Today I would like to share my latest discoveries with you.

Here are 5 Startups that I consider to be worth yoru attention in 2012

1) Codeanywhere

Codeanywhere is a real godsend for those who are in love with web development and never want to lose an opportunity to code. Wherever you are, this multi-platform code editor with a FTP client lets you quickly and easily connect to your data on web servers and edit or create new files instantly.

Having faced the lack of cloud based coding tools, the developers from Croatia decided to make the platform that enables you to work on the move anytime, anywhere and on any platform.
The system is compatible with any browsers and mobile devices as a native app for iOS and Android. Moreover, the company promises that you will always be concentrated on work, not on the fact that you code via browser due to use of the latest technologies.

Codeanywhere has already been launched , so you can start using it right now – Codeanywhere

2) Teamlab

In my opinion, Teamlab is one of the most promising project management and collaboration software for small and mid-sized business. In just a year this startup turned into a huge system trusted by more than 100 000 companies all over the world.

The platform provides 4 fully-featured modules for project management, document management, online collaboration and CRM. In fact, Teamlab is a real social network for business where you can control project progress and communicate efficiently. With in-built online document editor, the system appears to be a real cloud-based web office with all the essential tools, so there is no need to resort to any other applications.

Brave Latvian team announces a desire to conquer the whole world and prove that Silicon Valley citizenship is not a must for being successful. Well, development in a high-competitive IT industry is a decisive step, but here it sounds reasonable. For the quality and number of integrated tools TeamLab is truly ahead of its analogues.

The service takes your office to the cloud in a few clicks which makes sense especially when it comes to remote teams and freelancers – TeamLab

3) Fast Dove

Fast Dove is another cloud computing system, aimed to make your life easier. This service lets you manage SMS communications freely and quickly.

The developers tell a beautiful story about the appearance of the project’s idea. Once in the forest they saw a flock of happy doves flying over their heads. This incredible view inspired them on the project FastDove.

Today FastDove is an application which helps companies and individuals communicate by sending sms via Internet. What makes it different from all other online sms-sending services is that the messages are delivered just as though they were sent via your own mobile phone. Moreover, recipients of your messages will be able to directly reply to your number.

The project is growing extremely fast. Launched in 2009, by developers from Barselona, currently they support 116 (!) countries and are not going to stop - FastDove

4) Relead

These years Latvia seems to be rich in ambitious IT projects.

Relead.me is SaaS software , which promises to increase the conversion rate of clicks to sales by up to 10 times. It is  a real-time web analytics tool for sales professionals and the project positioning ensures that the tool is really powerful.

With Relead you get detailed information about visitors: their company name, industry, company size, financial and credit information, positions and contacts like phones and email. Geo-information, so you can see your visitor on the map. Full visitor path, so you can see what products or services your visitor is looking at on your website.

Sales leads are generated from website visitors, who never signup or fill in any form.

In their own words : “With Relead, it is possible to identify each client that has demonstrated interest about each respective product. This will, in turn, generate increased sales opportunities”
As soon as the project is launched, it will definitely gain certain success. Waiting impatiently - Relead.me

5) Mediatoolkit

And the last but not the least startup, which I would like to review in this article is a very promising Croatian project – Mediatoolkit.

The developers state that they have vast experience in working with media companies, that’s why they know exactly what media professionals really need.

Let’s see, what they mean. Being a blogger, an editor, a journalist or just a freelancer, sharing your thoughts in the World Wide Web, you certainly need to know what kind of effect content produces on the Internet, right?

Everybody would like to predict the future and, being more exact  - to be sure what kind of content will be shared with friends in social networks, such as Twitter, Facebook or Digg. Mediatoolkit will help you to be a real foreteller in the sphere of Internet publications!

The developers explain: “This service helps to find the most popular and shared content in real time and on any website he is interested in as well as get a prediction of what will be popular in the future”
Still being sceptical? Get a 14-days trial here – MediaToolKit

I hope you find these applications useful for your business.

Good solution to unemployment problems:

Let’s face it, the global economic downturn has taken its toll on many people, jobs are more cherished than ever and hardly a day goes by without another company announcing ‘restructuring’ plans, which is corporate speak for laying off lots of hard working and loyal workers.

