Your Nerdy Best Friend

I’ve written before about how much I love PowToon, a clever online tool that lets you create an animated infographic-type video to demo your product, promote your event or simply amuse your colleagues. Another way to liven up electronic communication is to create an animated cartoon. My two favorite tools in this category are GoAnimate and XtraNormal.

I’ve played around with both tools several times, and they’re really cool. You pick everything from the background to the characters to the expressions on their faces and the way they point at each other. You type the dialog and pick the funny robotic voice of your actors — or even record your own voices for a more personalized video. A short piece without a lot of fancy touches might take you less than half an hour to create, or you could probably spend hours on the little details.

Both GoAnimate and XtraNormal have free-ish plans, which means you can play around with some very basic templates before shelling out any money. If you’re going to use the videos for your business, you’ll need to consider the subscription levels for professional use, which start at about $25/month.

Here is the first Xtranormal video I ever saw, “I’m Training for an Ironman.” It’s still makes me laugh every time.

Warning! It has, well, colorful language and is probably not safe for work. But my husband just finished his first Half Ironman event, so now this video is even funnier.

You can also add a little twist to your marketing with a fun cartoon. ToonDoo has templates and characters that you can drag and drop into a variety of cartoon formats. You can even put several cartoons together into a flippable cartoon book that reminds me of Issuu, my favorite magazine maker (see a sample here).

How DO you pronounce Ziesenis?

Thanks to Kevin MacLeod for the awesome soundtrack!

Whuda thunk that technology startups would seek to make teleconferencing more fun? The new options for meeting people via phone are very cool indeed. Instead of the traditional phone number and PIN code, the new systems connect with the web, smart devices and your computer with just a click of a button rather than a series of pound signs and access codes.

One shiny new tool is Speek. Go to their app or the site, and you’re prompted to create a private URL for your teleconferences. Then send that link to your invitees, and they can connect through devices or computers. The system will even call out to participants at their desktops or dial a phone for them through a device.

On your Speek site, you can watch the interactions, mute and unmute callers and invite more attendees. You can also drop files into the web interface to share with others. Speek even offers to create a Dropbox folder for your account that will save the shared documents.

UberConference is similar to Speek with a limit of five participants, but you can earn spots for up to 17 by spreading the word. When people call in, they show up on your own UberConference web page, and from there you can share files, record the session, mute or unmute participants and more. When people speak, their icons (or pictures if they’ve hooked up their accounts) pop to the top of the screen.

If you pay for the UberConference pro version, the system will actually call participants for you at the appointed time. And iOS and Android apps let you take all the features on the go with you.

If you’re not ready for web-based audio conferencing, there’s always the reliable free conference call companies such as the appropriately named FreeConferenceCall.com. I’ve long relied on sites like FreeConferenceCall.com for a free phone number and PIN that I can share for teleconferences. Up to 96 attendees can join in by dialing a regular old U.S. phone number. The attendees incur regular charges for making a long-distance call, and no one has to pay any extra. Because so many people have flat-rate plans for calling or lots of minutes through their business accounts, there’s no need to feel guilty for not offering a toll-free number.

Podio is one of the tech tools that is making it impossible for me to finish the chapter on Project Management Tools for Release Your Inner Nerd. Here’s why:

You can always use cloud-storage sites to organize and back up your photos, but there are several services that specialize in image files, and they are designed to help you organize, share and edit photos inside the tool.

Let’s start with an online photo storage tool that’s not actually designed for photo storage. Picasa is a super-secret weapon for getting your graphic library into shape. Install this free program (courtesy of Google), and it searches your entire computer for all graphic files. The program leaves the files where they are, but the Picasa interface now gives you access to see everything.

In just a few minutes, you can find duplicate picture files, add names to pictures (especially easy if you sign in to Google and use your Gmail contacts) and create folders. You can also create folders and files to share with others and store them in your Google Drive account (5GB free).

But one of the most awesome tools is hidden under the hood — editing with my favorite tools from the long-lost Picnik web app! They were purchased by Google a few years ago, much to my dismay. But now the easy editing tools are available in Picasa, along with easy collage-making capabilities.

Flickr is a grandfather in the cloud-storage department, invented way before we ever started using the word “cloud.” Owned by Yahoo!, Flickr in and of itself is pretty simple. You upload photos, there you have them, uploaded photos. You can organize them into albums, tag them or share them with friends. But one of the coolest things about Flickr these days is their “App Garden,” which holds approximately one terabyte of third-party apps that integrate with your Flickr feed.

The apps allow you to do everything from backup your Flickr collection to automatically upload and organize. Plus, there are any number of tools to edit your photos.

Photobucket is another cloud storage solution for pictures, allowing up to 2GB free. Like other services, you can share photos or keep them private. Photobucket uses Aviary photo editing tools to add borders, crop, add filters and more.

My sister uses Shutterfly to share the adorable photos of my adorable nephews, with the peace of mind that Shutterfly defaults all the uploads to private and specializes in sharing personal photos with small groups, such as classrooms, sports teams and families.

