Tag Archives: tools

Feb 20 2013

Remember Yahoo Pipes? You Should If You Want to Tame Your Info

Yahoo-Pipes

If you like to tinker with and automate your web, and if you are a fan of services like IFTTT, then you may or may not have heard of Yahoo Pipes. Yahoo Pipes has been around for a dog’s lifetime in Internet years – it was first introduced in early 2007. While venerable, it is still mighty useful if you spend a few moments getting to know what it can do for you.

So, what can it do for you? It’s tagline is “rewire the Web.” Pipes describes itself as a powerful composition tool to aggregate, manipulate, and mashup content from around the web. Or, stated differently, it allows you to remix feeds and create data mashups so you can better control the flow of information to your virtual doorstep.

By joining together simple commands, combine multiple feeds into a single feed and then sort, filter and translate it. Use Pipes to  geocode favorite feeds and browse the items on an interactive map. Use Pipes to create widgets and badges with feed information on your web site. And this is just the beginning of it.

You start with a Yahoo account login. Then you access the visual editor wherein you can drag and drop preconfigured modules and “wire” them together. Each module performs a task like “Fetch” or “Feed Auto Discovery” or input date, location, number, text or URL. Operator modules transform and filter pipe data. URL modules manipulate the URL. Combine text strings, define and format dates, convert text strings to geographic location and perform mathematic functions. After you build a “Pipe” by stringing together modules in the visual editor, you can save it on Yahoo’s servers. You can output your data in several different formats. You also can publish your Pipe to benefit net-kind. You can discover a feed in module one, filter the feed in module two, three and four, add other functions and then connect the Pipe to the output module. You are then greeted with a Pipe that will pull and filter information and present it to you the way you want to see it. Then subscribe to the Pipe’s output in your favorite feed reeder and get only the news you want, when you want.

If you don’t feel much like building your own, check out the large number of community Pipes published by members and tailor them to your own use. Search for Pipes on the Browse tab, or check out the tagged Pipes along the left navigation pane. For example, type in “find jobs” and pull up a bunch of Pipes that will allow you to do just that. Pre-built Pipes allow you to simply add the required information into fields and run the Pipe to get the output.

What if you want to get really creative and use a search module to pull up any mention of your company or firm on the Web or on Twitter, mash the two feeds together and output them in a fancy little widget on your website? Real time, and real handy for web monitoring and promotion.

It is a little hard to explain without visual aids, so check out the video below to see how to build one yourself. And, remember, you can already use a pre-existing Pipe – chances are someone has already built the mousetrap using Pipes. Kinda like a virtual Rube Goldberg machine for your Internet information.

 

Aug 10 2012

Master Time Like A Pro with TimeAndDate

 

There are plenty of tools that help with scheduling and such, but there are few tools that offer quite as much functionality as the web-based time-management dashboard TimeAndDate. There might even be too much functionality. Across the top, you get tabs for Home, World Clock, Time Zones, Calendar, Weather, Sun & Moon, Timers, Calculators, and other more mundane stuff. There are widget-like windows for the information on the home page.

 

 

When you hover over the tabs, you get several options under each of the categories. I particularly liked the World Clock Meeting Calendar that helps you pick the best time for meetings across time zones and the Countdown to any date calculator.

 

 

You can get a list for time zone abbreviations and a time zone difference calculator helps you figure out how far ahead or behind someone else is in a different zone. An interactive map shows which parts of the globe are in which time zone. And there is a whole page dedicated to my arch-nemesis, Daylight Savings Time. There are options for formatting and customizing your calendars. They even offer clock and countdown timer widgets to embed on your own website, as well as various time related iPad and iPhone and Android apps. And there is more.

 

Even if you use a few of the tools, this is a fantastic site, especially for free. Never be flummoxed by a date snafu again – just head to TimeAndDate.

 

 

Jun 5 2012

Why DuckDuckGo?

