Friday Five: 5 Social Media Tips for Entrepreneurs

As the below chart illustrates, sales of the iPad have exploded over the past two years. The tablet's uptake has even outpaced that of the iPhone - itself a sales blockbuster for Apple since its release. To be sure, many iPads have been sold to consumers. But the device is growing increasingly popular in the business world, too. Many small retailers use iPads to replace point-of-sale systems (a.k.a. cash registers), while corporations are adopting them to enhance the customer experience (a la J.C. Penney, which plans to install iPads in its stores as part of a brand overhaul)

There is a lot of hype around the cloud right now. People are saying goodbye to their multimillion-dollar IT budgets and hello to cheaper solutions. These solutions are much more service-oriented - and friendlier for businesses of all sizes. Cloud service providers, by simplifying complex technologies and pricing them affordably, are making it easier for business to have an online presence. No longer does a firm need 50 servers to power a complex website; now it can access a cloud server that is infinitely scalable. It's possible to scale from one server to 50, then back down to one, in a matter of minutes (as demand warrants). Furthermore,

Bill Horton isn't your average insurance broker. He was an amateur drag racer for more than two decades - and he turned that passion into a successful line of business. Bill was working for a large insurance brokerage when he began selling race-car insurance. Bill met enough interested people at drag events to start offering policies for dragsters, he told us. The brokerage changed ownership in 2010, but the national chain that bought it wasn't interested in Bill's racer customers. "What am I gonna do now?" he remembers thinking. Fortunately for Bill, race-car insurance was in demand. After leaving