By 
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!
Posts Tagged ‘Cool Apps’
Cool Apps: A New Way to Web Conference
Cool Apps: Instapaper Saves It for Later
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.?
Cool Apps: Total reQall
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.
Cool Apps: What Do You Like?
It’s official. Facebook is taking over the world.
A couple of weeks ago, they made a subtle change. You may have noticed that where you once became a “fan” of a particular page, you suddenly “liked” it. At first, this didn’t seem like a big deal. But it was. And it is. BIG.
Last week at its F8 developers’ conference, Facebook announced some changes that will dramatically change the way that people interact online. The biggest part of the changes is something that Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and CEO, calls “Open Graph”. Open Graph is a new platform that will allow websites to blend their users’ social experiences. They’ll take the information that they have about your likes and dislikes, and make a customized online experience for you.
For example, if you have a Facebook profile and you visit Pandora.com, a popular music service, you’ll find that they are able to recommend playlists for you, based on artists that you’ve “liked” on Facebook. Similarly, if you visit CNN.com, you’ll see if any of your friends have visited the site and recommended news stories that they’ve found helpful. When you click the “like” button on these pages, that activity will be posted to your Facebook profile. It’s pretty nifty.
Now, what this means for each of us, personally, is a big question. Whether to opt in or out of the instant personalization functionality — deciding what you do and do not want to share — is a personal choice, and an important one.
What it means for businesses, however, is, as I said earlier, big.
The “like” button, which you’ll see popping up on sites all over the place (if you haven’t already), is exceedingly simple to add to your own website (if you have someone manage your website, they can make the addition in about 5 minutes’ time). It’s a simple addition that has the power to expose your site or business to vast numbers of people who mightn’t have been aware of it before.
When one of your Facebook friends “likes” any of your blog posts (or any other items to which you’ve added the “like” button), that activity will be posted on their personal profiles and in the news feeds of their friends.
This new functionality is controversial, make no mistake, but the possibilities that it opens for businesses are myriad and fascinating.
Cool Apps: Don’t Be Blue, Get BatchBook!
Each and every day, it seems that there’s a new social media channel on which we need to keep tabs. Whether it’s making professional connections on LinkedIn, managing our personal Facebook profiles, our “fan” pages, Twitter feeds, FourSquare checkins, not to mention email, and the things we use to make sure we’re meeting the needs of our clients, there’s an endless stream of, well…streams to monitor.
How can we do it without sacrificing our work ethic or our commitment to providing the highest quality work to our customers and clients?
BatchBook may just be your answer.
BatchBook, developed by the big thinkers over at BatchBlue Software, features contact management, social media monitoring, email forwarding, communications tracking, to-do lists, the ability to create lists, reports, and Web forms, and integrates seamlessly with Google Contacts, Freshbooks, MailChimp, Shoeboxed, and Zendesk. These features, combined with some of BatchBook’s unique offerings, might make it the most powerful social monitoring/CRM tool around.
First and foremost, BatchBook is a contact management powerhouse. It makes it possible for you to track your business, personal, and social media contacts and share them, if you like, with team members or coworkers. You can create a database from the ground up, or import your contacts from any of several different existing systems. BatchBook has a great feature, which they call “SuperTagging”, which you can use to create custom fields that’ll let you monitor the information that’s important to you, not just those that conform to the software.
Its social media monitoring helps keep the lines between personal and business contacts on social media channels clear. For each of your contacts, you can see their most recent tweets, blog posts, as well as their LinkedIn profile.
Another cool feature is the ability to track communications. If you want to know the last time one of your team members contacted a client, you can see it in BatchBook, whether it was an email or phone call, you’ll have a complete record of all of your communications with your clients. And with BatchBox, your emails can get forwarded directly to BatchBook and attach them to your contact, so you’ll know exactly where you stand at all times.
BatchBook gives you the ability to collect information about your clients and other business-specific information. Not only does it do that, but it gives you an easy-to-use system with customer support that’s second-to-none.
Got the contact management blues? Get BatchBook.
Cool Apps: Get Smart With Smart Draw!
