Editor's note: we offer our long-term sponsors the opportunity to write 'Sponsor Posts' and tell their story. These posts are clearly marked as written by sponsors, but we also want them to be useful and interesting to our readers. We hope you like the posts and we encourage you to support our sponsors by trying out their products. Over the past decade, the Internet has evolved at a rapid pace, and if you didn't jump on the bandwagon in years past you may be feeling like it's a bit too late to establish an online business. That's not the case, however, and 2010 is the perfect time to start doing business online. The underlying technologies of Internet architecture are well-established and are more affordable now than ever to end-users. Sponsor The last several years have also seen a huge increase in the number of available social tools, web utilities and online services that make promoting your business and being visible online easier and more affordable. The number of Internet users continues to grow substantially across the globe, and there are an expansive number of channels you can use to reach potential customers online. From an economic perspective, now is also a good time to consider starting or growing your business. The global economy is showing signs of recovery from recession, and catching an economic upswing when growing a small business is always a good thing. Small business loans from banks and other creditors may still be difficult to come by, however, which makes an online business an even better choice due to low start-up costs. In recent history, a great deal of attention has been paid to the massive growth in large social networks, but now the Internet appears to be shifting towards a more local or hyperlocal focus with smaller communities inside bigger networks becoming more common. As a result, small businesses offering local products or services can find a targeted audience of potential customers to engage with. All these factors make now a great time to start your business online. Follow through on a 2010 resolution to make money from what you enjoy doing by starting a complete business from the ground up, adding an online component to your existing physical business, or just using a website to supplement other income and test the water for your idea. Below are a few steps you can take to get started. 9 Steps to Getting Your Business Online Find a little cash : It's probably going to cost a lot to get started with a business website, right? Not so much. Don't fool yourself into thinking that you can't afford to start a business online just because you see startups with millions of dollars in venture capital funding featured on ReadWriteWeb or other tech blogs. A huge number of successful online small businesses were started out of a home office or garage workspace. The Internet is massive, and if you can find a good niche, you don't have to be everywhere at once to be successful. Costs for getting started with a domain name, hosting, basic website creation and online marketing can easily be kept under $1,000 in your first year of business if you plan well. Get a strong domain name : If you're in the early planning stages of your business, always keep potential domain names in mind when choosing a business name. If you move forward with a great business name only to find the domain name is taken , it could mean back to square one on name planning. Instead, keep a domain search handy as you brainstorm and get creative with names to find a great fit. Your domain name will be your website's permanent address on the web, so it's important to get it right the first time. Get Web hosting : You'd be surprised how many people think the domain name is all they need to build a website. What you need next is a place to store website files online. That could be something as simple as basic web hosting or a more powerful solution such as a virtual private server - both of which we offer at MyDomain. There are many other options as well, including self-hosting on your own server. There's a decent chance you know these basics already, so if that's the case, make sure to share your knowledge with others who are looking to get started online. Build a website : There are a huge number of options when it comes to creating a website in 2010. Most hosting packages come with some a website builder that will create a decent, if not slightly dated looking website from a template. If you're not experienced in web design but want to create a good-looking site yourself, look into content management systems such as Drupal, Joomla, or even WordPress as viable options that are easy to keep updated. The best - and not-surprisingly most costly option - still remains to hire a Web design company or freelancer. But if you're serious about your online business, your website design and usability should be a top priority. Create an e-commerce strategy : Now comes the fun part: figuring out how to let other people pay you. If you want to have an integrated shopping cart solution, you'll be able to sell directly through your site and manage complete product listings. However, this type of solution is the most expensive and complex way to sell online, and a simpler solution may be a better fit for a small business just getting started. A great place to start is simply integrating services such as Paypal or Google Checkout into your website to accept payments. Another viable alternative is to use a website as an informational source for your business, but sell through another online vendor like Amazon, eBay, or Etsy . A final option is to choose to not sell online, but instead establish a website to promote and market your physical business. Secure your site : If you're planning to sell through your website or will even be collecting sensitive information from visitors, you'll want to look into getting an SSL certificate for your website. SSL encrypts data transmissions to and from your website and is most commonly used to protect credit card and financial data. Varying levels of encryption and visible security indicators for your website are available. Network like crazy : Traditional networking can be crucial to the early success of a business, and social media can enable you to network effectively online. Talk about social media for business use is everywhere, and there are a huge number of resources and articles available to help you get started. Make sure that above all else, you go where your customers are. Utilize the tools that will allow you to most effectively communicate with those customers. Track like crazy, too : Make sure you're using website analytics to track your website visitors and sales. Part of the beauty of the web versus a traditional storefront is the ability to easily track, sort and analyze all of the data collected from visitors to your website. Analytics can help you improve your website design, track your sales conversion, see where you're ranking in search engines and much more. Google provides some of the best options available with Analytics , Webmaster Tools and Website Optimizer that all provide invaluable data for any online business. Grow and organize for the future : If you've made it to the point where you have a website set up, sales are coming in and your business is growing, it's the perfect time to make sure you're fully organized online. Use custom email addresses for your business, and make use of powerful collaboration, calendar and task management tools such as Open Xchange , Microsoft Exchange or Google Apps. Stay on top of the latest Internet trends and changes as things will continue to change rapidly for the foreseeable future. From there, carry your 2010 success long into the future as the Web continues to expand as a great place to do business. Discuss

