making sure that they have what they need to work effectively,” says Wakeman. Plus, “It requires a few thousand dollars per person to set up an office, as opposed to $10 with InfoStreet.” The Wakeman Agency expects between $600,000 and $625,000 in revenues for 2009.

Right Time for SaaS?
Although SaaS providers have been around for years, the recent recession has really forced companies to rethink their core competencies, says Jen Grant, vice president of marketing for Box.net (www.box.net), an online document storage, sharing, and collaboration service. Rather than installing and maintaining applications on company servers, many firms are now opting for these types of solutions.

“Everyone is looking at their bottom line again,” Grant says. Ease of use and the low cost of Internet-based solutions are now generating “tremendous growth” in the industry.

Wakeman combines Infostreet’s offerings with services from Salesforce.com to foster efficiency and better serve her clients. “We can mix in things like document management with CRM to build The Wakeman Agency. I have found some pretty great tools that give me a big corporate feel with a small business budget.”

A Peek Into the Cloud

Cloud computing — The “cloud” is simply a metaphor for the Internet, which is typically represented visually as a cloud.

SaaS – Software as a Service; it is the practice of developing and deploying applications to customers as a service rather than a boxed, single-sale product. Pros include the ability to access information and work remotely, collaborate on projects, and reduce overal costs.

Some examples include:

• Box.net and drop.io: Secure online document sharing and collaboration
• Salesforce.com: Sales and customer relationship management tools
• Google Apps and Zoho.com: Consumer and small-business applications

This article originally appeared in the September 2009 issue of Black Enterprise magazine.