Let’s face it. Ver
y few of us are good at everything. Oh, sure … there’s that guy with whom you went to college who was great-looking, and the quarterback of the football team, and graduated summa cum laude just after rescuing a troupe of old ladies with puppies while on his way to donate blood to an orphanage, but most of us have to face the fact that we’re just … not that guy.
This means that while we might be great salespeople and that we might be great at taking care of our customers, we mightn’t also be great at blogging, or math, or <gulp> creating presentations.
That last one is something over which I stew all the time.
I have great information to share but I just don’t have that certain … something … that allows me to turn that information into moving, powerful visuals. And for most people, visual representations of information are much more striking than any other form.
So, what’s there to do?
I could hire a graphic designer, but that takes a lot of time, and can also run into a lot of money. Drawing something by hand is out of the question (I can make a mean stick figure, but that’s about it). Even using my mouse to create images on my computer can get frustrating, because as much as I nudge things around, the graphics never look as clean as I’d like.
But there is a solution. And a darned good one, at that.
For the software gods have given us SmartDraw. Unlike most of the applications about which we write, SmartDraw isn’t free. However, it’s less than $200 for the full version, and that’s less than one hour’s time from most graphic designers (the math here should be pretty obvious).
So, what does it do?
Put simply, with just a few clicks, SmartDraw can create more than 70 different sorts of diagrams and presentations, including maps, flowcharts, organizational charts, calendars, graphs … you name it. If it’s a graphic that you need, odds are that SmartDraw can make it. And there’s no dragging and dropping. Just click and type. That’s it. The graphics come out professional-looking each and every time. I don’t know many people who can turn out quality like that without losing lots of sleep, or without ripping out the bulk of their hair.
Want to hear something else that’s really, really cool? SmartDraw works seamlessly with Microsoft Office, so once you create your graphics, you can click once, and have all of them transferred directly into PowerPoint and have your presentation ready to go, and, more importantly, ready to knock the socks off of your clients.
You can check SmartDraw out with their free trial download. Unless you’re a graphic designing, quarterbacking, honors grabbing puppy saver, I promise that you won’t be disappointed.
Cool Apps: Know the Real Deal with StatCounter!
Congratulations! You’re in the game! You’ve got a website (maybe several), you’ve got a blog. A Facebook fan page. You name it, you’ve got it.
Sooo, now what?
You update your website. You write blog posts. You post links to Twitter, to your Facebook page, to ActiveRain, not to mention every other place you can think of. Heck, you might even be paying to run an ad or two. How do you know what’s working? How do you know where to focus your attention?
There are some services out there that can give you some basic information, but to get really in-depth, most analytics companies demand a handsome fee. But there is an option.
Welcome to StatCounter.
If your web page has fewer than 250,000 page views per month (and that’s a pretty significant figure), the service is 100% free. FREE! That’s a good thing. But what does it do? The answer is a lot.
Once you include StatCounter’s code in your webpage, it records valuable information about your site’s visitors and records it in a log for you. It tracks information about the sites from which your visitors came, the keywords they used to find you, how long they spent looking at your site, if they’d visited before, where (geographically) they are located, what kind of browser they’re using … and lots more. Once it collects the data, it organizes it and compiles it into charts and lists, so that your analysis is made easier.
If you’ve got more than one site, StatCounter can be used to track those, as well. Oh, yeah! And it’s still free.
You work hard. You spend lots of time making sure that your websites and blogs give just the right impression. Making sure that the sites are doing their jobs and also knowing where to focus your energies is important. If your site’s visitors come mostly from Google, then you don’t want to channel your efforts somewhere else.
In today’s marketplace, a tool like StatCounter is indispensable. If you want to hang tough with the big boys, StatCounter can help you do it!
Cool Apps: AARDVARK
There are times when, no matter how much we think we know, we’ve gotta have a question answered. We go online, we search. Google or Wikipedia or some other search engine might have a cavalcade of “answers”, but the odds of those answers being exactly what you were looking for…well, they often come close, but rarely do they hit it right on the head.
Sometimes, the answer we want is the sort that we’d get if we simply asked a friend. Someone who’d had actual experience with something. Well, now there’s a search engine for that.
Let’s take a look at Aardvark, or ‘Vark, as they like to be called.
