13 Cool Web Tools to Help You Stay Connected With Your Team Businesses are no longer restrained by location or physical space. Use these application to collaborate and expand.
By Jeff Boss •
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In today's day and age, working interdependently across geographical boundaries is the norm. Whether your team is located with you or working out of a straw hut in Africa, the technology available today makes it easier to not only stay up to date but also ahead of the entrepreneurial power curve.
Related: 5 Tech Tools that Help Businesses Compete With the Big Guys
To show the wealth of tech opportunity available at your fingertips, here are 13 mobile apps and websites to help you and your team work together across time and space:
For video conferencing
1. Awesome talk: With no login or signup, this just may be one of the easiest and most convenient "talk tools" out there. Plus, communication is encrypted, so go ahead, "selfie" away.
2. Veeting: Upload a presentation, use a virtual whiteboard, share your screen and more. You'll have unlimited free videoconferencing for up to 30 minutes but be limited to a five-person maximum for video and 10 for audio. Pay as you go or subscribe.
3. Redbooth: This is the one-stop shop for productivity and communication. Manage your project by integrating your DropBox, Box or Google Drive accounts while also staying connected with your team through video.
For increased productivity
4. Toodledo provides a place to store notes, lists and to-dos. One cool feature is that if you have free time, it will calculate which tasks would be most beneficial (and feasible) to tackle in the moment. In other words, it "analyzes your due-dates, priorities, time estimates and other characteristics to determine the best use of your time. If you have two hours free, Toodledo can pick the tasks from your list that will be the most effective usage of your time," according to its website.
5. Hubstaff: This is it -- the all-in-one productivity masterpiece. A tool to track time, manage projects and send payments, Hubstaff offers the essentials for competitive prices (free to $15).
For better project management
6. Twoodo allows you to generate workflows from team conversations. Twoodo uses hashtag technology that immediately sends a task to your inbox and synchronizes with Google calendar -- a must if you live in inbox hell.
7. Team.Do: With the smorgasbord of referrals, this tool can't be bad. In fact, it's quite good, as you can customize your team's workflow, minimize calendar clutter by setting recurring tasks, as well as modify how you see your tasks (calendar or timeline).
Related: The 25 Tools Every Entrepreneur Should Know About
8. daPulse: This is a great tool for keeping communication channels open and collaborating as a team. DaPulse displays a project team or company's operating rhythm such that each silo, or functional group, knows what the others are doing.
For smart money management
9. Stripe lets you process and accept payments online and through mobile apps.
For marketing
10. Urban Airship: Self-heralded as "the most globally deployed mobile-push messaging service," Urban Airship leverages its technology to target customers based on their locations and send them push notifications of products or services of interest (such as yours).
11. Pingdom: Having a company website is imperative to marketing as it builds credibility and customer awareness. However, if your website goes down during peak business hours, there's no telling the loss in potential revenue. Enter Pingdom, a website-monitoring service that advises you when your site is down and how well it performs.
12. Switchrus: With a headline of "Free Ad Space for Startups," there's no ambiguity with this one. Exchange your ad with somebody else's and boost traffic to your site with an average of over 7,500 monthly impressions.
For customer service
13. Keeping: Get rid of the external help desk by linking your Google account to Keeping, and receive questions from customers to one email address. Leverage your company's depth and breadth by letting the rest of your team answer support questions as they come in.
Don't reinvent the wheel. Leverage what already exists and use as many tools as possible without breaking the bank.
Have any other recommendations? Share them in the comments section below.