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Sponsor Post: MyDomain Shows How to Take Your Business Online in 2010

Don't worry, it's not Twitter! For our Best LittleCo of 2009, we've chosen a small company whose product launched in 2009 and quickly became a leading example of one of the year's big trends: the real-time web. Our pick for Most Promising is something that could change the way people search on the Web. Last week we announced that Google was our choice for Best BigCo of 2009 , due to its product innovation in 2009. Today we're announcing Best LittleCo and Most Promising Company , as selected by the ReadWriteWeb writers. Sponsor This is the 6th year we've done this and many of the small companies we choose each year go onto much bigger things. Here's a quick look back at previous winners: In 2008 we chose web office vendor Zoho as Best LittleCo and Brightkite as our Most Promising. Zoho is still competing well above its weight bracket against office software giants like Microsoft and Google. However it's fair to say that Brightkite hasn't delivered as much on its promise as we thought it might, due in part to the emergence of Foursquare as 'the next big thing' in mobile social networking. In 2007 Twitter was Best LittleCo and in a break from tradition we named "the open source movement" as most promising. Twitter, of course, has since gone on to make a huge impact on the Web and media. In 2006 YouTube was Best LittleCo and Sharpcast Most Promising. YouTube was acquired by Google in October of that year. In 2005 37Signals was Best LittleCo and Memeorandum (now Techmeme) and Digg were joint Most Promising. In 2004 Ludicorp , creators of Flickr, was Best LittleCo and Feedburner Most Promising. Both went on to be acquired, by Yahoo! and Google respectively. Now let's find out who is ReadWriteWeb's Best LittleCo of 2009. Then on page 2 we name our Most Promising company for 2010. Best LittleCo of 2009: Aardvark Aardvark (our initial review and then a comparison review ) is a social search engine that combines artificial intelligence, natural-language processing and presence data to create what the company calls "the real-time Web of people." The company was founded in 2007, but the product only launched in March 2009 at SXSW. It quickly became one of the companies we point to most when we discuss the Real-Time Web , one of the most significant trends of this year. In our report on the Real-Time Web released in November, we described how it works: "You can ask Aardvark any question, and it will try to find a person in your extended social circles who knows about that topic and is available to answer at that moment. Aardvark facilitates these conversations through a very polite IM bot, an iPhone app with push notifications, the company's website, Twitter or email. Instead of broadcasting your question to every one's stream of information, Aardvark delivers the question only to people who are relevant and available." Unlike Yahoo Answers or similar services, Aardvark doesn't keep a repository of frequently asked questions. The service's mission is to get you current answers from experts in your own social networks. On most days, over 85% of all questions get answered. As we noted in our report, Aardvark's got an all-star team of engineers from Google and Yahoo and high-profile investors. It's already cutting deals with major tech brands and is rumored to be on Google's acquisition list. Whatever happens to the company, the use cases for Aardvark are just beginning to be explored. In short, Aardvark impressed us a lot this year and it made no fewer than 3 of our 2009 best-of lists : Top 10 Consumer Web Apps of 2009 Top 10 Real-Time Technologies of 2009 Top 10 Startup Products of 2009 Aardvark's iPhone app was also popular with our writers, two of them putting it in their top 5 mobile web applications of the year . Next page: ReadWriteWeb's Most Promising Company for 2010... Most Promising: Wolfram|Alpha Wolfram|Alpha launched in May and ended up making our list of the Top 10 Consumer Products of the year . It was also the most hyped, with the possible exception of Google Wave. Inevitably, Wolfram Research's "computational knowledge engine" disappointed many who were looking for a Google killer . But Alpha introduced a new paradigm for search engines: Instead of giving you a long list of links, Alpha tries to give users an answer based on information from reputable sources. It also enables users to compute and calculate things off that information. While it isn't useful for everybody yet, the Wolfram Alpha team has worked hard to expand Alpha's knowledge. If you are an engineer or scientist, Wolfram Alpha might just be the most useful web app for you. For the rest of us, Alpha's ability to solve anagrams, aggregate weather data and tell you the distance between two cities proves to be useful, too - although not as useful as the service's ability to solve complex math problems. Wolfram|Alpha also launched a $50 iPhone application in October. Even though Wolfram Alpha's web interface is available for free, the company insisted that its mobile application offered enough new features to justify this price. We listed some initial use cases for Wolfram|Alpha in July, but it's a safe bet to say that the best of this product will be seen in 2010 and beyond. If Web 2.0 was about creating data (user generated content, to use the most familiar term for this), then the next generation of the Web is all about using that data. Wolfram|Alpha is premised on using and computing data, so we think it's a product to watch in 2010. Now let us know your thoughts on our picks for Best LittleCo (Aardvark) and Most Promising (Wolfram|Alpha). Discuss

