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:

• Only 29% of biz owners know the Cloud?
• Cool new application – Do you have a Dropbox?
• How do you remember all of your stuff?

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

Similar Posts:

• Discover 2 Cloud tools that will rock your Biz!
• Only 29% of biz owners know the Cloud?
• How do you remember all of your stuff?

Upgrade your communications?

Photo by tylerdurden1

For any business endeavor that goes beyond a single person probably the biggest driver for success is clear communication.  The good news is there are some amazing new technologies / products coming out that can revolutionize how your team communicates.

If you think about it, that clear communication starts with the vision for the product, the service, the strategy, the plan and the approach.  Then the work starts and it’s critical that everyone is on the same page – they’re communicating status, they’re communicating issues and they’re communicating ideas, suggestions and next steps.  Finally,  someone in charge is communicating milestones, progress and what lies ahead.

Hopefully everything is clear, timely and to the point.  If not…something will get screwed up.

It’s amazing how much things have changed through the years.  At one point, everything was paper based (TPS Report anyone?).  Phone calls and face to face meetings were used to review all of that paper.

Communication today

Paper’s not going away anytime soon, but you do have some alternatives – as a small business owner you have access to tools like Google Docs which lets you create and share all sorts of documents online (it’s free and easy to use – there are also several commercial variations).

In addition to all of the document management and project management support, now there’s a new kind of tool on the market – a business variation of Twitter, kind of a cross between instant messaging, email and forums.  Twitter asks you to briefly (140 characters) answer the question “What are you doing now?”.  These business variants ask “What are you working on now?” and they’re intended for your working partners (as opposed to the world or social connections).

I’m sure there will be several players in this space, but the first one that was announced was the winner of this year’s Techcrunch 50 show that concluded earlier this week.  The product is called Yammer and it demonstrated why it was the winner by signing up 10,000 people from 2,000 companies on the first day of their launch.

There are a lot of cool things to really like about the ideas behind Yammer – first of all the business model is brilliant.  In order to use it, you simply sign up using your business email address and you are automatically assigned to your business ‘group’.  95% of the functionality is free, but the catch is that if the business wants to manage the tool (and the messages and the participants for their company) then they need to claim the group and sign up for the paid service – at a cost of $1 per user per month.  Obviously that’s going to be expensive for a Fortune 500 company with 50,000 employees, but realistically they aren’t the target market – major corporate players will create their own solutions in house (or do without more likely).

The real winners are smaller companies, especially those with knowledge workers that work remotely that want a great way to keep up with what everyone is doing.

The other application coming out (that I’m aware of….I’m sure there are several more) is Present.ly .   Present.ly is still in a beta phase so there’s not a lot of detailed information, but on the surface appears to be fairly similar to Yammer.

Anyway you slice it, the future of communications for teams, especially those that work remotely, is pretty amazing – especially when you think about where things were just a few years ago.

On a somewhat related note – another company that presented at the Techcrunch 50 was Geekvolution – the next generation of social networks targeting the self-proclaimed Geeks of the world.  Not only is it a cool idea with a lot of promise, but it was also started just down the road from Kansas City in Lawrence – check it out if you get a chance.

Would you use a service like Yammer?  I’d love to hear your thoughts on why it would or wouldn’t be useful to you.  Share in the comments.

Shawn Kinkade  Kansas City Business CoachSimilar Posts:

• Discover 2 Cloud tools that will rock your Biz!
• When you’re on the net…very funny stuff!
• Check out 3 new surprising sites for your business!