Webware

When a business is just starting out and its founders need to fill some administrative holes inexpensively, simple Web apps can fill the void. The apps we're going to look at here are not always good for large organizations; in fact, several are designed specifically for smaller companies that need simple but robust solutions to common business needs.

Manage projects with Basecamp
Once a company starts servicing multiple clients, it needs to manage logistics and ensure that employees are doing what's expected of them. That's where Basecamp comes in.

Basecamp is not only a simple online project coordinator, it's the best of its kind on the Web. Once you sign up, you can immediately start creating projects and share them with employees. The site features to-do list creation, the ability to share files, project progress tracking, time tracking to see which employees have been working on the project, and more. In essence, Basecamp provides a full end-to-end project management service that allows you to see how well your company is performing every step of the way.

Creating and monitoring projects in Basecamp couldn't be easier. But Basecamp is not free. Its Basic edition costs $24 per month and allows users to create and track 15 projects at the same time and store up to 3GB of data. Plans go up from there to $149 per month, which allows for an unlimited number of projects, 50GB of storage, and time tracking (the other plans don't offer time tracking). If you're looking for something simple and effective at managing your projects, Basecamp is worth the money.

Dropio has launched a new applet called Playlistio that allows users to post music to the cloud in just three clicks. According to the company, users can find the file, upload it to the cloud, and stream it anywhere they can find a Web hookup and connect to Dropio. And with the help of the company's new Apple App store application, Droppler, users can even stream their Playlistio songs through their iPhone. The free applet is available now.

Google announced Tuesday that it has launched a new skills qualification program. Dubbed Google Analytics Individual Qualification, the new feature will allow users to demonstrate proficiency in Google Analytics.

According to the company, it will provide a free online course that covers Web analytics techniques, as well as Google Analytics implementation and administration. The company hopes that businesses will require their IT professionals to take the course and become more skilled in Web analytics. And in the process, Google is hoping that its qualification will join a laundry list of others that IT professionals are encouraged to have.

Shoeboxed, an online receipt depository, has partnered with FreshBooks that will allow users to export their receipts directly to the online invoicing company. Any Shoeboxed customer can have their receipts scanned into the service and export them to FreshBooks. No fee will be charged, but to use the new Shoeboxed feature, users will need to register for both sites.

Online customer review site PowerReviews announced Monday that it has moved from a subsidized pricing model to a paid subscription model with monthly subscription fees. The company also announced that it has launched a new service called AnswerBox, which is a question and answer tool that allows knowledgeable customers and staff to address questions posed by shoppers. The new tool and revenue model, which was designed to help it survive the economic downturn, are live now on the company's site.

In other PowerReviews news, the company has also announced that it's working with eBay's ProStores, a customizable online store service, to provide access to its customer ratings for ProStores' merchants. The service will be available for free for 30 days and after that period, the customer will be given a limited-time 15 percent discount off the standard $80 per month charge.

Financial services firm, Virgin Money announced Wednesday that it has joined the Uncrunch.org campaign in an attempt to raise awareness about alternative, social sources of credit for both consumers and businesses. Virgin joins Geezeo, Lending Club, OnDeck Capital, Credit Karma, and ChangeWave, while trying to "unthaw" the credit markets by giving consumers and businesses an online resource to research and find credit.

Uncrunch's focus is social lending, which is why Virgin Money joined the campaign (the company has close to $400 million in social loan volume). Those who surf to Uncrunch will be able to learn about sites like Virgin Money and Lending Club and have the opportunity to take out loans from other individuals who are willing to lend cash.

"With Uncrunch America, we hope to encourage Americans that have sidelined their cash to invest in a friend or family member," Asheesh Advani CEO of Virgin Money, said in a statement. "Maybe they don't feel comfortable in the market, but they can inject cash in the economy by lending to a loved one."

Gmail engineers announced on the Webmail client's official blog Wednesday that a new Gmail Labs feature called Title Tweaks is now available. The hack changes the order of the elements in the browser title bar so "Inbox" followed by the number of unread messages will be placed in front of "Gmail."

