If you’re a small business or independent professional searching for a relatively painless and inexpensive way to establish a Web presence, look no further than SiteKreator, a subscription-based service developed by NetClime Inc. SiteKreator offers impressively easy-to-use online tools for creating Web sites from templates and also hosts your pages. SK Business Edition starts at $95 a year with 200MB of hosting capacity.

The intriguing thing about SiteKreator is that it lets you do more than build stripped-down, basic sites. You can add advanced Web 2.0 services for online collaboration and information sharing, including blogs, discussion forums and file areas where you post documents for visitors to download. You can also add online forms to capture information from and about visitors, including registration forms that they fill out to get password access to additional content.

SiteKreator provides hooks for integrating your site with PayPal and other e-commerce solutions and services such as Google Search and QuickBooks. It gives you the tools to add meta-tags (keywords) and descriptions to optimize the site for search engines — so your site’s more likely to be found. And it provides rudimentary visitor statistics and an onscreen page hit counter.

Cheaper in the Long Run
The alternatives are to pay somebody else to create your site or build it yourself from scratch. Either way, you’ll still have to pay for hosting. It will certainly cost a lot more than $95 a year to have somebody else build it for you — don’t forget to factor in the charges from your Web developer every time you make a change. And if you go the do-it-yourself route, you have to factor in the cost in time or money (or both) of researching and purchasing software tools and learning how to use them efficiently. (more…)

If users won’t move from to paper to digital technology, why not digitize the paper itself? That approach, taken by Talario LLC’s Xpaper signature-capture system, creates a digital copy of the physical document without requring it to be scanned.

Xpaper includes a digital pen and paper that carries a unique identifier and a grid pattern that orients the pen on the page. “You print on our special paper, and when you write with our pen and dock it, you get a digital copy,” says Tim Aughenbaugh, president of Brookings, S.D.-based Talario. The user creates a form in any Windows application and converts it to PDF format. When the signature is captured, it is embedded into that document. (more…)

In a tale of intrigue that’s perhaps fitting for the parties involved, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has denied that it paid a hacker to steal information from TorrentSpy, as alleged in a lawsuit filed by the file-searching company this week in California.

The suit itself reads like a movie script. In it, Valence Media Ltd., which operates TorrentSpy.com, claims that in June last year the MPAA hired a man to break into TorrentSpy’s computers and steal information. The association did this, the suit says, as part of a “mistaken and misdirected vendetta” against TorrentSpy. (more…)

The U.S. government is moving in the right direction with its efforts to reform its patent process by making it tougher for companies claiming infringement to get court injunctions, said a top executive at Research In Motion Ltd., which settled its own patent fight in March.

Ontario-based RIM, maker of the popular BlackBerry wireless device, is encouraged by the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling this month that said courts need to look at several factors instead of awarding near-automatic injunctions against the sale of products found to infringe patents, said Jim Balsillie, RIM’s chairman and co-CEO, during a speech today. The court sided with eBay Inc. in a patent infringement case brought by online auction company MercExchange LLC. (more…)