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.

Just a quick note that SearchSMB.com is currently accepting nominations for Products of the Year. There are five categories of products being evaluated: security, storage, networking, CRM and content management.

We’re accepting nominations from both readers and vendors, but (and this is a big BUT), only products that are designed specifically for SMBs are eligible. In other words, a CRM product that was originally designed for large enterprises but can be jury-rigged to work for an SMB would not be considered.

The deadline for nominations is November 9 and winners will be announced in January. Click here for all the details and here to access the nomination form. And good luck!

Is there a conspiracy here?

Dirk Morris, the CTO of Untangle, thinks so.

Two years ago, Morris did a “bake-off” with a leading open source antivirus (AV) scanner, Clam AntiVirus. He pitted it against a bevy of proprietary AV engines to see how each one did against a bucketful of viruses he had pulled out of the wild.

Morris, whose company sells gateway appliances stocked with open source security software to small businesses, said he was astonished by the results. He figured AV engines were somewhat commoditized, but some big-name vendors, who shall remain nameless for now, had success rates as low as 30%. These were NOT zero-day viruses he was throwing at them. He was pulling stuff from the wild, viruses that had been around for a while. And still, some AV engines had no signatures to fight them.

Looking to get these results reproduced for public consumption, Morris approached a leading testing lab and asked it to test Clam against some of the commercial vendors. The lab, which he declined to name, turned him away.

“They said ‘We won’t test Clam because it’s open source.’ They refused to give us any explanation,” Morris said.

Morris cried foul play. He suggested that the lab didn’t want to show how well an open source project like Clam stacked up against the proprietary heavyweights.

“If they said the open source project was the best product, they’ll have a lot of unhappy customers and they won’t get any paying customers anymore.”

With that in mind, Morris is staging an “Anti-Virus Fight Club” at next week’s LinuxWorld. It isn’t exactly Brad Pitt versus Edward Norton. And Dirk Morris is no David Fincher, but this should be worth checking out.

Morris will take 20 viruses that are roaming about on the Internet and introduce them to machines protected by each AV product. Who will be left standing, and who will be left a bloody mess on the floor, is anyone’s guess. Morris is quite sure Clam, the open source champ, will leave most of the big guys in the dust.

AV scanners from Norton, McAfee, Fortinet, WatchGuard, SonicWall, Hauri, F-Prot, Sophos and Kaspersky Lab will all face the same 20 viruses as Clam, Morris said.

“I suspect what will happen is Clam will be the best,” Morris told me. “Kaspersky will do pretty well. They’ve got a good product. Some of the other vendors will do pretty poorly.”

Interested parties should check out the Fight Club on Aug. 8 from 6 to 7 p.m. at LinuxWorld in San Francisco. It’s a Birds of a Feather session.

For what it’s worth, the U.S. came out on top in a recent ranking of the 64 “most positive environments for IT firms in the world” by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), scoring a 77.4 on a 100-point scale.  

Asia was well-represented by Japan and South Korea, which finished second with 72.7 points and third with 67.2 points, respectively. Iran brought up the rear with just 15.7 points. 

The EIU based its findings on six key indexes:  

1. A stable, competitive business environment.

2. An advanced IT and communications infrastructure.

3. A forward-thinking IT training and education environment.

4. Protection of intellectual property rights.

5. Strong support for innovation and R&D.

6. A supportive government.

The U.S. placed in the top five in all six of the categories. “Uniquely among countries, [the U.S .] IT environment combines scale and quality in the key areas that promote competitiveness, including education, infrastructure and encouragement of innovation, as well as solid legal protection,” the EIU concluded.   

The news wasn’t all bad for the countries that finished in the lower half of the rankings. The report predicted that:

“ … a number of emerging economies will compete more effectively with China [ranked 49] and India [ranked 46] on the availability of relatively low-cost IT skills. These will probably include Malaysia, Brazil and Vietnam, as well as east European countries such as Russia, Hungary and Poland.” 

Who knows, maybe your next major IT purchase or offshore agreement will be with a vendor from the former Eastern Block. How do you say “advanced routing protocol” in Hungarian, anyway?

Jeff, I think you are partly right when you say that SMBs need IT products that are built from the ground up for SMBs, not enterprise products that have been scaled down (or dumbed down, some cynics would say). Hey, I touched on this very subject last month while writing about the SMB storage technology.

But I wouldn’t say that big iron vendors find the SMB market to be a mystery. In conversations with vendors and analysts (and end users), I’ve sensed that many companies are aware that their so-called SMB strategies are aimed more at the midmarket than anything else. This seems to be the first stage of the SMB market push for these IT vendors, and these companies often have the complex needs and resources to make use of enterprise products that have been retooled and priced down for them.

Small companies are diverse in their needs and seemingly infinite in their number. Knowing this, vendors like IBM, Oracle, etc., are probably aware that any legitimate small business product they put out will please some, but not all. I think conquering the small business market will take baby steps. It will take time for any vendor to get there. In the meantime, vendors that have always sold to smaller businesses can rest assured that the big players are still finding their way in this market.

With the iPhone hitting stores, Apple will be raking in the greenbacks. Now the company is getting the thumbs up from Greenpeace.

Just the other day I was teasing Apple for getting rotten grades from environmental watchdogs like Climate Counts and Greenpeace. These groups were saying Apple was doing next to nothing about reducing the harm it does to the environment with its manufacturing operation and the energy its products consume.

Well, now Greenpeace is saying Apple has turned over a new leaf. A personal letter from Apple founder Steve Jobs on the company’s Web site stated that the company’s “stakeholders” [read: environmentally conscious customers] “want us to be a leader in this area.”

