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Increase your website’s global reach with the Google Website Translator Gadget

maggie.hunsucker — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 20:27:59 +0000

If you take a gander at your website’s analytics, you may be surprised to find that many of your visitors come from other countries. One way to increase your site or blog’s global appeal, is to make it readable in all languages.

Thanks to Google’s Website Translator Gadget, you don’t need to invest in a professional translator or complex multilingual platform. Simply add a snippet of code to your site, and your site content will be available in over 50 languages.

Here’s how it works. When a visitor comes to your site, the Translator Gadget looks at their browser settings. If it’s different than your language (the language your content is written in), a small banner will pop up, prompting the user to push a button. Voila! Your site is readable in that user’s language.

Google’s been hard at work making the web truly a universal platform (the launch of the Translator Gadget just so happens to correspond with International Translation Day). This idea is free, easy to install, and doesn’t alter the look or feel or your site. The Translator banner only appears if a foreign user visits your site – and when they do, your site is ready.

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Sync files across your computer, laptop, and iPhone with Dropbox

maggie.hunsucker — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 20:21:28 +0000

It’s a common scenario. You start a document from your work computer. Email it yourself (or save to a memory stick) to make further edits from a home computer or laptop. Email it to a coworker to add their stamp, who it turn emails it to another coworker, and so on and so forth.

At this point, you’ve got multiply versions of the document floating around. Who knows if what’s made its way back to you is the final version – a dicey situation if that document in question is being sent to a client or used during an important meeting.

That’s where Dropbox for iPhone comes in handy. Before we discuss the merits of this application, we should look at Dropbox’s core product. Dropbox is an online file management system. Users simply drag-and-drop files (documents, images, audio, and video) to a Dropbox folder, which uploads them to secure web server. All files are accessible through a web browser and any local versions of Dropbox you install. This could be your work computer, home computer, laptop – and now your iPhone.

The iPhone application is free, but it requires a Dropbox account to work. Dropbox gives you 2GB for free, and you have the option of upgrading to 50GB for $9.99/month or 100GB for $19.99/month. Once installed on your iPhone, you have immediate access to all your Dropbox files. Even better, any photos or videos you take with your iPhone can be added to the Dropbox and automatically synced with your main account. During my testing, I was impressed with how quickly my computer files synced with my iPhone. I deposited the iPhone screenshot below in Dropbox and within a matter of seconds, it appeared on my computer Dropbox.

Dropbox is one of the better – if not best – file management systems I’ve seen. It’s simple and intuitive to use (seriously, no instructions needed), and it syncs files quickly and automatically (i.e. no orphan documents to worry about). Once your documents are in the Dropbox, you can further organize them into folders and if you choose, share these folders with friends and colleagues.

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Use product review search engine, Wize.com, to source product insights

maggie.hunsucker — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 18:41:46 +0000

Product recommendation sites have evolved beyond good product/bad product reviews. The new breed actually looks at search behavior and serves up products based on specific customer needs.

Take Wize.com for example. It gathers and analyzes product reviews from hundreds of sites, including Amazon, BestBuy, CNET, Target, and Walmart. Wize recently rolled out some new features and an upgraded search algorithm. The gist being, customers don’t have to sift through countless product reviews to find “the best dishwasher for energy efficiency” or “the worst camera for night shots”. Wize finds these results for them.

While this is an impressive feat from a semantic search perspective, we think marketers could use a site like Wize.com to their advantage. For example, what features are being highlighted about your product? Who are your competitors by feature? Not to mention, the obvious – are the reviews favorable?

Wize is geared towards consumer goods, so we wouldn’t recommend it for a service industry or general brand monitoring. The idea here is to learn how customers are searching for/finding your products – and more importantly, what is leading to a sale.

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Make whiteboard notes electronically accessible with the Whiteboard Capture iPhone app

maggie.hunsucker — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 20:26:19 +0000

Whiteboards are still the go-to tool for brainstorming sessions. Even high-tech geeks like us tend to stick with the original (we have three extra large, double-sided whiteboards on wheels). Problem is, there’s no easy way to transfer information from the physical board to your computer.

