GigaOM » Apps

New Version of File Sharing and Collaboration Service Box.net Targets Simplicity

Simon Mackie — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 21:00:11 +0000

At a media event at its headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif. on Thursday, Box.net unveiled the latest version of its cloud-based, file-sharing software. The service enables Box users to view and collaborate on files and works in both the browser and on mobile devices; it’s similar to long-time WWD file-sharing favorite Dropbox, but it offers many more enterprise-friendly features, such as granular permissions and role-based access to files. The new version of Box has been rebuilt from the ground up with a greatly simplified UI, as well as offering new collaboration and real-time notification features.

In addition to being faster and simpler, the new interface should provide a better experience for interacting with content by removing clutter and providing much more screen real-estate for the viewing of files within the browser. Box.net believes that many of its competitors in the enterprise collaboration (notably Microsoft SharePoint) are too complex and difficult to use, which is why it is concentrating on making its software as simple and intuitive as possible.

Other significant changes to the new version of Box include:

Real-time activity updates. Powered using Tornado technology, the new Box brings real-time updates and in-line uploading to users. It works in a similar fashion to the Growl notifications on Mac OS X, keeping users up-to-date with latest content and collaboration activities anywhere on Box.
New collaboration features. A new discussions tab at the folder level facilitates conversations around projects rather than individual files.
Box Apps Marketplace. Third-party apps have been available for Box for some time; more than 150 partner apps have been developed and notable integrations include NetSuite, Google Apps , Salesforce and SurgarCRM. The new Box Apps Marketplace provides easy access to those partner applications from a new tab.

Invitations to the new version of Box will start rolling out to the company’s 5 million users today; users will be able to switch between the old and new versions through the end of February.

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Integrated Online Accounting and Bookkeeping With Zoho Books

Charles Hamilton — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 17:00:51 +0000

Zoho, a provider of an extensive suite of 26 web applications, many of which we’ve written about previously, is now offering a bookkeeping and accounting system called Zoho Books. It will compete with online business accounting systems like LessAccounting and QuickBooks Online.

I was given a preview of the app, and the folks at Zoho that I talked to take great pride in operating their company using their own products. Unfortunately, I didn’t get as much of a chance to explore the product as I would have liked, but another blog announced Zoho Books prematurely, and Zoho had to take the site down until today.

I was impressed with what I was able to see, however. Zoho Books is intended for businesspeople who may not have accounting backgrounds, but it includes the features we’ve come to expect from accounting software, including functions to manage customer, invoice, banking and expense data. Users can generate estimates, quotes and invoices in multiple currencies, all of which can be customized, include company logos, and be sent electronically or by postal mail. Its systems for generating reports, automating recurring invoices and sending out payment reminders should be useful for many businesses.

The new service is a natural extension of existing products Zoho Invoice and Zoho CRM. Not surprisingly, Zoho Books integrates well with the existing contacts modules, and the service makes it easy to import and export data. Zoho has preset systems for importing information from other major accounting programs, and Zoho support will assist you in importing data from other sources.

Zoho Books also includes some nice additions, including a function allowing accountants and financial advisorts to collaborate with business owners in real time, and a system for letting customers pay online using Authorize.net, Google Checkout, or PayPal for Business.

Even though the Google Apps suite competes with Zoho, the new app joins several other Zoho applications that are available in the Google Apps Marketplace.

A video tour and a free 30-day trial of Zoho Books are available, and Zoho is offering two free months for those signing up for the new service. Zoho Books is priced starting at $24/month or $240/year, which includes access for two users. Additional users may be added for $5/user/month. Combination packages will be available for those who are already using other Zoho products; pricing has not yet been set.

How do you manage accounting for your business?

