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Posts Tagged ‘ipad’

Cool Apps: Blogsy Puts Blogging in Your Fingertips

By John Thompson | March 30th, 2012 0 Comments

Blogsy Puts Blogging in Your Fingertips

By: John Thompson
Executive Vice President
Intero Real Estate, Inc

Just in case you needed another reason to fondle your new iPad (or iPad 2 – because that’s still cool too), there’s an app that will enable you to create blog posts – and do it well – right from your beloved tablet.

Blogsy will completely challenge the notion that iPads are for content consumption, not content creation. The app enables posting to WordPress, Blogger, TypePad and other blogging platforms.

Blogsy has a built-in web browser that makes linking, photo, video and other content embeds simple. It’s real content creation right from your fingertips. Built with touchscreen interaction in mind, the interface is simple and intuitive to use.

Not blogging? This is a market technique that is well worth a try – even if you think you can’t write. There are plenty of online resources that can help you get started. (Try Copyblogger for starters.) Think about blogging as a way to answer or address all the questions you find yourself constantly answering for buyers and sellers. You can use it as an educational tool that helps market your expertise and therefore sell your services.

If you’re looking for an easy interface to use for blogging that’s simple, but gets the basic job done, test Blogsy.

The app is available for $4.99 in the app store – well worth the cost if it helps you execute on a solid marketing strategy that moves you ahead.

Cool Apps: 5 Must-Have Apps for Your New iPad

By John Thompson | March 23rd, 2012 0 Comments

If you’re one of the 3 million people who snagged a new iPad last weekend, you’ve probably been busy drooling over the device’s ground-breaking retina display and also wondering which apps are the best for both personal and professional use in the real estate business.

This week, we’re highlighting the top five iPad apps that you won’t be able to live without once you’ve started using:

Dropbox (free) – Dropbox enables you to save and access files from your iPad from anywhere with connectivity. If you’re already using Dropbox on your desktop or laptop, then adding the iPad app is a no brainer. If you’re not yet using this cloud storage system, then you’ll want to create a free account right away. It’s a lifesaver for situations in which you need quick, remote access to important files.

Skype (free) – With the iPad’s camera, easy user interface and web connection, catch up with clients, vendors and business associates using Skype. You can do Skype-to-Skype audio and video calls for free, and also instant message other users.

iPhoto ($4.99)– Photos are essential for great real estate marketing. But why pay professional prices when you can create great-looking photos of your listings or purchase prospects with your very own iPad? The new version of iPhoto for iPad gives you basic photo-editing capabilities that are super easy to navigate and actually pretty fun.

Quickoffice Pro HD ($19.99) – This app may be the one that finally makes it possible for you to never have to leave the office or home carrying your laptop again. Quickoffice Pro HD enables you to open Office documents and PDFs, and make edits all from your iPad. Now you can tweak contracts on the go – saving time and impressing clients with your amazing response times and ability to get things done.

Tweetbot ($2.99) – If Twitter is part of your personal real estate marketing strategy, check out Tweetbot for iPad. The Twitter client has a unique interface that gives you a larger view of the context around your tweets (and tweets from others). Swipe to the right and see the full conversation surrounding it; swipe left and see replies to a tweet. You can also tap and hold a tweet, hashtag, username or a link to view contextual options that relate.

All of these apps are easily found by searching for them in the app store right from your iPad.

Cool Apps: Organize Business Receipts From Your iPhone with Shoeboxed

By John Thompson | December 2nd, 2011 0 Comments

For most people, the end of the year means holiday shopping, decorating, parties and eating. But for real estate agents who are independent contractors, the end of the year also means there are some scary bookkeeping chores coming up quickly.

One of the oldest tips in the book is to track your expenses and receipts throughout the year for easier end-of-year reconciliation and tax time drama avoidance. But it’s one of those things we all know is easier said than done. When the going gets tough throughout the year, business gets busy and we have to let things go – all this record-keeping can easily get assigned to a shoebox (as in, we simply shove it in a shoebox and figure we’ll deal with it later).