Fiverr can and has become a lifeline to hundreds if not thousands of people around the world to put food on the table or a roof over their head. Sure, $5 isn’t going to make you rich but if you can package your skills or offer a service which only takes 15-20 minutes to do you could easily be on the road to earning $50 or more a day.

Even if you think you’ve got no talents to offer, many people are making money just by doing voice over recordings or even making a 1 minute video testimonial about a product. Fiverr and the army of clones have also helped people working full or part time jobs generate a little extra cash by doing things like sending postcards from their city or talking to people in other parts of the world on Skype for 10 minutes to help them practice their English.

Social services:

In the age of austerity, Fiverr and other micro job portals can be your way of giving back to the community if you are financially better off than many other people. Many doctors are donating their time and for $5 you can speak to a doctor about a medical problem and get proper medical advice – a service that as we all know can cost a lot of money and something many of us put off because of the expense.

Connect, share and help:

Around the world there are plenty of people looking for small jobs to be done and thanks to Fiverr there is an army of people ready and willing to get it done.

Thanks to the social networks of Facebook, Fiverr, LinkedIn and Digg, the gigs can be shared around the Internet and promoted for free which means the gig sellers have no upfront costs to getting buyers and also means that they have the chance to earn even more money at no extra cost.

Fiverr clone and alternatives:

Fiverr hasn’t just helped a large number of sellers make money to beat the recession blues, it has also kickstarted a wave of clone sites using similar software to run their own fixed price job sites. Without Fiverr these budding entrepreneurs wouldn’t have had a market to capitalize on and as Fiverr grows and more people become aware of it the need to create niche specific fixed price job sites is growing.

According to one industry blog, the top 5 alternatives of Fiverr are,

1. GigBucks
2. Zeerk
3. TenBux
4. Uphype
5. Dealerr

At the last count there were some 200+ Fiverr clone type sites out there but these 5 above are thought to be the biggest ones.

Fun “Yes”, Spam “No”:

Fiverr doesn’t take itself too seriously and the same can be said with a number of sellers offering some really weird and wacky gigs on the site but there is a line drawn somewhere so you won’t find any unethical gigs, harmful gigs or gigs that provide no value.

If you plan to post your jobs on Fiverr make sure they offer value and you can deliver them in a reasonable amount of time otherwise you might find you and your gigs are swiftly removed from the site.

Brand promotion & expert advice:

Many sellers on Fiverr have used the site as a spring board to honing their own talents before venturing out on their own. For example if you think you are good at logo design, after 100 gigs you will know for certain whether you have a talent for it and not only that but you will have a nice portfolio to venture out with.

One seller has branded himself as “Mr. Whiteboard” and the response to his 1 minute pitches has meant that he is being swamped with requests and people are prepared to pay him a premium to do their promotion quicker.

Just because you are charging five bucks now doesn’t mean it won’t lead to a real $500 dollar in the future.

I actually have more than one reason to review ToTheGo search engine.

ToTheGo is a search engine for Jobs, Homes and Cars based out of Milan, Italy. This year they launched their service for the US and UK market, and planning to reach more markets in the near future.

This rich source of information allows users to find the best possible deals when looking for jobs, properties or even vehicles.  ToTheGo can provide all these kind of information saving you a lot of time, energy and effort to find what you are looking for.

Why ToTheGo is different!

One search, delivers a plethora of results as ToTheGo has a huge amount of websites listings.

Also, the website is highly optimized for search engines like Google, Ping and Yahoo, which means all these search engines will find its listings easily, that’s another reason to use it.

The simple interface of ToTheGo search engine makes it super user friendly in terms of design, there are three main tabs for searches, switching between those tabs (plus the ability to customize your searches, for example: limit the distance by miles) brings you a high targeted results. The search box is also customized to search by “What” and “Where” indicators, which return more accurate results.

Probably now you understand why I did this review for ToTheGo search engine.

ToTheGo helps you fine a job!

I can see that the first tab is dedicated for jobs search, so I thought to visit the site and try to do some searches for jobs to see what type of results I will get!

