The Cloud…it’s everywhere!  You can’t walk down the street, check your twitter feed or shop (at Amazon) without hearing about the Cloud!  The Cloud of course is cloud based computing…basically it’s the ability to do stuff online without knowing the physical location of where all that computing magic is happening.

Cloud capabilities can include services (Google Apps is probably the most well known), data storage (I previously told you about Dropbox) and Entertainment (Netflix anyone?).  The Cloud is getting bigger every day and it’s opening up a bunch of amazing opportunities.

Check out these 2 really cool, cloud powered applications that will really rock your business productivity!

Free and Simple Online Meetings

First up is Join.me – a clear cut, simple screen sharing tool.  Here’s a description from their site:

So what is join.me exactly? It’s an impromptu online meeting space that happens wherever, whenever. It’s getting a second or third pair of eyes on your presentation from across the hall or across the continent. It’s instant screen sharing with anyone or everyone to get stuff done, quickly.

It supports up to 250 people at once, allows you to take control of a remote computer (think tech support) and doesn’t require a big download and application to stay on your desktop.  All that and it’s free and easy to use!

Even cooler – you can also use Join.me on your mobile device, letting you check out a new slide, document or whatever while you’re not at your desk!

File Sharing, backup and more

The other cool tool to check out is Egnyte.com.  Egnyte is an online file server, online storage, an FTP site (File Transfer Protocol), a file sharing tool and an online backup solution.  And it’s all in the cloud (no hardware needed) and it’s built for business!

I learned about Egnyte from a client of mine who needs to share lots of files with lots of different clients in a very secure and specific way.  A year ago, she would have needed to buy an expensive server and get it set up and maintained by a professional.  She was expecting to pay several thousand dollars to solve this problem

Instead she’s paying less than $50 /month and she gets a complete and fast backup solution as well!  It’s convenient, it’s fast, you can access all of your stuff (and all of your clients can access their stuff) from anywhere, all of your employees can be working from the most up to date document, you have built in version control and you don’t have to worry about a hardware crash losing stuff that can’t be replaced!

If you’re not sure how you’d set up Egnyte (it can be pretty tricky), you can contact my friend Mike Hill at MicroNetKC – he’s a local reseller and has helped other folks get it configured.

It’s pretty amazing what’s possible these days!

What cool cloud stuff have you seen lately?  Share your thoughts in the comments below – I’d love to hear them.

Shawn Kinkade   Kansas City Business CoachSimilar Posts:

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I like to keep track of stuff – notes I take during a meeting, ideas that come up at odd times and get thrown onto a post-it note, a cool website I run across, powerful images I could use for blog posts, interesting videos or a important emails.  Historically I haven’t had much of a system for being able to track all of that stuff…but I think I may now have an answer that could really work!

I stumbled onto Evernote over a year ago and I was intrigued by the possibilities, but I wasn’t sure how practical or helpful it would be.  At the time I had an older Palm OS phone that didn’t let me do much of anything and I was primarily just using one computer in my office.  Fast forward to now – I’ve got an Android phone, I’m using a laptop and a desktop for different things and I need access to all of my stuff from all of those places.

Although I’ve only used the application sparingly so far, I’m seeing some strong possibilities for Evernote – here are a couple of ways I’m using it so far (and I’m just scratching the surface):

• I finished a great book and wanted to make sure I remembered the author the next time I was book shopping.  I took a picture of the book and stored it in Evernote where it was easy to bring it up 2 weeks later on my phone in the book store.  (Did the same thing with a great bottle of wine we had at a friend’s house).
• I’m starting to use it Evernote for note taking – creating a someday / maybe file of ideas that I’d like to do…someday maybe (that way I don’t lose the thought but I get it out of my head).
• When I buy things online I virtually clip the receipt and store it in Evernote in case I need the confirmation number.

Here are a couple of things that I haven’t used yet, but look pretty powerful:

• Evernote has character recognition built in, so you can scan or take a picture of your handwritten notes, store them in Evernote and later search on the text to find what you want…(could do that with business cards as well).
• You can encrypt files – so saving all of your application passwords and IDs in an encrypted file that you could get to from anywhere.
• You can create specific notebooks of information and share just that notebook.  Imagine if you were doing a project with 3 other people and you had notes, pictures, a video and some websites as input for the project.  Put it all into a single notebook and share it – it gets updated for all of you as new things are added.