I have featured DuckDuckGo here in the Studio before, but this article at MakeUseOf has prompted me to bring it up again. That, and the fact that I always run substantive searches in DuckDuckGo as well as that other search engine everyone “flocks” to. Seems redundant, sure, but there are plenty of good reasons to do so if you want to make certain you are really getting the goods.

 

DuckDuckGo has the ubiquitous search box on its main page and a results page full of links. But it also has zero click pages which permit you to instantly access sources by the type of term you enter in the search box. Type “define” and a word and you will get a Merriam Webster definition. Or a name, and access Crunchbase. Or a song lyric and access LyricBase. And numerous other databases of information. Zero click allows you to get an “answer” rather than links – you will see results to queries that give answers from Wolfram Alpha, Wikipedia, and many other reputable sites, enabling you to collapse your search efforts and answer questions from the results page. If your term is more on the ambiguous side, DuckDuckGo will respond with variations on the theme, broken out by category, to help direct you to the right results. You can even enter emoticons into the search box and get back their meaning in the results.

 

Click the down arrow next to the search icon, and you can feel “ducky” instead of Google’s “I feel lucky” instant results. There are other prompts in the drop down as well.

 

Check out the Goodies page on DuckDuckGo for more search tools (there is also a Tech Goodies page, with more technologically specific data and tools).   You will boxes for entering searches for Calculations, Conversions, Dates, Entertainment, Facts, Finance, Food, Geography, IDs, Language, Random, Time Sensitive, and Transformations. There are some location aware searches that will pull relevant information from your locale in responding to your search request. For example, type in “Is it Raining?” and get a local weather report discussing the chances of rain in your area.

 

DuckDuckGo has built-in syntax for searching that will assist in formulating queries. Related to this, the search engine features a tool called !Bang – there are hundreds of sites that the engine will search directly when you precede the search term with an exclamation point. Such as typing in !Amazon portable basketball hoops and go straight to Amazon’s search results. This covers most major sites and most general terms. For a complete list, check out the !Bang page here.

 

If you are missing Google’s auto-complete, a DuckDuckGo user has created a browser add-on that combines the search engine with Google’s auto-complete – check out DDG + Google Suggest.

 

Private browsing is enabled by default, which is a nice change of pace. Furthermore, and this is the reason I like it for searching, it does not attempt to tailor results to your interests – you will get results based solely on your search terms. DuckDuckGo’s results are a compilation of many sources, including Yahoo! Search BOSS, Wikipedia, Wolfram Alpha and its own Web crawler, the DuckDuckBot. As I previously reported, the engine automatically deletes results from sites believed to be “content mills”, ostensibly improving the quality of the results. While Google recently has made attempts to cull out similar sites, DDG has been doing it all along. You can also employ voice search on DuckDuckGo with the Chrome browser, with another user submitted add on.

 

There are mobile apps as well:

Check out the add-ons page for more tools.

 

People tend to default to Google because it’s there. But there are so many other great search options out there – you may be missing some key information. Check out the browser comparison charts here to get an overview of some of the other choices you could make when searching your terms.

 

Broaden your search and broaden your horizons. DuckDuckGo is a great place to start. Load it into your browser using the instructions at the Tools page and you’re good to go.

Chapman-biz-plan
May 29 2012

When You Need A Fast Business Plan, Fast

Do you need a business plan for your new venture? Writing a business plan is a specialized form of communication resulting in a document encompassing certain expectations, much like a résumé. To do it well, you could invest money into how-to books, not to mention the hours spent adding, subtracting and tweaking your text as you polish the piece to a sheen.

Of course, there are apps for that too. One such app is Enloop, a free for starters, and paid for more, online tool for creating a credible business plan.  The app creates a plan from scratch, and supplies to more difficult information sought out by bankers, investors and financial types. Enloop states that the system is developed by MBAs, accountants, and software developers. Not only do you get the text for each section, you get an explanation in basic English explaining each section. You can modify parts and Enloop will update the whole. Makes refining the plan a lot easier. Enloop also generates customized financial forecasts, including Sales, Profit & Loss, Cash Flow and Balance Sheet forecasts. You can adjust the complexity of the plan and forecasts up to 36-month inputs.