In the letter, Jobs said he has been investigating Apple’s current practices and progress toward becoming more eco-friendly. He said he was “surprised to learn that in many cases Apple is ahead of, or will soon be ahead of, most of its competitors in these areas.”

Basically, Jobs provided a rundown of the toxic chemicals Apple will be phasing out of its products by 2008 and how it’s trying to promote recycling of its old products.

Greenpeace is pleased by this announcement, but the organization noted that “it’s not everything we asked for.” Apple will accept old products from customers in the United States for recycling, but Apple isn’t extending that policy internationally yet. Other companies do recycle their products globally, Greenpeace said.

Also, this Apple announcement addresses the complaints from Greenpeace about toxic chemicals. But there is still work to be done. Climate Counts, with its scorecards, has noted that Apple still has to address the amount of greenhouse gases its products contribute to the environment. Jobs’ open letter on Apple’s Web site says he’ll be sharing more on that issue later this year, maybe. Until then, Apple has a little more work to do.

Though most of you are probably reading this blog post on an HP or Dell system, a growing minority of you are lapping up my words of wisdom on an Apple machine. That’s because Apple’s share of the desktop/laptop market grew more than 100% over the last year thanks in part to its success in the SMB segment, according to new research from AMI-Partners. 

The report found that among small businesses, which AMI defines as those with between one and 99 employees, Apple increased its desktop market share to 12% from 7% and its share of the notebook market to 8% from 5%, both on a year-over-year basis. 

Even better for Apple was its growth among medium-sized businesses (orgs with between 100 and 999 workers, as defined by AMI), upping its desktop market share to 27% from 13% and its notebook market share to 18% from 8%, again on a year-over-year basis. 

AMI credits Apple’s rise in the SMB segment to its “recent launch of the industry’s first-ever backlit LED screen for Mac Pro” and the allure of the Mac OS X Tiger, “which supports multiple OSs, including Windows, on a single platform,” among other reasons. 

Still, Apple’s overall share of the desktop/laptop market remains relatively small.  

A Piper Jaffray analyst estimated last December that Apple’s piece of the PC pie then stood at around 3%, with only modest growth expected for 2007.  

Now, I’m not sure if by “PC market” Piper Jaffray was referring to just desktops or desktops and laptops. Either way, Apple’s market share is still small change compared with the aforementioned HP and Dell, which own 19% and 15% of the overall desktop/laptop market, respectively. 

Clearly, Apple still has a long way to go, but it has to be encouraged by these latest SMB numbers. Whether Apple can maintain its momentum and eventually make headway in the overall desktop/laptop market will be interesting to watch. 

On another topic, Apple is also making headlines this week, you may have heard, thanks to the debut of something called the iPhone.

It’s not easy being green. Even for Apple. Climate Counts, a nonprofit group funded by organic food company Stonyfield Farm Inc., has released its annual “scorecards,” which examine how companies are working to be more environmentally friendly. 

Climate Counts rates companies on a scale of one to 100, based on 22 criteria that examine whether companies are measuring their “climate footprints,” reducing their impact on global warming, supporting progressive climate legislation and publicly disclosing their progress in these areas. 

Apple Inc. received the lowest score of the electronics companies reviewed. Just two points out of a possible 100. I’ve had the displeasure of watching far too many of those “Hi, I’m a Mac. And I’m a PC” commercials. The actor playing the Mac is the young hip guy. It’s the PC who is the stodgy, older fellow who is afraid of change. And Apple has also brought us the iPod, which a fine piece of consumerism that every hipster has clipped on his or her hip.  

So why isn’t Apple, the company with all the hip products, “with it” on climate change? It received an anemic total of two points for its stated intention to review the overall impact its products have on global warming and its plan to release the data later this year.  Compare that with IBM, which scored the highest among the IT vendors reviewed with 70 points. Toshiba followed with 66 points. Hewlett-Packard received 59 points, and Dell was in the middle of the pack with 41. Canon, better known for cameras, printer and copiers, led all electronics firms with 77 points. 

Apple has been repeatedly dumped on for its environmental policy. Greenpeace has launched a campaign, Green My Apple, specifically targeted at forcing Apple to become more environmentally friendly. Apple does have a page on its Web site that describes what the company is doing to be more environmentally friendly. But apparently its efforts haven’t impressed.  

In a separate category for Internet and software companies, eBay and Amazon.com stunk up the joint, with two and zero points respectively. Yahoo led the category with 36 points, followed by Microsoft with 31. Google, the ubiquitous search and online application behemoth, scored a middling 17 points. Google’s mediocre score promises to rise simply by virtue of the extremely ambitious announcement it made this week. Google said it will make itself carbon neutral by the end of this year.  As reported by GreenBiz.com: 

“In an announcement made this afternoon, the company said it had calculated the total amount of its GHG [greenhouse gas] emissions through operations, employee commuting and business travel, construction and the manufacturing of its servers. Tallying the carbon footprint is Google’s first step in its mission to reduce and offset all its GHG emissions.” 

This is promising news from Google, but as Foreign Policy blogger Prerna Mankad pointed out: 

“Sergey Brin and Larry Page may want to reconsider jetting around in their personal Boeing 767.”  

In other words, Google’s billionaire executives might want to lead by example.

Are the big IT vendors still in the dark when it comes to the SMB market? Illuminata analyst Wayne Kernochan thinks so.  

I think Kernochan is right on when he says that creating SMB-specific software and applications isn’t just a matter of scaling down existing enterprise-level apps. 

Rather, software and apps for SMBs should be developed from the ground up with the specific needs of SMBs – simple to use, easy to administer, yet powerful enough to get the job done, as Kernochan told InternetNews.com — as the focus.

Let’s hope the major IT vendors get the message.