More software providers are finally recognizing the unique support needs of small and home-based business, as evidenced in this year's Demo-Fall technology conference in San Diego. Sixty-nine start-ups attended the most recent edition of this semi-annual show, each receiving six minutes to pitch their products to reporters and potential investors. Standouts included scaled-down versions of applications used by large companies, as well as tools designed to make organizing meetings, collaborating, and sharing data much easier. CashView aims to reduce the headaches of cash flow management with a hosted service that allows significant subscriber control. BatchBlue markets its BatchBook online application as three products in one: various tools for managing contacts, communications, and other tasks. Both BatchBlue and LongJump offer limited free trials. Business plans and projects can be created and tracked with software from PlanHQ, while Tubes allows drag-and-drop sharing of any type of content by team members. Conference calls become vastly simpler to arrange with Vello, which not only calls selected participants at a predetermined time, but also is downloadable to mobile devices and integrates with Microsoft Office. Sharing desktops and files, as well as collaborating on projects, are the focus of services offered by DimDim and Yuuguu that promise chat capability and no downloads. DimDim even claims it has developed the first free open-source web-meeting service. While a number of these products and services are still in beta testing or otherwise not widely available, small businesses facing IT hassles have reason to feel encouraged.