Early yesterday morning, the Virya Technologies team left our office at Basepoint to go and setup Stands 8 & 9 ready for ISSBA's Suffolk Business Exhibition 2012. By the time Chris and Ruth arrived at the Office, I had already set the coffee machine brewing in order to provide the caffeine dependant amongst us with a much needed early-morning kickstart!

Upon arriving, we met up with Chris Pond who had helpfully agreed to help us run the stand and began setting up our little area (which felt far, far more organised than our last minute dash at SBE 11!). The guys at Trinity Park helpfully provided us with the power outlets we needed to run multiple machines (a true geek will always use more than one!)

You may be excused for not noticing the latest additions to Google Places - I don't often visit my Places page but each time I do recently I've noticed additional features popping in without much song and dance!

So just a few moments ago, Google announced that they were opening up Google+ pages for businesses - one might say a direct competitor for Facebook Pages.

Today I came across something interesting when I was checking out how our Google Places entry was performing (Google Places, for those who aren't aware, is how companies appear in Google Maps and can be accessed at google.co.uk/places) and noticed a new feature - Adwords Express - had appeared on my toolbar.

It doesn't matter whether you are designing a new piece of software, a business process or even your end product, the importance of applying common sense and considering real-life scenarios simply cannot be understated.

A mistake can be very costly both in terms of time and reputation. If that mistake affects the way your customers interact with you, it could both expose your business to ridicule and potentially lose you custom.