Tech in Small Business

O'Rielly Media announced today that they are expanding their forums. I am big fan of O'Rielly Media, but I have felt that there was a whole in their other wise excellent coverage of the tech sector. I posted the following as a response the announcement. As an avid reader of Radar, follower of Mr. Orielly's tweets and many other O'Reilly outlets, I have been very impressed with the direction that O'Rielly has taken in the last year or so. Nowhere else have I found such a clear articulation of the current and future state of tech, and the critical roles it can play. However there is one area that I keep wishing would get more attention. Tech in small business. Perhaps a forum could be setup to address this missing peice. Small businesses and the tech vendors that serve them face a different set of challenges then their counterparts in the enterprise sector or those tech companies building consumer software and services. The most obvious constraint is resources. But small the small business sector also suffers from a lack of a serious lack of vision. The small business sector doesn't know enough about emerging technologies to take advantage of them. I enjoy all of the inspirational stories and new fascinating takes on solving the critical issues facing humanity today. But for many in the small business sector, we just have jobs to do. All of that high-minded stuff seems a bit out of our league. Small business is responsible for the majority of employment in this country. Getting out of our current crises will require the creation of millions of jobs. Most of those jobs will probably come from small business. So perhaps helping small business is one of the biggest challenges facing us today.