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Choosing a Collaboration Tool Capable of Working Internationally

Thursday Bram — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 22:00:13 +0000

When you’ve got team members all over the world, you have to have the right tools to keep them all up to speed. Inventure Management works with Brazilian and American employees and found itself in need of a collaboration tool that could cross international barriers easily. Janis Majors, who manages projects for Inventure, described the search process: “We are a management consulting company with clients ranging from multi- billion dollar companies to start-ups. What we needed was a cloud-based project management tool we could use as an extranet, shared with our clients. A major consideration was Google Apps integration, as we use Google Apps Enterprise as our IT backbone, running our email system, intranet and websites. We tested more than 20 software packages that integrate with Google Apps, and when the dust settled only one contender was still standing: Smartsheet, because it is intuitively easy to use, and at the same time actually manages to track everything we need to track. We decided to go all in, and implemented Smartsheet as our only system for project management, task management and information sharing, internal as well as with clients.”

Avoiding Cultural Issues

One of the potential issues that goes along with using tools in different territories is that you may easily find yourself facing a cultural barrier, as well as any language barriers that you already now about. Taking cultural considerations into account from the point you decide on a tool is necessary. Your training may have to reflect the diversity of your team, as well as being available in multiple languages. Majors notes, “Until now, we have held informal training sessions, mostly conducted by myself. But as we are growing and building a Smartsheet training program with several internal instructors. We haven’t experienced any difficulties with language/slang so far. But our Brazilian employees all have to be proficient in English. Implementation in a regular Brazilian company would be difficult. An advice to Smartsheet would be to consciously use the ‘simplest’ and most common way of explaining a feature, even if it is less elegant. This would increase the pace of Smartsheet’s expansion into international markets. Actually, it would not be difficult to translate Smartsheet into other languages. A Portuguese version would open up a huge and booming Brazilian market, for example.”

One of Inventure’s key considerations was choosing a tool that its staff could access, no matter where in the world they are. The company significantly reduced the resources it has to put towards IT and maintaing a server. But being sure that the different members of its team were able to fully use that tool was just as important a consideration.

What do you look for when choosing tools that will be used by team members in more than one country?

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Trunk.ly Keeps Track of the Links You Share Online

Simon Mackie — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 20:00:26 +0000

Ever since hearing that Yahoo was planning to ditch Delicious, I’ve been looking at alternative bookmarking services. Trunk.ly is a free bookmarking app with a twist: It automatically gathers all the links you share online and makes them available via a searchable web interface. It can connect to Twitter, Facebook, Delicious and Pinboard via built-in connectors, and as it can work with RSS feeds, it can also grab links from services such as Instapaper, Tumblr and Posterous.

Once you’ve created an account and logged in, you simply authorize the services you want the app to connect to. Trunk.ly will then start collecting any links you share, and it’ll also go back and gather any links you’ve shared in the past from your accounts, too.

Links are displayed in chronological order on the homepage with icons to indicate where they’ve come from, along with any tags and the tweet or message included with the original link. The listing of links is interesting to scroll through but probably not all that useful; where Trunk.ly shines is in its fast search feature, which filters the listing of links as you type, providing a quick way to find links you posted previously. For example, if you vaguely remember sharing a link to an awesome martini recipe a few weeks back and want to find it again, you can use Trunk.ly to dig it out of your archives.

While there’s a bookmarklet for adding links manually to your Trunk.ly account, as well as some social features (you can follow other Trunk.ly users and see their links, and you can also see when other users share the same links as you), it probably isn’t going to replace the existing dedicated social bookmarking services like Pinboard and Delicious, unless you happen to post every single link you’d like to recall to a social media account. However, it is an easy way to maintain a no-effort, zero-cost archive of all those links that you share online.

Let us know what you think of Trunk.ly below.

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Two Vintage Movie Making Apps Vie for an Audience

Darrell Etherington — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 18:30:00 +0000

Apple is finally bringing AirPlay to home movies shot on the iPhone or iPod touch in iOS 4.3, which got me thinking that when it does arrive, I’d like to have some actual videos to show friends and family using the feature. Home movies tend not to be too thrilling, but a couple of new apps promise to at least make them visually interesting.

8mm Vintage Camera and Super 8 aim to do for iPhone video what Hipstamatic and Instagram did for iPhone photography. Both apps let you use filters to give video shot using your iPhone’s camera a retro look, but they go about it in different ways. 8mm applies the filter as you shoot, providing a live preview of how the end product will look while filming. Super 8 lets you film first, and then lets you choose which filters and effects to apply after the fact. Which will I use to document my excesses then share with friends and family? Let’s find out.

