Advocate's Studio

Stymied by the prospect of condensing your amazing idea, your raison d’etre, your invaluable services or the reason why someone should pay attention to you or your business into one compelling minute? Harvard Business School has the web app for you with the HBS Elevator Pitch Builder. Enter the app and get prompts for “who”, “what”, “why” and “goal.” In each section, you are given a number of words relevant to the section and designed to catalyze your point. There is also a “tip” link to help you if you find that you are still stuck. Because of my curious nature, I of course had to try this out. Under the “who”, I wrote:

I am a creative, original thinker, authoritative in my field and responsive to customer need.

The “what” boils down to your “tag line” – or, as the MBA’s put it, “your value phrased as key results or impact.” I wrote:

Effective decisions, deeper analysis and pointed research, brought to you in half the time.

The “why” asks for what differentiates you and makes you better. I had to think about this one for a little bit. Eventually, I wrote:

Having spent my entire career researching and writing, leveraging technology, and employing creative methods to improve productivity without sacrificing quality, I offer a unique combination of expertise and efficiency.

Then, I had to state my goals. Making more money than Bill Gates didn’t seem a realistic option and my intent was to come up with a useful elevator pitch, should I ever find myself in need of one. But I didn’t have an immediate goal in mind. So I simply wrote:

I am looking to step up to the next level.

O.k. I know. Not very impactful. And the HBS geniuses caught on – this is what they had to say.

Avoid jargon, business-speak or trendy buzz words. Your audience has set through all those boring meetings, has attended those seminars, has read those books. You want to be memorable and that means using your own voice.

The analysis gave me word count, number of repeated words and elapsed time. I still had about 45 seconds to work in my own voice. It gave me average stats, so I could compare. I could email or print my pitch, or edit the pitch to tighten it up.

A pretty cool little tool for making you think about the meaning of life. Thanks Harvard.

Adobe teamed up with Echosign, an electronic signature service, a while back and now its hitting up the iPad and iPhone with all of the legally binding digital goodness in Echosign’s universal iOS app. Echosign allows you to send instant fax and e-signatures, track changes to contracts in real time, auto store and manage signed agreements, all with enterprise-grade security. Echosign has a number of different integrations, but this new iDevice option is pretty sweet. Download the iOS app for free and Echosign subscribers can attach their electronic signatures to any document within the app, along with the great sending and tracking features found in the full-service version. Echosign is no fly-by-night either – a lot of big names you might recognize rely on it for the contract execution and tracking efforts (Twitter, Google, Facebook, VMware, Dell, and Groupon, to name a few). So what are you waiting for? Get signing!

To do lists are fine, but for me, they mostly serve as reminders of all the things I haven’t done yet (and probably won’t get to for some time). What if you could automate some of your tasks – set up a simple chain of events that you put in motion once and then never really have to think about again? If this idea appeals, then If This Then That (“IFTTT”) might be just what you are looking for.

The application is conceived and executed by setting up triggers and actions in channels. Channels are essentially the web services that you may manually use every day, but with this app you can define certain triggers (the “if”) and then assign an action to the trigger (the “that”). The “if” can be something like “I’m tagged in a photo on Facebook” or “someone mentions me on Twitter.” The “that” can be “send me a text message” or  ”create a status update on Facebook.” Your triggers and actions are limited to the channels available on ifft, but there are more than enough to choose from to make the set up worth your time.

You can have up to 20 active tasks set up and running at any given time.

You select the channel for the trigger, define the trigger, then set the channel for the action and define the action. For example, see below:

You get the “picture.”  When you pick a channel, you are given a limited number of options for triggers and tasks, such as “add in” language for tweets, but there are many combinations. Follow the steps, define or describe your task and you are all set up. There is a date and time trigger as well that will allow you to initiate tasks at a certain time and date. Tasks can be turned on or off and when they are resumed they pick up right where they left off. Tasks poll for new trigger information every 15 minutes or so, so the results are relatively current.

Another very cool aspect of ifttt is the community involvement in task creation. Task “recipes” can be created and shared with other users on the site. So, while you are certainly free to create your own little cause and effect loops from scratch, you can also forego the heavy lifting and check out some of the other great recipes put together by clever ifttt users.

I believe ifttt is simply brilliant. Set tasks up and watch them go, with no further interaction from you. While it might not be appropriate for all of your online actions and interactions, there are plenty of tasks that simply do not need oversight. Save yourself some time and effort with this fantastic tool.

Windows only, but still pretty sweet. This little bit of freeware, aptly called Easy Email Extractor, allows you to extract email addresses from files, folders and URLs. Point it at your hard disk and you will get every email address on there! The program allows you to add a button to the SendTo menu and exclude emails that contain specific words. Just great for finding long, “lost” email addresses on your storage systems.

H/T to Lifehacker.

Too busy to read? Need to multitask your on-line browsing with other tasks? Check out Announcify, a very cool browser extension that will read a web page to you. It is a very sweet open source Google Chrome extension that you can pick up here. Once installed, click the little red Bird icon on the top right side of your browser bar. The extension will then read to you, first the title of the page / article and then the body. The web page is blurred, with only the portion currently being read in focus. Very clever indeed. There are customizable settings to adjust speed, pitch and volume. Tweak the voice, and you’re off to audio-book-ify the Web!

Announcify is an Android app too, in case you wanted to let your phone / tablet do the work for you.

I love this app – thanks MakeUseOf for the tip.