Monthly Archives: March 2011

Octopus – Online Business Management Software For Service Company

Octopus logoOctopus is a great web based application that comes with enormous features to facilitate business management.  You and your employees can easily access Octopus from anywhere of word at any time to manage your business. Since, Octopus is completely web based, you don’t need to be bothered about data backup that is a huge concern for the desktop based management system.

After the registration process you can setup Octopus according to your business criteria. This customization will make your business well-organized. You can add additional users such as your employees and you can also view their last login time. Adding new user in Octopus is very simple. Just specify user details such as name, email and initial password. Using Octopus you can setup user permission very simply. You can select someone as an administrator or limited user according to preference by enabling few options. Another important feature is that you can add company logo and it will increase your company’s professionalism. In service and product section you will find services or product according to your business criteria that you have selected during registration process.  In the work setting section you can easily customize the invoice and you can also change its setting time to time.

From dashboard you will get a brief idea about company’s situation such as you can see number of open job, active invoice, “to do list” and overdue items. Octopus’s calendar is very useful as well as its allow drag and drop facility. Adding any event or add “to do list” on calendar is very simple. Assigning work directly from the calendar is one of attractive feature of Octopus. You can assign same work on multiple employees by few clicking.

Adding few details of client you can easily make a database of your clients. And this database gives you a more efficient client management. It will save all closed job, payment history, earlier invoices and more. Under the people tab you will be able to see the list of all clients and you can search through clients. Another feature is that using Octopus you can export or import client list in multiple formats. In addition exporting of client list in any other third party services is also possible from Octopus. Octopus can be called as a complete business management tools with many attractive features.

Octopus is the perfect solution for the small and medium company those who wants to integrate with automation as well as digitize their business. Octopus’s pricing plan seems affordable. There are three plans such as small, medium and large. You can choose any plan according to your company size. In small plan you will get 2 users account, 500 clients account and 100 invoices per month and it will cost $9 per month. Moreover Octopus has made various add-ons to accelerate and efficient your business but you have to pay addition monthly charge for it and can turn off add-ons at any time.

Stickr – Social Bookmarking With Sticky Notes And Screenshot Preview

stickr-logoIn today’s versatile internet era it is very much essential to keep our visited site bookmarked in an organized manner. Stickr comprehensively provide you a free online platform that will allow you to manage your bookmarks from your favorite browser. It’s a convenient and easy to use add on with a cool sticky note interface that serves the purpose gorgeously. The idea just works as the sticky paper we use at our desk.

Using Stickr, you can create bookmarks with a screenshot preview or place notes! In addition to that, you can also bookmark videos or even images, just hover over your intended video or image and click the popped up stickr option and there you go!

All your bookmarks can later be collected from your homepage. Remember, Stickr is more than just another bookmarking application; it’s a social network for your bookmarks where you can share your bookmarks with your friends. You can save your items both publicly or privately so that you have full control over what your friends see. Moreover you can follow others just as twitter and can have a look into others bookmark you might be interested in.

Stickr also allows you to customize the looks of your sticky note; you can change the color or size of the font of your sticky note. In brief, it’s a wonderful bookmarking site with a social networking essence. Trust me; you would definitely want to bookmark the site.

Advert.ly – Self Promotional Platform For Blogs, Websites And Brands

Advert.ly LogoAdvert.ly is an awesome concept that can be used as a great internet marketing platform for your business, brand, product, websites, applications or anything on the web. Although there are many internet marking platform but Advert.ly is distinguishable for its simple campaigning system.

The notion of Advert.ly is very straightforward, suppose that you sell exercise machine and you are a member of health and beautify forum. In forum, most of the people are concerned about health and beauty and they always to try grasp the best and the brightest product to keep them healthy and beautiful. So that forum is a great place to display or campaign of your product to users. Now how is it possible? Advert.ly allows you to embed your marketing campaign on every link you share online.

The process is very simple after completion of registration process at Advert.ly go to My Campaign in left side of the page. Then add some information related to your campaign, such as name of your campaign, upload the banner and finally set the banner URL. Now go to Run Campaign, click Add New Content. A new pop up will appears choose to share a link or picture or embedded video. After that add the title of your campaign and finally add what link you want to share. At last Advert.ly provides you a link and share this link with other on the forum or your status on Facebook or email it to friends to show your banner on the top that page. It is amusing that you can add your ads on any web page with Advert.ly provided link.

