Aside from the news that a 10-year-old boy playing with matches started one of them, the California wildfires have mostly fallen off the front pages of most of the nation’s newspapers.

But businesses will be feeling the effects of these fires for quite awhile. Especially at risk are the small and medium-sized businesses whose physical offices were either partially or completely destroyed.

As we reported, even those businesses whose property was spared by the fire had trouble getting their employees to the office. Many had to work remotely because they had been evacuated from their homes or simply had no way to reach the office (or no clothes to wear to the office).

That’s where free online collaboration tools can become a must. Online services like Zoho and Google Apps might prove useful to employees who have no access to their office computers.

One vendor, HyperOffice, announced this week that it will offer its online business collaboration and business continuity technology free to qualified California companies for 90 days. The Rockville, Md.-based vendor offered the same free services to companies affected by Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

HyperOffice offers email, document management, contact management, security, backup, time and expense tracking, portal management, and a variety of other on-demand technologies.

Plenty of SMBs might take the company up on the offer. And who knows, when that 90-day offer expires, maybe some of them will like the company’s services so much they’ll be willing to pay the $7 per-use per-month charge that HyperOffice usually charges its customers.

Bashing help desks and tech support sometimes feels too easy.

With that in mind, I’ll try something different. I want to offer kudos to the tech support call center at Digimarc Corp., for helping the U.S. Secret Service nab a thief.

Apparently Timothy Scott Short, 33, allegedly stole a Digimarc printer on Oct. 5 from a contractor that prints driver’s licenses for the state of Missouri. When Short, who has also been investigated in the past for unrelated identity theft charges, couldn’t get the printer to work, he called Digimarc’s tech support line two days later. He said he wanted to buy driver software for a printer.

Digimarc isn’t commenting on how the Secret Service ended up listening to a recording of the call Short made to the call center, but it’s pretty obvious that the company did a good job of identifying this apparently clueless alleged thief and helping to facilitate his arrest.

It’s finally here! Talking spam!

This morning Commtouch Software Ltd., the Israeli antispam service vendor, announced that its Commtouch Detection Center has identified a huge outbreak of MP3 spam. Other antispam vendors have also detected it. These messages come with MP3 attachments that, when opened, play voice messages promoting stocks.

To hear an edited version of one of these messages, click here: click here

That distorted voice is creepy. It sounds like a female version of HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Commtouch says it hasn’t detected a virus threat in the spam yet and the files are larger than standard spam, averaging around 85 KB, and reaching up to 147 KB. The message contents are mostly empty. The MP3 files carry the marketing message.

According to Commtouch, these messages have accounted for 7% to 10% of all global spam over the last day or so.

The spammers have of course given names to these MP3 files that are supposed to induce you to open them. Sample file names include dadsong.mp3, oursong.mp3, weddingsong.mp3, smashingpumpkins.mp3, bspears.mp3, gloariaestefan.mp3, beatles.mp3 and coolringtone.mp3. Would anyone really want to open an MP3 from Britney Spears these days?

The federal government is really cracking down on spammers. Here’s a video of the feds processing spam complaints:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjarLbD9r30

The federal government hopes its criminal prosecution of spammers will act as some sort of deterrent. On Friday, two men who were convicted of spamming millions with pornographic emails were sentenced to five to six years in prison.

I suppose prison time is a sharp deterrent to just about any crime, from murder to shoplifting. But read the details of that story. Jeffrey A. Kilbride and James R. Schaffer, who were convicted in June, earned $1 million in just over a year in 2003. That’s a lot of money for a business that requires very little overhead.

These two men were charged in part under the 2003 CAN-SPAM Act, which bans false and misleading header information and subject lines, requires opt-out methods for recipients of spam (for those of us who are stupid enough to click on anything in a spam message), and mandates that commercial email be clearly identified as an advertisement.

I don’t know about you, but a few dozen spam messages have gotten through the filters on my various email addresses today, and absolutely none of the senders of those messages adhered to any of these requirements.

Hence, the video of Charlie Chaplin above.

But the feds will continue to fight the good fight. Last week, the FTC ordered a halt to spam messages from a company called eHealthylife.com, which was offering “Hoodia” weight loss products and human growth hormone. The FTC is planning to prosecute the company and its owners for violating the CAN-SPAM act.

