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Google has tried so hard to get into the social networking game, but its first attempts were little more than failures. Let us count the ways:
- Google Wave, which promised to reinvent how we collaborate. Dead.
- Google Buzz, a social network inside Gmail. Dead.
- Orkut, an outright social network. Practically unknown outside of Brazil.
So then, Google practically had to redesign their entire company around their final social offering: Google+. It launched with fanfare, and even had some nice features, but ultimately wasn’t enough different to drag most of us away from Twitter and Facebook. Just about the only standout feature was Hangouts, group video chats inside Google+.
But Google has forged it deeply into Google search, making a Google+ profile rather necessary if you want your site’s search results to show off your author info. Plus, if you buy into Google’s other products like the brand-new Glass, you’ll get the best built-in sharing experience with Google+.
So, are you still using Google+? Or has your account languished without any recent updates?
Of course, if you do use Google+, be sure to follow us on Google+!
Are you ready to have all your data in one place, so you can grow your business and take care of your customers? Are you tired of having to go to all your different web services to get to YOUR data? Then you need Leftronic, our sponsor this week, to make a graphical dashboard that’ll show all of your team’s data in one place.
Leftronic makes it easy to build a dashboard with your key metrics. You can be up and running and tracking real-time data in just a few clicks. Start with templates to quickly create dashboards that connect to the data sources of your choice, including:
- Google Analytics
- Amazon Web Services (AWS)
- Zendesk
- New Relic
- Pingdom
- Salesforce
- Mixpanel
- …and more!
You can connect to all your data, no matter the source: whether it’s in the cloud, on your server, or in your Excel spreadsheet. You can even your own custom data with Leftronic’s API or Spreadsheet tool. Then, Leftronic has lots of widgets to display your data in insightful ways.
Leftronic was designed for large screens in mind, so display your dashboards on a big TV in your office or lobby, or next to the water cooler. Or you can just share your dashboards online with built-in unlimited sharing with read-only links so anyone can see your dashboards from their computer.
Get a Dashboard for Your Team Today!
Ready to get a dashboard to show all of your team’s data? Then get started with a 30 day free Leftronic trial today! Then, you can keep using it after that to keep your team in touch with your business data starting at $42/month for up to 2 screens.
We’d like to say a special Thank You! to our sponsors from April. If you would like to feature your app on our site with an advertisement, be sure to check out our available slots on BuySellAds or register for a weekly sponsorship for your app.
If you haven’t already checked out our the great apps that sponsored our site last month, be sure to check them out now!
ServiceTask
ServiceTask simplifies everything down to the 3 most important things in your business: your customers, your jobs, and you calendar. You can keep up with everything important about your customers to make sure you provide them the most personalized service each time. Then, you can keep up with the tasks for your whole team in Service Task, even recurring tasks with service plans, and turn them into timesheets as work is finished. Finally, but most importantly, you can manage your company’s calendar online, dragging-and-dropping appointments and meetings to the time that’ll work best for you.
You can try Service Task for free for 30 days, and keep using it for free if you have only 10 customers. After that, you can keep using Service Task to keep your business running starting at $24/month.
Quote Roller
Quote Roller makes it easy for you to build, send, track and get awesome proposals signed in a matter of minutes. Use their customizable templates as a basis, then add the story of your company, your portfolio and samples of your work, highlight your potential customers, address their needs, and whatever else that will make you proposal shine.
Quote Roller actually cuts off, on average, two hours of the time usually spent writing each proposal, so you can better spend that time selling.
You can try out Quote Roller for free, and if you enter the coupon code APPSTORM, you’ll get 30 extra days on your trial, giving you 6 weeks of Quote Roller for free.
Sothink SWF Decompiler
Sothink SWF Decompiler gives you everything you need to work with your Flash files. It gives you tools to easily download Flash files from your site, and then lets you convert the Flash files into a fully editable FLA or FLEX file that you can tweak inside the app or in Adobe Flash Pro. You can then easily extract design elements from your Flash files to use in other design work, or replace, say, an image or audio in a Flash file to update your branding. Finally, you can convert Flash videos and animations to HTML5 compatible formats, to make your old Flash site work on any modern browser.
You can download a free trial of SWF Decompiler for Windows if you’re a PC user, or get SWF Decompiler for Mac. You can then purchase your own copy for $79.99 directly from their site.
BetaPunch
BetaPunch helps you find out why users are leaving your website before signing up or buying your products or services. When you signup for a test, BetaPunch gets one of their 3,000+ testers to do a screen cast, offering their feedback on your site. The end result is a 10-15 minute video of a user navigating and talking about their experience using a website.
You can try out BetaPunch on your site, and the first test is free. Then, we’ve got an exclusive discount for our readers: use the coupon WebAppStorm to get a 10% discount on purchasing extra tests on your website!
And a special thanks to you, our Web.AppStorm readers, for reading and sharing our articles. We hope you continue to find our articles interesting and helpful!
Google started out as a search engine, but over the years it’s amassed quite the set of web apps for dozens of purposes. If you use Gmail, Google Calendar, Maps, and Search, then Google has tons of data about you, enough to let it rather smartly predict what you’ll need to know and when you’ll need to know it.
That’s what Google Now, the new Android feature that’s finally come to iPhone and iPad users this week by way of a new version of the Google Search app, is. It shows you directions for how to get home when you’re supposed to be heading home, lets you find out if something else has happened about a news article you recently read, and so much more. In many ways, it’ll keep you from searching on your devices as much, and perhaps eventually on your browser as well since it appears to be coming to the web sometime soon.