Another most interesting feature is that monetizing is also possible by starting promoting Affiliate product or CPA using Advert.ly banner campaign on twitter, Facebook or your personal blogs or any social networking platform.

Advert.ly’s nice method helps to get more visitors on personal blog or promote product as well as increase sells. Advert.ly is completely free and anyone can join it very easily. Just go there to unlock a new advertising wave of web.

Slowcop – Get An Instant Speed Report For Your Site

slowcop logSlowcop is an interesting and useful web application that helps you to make your webpage faster. It’s a wonderful tool that calculates how fast a site loads. Simply copy your site’s URL and press enter and you will be presented with a complete report that will highlight the pros and cons of your website and will provide you suggesting a comprehensive course of action that needs to be implemented to improve your websites performance. This includes DNS Lookup, cache info, parsing info and many more.

You can also play around with it like I usually do with my favorite websites by generating reports out of it. Slowcop also provides you a small dashboard that displays the page size, download time, name of the web hosting company and page speed score for your provided link, pretty cool huh!!! It’s really amazing how wonderful, informative and yet still so freaking easy to use this application is.

It’s a great site and you will find yourself coming over here again and again. Please visit the site as you will definitely don’t want to miss the opportunity to bookmark the site.

Numia.biz – A Wonderful Free Online Accounting Platform

Numia.biz LogoNumia.biz is a wonderful Free Online accounting platform that is designed and apposite for small businesses to track and record their expenditure, revenue or income, furthermore other business related accounting transaction securely and privately.

Despite lots of online accounting platform Numia.biz is noticeable and evident for its simple and straightforward interface and easy navigation. Numia.biz is not only a accounting software, you can also easily run and administrate your whole office from here. It provides easy forms to setup Customer, Vendor, Company preferences and Bank accounts according to your needs and preferences.

Looking on the home page you will get a synoptic overview of your company condition and circumstances.  In your homepage you can view twelve different Gadgets box on various activities of your company. In addition Numia.biz also allows customization in homepage and it will make your work more efficient and well-organized. Using Numia.biz you can easily make a nice furnish informative report for any department of your company. Such as report on profit and lose, balance sheet, customer balance, transaction list or recent transaction and more. User account section of Numia.biz provides easy and simple way to persevere and update user account information and also provide steadfast and secure data transfer.

Invoicing system of Numia.biz is very easy and simple but it is fully dynamic, you can make an invoice within few second. In addition you can directly email the invoice to the recipient. Another new but important feature is added to Numia.biz recently that allows you to easily design your invoice according to your preferences.

All important features at a glance:

  • Easy accounting
  • User friendly navigation
  • Access from anywhere
  • Secured data transfer
  • Easy to create report
  • Multiple users

Sometimes small or nonprofit origination cannot afford high tech, such as customized accounting software or highly capable sever to digitalize their way of work.  In this case, Numia.biz can be the perfect solution for them. In addition, you can access Numia.biz from anywhere of the world. You don’t need any sever to automate your official work. You will get almost everything in Numia.biz necessary for successfully maintaining a small office. I think you will love it and give a try to gear up your office with Numia.biz.

Podio – The True Social Work Platform With Unlimited Possibilities

podio logoImagine a project management platform that comes with endless possibilities to deal with almost all kind of projects your company may engages with. Podio is exactly that kind of dream work platform with absolutely stunning user interface, that allows you to manage your projects in a smart more social way. Here, you can manage projects such as Software development,  Education, Marketing, Sales & CRM, Human Resource, Finance, Engineering, Public Relations, Community or even more special types of projects and there is no boundary.

Wondering how is it possible for one single platform to integrate them all? It is the apps based architecture of Podio platform and its App Store what makes everything possible. There are thousands of apps available in the App Store, you can add them one by one to shape up your project. Podio also provides a very simple and straight forward way to create your own custom app graphically without any prior programming skills.