User Interface

Both apps feature a user interface in keeping with the concept behind their purpose, meaning they mimic the lock of old-school camera hardware. It’s cute, but it isn’t ideal from a UX perspective. While the built-in camera app features very little beyond a nearly full-screen preview of what your video will look like, both Super 8 and 8mm cut down considerably on how much of the screen is devoted to showing what you’re recording. At first glance, Super 8 seems to offer only a tiny viewfinder, but when you hold down the record button, the view expands to mostly fill the screen. Compared to Super 8, 8mm displays less of the video while actually recording, but it has to accommodate a variety of onscreen controls you can make use of while recording. Of the two, I prefer 8mm despite its smaller preview screen, since it doesn’t require you to hold the record button down to capture video.

Features

Speaking of those onscreen controls, they make for much more on-the-fly creative play from 8mm. You can switch lenses or film while recording with 8mm, and add authentic-looking frame jitter. The end result might not always work out with such a range of experimentation abilities, but it’s a lot more fun than Super 8, which just lets you record without the opportunity to add or change effects until you’ve finished recording.

Once you’re done recording, 8mm has basically done its job. You can share your videos via email or YouTube, or save them to your iPhone’s camera roll. Super 8, on the other hand, is just getting started. The edit suite is where you apply your vintage effects. You can choose from Light, Medium or Heavy effects, and adjust the color filter of your video from cool to warm using a slider. Hit the Process button, and Super 8 outputs the resulting video to your camera roll, while preserving the original unedited.

8mm offers more customizability, and Super 8 only lets you record snippets of up to 20 seconds at a time. I wish 8mm had an option to change or apply effects post-recording, and I wish both apps could import video already recorded to add effects after the fact, but I still think it offers the better feature suite overall.

Results

For my money, 8mm does the better job of delivering an awesome finished project with very little effort. I’ll let you check out the videos below, though, and judge for yourself.

Watch this video for free on GigaOM

Conclusion

At $1.99 for 8mm Vintage Camera, and $0.99 for Super 8, neither app is going to break the bank. But for my money, 8mm is hands-down the best buy in this category. The lack of a limit on the length of your video, the ability to switch and experiment on the fly, and the look of the final product put it well ahead of Super 8.

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Facebook Apps Can Now Access Phone Numbers and Addresses

Charles Hamilton — Mon, 17 Jan 2011 10:48:56 +0000

On Friday evening, Facebook quietly announced to application developers that third-party apps will be able to access the addresses and mobile phone numbers of its users.

As the All Facebook blog points out, users must explicitly give permission to third-party apps wanting access to personal information, but many people probably won’t notice the addition of the words “current address and mobile phone number” to the text in the request window, and will likely click “allow” without realizing they’re granting so much access to their data.

This change is consistent with Facebook’s policy of encouraging openness. But for web workers who are increasingly using Facebook for business purposes, such a policy may not be welcome.

Of course, the easiest way to avoid making your postal address and mobile phone number available to third parties is to not include it in your Facebook profile at all. To edit this data, go to “Profile” at the top-right of the Facebook screen, then click on the “Edit Profile” button. From the menu on the left, click on “Contact Information.” Delete any information you may have entered in the “Mobile Phone” and “Address” fields, then click the blue “Save Changes” button at the bottom of the screen.

Note: if you’ve added a phone number in the “Other Phone” field, Facebook will copy that number into the “Mobile Phone” field if you leave the mobile number blank. So you’ll need to erase any phone numbers that you’ve entered into either field.

Do you include your personal contact information on your Facebook page?

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App Store Beats iTunes to 10 Billion Downloads by 6 Years

Josh Asch — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 18:30:44 +0000

Apple has posted a downloads countdown page on its site as it approaches 10 billion apps downloaded. This year marks the App Store’s third birthday, so that’s an average of over 3 billion app downloads per year. iTunes took eight years to reach the same milestone.

