Intero Cool Apps

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Cool Apps: Xobni Puts Organization Back into Email

By John Thompson | August 27th, 2010 0 Comments

Beyond all the cool, new apps that do cool new things, there are some apps that help us transform the bread and butter mundane things that are critical to our everyday business processes.

Take Email. Though obviously not a new and exciting technology, few of us can live without it. The problem is, it’s often inefficient and sucks up a lot of time maintaining it. What if there was an app that helped us organize it and allowed us to mine its rich data as well – the currency of our modern livelihood?

Ask and you shall receive. Xobni turns your inbox inside out – in a good way. The Outlook plug-in simplifies email management and helps you make the most of your email and time spent on it. It’s easier, faster and more intuitive than your standard out-of-the-box inbox.

What does Xobni really do? It enables faster, more accurate search of your inbox, for starters. And it brings together contact information right beside every email message.

Xobni’s best feature is the easy access it grants to information you will use. For instance, say you get an email from someone whose contact info has not been stored in your contacts folder. No need! Just glance over at the side of the email and you’ll see this person’s contact info nicely organized for your use. You’ll also see links to their Facebook and Twitter accounts if they have them.

OK, this feature may be even better: trends reporting. See who sends you the most email, who sends the most email that you delete without reading, who sends the most email that you consistently respond to. Folks, this is real-time intelligence for your email, which, if used right, can cut some serious time suck that clogs up your life.

Best of all? Xobni requires no additional input from the user. You just plug in and poof … you’re off and running. It’s kind of like slapping a CRM tool right into your Outlook. Only now you don’t have to mess with importing contacts and learning a new platform.

Xobni’s basic version is free and it costs $29.95 for the Plus version. The company also recently launched a mobile version for the Blackberry that costs a one-time charge of $9.99.

Don’t hate email, but do make it smarter and work harder for you. You’ll be much happier for it.

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Cool Apps: Kick Some Oomph into Your Social Media

By John Thompson | August 13th, 2010 0 Comments

You’ve sat through a few workshops about using social media in real estate. You may already be tweeting, Facebooking, Friendfeeding. You’re digging in, trying new things, seeing what sticks.

By now, you may be realizing that your tweets and updates can get lost online as quickly as a single raindrop disappears into the ocean. You’re thinking: OK, now I’m doing it, but how do I break through all this noise?

This may not be what you want to hear, but how about trying another app? One that allows you to schedule your tweets in advance, track keywords, automatically follow those who follow you. One that helps you make the most of social media while not sacrificing all of your time. See, the thing about social media is that you try, try, try again, but that you also test, see what works, test, see what works, test, see what works.

SocialOomph is an app that can help you organize your social stream. It might be that you’re tweeting the right things, but at the wrong time. Or it might be that your tweets are not connecting to the right conversations – i.e., that the right people aren’t noticing them because they lack hashtags or keywords.

SocialOomph offers a way to get some insight into your twitter activities. It can also help you build your following by auto-following those who follow you, and direct messaging new followers.

The free version allows you to schedule tweets, track keywords and click-throughs, and create an extended profile, among other things. (See the full list of SocialOomph’s free features at the company’s website.)

The professional membership offers, in addition to the free features, the ability to find friends using keywords. You can also find influential followers – which are important as most people agree that it’s better to have fewer followers who are influential than more followers who are not influential. You get automatic spam controls and the ability to bulk upload and schedule a large number of tweets.

So you see – it may seem laborious to use yet another app for your social media outreach, but SocialOomph can really help you get the most of your activities in less amount of time.

Then you can spend more time doing what you love – selling real estate! And hopefully have more clients to work with in the process.

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Cool Apps: Dropbox for Seamless Syncing

By John Thompson | August 6th, 2010 0 Comments

Par for the course in real estate sales is the mounds of contracts and files that pile up. And of course, you’re pressed for time and need to access these contracts while juggling a thousand other things and in your car all day.

Google Docs is pretty good for this. But if you need a little more under the hood then Dropbox is a fantastic option since it lets you sync between devices and platforms (attention: dual Windows and Mac users), while also enabling online access.

