Posts Tagged ‘iphone’

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: Instapaper Saves It for Later

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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

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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.


Cool Apps: Goin’ Mobile!

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QR codeEverywhere you turn, everyone’s going mobile. Smartphones are everywhere, and not just in the hands of “business” people. Soccer moms, NASCAR dads, and yes, even kids, have them, and more users join the fray each and every day.

Now that the technology is really going mainstream, finding new ways to capitalize on it and monetize it is what everyone is clamoring for.

Raise your hand if you know what a QR code is. Anyone?

Outside of the world of tech-geekery, few people do, but I’ll bet you’ve seen one. See that little square up in the left-hand corner? Well, that’s it. But what is it? What does it do?

The answer is, “Quite a lot!”

Most smartphones — BlackBerry, iPhone, Palm Pre, Droid … you name it — have applications available that read those handy-dandy little codes (they read regular barcodes, too, but that’s not germane to this conversation). The neat thing is that you can use those apps (as well as countless web-based apps) to create QR codes. Even neater? You can make them to hold almost any information you’d like.

Code them with a link to your website. Or a website for your listing. Create a coupon that they could use for a discount on a particular service. Include a special message just for people who’ve got a QR code reader.

Think of the possibilities.

Once you’ve generated a QR code, you can place it on just about anything. Include it in property flyers. Put it on your business cards. Embed it in your website. You can even put them on t-shirts, mugs, or just about anything else you’d like.

All your potential customer has to do is point his phone’s camera at the QR code, snap its picture, and his code reader will send his “secret” message. Pretty cool, right?

This is still emerging technology, but being an early-adopter is cool! Take a look at QR codes. How could you use them to help your business? We’d love to hear your ideas!


Cool Apps: AARDVARK

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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: Stay Connected With LogMeIn

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logmeinWhen 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.


Intero Cool Apps: Fast & Free Property Info – Text INTERO to 59559

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Have you ever been searching for property and come to a home with NO flyer? Or fell in love with a neighborhood and wondered, are there are any homes on the market close by? You’re interested, don’t have a lot of time, and want some information fast.

Now with your mobile phone’s texting feature text INTERO to 59559 and receive immediate information such as – number of bedrooms and bathrooms, square feet, lot size, and asking price, on any one specific property. One step better – if you are an iPhone or Droid user, and your phone is GPS enabled (most are) our system maps out the five surrounding closest properties for sale, to you.

View the following video as I explain the exciting features and benefits of our NEWEST Intero innovation-