Available on The Web or via its own iPhone application, Aardvark is a new kind of search engine. It lets you tap into the knowledge and experience of friends, or friends of friends. Using information from your social graph (the people you know), Aardvark searches contacts for people with related topics, people to whom you’re connected, people who’re in or near your location, or people who share your tastes. When you want someone who knows the answer — the answer YOU want — Aardvark will get it for you.
Now, let’s think about how this could apply to your business. There’s a great shift in our industry toward offering services on a hyperlocal level. If you’re a real estate professional in Awesometown, USA, you’re probably looking for as many ways as possible to set yourself as THE authority for information on your area. Aardvark works there. When people go to vark.com looking for information about Awesometown, you’ll be the one with the answers. People will say, “WOW! She (or he) really knows what she’s talking about!” and will, most likely, remember that you were helpful.
This opportunity has “WIN” written all over it.
As vark.com (Aardvark) was just launched in October, you could be among its early adopters and set yourself apart as one of its go-to contacts for your area. Just think of the possibilities.
Aardvark. It’s new. It’s cutting-edge. It’s cool. Check it out!
Cool Apps: Get the Gist!
“It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.”
How many times have you heard that phrase? What if you could combine those two things? What if you could take who you know and increase what you know about them? From the perspective of a real estate professional — someone whose business is dependent on understanding people’s needs and desires — that’s something that could be pretty valuable, right?
As it happens, there is, in fact, an app for that.
Welcome to GIST.
Everyone with whom we’re connected online is searchable. Every blog comment, tweet, online profile, even reviews at places like Amazon, are searchable. But tracking down all of that information can be awfully time-consuming. Gist takes the legwork out of finding out what you need to know about your clients and business contacts before you talk to them.
An indispensable tool for anyone in sales, Gist is what Outlook wishes it could have been; not just contact management, Gist is knowledge management. Relationship management.
100% free, Gist couldn’t be simpler to use. Just log in and tell Gist where your contacts are listed: Gmail, LinkedIn, Twitter … wherever they happen to be. Gist aggregates all of your contact information, then turns that data into something really intelligent. Something you can really use.
The more you know about a person or a company, the more productive you’re going to be.
In the dashboard, you’ll see your lists of contacts (either individuals or companies), plus their latest tweets, blog posts, news items, comments and other online information that has recently been posted. Pretty handy information to have before that conference call or big meeting, right?
Gist is knowledge. Gist is power. Gist is totally cool.
Cool Apps: Stay Connected With LogMeIn
By 
When you’re working from home, you have access to all of your passwords, your networks…everything is AOK. Hunky dory, even. But sometimes, we’re away from home or the office, for any one of a multitude of reasons, and suddenly, things aren’t so straightforward.
When you’re away from your own computer, you might be faced with some serious firewall challenges or other security issues. Let’s face it: remote access is tricky.
There is an answer.
Let’s talk about LogMeIn. LogMeIn is a 100% free site that provides solutions for remote control, file sharing, systems management, data backup, business collaboration and on-demand customer support of PCs, servers, MACs, smartphones (iPhones, BlackBerrys, Pres, etc.)
With LogMeIn, you can access your personal computer and all of its resources over the web. You can access your desktop from your iPhone, no matter where you are. You can create virtual, peer-to-peer networks. You can control your PC or MAC remotely from any web browser. You can back up your files and important data, so that you are always in control, and so you won’t lose anything, even if something happens to your computer.
Cool, right?
Even cooler is the price. LogMeIn is completely, totally and, in all other ways, free. The only time you have to pay them is when you want to sync files across machines or do remote printing. When compared to other services like this, many of which charge $20 for each computer you use (this can really start to add up after a while), LogMeIn does it for free.
LogMeIn isn’t flashy. It isn’t exciting. What it is, however, is dead useful and practical. It’s a great service to have in your arsenal for those times when the unexpected rears its ugly head. For those times when you’ve left your laptop behind and you suddenly need access to your computer.
Check it out today. You never know when you might need it.
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Intero CEO Gino Blefari created the fastest growing company in the history of real estate. Now he's sharing the secrets behind his success.
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