Your Nerdy Best Friend

I’m excited to announce that my friends at Xobni have made one of my favorite tools even better. Originally an amazing tool for Microsoft Outlook, now Xobni organizes your contacts and more on your smartphones and in Gmail. Here’s an update the company sent me last week:

Not only can you use Xobni with Outlook, but you can also use Xobni with your iPhone, Android or BlackBerry.  Smartr Contacts by Xobni enables you to access all your contacts from any Xobni or Smartr App, when you’re on the go!

With these apps on your phone, you’ll never need to manage your address book again.  Smartr Contacts pulls in all the existing contacts on your phone AND it pulls in information from your email, calendar and social networks. Each contact is not just a name on your phone, but Smartr Contacts imports photos, and recent updates from social media sites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

Most importantly, it pulls all the information for a person into one contact–you’ll no longer have six entries for the same person and all these contacts are ranked contacts by those you interact with the most. Each contact profile is complete with all the email addresses and phone numbers for that person and a history of the most recent interactions and emails, and even a list of contacts you share in common.

Lifehacker named Smartr Contacts “The Best Address Book Apps” for both iPhone and Android. 

Click here to get started right away with Smartr Contacts:
Smartr Contacts for iPhone
Smartr Contacts for Android
Smartr Contacts for BlackBerry

Here are some videos if you’d like to see the apps in action:
Smartr Contacts for iPhone

Smartr Contacts for Android

Xobni | Your smarter address book is waiting.

Think of Zaarly as a very organized, moderately safer Craigslist. It allows your neighbors to offer and request goods and services with the benefit of a moderated platform and a rating system. Need your house cleaned while you work at home? Post a free request, and within hours you’ll hear from a local provider who can help. Then pay via credit card through the site and get on with the real work at hand.

Not yet available in all US cities.

Platforms:

•  Online
• Apple iOS
• Android

Sites like Zaarly:

·         TaskRabbit:  Find household and office help in your area from providers who have gone through background checks.

Ever feel like your project is lost in a sea of emails and missed deadlines? Check out the excerpt from the book “Upgrade to Free: The Best Free and Low-Cost Online Tools and Apps” for an overview of some of the best project management tools, free and paid.

My experience as a copywriter revealed to me the secret insecurities that many people have about their writing. Incredibly intelligent people with excellent communication skills would cringe when they handed me a first draft of a piece they wanted me to shape.

With visions of former English teachers in their heads, they fretted about grammar, spelling and word choice, forever concerned that they were making the mistakes that they made when they were in school.

Most of the time, they had nothing to worry about, but a clever, anonymous tool can help restore a writer’s confidence, no matter his level.

Just paste text into a text box at www.PaperRater.com and receive instant feedback about spelling, grammar, word choice and more. It’ll even analyze your sentence structure and vocabulary use to give you an overall grade, just like your English teacher used to give.

Designed to help students improve their writing, this tool is completely free and a little addictive. I ran several of my published pieces through the analysis and was surprised by the little errors I had missed.

Oh, and I ran this post through PaperRater — I earned a “B.” Harumph. Paper Rater Blog Analysis.

Paper Rater: Free Online Grammar Checker, Proofreader and More.

Happy New Year!

If you’re like me (and most of the country), you’re probably making promises to yourself that this year you’ll eat less, move more and work more effectively.

Yeah, yeah. We’ve all heard it (and done it) all before. But I just discovered a tool that may help! Experts say it takes 21 days to make or break a habit, and 21habit is a simple tool to help you through it.

You set up a goal to do (or not do) something every day, and every day for 3 weeks you’ll get an email or check in at the website to report on your progress.

A free plan has no real ramifications, but sign up in Committed Mode, and you invest $21 toward your challenge. Every day you succeed, you get a buck back. If you fail (or don’t check in for three days), you lose a buck. Your money will be donated to a list of 21habit charities.

I’m committing to start getting in shape for my marathon (read the very important reason I’m doing it here), so I’ll report back to you in 21 days on my progress!

21habit

San Diego real estate broker Kimberly Dotseth turned me on to one of the coolest bargain sites I’ve seen in a long time. Fiverr lets people put up offers to do a kabillion creative, fun jobs for a fiver — five bucks. Here’s a sample of products and services you can buy for five bucks:

• Create a simple banner ad
• Write a customized limerick
• Make a tough decision for you
• Tweet your message to thousands of followers
• Record a voice over in a native British accent
• Add music to your video 
• Send your child a personalized letter from Santa Claus
• Create a QR Code
• And on, and on and on… Hilarious and fun!

It’s no secret that many, many awesome people have found themselves dusting off their resumes and setting off on a job hunt during this challenging economic period. I ran across JobSpice, an easy, fast way to import your LinkedIn profile into their fields and create a basic, downloadable resume within minutes. You need to watch my 2-minute video to see how easy it is!

Get the book! Upgrade to Free: The Best Free and Low-Cost Online Tools and Apps is just ten bucks on Amazon.com!

Here’s an easy, fast way to share a file. Just upload a file, and within seconds you have a link to the online version to share with colleagues. Seconds, I tell you. I just uploaded the latest version of the Quick Reference Guide… feel free to download and share!

Credit card machines for small businesses can be expensive and a hassle, and often you have to enter into a contract with a company for the equipment and the service. But if you’re a small business like me, a super-easy credit card reader like Square may be just the ticket.

Square is a tiny little card reader that slips into the audio port of your Android phone, iPhone or iPad. You set up a free account, get a free reader and can start swiping cards immediately. The system is linked to your bank account, and the money transfers in the next day. They charge no setup or maintenance fees, and take just 2.75% out of every transaction. They’ll even help you calculate and keep track of sales tax.

I’ve been practicing with the reader by charging the price of my book on my husband’s credit card. He doesn’t know it yet, but he is going to have plenty of copies to give away for Christmas.

Watch my full review here:

Ever have to transcribe handwritten notes from a meeting then spend half an hour sending them out to everyone? What a pain.

Minutes.io lets you quickly and easily take live notes of a meeting then distribute them to a group of people with a click of a button.

I love that they don’t make you register for the site even though you have access to the archive.

Oh, and I also love that it’s completely free.

Watch my full review here: YouTube – Minutes.io.