I don’t know if Evernote is going to be as useful as Dropbox (which I use extensively) and it’s going to take some effort to incorporate Evernote more into my workflow – but the possibilities are pretty amazing!  Check out the Evernote Video page for lots of cool ways people are using it.

“Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” – Ferris Bueller

Life does move fast – I’d like a place to put some of the cooler things to look at later…Are you using Evernote?  What have you found to be really useful?  I’d love to hear your thoughts – share them in the comments below.

Shawn Kinkade  Kansas City Business Coach

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I continue to be surprised with some of the cool applications and sites that pop up… a lot of free stuff and generally pretty innovative!  From a business standpoint, free may not be the best way to go, but I think the developers are in a tough situation.  If you want people to find your stuff, try it out and talk about it, your best bet is to make it free and get it out to a lot of people.

So that’s what I’m doing here – talking about 3 interesting, useful and free sites that you should check out today.

Check out Soluto

The first surprising new site is the recent winner of the Tech Crunch Disrupt contest held this past May (it’s a Silicon Valley review of new technology related start-ups).

Israeli based Soluto is billed as Anti Frustration Software and targets users of Windows who are frustrated with how long it takes to boot up their computers (and why they bog down over time).

Soluto’s approach is an app that runs in the background of your computer during the start-up sequence and measures how long (and what) is running when you’re computer is chugging away.  Once you’ve done the initial load and analysis you can fine tune what runs, remove anything that’s not needed and delay other things that aren’t critical.

I saved about 40 seconds on my start-up (of a fairly new computer), but I can really see the value over time as things get loaded and added in over time – Soluto gives me a way to see what’s actually going on and a way to do something about it (and it’s free)!

Build some Rapportive

Over at Duct Tape Marketing this weekend, John Jantsch suggested a helpful app called Rapportive.  Rapportive works with Gmail and adds in Social Media background on who ever sent you email (into your Gmail inbox).

It has some of the same functionality that Xobni offers with Outlook (also a worthwhile free app that I’ve written about before).  Primarily a quick and easy shortcut to a lot of information on who ever you’re interacting with (links to Social Media profiles, etc.).  It also has the capability for you to record notes, giving you some simple CRM functionality as well.  Simple, but useful.

I believe the trend on this kind of functionality is only going to accelerate – at some point this will be built into all most applications and sites, but until then it would be silly not to take advantage of it now where ever you can.

Go to Market

Finally you should also check out the Google Apps Enterprise Marketplace.  I knew there was  a Google Apps marketplace out there (there’s another one focused on mobile devices similar to iTunes App Store), but I didn’t really know much about it.

It turns out there are hundreds (if not thousands) of free and paid apps available to be checked out at your leisure.  I quickly browsed through some of the accounting and finance apps and found Expensify (an app to help your company streamline expense reporting) which could help out a couple of my clients.

The Market is still evolving, you may or may not find anything useful right now – but keep looking!  This is another big up and coming trend.  Find applications based on what other users think, how well they work and how popular they are…for whatever problem you’re trying to solve.

What cool apps or sites have you discovered recently?  Share your thoughts in the comments below – I’d love to hear them.

Shawn Kinkade   Kansas City Business Coach

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When your hard drive goes up in smoke you likely will end up losing some data, but you will also need to re-install all of those tools that you use to get stuff done.  The basics – Word, Excel, etc. are pretty straightforward, but if you’re like me, you’ve probably collected some more specialized applications that you’ve found just make life easier.

I thought I would share a couple of those here today – these are tools that I hadn’t really thought about using…until I didn’t have them (and then it becomes an issue!).

Screen Capture

I’m sure there are a lot of uses for Screen Capture tools (basically taking a picture of what ever’s on your computer screen to share with others).  I use it when I’m updating presentations and potentially as illustrations for documents or blog posts. 

As far as I know, there aren’t really any ‘standard’ applications that come with Windows (I’m sure the Mac people have something, because they have all of the cool stuff) but the good news is that there are a lot of interesting choices available and many of them are free.

