Google Voice is a service that gives you a single phone number for all of your phones. Still in closed beta, those with an invite can select a phone number from Google (hopefully in the same area code as you are), and use this number to take advantage of advanced services such as: Voicemail to email, voicemail transcribing, call conferencing, international calls, blocking and screening. Never miss a call again and my favorite use is that I never have to give someone my actual cell number again!
When Google Voice opens to the public or if you have gotten your hands on an invitation, login to your google account and setup your google voice account. It will ask you to select a phone number and authorize a phone you would like to use with the service. From the browser based control panel you can add phones, setup voicemail, view and listen to voicemail and manage your google contacts.
Contacts can be setup into groups and either full groups or individuals can be blocked, screened or allowed to ring through. Multiple phones can be used with the service. For example I have my cell, work and home phones all synced to the google voice system. When someone calls my google voice number, all phones will ring, or not, depending on how i have the system setup.
To use your Google Voice account with your cell, home or work phones you will need to dial a number to access the google system and then initiate your call to the intended party. When the call is placed using the Google system, your Google Voice number is displayed to the recipient and not your actual cell number. This option however is configurable via the Google Voice control panel. Applications for cell phones that automate this process are available for Blackberry, Palm, Windows Mobile and Android devices. Android phones obviously have the best solution for this as it is written by Google.
Google Voice, 1 number for everything!
Companies and small businesses have been sending invoices to customers the same old way for decades, but what if I told you there is a service that could change the tired old thinking and make it simple and fast. This is where Freshbooks comes in.
Anyone who owns a small, medium or even large business knows that sitting down every month with either excel, word or quickbooks to create and send out invoices is a boring and time consuming task. Your time could be better utilized doing other things like looking for the next new client to invoice one day. Invoices have to be created, printed, stuffed into envelopes, addressed, stamped and mailed using traditional snail mail. Then you have to wait for your customers to write a check and do the process all over again to mail you a check. Thats alot of time and I dont know about you but I dont have any staff members with extra time on their hands. On another note, how do you keep track of time spent on projects for customers and does that time data import to your current invoicing methods seemlessly, I bet it doesnt. Take a look at Freshbooks!
The Joomla website system is a CMS (content managment system) that allows you to quickly and easily build web, intranet, merchant or personal spaces quickly and easily. Post content using a browser based managment portal just as easily as creating a document with a word processor and add tags and SEO information quickly and easily. Create custom webpages that suit the needs of you and your viewers. The benefits and uses are endless but thats not the best part.
The best part of Joomla is that its open source. Its free to use! Since this is an open source platform, that means there are millions of dvelopers working on it everyday making it better and easier to use. Plugins and new functionality is being added everyday. Some of these added features include, polls, galleries, calendars, forums, blogs, banner systems and anything else you could possibly want in a web design. Cant find a plugin for a function you want? If you have a little programming experience you can build it yourself. Dont have any programming experience? Submit a request to the Joomla community. Thats the beauty of open source!
Take a look at Joomla! and see what it can do for your website!
Dropbox is a freeware application for Windows, OSX, and Linux that allows you to seamlessly keep the files on multiple computers in sync and backed up off-site.
Basically you install the Dropbox client on two computers you want to keep in sync. The client creates a folder on each machine and when you place files in this folder Dropbox automatically copies those file between the two systems and creates a secure backup on their servers.
As an added benefit the copy on their servers is accessible from their secure web site on any computer with Internet access. This has three main benefits for our web design and consulting business.
- I can share large files with clients by simply emailing them a link to the file on Dropbox's servers. This gets around the email attachment limits in place at most organizations.
- If I forget an important file I can simply bring up the web site on my smartphone and either view the file there or email a link to the client all with out having to wait until I get back to the office.
- No one remembers to backup every time they make a change to a file, let alone keep a copy of the file in a secure off-site location should something happen to the office. With Dropbox we don't have to change our work flow. Simply save your file to the Dropbox folder and the rest is handled in the background.
Best of all, 2GB of storage is free. If you need more, 50GB is only 9.99 a month. If you need to backup an entire computer look at Carbonite.
From time to time I am asked which operating system is the best in my opinion. This is a tough question to answer as there is no definitive answer. All your choices have their technical merits but, you really shouldn’t select an operating system based solely on its technical merits. You should instead select one that best suits your usage case. To that end I have done my best to summarize the pros and cons of each operating system from the point of view of the average end user. This overview is intended to be part of a larger series of articles I am working on to help you determine which is the best computer for you. A question I get asked a lot more often.
Lets address your operating system choices in order of market share, just to be objective.