Welcome to the new Small Business Computing forums!

[KevinReichard]

Welcome to the new SmallBusinessComputing forums! As a former small-business owner myself, I know the challenges facing today's small and medium businesses -- like how to get the word out about yourself and your services without spending an arm and a leg.

That's why we're here. On our parent site, www.smallbusinesscomputing.com (http://smallbusinesscomputing.com), we address these issues on a daily business: what technology to watch, where to invest your hard-earned dollars, and how you can best market your small business with a variety of online-marketing tools.

The purpose of these forums is to extend the discussions and help the small-business community to gather, compare notes, and share advice. These forums are for you -- please join in to discuss the issues of the day, ask questions, or share some nuggets of insight.

And remember: both these forums and www.smallbusinesscomputing.com (http://smallbusinesscomputing.com) exist for you. Please let us know what you think about the forums and the Web site, and don't be afraid to make suggestions.

Kevin Reichard
Executive Editor, www.smallbusinesscomputing.com (http://smallbusinesscomputing.com)
kreichard@jupitermedia.com

[tonybiz]

Kevin,

Thank you for the opportunity to learn about trends in computing technology and how they can be adapted to small business evelopment.

Recently I had an embarassing experience. I used to subscribe to computer magazines and MIT's Technology Review. With the birth of my son about 3 years ago I cut back on my reading.

A friend showed me a disk recently and I had to honestly admit I never saw it before or knew what it was. It was a disk on which you can load information about your business and yourself and give away like a business card. "Neat," I thought.

It just goes to show that I need to "get in the know" where computing technology is concerned. Hopefully, this forum will help me get just what I need to know.

[KevinReichard]

Those disks have been around for some time -- Linux vendors were using them in the late 1990s as emergency boot diskettes and advertisements at the same time. I think they're fairly slick, but I think they may be too bulky -- even at the mini-disc size -- to be truly useful.

But they did get your attention. ;)

What other unique marketing tools have you seen recently? Anyone?

--Kevin

-----

--Executive Editor, SmallBusinessComputing.com

[GusVenditto]

What are they called? I never saw one.

[KevinReichard]

Well, different vendors use different names for them. Generally, they're called Business Card CDs, and they are a smaller (mini-disc) CD that holds only 35-50MB. You can see a picture of them at http://www.nashuamedia.com/special.html.

They are actually pretty common; my son's Pokemon collection contains some mini-CDs that were issued as Pokemon cards.

--Kevin

[dastreb]

The mini discs have become very popular in recent years.

We first started supplying interactive media projects on the business card sized disc about four years ago. They originated in Germany (or maybe Switzerland) in the mid-90s. When we started to produce them, they were very expensive...about $3.00 each.

As with most tecnology, prices have dropped considerably. Depending on quantity, we now produce them for less than $0.90 each. We've produced over a million of them for clients over the past couple of years.

As you've discovered, they are "Neat" and still carry that "Wow" factor. Clients love them.

If you want more information, go to our website www.reel1.com.

[GusVenditto]

To make the topics easier to follow, I have moved the thread to a different section (http://forums.smallbusinesscomputing.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=20)

It will be eaiser for people to follow and contribute if the discussion continues under a thread that's more descriptive.