I did a simple search for “writer” jobs as my example keyword, and here are the results:

As you can see in the screen capture above, ToTheGo came up with a few cool writing jobs, for example: Technical Writer, Development Writer, Technical Writer, Automotive Technical Writer, Junior Technical Writer and  Reports Writer jobs. Pretty cool!

Final Words

ToTheGo will always redirect you to the original source to read the full text of the ads. Because of the large number of classified ads indexed by ToTheGo, search engines like Google, Ping and Yahoo will find it easily.

Do some searches using ToTheGo and let me know how you find the results.

What is Blokube?

Already featured here on FamousBloggers, few months ago.

Blokube offers a place for bloggers to mastermind. To network. To exchange ideas and interact. Blokube is a community.

It’s all about like minded individuals getting together to share valuable, quality content, but that’s just the beginning.

Simply Sharing content is one piece of the puzzle, but putting the ‘social’ back into ‘social media’ means having the right place to plug in and interact with our peers, and really engage with our readers.

Blokube PRO

For the last few months Blokube has been running without any advertisements, aff. Links, but now is the time to show your support & get the PRO version. With PRO, your content will be automatically submitted to Blokube.

Benefits of joining Blokube PRO:

• Automatically submit one or multiple articles per RSS Feed Update
• One free vote with all RSS Feed article submissions.
• Build your Brand awareness
• Automatically create dofollow backlinks
• Increase your Search Rankings
• Grow your reader base with our real community members
• No Ad Browsing  – you won’t see any ads on Blokube, if you’re a PRO User

Wrap Up

Blokube makes this extremely easy for bloggers by creating a great community where bloggers can share and discover each others’ content. It is a community with over 7,000 users registered, and with at least 80 percent of them being bloggers.

What this means for you is that with the right approach you will be able to get a lot more people to read your content – and if those people who read your content find it really interesting they will also end up sharing it or blogging about it.

Get  Blokube Pro

What do you think about Blokube & the PRO feature? Do you have any suggestions/feedback? Please let us know in the comments below.

I’ve always been interested in Q&A (Questions and Answers) websites, the reason is this type of site plays a big role in content creation. It can generate real content from real people, and the interaction keeps the site fresh and updated all the time as people ask questions and others -who may know the answer- answer them and share their experience. This creates a trusted environment and builds an amazing supportive community.

Do Q&A sites attract free web traffic?

You might be asking yourself right now, why should I build a Q&A site? And what has this got to do with my blog?

Here is my answer: I personally like to expand my business by building more online assets and I follow the idea of building more than websites to stream income. I don’t think that one website is enough to achieve my online business goals. We’ve discussed this topic here on the blog (read the comments on this post which indicates that one blog is not enough to make real money online), but running more than one blog is not that easy and will usually require outsourcing to get things done.

But what if you can do this without having to do a lot of work, or generate content by yourself, not even outsource any tasks?

It’s pretty simple, launch a Q&A site, do some promotion and watch it grow!

AnswerBase has recently published some stats from one of their clients that show how much new search engine traffic this type of site can attract. It does make a lot of sense to me, especially as Q&A sites have a unique nature. They are regularly updated with fresh and useful content for visitors, which makes the search engines crawl and index the sites more often.

This will increase traffic to your site rapidly in a short period of time, (we are talking here about one year or so) and you will own an amazing site for your business. Read the full post about attracting new search engine traffic.

The very interesting thing is the traffic you are generating to your site will benefit your community members as well by participating in the community and being useful to others. This will allow them to get traffic from your site to their own sites or blogs. I came across this MOZ article that talks about Why Q&A sites can boost your SEO which indicates that this type of site has great benefits for smart internet marketers, and this is probably another reason why you should pay attention to Q&A sites in your niche.

Why AnswerBase ?

If you are looking for building a Questions and Answers website, or add this service to your already established blog, then AnswerBase is an excellent Q&A application, it has all the features that you will need, and much more.

Examples of Q&A sites

Here are a few examples of Q&A sites using AnswerBase:

Edmunds Answers, this could be my favorite, I love cars!

Apps questions and Answers, nice idea for a Q&A site!

Weddings Answers! Really nice and elegant website, I love it and I like the design of the site!

Final thoughts!