Think: anytime, anywhere access to your contracts and super easy file sharing. Think: you can drop a file in your Dropbox drive on your laptop and then pull it up on any smart phone later. Think: you can reduce a few dozen emails to your clients to a simple shared folder where you constantly update contracts and other files and communication.

And it’s free for up to 2 GB of storage – $9.99 per month for up to 50 GB (higher pricing tiers for even more storage).

Dropbox’s shared folder feature can be a lifesaver for agents who are tired of the constant paper shuffle back and forth via email. And with the added privacy of the service, you can feel more secure using this feature with your clients’ sensitive information.

Also, can you say automatic backup?  Yes, automatic online backup without you having to think about it.

Dropbox has been around for a few years, now with more than 4 million users. One thing you’ll notice after using it for awhile is that its users are kind of like Apple fanboys – raving fanatics. One of these users wrote a great article on LifeHacker about various ways to use Dropbox beyond your basic file sync. Use the service to sync passwords across PCs, control your computer remotely, or to access portable applications from any PC. Now that’s gettin’ geeky!

The company’s referral program probably helps in creating loyal users too. For every friend you refer to the service, you and the friend each get 250 MB of free storage added to your account.

So if you’re desperately searching for a way to simplify your life’s many files, devices and locations, try Dropbox. Then maybe you’ll be the next to discover a cool use no one’s even thought of yet.

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Cool Apps: A New Way to Web Conference

By John Thompson | July 23rd, 2010 1 Comment

At some point in your sales career, you may find yourself teaming up with other agents or service providers in your area to build business. Or maybe you’re working together on a neighborhood event or website. Or maybe you’re trying to win a listing for a client who spends half his year 2,000 miles away in Maui.
 
This type of collaboration inevitably leads to some Web conferencing. But don’t let the nature of a Web conferencing platform kill your creativity. Instead, try something new!
 
Meet Dimdim, an alternative that’s free and also kind of fun as it gives more collaboration opportunities than the usual roster of GoTo Meeting and Webex.
 
Dimdim allows you to meet with your colleagues or even long-distance clients on a live Web page. You don’t have to download anything or even pay to use it if you have just a small group! (Now that’s a nice perk.) It’s literally click a button and boom! Instant meeting commencement.
 
Using Dimdim, you can share documents, Web pages, whiteboards, audio, video and even record your meetings for those who couldn’t make it or just for remembering a thought process or decision that was made.
 
As I mentioned, it is free to use for smaller groups of up to five participants and then starts at $25 per month for unlimited use with more participants. It works on a Mac or a PC. And since there is nothing to install, there’s no excuse for your meeting not to start on time.
 
What really stands out about this new platform is the collaboration capability and the fact that you don’t have to download anything to use it. For that, it’s worth checking out!

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Get a Fresh Money Perspective With Mint

By John Thompson | July 16th, 2010 0 Comments

Real estate agents can always benefit from tools that help make for more efficient use of time – especially when it comes to finances. In many respects, the agent’s life is a small business. And we all know how complicated the financial aspect of earnings, taxes, expenses and retirement savings can get.

That’s why I want to tell you about Mint.com. It’s the hottest thing in personal finance apps since online banking.

The site has gained a lot of recognition and increased its user base after being sold to Intuit (the same company that brought you Quicken) last year. If you ever talk to people who use it, you’ll quickly see why. They absolutely love it!

What is Mint? It’s an online money management system that does all the heavy lifting for you. When you set up an account, Mint goes out and pulls your data from your banks and brokerage accounts in order to build a financial picture for you. This sounds a little scary at first, but the company uses bank-level data security and has never had any reported problems. The company does a good job at explaining the security measures at this link.

We all know that personal budgets and savings plans are about as exciting as insurance seminars. That’s probably why Mint has become so popular – unlike the old systems that had you sitting there laboring for hours entering your data, Mint gets to the goods in a matter of minutes. You get real insight and you never have to open a spreadsheet once.

