Biz Blotter

The primary purpose of Biz Blotter is to provide details about our upcoming business software projects and supply links to web sites of interest to small business owners, webmasters, and software developers. From time to time we'll post articles in the Mad Rhinoceros Speaks blog relating to products or services that we've used and think other small business owners might find to be useful. 

Feel free to send us links to any web sites & articles that you find useful. We'll review them and include them here or in our blog if we feel that they'll be useful to our site visitors. Thanks! 

Rhino Business Projects | Business Advice | Webmaster Tools | Software Development

Rhino Business Projects

What business-related software projects are we currently working on? Read on oh gentle reader...

Rhino Viewer 4.0
An updated version of our Rhino Viewer software for viewing and manipulating PSR reports is planned for release by the middle of the 2006 calendar year. The current edition of Rhino Viewer, version 3.5, works perfectly with PSR reports created by our Rhino Baseball and Rhino Hockey fantasy sports software. However, this version of the Viewer can only read PSR reports generated by software applications written in PowerBuilder 5 (or earlier versions). Many companies have since moved to using business applications written in later versions of PowerBuilder (versions 6, 7, and 8). As a result, the current edition of Rhino Viewer isn't able to fulfill their report management needs.

Version 4.0 of Rhino Viewer will be able to read and manipulate PSR reports generated by software applications written in PowerBuilder 8 (or earlier versions). That means the new version will support a much broader base of business users who have been searching for a powerful, yet easy-to-use utility that lets them view, print, export, sort, and filter their PSR reports. So if you're looking to analyze your company's customer, call center, marketing, sales, or financial data, Rhino Viewer 4.0 will be the ideal program to help you accomplish those tasks.

Call Tracker 1.0
We had been working with a representative of a financial services company on a small business software product known as Call Tracker. This Windows-based desktop program is aimed at telemarketing style businesses, and assists sales reps in identifying phone numbers that are off-limits to sales calls. As you've probably already heard, many U.S. states have passed legislation that makes it illegal for telemarketers to contact people whose numbers appear on the No-Call List. Call Tracker also enables sales reps to maintain their own database of valid phone contacts, and enables them to quickly analyze contact and call-back data through the use of flexible database queries.

A beta-version of Call Tracker was released to our client during the middle of 2003. Unfortunately, that client has been unable to continue assisting us in the further development and fine-tuning of this product. So at the present time, continued work on Call Tracker has been pushed to the back-burner. We eventually hope to revisit this project when time permits, put the finishing touches on it, and release a commercial version of the Call Tracker sometime down the road.  

Business Advice

If you're a small business owner in today's economy, you're probably interested in how to use the internet to market your business better and get the most out of E-commerce. Here are 4 web sites that we highly recommend looking into that provide excellent business and marketing advice from trusted professionals. We have no special affiliation with any of these sites, but simply feel they're really worth investigating.

If you're a sole-proprietor or owner of a small business, you simply must allow potential customers to purchase your products and services via credit card or you'll never achieve the level of sales you desire. This is doubly true if you sell products & services over the internet. One easy way for any small merchant to accept credit cards is to signup for a PayPal for Business account. With minimal effort you can setup an account and start selling your products and services to the huge audience of consumers who prefer to buy online using PayPal's popular and highly trusted payment system. Even if you already have a credit card merchant account, adding PayPal as an alternative payment option is a smart play. So what are you waiting for, click the banner below and setup your PayPal for Business account today!          

Below are some links to other business advice web sites that may also be helpful to you. Please report any dead links to our webmaster.  

Webmaster Tools 

If you're a webmaster, there are literally hundreds of sites that can help you develop and fine tune your web site. Obviously, there's no way that we could list them all here, so we've chosen a select few that are worth looking into. In particular, here are 6 "webmaster tools" sites that we really like: 

Again, we have no affiliations with these sites, but just wanted to share them with our visitors. 

There are also a plethora of web hosting and e-commerce services to choose from. The ones we use and highly recommend are:

Below are some links to other webmaster tools and services that you may also find helpful. Please report any dead links to our webmaster.

Software Development

The field of software development has grown increasingly complex in the past 10 years, with the introduction of dozens of new languages and application development tools. There are RAD (rapid application development) tools such as PowerBuilder, Delphi, and Visual C++ for client/server development, web-based languages such as Java, ASP, and ColdFusion, and an open-source movement which has introduced languages such as Perl, PHP, Python, and Javascript. It's almost too difficult to know where to begin. Software development has become very similar to the field of medicine, with lots of specialization. As a result, our list of useful links cannot possibly address all areas of software development. So we've chosen to focus on a few sites that we find useful in our own business. Here are a handful of development tools and reference/support sites that we just wouldn't want to live without.

Below are some other software development links that you might find useful. Please report any dead links to our webmaster.