Top 5 geeky tools everyone should use to make life better.

Gareth    Customer Services, eCommerce     37 signals, dropbox, evernote, Skype, software, tools, tweetdeck

Being a small business is like being a surfer, you’re either riding waves so high it makes you giddy, or just trying to breathe through a lot of water! We’ve been in business now for over 3 years, and over that time, we’ve definitely improved the way we do things, but there are several key tools that we use that we couldn’t do without now. These tools help us no-end to keep on top of the ever growing beast that is Webtogs.

This is our list of the ones we feel to be essential in our day to day lives, both as a small business or from a personal productivity point of view. There are many more that could have gone in, but these are the tops as they say. So in the best chart tradition, here’s our rundown from 5 through to number 1 (cue music)

TWEETDECK Just two of us use it in the office, but it’s the social media hub we’ve come to rely on. Twitter, linkedin, Facebook all come in to here and it helps us keep an eye on customer services issues, lets us spread news about whats going on at Webtogs, and in the wider outdoor world, as well as enabling us to chat with our customers. Flexibility in following people, managing Twitter lists and our FB pages all mean it gets our vote for managing our presence out on the web.

EVERNOTE The Daddy of all note systems, we love One Note, but as we work hard at home as well as at work, having a notebook that synchronises between home, phone and office is invaluable. We love the ability to tag everything to the nth degree and there are some great examples out there such as Steve Horners use for storing routes. I also love the ability to photo our ramblings on the whiteboard, if only it was able to then decipher my Doctor style writing……

37 SIGNALS The guys at 37 signals have produced some awesome tools, but the ones we use are Highrise and Basecamp. Highrise is a contact management software and we use it to store details of all the people we deal with, notes to do with them and ourselves. The ability to access everywhere is crucial. Basecamp is a seriously simple project management tool, that although not favoured by all, helps us keep track of our larger development projects. Both are seriously easy to use, available everywhere and incredibly useful.

DROPBOX A small piece of genius that we have been using for a while now. Automatically installs within your documents on either your smartphone, Mac, PC or tablet  and then auto-syncs anything you put in there between those devices. You now have the ability to specify what you want synchronised within your folders, and it’s ability to just quietly do it’s job without thinking about it is testament to how easy it is to use. So easy I now use it as backup for my parents!

SKYPE Simply put, we couldn’t live without it now. This is our key tool for communicating as a business as we have a warehouse, an office, and people working remotely. Video calling is brilliant, file sharing a doddle, calls are free and we can also use it as backup for taking calls from customers.

So, this is what we couldn’t do without, what’s your experience, and what would make it in to your top 5 list of seriously handy tools ?

Skype for Business

Gareth    eCommerce, Gareth     Gareth, Skype

As a small business, we have been using Skype for several years and it has really helped our productivity. All of us have our own accounts so we were chuffed when they released their new version, 4.1. That chuffedness lasted for about 30 minutes before we realised just how un-business friendly it has become. As Comrade G for the Webtogs republic of Skype we have four main demands we would like to make known

1) We can no longer transfer calls, why oh why did they remove this?

2) The ability to punch a number in on the call bar at the bottom of the main window has been removed, for those comrades who make a lot of calls each day, the additional click is frustrating to bring up the dial up window.

3) File transfers are also now listed within the main IM window rather than separately. The amount of times I have closed an IM window only to terminate a file transfer is more than a little irritating

4) Conversely, a pop up for each call you get that stays there when you take a lot of calls is simply frustrating and leads to Window spam. Pleeeeeeeeeeeeeese can we have the option for calls to simply appear as a tab on the main window along with conversations.

These are our main requests to enable Skype to return to being a tool of the proletariat and the minimalist, call friendly business application it was before. Vive la revolution!