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Best LittleCo of 2009 & Most Promising for 2010

Respected industry thought leader, Joseph Smarr, announced on his blog today that he is leaving Comcast-acquired Plaxo to join Google and help drive the company's next steps in the social web. Smarr has been a key innovator in the OpenID , Oauth and related technical movements. Smarr's work is all about enabling innovation by making it easy for users to move data from site to site. Sponsor While noting Google's support for specific open web technologies, Smarr also said: "Getting the future of the Social Web right - including identity, privacy, data portability, messaging, real-time data, and a distributed social graph - is just as important, and the industry is at a critical phase where the next few years may well determine the platform we live with for decades to come. " Smarr was the first non-founding employee of Plaxo, a dynamic contact management service that was once the darling of Silicon Valley, and then became its spammy boogeyman, and was finally acquired by Comcast 18 months ago . Plaxo was co-founded by Napster co-founder Sean Parker and was backed by Sequoia Capital, the fund that backed Google and YouTube. Chris Messina , fellow open-web leader and the self-described evangelist that helped turn Smarr from the dark side of Plaxo's early days ("champions of the open web can come from all corners," he told us), said of the move: "Smarr joining Google is a logical next step for him - I think he's done great work at Plaxo with John McCrea, but advancing the open web has not been able to be his priority since he took on the CTO role there." Kaliya Hamlin , who says she introduced Smarr to the Identity community, said of his move to Google: "His spirit and energy to get things done, work across company boundaries and a deep commitment to open standards innovation will be a great asset for Google. One thing that really stands out for me was his innovation with Microsoft on the Portable Contacts API. That idea originated at the Data Sharing Workshop seeking to make progress on what was possible and within six months under his leadership it was complete." OpenID leader Scott Kveton said this announcement is just the beginning. "That's great news," he told us, "and just the first of more to come I hear. It's going to be down to Google, Microsoft and Facebook. They are hiring all of the people building the open web. I'll be curious to see what kind of impact it has." Smarr photo by Adactio . Discuss

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Google Hires Open Web Leader to For Social Initiatives

At the close of a whiz-bang year, OpenID has a lot to be proud of. With a community of 9 million sites that use OpenID logins and 1 billion individual users, OpenID has effectively revolutionized the way we are able to create and maintain portable identities. Best of all, it's not just bloggers and geeks who sang OpenID's praises: The U.S. federal government got on board this year, too. Sponsor OpenID accounts are enabled by such providers as AOL, Blogger, Flickr, Google, LiveJournal, MySpace, Verisign, WordPress and Yahoo with announcements of upcoming OpenIDs from Microsoft and PayPal. Sites that allow users to login with OpenID range from major retailers and music labels to news organizations and social sites. As for the government, at the Gov 2.0 Summit in Washington, DC, earlier this year, the General Services Administration and several government agencies announced they would adopt OpenID as part of the White House's Open Government Initiative. Participating companies included Yahoo!, PayPal, Google, Equifax, AOL, VeriSign, Acxiom, Citi, Privo and Wave Systems. On the government side is the Center for Information Technology (CIT), National Institutes of Health (NIH), U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and related agencies. Not only is the government's involvement a vote of confidence for OpenID's innovation; it also speaks to the product's security progress, which was spearheaded by security committee head and PayPal exec Andrew Nash. In addition to developing and spreading the OpenID product, there's also the OpenID Foundation, which appointed its first executive committee, including Chris Messina and Don Thibeau, in 2009. Portable identity is one of our favorite themes from this year, and we applaud what OpenID has been able to accomplish. What do you look forward to seeing from the product, the foundation and OpenID partner sites in the year to come? Let us know your thoughts in the comments. Discuss