Enloop will even score your plan using its own Enloop Performance Score or EPS. The better the plan, the higher the score. You can invite colleagues to view and edit your plan, and download, share and print on the fly. In addition to the EPS, Enloop also gives a report card that evaluates forecasted performance based on overall score, three important financial metrics, and a cash-flow positive status. Enloop can also generate ratios.

That’s a lot for free. With paid, you get more ratios, better customer support, a PDF of your plan without the Enloop logo, more business plans, and more detailed financials. Still, though, for a quick free option, it’s hard to beat their basic functionality.

For something different, you can also try out Plan Cruncher, another free business plan service. This one looks to condense your business plan into a single page summary using symbols for shorthand. Plan Cruncher’s icons remind which questions your business plan must answer.

  1. Are you ambitious? Can you build a business?
  2. Do you have the skills to build the product or service?
  3. Can you already demo the product?
  4. Have you worked out how to monetize the product?
  5. How much investment capital do you need?
  6. Do you have a revenue forecast?
  7. How long will it take to reach profitability?

The quality of the executive summary affects how quickly and well Plan Cruncher can summarize your plan. The resulting plan summary will look like this:

The idea here is to get a summary into the hands of a potential investor that can give them the good information right away. Because time is money, you know.

Another great quick tool can be found at the $100 Startup - a one page business plan PDF with essentially 10 questions, the answers to which form the basis of the plan.

Whatever your need, these tools should get you well on your way to forming up your next amazing venture.

May 2 2012

Google's New e-Discovery App – Vault

Leaving no part of the business software suite untouched, Google has recently introduced its new e-Discovery product within its Apps for Business offerings. Called Vault, it serves to automatically store and save emails and chat sessions of users within a Google Apps ecosystem. Like any good e-Discovery product, Vault allows you to easily preserve, retain and retrieve information that may be needed in the course of litigation.

Vault is, like most Google offerings, cloud-based and quite easy to deploy according to reviewers. It is instant on and provides access to all  Gmail and on-the-record chats. It’s a bit different - instead of making copies of the tracked content and storing them in a separate storage locale, Vault merely changes how users “see” their content – when an end user “deletes” emails and IM sessions, they are removed from the user-interface view but retained on the Google Apps servers.

 

 

Vault costs $5 per user per month, on top of the $50 per user per year, $5 per user per month Google Apps fee. While it certainly isn’t “free”, like many Google products, the price is doable from a small business perspective.

 

Vault is not the only Google product that can be used for e-document preservation and retrieval – Google Message Discovery is already available and being used by Apps users, at a cost of $33 per user per year. Message Discovery operates more like a traditional e-discovery solution – with copies of docs stored in a separate section of the server. Google advises that the differences between Vault and Message Discovery include:

 

(1) Google Apps Vault is built natively in Google Apps and provides a true manage-in-place capability

(2) Vault can archive on-the-record chat messages

(3) Vault plans to support additional data types in the future (stay tuned for more information). GMD only supports email.

(4) There is no time limit on retention. GMD has a maximum retention period of 10 years

(5) Easy set-up through the Apps CPanel. GMD has a separate, non-integrated user interface

(6) Vault supports archiving email and on-the-record chat messages in all languages that Google Apps supports. GMD does not support as many languages, particularly double-byte languages.

(7) Vault can leverage existing migration tools for Gmail which gives customers more flexibility and can lower costs.

(8) Vault can be deployed “on-demand” and immediately begin applying information governance policies to the data that exists in your domain’s Gmail inboxes (legacy and newly created data). GMD starts capturing messages from the time that it is deployed and requires Historic Message Journaling to load historical email into the GMD archive.

 

At release, Vault is available to new Apps customers only. Google assures that it will be available to existing Apps customers in the future, with automated data migration for Message Discovery users. Google likely will expand Vault to other Google products as well, such as the Google Talk client and perhaps even Google voice transcripts.

