10 Webapps for your business

1. Zoho offers a suit of webapps for business and personal use. They offer a word processor, spreadsheet, CRM, project management and more.
2. Project2Manage offers a free online project management software.
3. Freshbooks offers an online invocing and time tracking service for freelancers and service based business.
4. YouSendIt allows you to send up to 2gb files to clients they also offer a up to 10mb free.
5. PayPal gives you a way to collect and make payments without having tow worry about sharing or storing critical finanicial information.
6. FaxZero offers a way to send faxes without having to invest in a fax machine.
7. Craigslist an invaluable tool for finding clients, supplies and etc.
8. MyNewCompany helps with legal documentation for startups.
9. Qoop offers prints on just about any product you want to promote your business.
10. Work offers how-to guides for your business industry.

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Jump starting the ecomony

Productivity501 had a interesting post on how to jump start an [tag]Economy[/tag].

One particular idea I thought was great is  giving a tax benefit in hiring the unemployed.
How to Jump Start an Economy? at Productivity501

1. Make it easier to hire people off unemployment. For example, the [tag]government[/tag] could give an employer a 90 day tax break on all the taxes they pay for employees that are coming off unemployment. This would help encourage businesses to hire people who are currently costing the government money and could drastically reduce the expenses of hiring someone until the company knows if they are a good fit or not.

To add, since most of the [tag]factory[/tag] jobs are going overseas, how about we start sending more money to education paying for low income population and reforming it so that its more effective. If we are to base our economy on our technology than we need to keep our [tag]education[/tag] at a top level and more easily accessible. I would love to see education become free to the people rather than the outrageous tuition [tag]students[/tag] pay now.

[tags]business, unemployment, federal[/tags]

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Interest rates cut by .75%

Fed cuts interest rates by 75 basis points – MarketWatch

Acting forcefully against [tag]economic[/tag] risk and [tag]financial[/tag] [tag]market[/tag] meltdown, the [tag]Federal[/tag] Reserve cut its overnight lending rate by 75 basis points to 3.50%, the Fed announced Tuesday. It was the first time the Fed had cut interest rates between meetings since the 9/11 attacks in 2001. “The committee took this action in view of a weakening economic outlook and increasing downside risks to growth,” the Federal Open Market Committee said in a statement. Downside risks to growth remain. The committee met on Monday evening.

Another attempt by the feds to boost the economy.

[tags]housing, mortgage[/tags]

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Increase your Productivity

There are many ways you increase your productivity. The goal is to get more done in less time and less work, so you can focus on what you want.

With these 5 simple steps.

• Step 1: What Do You Want? What are your goals?
• Step 2: Make a list of your average Daily activities not by hour but by activity and average length of activity.
• Step 3: Eliminate unnecessary activities
• Step 4: Streamline
• Step 5: Automate

These 5 simple steps can be applied to almost anything whether it is work or home related.

Step 1: What Do You Want?

This is the biggest and hardest one to answer. List your goals and objectives you have for the next year. This is the focus and carrot to keep you going. This will also keep you from saying I’m bored and wasting time because all you have to do is pull out your list of goals and objectives and do one.

Step 2: Make a list of your average Daily activities

Making a list of your Daily activities allows you to examine where your time is going and help decide how to better focus your time. This list should be by activities and average length of time

Step 3: Eliminate unnecessary activities

There are many activities most of us do that are very unproductive and suck up time. Such as news, we often spend hours watching and reading news for things that little concern us in our great scheme of life. While I’m not saying ignore all news but filter it out to only news that concern your goals in life. The rest of the big stuff you will often hear from your friends and family.

Often a unnecessary activity that I personally commit is attempting to learn to do something that I should outsource because my goals don’t require me to know it but require me to have it done. This is a problem most commit such as learning to build a website capable of managing our content for our goal rather than getting a already built content management software to handle the content. The content management software may be relevant to our goal but it our goal isn’t to create the content management software but to make the content, so why not leave the content management software up to the people whose goal it is to make content management software.

It is often the small time consumers that can be eliminated and free up the most time.

When going through these activities you are looking for things of low priority, things that can be ignored and things that are irreverent to your goal. If they can’t be eliminated than or ignored than go through the next two steps.

Step 4: Streamline

Examine your task and figure out a way to do them faster. Often the biggest way to streamline task is to do it in batches rather than attempting to multitasking. Multitasking is like switching horses in middle of a race, sure there is a chance that the fresh horse can get you to the end faster but there is a cost of switching which is time. Every time you switch task, even amongst the simplest of task, it takes you a few seconds or longer to proceed with the other task. Multitasking also affects the quality of your work, because you are constantly thinking about the previous task and the future task.

Some things that often cost you time that you don’t realize can be phone calls, you often make/receive calls throughout the day constantly being interrupted in your work and then have to figure out where you were to start again. The idea is to do it in batches, rather than making/recieving calls throughout the day set a time or two to return calls. Any emergencies they can call your cell phone.