That’s why I like the Shoeboxed receipt tracker and reader. It’s an app available for iPhone and iPad that puts a lot more organization into your receipt-tracking efforts without much work required from you. You can test it out for free with five documents (receipts) scanned per month, and sign on to a monthly plan that matches your volume needs if you like it.

It’s fairly simple to use the app: Just snap a picture of your receipt and it will extract the data and store it into a searchable online archive one day later.

What can you do with this data? You can export it to any type of file you may have for tracking your expenses: PDF, XLS, CSV. You can generate expense reports if you need to be reimbursed for anything. The app also integrates with Freshbooks, Evernote, Salesforce and many other tools for easy plug-in to organizational systems and apps you may already be using.

Check out Shoeboxed’s monthly rates at this link. And check out the free app and free trial period by downloading the app from the app store.

Tax time will be here before you know it. Make this the year you get it together ahead of time without sacrificing precious time in the process.

Cool Apps: Penultimate Offers Easier Note Taking on iPad

By John Thompson | September 30th, 2011 0 Comments

Probably the greatest thing about an iPad is the direct hand-to-screen interaction it allows you. It’s why I love stumbling across great apps that really take this ability to the next level and allow me to be more productive.

Enter Penultimate, an app built for iPad that essentially gives your finger the same power as pen and paper, with a few more perks.

For instance, you can import photos and images onto your notebook pages, from your photo library or from your iPad’s camera (if you have an iPad 2). You can move, resize and write on the images.

I see a few great uses for this in real estate:

Take notes while touring properties with your clients. Remember the details that your client’s really liked simply by taking a picture and adding a notation. Careful note taking and observation can often help you better figure out how to help your clients find the home they’ve been looking for, rather than continue to see properties that don’t quite match – wasting your time and theirs.
Take notes while on broker tour. A picture can capture a home much better than simple notes on a scratch pad. Now imagine being able to take a picture and write down a few details to remember, all in one place.
Take notes while on inspection. This is a definite potential wow moment for your client too when you come back and show them pictures and notes to help remember details of specific inspection items that need follow-up.

All this and it’s as an organic experience as using pen and paper to capture your thoughts – except that your odds of losing it are much lower.

Penultimate costs $1.99, and can be downloaded from the iTunes app store.

Cool Apps: Bamboo Paper Makes iPad Note-taking a Breeze

By John Thompson | July 1st, 2011 0 Comments

As if your non-iPad colleagues and friends didn’t already have a reason to be jealous of your effortless tech lifestyle, now there’s an app that makes taking notes on the iPad about as effortless as breathing.

Bamboo Paper, a new app from Wacom, launched this month. If you were lucky enough to know about this app before June 30th, it was free. But after that date, you’ll have to pony up a little cash.

What does it do?

Think pen and paper. Old school. You know how no technology has really given you the ability to freely jot down notes or sketches the way good old pen and paper does? Bamboo Paper does that.

You get one notebook to write or draw in and can choose from three page types, three pen widths, and six ink colors. You also get “undo” options for erasing. You can save pages to your iPad’s camera roll or print them.

This app is great for an intuitive note-taking experience. It’s not bloated with features or technical like the more serious drawing and sketching apps. So for that first meeting with a client when you want to simply write down a few notes about them, what they’re looking for, etc., Bamboo Paper is a breeze. Or, imagine pulling out your iPad on your next inventory tour and jotting down notes while standing in front of a house.

You can use Bamboo Paper with or without a stylus. I tested it without (just using my finger), but imagine it’s even more intuitive with a stylus since you’re mimicking pen and paper.

Bamboo Paper is currently available in the iTunes store. You can buy a Bamboo Stylus for $30 through Wacom. More info about the stylus is on Wacom’s site.

Cool Apps: Sign and send documents right from your phone

By John Thompson | January 14th, 2011 0 Comments

Picture it: You’re sitting in your car in traffic trying desperately to meet your client on time at the house she’s interested in. You check your email and realize you forgot to sign one page of a document that’s part of another client’s offer. Do you panic?