 

Google has released the video below outlining it’s Vault product. Take a peek:

 

Mar 29 2012

Total Attorneys Has It's Own App Store

 

Total Attorneys is a web-based (read: cloud-based) law practice management program. Essentially, TA provides the means for clients to retain your services, make payments, upload documents and complete forms online, while you and your colleagues can access complete case files at any time from any location with a secure Internet connection. Manage your practice, track time, send bills, manage documents and communicate with clients, all from a centralized Web location. They even offer virtual receptionist services from their Chicago location. Sounds pretty cool, right?

 

It gets cooler. TA has now implemented an App store for its platform, called Total Apps, unveiling the wonder at the ABA Tech show going on in Chicago as we speak. The first apps out of the box include:

 

• Fastcase, for legal research

• Capital Payments, for payment processing

• LegalEase, for attorney and paralegal contract support services

• Legal Web Experts, for website creation and marketing

• Virtual Receptionist, for fielding calls

• LawQA, to showcase expertise

• Google Sync, to keep Contacts, Calendars and Tasks in line

• IfByPhone, to reach out to leads that have contacted you

• LegalLeads, TA’s own lead generation service

 

Plus, TA has an iPhone and iPad app to enable access to the platform while on the go. The timetracking feature on the mobile apps is ultra simple to use, making it quite easy to accurately keep time. Plus you can easily access the various tasks within the platform and, I presume in the near future, the apps via the mobile interface as well.

 

 

TA is making its API available to developers in the hopes that third parties will pick up and run with the store and integrate more functionality into the platform. I think this is a forward-thinking means of managing legal practice in a way  our rapidly mobilized society can understand – with app-based, tool-oriented deployable solutions. Nice work, guys.

 

 

 

Feb 7 2012

MeetingBurner Brings Fast Free Video Conferencing To The Table

Lifehacker tipped me off to this great service for web-based online meetings and webinars – MeetingBurner. This great tool offers a whole lot of functionality for free, and even more with some cash. Create an account in minutes, and host your first video conference a minute or two later. MeetingBurner does its thing without downloads – because it is web-based, set up is quite fast and costs are contained. So, what do you get for free? An online meeting for up to 15 people, email tech support, instant screen sharing, Mac & PC compatibility, audio conferencing via telephone, computer or Skype, support for mobile attendees, meeting scheduling functions, streaming host video, the ability to instantly change presenters, in-meeting chat, a customizable meeting registration page, and, automated email reminders. Geesh. What don’t you get? Well, if you pay a bit more for Pro at $39.95 a month, you can have up to 50 attendees, phone and email tech support, meeting recording and recorded meeting sharing. Premier at $99.95 a month gets you 1,000 or more atetndees, meeting analytics, SMS reminders, “AutoPilot” meetings (pre-recorded meetings that play as if live), and paywall PayPal integration. For all levels, the interface is beautiful and easy to understand. Mobile users can download the iPhone app to join meetings on the go. That should put a dent in some of the high priced video conferencing competitors.

And it’s available today! Go on, get to your meeting.

Dec 16 2011

Quick Guide to Online Interaction

With my crazy day-job and travel schedule these past few weeks, I haven’t been able to post my usual volume of quality content. Here is a quickie until I can get some more fully featured posts up. Nice simple infographic about what sites on the Web are designed for certain business- related tasks. Enjoy.

20111216-094743.jpg

Aug 15 2011

Scoop.It's Rich, Easy Curation Makes You Look Like A Pro

Scratching both the itch of discovery and creation, Scoop.it is an invite-only service that offers a slick, powerful tool focused on content. Within the rich interface, users can set up topic-based pages to fill with relevant content. Or, users can explore the pages created by other users. Or both.