If you are planning to build your Q&A site, then my advice to you is: Don’t create a general website that discusses a wide open topic, this will take you years to succeed as you will have to compete with the monsters of Questions and Answers sites out there. The best way to do this is to actually narrow the site categories to your business niche, focus the site on only one topic. By narrowing your targeted niche, you are increasing your chances of success.

I gave AnswerBase application rating of 5, which is the max I can give. This is to show my admiration to Q&A sites and the effort of people behind them.

There are several online tracking tool applications available that can make your expense tracking format far easier, which would allow you to concentrate on other important business related activities.

Some of the online expenses tracking tools for your small office are discussed below:

1. Invoicera: Invoicera is supposed to be one of the most popular online expense tracking software that every small business owner dreams to possess, which easily helps them to keep proper track of their project costs. In this software there is an account where you can even bring in expenses in your Invoicera account, you can learn about the productivity of your company.

2. BillMonk: This online app makes sure that you can settle down all the due and pending expenses among your clients very easily and conveniently.. You can also reconcile the expense tracking right away online.

3. Freshbooks: Freshbooks is believed to be known for being one of the best accounting apps available. It makes billing far more convenient as it is proven to be a proficient invoicing and time following web app. Freshbooks offers quite a few pricing choices and permits you to direct up to five thousand clients with custom branding and up to twenty staff members.

4. LessAccounting: This is also an efficient small business accounting app, using which you can professionally track your expenses. By using this app, you can present proposals, invoices and track expenses. This particular application includes iphone application and incorporation with a wide range of popular business applications.

5. Billster: This is an online application that has been developed to systematize your personal and shared expenses. This online application is entirely free and it can do the work of reporting a recording on your group and personal expenses. Also it can routinely email you with a synopsis of the expense you have exposed to billster. This application also has the ability to send reminders whenever you want to remind people that owe you money.

6. BudgetTracker: This application helps you to track your budget and bills and in easy read calendar format. One of the most attractive points about this app is that it sends you reminders when your bills become due.

7. BudgetOnWeb: This is a free and online system application that puts together project management with financing tools and contact management that will permit you to supervise your online budget.

8. ExpenseWatch: By using this tool, you can get products that can control spending and business services that mechanize time, manual, paper-based procedures while preserving the visibility and management of all business operating cost.

9. Moneytracking: This is a free online application that reduces all your attempts related to expense tracking. This particular app enables you to have an obvious idea about your financial status and condition and know where your business stands now.

10. Expensr: This is another amazing online application that keeps track of your expenses effectively and also with this app you can even compare your daily expenses with the people in the same profession so that you can better understand and get an idea that where you are spending unnecessarily and where you can cut down your daily expenses to become more profitable.

After all, Time and Money are not just Pink Floyd songs – they are two of the most sought after commodities in both life and business. However, as any economist will tell you, there’s no such thing as a free lunch.

Essentially, to get one thing you want, you must sacrifice another.  This theory couldn’t be more true when it comes to virtual assistant outsourcing.  To reap the true rewards of hiring an outsourced assistant, you must put in the time and effort necessary to make the business relationship work.Hiring a virtual marketing assistant can help you with time consuming trivia, and allow you to spend more time on money making tasks.

For instance, a virtual assistant can help you with data driven marketing chores such as content writing, link building, graphic design, as well as functions such as telemarketing, inbound call answering, and general secretarial duties.  However, getting powerful results from outsourcing will require some effort on your end.

1. Some team members are robust workers
2. The company is international – some collaborators live in different parts of the country and even in different time zones.
3. The company does not intend to spend money on collaboration solutions.

Now try walking in the project manager’s shoes. What would YOU do? Fortunately, nowadays when the army of freelancers and robust workers is increasing extremely fast, a large number of web-tools have appeared to help them collaborate & connect regardless of distance.

Here the 10 most popular online project management solutions

Its reviewed in order to give you one more clue on how you can enhance your business collaboration effectively.

1 - Freedcamp

Freedcamp will perfectly suit those who are not used to paying for software and can be satisfied with  a basic tool kit. It can be strongly recommended to small groups and organizations that need to collaborate on a tight budget. Here users can create projects with description, small to-do lists, set up tasks and milestones and keep track of progress via e-mail notifications.

