VerusNova

A great small business tool —

Invoice Journal - For the incredibly low price of zero dollars and zero cents you too can use Invoice Journal to send an unlimited number of invoices to an unlimited number of clients.

ADRIVE - A quick, easy, and secure solution to backup your valuable files - get 50GB for free.

ProQuo - Your personal information is being collected, bought, and sold by thousands of businesses every day. Without your consent. Stop the Junk Mail!

Are you having a fundraiser? How about a concert? Maybe you are starting up a new pizza business and want to give away free pizza for lunch to local residents. What is the best way to advertise online for free? First of all is your website, after that—

Here are 6 great event listing sites:

Zvents

Eventful

Upcoming (by Yahoo)

Craigslist (International; go to your local area)

Event Setter (International)

Event Space

Emoze - Push your personal & business emails, contacts & calendar directly to your mobile device! Works with outlook and is totally free. Service is independent of network technology and works on any wireless GSM, CDMA or Wi-Fi network including 2.5G and 3G such as WCDMA/UMTS, CDMA2000, 802.xx, Wi-Max, GPRS (2.5G), EDGE, CDMA 1xRTT, CDMA 1xEVDO, etc

Phone.com offers a virtual office for about $15/month including all types of phone services such as: follow me; voicemail; auto-attendant, calling cards, vanity numbers, and more.

DashWire lets you mirror the content on your phone onto the web. This is not only handy for backing up and transferring content, but allows you to actually perform many functions (like sending SMS messages) from your PC.

Whisher - This free app lets you share your WiFi with others in a safe and secure way, and in return, you get free WiFi everywhere.

If you don’t have a lot of time to learn computer skills and you have a problem you need resolved - check out PCLive.com 24×7 help desk. You pay a flat-rate and if they dont solve your problem you don’t have to pay!

PCLive.com solves a wide range of computer problems from removing spyware, adware or other malicious software to fixing problems with your Internet browser—all with one click or call. And all for just $59.95 per session.

If you prefer to try and attempt to fix it yourself, a great DIY site is How To Geek.
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Wired Magazine has a list of the Top Free music sites for streaming tunes….

“Cheat the Music Industry; Never Pay for Music Again”

I use Windows Remote Desktop (as well as VNC) to perform my remote server management for customers. Here is a little tip to keep you from having to go Start -> Accessories -> Communications -> RDC every time…
[courtesy of cybernetnews]

Create a desktop shortcut to Remote Desktop

Lifehacker has a good article I used to find a video encoder for one of my projects.

Top 10 Free Video Rippers, Encoders, and Converters

Here is a look at 2 new tools I thought might be useful to small business. One is for those still looking for an Outlook-style email contact system without the cost/hassle; the other is for creating marketing, training, and other screen shows.
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(1) I am always looking for a better online contact management software. I like Plaxo and a few others but ContactOffice – currently in beta — looks very promising. It reminds me of an Outlook interface with drag-and-drop in an online venue. I think this is a good solution for a very small team or office.
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(2) Screencast-O-Matic is the free and easy way to create a video recording of your screen and upload it for free hosting all from your browser with no install. You can export your screencast to quicktime (.mov) format. The maximum hosted screencast time is 15 minutes.

Rotaboard, makes it easy to manage and keep track of all your staff’s working schedules. While I have no use for this type of application - I imagine that this is extremely useful for those who do need it. I remember working fast food as a teen and the assistant manager spent hours trying to come up with all the permutations and create schedules for the upcoming week. This may be the best free tool I’ve seen for this type of job. It is head and shoulders above using Excel.

it has many features such as:

• Send notifications and share your online rota with your staff members.
• Customisable shift types
• drag and drop interface
• regular and recurring shifts

If this is something you might need in your business - this is a must testdrive app!

Do you need to monitor your servers, applications, and would you like to know in advance when you need more computing and IT resources?
Up.Time Software provides - “Easy Server monitoring, from dashboard to detailed metrics in seconds… Monitor all of your IT Services, Applications, and Databases with ease… Easy to use capacity monitoring and reporting helps you identify trends…”
You can download a 14-day trial of this software online - there is no info about how much it costs, only a place to request a quote.
It looks very feature-rich and has lots of easy to read graphs and reports. I may give this a whirl soon and let you know how I fared….

ALSO - Product Tour is here.

Keeping your privacy these days can be quite a challenge…
Two of the more useful tools in helping keep your identity hidden are disposable email addresses and phone numbers. Another tool which can be used for good or evil — is Caller ID Spoofing (yes, it’s legal). We actually use this for our corporate PBX because our VOIP provider shows the wrong phone number for our outgoing calls and I used a spoof script to make sure it shows the correct callback number.

Disposable Emails and Messages

MintEmail

Pookmail

Self-Destruct Message

Sizlopedia has 20 more options for this…

Caller ID Spoofing

SpoofCard
Phone Gangster

Disposable & Hidden Phone Numbers

Numbr (used to be Craigsnumber)
Tossable Digits
MyClassAd
MyAdBox
Jangl
My Private Line

NetworkText - Send SMS messages to everyone in a group, free. You define the groups. This is great for work teams (e.g. meeting cancelled), as well as after-work events and notifying family members.

Rip Off Report - Have you been ripped off? Write about it online - better yet, check before you buy/invest

Xpensr - Record and track your business expenses with your mobile phone - I admit that I use little pieces of paper for this, but I probably should use something like Xpensr.

Tumblr - the fastest way to create a quick multi-media blog including video, images, audio, text, chat, etc. free

Top-40 GIMP Plugins - If you are a fan of the free photoshop-like tool called GIMP, then you will want to check out these great plugins.

Not sure why but most of my best ideas come to me while driving - maybe I drive too much. I also remember all the stuff I forgot in the car. I still say nothing beats a digital voice recorder — which I leave in the car door and review just before I get out of the car each day. But since I don’t like to take it out of my car - I sometimes find myself in a similar situation elsewhere, and without paper and pen.

There are 2 free services that allow you to use your cell phone for a similar purpose. Even better, these services will translate your speech to text and email it to you. (check spelling though!)

Give these two a whirl:

Jott - Create an account and dial 866-JOTT-123

reQall - Dial 888-9-REQALL (numbers for Canada and UK as well); works with iPhone too.

CuePrompter - Free Computer Teleprompter site - Great if you do a lot of speeches or create videos, etc.

PassPub - The best random password generator I’ve seen - includes WEP keys, and pronounce-able passwords

PicMarkr - Add custom watermarks to any photos (assuming they are yours!) - This is great for those who create visual art and want to sell it online or provide samples.

CameraSummary - A great online tool that extracts all EXIM and other data from a photo so you can see when it was taken, what type of camera, light source, etc. Some of this is done by Picasa and other tools, but it is nice to have a quick web version as well.

FakeNameGenerator - This is great for writers, undercover-cop wanna-bees, and for temporary accounts online when you want to hide your true identity….maybe some other creative uses. Includes name, address, email, SSN, credit card number…not sure if the SSNs and CC #s are actually valid or in use. Use with caution…

I recently had to wire funds to a contractor’s account. I had the account # and the ABA Routing # - my bank also wanted the name and address of the bank. I had no idea…

I found this site that lets me lookup a banks complete info by Routing Number (you can also lookup Routing number if you know the address)…. very handy.

http://www.fedwiredirectory.frb.org/search.cfm

Happy 2008 to all the VerusNova readers.

It has now been over 2 years of publishing for this blog.