Scoop.it makes the curation part VERY easy for you – along with the standard bookmarklet that will allow you to pull from all over the Web, you will also get a stream of recommended content from around the Web for each page you maintain right on the site. Recommendations are based on your own search terms and can be tweaked by source or term. With one click, that content is packaged into a nice little “box” showing the title with link to original article, image and a quote that sums up the article, enticing the reader in for further discovery. When you have curated enough content, your page starts to look like one of those magazine-themed apps like Flipboard or Pulse. Scoop.it also shows you stats for your page, so you can see how people are interacting with your content.

Of course, there are cool social features. In addition to the usual sharing options to other social sites, Scoop.it lets you follow other pages of interest, comment on material and even suggest material to topic curators. Check out the embed of my page on Pro Tech:

Scoop.it’s team likens itself to Tumblr without the blogging and Paper.li with more manual control over the content. Scoop.it isn’t stingy either: they are fine with you taking your Scoop.it page and embedding it elsewhere, anywhere – such as a Facebook page, WordPress blog or LinkedIn, with widgets and embeds. The Slideshare below talks about this new feature in greater detail.

Scoop.it everywhere

View more presentations from Scoop.it

Scoop.it is a total package for content curation, meeting many needs – particularly of those passionate or knowledgeable, but without the time to devote to a blog to impart that information to the public. Look like a content pro with Scoop.it.

Mar 23 2011

Virtual Assistants To The Rescue!

Yesterday’s news feeds brought me two new applications that can ably serve as assistants in your process of getting things done. The first is FellowUp, a tool that helps you make the most of your various social web connections. The second is Flow, a beautiful group task management app that puts your to do list front and center in a very dynamic way.

First, FellowUp. This CRM tool tackles a problem made almost monumental in the digital, social sharing age: how do you maintain relationships across social networks, relationships that might actually yield positive experiences and networking fruit? You connect your social networks to the application, which then mines your networks for “insights”, such as important events, happenings, job changes, etc. From FellowUp’s dashboard, you can then comment or connect over the “insight”, making a positive impression on your friend or colleague and, in essence, “following up” with them. Get quick note of important life events and even common interests, which you can then act on if you wish. Of course, like any good CRM, FellowUp affords a useful mechanism for saving and storing contact information across networks in one place for easy access. Mobile access too, with a companion iPhone application. FellowUp has a more personal feel than competitors such as Salesforce, Xobni or LinkedIn, and a more effective interface for acting on events. Another cool feature: use it as a personal “to do” application by creating a new contact for yourself and adding notes, reminders, tasks or anything else you need to bring to your frontal lobe. FollowUp currently connects with Facebook, LinkedIn, Google and Outlook. The site indicates that the team is working to add iCal, Yahoo, Twitter, hotmail-live, Salesforce, MySpace and more. A plug-in for Gmail and Outlook is in the works. FellowUp is in private beta right now, but even at this early stage, it promises to be an interesting way to deal with burgeoning online communities of friends, colleagues and acquaintances,  helping us make more meaningful connections in a rapidly disconnecting world.

Next in line, Flow. Flow is all about managing and delegating tasks to your team. In their sample vid, the “team” is a group of kids (I know, aging myself here) setting about to have a party. But your aspirations with this gorgeous app can certainly rise higher. The problem Flow is attempting to solve is similar to FollowMe – how to pull together disparate tasks and to-dos scattered across various applications and platforms and localize them in one place for easy management. Use Flow from your browser or a companion Mac desktop application. Use if for personal and work related tasks, by entering a name, a due date, contacts you’d like to include in the task-completion process, and relevant tags. You can group tasks into projects. Collaborators can add content to tasks, including real-time comments, which is a huge boon on a short deadline. You can add tasks and can delegate by email and all team members get access to a single dashboard. And, of course, there is the ubiquitous companion iPhone application.

To say the interface is pretty would be an understatement. But, at $9.99 per month, it should be. Still, let it be known that $99 per year for a virtual assistant is not a bad deal, particularly if it helps you get your work done and done effectively and efficiently.

Check out these very cool new apps. And be watching for more – clearly developers are plagued with the same professional problems as us little folk and keep coming up with creative ways to solve them.