If you’re looking for a good round-up of choices – this site has a good list of screen capture tools.  There’s a premium tool called Snag-it that I’ve used that is excellent, tons of functionality, easy to use, but it costs around $50 – give the free 30 day trial a shot if you think you need a really strong solution.

I also think Jing is really cool  but it’s a big solution when all you really want is a quick partial screen shot.

What I’ve ended up using is an older freeware application called MWSnap, it doesn’t ahave a lot of bells and whistles, but it works well, does what it says it will do and I’ve never had any technical issues (not necessarily true for some of the others that I’ve tried).

Print to PDF

Another tool that I find myself using quite a bit is the ability to Print to PDF format.  A lot of times you’ll find a document online that you’d like to share or keep and there’s not a good quick way to save it (you could also cut and paste into a word document, but that can take a long time and usually doesn’t work very well).

Printing to PDF is done by an application that sets up as a printer option on your PC – when you choose to print something you select the Print To PDF application instead of your regular printer and you will end up creating a new PDF file.

I’ve now used a couple of different free applications for this – the first one is called PDF995 and is actually part of a suite of tools that can do a lot of really cool stuff that I never even knew was possible (like the ability to append and combine multiple PDF documents together).  The free version is the same as the paid version in terms of functionality you just have to deal with a sponsor page view every time you use it.  To upgrade to the ‘paid’ version only costs $9.95 (hence the name).

The other app I’ve used for this is called DoPDF, it’s simple, it’s small and it works as promised and does what you expect (and it’s free).  You can’t ask for much more than that.

What tools do you find to be really useful?  I’d love to get some more ideas on what’s out there, share your comments here.

Shawn Kinkade  Kansas City Business Coach

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There are some things that you take for granted, sequels are almost never as good as the original, Stephen Colbert is funny and when you hit the power button your computer is supposed to turn on, not give you the dreaded Blue Screen of Death…!

Unfortunately the unthinkable happened to me and it’s been a painful couple of days (so far).  I was initially hoping that it might be something minor that could be fixed (although after a couple of hours of trying, it was clear that it wasn’t going to be fixed by me!).  So I called my friend Tim New over at Onsite Logic and had them take a look at it.

It’s never a good sign when the conversation starts with “Did you notice that burning smell?”.  It turns out that my hard drive had fried (literally) and short of a really expensive procedure all of that data was gone forever – Old Reliable had failed me.

The good news is that not all was lost – I had done a few simple things that kept it from being a major issue.

Back it up!

There are quite a few cool online services that you can use to back your stuff up that I might look into going forward, however my approach was a little more ‘old school’.

I used a combination of an external hard drive and my Dropbox account which I wrote about a few months ago.  The external hard drives have really come down in price – I think you can find a 500 Gigabyte drive for about $100 and it just plugs into your PC with a standard USB cable.  The drawback to the hard drive for backup is that you need to consciously remember to move your stuff there on a fairly regular basis (if it’s changing).  I hadn’t updated for several months, so I will end up losing a few things.  Primarily it impacts my music collection (just the few CDs that I added since this spring that I can re-add) and a few other things (mostly photographs, but I still have the original files).

What did work well was that I had recently moved almost all of my active ‘work’ files to my free Dropbox account.  It automatically syncs and updates in the background with any changes that are made.  It’s free and it’s easy to set up (and it synchs between my laptop and desktop (at least when I had a desktop).

Use web tools!

I was able to configure my Gmail account very quickly so I could get access to my email without really missing anything.  I think I would like to mapmy Gmail inbox to my Outlook setup, but I haven’t taken the time to figure that out yet.

I play some games through Steam (an online game repository) so when I reinstall my steam account it will automatically reinstall any games that I might want access to (although any offline save games will be gone…).

Finally – I should have been synching my calendar with Google Calendar, that’s probably been the biggest issue that I’ve had to date, trying to recreate a busy calendar (so if I miss a meeting with you, that may be why…!)

What about you?

Are you covered?  When’s the last time you backed up your stuff?  Old reliable could burn out at any time, are you prepared?  Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Shawn Kinkade  Kansas City Business Coach

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