It tells you: where your money is going, where you could find potential savings, how your investments are doing, and now offers a way to set up and track goals for yourself.

Who doesn’t need that?

Mint can even help you detect suspicious activity in your accounts. And of course, they have an app for your iPhone or Android device.

To sum it up – Mint is like the personal finance tool for people who hate personal finance. It’s easy and dare I even say fun? Plus, all the kids are doing it. So if saving more and spending less were on your New Year’s Resolution list this year, you might want to step on over and give it a whirl.

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Cool Apps: Instapaper Saves It for Later

By John Thompson | July 9th, 2010 0 Comments

How many times has this happened to you? You’re surfing the web looking for something in particular and along the way you find four or five really interesting articles or blog posts. But alas, there’s no time to get stuck reading these things!

At that point, you wish there was an easy way to save these articles for later. Well, now there is!

Meet Instapaper – a service that enables you to save things for later reading. Say you’re in the office working on something and you stumble upon a long article that you don’t have time to read. You simply mark it with a bookmarklet in your web browser, then retrieve it later at Instapaper.com.

Brilliant!

Or, for you iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch users: You can pick up an offline version of the article using the Instapaper app made for these devices. The company has a free “lite” version of the app for iPhone and iPod Touch, but the full app for these devices and for the iPad costs $5. The paid version can hold up to 250 articles, while the free version holds only 10.

It’s almost like creating your own custom newspaper every day!

No more dealing with hundreds of bookmarks. Or just forgetting about the article altogether. Now you can feed your mind later without getting overly distracted from the task at hand now.

Instapaper is a side project of Marco Arment, the lead developer behind the Tumblr blogging platform. It was named one of the top 8 best iPad apps by MacWorld in April of this year.

Go on, check it out! Your brain will thank you now and later.?

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Intero Cool Apps: Mozy

By John Thompson | July 2nd, 2010 0 Comments

REALTORS are busy – working through the weekends, evenings, you name it. It’s a constant hustle to get the job done. In the shuffle, it can be easy to forget about some pretty major things like backing up your data.

You know – that data that lives inside your computer that you never really think about until you need it for something. It’s precious stuff. But have you ever lost your data unexpectedly? It can be soul-crushing, to say the least. That’s why I wanted to share with you a service called Mozy.

Mozy is an online backup service for consumers and small businesses. For a small monthly fee of $4.95, you can protect your personal data and feel much better knowing that a hard drive meltdown won’t take all of your files with it. You get unlimited space so you can back up photos, music, videos, you name it. Plus, you can access your files from anywhere because you’re not relying on CDs or external hard drives. Instead, everything lives in a safe place online.

The service also promises top-notch protection, so you can back up financial and other sensitive documents and not have to worry about anything being compromised.

They can’t really make it any easier to use. All you need to do is go to the Mozy website and sign up for an account, download and install the application, and then choose the files you want to back up. And like magic, your life’s precious data is backed up in a secure and accessible place on the Internet.

Future crisis averted.

Maybe you’ve never experienced a situation where your computer died and you realized a little too late that none of your files were backed up. If not, just ask anyone who’s been through it – it is devastating! If you don’t have a “back-up” plan, you will most surely go through this at some point. Using something like Mozy that’s easy and cost effective will save your life. And that’s no exaggeration!

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Cool Apps: Share My Map!

By John Thompson | June 25th, 2010 0 Comments

In real estate, the most important three words are LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION! This is true for your clients and where they find their homes and it’s true in the way that you do your business — how many times have you heard the word “hyperlocal” in the past couple of years?

In the realm of social/mobile media, location is the name of the game, as well. FourSquare. GoWalla. Yelp! Google Latitude … each of these applications is taking advantage of the hottest trend on the social media block.

Well, now there’s a new player, and this one could have some pretty nifty uses for REALTORS, not to mention lots of other folks.

People, I invite you to Share My Map.

