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Productivity is increasingly moving away from the classic desktop machine. As mobile, BYOD and cloud transfigure the way we work - soon to be further disrupted by Google’s Chromebit,which can transform any screen into a computer for $100 - we need software tools that facilitate productivity in that new environment.

Gmail is a handy tool. But if you’ve never changed the setup on yours you could be leaving a lot on the table. Messing with the configuration of basic online tools is up there with people who use massive complex graphics as desktop backgrounds - a symptom of having too much free time, a sign of frivolity.

Apple hasn’t historically faced the same malware threats as Windows, mainly because it was simply used by fewer people. But now that mobile Apple products are everywhere, hackers are figuring out ways to attack the platform. Most of these are frightening only if it’s your credit card details in the hands of the Russian mafia; otherwise, business as usual.

While there are some obvious pointers that work across any channel, from the phone to a letter - relevance, value, engaging style - the social networks can’t all be approached in the same way. It’s not just that most of us have used them for personal reasons and it can come as a shock that all that experience sometimes adds up to not much when you have to use them for business.

You have a Google + account. You may not know it, but you do. Everyone who has a Gmail or YouTube account has one. Everyone who uses Google’s cloud productivity and storage suite has one. And everyone who has an Android phone has one. But the number of active users has always trailed far behind the number of accounts, drawing attention to the fact that Google’s venture into social hasn't actually been very successful.

Google Docs is most people’s first taste of the ease and convenience of cloud, though trends suggest it’s likely to become the norm soon. Meantime, many jobs that were once done on Microsoft’s productivity suite are moving over the Google. But one standby of the Microsoft system that we just can’t seem to quit is the ‘track changes’ feature.

Most businesses have clients, contractors or offices in countries that don’t speak English as a first language. Even if you don’t, you’re going to need to translate a document sooner or later. Unless you happen to be a linguist, when that day comes you’ll probably reach for an online translation service.

Maybe you’re old enough to remember the internet without browsers. For everyone else, here’s how it used to work: you typed the address you wanted, then went there. No address, no page. Obviously, browsers brought the internet to the masses. And on the desktops of our devices there’s an app just like a browser for navigating the space inside the device.

Making a post or tweet ‘go viral’ has become the internet equivalent of the Philosopher’s Stone. Just as medieval alchemists labored over bubbling jars trying to find the magic formula to transmute base metal into gold, so modern marketers struggle over bubbling keyboards (OK,not quite) to find the right combination of words, images and ideas that makes people want to share content with everyone they know online.

SMBs often shy away from big tech changes more than their larger counterparts: after all, they can’t afford even a single Ford Edsel moment. The risks inherent in betting on unknown outcomes is higher. But cloud isn’t some dream of how computing could be.