It’s good that the federal government is making an effort here, but this strategy is similar to building a moat around a sandcastle at the beach. Digging a hole in the sand won’t stop the ocean from washing over it. The vast majority of email traffic across the globe is made up of spam. Prosecuting one case at a time might deter some potential spammers, but it won’t stop all of them.

Analysts have repeatedly told me that Internet service providers (ISP) are the key here. They have to step up their efforts to monitor how their networks are used. They should be policing their own IP addresses for spam abuse. Unfortunately, so many spammers rely on ISPs based in the developing world, where the regulatory environment is pretty loose. The FTC could require better policing by every U.S.-based ISP, and spam would still be flooding our inboxes.

I didn’t need a survey to tell me this.

Sixty-four percent of Americans say they spend more time with their computers than they do with their significant others. I have two laptops. One belongs to my employer and the other belongs to me. And I spend entirely too much time with both of them.

SupportSoft Inc., an IT service management vendor, is thinking of expanding into the consumer space, so it conducted a new consumer survey about how people interact with their computers.

I’m not sure why SupportSoft wanted to know if people get the urge to throw the computers out the window when they crash. But it did. And apparently 19% of people feel that way sometimes. Nine percent said they feel stranded and alone when their computers crash, and 11% curse at their dead machines.

And apparently 84% of people feel more dependent on their computers than they did three years ago. This also makes sense to me. Nowadays, whether I want to know who directed the movie Poltergeist or whatever happened to the makers of ColecoVision, I go online. What would I do with myself if I couldn’t look up this trivial information? I’d probably spend more time with my significant other. And with that in mind, gotta go!

When Google Inc. bought hosted security and compliance vendor Postini for $625 million in July, experts said Google was aiming to boost the security and compliance capabilities of its emerging Google Apps product. The speculation was that Google was hoping this move would attract larger enterprises as Google Apps customers.

Less than three months later, Google has announced that it is officially adding Postini’s security and compliance capabilities to Google Apps.

Naturally, larger companies with bigger security and compliance concerns might be tempted to consider Google Apps now. However, analysts and users have warned that Google Apps is a nice supplement to other office productivity suites like Microsoft Office. No one, not even the smallest SMBs, really sees Google Apps as a replacement technology. Most of the components of Google Apps still have the “beta” sticker on them, even Gmail, which seems as standard a Google App as apple pie these days. I feel like I’ve been using it since I was a wee lad.

Anyway, SMBs with compliance concerns will probably welcome the Postini features, too.

A fifth reprieve from Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) does not appear likely for SMBs.

At a forum for small businesses, John White, the director of corporation finance for the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, said the SEC has no plans to extend the deadline for small business compliance with the internal controls requirements of Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) corporate finance law. White has been issuing this warning all summer, but some SMBs don’t seem to be listening.

In that same forum, White also promised that the SEC would introduce several rules by the end of the year aimed at making it easier for SMBs to comply with SOX, such as a relaxed process for issuing stock options.

Companies with less than $75 million in market capitalization have been granted four extensions on compliance since the law was passed by Congress in 2002 because small business advocates have warned that compliance is too pricey for them.

But another extension seems unlikely if you take White at his word. SMBs will have to be compliant by Dec. 15. At this week’s forum White said small public companies should be acting now to prepare compliance. But it’s worth noting that he is speaking for only the SEC.

“I would just urge all of you that are advising small companies that, at least from this building (the SEC), we are not anticipating any extensions,” White said, according to Reuters.

Note that he said “from this building.” He is speaking only for the SEC. In the world of Washington, D.C., where nuance is everything, that leaves some wiggle room. Congress could easily act again to extend the deadline if business interests like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce lobby hard enough. But time is running out. SMBs should probably be acting as if no fifth extension is coming. You should heed White’s warning.

SAP knows big business. SAP knows small business. SAP now knows medium-sized business really well. At least, that’s what SAP hopes.

On Wednesday, SAP unveiled SAP Business ByDesign, a full suite of business applications delivered through the Software as a Service (SaaS) model. Unlike many big-iron vendors that dip their toes in the SaaS waters, SAP actually built this product from the ground up as a SaaS application, which should make SaaS evangelists happy.