Freedcamp is a  free, hosted project management system. The developers ensure us that they are not planning to monetize it in the near future. Worth checking out!

2 - Dotproject.net

Dotproject.net is based on users` unselfishness. Yes, it`s true, the most surprising fact about Dotproject.net is that there is no company, standing behind the system. Users themselves manage, maintain, develop and support it! So, of course, the software is provided absolutely free.

Though the interface is incredibly simple and clean, all the basic collaboration features are provided. You can create projects, set up tasks and attach files to them (it is  much better than just a note, right?). What makes Dotproject distinctive PM software is a helpdesk with trouble tickets. This feature is first of all aimed at clients` support enhancement, as customers can contact you, if they have any kind of claim or suggestion and all the tickets will be automatically sorted by date and priority.

3 - Redmine

Redmine is a flexible web-platform for project management. Written on Ruby on Rails framework, Redmine provides developers with Open Source, which means you can always modify the system, according to your company’s specific needs. The program is multilingual and available in more than 30 languages. It also has multiple database support: the application is available on Postgre SQL, SQLite and MySQL.

Redmine provides users with Gantt Chart which is the most essential feature for project planning. Most features at project level can be disabled if necessary.
You can get a 30-day free trial, then  Redmine hosting on Planio servers starts from 9$ per month.

4 - Teamlab

Believe it or not, but Teamlab is a first-rate project  management software available for…nothing! In fact it is a free Basecamp alternative, as it provides as many collaboration tools as you can imagine. Teamlab is perfect for small and medium teams, remote workers and freelancers. It has 4 basic Modules: Project Management, Business Collaboration, Documents and Instant Messaging. You can track project activity and generate reports, share bookmarks and Wiki pages with your colleagues, keep your teammates up to date with news and even create a poll. Teamlab`s huge advantage is a fully featured Documents Module, represented by a built-in Open Office application and Online Docs Editor. Users can edit, store and share documents right on the corporate portal in real time. Besides Teamlab is available in 3 deployment solutions: Saas, AMI and Open Source. The developers promise that all Teamlab modules currently offered for free will remain free forever.

The only but essential platform disadvantage is the lack of CRM and Email management modules. They’re mentioned as “coming soon” options on Teamlab website, yet we still don’t know the exact release dates and pricing plans on them.

5 - Clarizen

What makes Clarizen different from other project management software? All these little buttons that appear from time to time while you`re working! For example, it has the “Save/ New” option  or “Exel” button, which can easily export the whole list to MS Exel if you prefer to work on the data there.

Some users think that it is overwhelmed with options, well…I guess, it`s clear, that providing such an amount of amazing features, the developers were reckoning on large companies as it comes out of the pricing page. Clarizen is not available for free – you can start a 30 day free trial version, but  Professional Edition costs 49.95$ monthly per user. (Further usage will cost you:- 12months – 34.95$ per month, 36 months – 24.95$ per month).

6 - Huddle

Huddle provides users with a free fourteen-day tour and guarantees 100% adoption across the enterprise in 90 days or your money back. Though it lacks issue tracking, tasks and milestones, Wiki and CRM module, it stays a powerful collaboration machine, which allows users to arrange phone and web conferencing, organize events visible to everyone in your workspace and invite participants. Huddle full-text search can impress your imagination: all the feedback is collected, time stamped and fully searchable. Every word and action is remembered by the system, so that you`ll find it easily even in three years. Moreover if you are a non-profit organization you can check out if you’re eligible for a charity account through Huddle Foundation programm.

7 - Active Collab

Due to its simple and friendly interface ActiveCollab will never make you think twice before pushing a button.

Here managers can add members to the projects, give them certain roles and even specify the available (accessible) areas. Invite colleagues to your team, give them tasks and duties, set up milestones and receive automatic reports on their activity. Moreover you don`t have to log in each time you want to get into the portal. ActiveCollab users can participate in forum discussions and leave comments using their e-mail account.

To try ActiveCollab you can host a fully-featured 7-day demo for free without installing any files.

8 - Teambox

Teambox was created to make project management as easy as possible. This application will help you put everything in order and set up the priorities within small to-do lists. Facebook and Twitter users will certainly like Teambox for the features borrowed from social networking. For example, collaborators can post their current task progress status right on the portal – it reminds of short Twitter messages or statuses on Facebook.

