IT Business Special Interest Group

We are a group of SMS members who are interest in anything business. That includes building a small income with a potential to grow big in future to helping senior citizens to start an IT business from home. Enterprising young adults are also welcome.

Setting up a busines is simple. The difficult part is how to bring in the revenue and even more difficult is to make it generate passive income for your retirement.

Every business must start with an idea of which there are many. Then comes the passion to develop this idea into a business. The selection of an idea depends on your budget, your interest, the risk you are willing to take and your domain knowledge.

In my opinion, the most critical factor in setting up a business is your domain knowledge or lacking it, you can partner with someone who has it. This is because in every business, there are bound to have competitors no matter how unique is your idea. Someone else with a better domain knowledge, can compete with you at a much lower cost.

Activities

We conduct a seminar once in 2 months. We will try to make this seminar business-like. New ideas may be shared.

Our seminars may also teach people how to use certain software tools in their business. Often, such tools are also useful for home users. Business people or home users, students to retirees, are all welcome to attend our seminars. Every tool that can enhance your business can enhance your home usage too.

Past Seminars

This is not intended to provide a complete list of our past seminars but just an idea of how our seminar can benefit you.

Microsoft SyncToy - This software is free and can easily be configured to backup your precious data and programs. It saves time by backing up only modified files or sync your files onto another folder preferably in another hard disk or thumb drive. When one hard disk crashed, you can use the other set of data. During the seminar, you see, you learn, you evaluate it's suitability and you can even get the programs from us. That can save you precious time doing your own evaluation.

Web Site Hosting - Instead of sourcing for a hosting site and learning html editing and FTP and page designing, why not settle for an easy to use web site with online editor common known as Content Management. Editing is similar to editing a Word document though with simplified functions. This extremely low cost and easy to use hosting site will quickly get you your own domain name and pages up quickly and you are in business.

TrueCrypt - Ever lost your thumb drive or notebook or sending your PC for repair? Is your main concern that of compromising your data? If you are worried about the privacy of your data, then you must encrypt it. TrueCrypt is free and it can encrypt your data on the fly. That means you access you data as usual. After you backup your data onto a thumb drive and shutdown or logout, and you forgot to keep the thumb drive, your data remains encrypted and safe. If you use TruCrypt on your notebook computer and your notebook is stolen, you just loose your notebook and that's it. Your data cannot be read. So if you have secret photos, it remains secret. If you have a backup - can use SyncToy - you just buy a new notebook and you are in business. Take it as an upgrade for your notebook.

Write-Protected Thumb Drive - When you insert your thumb drive into someone else's PC, that is the computer equivalent of unprotected sex. If that PC was infected with a computer virus or worm, you could very likely also get infected. Then when you plug your infected thumb drive into your wife's PC, you infected hers. How often did you plug your thumb drive into someone else's wife's PC? How about your own office PC? Someone else could have infected your office PC by plugging in their infected thumb drives into your office PC while you were away or perhaps right in front of your own eyes. Your camera and phone can also get infected. Infection can also come via email or web access to malicious site. SMS is the only place in Singapore where you can buy a Write-Protectable Thumb Drive that comes with a switch. Never leave home without it.