Posts Tagged ‘android’

Cool Apps: Make Your Mobile Google Calendar Even Better

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Schedules rule your life in the real estate business. Time is often of the essence – even when it’s sometimes a hurry-up-and-wait situation. Keep yours in check by streamlining and taking the beauty and depth of features of Google Calendar online with an easy app on your mobile.

CalenGoo takes your Google Calendar on mobile to a much more sophisticated level.

The calendar app gives you a fast, like-the-real-thing interface that syncs your Google Calendar with your Android or iOS device.

Easily add appointments and move meetings around with a drag-and-drop interface. Set reminders, copy and send appointment dates and times via email or text, and search your calendar by keyword. CalenGoo puts it all at your fingertips.

You can even work on your calendar offline – it will sync back up when your reunite with your Internet connection.

The best part, though, is that it’s still Google Calendar. No learning a new system, sacrificing formatting or risking synching mistakes that can occur between two different calendars. And you can invite people to meetings right from the app.

Sync CalenGoo with Google Tasks to read and manage your task lists from your smartphone or tablet. Choose whether reminders come to you as pop-ups, email or text messages.

If you’re a Google Calendar fan, try CalenGoo for even more awesomeness.

Check out CalenGoo for Android here, and iOS here.


Cool Apps | Top-Notch Mortgage Calculators On The Go

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As real estate agents, we’ve all been there: kneeling in an unfurnished house, helping our client through a couple of math situations as we compare and contrast a couple of houses and loan situations. That’s why every agent could use a good mortgage calculator app, such as Karl’s Mortgage Calculator in the Android Market or Home Shopper for iOS..

Karl’s Mortgage Calculator enables you to calculate mortgage payments given principal, interest and loan terms. And you can reverse calculate any of the other variables given the other three. Perhaps even more useful, you can see how the monthly payment changes when factoring in additional monthly costs like mortgage insurance, taxes, homeowner’s association dues, and property insurance.

Have international clients? Karl’s Mortgage Calculator supports multiple currencies for easy translation.

Home Shopper on iOS is just as robust. This app isn’t just for buyers, it’s a must have companion for real estate agents and lenders in the field who need quick answers for their clients regarding the costs and benefits associated with owning a property. Do you need to know the total monthly break down of owning a home, as well as what your tax benefits will be in plain easy to understand terms? Want to be able to compare those figures to what you’re currently paying in rent and then email that entire report to yourself, your agent, your spouse or whoever? Then Home Shopper is for you.

There are literally hundreds of mortgage calculator apps out there. Both of these are very professional looking, without being bloated with unnecessary functions that make it difficult to use. Graphs and charts help visualize the data so it’s quick and easy to understand.


Cool App overview

Name: Karl’s Mortgage Calculator (Android) & Home Shopper (iOS)

Website:https://market.android.com/details?id=com.drcalculator.android.mortgage

http://itunes.apple.com/bw/app/home-shopper/id452513740?mt=8

What it does: These Calculators enable you to calculate mortgage payments given principal, interest and loan terms and more.

How to use it: Download the app to your device. Enter  down payment amount or percentage and let the calculator show how large a mortgage you require.

Cost: Karl’s Mortgage Calculator (Free)
Home Shopper (.99 cents)


Cool Apps: Send and Receive Texts In Your Web Browser

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To sum it up, this week’s feature is a “cool to have in case you lose or simply forget your phone at home some day” app:

Browsertexting.

And yes, the straightforward name pretty much sums up what the app does. It enables Android users to send and receive text messages right through their Web browsers.

It’s free to sign up: Visit Browsertexting.com, create and account, install the app on your Android phone, scan the QR code you’re given in order to match your phone to your account, and you’re off to the texting races.

The benefits?

  • Browsertexting makes it easier to continuously work on your computer and not have to pick up your phone to answer text messages.
  • You can leave your phone undisturbed and charging while you work on your computer.
  • You have backup for when you inevitably forget your phone on the mantel, lose it in the parking lot, or forget it in a restaurant.
  • For most of us, a full keyboard is much more efficient than a pair of thumbs by themselves – although it does lack the humorous mess-ups (a tragedy to Lamebook fans).
  • It works in all popular browsers: IE, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera.
  • Of course, there’s a slick Chrome plugin.
  • It has all sorts of other added features like live synching, no signup, and the ability to cancel messages.

The service is still in beta, which in the app world means there are bound to be glitches here and there. However, I found that it worked quite well.

If you’re using texting a lot to stay on top of business, and communicate with clients and vendors, then check out Browsertexting and make your text/work experience even more seamless.


Cool Apps: Read and Annotate PDF Files On the Go

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Business is very possible to do from your smartphone. But sometimes there are roadblocks that come up. Case in point: A contract in PDF format needs a review before sent off to move a deal forward. Until now, it’s been kind of difficult to manipulate that while out in the field – better left done on a laptop.

Enter RepliGo Reader, which enables you to view and annotate Adobe PDF files from your Android or Blackberry device. The app integrates with Gmail, Dropbox, Evernote and other apps.

