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Communications
Quick poll: Would you think of email as a productivity tool? Most of us use email all the time, from our phones and browsers and anything else imaginable, to stay on top of the loads of messages that bombard us daily. It’s a great communications tool, but hardly something that helps you stay more productive. A full screen writing too, a powerful to-do list app, a big red highlighter and a wall calendar might all count for tools that’ll boost your productivity, but email? Not hardly. It usually feels much more like a distraction.
What if email could instead be a tool that could keep you focused on what you need to do, when you need to do it? Perhaps it could bring you messages right when you want to deal with them, and let you write emails when you’re thinking about them but send them when they actually need to arrive in your colleagues’ inboxes. Maybe it could even automatically send those emails you have to send every so often, freeing up your time a bit.
That’s what Boomerang is. It’s a tool that turns Gmail into a productivity tool that makes email run on your own schedule. (more…)
From Amazon’s runaway success with the Kindle platform to Apple’s new iBooks Author tool to help writers create interactive eBooks for their iPad iBooks store, eBooks are the story of the day for digital media. If you’ve ever considered writing a book or creating a new magazine, you’ll want to find the best tools to get your content published in the best way possible.
Calaméo is a digital publishing platform that allows you to publish documents not only for viewing on the web, but also for viewing on any iOS device. They offer native viewing platforms for iPhone, iPad, and the web. The only problem is, you’ll have to stick with their platform rather than selling your creations on any eBook store. Does it have enough to make an author that committed to their platform? Let’s take a look and see.
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Many of us work with people located in different parts of the world and services like email, social networks and file sharing have offered us the ability to do so easily. Even here at AppStorm, Matthew Guay, the editor, and I live over 8,000 miles apart, but we are still able to communicate and work together productively thanks to our internet connections. There’s a range of project management and collaboration web apps around, but wouldn’t it be cool if teams could work in a shared workspace, virtually?
Enter Kohive, an online, virtual desktop for collaboration. Kohive mimics the design of a computer desktop to bring an online collaborative space for your team to work in.
If you’ve had to get feedback on a product/service or learn about people’s needs/opinions, you’ll agree that web-based surveys are the easiest way to poll your audience – but do you get the most of your efforts? Many people ignore online surveys and a large number also rush through them in order to quickly qualify for any incentives that are offered for filling them out. Is there a way to optimize the survey exercise for marketers and researchers to get more participants and better-quality responses?
Eval.me believes it has found the answer, in people’s innate desire to do good. The app aims to help you build surveys easily and get more people to take them by offering a unique incentive – for every survey filled, the surveyor will donate US$1 to a charity selected by the respondent. The approach to getting a higher number of responses is certainly interesting, but does it really work? And how does the app stand up to the competition? Let’s build a survey or two and find out.
Chat rooms have been around for decades now, fulfilling all types of purposes. The first online chat service was in 1980 (at least, according to Wikipedia) and they’ve developed significantly since then. However, with the rise in social media that encompass private and/or public group chat, these dedicated services have became somewhat less necessary. With Nurph, the bridge between social networks and dedicated chat rooms has been built.
Nurph takes a Twitter account and build a chat room onto the side. The idea is that Twitter users can create adhoc chat rooms for their followers to discuss matters in real time, while still maintaining their Twitter branding and profile information. (more…)
Online surveys are a drag. Usually, they’re just a series of questions on a drab-looking page that are no fun to answer, and they make you wish you hadn’t agreed to fill out the survey in the first place. That’s probably why market researchers, advertising firms, online stores, and corporations worry about completion rates – if a participant doesn’t finish a survey, the data gathered is often of little or no use for their analysis. So what are your options? You can either spend a lot of time and money building a well-designed survey from scratch, or you can try PopSurvey.
PopSurvey helps you create beautiful surveys that people will want to complete. The app makes it easy to build surveys, analyze results and promote your surveys. It’s currently available with a number of plans to suit your needs, including a free one and is great for getting started with conducting surveys. But will PopSurvey meet your requirements? Let’s test-drive it to find out.
Have you ever found it difficult to share stuff you find online? Sure, there’s millions of social buttons across the ‘net to like, 1+, Tweet, and do just about anything else you can think of with the pages you read. But what if you want to, say, share a part of a page on Amazon.com with a friend to show them the a price and a picture of the thing you’re talking about? You could take a screenshot, but then you’ll have to still share a link to the site, and the text won’t be searchable. Or you could copy and paste the text, but then you’ll lose the picture, formatting, and more.
Clipboard is a new beta web app that aims to reinvent copy/paste for the web. It’s a surprisingly powerful tool that you can use to share anything you discover, embed stuff from any site on your pages, and save your favorite content safely. Here’s our first look at this innovative new way to clip and share web content.
Every once in a while, a tool is developed that is stunning in it’s simplicity. It’s utility is such that the tool itself fades away, and you wonder how you went so long without it. No, I’m not talking about an Apple product–but if you know Johnny Ive, see if he needs a speech writer.
Today, I’m going to try out A Web Whiteboard: a browser-based, collaborative brainstorming tool created by Senko Rašić, a programmer from Croatia. If you have a whiteboard in your office, or have ever used a whiteboard with colleagues, you are likely aware of the benefits. Personally, I’m a big fan of whiteboards because they’re an easy way to organize your thoughts, even when your thoughts and ideas change on a whim.
A Web Whiteboard takes this process and moves it to your computer, and more importantly, to the web, making easy and efficient collaboration possible, even when you’re miles away.
It’s common knowledge that if you’ve invested a lot of time and effort into developing a useful web app, your users will be your number one priority. It’s your duty to ensure that they have the best experience using your app to ensure satisfaction for paying customers and hopefully sway free users into making the move to a premium account. To better provide the level of quality you require, you’re going to need to talk to them or at least get basic feedback on what they think.
UserMood is an app dedicated to doing just that. Read on to find out more about UserMood and the ways in which it could help you.
Sharing feedback is one of the most important aspects of teamwork. It’s what gets (and keeps) everyone on the same page and helps to ensure everyone is working together properly towards a common goal. This is easily achieved in face-to-face meetings… But it’s 2011, so how does one get comprehensive, coherent and usable feedback via the web?
The team behind ConceptBoard seems to have an answer: their web app provides a space to display and discuss files and ideas and get everyone’s points of view into focus. Is this the meeting-killer miracle you’ve been waiting for?
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