What makes that figure even more interesting is the fact that just last year, Apple celebrated the 10 billionth download from the iTunes Music Store in similar fashion. That milestone came a full eight years after the debut of the iTunes store, which makes for an average of just over 1 billion downloads a year.

That’s six years difference in how long it took each store to reach the 10 billion download mark. However, it’s easy to see why the difference exists; there are millions of iOS devices out there, and since there are a whole load of free apps available, that’s got to account for a large percentage of those downloads. Whereas a large proportion of the App Store is free, only a very small minority of the iTunes Music Store offerings can make the same claim.

There’s also the fact that a lot of people get their music from sources outside of Apple, something which isn’t possible to do with apps without jailbreaking. People new to Apple devices likely already have an established music collection, but someone who’s never had an iOS device before won’t have any apps at all, making them more likely to download apps than music.

While Apple celebrates 10 billion downloads, HP-owned Palm is getting excited about having surpassed 100 million downloads from the webOS store. Palm may not be an iOS competitor on the level of, say, Google, but the discrepancy still says a lot about the app gap between Apple and the rest of the market.

Whoever downloads the 10 billionth app on the App Store is up for a $10,000 iTunes Gift Card, so hit up that Top Free apps list and get to it. If you’re interested in finding out how much you’ve contributed to those download numbers, you can use Geoffrey’s method for determining your yearly app spend to track and tabulate your total iOS app downloads.

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3 iPad Guitar Amp Apps iPad for Those About to Rock

Mark Crump — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 15:30:48 +0000

It wasn’t consciously a New Year’s resolution, but shortly after Christmas after years of tripping over my guitar cases, I decided it was time to get back in the game. While I have three guitars I love, my amp gear was either anemic or overpowered. I have a small practice amp I’ve never been happy with, and my stage rig. The cats don’t really seem to care for the loud amps.

So, after watching Apple’s “iPad is Electric” commercial I decided to take a look at amp apps for the iPad. Three in particular caught my eye: Amplitube, PocketAmp, and iShred.

Hooking Up

First you need a way to hook your guitar into your iOS device. You can either make a cable yourself, get one from Griffin, or use the iRig. I chose the iRig and it’s a fairly simple adapter. You have a female guitar cable input on one end, a male headphone jack that plugs into your iOS device, and a female headphone connector for connecting headphones or a set of speakers. It may not suit the needs of perfectionists, but for the general user, it fits the bill.

The Apps

Amplitube (Free/$19.99): While the $20 price tag is a big turn off, I found the free version to be perfectly fine for the average practicing musician: the paid version gives you more presets and the ability play songs from your iTunes library. The free and paid versions both have in-app purchases for more pedals. Amplitube does have a lot of in-app purchases, even if you purchase the paid version, which may seem greedy. To me, it seems more like an effort to offer very specific levels of customizability. One of the things I liked most about this app was that for relatively little money, I could tailor my playing experience the way I wanted it.

There’s in-app recording (single track is free, multi-track is an additional $15), but I’m just as happy pumping the feed into Garageband. That’s because the sounds I got from this app were fantastic. I could get a nice warm clean tone and also a heavy metal scream. You get three pedals (delay, noise gate, and distortion) with the free app. Those combined with the ability to save presets let me build a nice library of sounds. Additional pedals are $2.99.

PocketAmp (Free/$4.99). This is the perfect app if you just want to jam with a minimum of fuss.The free version comes with two presets (Clean and Rock) and both sound decent. You also have a few sliders to customize the sound. For $4.99, the paid version is almost a no-brainer. You get more presets (Clean, Blues, Rock, Metal) and a handful of effects (Chorus, Flanger, Rotary, Tremolo). Both versions lets you play along to your iTunes library on your iOS device. The app lacks the customization you’ll find in Amplitube, but you get more than your five bucks worth of sound. PocketAmp is also a universal app, so it works on both iPhone/iPod touch and iPad. The one big problem I have is likely to be minor for most: PocketAmp is portrait-only on the iPad, and I prefer a landscape orientation.

iShred (Free/in-app purchases): While it got decent reviews, I had a hard time getting good sound out of this app. Even with the in-app purchase of the “Screamer” distortion pedal, the sound came off as weak. It gets points for being both a universal app and having free iTunes play-along, but loses just as many for having a weak overall tone. That said, if you’ve got physical effects pedals you love the sound of, and just want a free amp app to practice over songs, this might be a good choice. I was much happier with even the free PocketAmp app.