Shoeboxed, an online receipt and business card manager, announced Wednesday that it has partnered with Evernote to launch a "direct integration" between the two services. According to the company, users will be able to mail receipts and business cards to Shoeboxed, which will be analyzed by the service and sent directly to Evernote where they can be accessed online, on the desktop, or on a mobile phone. The integration requires registration on both sites, but it's free.

Google has officially dumped public calendar search, the company wrote on its Calendar help page. First mention of the missing search was made by concerned users more than two weeks ago. Google said on the company's help page that the search wasn't used "as extensively as [it] would have liked" and it will look for ways to make it easier to search in the future.

Dex announced Wednesday that it has launched its revamped local search service that will allow users to find landmarks, businesses, and service areas. The site features semantic technology, which lets users search for anything they want in specific or general terms and DexKnows.com will find relevant results based on those queries, the company claims. The site is available now.

Microsoft released Office Live Workspace stats Wednesday that show more than 3 million people are now using Microsoft Live Workspace and it's now available in 28 total languages. The service also boasts a Folders function where users can store, share, and manage documents and storage in those folders have been expanded from 500MB to 5GB per subscription.

Allen Stern, who writes the Web 2.0 blog Center Networks, is trying his hand at his own Web 2.0 start-up: Cloud Contacts. It's a simple service: You send it your business cards, and it enters them all into a format you can import into the contact manager of your choice. An existing scanning service company, Shoeboxed, announced a similar service Monday morning, adding it to the company's receipt scanning service.

As a guy with boxes and boxes of cards that I have never entered into any database anywhere, I find the concept attractive. The issue is price. Cloud Contacts offers a pay-as-you-go service, with packages ranging from about 30 cents a card down to 20 cents. The minimum is $30 for 100 cards.

Shoeboxed works on a subscription basis, with per-card fees working out to 20 cents a card at the lowest volume ($9.95 a month for up to 50 cards) to 10 cents a card at the highest, as well as a "catch up" service on annual plans, if you forget to send in cards one month. You do have to use this service regularly or you could end up wasting money.

These are not unreasonable fees, but if like me you've been managing this far without doing anything with your cards at all, sending off your cards with a payment is still a hurdle to get over. And although the Cloud Contacts pricing model gives you more control, the Shoeboxed monthly subscription plan is probably easier to sneak through on an expense report.

I have not tried either service and cannot vouch for their quality. Stern says he's not yet using automated scanners in order to keep quality up. Shoeboxed advertises that it is.

Alternatives, of course, are entering the cards yourself; or having an assistant or junior employee do it for you; or using a card scanner. With a low-priced staffer you might be able to save some money over the services, and if you have a small number of cards to deal with a scanner might work. But if your business is meeting people and the cards just keep piling up, a dedicated service for this annoying function could be a good option.

Either service will optionally send your cards back to you when it's done with them, or recycle them for you.

The one thing neither service can do automatically is tag each record it creates with the date or event at which you met the person on the card, unless of course you write that down on your cards. But if you're that disciplined you're probably already using a scanner.

Receipt-scanning service Shoeboxed just launched a new feature that automatically files scanned receipts into one of 15 expense categories. These include groceries, gas, and travel expenses, which you can view simply by clicking on them. Users can also create their own expense categories, although there's currently no way to have the service auto-tag expenses by keyword.

In addition to new receipts, users will find a good number of their old receipts categorized. Dan Englander, Shoeboxed's VP of Communications says some may not get the tagging treatment if the system can't find a match, but that a "large majority" have.

Users of Mint.com and other online banking services have been enjoying auto-categorization for some time now, but keep in mind these places are getting the information digitally. Shoeboxed must first scan your receipts then run them through optical character recognition. The categorization is not just for the scanned receipts though; any online receipts you "CC" Shoeboxed with will get tagged too.

If an item fits into a category it's now automatically tagged with it for easy sorting later on.