Email is another big time killer. Most managers and others have been gotten to the point of checking email every 10-20 minutes. Like phone calls do it in a batch at specific times rather than stopping what your doing to answer an email. Some other tips are to set custom filters base on subject lines to get your attention for important emails. If you have a secretary use them to filter your emails for you, and giving you a summary of any important emails that may need your attention. This way you can focus on your job rather than getting those low priority reports, office jokes or etc that don’t need your attention at the moment.

Utilize your most productive time period. If your a morning person than make sure to get most of your work done in the morning and focus on returning calls and other task that don’t require you to be at your top.

Step 5: Automate

One of the beauties of technology is the fact that it has given us the ability to automate things. Look to automate any activities you have.

Somethings you could automate to free your time

• Email – Create an auto-responder for specific emails. This is great for when you often receive emails asking common questions.
• Vacuuming – Get a roomba, these things will automatically clean your floor.
• Shopping – Amazon offers a Subscribe & Save program. The program basicly setups a schedule delivery of supplies you need. They offer a 15% discount and flexibility to change the schedule or cancel at any time with no risk.
• Automate your Checkbook – A lot of banks now offer free online payment, take advantage of it.
• Outsourcing – Got a task or project need to be done but don’t have the knowledge or time to do it than outsource it. Sites such as Domystuff and Elance can help you find freelancers willing to do your work.

Portal: First Slice free for all NVIDIA Gamers

Just awesome. Click Here to get it

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Just Signed up for hubpages

I just signed up for an interesting service called HubPages.  HubPages offers for free a ability to create articles with text, pictures, and videos around a topic called hubs.  Anyone can create an hub.  HubPages generates money by displaying adsense on your article for 40% of the time, the other 60% of the time is for your adsense.  You can also add amazon and ebay ads to your article that is relevant to your topic.

I already publish 3 articles with them.  After a month or so I will give a personal review of the service.

My first 3 artiicles

Top 10 Free Windows Apps
15 Ways To Earn A Living With A Digital Camera
Automated Version Control For Windows

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Another win for the Blu-ray camp in HD war

While its not offical two major HD DVD studios may be producing Blu-ray DVD soon after their exclusive commitment to HD DVD contract is up.

HD DVDs Fall Like Dominoes – Bits – Technology – New York Times Blog

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16 ways to earn a living with a digital camera

There are several ways to earn a living with a Digital Camera

1. Taking wedding photographs
   - can be a very lucrative way to earn a living. Best way to
   generate business in wedding photography is through referrals.
   Mainly you want referrals from caters, wedding planners, and other
   aspects of the wedding so that they might referrer you to them in
   case they forgot a wedding photographer. In return for the
   referrals you can also offer referrals to the other aspects of the
   wedding, working together with the other business to assist.

2. Pet Photography – Pet
   business is currently booming in all areas related to pets. If you
   have a love for pets and photography than this is a perfect
   business. In addition to the pictures you can offer other services
   such as coffee mugs, and t-shirt through services like cafepress.

3. Photo Business cards –
   Photo business cards is offering a service to photography and design
   business cards for professionals looking for an eye catching
   business cards.

4. Photo Novelty – Mugs, t-shirt and etc.

5. Home Inventory – Offer inventory services for people to protect their property incase of disaster. 

6. Home Portrait service

7. Senior Pictures &
   Graduations

8. Landmark and tourist
   photographer

9. Parades – Take pictures for local paper and/or parents and participates.

10. Holiday Family Postcards 

11. Real Estate Services – Take photographs for Real Estate Agents.

12. Local sporting events – Take pictures of local sporting events and sell them to parents that were unable to make and/or newspapers.

13. How-to projects – Develop a step by step project to sell online either in digital format or through services that print per order.

14. Scrapbooks – Build Scrapbooks for people

15. Freelance photographer

16. Stock photography

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Business card that dials home

Want to have that prefect business card that stands outs?  Well this business card certainly does.  Once you have dial tone just push the corner and it dials your number.  It’s a great way to get that client your dieing to get that could make your business big especially when they may have been give tons of ordinary business cards at a conference by your competition.  With this card they are likely not only remember it but to go to the office and try it the next chance they get just see it work, giving you the second talk to further sell your product/service.

MAKE: Blog: Business card phones home

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Interest Rates may be cut again

Fed Chief Signals Further Rate Cut – New York Times

Many analysts now expect the Fed’s policy makers to cut half a percentage point off the Fed’s benchmark interest rate, reducing it to 3.75 when they next meet, on Jan. 29 and 30. They expect the Fed to continue cutting, to 3 percent or even lower by summer, to prevent — or at least mitigate — a recession. The goal would be to get people to borrow and spend more.

While a applaud the fed trying to stop this recession, I just wish they would have taken a bigger stance on it awhile ago to have prevent having to do this.  One of the groups I personally accredit the downfall of our economy besides those subprime loans are the high interest credit cards jacking up the interest rates on already high interest when a person is late 1 day or is struggling.  Maybe someone can explain to me how a person that can’t afford x amount a month is able to pay 2x a month?

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