In Podio, you need to create an organization first which is free and one can create more than one organization under the same Podio account. Then, you are able to create spaces under an organization, each space can be considered as a project. When you create a new space in Podio, you will get a very basic but core set of functionality by default, these are Activity stream, Contacts, Calendar, Tasks and Add app. These basic functionality make you capable of creating and managing tasks, calender events and collaborate with your team members etc.

Does it stop here? No, its the beginning. Now, you can add additional apps to your project like File Library, Twitter, Milestones, Events, Bugs, Releases etc from App Store as you feel necessary. You can also choose from specially bundled app packs. One app pack usually contains more than one related apps among them Project Management, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Intranet, Product Design, Digital Agency: Team Space, Projects, community and Web App Development are most popular in the store. All these apps are well integrated with the space providing unique capability to increase productivity. You can write comment on almost every item in apps making collaboration easy and the activity stream keeps you updated on all the activities around your spaces.

Podio can be called as an all-in-one solution for enterprise. With Podio, it is you, not the software, who decides how your work should be done and this is how Podio is different from Basecamp, Yammer or any other existing social work platform. It comes with a free plan for 10 users and a premium plan for 25 users with premium features including detail reporting, user management and  priority supports. Obviously, the free plan will help attracting more businesses to the platform and eventually turns them to premium subscription.

However, you need to move across the apps to carry out different activities and comments are leaved here and there providing to many options to collaborate, these might be overwhelming with excessive information and might be a drawback for this system.

Podio is based in Denmark and is lead by Tommy Ahlers (former CEO of ZYB, which is sold to Vodaphone at $48.7 million few years ago) as CEO and more than 15 multinational team members.

W3wiki – A Free Domain Information Database

w3_wiki-logoW3wiki is a free domain information database. It is awesome and additional data about domain makes it different from any other domain information websites.

W3wiki provides many additional important information about a particular domain. To get data about a domain just type domain name on the search box  and click on search button. It is a matter of few second to get information about the domain. W3wiki provides calculated data reports to present a good estimate about how a certain domain performs on the internet. W3wiki makes available information about server’s IP address, saver’s location information with map. They also supply information about daily visitors on that domain.

Interesting information is that they present an estimated value of particular site but W3wiki does not mention on which ground they made this value. Ranking and historical data provided by  Alexa is also viewable from W3wiki. In addition, there is an opportunity to compare the domain with three important web matrix, these are Google index, Yahoo index and Google page rank. You will get all types of information about a domain in W3wiki and you don’t need to visit who.is to get registrant contact information. So, W3wiki may be called as an all in one domain information database.

W3wiki has Firefox Add-on and Google Chrome Extension that helps you to get information more easily and quickly from your Firefox and Chrome browser.

This might be a nice tool if you are a software developer, web master, system admin, search engine optimization expert or any other related professional who frequently look for additional domain information on the web. Please have a look at this tool and let us know your feedback.

AdGrok – An Incredible Online Advertising Platform To Simplify Google AdWords

adgrok-logoAdGrok is an incredible online advertising platform which can be more specifically called as a simplified front-end to Goolge’s popular AdWords program. AdWords is still the most powerful online advertisement platform and one of they key source of Google’s revenue. For businesses, AdWords is very effective and can generate huge traffic to their offering. But not all businesses can use AdWords effectively because of its complexity and overwhelming process. Businesses with clear goal often lost their advertising strategy seeing so many options and information in Google AdWords. This is really frustrating for small businesses specially those having little or no experience in SEO.

AdGrok is going to make this entire process very simple and fun. Within a minutes you can get up and running on Google AdWords with AdGrok. This Y Combinator backed project is a Google AdWords certified Partner, verified by Google and granted preferred API access.

It’s unique GrokBar allows you to visualize your data side by side right on your website, in context, so no more switching between your website and Google AdWords tabs. You can see exactly how much you are paying for each campaign, compare campaign’s performance and if it does not provide expected result, you can kill the campaign. You can perform almost everything you can do in Google AdWords, so you don’t have to log into Google AdWords again.

Another important feature of AdGrok is Grok-O-Matic which allows you to set up AdWords campaigns on your entire website uploading a text file with your URLs and defining some page attributes. You will have your entire product catalog on AdWords with one click through Grok-O-Matic saving you endless clicking inside AdWords.

