Startups face a lot of challenges, but putting together the tools and infrasture they need to get up and running shouldn’t be one of them. Startups need to minimize cost and effort so they can focus on brewing their secret sauce, but they can’t afford to look like amateurs.
That’s where ReadWriteRecommends comes in. The Startup Toolkit…
Tag Archives: Software Guides
RWW Recommends: The Startup Toolkit
5 Tools to Improve Your Idea Before You Write a Line of Code
In my last post on ReadWriteStart, I talked about how, in many cases, it wasn’t an advantage to build your start-up in stealth mode. As a continuation of that theme, I thought it would be interesting to explore five tools you can use to iterate and improve your startup idea before writing one line of code. There is nothing worse than building a…
What Are the Best Web Tools For Running Your Business? [Infographic]
For small businesses and startups, the selection of Web-based tools available for things like communication, productivity, finance and IT is seemingly limitless, with new products launching left and right each week.
In a recent survey, business app advice startup BestVendor asked 550 startup executives and managers which tools they most…
5 Free Collaborative Whiteboard Apps For the iPad
It seems as though the minute the iPad was announced, innumerable light bulbs went off as developers and entrepreneurs everywhere came to the same realization: “We could totally use this device as a digital whiteboard!” Indeed, a search for the word “whiteboard” in the App Store returns a whopping 170 iPad apps.
Although the device’s 10-inch…
Learn From Your Competitors’ Google AdSense Mistakes With MixRank
When setting up Google AdWords campaigns, it can pretty difficult to guess which ad copy is going to perform the best. Sometimes even the tiniest, most unexpected changes can have a dramatic impact on ad performance. But how do you know what will be most effective?
A new Y Combinator-backed startup called MixRank wants to help take some of the…
How Many of Your Company’s Facebook Fans Are Local?
For small, local businesses using Facebook for social marketing, building up a fan base is important, but only so far as the people clicking the “like” button actually live nearby.
While some businesses can sell their products and services online to customers regardless of location, truly local businesses who serve a particular locale need to…
Fuze Meeting Now Integrates With High-End Telepresence Systems
FuzeBox wants to make telepresence a less proprietary, boxed-in experience for businesses. To do this, they’ve begun integrating Fuze Meeting, their cross-platform online meeting product, with high-end telepresence systems like Polycom, Tandberg and LifeSize.
This move lets companies hang onto their legacy teleconference solutions while easily…
GrexIt Saves Information From Dying in the Depths of Your Inbox
If you’re like most modern professionals, you conduct a lot of discussions over email. We don’t often realize it as we go about our day-to-day, but the information contained in some of those emails can have some long-term value to the organization.
Even with a system of stars and labels such as what Google Apps users are accustomed to…
Enloop Writes Your Business Plan For You (And Tells You If It’s Crazy or Not)
When it comes to writing a business plan, there’s no shortage of online tools and tutorials to help entrepreneurs turn their ideas into a realistic goal. but how many of those tools automatically generate the text of your business plan and then use a predictive algorithm to score the likelihood of the business’s success? Well, at least one…
Accept Payments From Your Site in Minutes With PintPay
For startups and small businesses operating online, one of the biggest headaches can be setting up the ability to accept payments from one’s Website.
The latest attempt at relieving this pain point is PintPay, a Web app created by former Scribd developer James Yu, who also authored a JavaScript API for Gmail called Gmailr.
Optimize Your Web Content As You Type With InboundWriter
For online marketers and other content creators, the need to optimize one’s content for search and social media is now well-known. What’s less clear for many is how to go about it. Which keywords are best to use? How frequently should you use them?
It was with these questions in mind that Eightfold Logic created InboundWriter, a new social…
Take Meeting Minutes From Your Tablet or Laptop With Minutes.io
Whether you meet with colleagues in person or from remote locations, there’s still a need to keep an accurate record of what was discussed and what next actions are required. You could go the old school, pen-and-paper route, but those notes will still need to be typed up and shared with colleagues.
To simply the process, you might want to try…
With So Many Alternatives, Why Does Microsoft Office Still Reign?
It’s been more than two decades since Microsoft’s now-ubiquitous suite of office productivity software was released. Although we’ve seen numerous free or low-cost alternatives arrive on the scene since then – OpenOffice.org, Google Docs and Zoho Docs to name a few – Microsoft Office still remains overwhelmingly dominant in this space.
Forrester…
Get Things Done on Your iPad With Remember the Milk
Remember the Milk, a popular task management Web and mobile app, recently launched their long-awaited offering for the iPad.
Although the desktop Web version of Remember the Milk works fine on the iPad, the interface doesn’t quite take advantage of the tablet form factor. Their new native iOS app fixes that problem with a fancy layout reminiscent…
Boost Your Website’s Performance with Yottaa
After several days of recent downtime with Amazon Web Services, the promise to optimize websites via the cloud may seem both promising and daunting to small businesses. But that’s what the Cambridge-based Yottaa is offering with the launch today of a new Web performance optimization service. Yotta knows its way around the cloud, as it was one…
Web Form Builder Wufoo Acquired by SurveyMonkey
SurveyMonkey, one of the Web’s preeminent tools for building interactive surveys, announced today that it has acquired Wufoo, a drag-and-drop service for building Web forms.
Wufoo was quick to assure customers that its popular tool would not be gobbled up and dismantled by SurveyMonkey, who plan on leaving Wufoo as-is but want to “nurture it and…
iContact Offers Free Email Marketing Service for Small Businesses
While much of the focus in online marketing has been on social media over the last few years, there’s still something to be said for the value of good, old fashioned email. Marketing via email can be highly effective, but smaller companies don’t necessarily need all the bells and whistles offered by most email marketing service providers.
In an…
Google Analytics Begins Rolling Out New Dashboards
Google Analytics, one of the most widely-used Web traffic monitoring products out there, is gearing up to launch a completely new version soon. To get things started, they’ve begun rolling out a completely redesigned dashboard to some users.
Google first announced the new version of Analytics at its Google Analytics User Conference in San…
Now You Can Chat With Your Team For Free With Talker
Talker, a Web-based group chat application geared toward remote teams is now available for free, having been rolled into the Teambox collaboration suite.
Talker is one of the many group messaging apps that seem to be coming out of the woodwork lately. It’s a browser-based chat environment that supports inline images and videos and has a slew of…
Manage Projects From Your iPad with Smartsheet
Smartsheet, a collaborative tool for managing work and projects, has been made available to iPad users in the form of an iOS-friendly, HTML5 Web app.
At its core, Smartsheet is a bit like a glorified, Web-based spreadsheet program, but it’s geared toward managing tasks, planning projects and collaborating with others. It has calendars, Gantt…