Friday, August 1, 2008

The Round-Up Volume 1, Issue 9: Yee hah! It’s Digital Round-Up Time Again!

We wanted to kick off this week’s Digital Influentials Round Up with a quote. We searched high and low to find the right inspirational quote that would embody what we do each and every week and we found a simple one that seemed to hit the spot...

“Every artist was first an amateur.”- Ralph Waldo Emerson

It may not seem immediately relevant, but it inspired us as we examined these new and innovative companies and ideas throughout the week. Every company emerges from an idea and ideas come from the unlikeliest of places. If you have an idea for a company, product or service you should pursue it! Don’t let a lack of experience or a fear of the unknown cloud your judgment and inhibit your excitement. Everyone starts from the same place and it’s the assertive person that has the initiative to learn and grow beyond the amateur into an experienced, seasoned veteran. No-one will do it for you. Be afraid to make mistakes. To be a success you have to make your own luck! With that, let’s see some of the innovative ideas that other people have been working on!

Are you tired of trying to create forms for your business? Do you need to create employment applications? Customer satisfaction surveys? Event registrations? Lead generation forms? There are many ways to do it and many of them cost at least a little bit of money. They’re free at WUFOO (http://wufoo.com/). We discovered WuFoo in the development of an event registration form and we were sold immediately. It’s simple, fast and like I mentioned already, free! That’s my favorite price and I’m guessing it’s yours as well.

While creating an event registration form for a client, Jim Nichols (one of my business partners) realized that we need to do a better job of tracking our time allocations to various clients. There are a number of really expensive time tracking solutions and they’re always difficult to implement. The biggest hurdle with time tracking systems is in remembering to log your information correctly throughout the day. That’s where TOGGL (http://www.toggl.com/) comes in. Toggl provides a handy, free desktop application (or widget if you prefer that term) which is convenient and easy to use. Just enter time as you bounce from client to client and learn how your day is being spent! It can be an invaluable tool for a growing business. Thanks to Jim for finding it!

Peter Figueredo suggested another great site to us this week! Peter suggested we check out GENI (http://www.geni.com/). He must have known how important family is to us! Geni is a great tool for managing your family history. Your family is a social network and one that can be the most fun to track. Keep a log on who marries whom and how everyone is related!

A few weeks back we featured MUXTAPE (http://muxtape.com/) as a cool place to listen to music. It appears there are a few other really cool places to check out in a similar vein! We discovered FAVTAPE (http://favtape.com/) and MIXWIT (www.mixwit.com) and love how they provide a place for you to create a collage of music, pictures and just about anything you want. I love outlets for creativity and these are the types of places that can suck you in for hours!

If you like Twitter (http://twitter.com/) and you have a really short attention span for new information, you’ll love BLIPPR (http://www.blippr.com/). It’s a Twitter-like site that allows you to share reviews of music, movies, books, games and just about anything else in the short-format of Twitter. This type of review is probably all you really need to know if a band is good or their albums are worth listening to, so sign up and check it out!

And last but not least, if you use lots of charts in presentation then you will probably like GRAPHJAM (http://graphjam.com/). I’m pretty sure it’s meant as a joke, but that doesn’t mean you can’t work them into a presentation somewhere, right? This might be my favorite (http://graphjam.com/2008/06/16/song-chart-memes-fingers-used-in-anger/).

Thanks again for reading and telling others about Digital Influentials! Please spread the word to your colleagues and let us know of any cool new sites or products in your various travels!

See you in 2 weeks!

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