Technology & Gadgets

Software and hardware today is more accessible than it has ever been. Small businesses, being on the front line, must find ways to leverage time and resources not only for profit increases but for survival itself.

Technology offers excellent ways to increase productivity, devise management systems and streamline operations.

A solid premade underlying baseline for creating new digital products is the route many developers prefer today. AI “vibecoding” makes this easier because coders no longer need to know how to code – they use a copilot to create whatever they want in seconds.

Recently, I’ve been building AI chatbots using both Poe and Google Gemini. Poe was easy because it is part of Quora and is already built – you just feed it with your knowledge base and write a prompt – but the Google AI required a lot of coding.

And guess what? I did it all with ChatGPT! I don’t know javascript, and it didn’t matter. I got the AI to help me code another AI.

Open Source Software

Open source software is one of the greatest gifts. The communities surrounding the thousands of free open source apps and utilities is attractive to those looking to use some kind of existing framework to build upon.

Similarly, if you’re building a website you do not have to spend time creating it from scratch. It is very rare for a developer to write code by hand when there are dozens of trusted content management systems including WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal.

With a framework, essentially, you embellish upon an existing template and use it freely with redistribution rights.

WordPress is among the best examples of open source software and is a powerful tool. 

You’ll find not only video channels, podcasts, courses, blogs and websites dedicated to WordPress, but live conferences and meet ups with keynote speakers.

With some creativity and imagination, it’s possible to get open source and free apps to do things their paid counterparts do.

Just don’t assume open source simply means free. It doesn’t, not always.

• Open source gives you redistribution rights under the Creative Commons licenses.
• You can take a piece of software and access the API (like WordPress) to change it.
• Plain old “free” software in the conventional sense usually means you get what you’re given and cannot reprogram, recode or reverse engineer any of it.

Proprietary Software

Some of my tools are paid for, and I consider it money well spent. When it comes to paid/proprietary software, you need to ask yourself what the free alternatives are and do a cost analysis.

The important question is whether the free tool you use will be around long term?

Sometimes, free apps and software get bought out by another company who then decide to change the terms. If your business tech strategies are sensitive to disruption, and you’re relying on a tool you have not paid for, this could become an issue.

One broken part in the chain causes the house of cards to collapse.

Here’s my warning: Please do not  get into a situation where your business is jerry-rigged with uncertain/unreliable software solutions. When you buy something from a provider, your relationship is totally different with the entity compared to if you were using a free alternative from the same provider.

Sometimes it is worth coughing up the money for paid software. You’ll get better customer support when there might have been none with the free alternative you were using.

Mixing It Up

Most people combine free software with paid software. WordPress plugins are a good example of this, since free ones sometimes get removed from the plugin repository which can upset your tech stack and workflow. 

It’s normal to end up with a vast, extended family of tools you didn’t exactly expect. Like all families, there can be friction and disagreements.

For this reason, I use Adobe Illustrator with Photoshop and InDesign whereas some designers will insist on Corel Draw.

Brands like Apple are notorious for ring fencing their products and grooming a captive market who cannot easily use outside software with their Apple product.

To avoid problematic situations I’ll always seriously evaluate exactly what tools I’m using for design, marketing and logistics. I always definitely consider paying subscriptions for good software without headaches.

For example, Skype was retired in 2025 and that disrupted my communications because I was using it for my phone number. Thankfully I found Switchboard to replace it but Skype was still taken away at short notice AND I was paying for it!

Hardware

After all these years, I still don’t have a proper camera! Just an iPhone on a tripod, with an external ATR2100 microphone recording audio directly into my PC. I have a handy boom arm for the mic too, so I can sit at my desk having phone calls or recording a podcast.

Everything gets edited together in post production, but really, I want a second hand Panasonic G8. Those are like the Ford Focus of the camera world – reliable without being fancy. The footage you download from the camera is already in MP4 format (unlike iPhone – lots of messing about there!) making it easier to edit.

A couple of years ago I invested in a large greenscreen and some bog standard lights from a shop around the corner from where I live. It’s pretty amazing what this allows you to do in combination with decent editing software like Sony Vegas. 

A lot of small businesses either can’t or won’t do video. More often than not, it’s about ego and laziness, but even if they wanted to, they wouldn’t know where to begin. Well, as I have shown, it’s possible to start acquiring bits and pieces strategically and at low cost.

Posts About Technology

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Google Calendar Retiring SMS Notifications – iOS Calendar Picking Up the Slack

How I Use My iPhone and Google Calendar SMS for Social Media Reminders

How I Digitise & Back Up My Expenses with an External USB Drive

A List of All My Hardware/Software Tools