PAYWare Mobile sounds like a cool idea.

It consists of two parts: an iPhone app and a reader, which is a piece of hardware.

The reader is a sleeve into which you slip your iPhone. During the course of a transaction, the merchant launches the app, enters a PIN and can then accept payments from customers by swiping credit cards through the reader. There is a stylus for customers to sign on the iPhone screen.



Photo courtesy of PAYWare Mobile.

It could be useful for small-business owners who are mobile.

Here's a video on how it works:




Anyone using it? Thoughts?

Andréa Maria Cecil is managing editor at the Central Penn Business Journal. She is a 31-year-old native New Orleanian who is interested in how gadgets and technology can make business more efficient.

Outside of Wall Street and Government Motors, most businesses are obsessed with running their operations efficiently and affordably. Most businesses use Six Sigma, balanced-scorecard or other analytical management tools to improve productivity, enhance customer satisfaction and increase sales. More than ever, government needs to get better, leaner and faster. Technology and analytics is the key.

Governments must become fact-based organizations. The strategic use of analytics will shorten the time to realization. Analytics help with operational efficiencies by:

• Providing the mechanism for evaluating program effectiveness.


• Providing the framework to conduct advanced decision-support exercises that take the what-if scenario to a new level.


• Providing new methods of detecting fraud, waste and abuse on both the revenue and expenditure sides of the equation.


• Centralizing executive review and support to bear success.

SAS, a North Carolina company that provides business analytics and business intelligence software, advocates a centralized enterprise analytics competency center that elevates the practice of applied analytics to a strategic discipline. Advanced analytics helps uncover fraud, waste and abuse while also demonstrating system and program integrity with this heightened level of scrutiny.

Senate Resolution 161, sponsored by Republican state Sen. David Argall, established the Government Management and Costs Study Commission, which meets for the first time at 10 a.m. Feb. 19. The commission is charged with making recommendations that will:

• Cut costs.


• Increase efficiency.


• Consolidate like functions.


• Return functions and job-creation opportunities to the private sector.


• Eliminate functions.

I was appointed to the commission in early January; I very much look forward to exploring ways to improve government.

I strongly believe technology and the dynamic use of analytics help uncover waste, fraud abuse and unneeded or redundant programs. The use of technology and analytics is the path to true performance-based budgeting where successful programs are rewarded with ever greater resources and poor programs are merged or eliminated.

Kelly Lewis is president and chief executive officer of TechQuest Pennsylvania, operated by the Technology Council of Central Pennsylvania.

In the old days, if you wanted to buy a product you talked to a salesperson, who used contextual clues to tailor the information he gave you to suit your needs. Today, as people gather their own information from the Web or print, there is no way to tailor the sales presentation to suit those contextual clues from the customer.

Because businesses aren't getting that feedback from customers, they often make huge mistakes in how they provide information. As software designers building a tool that empowers non-technical people to build, deploy and manage their own business software applications, WorkXpress encounters this gulf between customer and designer all the time. Actually, we fall into it, because we usually don't even see it coming.

WorkXpress had this issue recently. We designed an interface we thought couldn't get any simpler, but as soon as we tried it on the very first customer it failed miserably and left the customer feeling unsure and therefore unhappy. It didn't take much work to fix, but why weren't we able to perceive that shortcoming on our own? In retrospect, it was obvious.

I've found it is enlightening to actually be that customer every once in a while, and to notice how basic your needs really are, even for a complex product.
Recently, while shopping for a key business technology, I ended up at two different Web sites. Although they were offering nearly the same product, the two sites were radically different.

Company A's Web site was very traditional and generally very well designed, with a lot of information. It identified me (a small business) as an audience and had a page focused on talking to me. It walked me through their products and pricing matrixes. It had testimonials and case studies. Finally, it had a page for standard corporate information and inquiries.

On my first pass, though, I didn't get the exact information I needed. I didn't feel like sifting through all the information. My experience on Company B's Web site was much different.

On first glance, Company B's site had only four simple pages, presented through tabs at the top of the home page. On each page was a big button to take me to the next page. The first page told me who they were and gave some of the most important features. I thought, "OK, I'm in the right place."

The second page told me how their product worked in a single, simple illustration. I thought, "OK, I get it. This is what I'm looking for, I think".

On the third page, I viewed a detailed list of feature names, and for each one I could get an ample amount of information with a single click. This page was important because it provided the technical detail I was going to need to make a decision.

Finally, I was led to the fourth page, which provided pricing and a place to sign up.

Wow! I left Company B's site a customer, and never even realized that Company A's offering was substantially similar. I simply didn't want to sift through all the information that one finds in a traditional site, even a well designed one. And why should I have? If Company B was clearly meeting my needs after four pages, isn't that good enough?

WorkXpress has the same issue with every interface we design, from our Web site through to our management portal to development environment. You have the same issues with your restaurant, your consulting firm or your HVAC company.

Until a customer makes the decision to vest themselves in your product, you must spoon-feed them what they need to know. And that doesn't mean twist, market or lie to them; it means tell them those aspects of your offering that are relevant to them.

And you must remember that relevance is situational -- it evolves throughout the customer's experience with you. At one point, they know they need software; later, they want to know the price; and after that they might want to test drive it. At each point in that experience, they don't want to be bombarded with options other than what they are wrestling with in their mind.

In the world of technology, you aren't going to get contextual feedback from your customers. You can't adjust your presentation midstream. It's not working any more to simply throw a lot of information onto a Web page and hope they will sift through it.

Strong technology, more than ever, is going to be about strong psychology; knowing the minds of people you've never met and giving them exactly the evolving experience that they need.

Treff LaPlante is president and CEO of Carlisle-based WorkXpress.

We've heard about national sports leagues cracking down on what its employees and players could post on social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Now it's the investment world that's turning up the heat.

The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority has updated its guidelines for interpreting rules that govern how brokers present advice to the public to cover social networking sites, according to Ars Technica.

"First, the new rules attempt to take the traditional distinction between marketing a brand and hawking specific investment products, and to enforce it in online venues that sport a constantly evolving slate of features and functionality, and where the lines between the personal and the professional -- or, the personal and the promotional -- aren't always clear," the technology blog reported.

The authority's new rules also state that firms must keep records of business-related communication on social networking sites, but doesn't recommend a particular technology and even states, "nor are we certain that adequate technology currently exists."

Priceless.

Thoughts?

Andréa Maria Cecil is managing editor at the Central Penn Business Journal. She is a 31-year-old native New Orleanian who is interested in how gadgets and technology can make business more efficient.