PollDaddy
January 20, 2009 in 3 out of 5 stars, A service, Business Intel Poll Daddy: A service which allows you to put a poll or survey on your site. It then offers rich graphical reporting of the responses. Automattic, Inc. Because it makes it simple to ascertain the opinions of your website/blog visitors. As the website publisher, you fill out a simple form on the PollDaddy site indicating your question and the possible responses (including "other" where they can enter their own responses) and they provide you a snippet of code which you place on your website to display the poll/survey. It has a user-friendly admin interface which makes it easy to quickly create a poll and view the results. All plans (free included) offer the ability to customize the look of the poll to match your site, if you don’t like one of their preset looks (they’re not too bad). They’ve got a nifty editor to make customizing easy-ish, but if you want to edit your design once it’s changed, you need to know CSS. The upside is that if you do know CSS, you can make a very customized poll. You can add youtube video, or images as your question, or answers. There’s pretty good logic and constructs in place to help you prevent and manage multiple votes by the same person. And you can close the poll after a certain date. They’ve done a nice job of making a fairly easy-to-use site and service. The reports are pretty neat as well, and the poll and survey setup (when they work) are pretty straightforward and easy. I ran into numerous bugs using the service. Nothing I wasn’t able to work around, but it was a mess. I had pages error out, and when I generated my first poll, the code (to paste) was wrong and didn't work. I had to go back through the site and load the code page again to get the right code. It had several problem that I assume are probably related to the a heavy load today? Things did eventually work after I re-tried them so I assume they'll get these cleared up, and when they do – this is a great offering. Free for a basic version, then $200/yr or $900/yr to allow more than 1,000 responses per poll.What is it?
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Here’s an example of the poll (and I’d love to have your responses).
senduit
January 13, 2009 in 4 out of 5 stars, A service, File uploading services Davidville, Inc. (the crew who created Tumblr) Last week I reviewed drop.io which was also clean and simple, but full-featured. If you don't need all those features, it'd be hard to beat senduit for uncompromised simplicity and elegance. It's another site I can (and will) use with my family and clients and won’t have to explain anything. Here’s the process: 1. To send a file: Browse for File – Click Upload Button – Copy Link – Paste Link (to email/IM). 2. For the recipient: Click Pasted Link – Save Download. The End. No login, short easy-to-share urls. You can set the expiration on a file for from 30 minutes up to 1 week. The download page couldn’t be simpler. It starts the download without any user action needed (while you look at an ad). It has 100% of what you need to share a file, and 0% of what you don’t. It does not get any tighter than this. It might be nice to also enter an email address to send the file to after its uploaded. This would be a compromise on the perfect simplicity of the beast though, so it’s a hard call. $0.00 Reviewed by Carson McComasWhat is it?
senduit: A beautifully spare and elegant file sharing tool.
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drop.io
January 7, 2009 in 5 out of 5 stars, A service, File uploading services drop.io: A gloriously clean and simple file-sharing tool. It's amazing that with all the solutions to this already out there, none have done it this well. If you need to share a too-big-to-email* file (or set of files) with someone, or share the same large-ish file(s) with multiple people, this is the best solution I've found. (Plus, knowledge of FTP soup: Not required.) *For easy emailing of files, also see usend.io, built on top of drop.io. drop.io (these guys) Because it's so simple all my clients and family can use it without a personal education session with me first. And it works. Well. No signup required, it takes literally a few seconds (plus upload time) to share a file. You can pick your own url suffix (provided it's available). So, drop.io/clientname or drop.io/yourname, for example. You can easily password protect the upload, and expire the upload as soon as 1 day later, up to as late as a year later. Once shared, you can track how many times the drop has been accessed. Somewhat helpfully, each “drop” comes with an email address you can send files to, which will make them available for download. Somewhat amusingly, each “drop” comes with a voice mail number you can call to add an mp3 of yourself to the drop (it also offers a full enclosures RSS feed of anything added - poor man’s podcasting tool?) plus, a private conference call number for meetings (I guess so you can share files, and chat about them). An extra nifty feature is the ability to set up a pay wall so you can sell downloads through drop.io. Selling art? Photos? Music? An ebook? This might be a good solution. It can be pay per use, or a subscription. Pretty killer. Premium users can send faxes with it. Anyone can receive faxes – but it’s clunky. And there’s a lot more too, all without an overwhelming UI. It’s impressive. They also have an API allowing brilliant solutions like usend.io. The premium code prominence on the upload page feels obtrusive and mildly confusing. 100MB limit per file (for free) might be a bit skimpy for some. The help disappoints. The faxing functionality is just too clunky, and while the help claimed it exists, I couldn’t see where or how. It utilizes the right-click in a few places, which no one expects in a web app. Free for 100MB per drop. Upgrade for $10 per year per extra GB. Reviewed by Carson McComasWhat is it?