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OpenID Ends 2009 With 1 Billion Users

In one of ReadWriteWeb's longest-running traditions, every year we review the top Internet companies and their impact over the past 12 months. Today we're announcing the 6th annual Best BigCo , a.k.a. big Internet company. Next week we'll announce Best LittleCo and Most Promising Company . In 2008 the Best BigCo went to Apple , due largely to the iPhone and App Store. Facebook won in 2007 , Google in 2006 and 2004 , and Yahoo! in 2005 . Who will be Best BigCo of 2009? Will Apple be the first company to win it two years running? Will Google win the honor for a 3rd year? How about Facebook, which grew significantly this year. Let's find out... Sponsor Best BigCo of 2009 The ReadWriteWeb team has chosen Google as our Best BigCo of 2009! Google last won it in 2006 and this is the third time we've honored the Mountain View company. Google is without question the predominant Internet company of our time; in large part because it continues to innovate and stay one step ahead of its competition. In our Top 100 Products List for 2009, seven Google products made the cut: Android platform Google App Engine Google Apps Google Chrome Google Maps Google Search Options and Rich Snippets Google Voice And we didn't even include Google Wave , its biggest launch of the year . We think Wave has a lot of potential, but it's clearly at the experimental stage still. The web browser Chrome was probably the Google product that had the biggest impact this year. Launched in late 2008 , Chrome still only holds a small share of the browser market and doesn't offer a stable version for OSX or Linux yet. However it has already changed the browser market. As we wrote in our Top 10 Consumer Web Apps of 2009 review, Chrome's relentless focus on speed helped to reignite the browser wars , and is changing the way developers and Google's competitors think about browsers. Chrome is also the basis for Google's upcoming Chrome OS , designed for netbooks - a growing fad in computers. So expect to see a lot more of Chrome in 2010. Runners-Up: Apple, Facebook It's been another good year for Apple and its iPhone platform. The iPhone is the leading smartphone in the market and the App Store now features over 100,000 applications . This year, as we mentioned in our Top 10 Web Platforms of 2009 review, Apple extended the SDK with version 3.0 of the iPhone OS . The updates included better support for 3D gaming, augmented reality apps, easier access to maps, in-app purchases and support for push notifications. With these kinds of improvements, we expect Apple to continue its success on the mobile Web in 2010 - despite increasing competition from Google's Android platform. Facebook had a stellar year too, passing the 300 million active user mark in September. It also continued to add features to the site, ranging from vanity URLs to a new sharing widget and a focus on real-time updates of its users' news streams. Facebook's user base is increasingly diverse , and it is now clearly the number one social network in the world, leaving MySpace in its dust. What's more, Facebook's user base is now bigger than the population of all but three countries in the world. Next Page: Honorable Mentions & Also Rans Honorable Mentions: Microsoft, Amazon, Adobe While Microsoft continued to struggle with its Windows Live brand , it did come out with at least one compelling new product in 2009. Until earlier this year, Google didn't have any serious competition in the search market. But with the launch of Microsoft's Bing in July, users suddenly had a new choice of search engine. Bing bills itself as a "decision engine" and its market share has climbed steadily over the last few months. Microsoft keeps adding interesting new features like visual search , hover previews, integrated Twitter search and a smart integration of some of Wolfram Alpha's most compelling features. We also recognized Windows Azure , Microsoft's cloud computing platform, among our Top Products of 2009 . Amazon had another good year in 2009. Its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) was one of our top 100 products this year. However Amazon had the most impact this year with a piece of hardware: its e-book reader, the Kindle. In May, Amazon unveiled the Kindle DX , featuring a 9.7-inch display that is about two-and-a-half-times larger than the Kindle 2. November was Amazon's best month ever for Kindle sales, and, according to the company, the Kindle is the "most wished for, the most gifted, and the #1 bestselling product across all product categories on Amazon." Very few Web platforms have the cross-platform reach of Adobe AIR . It allows developers to create one application and run it on all of the major operating systems. This year Adobe launched AIR 2 , which now allows developers to access mass storage devices, drag-and-drop support for remote files and rudimentary support for P2P networking. In addition, AIR 2 enables developers to use the multi-touch capabilities of modern screens. Also Rans Unfortunately, the less said about Yahoo!, AOL, Mozilla, eBay - the better. It hasn't been a great year for any of them. Yahoo! struggled gamely and impressed us with its YQL (Yahoo Query Language) and SearchMonkey. But it is far from the Internet force it was in 2005, when we named it our Best BigCo. Yahoo still has a wide reach and is very popular amongst mainstream audiences, but it just isn't the force it once was. AOL has resorted to becoming a content farm in order to compete, eBay has squandered a valuable asset in Skype , and Mozilla - while continuing to innovate - has been hurt by Google's Chrome browser entering the market. Now let us know your thoughts. Do you think that Google deserves the Best BigCo of 2009? Ed: Thanks Frederic Lardinois , one of our writers whose year-end posts I liberally quoted from to create this article! Discuss

