Business of all volumes has a necessity in common. A platform to better relate, collaborate and to manage the workflow. Be it employee monitoring or working on a task at hand, the job is to unite all the efforts to develop a more systematic and productive environment. Big enterprises have their custom build software to meet their specific demands. However budding entrepreneurs since being on a limited budget needs to rely on free tools available. Well in case you are looking for one, here is Apptivo, a web-based app, that can take care of almost all the business needs you can possibly think of.

After filing up the sign up form get started with the application. You will get to choose from the category of apps you want to have included. You can select them later on too. Here is a review of the app categories you can have within the service.

Collaboration:

This part is dedicated to sharing documents, storing contacts, putting up events and you also get a fax service (paid).

Sales:

The sales category lists tools to deal with customers, leads, probable options to create sale and orders.

Project Management:

This part is all about managing projects and maintaining a scheduled timeframe.

Employees:

Manage your employees in a better way. Keep records such as designation, department, pay scale, legal info and lots more related to a specific employee.

Product Management:

Listing items and customer requirements are dealt with using the apps included in this section.

Website Management:

If you want to market your business online, these tools will definitely help you manage your domains and blogs. If you do not have any domains as of now, you can create them here as well. You can even configure your online payment gateway with this tool. Listed services include Paypal, Google Checkout and many others too.

Invoices:

Apptivo comes with a standalone invoicing service which you can use to request payments from your customers.

Customer Services:

This being one of the key factors for any trusted business, Apptivo provides two basic tool to deal with it. One is designed to handle cases raised by customer complaints and suggestions. Another deals with RMA (Return Material Authorization) specifically.

Fund Raising:

If you are looking for tools that let you handle investors (present and probable) as well as funding rounds there are three tools that can let you do that efficiently.

Marketing:

This is perhaps the most important element for a growing business. Hence, you get a complete array of 5 tools included in this section. These take care of campaigns, loyalty management, message templates, pricing, promotions and targets.

Supply-Chain and Sourcing:

Finally these two sections handle the supply chain of your business. Managing relations with manufacturers and suppliers to logistics, all are being taken care of with the tools listed under these two sections.

These comprises the only free tools offered by Apptivo. You get to buy more apps if isn’t included among the free apps.

With the quick overview of the online tool or rather collection of tools it can be inferred that this definitely promises to be a powerful business companion to anyone who is looking for a free alternative. Provided the benefits of a web based alternative in many cases such as platform independence, installation overhead, portability etc this tool deserves to a worthy try. However, take a good look at them yourselves and let us know, if you liked it or not.

TIP: We have previously covered OpenPetra, an open source project that lets you achieve a part of the tasks mentioned above.

GE.TT is an online file sharing service that lets you share any file with anyone. Sharing or sending files has become a necessity these days and with the rising demand, more apps have been developed to serve the purpose.

GE.TT addresses the task with a very simple three-step solution. Upload, share and move on. No need to sign up for an account. Go to the site and upload your file and share it with anyone on Facebook and Twitter. You can also share the file with anyone by sending the sharing URL. Users can share multiple files with a single GE.TT URL.

There is also an option to share the file by sending an email to the person by filling up the email form. All the files that you share using GE.TT expire after 30 days.

However, you can also sign up for the service. The only added advantage of having an account is that you can view the list and stats for the shared URLs. GE.TT has no restrictions on the size of the file you can share, but browsers can put an upload limit of 2GB.

Techie-Buzz Verdict:

Considering all the options it provide and that too in a simple way, the tool is highly recommended. One thing to note is that, the shared files being public, confidential information should not be shared using this service.

Techie Buzz Rating: 4/5 (Excellent)

Microsoft Live Labs has rolled out a new web based tool named ZoomIt to zoom any image on the web. All you need to do is copy the URL which holds the image and then paste it in the create box and hit the button Create.

When I checked the quality of zoomed image, well, I am sorry to say that the Windows default zooming (in Windows Photo Gallery) served better. However the tool surely proves handy if you wish to zoom any image on the web and not necessarily download it.

The good thing about the online tool is that you can embed the zoom tool (with an online image you wish to show) on your web page. Following is an example of that.

Techie-Buzz Verdict

If you are an webmaster and wish to demonstrate a big image which you can’t embed normally use Zoom.it. This way you can embed the picture as a whole without disturbing your website layout.

There are many file sharing services out there. Many offer simple free file hosting, however, I don’t know of any that offer as many ways to share files and share ideas as the Drop.io service. I recently received a letter from them that mentioned a cool feature I wasn’t aware of. Here’s the letter:

Few know this, but it’s easy (not to mention useful) to record a voicemail inside a drop.

Here’s how:
1. Start a ‘drop’ with 1-click
2. Inside the drop, hit the button that says ‘create a free number’
3. Call that number and leave a voice message
… that’s it! The message will automatically become an mp3.

Reporters use this function as an easy way to record interviews on-the-ground and podcasters use it for their shows. We like to leave personal greetings on drops filled with photos for our friends and family.

Check out the voicemail we left for you – and leave us a message in return.
http://drop.io/maynewsletter

I can think of several other ways to use a public (or private) online voice mail. There are many other useful Drop.io features you might want to check out. Here’s short video about them:

Here are a few of our previous posts about the Drop.io site and services:

1. Drop.io Extension For Google Chrome

2. Drop.io | A File Sharing Program, which is more than just RapidShare

3. Send 100MB Attachments With Yahoo Mail

4. Drop.io, A Service To Privately Share Your Files

5. Drop.io Extension For Google Chrome

Be sure to let us know if you have some new ideas how to use this or any other file sharing service.

For the amount of time I have been around with budding graphic designers, mostly students, the constant complaint I receive about their passion/hobby/interest/study is that the tools involved especially vector illustration and general high-quality image editing is the price of the software. Now, generally they have to shell out quite a bit for the graphics tablet (if they are seriously into design and illustration) and the add-on cost of the software compels quite a few of them to go the pirate way. Well, all that changes now as the powerful suite of online editors ranging from image to vector to even sound editing has become completely free!

I am sure there was a collective jump of joy when Aviary announced their decision. The feather in their cap (no puns intended!) is the Raven vector editor which is the first online vector editor in the world. It is easy to set up and you can be flirting away with creativity within minutes of signing up (it’s free now!). But that is just one part of the story. Couple this with Phoenix, the image editor with masks, layers, effects and all that good stuff and Toucan, the dedicated swatch editor as well as Peacock, the effects enhancing editor (aptly named the visual laboratory) and you have all the tools needed for a great illustration/drawing/fan-art!

But the remaining two are new and one of them is extremely pleasant to hear about! Yes, Myna, the audio remixing editor (I cannot even begin about how aptly their tools are named, but considering the fact that the myna bird consistently mimics other birds in its own voice really struck a chord!) lets you do quite a lot of things with audio. And to finish it all off, Aviary rounded it up with Falcon, the image markup tool, so you do not need to look around for an image capturing tool. It even has a Firefox plugin so rejoice!

Thus, online editing almost completes a full circle and cloud computing does look like it is the future. But for those who are not interested in the future of computing and all that mundane semi-philosophical stuff and who just want to design, Aviary is the way to go. Enjoy! And do tell us what you think of it in the comments.