Please find below different Productivity tools as per classification:

1. Office Tools:

The following Office tools will definitely increase productivity & save time of the Entrepreneur:

• Password Manager: KeePass, RoboForm, KeyWallet
• Time Tracking: LazyMeter, Focus booster
• Accounting: Expensify, TradeShift
• Human Resources: Odesk, Freelancer
• CRM : Sales Force, Zoho

2. Web Tools:

Now, check various Web tools available:

• Survey Builder: Survey Monkey, Kwiksurveys
• Bug Tracking Tool: 16 Bugs
• Enquiry Form Builder: Wufoo, Formsite
• Data Storage: Dropbox, Box
• Create Landing Pages: InstaPage, Unbounce
• Spell Checker for Websites: CheckDog, TextTrust
• Live Chat: Chatango, BoldChat
• Webinars : GoToMeeting, Webex
• Video Conferencing: Skype, Freeconference, GoToMeeting
• Social Book Marking Button: Add This, ShareThis
• Resize Images: PicResize, ResizeYourImage
• Customer Support Tool: ZenDesk, UserVoice
• Project Management Tool: Basecamp, Jira
• Web Analytics: Google Analytics, Clicky
• Online Reputation Management: Radian6, Simplify360
• Language Translation Tools: Google Translation, Yahoo ! Babel Fish
• Share Images and videos: Jing
• URL Shortener: goo.gl , bit.ly

3. Document Management:

Read some tools available for managing your documents:

• PDF to Word Converter: PDFtoWord, PDFonline
• Word to PDF Converter: Doc2PDF, WordtoPDF
• Online Document Collaboration : Live Documents , Google Docs, Confluence, SlideShare
• Plagiarism Checker : Plagium

4. Social Networking:

Please find some tools for Social Networking below:

• Build your Social Network: Ning, Grouply
• Enterprise Social Community: Yammer
• Tweet Scheduler: Social Oomph, Future Tweets

5. Email Manager: Manage your Emails

• Mass Mailer : Mail Chimp, Constant Contact
• Send Future mail: Fumes.me
• Google Apps for Business

6. SEO: Useful tools for SEO
• SEOCentro
• SEOMoz
• Tynt

7. Hardware:
• Smart Phones
• IP Phone

The study, highlights the growing trend of consumers using mobile phones in stores for purchasing decisions.

Pew reported the following in its survey :

• 38% of cell owners used their phone to call a friend while they were in a store for advice about a purchase they were considering making

• 24% of cell owners used their phone to look up reviews of a product online while they were in a store

• 25% of adult cell owners used their phones to look up the price of a product online while they were in a store, to see if they could get a better price somewhere else

Taken together, just over half (52%) of all adult cell owners used their phone for at least one of these three reasons over the holiday shopping season and one third (33%) used their phone specifically for online information while inside a physical store—either product reviews or pricing information.

Pew further reports about the demographic patterns of the respondents in the survey:

• Cell owners ages 18-49 are significantly more likely to use their phones for online product reviews than are cell owners ages 50 and older. Cell owners ages 65 and older are especially unlikely to do this—just 4% did so this holiday season.

• Urban and suburban cell owners are roughly twice as likely as rural cell owners to have recently used their phone to look up online reviews of a product they found in a physical store.

• Non-white cell owners are more likely than white cell owners to look up online product reviews, and those who have attended college are more likely to do so than those who have not.

The Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project is an initiative of the Pew Research Center, a nonprofit “fact tank” that provides information on the issues, attitudes, and trends shaping the USA and the world.

Mobile users are increasingly using apps rather than browsing the Web as the sales of Smartphones skyrocket. For the study, Flurry tracked anonymous sessions across more than 140,000 applications running Flurry analytics and compared it to mobile web data usage from ComScore and Alexa.

This shift in activity from traditional Web browsers to mobile apps is driven primarily by changing consumer habits related to Facebook. Rather than accessing Facebook through a standard browser, users are now accessing the site through mobile apps. Games (49 %) and social networking apps (30 %) accounted for almost 80 % of time spent in mobile applications, according to Flurry. However, the decrease in Mobile web usage, could be evidence of consumers’ growing preference for rich, native application experiences.

Flurry, said “Facebook and Google are already locked in a battle for the online consumer, with Facebook having steadily taken share from the search engine giant over the last several years. Recently, as Google countered with its socially-oriented Google Plus, Circles and Hangouts services, Facebook added features such as news feeds to further lock in consumers to its service by obviating the need to discover content through search”.

Flurry further estimates that the cumulative number of iOS and Android devices activated will surge past 1 billion. It is estimated that, over 800 million PCs were sold between 1981 and 2000, making the rate of iOS and Android smart device adoption more than 4 times faster than that of PCs.

However, Flurry reports that the growth of mobile app usage appears to be slowing. Between December 2010 and June 2011, the time spent in mobile applications grew more than 23 %, but from June 2011 to December 2011 time spent in apps has grown 15 %. While the growth in time spent on mobile apps is slowing, users are engaged in more sessions, visiting apps more frequently than in the past.

Fumes is a free service which stores your email, and delivers to the recipient at the requested time & date in the future. Now, Fumes has added another feather to it cap – It can remind you of your Friend’s Birthday if you have an account with Facebook. You can subscribe for Fumes’s Birthday reminder service for free and get automated reminder emails for all your friend’s birthdays.

When somebody logs to Fumes using their Facebook account, an option of selecting your friend’s birthday will appear. If you wish to get reminded of your friends’ birthday, then you can choose that option. If they give the yes option, their Birthdays will be stored in Fumes. Whenever, these Birthdays happen you will get a reminder from Fumes. Set it, so you do not forget it.