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Best BigCo of 2009

Collaboration services targeted for the small business market often seem more like software suites than web-based services with deep linking capabilities and tag-based environments. For example, the new offering from HyperOffice focuses on features that are fundamental to small business operations but lacks the advanced capabilities that we see from a number of Enterprise 2.0 services. Is this a good thing? Is this due to the domination of document-based systems that have traditionally been such a part of the small business world? Sponsor We are torn on this one. We see a number of companies offering services such as real-time collaboration environments. Still, the portal mindset seems to have such a hold on the small business market. HyperOffice looks like it is providing a service that has value for the small business. But like others we have seen, HyperOffice feels monolithic. It provides the capability to create personal and group environments but extensions to the web are limited. In some respects this may be just the right approach. HyperOffice users may not want the capability to build data mashups and tie into services like Twitter. The company points out that the market is flooded with Web 2.0 style point tools. The HyperOffice platform is a one-stop shop. This may be smart as the company is targeting Microsoft Sharepoint and Lotus Notes users. A SaaS like HyperOffice may be enticing, perhaps even more because it has similar functionality to the offerings from the big players in the market. The HyperOffice UI resembles a Microsoft Office environment. The main page includes icons such as desktop, mail and calendar. The features are basic but provide a clear functionality for the user. HyperOffice has personal and group settings. Groups may share calendar items, collaborate on documents and other tasks. Additional features include tasks, notes, a wiki and the ability to search Google and Yahoo! from within the application. Here's an overview of the service: Google Apps and Zoho provide a deeper web experience than HyperOffice. But there is definite value here for the company looking for an affordable, CRM service. Pricing starts at $7 per user, per month. Discuss

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Why Do Small Business Services Sometimes Lack Sophistication?

This morning, we got news that Microsoft had unequivocally ripped off design and code from marginally successful microblogging service Plurk . Now, we're seeing reports - and seeing for ourselves on the Microsoft website - that the knockoff site has been unceremoniously ganked from the tubes. Did a major corporation get caught red-handed stealing intellectual property from a startup? Say it ain't so! More interestingly, is the site's removal an admission of guilt? And are these side-by-side source code screenshots incriminating or what? Sponsor We received an email from a Plurk co-founder Amir Salihefendic this morning calling MSN China's Juku an obvious counterfeit . The proof is in the pudding. And the screenshots. And the source code: Currently, the Microsoft microblog site reads something along the lines of "We regret to inform you that the service is temporarily not available due to system maintenance. Please visit the site again later. We apologize for the inconvenience." Perhaps they ought to be apologizing to Plurk for the inconvenience. "We were absolutely shocked and outraged," wrote Plurk rep Dave Thompson, "when we first saw with our own eyes the cosmetic similarities Microsoft's new offering had with Plurk... "We're still in shock asking why Microsoft would even stoop to this level of wilfully plagiarizing a young and innovative upstart's work rather than reach out to us or innovate on their own terms." Microsoft has issued this press release that passes the buck on to an unnamed third-party contractor. Is it likely that the Microsoft executives in charge of producing the microblog were a) unaware of Plurk's existence and design to the extent that they wouldn't recognize a clone as such and b) that they didn't simply point at Plurk and tell their vendors to "make us one of those"? Having had some experience in both startup development processes and corporate application deployment, I personally know very well that a (literally) criminal amount of IP theft goes on every day in Silicon Valley and around the world. Most of the time, the offending parties are operating under the belief that they won't get caught. And a great deal of the time, they're not caught. We must, however, applaud Microsoft's taking the site down to investigate the matter rather than being defensive or litigious. Still, the software giant should be accepting more accountability for the attempted theft that was conducted in its name and under the auspices of its brand. What do you think? Who is to blame in this situation? Cast your vote below, and tell us what you really think in the comments. How Do You See the MSFT/Plurk Situation? ( polls ) Discuss

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Microsoft Caught With Hand in Plurk's Cookie Jar?