(Credit: Shoeboxed / CNET Networks)

Shoeboxed and Price Protectr, two sites we've written about in the past, joined forces on Monday in a partnership that's downright helpful to deal hunters. Any receipts sent in to the receipt scanning service will be parsed over for product names, then sent over to Price Protectr. If something you bought goes down in price within the return or exchange date, you'll be notified--potentially saving you some cash. That is as long as you've manually entered that item into Price Protectr.

Since Shoeboxed keeps copies of all your receipts, you can simply print out a copy from your browser to take into the store in case you've lost the original.

As part of the partnership, users of Price Protectr will get free one-month subscriptions to Shoeboxed's classic tier of service, which usually runs at $19.95 a month. After that, they'll have to keep paying that rate or bump up to the $60 a month professional plan. but considering all your purchases are being price checked for things like rebates and drops, it's an extra value add for small businesses buried in paperwork.

Update: I've been told by Dan Englander, Shoeboxed.com's VP of Communications, that the process of cross checking purchases with Price Protectr is not automatic, but that it's "something we may consider for the future." In the meantime, it's little more than a promotion to get users hooked on Shoeboxed's services. Users will still have to do the heavy lifting by going to Price Protectr's site and dropping in the product URL to track price drops.

Pixily is a cool scan-by-mail service that launched in early June. Like Shoeboxed, which I checked out last month, Pixily is all about taking paper clutter out of your life by scanning it in for you and making it both searchable, and able to be organized into buckets. The big difference between the two services is that Pixily is focused less on receipts and finances, and more on day-to-day papers like insurance claims, long cell phone bills (with call lists on them) and little things like birthday cards.

Everything that's scanned goes through optical character recognition (OCR), so you can search for it in the built-in search tool. It also lets you tag, and make notations to documents for the sake of sorting. If you've got digital documents, you can upload them into the mix as well.

Like Netflix, Pixily works through the mail with similar pre-paid envelopes that you can stuff with as much paper as allows. Each paid plan has a higher number of envelopes you can send in each month, along with limits on how much scanned content the service will host for you. After it's scanned, it's sent back in the same mailer, which can be chucked in with your paper recycling--envelope and all.

It's worth noting that for things like school papers and general writing, Scribd.com has a free program called Paper-to-iPaper that lets you send in all sorts of paper items by mail (at your postal expense) complete with OCR. One thing to note, however is that you have to get the content pre-approved, and things like bills and notes scribbled on paper are not welcome.

Pixily plans start at a free level (which requires you sending in documents on your own dime), all the way up to a $60/month plan that serves up four envelopes a month for you to stuff.

[via ReadWriteWeb]

Pixily requires using the mail to get your documents online, although if you've got PDFs lying around, you can send those digitally to go alongside your scanned docs.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Shoeboxed is one of the more inventive and useful services I've seen lately. It lets you organize some of the payments you make with cash (not credit cards) by sending in the huge wad of crumpled receipts you end up with from retail stores. Those receipts will automatically be scanned and plugged in to a financial tracking tool for you to manage with the site's tools, or to export to something like Quicken.

(Credit: Shoeboxed)

The site launched in July of last year, and this morning it is unveiling two new useful features. The first is a new analytics engine that will break down your spending habits with svelte-looking charts and graphs. What makes this particularly useful is that it can track both your on and offline purchases, which is shown in one of the new graphs.

Mint.com, which also does this (sans the paper receipt scanning) can be incredibly useful in this regard, but it goes the extra mile by tapping in to your credit card and bank account information to itemize these purchases for you. Shoeboxed's solution is slightly more low tech, with a special e-mail address you can CC to get your payment confirmation sent from online retailers. It will automatically figure in those payments and add them into your total spending.

Also new today is an envelope-tracking system that will keep a history of all your sent and received receipt envelopes alongside a live status indicator that gives you the heads-up on when a new envelope has been sent out. If you're a user of Netflix or any other shipper of goods this tends to be more important, but in Shoeboxed's case it's a nice touch if you want to make sure someone didn't steal the envelope full of financial goodness from your mailbox.

Shoeboxed has a free service where you plug in all the information. The plans that will scan your receipts and actually send them back start at $10 a month, all the way up to the $60 express plan, which guarantees same-day scanning and processing.