If you look at this press information page, you’ll see that SAP is positioning this technology as the lower midmarket product in its SMB ERP product portfolio. It has SAP All-in-One, a vertical-specific suite of on-premise ERP software aimed at larger midmarket firms, with 100 to 2,500 employees. Then there is SAP Business One, a truly small business solution for companies with fewer than 100 employees. Now there is SAP Business ByDesign, aimed at companies with 100 to 500 employees.

As James Governor of Red Monk noted in an excellent blog review of Business ByDesign, SAP is one of those huge enterprise software vendors famous for complexity that is just plain poison for small and medium-sized companies. However, SAP likes to tell us that 65% of its customers are SMBs.

Last year SAP started airing television commercials during NFL football games. Clearly, these ads were aimed at rebranding SAP as a company that could serve SMBs. Every single enterprise software vendor you talk to says it’s going after the SMB market because it represents the best opportunity for rapid growth. With a three-headed monster of a product portfolio, SAP clearly means business. SMB business, that is.

Business ByDesign will feature on-demand software that will help medium-sized firms manage their finances, business analytics, human resources, projects, supply chains, customer and supplier relationships, and compliance.

Governor said SAP hasn’t hit a home run with Business ByDesign, but he thinks it’s offering a tool that may serve the medium-sized market well.

“I am pretty positive about BBD’s chances in the market, and it looks [like] a powerful set of apps for $149 per month per user. I do, however, feel SAP could have really smacked the ball out of the park had it driven harder on Web 2.0 front-end interaction. Time for SAP to get JavaScript religion.”

Dennis Byron, who says he’s a fan of the product, wrote on SeekingAlpha.com that SAP’s new product has a ways to go.

“Sorry, SAP, I am a great admirer but Business ByDesign (codenamed A1S) has a few problems. The name is too long, the beta set of users is too small, the price is too high, the reference implementations and demos are too much old SAP, and the channel strategy is too 20th century.”

I believe this is SAP’s first foray into SaaS. Companies like Salesforce.com and NetSuite have earned some well-deserved hype for their customer wins in the SaaS-delivered SMB ERP market. Now SAP is going to try to take them head on.

SAP is planning to sell this product through its channel partners, which is how most big vendors reach the SMB market. But will channel partners embrace this as an opportunity? New research from IDC suggests maybe not.

Three months after announcing Foleo, a companion technology to the Treo smartphone, Palm has cancelled the product.

Palm CEO Ed Colligan wrote on his corporate blog that his company is canceling the Foleo in order to focus on building a next-generation software platform for its handheld devices. According to Colligan, Palm is taking a $10 million hit to its earnings to stop production right now.

The Foleo, which looks like a mini-laptop, was greeted with yawns and quite a few sneers. While Apple was coming out with the flashy, hyped iPhone, Palm was offering up a … what exactly was this thing, anyway?

Just two weeks ago, Engadget.com in an open letter to Palm urged the company to stop wasting money on the Foleo:

“We all know this isn’t going anywhere. And even if it does do alright — and let’s be real, it’s never going to do better than alright — it’s really just a distraction from the main business you’re already neglecting. Besides, how many Treo companions do you expect to sell if the Treo itself isn’t up to snuff? The Foleo is not the way to make the core product better.”

Judging from the comments Colligan received on his blog, canceling the Foleo was the right thing to do. However, more than a few of those who commended Colligan in their comments also asked him for one of the prototype. “I promise that I won’t resell it on eBay,” wrote one Palm fan.

Are there any Palm fans out there who were planning to adopt the Foleo? I’d love to hear from you. How were you planning to use it, and what are your plans now that the product is canceled?

It’s time to assess the risks posed by sloppy road warriors

One-third of mobile workers make a habit of hijacking their neighbors’ wireless connection or jumping onto unauthorized connections in public spaces, according to a new wireless security survey from Cisco Systems Inc. and the National Cyber Security Alliance (NCSA).SMBs these days have plenty of road warriors, so you should be asking yourself, what are my users doing? And do they know the dangers of this?This Cisco survey said that 73% of 700 mobile users claimed that they are not always cognizant of security threats and best practices when working on the road. Why is this? Take a look at the news and read about the latest stolen laptop with thousands of customer records on it.