Biz Bits

The release of the iPhone 3G caused quite a stir, but iTunes’ application store deserves attention as well—especially from business travelers. Here’s a taste of what you can find.

1. Salesforce Mobile
Free • Critical customer data (contact info, accounts, leads) will be instantly accessible so you can make a deal on the road.

2. Expense2Go
Free • Creating expense reports has never been easier—and you can even use the iPhone to photograph receipts and attach them to the record.

3. LionClock Plus
$80 • Keep track of how much time you’re spending on projects, and bill clients directly from your iPhone—it’s ideal for self-employed professionals.

4 .Bloomberg
Free • Receive accurate, timely info about the world’s fi nancial markets, and create a customized list of stocks that you want to follow.

5. Oracle Business Indicators
Free • Keep tabs on your company with this business intelligence app, which provides real-time, secure access to performance metrics.

6. Aria Touch
$30 • Manage your team while on the road by reviewing, updating or assigning tasks; you can also organize personal notes.

7. ReaddleDocs
$15 • Save and store documents, books and web articles, and read them later, perhaps while you’re on the plane; it also works with PDFs, gif, html, jpeg, rtf, fb 2 and txt fi les.

8. ZeptoPad
$10 • Creative types can sketch, plan, conceptualize and design to their heart’s content when the next big idea hits.

9. Mocha VNC Lite
Free • Access a VNC server, and see fi les, programs and resources as if you were sitting in front of a computer at your desk.

10. Loan Calc
$.99 • Compute any component of a loan with this simple fi nancial calculator.

11. Stage Hand
$8 • Forget index cards or hunching over a laptop—use the iPhone to completely control your next presentation.

12. MyAccountsToGo
(with Dynamics GP or SAP BusinessOne)
$450 • Sales, marketing and fi nance execs can access records, sales orders, invoices and more from corporate financial management systems like Dynamics GP or SAP BusinessOne.

THE CLOSING BELL

JACK GUINAN

RESEARCH SEARCHES

Knowing what people are looking for online can improve your business.

Bill Tancer loves data. The self-professed data geek and author of CLICK: What Millions of People Do Online and Why it Matters, has made a career of ferreting out how people search on the internet. While it’s fun to know that “how to tie a tie” is the most common “how to” search, online data also makes for important market research for companies like MTV and Panasonic (both clients of Hitwise, where Tancer is general manager of global research). Search engines provide objective information—and lots of it. Finding out how people search can lead to big dividends for your company.

UNEXPECTED FINDINGS
You may think you have an idea as to what potential costumers are searching for. For example, it’s no surprise that searches for diets spike in January. But other trends are a bit quirkier. One such phenomenon is a rise in searches for “prom dresses” in the fall and winter. Teens aren’t planning ahead; they’re looking for homecoming dresses. “Some of our [dress-selling] clients were missing out on the searches,” Tancer says, because they didn’t know to market prom dresses so far in advance of the spring season.

RANK AND FILE
One criterion for how pages are ordered in search results is relevance of your business’ web content to the terms searched, which is where knowing what individuals are looking for comes in handy. The other element, on Google, is page rank. “Page rank really is about getting people to link to your content… and sometimes it’s just about the popularity of the content,” Tancer says. If your content is unique and well written, others will link to it, thereby treating it as an authority on the subject, which will bring you to the top of the organic listings.

BRAND NAME
“One thing that we find with our data is that the top search terms are usually branded navigational terms,” Tancer says. When the iPhone was released in July, three out of the top 10 search terms that included the word “iPhone” also included “3G,” showing that AT&T and Apple were successful in marketing 3G as part of the brand name. What does this mean? Traditional advertising is still important: If people know your brand name, they will search for it specifically instead of using a generic industry term.

GET A HEAD START

A growing number of college students are pursuing degrees in business early on. Here are the top five undergraduate business schools, according to BusinessWeek:

The Wharton School
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia

McIntire School of Commerce
University of Virginia
Charlottesville, VA (72 miles from Richmond)

Mendoza College of Business
University of Notre Dame
South Bend, IN (96 miles from Chicago)

Cornell University
Ithaca, NY (91 miles from Rochester)

Goizueta Business School
Emory University
Atlanta

Business undergrad illustration: Tim Vienckowski