The above feature of Fumes is a simple way of remembering friend’s birthdays. The original idea for the website was simple, remind people of various events by getting a reminder mail from Fumes. We received such a positive feedback that we began to add new features to Fumes. The above option of getting a reminder of your friend’s Birthday happened due to this experiment.

The good thing about Fumes is that it keeps track of as many friend’s birthdays as you like. At Fumes, we are committed to providing a cool service which is a true benefit to our users. We listen to and respond to user’s feedback and most of the features of Fumes have been made as a direct result of this interaction.

In 2007, BusinessWeek named Ries one of the Best Young Entrepreneurs of Tech and in 2009 he was honoured with a TechFellow award in the category of Engineering Leadership. He serves on the advisory board of a number of technology startups, and has worked as a consultant to a number of startups, companies, and venture capital firms.

He is the author of several books including The Lean Startup. The Lean Startup by Eric Ries explains How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses.

Learning from his own mistakes chronicled in his blog , his team formulated a methodology that is changing the world of startups. Eric makes statements like “failure is preventable”, “don’t launch” and urges entrepreneurs to stop using “vanity metrics”.

Listen to his interview below:

Check, fly.twitter.com for details of the above changes.

Another major change for brands  is new brand pages.

See screenshot of @JetBlue below:

The two big changes are a new banner just below the profile information that stretches across the page and the ability to pin a tweet at the top of each brand’s stream. This will give brands a more distinctive presence on Twitter.

Twitter is launching the new brand pages with 21 partners: @AmericanExpress,   @BestBuy,  @bing ,   @chevrolet,   @CocaCola,   @Dell , @DisneyPixar,  @generalelectric,   @Heineken,  @HP,  @intel,  @JetBlue,  @Kia,  @McDonalds,  @nikebasketball,  @NYSE_Euronext,   @GhostProtocol, @pepsi,   @Staples,  @subwayfreshbuzz, and   @VerizonWireless.

However, you will need to use the new version of Twitter to see the above Brand pages. Twitter will slowly roll out enhanced profile pages to a wider audience of brands in the coming months. To learn more go to fly.twitter.com/ads. To learn how to get the new version of Twitter, go to fly.twitter.com.

The greatest advantage you can get from hiring an Individual Software Vendor is that of complete attention to your project. If you hire a veteran Individual Software Vendor with the right expertise, you can be sure that your project will receive the professional’s full attention.  Unlike with a Software Company, where a Development team works on so many projects at a time, an Individual Software Vendor usually works on just 1 or 2 projects at a time. This ensures that quality is not compromised.

You can stay in personal touch with an Individual Software Vendor and provide feedback on the parts of the project already accomplished, which the Vendor can immediately act upon. While there is a certain element of uncertainty involved with an Individual Software Vendor, most of them are more than willing to work late nights, so that the project is completed on schedule.

Finally, the payment terms of an Individual Software Vendor is more than reasonable compared to a Software Company.  An Individual Software Vendor also turns out to be cost-effective compared to a Software Company.

One of the main advantages of hiring a Software company is that you can take advantage of the numerous skilled professionals employed by that company. With a programming company you can assign multiple projects to the company and expect to get them completed within a reasonable period of time. While you may not be able to communicate with each individual working on your project, you may be assigned an Account manager whose primary job is to understand your requirements & communicate then to the Development team.

A Software company can quickly replace a team member who has resigned from the company, thereby ensuring that your project is delivered on time. Therefore, hiring a Software company protects you from turnover risk.

Pros and Cons of hiring a Individual Software Vendor Vs. Software Company:

Let’s see policy of large companies towards Individual Software Vendors Vs. Software companies. Intel, for example, says it primarily collaborates with Software companies & Individual Software Vendors, alike. Therefore, we can understand that the right Skill Sets & timeliness is more important than other factors when hiring an Individual Software Vendor or a Software company.

Since 2001, with the emergence of Crawler-based Search Engines, the process of Search engine submission is not required & it is actually a useless exercise. The better way would be to earn Inbound or back-links from other Websites. However, even today we have Submission pages for Yahoo !, Google & Bing ( the odd man out, Ask.com has no Submission page. Instead it indexes Websites using other links on the web).

However, the concept of Search Engine Inclusion was alive till around 2004. During that time, if you wanted to include a Website in Yahoo’s index you had to pay to Inktomi. i.e., it was paid Inclusion, to be specific. After Inktomi’s ( Yahoo had acquired Inktomi earlier ) natural death, the concept of Paid Inclusion in Crawler-based Search Engines had taken a beating. Today, it is free to get a website indexed in Crawler-based Search Engines, like Google, Yahoo, Bing & Ask.

The acronym SEO was coined, before 2000. However, the term Search Engine Optimization became popular after 2002. I remember in the year 2001, I found it very hard to get (and failed…) an investor for my SEO firm. The investor was very skeptical about the art( or Science? ) of SEO & repeatedly told me that SEO will die & something else will come in its place. However, even after 10 years now, SEO is alive & kicking with no signs of decline in the immediate future.

SEO is defined as a process by which a website is promoted online. A SEO-friendly website is easily indexed and ranked by the Search Engines which makes its probable customers find the website easily. There are a lot of techniques involved in the process of SEO and getting them to implement is another huge task. Unfortunately, over the past 12 years, a great number of misconceptions have emerged about how the search engines operate and what’s required to perform effectively.

The journey from Search Engine Inclusion to Search Engine Optimization was not easy. With the advent of Social Media, the Search Engine Algorithms seems to have been altered to favour a Website having a good presence in the Social Media. Presently, Social Media Optimization(SMO) and Search Engine Optimization(SEO) are becoming more and more interlinked. It follows that if somebody has to be proficient in SEO one must also have a strong grasp of the Social Media as well.

If today, you get a mail from a purported SEO firm offering Search Engine Inclusion & Search engine submission services, run away !