Shutterfly makes its money by encouraging you to buy prints and gifts from your photos and makes it ridiculously easy to do so. That’s why our favorite gift from my sister is the annual family calendar, with photos of all of us with the kids throughout the year, along with birthdays and important family dates.

Because Shutterfly wants you to buy stuff to pay for their services, they won’t let you download a high-res version of your upload. If you want the full resolution photos, you’re going to have to pay ten bucks or more plus shipping and handling for an archive DVD.

Oh, and surprise! Looks like Shutterfly partnered with my favorite multimedia video maker Animoto so you can create “Videograms” from your Shutterfly pictures for $30/year (the same price as a subscription to Animoto).

Finally, if you’re really good at taking pictures, I’m talking portfolio good, you might consider SmugMug, a photo storage and sharing site made for amateur and professional photographers. The site can be a beautiful backdrop for your photo portfolio, and the higher subscription levels even integrate with eCommerce options to sell your masterpieces. SmugMug is quite reasonably priced: unlimited photos starting at $40/year.

A computer used to be a box on a desk, and to do computer work, we had to be in front of that box. Now our files and applications have moved into the cloud, meaning that we can be almost anywhere and do almost anything using almost any device. We can also backup the heck out of everything – which, in this dangerous age of hacking, viruses and other nastiness – we should.

When you’re using an online backup service, you generally set up an account; tell it which drives, folders and files to back up; and let it get to work. They can work in the background all the time or back up on a schedule. If your computer blows up, you can restore your files to another machine, or recover an earlier version of a document (ever hit “Save” instead of “Save As …”?)

If I didn’t use Dropbox for my backup plan, I’d choose CrashPlan. The free plan, aptly named CrashPlan Free, puts the backup network into your hands by allowing you to connect to friends’ computers for storage. You backup to someone else’s computer while he stores his backup on yours. Neither one of you can see the others’ files, but everyone has peace of mind — without a price tag.

Their paid versions are pretty comparable to other services — $59.99/year for unlimited data from one computer. They also offer to save multiple versions of your active files as well as all the files you delete. And you can backup to multiple locations, such as their online cloud, another computer and an external hard drive.

I need to mention Carbonite and Mozy because they’ve been around the longest and are perhaps the best known, but I think these days you have better options. Carbonite looks great on paper — unlimited storage on unlimited devices for $59 a year. But if you read the small print, you’ll soon discover that if you have more than 200GB to backup, your backups will be slower and take longer — data throttling, if you will. That said, it’s a simple service with a great reputation, so if you don’t need 200GB+, it’s a nice option.

Mozy was one of the first online backup services I discovered. These days they also have MozyStash, which is their file synchronization service. You can have 2GB for free, or choose a paid plan starting at $5.99/month for up to 50GB.

SOS Online Backup doesn’t have a free level, but they’ve won plenty of awards and high marks. IDrive is another standout in this field. It has a fairly generous free plan, and the paid plans start at 150GB for less than $50/year. I love the fact that it integrates with Facebook, which means you can share files and folders with connections with a couple clicks. IDrive keeps a whopping 30 versions of each file, and it backs up multiple devices into the same account.

IDrive is a good example of the mixing of the pure storage sites and the collaboration/sync cloud services. You can sign up for the classic IDrive storage or go for IDrivesync for a Dropbox-like experience with up to 10GB of storage for free.

ADrive also stands out in the pack because of its free level – a very generous 50GB of storage, which is at least five times the free space as most services. AVG LiveKive is a cool option from a trusted company. They have a free 5GB version, as do many of the others, but their unlimited device/unlimited storage version for $79.99/year is an incredible deal. Like Carbonite, though, you should read the fine print, which says that if you have more than 500GB of stuff (which is a LOT of stuff), they may charge you extra.

I just discovered this very cool site that generates random titles for blog posts and articles when you’re stuck for ideas. What a cool idea!

Vote below for your favorite blog post title, and Your Nerdy Best Friend will write it next week!

Are your tweets and Facebook postings works of art? Backupify can help you preserve them forever so your kids and grandkids have a permanent record of what you ate for breakfast every day and your reviews of local cupcake shops.

When I first heard about this tool, I thought it was a nutty idea. Why would you need to keep a copy of your Facebook posts? And who wants to keep all the old tweets?

But some high-profile hacks in 2012 brought all kinds of important questions into play. If Facebook fails, what happens to all the awesome photo albums you’ve created? And how can you get back all your Gmail contacts if the service blows up one day?

Preserving your online data from services such as Gmail, Flickr, Basecamp  and social networks can protect you from hackers, prevent loss of valuable data and perhaps keep you in compliance if you are required to keep records of your online data for legal reasons. When you put it like that, backing up your online stuff makes more sense.

You could also try SocialSafe, a newer company with fewer integrations. Instead of backing up your information to the cloud like Backupify, SocialSafe stores the backups on your own computer. The price difference is major: SocialSafe starts at $6.99/year for up to four services, while you’ll pay $4.99/month for up to five with Backupify.

Siri has a sense of humor. Watch this video of a recent conversation I had with Siri, and visit this site for some Siri-ous humor.