Green IT and concern for the environment are getting lots of attention in the IT industry but seemingly productivity and not environmental concerns are the biggest driver for Australia’s small business owners switching to high-grade video conferencing for meetings.

A five-fold increase over the next five years in the public cloud services market is predicted for the Asia-Pacific region – the fastest rate amongst all regions – with the growth driven by the rapid uptake of cloud services by small to medium enterprises.

The Business Software Alliance is taking aim at small businesses in Perth. The move is set to go national.

The industry body representing New Zealand’s ICT sector, the New Zealand Information and Communication Technologies group (NZICT) has a new chief intent on building a thriving, healthy ICT industry, with a particular focus on helping SME technology companies expand globally, ultra-fast broadband development and government use of IT.

The Australian Computer Society Foundation (ACSF) will focus on software development projects and research for ICT companies now it has been recognised as an eligible research organisation under the Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research’s Enterprise Connect, Researchers in Business program.

Business management software solutions vendor, Sage, has released the new ACT! contact and customer manager solution with its ACT! Connect connected service which it says facilitates user access to their contact records and calendar items from virtually anywhere.

Small businesses that have been thinking of adopting Google Apps may have missed their chance of getting the service for free. Google used to allow up to 50 seats at no charge, but now that limit has been slashed to 10.

It's sometimes asserted that small businesses lag far behind the corporate sector when it comes to letting employees work from home or other locations away from the main office. But that's not what a survey conducted for Telstra found.

Telstra has published the first edition of Smarter Business Ideas, its quarterly magazine for SMEs published in conjunction with ACP Magazines and with a print run double that of all other Australian business titles combined.

Australian SMBs are only marginally better prepared for disasters than those around the world.