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FaxPipe
January 6, 2009 in 4 out of 5 stars, A service, Faxing FaxPipe: After initially recommending, and then getting hosed by Send2Fax (they significantly raised the prices, didn't let me know, made it hard to cancel and get a refund, didn't give a full refund), I was on the hunt for a replacement. I've been using FaxPipe now for several months, and can say it's everything I need and want in an electronic fax system. AirCom LLC. When someone faxes you, you get a PDF attachment of the fax in an email. To send a fax, you send an email with an
attachment to a special email address, put the recipient fax number as
the body of the message, and you're done. You get a toll-free or local number. Highly affordable. There's isn't much to it, it's just what you need, and nothing you don't. Paying yearly on the lower tier plans isn't my favorite (although, not a big deal). $48/yr for 25 pages/mo, $0.15 for more pages. Other plans. Reviewed by Carson McComasWhat is it?
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Elance
August 8, 2008 in 4 out of 5 stars, A service, Collaboration, Hiring, ProductivityElance: A place to (primarily) find freelance help, and also to find work as a freelancer. Elance, Inc. Elance has been around for a while (at least since 2002) and serves a wide range of businesses. I won't speak to their breadth, just their value to me as a non-Fortune-500-level entrepreneur. Elance's real benefit is in finding inexpensive (many of their providers are in Asia and Latin America) help for more specialized tasks that I can't afford the time to do myself, or that I don't have the skills to do myself.
For example, I have about 1,000 product images that I need the backgrounds removed from in Photoshop. My friend needed a customized Flash video player designed for his site. A quick (relatively simple) post on Elance, and we found the help we needed within 24 hours.
I like how careful they are about vetting businesses and providers to ensure everyone is the real deal. They also have an escrow service (free for businesses), and a fairly robust messaging and agreement system to make sure everyone knows what's expected and how the project will pay out. My results have been very satisfactory. The site is pretty complex, and as such, it's a bit cumbersome to use (I did muddle my way through without reading much and just guess-clicking and did ok however). Some of the communication structure feels more like insulation designed to make sure Elance gets their commission than a way to make my life easier. Most of their project management constructs are far too elementary to be useful. Free for businesses, providers pay 4-6% plus a monthly fee depending on usage. Reviewed by Carson McComasWhat is it?
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Google Sites
July 23, 2008 in 4 out of 5 stars, A service, Collaboration, Free, Hosted "Office", Hosted software, Issue trackers, Productivity, Project managementGoogle Sites: A poor man's (pretty darn good) intranet. An online, Google-hosted wiki-meets-project management software service. Google gobbled up Jot Spot (a hosted wiki service headed by Joe Kraus) before it even really got going, it was later re-born as Google Sites. Google I have a growing and widely dispersed team for my latest venture. I've set up a Google Sites website which is serving as an "intranet" for this team, and it's working quite well. It's like a wiki in that anyone (whom you allow) can edit or add pages or documents. It also has several built-in tools to help you create things like, a file download repository, a todo list, an issue tracker, or an announcements board. Most anyone can set one up and manage it, it's not difficult, there are no HTML skills required. You have some limited control over the look and feel; for example you can easily brand it with your own logo and colors. They've made management of the site very simple. You can invite others as owners, collaborators or just viewers. You can also optionally make the site visible to everyone on the internet. You get 100MB of storage space for free, and can bump that up to 25GB per account for their paid version which costs $50/user/yr. They even have an API. My primary beef is no discussion forum built in. That would make it twice as valuable for us. Even if they just took Google Groups and married it in, we'd have a winner. This is a huge omission. I would also like the option not to have previous versions of all my pages available to everyone. It's not a huge deal, but I don't need the last umpteen version of a page viewable forever, and there's no facility to disallow this. Free for most everything, $50 per user per year for the deluxe version with lots of storage space. Reviewed by Carson McComasWhat is it?
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There are also many more options available through "Gadgets" like a Google Calendar, a Presentation (read: Microsoft Powerpoint-like document), or a Spreadsheet. Plus hundreds of third party gadgets like maps, weather, games, news feeds, and chat. Not to mention a million other useless things no one would ever want (Woody Allen quotes?). Fortunately it's easy to ignore that stuff.What could be improved?
