Small Businesses are Using Way too Many Cool Tools Today

Small businesses are using many cool applications and tools to run their business.  These new tools are helping out in operations, project management, web content, collaboration, communications, and other areas of the business.  Our little firm, Compass Intelligence, uses a wealth of tools for our business. I wanted to share a few of them that you too might find interesting:

• Basecamp - We use basecamp for project management, sharing, and collaborating on projects for our clients.  You can collaborate with internal employees or add partners as well.  It is something we have been trialing for a short while now, but is becoming a great tool for our day-to-day work activities
• Curata - This a a curating tool used to bring in web content from around the web on a given topic.  It finds articles, press releases, blogs and more based on the parameters, RSS feeds, and sites you want it to browse.  You can also filter by many topics and key words, and categorize content by keywords and categories as well.  We use this for our website: www.ne2ne.com or news.ne2ne.com
• Skype - Most of folks out there are familiar with Skype, but we use Skype quite often for group chats, video calls, and day-to-day voice communications.  You can now even share your desktop screenshot with fellow Skype contacts, share documents, and more.
• Webex - This is another tool that many businesses are familiar with, and it is our company's provider of conferencing services including voice, web, video, and more.  We often use Webex with our clients ot colleagues when we want to share presentations, view desktops of others, and even for training.
• Jing and Screencast - Jing allows you to capture images on your desktop and even capture video of you doing things on your desktop.  So for example, if I wanted to show my web developer the issue I am having on our website...I can video logging into my site and clicking to the page, etc and show him the video of the error.  Jing is also great for a training tool to show people how to do things.  Once you have videos and screenshots, Jing work with Screencast.  Screencast is the online site where you can share images, videos, etc.  Techsmith owns both of these products and there are free and pay-based services to choose from.  Great tool!
• Carbonite - Carbonite allows us to backup files on an ongoing bases from our laptops or computers.  You can remotely access these files if you are out of the office by logging into Carbonite's remote access site.  It is not flawless when you move from one operating system to the next or move data from one computer to another, but it definitely does the job to ensure your data is backup on a3rd party location that is secure.
• Tweetdeck - this is one that use personally for 4 twitter accounts that I connect and post to for our company.  I can post to multiple accounts at the same time, and have one landing place that sits on my desktop to do everything I need to for twitter except manage my twitter settings.
• Other tools and sites that are becoming common, and our company or I use as well, include LinkedIn, Facebook, Salesforce.com, Nitro PDF, and others.

Are there some cool business tools that you use for your small business?  We would love to learn what you think is cool.  Learn more about Compass Intellgence's Small Business subscription service here.

All the best,

Stephanie Atkinson, Managing Partner

Related Subscriptions :

SOHO IT Subscription

Mid-Size Business Subscription

Enterprise Business Subsription

Please visit Compass Intelligence to learn more: http://www.compassintelligence.com/