For Shopify powered shops, AdGrok provides a nice integration with your products catalog in the shop. You can upload your entire inventory in AdGrok and create campaign around each product specifying when to end the campaign based on product’s inventory count.

AdGrok also provides professional service rendered by Google Certified Professional to do all the set-up and maintenance of your account.

Finally, AdGrok is a wonderful platform to create, manage and monetize your Google AdWords campaign. Please try it yourself and let us know your valuable feedback about this platform.

Tutorhub – Online Tutoring Platform For School Going Kids

tutorhub logoTutorhub is an excellent UK based online tutoring platform focused on supporting school age kids with their homework. Tutorhub provides private one-to-one tutoring over the internet using instant messages which kids are familiar with and enjoy. All the tutors in Tutorhub are both CRB checked and experts in their chosen subjects and many of them are teacher and university graduate or undergraduate students. Tutors set their own rates based on their area of expertise. Parents can control their kids account if they wish and can view tutor’s performance on passed sessions.

Tutorhub‘s amazing web based learning platform is for both tutors and school going kids. Tutors can have a profile providing all the necessary information about the themselves such as name, charging rates, area of expertise etc.  Parents or kids can choose their tutor seeing tutor’s profile and select how much time they want to spend with the tutor. This way, people can easily get tutor from this website. If parents feel that tutoring session did not go as expected, there is a refund policy which is applicable if called withing 72 hours. According to Tutorhub, most of the tutors are available from 4 pm to 9 pm at weekdays and from 2 pm to 6 pm at weekends.

Another important feature of Tutorhub is, it provides the opportunity to ask free questions to all and answer to those questions. This helps people to learn many things by asking and answering. In addition, Tutorhub also provides necessary child safety features, so parents can be ensured about their child safety when they are using this platform and they can also report any inappropriate conversations. Tutors are allowed to get payment once a month and they can not request for payment until five weeks after the session.

Feature at a glance:

  • Create a free or paying account
  • Hourly charging rates
  • Payment once a month
  • Child safe design
  • Refund Policy

Finally, we can say that students can improve themselves doing homework, coursework, revising their study and other activity though proper use of this wonderful platform. So, we welcome you to try it yourself and let us know your feedback.

For more information, Learningfy and Kidzmet are two similar platform we have already reviewed about. You can also have a look at those two platforms and compare yourself.

Clude – Group And Events Solutions For Your Networks, Clubs And Communities

clude logoclude is a nice platform for creating and managing groups, events and meetings for your networks, clubs and communities. Adding a new group or joining to an existing group in clude is very simple and all the functionality of this platform are revolving around the groups and their activity. Although there are many group and event solution available, clude is awesome because of its distinguishable features.

In the community tab, you can find members and groups with profile, group’s member list, group’s event list along with group’s location with map. You can create public and private group according to your wish. You can also invite your friends to join your created group no matter whether it is a public or private group. Once you have created a group, you can add tags to your group so that other can find and join your group easily.

Creating an event is very easy and takes a few simple steps. Since, all events belong to a group, you must be a group admin to create any event for that group. First go to group events page and click ‘create’ then follow the steps and finally fill in the relevant information for a successful event creation. You can also find events easily using map or searching facility on event directory page for any group.

Achievement Badges award is another interesting features and these award is provided on variety of activities on the site. Golden Clude can win you free subscription periods on clude from 1 month up to 6 months. In addition, you can automatically post event on Facebook, Twitter or Eventbrite from your group, but you need to authorize the connection before doing it. From event tab you can learn about group’s event time, meeting subject with location that helps you to join it easily. You can use clude for various purposes such as your network, club, community or alumni. It also helps you to connect with different groups and people all around from world.

All distinguishable features at a glance:

  • Create a group or join a group
  • Create an event or join an event or meeting
  • Twitter, Facebook and Eventbrite connection
  • Location with map

clude provides a nice interface with a robust architecture for groups and organizations to create meetings, events list easily. clude is now in beta version and soon coming with some exciting features such as paypal integration, event tickets, QR codes, Facebook event integration and more.