Here’s what you can do with it: • View and annotate PDF files from your email, memory car, Dropbox, Evernote or the Web.

• Highlight, underline, add arrows, text boxes and other annotation tools.

• Scroll quickly through pages by swiping or tapping the screen.

• Zoom in or out of documents.

• Copy text to your clipboard.

• Send PDF files via Bluetooth, Dropbox and Evernote.

There are more features, but these are the biggies.

No mobile professional should be without a good PDF program on their handheld. You just never know when urgent things come up. Now RepliGo Reader enables you to read and respond – all on the go.

The app is available in the Android Marketplace for $4.99, and also in the Blackberry app store for $14.99 (or a free 30-day trial). It’s not currently available for iPhones, but we’ll tackle an alternative in an upcoming Cool Apps post.


Cool Apps: More Help for Twitter

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We have a theme running through these weekly Cool Apps posts: making the most of your social media efforts without killing yourself. We all have limited hours in a day, which is why it’s so important to maximize our social media marketing and make what we’re doing count.

The bottom line: If you’re spending more time tweeting or facebooking than selling homes, then you’re not doing social media right. This can be tricky since a lot of social media in the beginning is a try-test-adjust cycle.

The good news is that there are many tools out there to help you. In fact, there are almost too many. We’ve already covered a few like: Social Oomph, ManageFlitter and Seesmic Desktop. But let me spotlight an old favorite in case you haven’t come across it yet: TweetDeck.

If you thought Twitter was a noisy mess the first time you used it, and also the tenth time you used it, then do yourself a favor and try TweetDeck. It’s a downloadable application that sits on your desktop (and of course there’s also an app for iPhones and Androids).

With TweetDeck, you can manage your Twitter conversations, set up columns for searches, follow specific conversations via hashtags, and even pull in your Facebook, Foursquare, LinkedIn and other social streams. It’s meant to be your social dashboard – an easy one stop for sending out tweets, a quick glimpse at conversations you’re interested in, and checking any replies or retweets you may have missed.

By far, my two favorite business uses for TweetDeck are:

Multiple accounts: If you find yourself managing more than one Twitter handle (an account under your own name, for instance, plus maybe one that is more vertical or branded to your neighborhood), TweetDeck makes it easy to send tweets from each account without having to log out and log in under a new name each time.

Ear to the ground: As a real estate agent, you need to know what’s happening in the neighborhoods you serve. TweetDeck makes it easy to set up a search that pulls in related conversations. For example, you can set up a column for the key phrase “San Jose housing” or “San Jose real estate” or even a hashtag like #realestatetech. Then every time you launch TweetDeck you’ll see a stream of the latest tweets containing these terms. It’s a cool way to find people on Twitter who are talking about things you’re interested in.

Give it a try!


Get a Fresh Money Perspective With Mint

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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.


Cool Apps: Total reQall

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For the most part, most of the tech stuff that I look at and test falls under the heading, “Mildly Interesting.” Every so often, though, I stumble across something that absolutely blows me away.

I had that experience a couple of weeks ago.

I have been blown away…by reQall.

Before I get into the ins and outs of what it does, though, let’s chat. Now, I’m sure that there are those of you out there who are hyper-organized, who never have any trouble remembering anything. All of your ducks are in their respective rows and every tiny detail is in its place. Well, most of us are not like that. Most of us have great ideas, but we have them when there are no Post-Its on which to jot them down. We make appointments, but can’t remember them. We know that there was … something … that we were supposed to do, but we can’t quite remember what it was because we haven’t had a quad shot gargantulatte (no whipped cream on that, thanks) with a side of Red Bull.

For those of us who are dealing with that grim reality? reQall is at our beck and/or call.

With applications for iPhone, BlackBerry, Android, Outlook, GoogleApps, email, Evernote, SMS, IM, and even an extension for Firefox, reQall is there, wherever and whenever we need it.

What it is is a high-toned, get-your-backside-in-gear memory aid that’s an organizer, a reminder system, and a productivity assistant, all rolled into one. Have an earth-shattering idea while on the road? Call reQall from your mobile phone and your recording is transcribed into text. Suddenly remember an appointment that you forgot? Record it with reQall and it’ll appear in your Outlook or Google calendars.

reQall is smart. If you say, “Meet with Jack Bauer every Tuesday night at 8,” reQall knows that it’s a meeting, and that it’s every Tuesday night at 8. It’ll also record it accordingly in your calendars. If you say, “Remember to buy milk” it’ll record that in your shopping list.

Here’s where it gets scary smart, though: reQall will remind you of things at the precise moment you need to remember them. Let’s say, for example, that you want to buy flowers for your wife on your anniversary. Create a reminder in reQall and when you’re near the flower shop, it’ll remind you to stop. Right then. I know. Crazy, right? But in the best way.

There are a ton of things that you can do with reQall, each of them cooler than the thing that came before it. Sign up for an account today and see just how organized you can become. You’ll have total reQall.