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Consumer support can be messy, and it can make or break an organization. With this in mind, developers have covered the web with countless help desk solutions, each promising to be different from the other. But in reality most of them were mere copycats, offering basically the same features with little variation beyond their stylesheet.
Freshdesk does an excellent job at bringing something new to the world of customer support, and has received critical acclaim across the board. Here at Web.AppStorm, they have bagged a prestigious score of 9 out of 10, and we loved their simple approach to Customer service.
Today we are going to talk with Kiran Darisi, Co-founder of Freshdesk. Keep reading to find out the story behind Freshdesk, how it was developed, and what’s in store for the future.
If you’re working for clients, or have clients working for you, you’ll likely have hit the problem of complaints over hours billed. It’s hard to see where the time went if you can’t see work as it’s being done. Peerdrum, our sponsor this week, is a tool designed to remove this problem for freelancers.
Peerdrum was founded by Tony Gialluca III who, just like many of us, is a remote-working, freelancing entrepreneur, working directly for clients. As his workload increased, he also took on the role of a manager by outsourcing work to other freelancers. Doing this for over ten years has inspired the creation of Peerdrum, a screen capture-based, time tracking system designed to allow more people to work remotely by giving managers assurance and remote workers validation.
As freelancers are primarily an hourly-based workforce, Peerdrum is an excellent way to bridge the gap between remote workers and their managers. Whether you’re a freelancer, a manager, or both, Peerdrum can be a great asset for you. Here’s how:
Peerdrum for Freelancers AND Managers from TG Studios on Vimeo.
Peerdrum automatically captures a screenshot on your computer while you’re clocked in on your projects, so the people you’re working for can see that you’re busy delivering what they’re paying for. It’s a simple way to provide accountability, giving companies the freedom to be more flexible with employees and freelancers but still feel confident that work’s getting done, from Starbucks or home.
Go Try Peerdrum!
Whether you’re a freelancer wanting to show the people you’re working for that you’re really working, or a manager wanting to see if your freelancers are working all the time you’re paying for, you should give Peerdrum a try. You can try out Peerdrum for 30 days for free, then get your paid account starting at just $5/month.
Facebook today announced that it has prepared a fresh and more focused News Feed for its users. The updated design will include the usual timelines, along with four new ones: All Friends, Photos, Music, and Following. With this upcoming redesign, the social network hopes to make your online experience much simpler — it wants to be the social nucleus that you’ve been waiting for.
With that promise, it has a chance to win back users who left over the privacy complications and overall clutter the site has gathered over time. Is this audacious overhaul enough? (more…)
We’ve just closed our giveaway, and want to extend our congratulations to our winners: Ricardo, Stevie, and Prajwal! Stay tuned for our next giveaways!
Wanting a better way to keep track of the time you spend working for your clients? Paydirt is one of the most exciting time tracking and invoicing apps we’ve tried lately, and we gave it a high score in our recent review.
Paydirt is designed to make it simple to get started, with a tutorial that’ll let you hit the ground running. You can then keep track of your work on any web site with the Chrome extension, and then turn all the data into nice invoices and more.
A Paydirt Hustler plan – their mid-sized plan – usually costs $16 AUD/month, and gives you unlimited clients, invoices, and more for one users. This week, though, we’ve got three 1-year accounts for free for our readers. All you’ll need to do leave a comment below, letting us what you find most exciting about Paydirt, and you’ll be entered in our giveaway. Want an extra entry? Share the giveaway publicly on Facebook, Twitter, or App.net, and share a link to your post in a separate comment, and you’ll get extra entries in our giveaway for each network you share on.
Hurry and get your entry in; our contest will close on March 13th, 2012!
Envato staff or people who have written more than two articles or tutorials for AppStorm, however, are ineligible to enter.
In a story that’s sadly common in the world of startups – especially web app startups, it seems – Twitter recently announced that they’re shutting down Posterous, little more than a year after they bought out Posterous. If you’ve been blogging on Posterous, it’s time to find a new place for your site before it’s shut down on April 30th.
One team is trying their best to make a great place for Posterous sites before they’re shut down for good: Posthaven. Started by two former cofounders of Posterous, Posthaven aims to let the blogging dream sparked by Posterous live on, only this time with a $5/month service that pledges to never shut down.
We caught up with Garry Tan, and were able to talk with him about Posterous, Posthaven, and their plans for the future. It’s quite the interesting interview!
There’s web apps for almost everything. You can run a lite version of Microsoft Office online, create surveys, replay classic games, smash pigs, watch movies, listen to almost any song ever written, watch those same songs in videos, and so much more. You can start a blog, or a business, or build legos. You can document your own life, or crawl through the details of others’ lives.
