· Depressed about the impending tax deadline? If you are self-employed or a company director needing to submit their self-assessment form and have yet to do anything about it, you ought to be at least a little anxious.
This is why Alliance & Leicester has got the Inland Revenue on board for its www.billpayment.co.uk website, which can be used to pay the bill at any point until midnight on January 31 so that you avoid a fine. Numerous companies, including the tax office, will accept payment through this website, and you don't need an online bank account to take advantage of it.
· Printer manufacturer Epson is pushing its way into the all-in-one market, launching a multifunction machine that will compete with similar space-saving options from Brother, Hewlett-Packard and others.
The company claims customers are disillusioned with offerings from other companies since they focus on only one element of the device, such as the scanner or the printer, at the expense of the others, whereas the new Stylus CX3200 won't make this mistake. Pricing had yet to be confirmed as we went to press.
Meanwhile, Hewlett-Packard is also targeting the smaller trader working from home with the HP OfficeJet 6110 and OfficeJet 5110 multifunction systems, coming in at £349 plus VAT for the higher-end product with the flatbed scanner built in, and HP LaserJet 1005w personal laser printer, which will cost £199 plus VAT.
The company believes it is making business products available for consumer-ish prices without compromising on quality. Expect retaliatory price cuts or new product launches from the competition as a result.
· Wireless networking is becoming desperately trendy but useful, and manufacturers Zyxel and Netgear are making efforts to make it easier and cheaper to use. Zyxel has launched a suite of products, including a wireless gateway with ports for four computers to share an internet connection without cables, a PC card, a PCI card and an ethernet adapter, all selling through Electronic Frontier and including extra security. It has also launched the 650HW router, which is a network router with a wireless access point built in for under £200.
Netgear is also pushing the more-devices-in-one idea, with a combined switch, router and wireless access point in the one box with a simple setting-up process. This is called the DG824M and will support up to 256 computers sharing the same internet connection, although if you had all of them online at the one time it would almost certainly slow down quite a lot.
· The Department of Trade and Industry-backed UK Online for Business scheme has published four booklets aimed at helping people who want to get their business online. The organisation has published research suggesting that in spite of the business advantages nearly a quarter of retailers in the convenience store sector and more than half the micro-businesses in the area have not even considered e-commerce - meaning that the big supermarkets will win the online business every time.
UK Online for Business claims its publications, EPOS and Supplying Electronically, EDI and Supplying Electronically, CAD/CAM and Supplying Electronically and Just-in-Time - Transforming Your Business, will help and will be jargon-free. Whether anything with EPOS, CAD/CAM and EDI in the titles can really make that claim is open to discussion.
· UK businesses are scaling back on their investment in leading-edge technology as the amount of information they need to process expands. Research from CopperEye entitled The Business Information Study suggests 87% of companies believe IT will continue to play a vital part in their business and two-thirds expected the information they will need to process to grow massively. However, they will not be investing in new applications but sticking with established technology to deal with it.
· A new collaboration between Avaya, Proxim and Motorola should sort out a lot of the confusion around the various means of communicating when you are on the road. Using technologies shared between the participants, the alliance hopes to start issuing multi-standard devices so the user won't have to think about whether they are on a mobile phone for internet connections, or using GPRS through a mobile, or near a WiFi 'hotspot' (an area in which you are allowed to share a wireless connection).
The systems themselves will detect and configure the best way to get you online. You will also be able to make telephone calls over the net where it will be cheaper. Trials of products are expected to happen in the second half of this year.
· Financial software specialist CIP-Global (www.cip-global.com) is coming to the UK with financial management products for small businesses. Its systems use SQL Server and are ready to take advantage of Microsoft's .Net environment. The scalability means the same system can be used to track the finances of a 10-strong company or indeed a 10,000-strong organisation. The products are particularly strong in reporting.