ShareMyMap is a social network paired with a geo-location service. It allows you to create communities based on whatever geographic information is of interest to you. Do you want to make a map of the best restaurants in San Diego? Places where you’ve been on your World Cup trip to South Africa? Or even new home communities in your local market area? See where I’m going with this?

You can make a map of anything you like. Be as broad in scope or pinpointed as you want.

More than just that, though, the service is interactive, so members who are looking for the information you’ve posted can rate or review places they’ve been, and add other feedback, as well.

Whatever sort of local expertise you’d like to promote, you can enhance with an interactive map on ShareMyMap. If you use your creative noodle just a little bit, you’ll see that there are some strong possibilities here.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to seek out the best running trails in my town. What will you look for?

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Cool Apps: Stop What You’re Doing … And Get RAPPORTIVE

By John Thompson | June 18th, 2010 0 Comments

There are countless plugins for web browsers these days; frankly, most of them aren’t all that exciting. Every now and then, though, one displays awesomeness that really raises eyebrows.

That, my friends, is what we’ve found with RAPPORTIVE.

In just two minutes, you can install and configure RAPPORTIVE in either Google Chrome or Firefox (IE is, according to reports, coming soon) and be up and running.

What does it do? Great question; I’d be delighted to tell you!

You know those endless, pesky rabble of ads that shows up in the sidebar of your Gmail messages? RAPPORTIVE takes those ads … and simply replaces them. And the information that they give you in return? Fantastic. Useful. In short? Awesome.

RAPPORTIVE replaces the pop-up ads with social information about the person with whom you’re corresponding. Information is pulled from each person’s Google profile, links to Facebook, flickr profiles, Twitter accounts … you name it. All publicly available, of course, but the plugin aggregates the information and displays it on-screen when you need it the most — when you’re actually communicating with that person.

The plugin also gives you space to jot down notes about your contacts; quick reminders and stuff you need to remember. There are even plugins for the plugin, called “raplets,” which provide even more CRM functionality.

There’s a huge side benefit to installing RAPPORTIVE, too: you don’t have to look at those aggravating ads anymore. Gone will be offers for teeth as white as Winter in Siberia or ways to turn yourself into a waif in 30 days or less. You’ll actually have something you can use!

It’s still in its infancy, but RAPPORTIVE is onto something really terrific. It does have its downsides: it can be a tad slow in gathering information on a new contact, and right now, it doesn’t support Internet Explorer or Safari, but for the most part, it’s pretty great. And it’s available for the low, low price of free (you can’t beat that with a stick).

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Cool Apps: Da-Doo-Ron … Rondee!

By John Thompson | June 11th, 2010 0 Comments

More and more, businesspeople — REALTORS included — are doing the majority of their work from home offices … or coffeeshops or the beach, you name it. They’re working pretty much everywhere except in their actual offices.

All of this is great. It helps morale, boosts productivity, cuts down on energy usage, and is cheaper for employers – it’s a “win” all around. The only place where it becomes a problem is when having a conference call between team members is necessary.

The really tough part is finding a way to coordinate everyone’s schedules. Emails get sent back and forth, people forget to respond … it can be a pain in the neck, to say the least.

Rondee takes a lot of the headache out of that process.

With Rondee (short for “rendez-vous”), the scheduler arranges a time for a call, and a message is sent to everyone they’d like to attend. Each invitee has the ability to respond “yes” or “no”, but Rondee keeps track of all responses. Those who respond “yes” will see the call entered seamlessly into their Google Calendar or iCal accounts, so no one should forget. Each participant — up to 45 people — is given a number that they can use to call in and that’s it. You’re off to the races!

One of the best things about Rondee is that it’s FREE. The only time they charge any money at all is if you opt to use a toll-free number for your callers. In that case, fees are nominal, at most. Other than that, the service is 100% free, which is a big plus in my book.

Rondee isn’t flashy. It isn’t glitzy. What it is, though, is dead useful. It has solved a problem with which all telecommuters have had to deal. It has done it in a clean, easy-to-use way and without hoops through which users must jump.

Easy, reliable, Rondee. Check it out!

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