That’s where the Whiteboard Capture iPhone App comes in. This handy dandy application lets you take a snapshot of your whiteboard and easily share the images via email. Granted, you can do this with any digital camera, but Whiteboard Capture removes the legwork and offers up some great editing tools.

For starters, the application automatically removes the glare that results from the whiteboard’s glossy surface. You can also remove old marker residue and other marring artifacts, which saves you the hassle in Photoshop later.

The result is a clean, print-ready whiteboard image that you can distribute to team members or email to yourself to upload to your own project management/collaboration software. If you have old whiteboard images stored away on your phone, you can also filter those with Whiteboard Capture.

Bottom line, some tools work better in the analog world. If you’re office relies on a whiteboard for meetings, sketching, collaboration, etc, here’s an easy and relatively cheap ($1.99/download) way to make that information electronically accessible.

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Attend a browser-based web conference via iPhone or Blackberry with Fuze Box

maggie.hunsucker — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 19:45:07 +0000

We’ve reviewed a couple of web conferencing tools on feed growth! The sell has always been the ability to meet with anyone, anywhere – anywhere in front of a computer, that is.

All that’s about to change with Fuze Box. Fuze Box is the first virtual meeting software that is mobile accessible. iPhone and Blackberry users can download apps from their respective app stores and attend conferences directly from their hand-held device. But that’s not the only trick Fuze Box has up its sleeve.

Fuze Box’s core product (Fuze Meeting) offers an impressive list of features, including:

Desktop sharing
High definition content sharing (stream HD video, graphics, and documents)
Annotation and whiteboard tools (mark-up video, audio, and images)
Participant fetch (lets you dial in missing attendees with one-click)
IM chat integration (supports Yahoo!, AIM, Google Talk, & IBM Lotus Sametime)
Easy-to-navigate interface

Fuze Box is browser-based, which means it works with both Mac and PC, and there’s no software or pesky plug-ins to install. Simply sign up, load content, invite meeting attendees, and you are good to go. Fuze Meeting costs $29/month, which gets you 2 GB storage space, up to 15 meeting attendees, and a toll-free conference bridge with 2 hours free talk time (additional minutes cost $.06/minute). Currently, Fuze Box is offering a 30-day free trial.

From what we’ve seen, Fuze Box is a pretty slick application. The intuitive interface and seamless integration of high-def content makes it a real contender with GotoMeeting and WebEx. Of course, we’re anxious to see the iPhone application in action.

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Feedly feed reader offers magazine-style layout and improved user experience

maggie.hunsucker — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 19:39:03 +0000

Feed readers make it easy to get your daily web digest, but they’re pretty bare bones. You sacrifice the on-site experience for the convenience of having all your news in one place.

That’s were Feedly comes in. It’s a Firefox add-on that displays all your news feeds in a very readable magazine-style layout. Instead of a never-ending feed stream, Feedly articles are grouped by source and ranked by the number or subscribers. Articles are further enhanced by thumbnail images, comments, and retweets, so you get many of the benefits of being on the actual site.

Top articles are featured prominently at the top of the page, while a column on the right explores the world beyond your personal reading list and offers up top recommendations from other users, YouTube, and Twitter. It might be easier to just show you Feedly in action:

Feedly doesn’t stop at just an improved user experience. It has some pretty nifty features of its own – particularly the search functionality. You can drill down within the current page or all your sources – or – explore the most recent results from other blogs, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, Amazon, and more. It’s a great way to incorporate new sites in your diet and if you’re like me, a great source for further news on a topic of interest. When you find something you like, you can subscribe with a single click and add to your Feedly reader.

I’m neglecting the best part too. Feedly automatically syncs with your Google Reader. There’s no need to populate feeds by hand or import a file. After installing the Firefox plug-in, Feedly had all my old favorites ready and waiting.

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