Final Thoughts

If you want fully-customizable sound, and don’t mind paying a little extra for in-app purchases, my favorite of the bunch is Amplitube, even using just the free version. I probably spent about $8 on a few extra effects and amps and really love the sounds I got from it. For the more budget-conscious that have a higher need for iTunes playback than I did, PocketAmp is a great value; even the stock presets sound great.

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NEO Pro Makes Outlook More Productive

Simon Mackie — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 21:00:34 +0000

In the world of collaboration, email remains king, resulting in overloaded inboxes for many of us. Apparently, some 107 trillion email messages were sent in 2010. Dealing with all those messages takes a lot of time, so anything that makes the email experience more productive has the potential for considerable savings for businesses. NEO Pro 5.0 is one such product; it’s an add-on that promises to make the Outlook experience more organized and productive.

Installation is straightforward; although if you have a large inbox, it may take some time to do its initial sync. After installation, you’ll discover that NEO Pro isn’t just a simple plugin for Outlook; it’s actually a separate program with its own interface that seamlessly syncs with Outlook. I actually quite like this approach; many of the third-party add-ons for Outlook that I’ve tried in the past have ended up cluttering my screen with additional toolbars and sidebars, leaving less real estate for the actual email. The interface is well designed and is similar to Outlook’s, with large panes showing the contents of your inbox and the currently selected email.

NEO Pro’s main strengths lie in two areas: its organizational and search features. The program automatically categorizes your email, and then offers many different views of it. By clicking on the tabs, you can switch to views showing email by date, status, attachment, or sender. Each view can then be further refined using filters, so you can quickly bring up a view that shows all of the emails in your inbox with Microsoft Word attachments, for example, and then refine that to only show emails with Word attachments from certain senders. NEO Pro’s search is virtually instantaneous; it’s much faster than Outlook’s own sluggish search on my machine. Search can either be performed on the whole email catalog, or on any filtered view of your email.

NEO Pro’s probably going to be most useful for power users who constantly deal with a lot of email; the wealth of organizational options and tools available (and correspondingly, the large number of buttons in the interface) might be off-putting for less experienced users and those who don’t deal with large volumes of email. That said, the interface is similar to Outlook’s, and there is plenty of documentation available, including a handy quick start guide.

NEO Pro’s a flexible and powerful email organizing tool that’s worth trialing if you or your users spend a large amount of time in Outlook. NEO Pro is little pricey: A single license costs $49.95, with volume discounts available. The 60-day free trial can be downloaded here. Note: NEO Pro 5 is not yet compatible with the 64-bit version of Outlook 2010; 64-bit support should be available in the next minor update.

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ChromaPaper Adds Offline Sync to Read-Later Service Instapaper

Simon Mackie — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 18:00:29 +0000

Users of Instapaper, a popular service that allows for the saving of online articles to read at a later date, should check out ChromaPaper, an unofficial Chrome app. It adds some extra features to the Instapaper website, such as two-column pagination, but what makes it really useful is that it provides offline sync.

The app can be downloaded from the Chrome Web Store. Once installed, a couple of new ChromaPaper links will be added to the top-left of your Instapaper account screen:

Clicking the “Offline Sync” link will download the unread articles saved to your Instapaper account to your browser’s local storage, meaning you can read them even while you’re offline; handy for being able to catch up while you’re flying, for example.

The “Options” link allows you to enable other ChromaPaper features, including two-column pagination and the ability to save the scroll position in each article.

ChromaPaper is free. Some of its features are still being developed, so you may find a few bugs while using it, but it’s worth downloading just to get the offline sync feature.

(Via Lifehacker)

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