Teambox Mobile application provides the platform with more flexibility as you don`t have to sit down in front of the computer each time you want to inform your colleagues about each action.

Professional Plan with 50 GB storage and 100 projects limitation can be yours for 99$ a month, but a free version is also available – with 3 projects and 50 MB storage.

9 - Comindwork

Ukraine-based Comindwork seems to be a godsend for those who are looking for a web-application that offers you all possible project management features. Surprisingly for such a massive tool, Comindwork has a simple and user-friendly interface!

You can attach files to tasks, create project wiki and even view the tasks entire history.

You will probably like the variety of Comindwork pricing plans . The most budget “Team” solution is available for $1 per day and can manage up to 10 projects at a time. Unlimited capacity options are available for 999/month for companies with up to 300 users

10 - Central Desktop

Central Desktop is a cloud based collaboration system very similar to other workspace platforms. Like any other online solution for project management, it will give you an opportunity to work wherever you are unless there are problems with the Internet connection. Users have open access to time tracking, can work with Word, Excel, and Power Point documents and even arrange web-conferences online – an essential feature for any group of people, doing a project together!

Free Central Desktop plan provides you with 5 users, 2 workspaces and 1 GB File storage

If you are asking yourself why? The simple answer is because I wanted to see how Google search results is changing based on location, if my site on the top ranking for different countries by searching the same keywords, and also what kind of Google advertisement my blog visitors can see while being in different locations, so I will be able to keep some ads and block some of those unwanted ones.

That was before GeoSurf Toolbar!

I used to do this by surfing the internet within a frame under another website that hide my IP, or giving me another IP to brows, which is really annoying because of the ads they are showing, so I wasn’t comfort with that.

I had a magnificent road trip on the South, so I had a chance to see how advertisements are changing based on places I visited as I was connecting to the internet from a different city almost every day during the trip, but that was not enough, I want to go more wild and open the whole world, not only States in the USA. I mean what about those who are actually living in a different county?!

Now, life is easier with GeoSurf Toolbar

There are 80+ available global locations to surf from, plus many States in USA as well that you can choose from.

I wish I knew about this nice toolbar before, GeoSurf Toolbar allows you to surf the internet as a local user without even leaving your room, it’s just a perfect tool on my laptop, and it’s installed mainly on my Firefox browser. Installing and using it is easy as select the country and click apply. Here is how it looks like:

I can use GeoSurf Toolbar to

The things I wasn’t aware of before is, I can use GeoSurf Toolbar to:

• Check my competitors’ sites, I can see how their sites perform for visitors from other countries, and then make business decisions based on the results I am getting.
• I can see what products are promoted in different countries before launching my own advertising campaign.
• I can check whether my advertising campaigns are deployed properly, running correctly, and targeting the right audiences in different countries, this will protect you from investing your money on the wrong place.

You actually can do a lot more based on your business model, and I am sure you will get a lot of inspiration using and playing around with GeoSurf Toolbar.

Watch this Video

Plans and Pricing

There are plenty of choices to fit your business budget, from a started up to enterprise plan, also you can try GeoSurf Toolbar for free.

I hope you will like it as I do!

Click here to start your free trial today!

It’s all just “media” now according to AtomicPR

While there are clear differences in lead times, gatekeepers, and content between “traditional” and “new” media, Atomic PR claims the overall media landscape has largely converged, with tweets read aloud on broadcast TV and major print media outlets seeing greater traffic online vs. their print circulation. AtomicPR understands these challenges and creates multi-pronged campaigns to address all these verticals simultaneously.

For Atomic PR, social media represents a return to the fundamental objectives of public relations.

Public relations has often been about “press relations,” according to Atomic PR, however, the influence of online channels and social media has truly taken it back to its roots. While strong press relations are a core component of any successful PR endeavor, AtomicPR recognizes that often times brands are communicating and interacting directly with its consumers via social media, and a strong understanding on this social dynamic is critical.

I just came across their website today while browsing the internet and reading about public relations firms, and I thought to share what they do! Enjoy your weekend.