It can be nice — some swear by it already — but if you don’t use Google’s services to run your life, it’s rather pointless. I’ve just tried it out on my iPhone, and was unimpressed when it didn’t even pick up the appointment I had this morning. It’s neat, still, but not nearly as lifechanging as many seem to think.
That’s why I’m wondering about your thoughts on Google Now. Do you like it, and do you think it’s something you couldn’t live without today? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.
Is keeping up with your team’s schedule more work than actually doing the work your business is all about? There’s no reason job scheduling should be so difficult. That’s where Service Task, our sponsor this week, comes in.
Service Task simplifies everything down to the 3 most important things in your business: your customers, your jobs, and you calendar. You can keep up with everything important about your customers to make sure you provide them the most personalized service each time. Then, you can keep up with the tasks for your whole team in Service Task, even recurring tasks with service plans, and turn them into timesheets as work is finished. Finally, but most importantly, you can manage your company’s calendar online, dragging-and-dropping appointments and meetings to the time that’ll work best for you. Your customers can book service online, and you can manage everything to make sure you’ll give them the best service, right from Service Task.
Want more? Service Task integrates fully with QuickBooks Online to make your accounting and invoicing simple, and also now includes its own brand-new invoicing tool so you can create invoices from Service Task directly if you don’t use QuickBooks. Then, Service Task also makes it simpler to promote your business online, with a built-in tool to create a basic site to publicize your business.
Go Get it!
Ready to get your service-orientated business more focused on the service you’re offering and less on getting your service scheduled? Then you should give Service Task a try. You can try Service Task for free for 30 days, and keep using it for free if you have only 10 customers. After that, you can keep using Service Task to keep your business running starting at $24/month.
If you’ve ever had a Posterous blog, you’ve got a project that you really need to take on this week: moving your Posterous blog to a new home. Posterous closes down for good on Tuesday, April 30th, so you’ve got 3 days to get your stuff. 3 days.
After that, everything you’ve ever put in Posterous will be gone. Boom! Whether you’ve been using Posterous until recently, or perhaps — like me — tried it out years ago and totally forgot you had a blog in Posterous, you’d better at the very least backup your Posterous data so it doesn’t get deleted, and if you want to keep it online, you need to find it a new home.
Don’t worry: you can backup and move your Posterous site in less than 15 minutes. I’m sure you can find that much time this weekend. So come on. Here’s what you need to save your Posterous site before it’s too late.
Several weeks ago, we asked our readers at Mac.AppStorm what Mac apps they couldn’t live without. The funniest thing is that tons of the responders — most, even — included a web app like Dropbox, Evernote, CloudApp, or Google Drive as an app they couldn’t live without. Turns out, almost everyone relies on web apps these days.
For me, I keep all of my files in Dropbox, my email is powered by Google Apps for Domains, my site is powered by Kirby, I use CloudApp to share files, Forecast.io to check the weather, WolframAlpha to discover more about the world, Google to keep me from seeming dumb, and App.net/Twitter/Facebook to keep in touch with friends and colleagues. AppStorm itself is powered by WordPress, our team collaborates with Basecamp and Google Docs, and our polls usually are powered by Polldaddy. I could honestly get rid of native apps easier than I could replace web apps these days.
So how about you? What web apps could you not live without? We’re looking forward to seeing your responses in the comments below!
You want to grow your business. The best way to do that is to get as many professional business proposals out to your clients as quickly as possible. If this is your goal, you just have to check out Quote Roller, our sponsor this week.
Quote Roller makes it easy for you to build, send, track and get awesome proposals signed in a matter of minutes. Use their customizable templates as a basis, then add the story of your company, your portfolio and samples of your work, highlight your potential customers, address their needs, and whatever else that will make you proposal shine.
The most important part of your sales proposal is the pricing. Quote Roller has a new customizable pricing table that helps you list your products, services and pricing clearly, while giving your customer the chance to choose between different packages.
Then, once your proposal’s sent, you can track just what the customer is looking at. You are automatically notified when they open or comment on it and when they sign, which is easier since they can use e-signature to do it right then and there.
Quote Roller actually cuts off, on average, two hours of the time usually spent writing each proposal, so you can better spend that time selling.
Go Get It!
If you’re needing a great way to make quotes and proposals online, then you should try out Quote Roller today. The free two-week trial involves no commitments or credit cards, so what do you have to lose by trying it out?
Plus, if you apply the special AppStorm code of “APPSTORM”, you’ll get an extra 30 days trial — meaning 6 weeks of amazing proposals for free! That gives you all the more reason to try out Quote Roller this week.
It’s been a tragic week for the US with the Boston Marathon bombing, as well as the events that have unfolded over the past few hours with gunfights and more in Boston. There’s also been a factory explosion in Texas, ricin-laced letters sent to the president, an even worse bombing in Iraq, and more. Scary stuff.
There’s so many ways to get the news, and you’d always figure the internet would be the best way. Often it is; cable news seemed incredibly slow compared to Twitter, say, in the events of the past few hours. But local TV — which, incidentally, I watched over the internet — had some of the best coverage, as did Reddit, a site most of us wouldn’t trust for authoritative information (sorry!).
And then, if you were actually in the area of the disasters, authorities were requesting that cell phones be turned off, and during the marathon bombing the networks were nearly overloaded with calls, making internet use, at least from your phone, not such a good option. Suddenly, old-fashioned FM radio made the most sense.
It made me wonder what you turn to first when you need immediate news. Do you turn a dial on a radio still, or are you more likely to turn on the TV? Or is Twitter the first place you’d think to check?