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MyNewCompany.com
March 22, 2007 in 4 out of 5 stars, A serviceMyNewCompany.com: An online service that handles all of the necessary paperwork and legal documents for incorporation. You can do this paperwork yourself, but it's typically a quagmire of legalese and headaches. If you're running your own startup your time is usually better focused on building your business instead of dealing with arcane laws and forms for days/weeks. MyNewCompany.com, Inc. For starters, their pricing is VERY competitive (incorporation costs vary by type (LLC., Inc. etc.) from state to state) - they're easily on the lower-end of the pricing scale out there. But they really make the entire process painless and transparent. Sign-up for the creation of a company is painless and intuitive. You can easily 'create' a company in about 8-10 minutes online. Collection of necessary data is not really much more difficult than filling out a few online forms - and they've done a great job of explaining things along the way. Better yet, they provide a whole slew of various options and additional services that you can chose, and when you're all done with sign-up, they keep you up to date on overall progress on their end. Likewise, their online 'dashboard' gives you access to additional business resources and links. Nothing. They've got a great thing going - their product is highly-polished, efficient, and intuitive. Highly recommended if you need to incorporate or protect yourself (i.e., LLC.) during the ramp-up of a new business venture. Varies by service and state. Typically $200-$400 Reviewed by Michael K. CampbellWhat 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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Google Docs and Spreadsheets
October 11, 2006 in 4 out of 5 stars, A service, Hosted "Office", Hosted software, ProductivityGoogle Docs and Spreadsheets: From Google's acquisition of Writely coupled with Google Spreadsheet comes Google Docs and Spreadsheets. A hosted, Gmail-like service which provides (you guessed it) a hosted document and spreadsheet editor. Just login with your Google/Gmail account to get started. Google Google is hit and miss on interface design (or maybe we just need to get used to their approach). This one is done quite well. The options are simple - and happen to be the only ones I think most of us care about anyway. The upside? No bloated confusing morass of menu options. All your documents are in a nice, clean, hosted centralized location allowing you, or colleagues to access them from anywhere. You can even upload existing doc(Word)/rtf/xls(Excel)/csv etc documents to the repository. The collaboration stuff really is nice. Send invites, track revisions, chat (IM-like, right in the window) while you work together on a doc, etc. (It's similar to Writeboard only with richer collaboration tools). You can also invite folks to view, but not edit. You can also export your creations to common formats (doc/rtf/xls/csv/pdf/html/open office). PDF export is a pretty darn cool feature. Has a very nice spell check. The spreadsheet (doc too?) allows you to autosave periodically to keep you from losing work (nice touch). You can also post word docs to your blog (nice clean drop-down+click setup for Blogger, WordPress, LiveJournal, SquareSpace, BlogHarbor, Blogware). And you can manually set up other services, including TypePad and Moveable Type, but it takes a bit more finessing. Works in IE and FireFox (haven't tested others, although I suspect all modern browsers work.) I'm not sure how comfortable we'll be having our documents hosted such that without a connection (read: airplane, vacation, etc.) we don't have access to them. Do rich collaboration tools and a hard-drive-crash-resistant hosted repository outweigh the annoyance of that? They are quite simple in functionality - probably 90% of what we all need, that last 10% may be a deal breaker for power users, especially the spreadsheet side. It's not as eerily omniscient as Excel, if you rely on that. Free Reviewed by Carson McComasWhat is it?
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eTickets.to
September 29, 2006 in 4 out of 5 stars, A service, Event managementeTickets.to: A self-service eTicketing system for events, lets promoters sell their own tickets online without the need for a ticketing agent. Sign-Up Technologies Event promoters get the money and the customer data directly (so you own your own data). - no extortionate booking fees or third party agents getting in the way. No minimum fees, no percentages, just a flat charge per ticket sold. Great for any kind of event -- a workshop, seminar or conference, or (as one of their customers, Exit Festival did) a monster event with thousands of participants. (Or even a school play or LAN party). Here's what an Exit Festival representative had to say: "its clear to see the benefit to our business in terms of additional revenue by eliminating booking fees and being able to control and tailor our customer service; we now have a far more direct and efficient way of communicating with our customers and offering them value for money." Well done, simple interface. You can be selling tickets in just a few minutes. You can set up your own additional fees per ticket (if you wish). You can control number of tickets to be sold, types of tickets to be sold, dates to start/stop selling. You have some moderate control over the feel of the ticket selling page (logo and content). You can sell your tickets in GBP, Euros or Dollars. Full featured without being bogged down by complexity. They're working on a mobile version to deliver tickets by SMS and introducing a wider range of payment gateways (only PayPal is supported at the moment). $19.99 account activation, then $1 per ticket sold. (Although you can set up an account and try out the process without making a payment). Reviewed by Carson McComasWhat is it?
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