TaskBin
September 18, 2007 in 3 out of 5 stars, Hosted software, Issue trackers, ProductivityTaskBin: It is a group task management tool. It helps you allocate tasks to your team members and is built around the concept of sharing tasks as a group (or groups). All of your tasks are visible to others and can be shared. Other members can add tasks to your plate or edit tasks already there. Mangospring Very smooth interface, attractive, feature-rich, and for a group working on a project, it offers a simple way to share and keep track of tasks. Nifty constructs like softer deadlines (today, tomorrow, next week, sometime soon) introduce an interesting (and more real-world?) way to prioritize tasks. It has a highly annoying construct where it forces you to add first and last name for anyone. None of the marketing pages outline what the "premium" account is, or what it costs. The confirmation link they email you is beastly-long, but not a hyperlink (easy fix, guys!). Free for everything I could find. There's mention of a "premium" account during signup, but I never saw anything else about it. Reviewed by Carson McComasWhat is it?
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Adwords Optimizer
June 11, 2007 in 3 out of 5 stars, Analytics, SEO/SEMAdwords Optimizer: A tool to help you fine tune your AdWords ads. MindValley LC It's simple, it's free, and it works. Savvy AdWords users write two or more ads for a given ad group. Google then uses both ads and you can learn which ad performs the best by watching the CTR (click through rate) and conversion over time. Adwords Optimizer sends you a daily report of how your different ads are performing and which one has the best CTR, then offers suggestions for improving. It's a simple thing, and something you can do by hand-checking your AdWords account every day and keeping track, but Adwords Optimizer makes a tedious thing you should do every day (but probably don't because it's tedious) very simple. I wish I could view a back history of my reports. If you save all the emails you get, you have a crude history, but I'd like a screen where it listed all my reports so I could view past ones. It's a bit sparse on metrics (but it does provide what it promises to provide). Update: The signup process they suggest is confusing and lame, you can signup here. Reviewed by Carson McComasWhat is it?
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Google Alerts
February 20, 2007 in 3 out of 5 stars, A service, FreeGoogle Alerts: A service where Google will send you an email anytime a term you specify is found by its crawler. In other words: roughly any time a certain term is used on the Internet. Google Because you can use it to watch what others are saying about you, your business, your industry or whatever else would give you a competitive advantage. If desired, you can narrow it down to just what blogs, or the news say about a search term. You can also limit how often it emails you. From as-it-happens to once a week. This service use to be horrible, inaccurate,
incomplete, and late when it worked at all. About a month ago something
magic happened and suddenly it works as advertised. Free Reviewed by Carson McComasWhat is it?
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Relenta CRM
October 16, 2006 in 3 out of 5 stars, CRM, Email newsletter management, Hosted softwareRelenta CRM: A new CRM tool (customer relationship management). Includes email, contact manager, shared calendar, email newsletter marketing/autoresponders. Relenta They claim, and employ a (now familiar) "Less is more" approach. They call it the "90/10 rule" "Designed for usability and efficiency, Relenta CRM achieves 90 percent of the functionality commonly required by small business users with only ten percent of the application weight." They integrate email, contact management, calendar, and email newsletter marketing software into one application. The free plan offers quite a bit for the starting-out entrepreneur trying to determine if this software is right for them. They've obviously put a great deal of effort into this offering. The interface is attractive and fairly well conceived and it includes many of the features you'd expect from a CRM. It will be interesting to see how it evolves (it needs some maturing still) and how it stands up to the imminent Sunrise (CRM product) from 37signals. A detailed user guide/help/knowledge base is really needed (they are working on it). The support is decent in the meantime (although the support form is cumbersome to fill out). They do have a PDF "user's manual" you'll find in your Relenta inbox after you create an account, which is helpful. They need spell check. HTML email templates would be nice (right now offers only plain-text email) They require 3 credentials for login, not just the normal 2 (i.e. username/password). The initial starting experience still needs some polish. I had that bewildering "what do I do now" moment when I started. The free account allows only one user, but you are offered the form to create another user. Only after you attempt it does the application tell you can't add one ("user limit exceeded"). Then the statistics on my dashboard reported 2 out of 1 user, but I still only had the one. The application response feels a bit sluggish (and no AJAX in sight, which could alleviate some of that feeling). It feels like they may have rushed to launch it. It's certainly usable as it is and (I have reports from a very happy user), and it's an impressive application, but we've come to expect more from web applications in the last couple years, and this one isn't quite there yet. From FREE to $50 per user per month Reviewed by Carson McComasWhat is it?
