Category: Productivity

Blinksale is an easy, online invoice-creation tool. It generates professional-looking invoices--with your own logo, if you want--and e-mails them to your customers. It also tracks payments and past-due balances, and it can send dunning reminders for you, too.

It's not complex. In fact, it borders on cute. But for very small businesses and work-at-home consultants, it could add ease to the invoicing process and a professional gloss to client communications.

Blinksale is free to use if you send three or fewer invoices a month. Paid plans range from $12 to $49 a month, depending on the number … Read more

Category: Productivity

Microsoft Office Live is Microsoft's attempt at creating a low-cost a la carte alternative to some of the small business software solutions that's available--including their own. It's designed to get a small business on the Web--both publicly, with a Web site, and privately, for collaboration and back-office work. Businesses get their own domain, e-mail, shared workspaces, Web site, and a contact manager tool.

Microsoft offers three tiers of Office Live service. One is free, with the other two being paid premium versions that throw in more shared storage space, e-mail addresses, and more back-office tools, … Read more

Category: Productivity

Google's ad services allow anyone to put advertisements up on their site. They can be anything from generic banners all the way to contextual ads that show offers related to content on the site. In addition to site ads, site owners can also purchase AdWords, which are purchased keywords in search terms. When a user buys one of these words, a link to their site will show up in the sponsored area to the right of a Google search using that word.

One of the reasons Google's ads have become so successful is that they can … Read more

Category: Media

Pandora is a music discovery and recommendation service. Users can listen to tracks in a simplistic player, and if they like or dislike a song they can vote yes or no on it. If they don't like it, the service will automatically skip it and move onto something else. If they do like it, Pandora will pull up tracks it thinks are similar in style. With enough use, it can effectively introduce you to all sorts of new music, and users can make their own radio stations based on personal tastes.

Pandora recently rolled out Pandora for … Read more

Category: Entertainment

GameGum is a Flash-based gaming community and portal service. Users can find a wide variety of free Flash games to play, chat about, and rank. GameGum also doubles as a social network, as each user gets a profile. GameGum employs an interesting technology called "Pulse," to keep track of what users are doing. It monitors user comments, game submissions, and forum activity. All of this can be seen at a glance, or you can drill down deeper and see the Pulse history for each user.

Like other Flash-game portals, GameGum offers game authors a place to … Read more

Category: Media

Last.fm is a music discovery and listening service. It's got a wide range of tracks users can listen to and share with others. It's also got a handy recommendation engine that will give you a list of artists it thinks you'll like, based your personal favorites. Users can make their own playlists and even share them with friends using the service's widget-making tool or Facebook application.

One of its more helpful services for music junkies is Scrobbling, which tracks the music you're listening to on your computer and sends the information to … Read more

Category: Productivity

Basecamp is a Web-based project management tool from 37signals. Groups can come together and work on large or small projects, sharing the same collaborative space. It's essentially a mash-up of various productivity tools, including a to-do list maker, shared storage space, message boards, and calendaring. What has made it so successful is how it's been tied together. It's well known as a service that fits both personal and group organization into one handy tool.

Basecamp has several tiers of service, with varying degrees of shared file storage and active projects.

Web site: www.basecamphq.com… Read more

Category: Entertainment

Line Rider is a free, Web-based Flash game that's one-part entertainment, and one-part creativity. Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to create a track for a tiny person on a sled on at high velocities. While seemingly simple, Line Rider employs realistic physics that force you to design well--otherwise the line rider will tumble to his doom.

At any time in creating your Line Rider course, you can view the outcome in the built-in player. The site has become immensely popular for this playback function, and for its community of avid artists and designers … Read more

Category: Entertainment

Yahoo Bix is a fairly simple idea. Users can create their own one-on-one online talent contests that others can vote on. Contests can contain pictures or videos, and users can see how others have voted after making their decisions.

While part-contest, Bix is also a full-fledged social network. Users get their own profiles, where they can host and list their entire history of Bix face-offs. Users can subscribe to others' profiles and keep track of what?s new.

Web site: www.Bix.com

Webware coverage: Bix, the online contest utility

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