No. Not if you have an app for that. The latest to hit the iTunes app store is called Sign-N-Send. It’s a program for use with iPhones and iPads that enables you to open documents and sign them right from your phone’s touch screen (or iPad’s touch screen), then send them out to wherever they need to go.

Crisis averted. (Unless of course you did all this while traffic was moving and ended up in an accident.)

Sign-N-Send works with PDFs or Microsoft documents. Say you get a document via email – while inside your email program you can choose to open it in Sign-N-Send. Then you simply zoom in on the area where you need to sign, then sign, save and email it back.

Sign-N-Send can save you time and paper because now you don’t have to print out documents in order to first sign them, then scan and send back. Now you can just grab your iPhone or iPad and do it the 21^st century way.

The app costs $1.99 in the iTunes App Store, but also has a free version. The only difference is that the free version inserts an advertisement on the first page of every generated document. (So it might be worth springing the two bucks if you’re going to use this with clients.)

As we move into 2011, I suspect we’ll see a lot more apps like this one designed for more mobility, productivity and to cut out paper-laden steps like printing and scanning. If you’ve seen an app you think works well for real estate professionals’ needs, let me know in the comments here so I can look into it for future articles.

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.?

Have You Landed On An iPad?

By John Thompson | May 14th, 2010 3 Comments

Love it or hate it, the iPad, Apple’s latest shiny technogadget, has taken the world not just by storm, but by virtual F5 tornado.

For most of the folks snatching them off shelves like they were loaves of bread in Russia, circa-1980, they’re just awesome, hyper-beautiful, super-slick … toys. But for REALTORS? The iPad holds a wealth of creative new ideas and opportunities to provide new services for customers and clients.

For starters, the iPad’s display is absolutely gorgeous. Really. It’s second-to-none. Imagine taking your clients on showing appointments and presenting them with splashy, hi-res, full-color photos on it. If you’re out and about and they suddenly decide that there are other properties they’d like to see, you can show them right on the iPad. No more carting around that heavy, cumbersome laptop. With it, you’ve also got a terrific way to take notes as you go with them from house-to-house, or with which to give a listing presentation the likes of which they’ve never seen.

And it’s a pretty cool tool outside of client interaction, too!

Some of the great tools that are available to enhance your business are:

Evernote. We’ve talked about this fantastic app before, but the version that’s available for the iPad is fantastic. The app itself is free, and basic memberships to Evernote are free, with upgrade options that, at their most expensive, are a minimal $45 annually.
iWork. Apple’s answer to MSOffice, iWork is a suite of tools — Pages, Keynote, and Numbers — that is incredibly easy, incredibly intuitive. Pages (iWork’s word processor) is a breeze to use, and the iPad version is really slick. Keynote simply blows PowerPoint out of the water in terms of the quality of presentation it produces. Numbers, which is similar to Excel, doesn’t have quite the juice as its Microsoft counterpart, but it’s still off to a pretty good start.
Things. Hands-down, this is the best organizational software out there. It’s a little pricey in terms of apps (most people are still used to paying $1 for things from the AppStore) at $19.99, but it’s worth every penny. If you’re a Mac user, this is a must-have.

There are tons of new apps being added each and every day, so be sure to check back for your favorites.

The iPad isn’t for everyone, but for us? For REALTORS? The iPad’s going to provide a very happy landing.

Posts Tagged ‘ipad’

Cool Apps: Blogsy Puts Blogging in Your Fingertips

Cool Apps: 5 Must-Have Apps for Your New iPad

Cool Apps: Organize Business Receipts From Your iPhone with Shoeboxed

Cool Apps: Penultimate Offers Easier Note Taking on iPad

Cool Apps: Bamboo Paper Makes iPad Note-taking a Breeze

Cool Apps: Sign and send documents right from your phone

Cool Apps: Instapaper Saves It for Later

Have You Landed On An iPad?

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