If there’s anything you need to do, chances are there’s a web app to do it. Sure, plenty of web apps aren’t as sophisticated as their native app counterparts, and you can’t run the whole Creative Suite online yet. But there’s apps for almost everything, and plenty of web apps are better than their desktop counterparts, too (quick: think of an app on your desktop to make a poll. Right, I thought so.).
That’s why we’re wondering: what do you need an app for that you can’t find on the web? It could be there’s one out there that you don’t know of, and we can help you find it, or perhaps your idea will prompt a dev among our midst to make a new app.
Here’s your chance: we’d love to hear what web app you’d love to have!
We’ve collected the top four reviews, roundups and how-to articles from across the AppStorm network in February. Whether you’re interested in Mac, iPhone, Web, Android, Windows, or iPad apps, there’s bound to be something you didn’t spot over the course of the month. Now would be a good time to explore a part of the AppStorm Network you’ve never seen before!
Thanks for reading AppStorm, and I hope you enjoy looking over some of our favourite posts from last month!
If you find yourself looking around for the neatest gadgets and accessories, and love finding new products that few know exist, then Man of Many, our sponsor this week, is a blog you’ll want to check out.
Man of Many was established in December 2012 to provide a curated selection of the latest and best men’s Products, Gear, Gadgets, Technology and Style. It offers a carefully selected range that will help any modern gentleman stand out from the crowd with products of quality. When selecting products to feature, they focus on the story behind the product and the value it offers to the ‘everyday man’. Their aim is to feature products that will empower people to get outdoors, be active, pick up a hobby and enjoy the good times.
Men in general prefer to shop online, since it’s convenient and helps avoid the hassle of waiting in line or dealing with disgruntled employees. When all you want to do is just get in and out, online shopping is the best option. Man of Many hopes to help you sort through the mess of online shopping and share only what matters.
Go Check it Out!
Man of Many believe in good design, functional elements and a lasting impression. It’s full of products you’re sure to find interesting, so be sure to check it out. You can visit their site, subscribe to their RSS feed, or follow them on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, or Pinterest to keep up with the latest products they cover.
We’d like to say a special Thank You! to our sponsors from February. 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!
FoxMetrics
Knowing how many people visit your site each day isn’t enough every more. You need to know about the people behind those pageviews, see what they’re clicking, and find what’s working (and what’s not) in your app or site. That’s why you should try out FoxMetrics. It’s an advanced analytics app that ties your customers with their actions on your site so you’ll see more than just pageviews. It’ll tell you who visited when, where, and why, in simple reports that you can easily understand and use to make business decisions.
TeamDesk
Want a web app that’s flexible enough to work with the needs your business’ data needs? Then you might want to try out TeamDesk. TeamDesk is web-based database software that enables teams to easily design web-based database applications or use predefined solutions to gather, share and manage business information. It’s almost like building a custom Access app for your business, except this time, it’s online and everyone can use it together.
Cloudswave
Cloudswave might be just what you’re looking for if you want to find great deals on web apps, or want to promote your web app. It’s a site dedicated to deals for web apps, with generous discounts on subscriptions to some of the most popular web apps. It also has bundles of web apps, letting you get a ton of new premium web apps for a great price.
Atmail Cloud
Looking for a new hosted email solution for your team? Atmail Cloud is the service you should check into. It’s the new cloud-based version of the great Atmail software, letting you use one of the best webmail interfaces on your own domain without having to deal with running your own email servers. We found it to be a great hosted email solution in our recent review of Atmail Cloud, one that has both great web apps and also works great with native email apps.
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!
Search = Google.com
For most of the world’s internet users, that’s just about it. There’s Google, and nothing else. People even enter Google into the Google search bar in browsers to bring up the Google.com homepage. It’s a mess.
But then, it’s not surprising that Google is so popular, simply because it works great for search. If you need to find something online, you’re almost guaranteed to find it with Google. And when it just works, and is blazing fast, why fix it? There are alternatives, most notably Microsoft’s Bing, which now powers Yahoo! Search as well. There’s also the underdog DuckDuckGo, which has somewhat of a geek following, but doesn’t seem to be that widely used.
I personally still use Google search, after periods of using both Bing, its predecessor, Live Search, and DuckDuckGo. I always end up coming back to Google. That apparently makes me like most of our search visitors, of which 96% use Google to find our articles.
How about you, our faithful readers? What search engine do you use by default? We’d love to hear your thoughts on why you use – or don’t use – Google.
