SugarCRM is one of the most popular CRMs available right now, and with good reason. They offer a free, open source version (Sugar Community Edition) or tiered levels for businesses, ranging from $30 per user per month, to $60 per user per month and above. A solid CRM is essential for many businesses and it’s incredibly important to find the best one for you and your workflow.
Let’s find out a little about what SugarCRM can mean for you and how it stacks up against others. (more…)
In the middle of last month, Google and Samsung announced the Chromebook “for everyone”, a $249 device running Google’s Chrome OS. The Chromebook is nothing new, and it’s a project that I’ve always been fond of in concept.
The new Chromebook has already launched online and in retail stores, and is quite possibly set to see some success as the holiday season nears. Let’s take a look at the state of the Chromebook as we reach the end of the year. (more…)
Google’s one of the best companies about adding features to their apps over time. The changes aren’t always welcome, of course, especially when they change things we like about their apps. Sometimes, though, it’s fun to be reminded of the best advantage of web apps: they can get new features without you ever having to install an update. When the new features improve your life, that’s very nice.
Today, Google added a new compose pane to Gmail that lets you compose emails in a floating pane much like the Gmail chat window. They also tweaked the research pane in Google Docs, a newer feature that makes it easy to research while you’re, say, writing an essay. Let’s take a look. (more…)
Taiichi Ohno is considered to be the man that made Toyota a supremely efficient organization, boosting it to worldwide success. Ohno’s secret was the Kanban (Japanese for signboard) project management system. Since then, the Kanban system has become extremely popular in organizational resources, and there are several Kanban-oriented web apps already out there.
LeanKit Kanban takes the system and infuses it with the benefits of the digital world, from analytics to team-sharing. If you often have trouble keeping a track of what projects need to be delivered, or which member of your team is up for a new assignment, this is what you need. (more…)
Our sponsor this week is Bidsketch, a great app that lets you create, track, customize, and design beautiful client proposals. It’ll cut down the time it takes you to create proposals to just a few minutes.
With Bidsketch, you can reate beautiful proposals in half the time. Easily mix and match content, fees, and designs to create persuasive proposals in minutes. You can use Bidsketch’s premade professional templates, or use the templates that are proven to work for your business with your own custom HTML template. Then, once you’ve sent out proposals, you can easily get detailed analytics about them straight from Bidsketch. You’ll be able to see if and when your client opens a proposal, and can even check your client engagement and see how long clients viewed your proposal. It’s everything you could want from an advanced proposal app.
Bidsketch integrates with other web apps you already use, such as FreshBooks and Highrise, so you can work efficiently with all of your data ready to use in proposals. Numbers of freelancers and teams already use Bidsketch, and on average see 18% more clients sign when they receive a Bidsketch proposal. That’s why you should give it a try.
Go Get It!
Ready to start saving time and seeing more clients signup with Bidsketch? You can signup for a free 14 day trial. Then, you can choose the plan that works best for your team, starting at $19 per month.
It’s hard enough to run a fundraiser and convince people to give to your cause. The last thing that should be difficult is receiving the money once people decide to contribute. Recently, I needed to raise money for a fundraiser and was looking for a tool to be able to do this easily. After searching through various big sites such as JustGiving, I realized that there weren’t many ways to raise funds online for personal projects.
PayPal was the only place that kept coming up as a simple way to raise donations. Well known as the most popular way to send funds online, PayPal is something many of us use regurally in work already. It’s not 100% straightforward to set it up for receiving donations, but it’s not too hard either. So whether you’re raising funds for your school or perhaps for Movember, here’s what you’ll need to do to accept donations via PayPal.
Have you ever wanted to play god to a tribe of virtual people? Veteran game designer Peter Molyneux created a genre focused on just that in 1989 with Populous for Amiga, DOS, and a bunch of other platforms. Populous turned out to be one of the most influential games of all time, mixing terraforming, strategy, tiny autonomous people, warfare, and godly power-wielding unlike anyone before (and few after).
Reprisal, a free web game (with paid desktop versions), recreates Populous for a modern audience. More homage than clone, despite the obvious similarities, it’s fantastic proof that a 23 year old idea can still be fun, addictive, and fresh. There’s catchy chip tunes music, 30 levels, a separate Skirmish mode, and cool pseudo-retro graphics that simultaneously bring nostalgia and a wow factor. (more…)
We all have done it or thought about it at one time or another: keeping a proverbial Bucket List, a list of all the major things you plan to do. It is one of those things that I don’t necessarily keep a good track of as some other people do, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t have things that I want to make sure I do before I pass on. I haven’t necessarily decided whether I should actually sit down and make one at some point as I take the approach of “one day at a time.”
Having the opportunity to try out Bucketlistly over the past couple of weeks has really made me think twice about making a bucket list for myself and our family. The developer of the app has taken what is a simple task and turned it into a social network of sorts. At first I thought the concept was a little interesting, but the more I played with it, the more I started to see how useful it could be. Let me show you more of the app and you can decide for yourself whether you want to use it or not.
It’s 2012, and almost everything that we work with has turned digital. However, sometimes this creates bigger problems than its worth – such as signing documents. Taking pen to paper for a couple of seconds used to be something terribly easy. This allowed you to manage and sign everything you wanted quickly and simply, though getting the document to and from the sender took far longer.
Today, you can get a form digitally sent to you in seconds, but you’ll often have to print it out, sign it, scan it, then email or perhaps fax it back. It’s far from a simple process. That’s why Adobe’s EchoSign, an effortless and pain free method to e-sign documents professionally and securely, seems so exciting. We didn’t assume it’d work great, but came away very impressed by its actual implementation. Read on to find out more!
It’s so good to see how web apps are simplifying bloated, enterprise grade software with simpler solutions and flexible pricing. They don’t charge for a ton of hardly used features and make sure there is flatter learning curve. After tackling the cumbersome project management vertical, web apps have started breaking down CRM and ERP functionality with single purpose apps.
Quote generation, help desk and sales management are important modules in a conventional Customer Relationship Management (CRM) app. Companies pay a boatload of money to deploy them and to train their employees. But, things are changing fast. I’ve been hearing good things about Stride lately and it looks like a capable sales tracking app. Let’s take it for a spin! (more…)