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nPost
September 6, 2006 in 3 out of 5 stars, A person, An interviewnPost: Another great resource for entrepreneurs, a collection of interviews with CEOs and Founders of small and startup businesses. Nathan Kaiser Kaiser has collected almost 150 intelligently conducted interviews, including some favorites of mine like Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia (how awesome is he?) and Joe Kraus of Jot Spot.
Clean site, searchable, or list them all. It appears that he records these, might be nice to have the audio versions as well. The search is a bit iffy. Free Reviewed by Carson McComasWhat is it?
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MailUp
August 31, 2006 in 3 out of 5 stars, Email newsletter management, Hosted softwareMailUp: MailUp is a web based tool for managing email newsletters. It can be integrated with web sites or CRM applications. It manages subscribes (single or double opt-in), unsubscribes, bounces and provides statistics. NWeb Pricing: MailUp does not have a "pay per message" or "pay per contact" pricing model, you pay only a flat monthly fee and you can send whatever you like plus and you can have any number of subscribers in your DB. However, there are different pricing plans. Lower plans offer less features (lowest plan doesn't have bounce management for example) plus the lower the plan, the slower the send rate, ranging from 720/hr to 103,500/hr. Nice features: attachments, embedded images, international charsets support. Their sales site is terrible (they tell me they're in the process up an update), getting started requires a human-mediated sales cycle (yuck). Polls/survey module not yet completed, SMS Module available only for Europe recipients, admin tools are slightly cumbersome to use. Admin tool doesn't work in FireFox. The parent company is Italian and you'll occasionally run into poor translations to English, or fully Italian language portions of the service. I had to email them to get this, but they claim it will be on the site once they redesign. They are responsive on email. $59/mo - $120/mo - $450/mo - $3,300/mo Reviewed by Carson McComasWhat is it?
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CellTell voiceNote for Backpack
August 2, 2006 in 3 out of 5 stars, A service, FreeCellTell voiceNote for Backpack: If you have a BackPack account, you now can send voiceNotes from any of your phones (e.g. cell, office or home) straight to your Backpack page. Additionally, if the page has been shared, then others can see your messages also. CellTell.tv Since Nov 2005, 37Signal has said they would have this type of feature. Now its available as a free add-on. Here are ways you can use this... 1. Register all your numbers, and let your family call you on the voiceNote number instead. This helps with constant interruptions and you can check for the message from anywhere. 2. While in the car and you have that great idea, call your voiceNote number and capture it. 3. Create a cell phone driven audio blog by sharing a Backpack page w/ a bunch of voiceNotes. voiceNotes should indicate the user's local timezone rather than PDT.
The volume on playback within Linux is low. Free Reviewed by Ali DanialiWhat is it?
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SlimTimer
August 1, 2006 in 3 out of 5 stars, Free, Hosted software, ProductivitySlimTimer: A timer to keep track of time spent on work tasks. Richard White Because its much simpler to use than ordinary timesheets, web or otherwise, and you get more accurate data to boot. It has spiffy reports allowing you to easily digest your time data. You also don't have to fuss with setting up clients and projects... you just setup tasks, tag them for reporting purposes (like billable) and off you go. It's still evolving so the main improvements would be around making it scale better for larger teams. Also the reporting while sufficient still needs some extra features to allow customizing them to the rules of an individuals businesses. Fortunately, the creator is accepting and acting quickly on suggestions. FreeWhat is it?
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OOo Label Templates
July 24, 2006 in 3 out of 5 stars, FreeOOo Label Templates: Free blank label templates, many same sizes needed for Avery Labels. Set-up site is very quick, designing and creating labels is pretty simple. Most business use all types of labels and the types offered here cover all needs. Since the ISO has approved the Opendocument format and lot of Governments and intuitions are adopting the ODF format, these templates are extremely useful in the work place. WorldLabel.com They are free for download and save a lot of time and energy trying to find or create a template from scratch. They also correspond with Worldlabel products and you can save enormous amount of money buying their "generic Avery labels". They could include some instruction on how to use the templates for beginners.
Free Reviewed by Patrick ParolineWhat is it?
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Simplybill
July 11, 2006 in 3 out of 5 stars, Hosted software, InvoicingSimplybill: An online invoicing tool/service Simplybill Very simple to use, plus inexpensive (starting at free). It allows you to email invoices, or print them for snail mailing. Has a time tracking desktop widget (paying accounts only) that synchs with Simplybill (PC only right now, a Mac one coming in the next few days). Sends reminders and thank yous. It alerts you when invoices are overdue. Supports recurring invoices. An API might be nice. From Free to $25 a month Reviewed by Carson McComasWhat is it?
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