Making your small business accessible from anywhere in the world using cloud computing technologies.

Businesses these days need to be dynamic in order to survive. And without some form of dynamicism, the automated business model just couldn’t work. So how do I make my business more dynamic? Cloud computing! Cloud computing is a young technology, so don’t be surprised if you haven’t heard the terms cloud computing, cloud hosting or cloud storage. Cloud computing at this level is about moving your business to the web, allowing mobility and access to your business assets Globally. This is the way forward, so adopt it while it’s young. It will future proof your business and give you a fighting chance for success.

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Links from the show:

• Cloud
• MindMister
• Soundbooth
• Garage Band
• Windows Mobile
• Android
• Blackberry
• iPhone
• DreamHost
• 1and1 hosting
• GoDaddy
• Microsoft Exchange
• Microsoft Outlook
• RoboForm
• Offisync
• Sharepoint
• Groove
• Quickbooks
• Netsuite
• Skype
• Trillion
• Mebo
• Fring
• Ebuddy
• Google Gears
• Zoho suite

Transcript:

Welcome to Automate My Small Business where we show you how to set up and run your own automated business on the cheap. So get ready to take back your life and add a little spice. It’s time to build something automated.

MATT: Hello and welcome to episode #12 of Automate My Small Business. I’m Matt.

BRANDON: And this is Brandon.

MATT: And today we have a really good episode about mobility and Cloud computing and how to set up your computer systems so you can access your data and your apps from anywhere on the any device on any time. But before we get into that, Brandon, what have you been upto?

BRANDON: Well, we had Thanksgiving recently so I took the week off to just kind of spend some family time and it was a good opportunity to kind of test some of these items that we’re going to be talking about today, which was you know I ended up taking the week off with the family and grab my netbook which was all synced up with my desktop and was able to keep up with anything that was needed to keep up with really having to worry about where I was or what device I was using and I had my iPhone with me, so pretty much had all access to email and any other application I used on the web. So yeah, it was handy to be able to take advantage of these new technologies that we’re going to be talking about today. I’m excited about his topic. It’s actually something that everyone kind of deals with and is always trying to keep ahead of the curve on is these stuffs changes so radically you know. So you know what we’re going to talk about today is going to be probably changing in the next few months no matter how hard we try to keep up with it. Yeah, so it’s been good just kind of spending family time at the same thing. How about you, Matt? What have you been up to?

MATT: Same thing, traveling for Thanksgiving. I’ve been in Nebraska and Colorado and Minnesota, so a lot of traveling, a lot of trying to stay online and many things that I’ve gone but I’ve also been sick.

BRANDON: Uh-oh.

MATT: I now regret laughing at the person that was wearing that was wearing that little surgical mask on the airplane. I wish I would have done the same. I caught something as I’ve been traveling so hasn’t been quite pleasurable the last couple of days but see what I can do.

BRANDON: You said last time we recorded that you’re glad that since I was sick and you weren’t that we’re doing this over the internet because it can’t be contagious. But maybe there’s something here that we don’t know about.

MATT: Yeah, I need to update my virus protection on my machine apparently.

BRANDON: Yeah, so just to let you guys all know, we record this over Skype and we actually record our own voices. Matt uses a Mac, I use a PC so we eat our own dog food here. This is all virtual stuff. We do our meetings and our brainstorming using web apps, a great program called MindMister that we do some mindmapping with and we get our thoughts and stuff in on a mindmap and record using Skype and I used a recording software called SoundBooth. What do you use, Garage Band, Matt?

MATT: Yeah, I just use Garage Band.

BRANDON: Yeah so this all you know very Cloud computing kind of stuff and we’re going to be talking a lot more about it today.

MATT: Yeah, so let’s kind of define the problem we’re trying to solve. So traditionally you had a PC or computer that you just had your files on, all your apps on, but as you get a distributed team and you start to have multiple devices that you’re trying to access all the stuff on, you know, accessing your files from your phone when they’re on your PC, is not really easy. So we want to set up a solution where you can connect to your data from any machine or device that you happen to be on and be able to run your apps from either your phone or from your PC or your Mac or some computer that’s sitting in an internet café in Africa, right, wherever you happen to be, you know. We want to make sure that you can do everything that you need to do to be able to run your business.

BRANDON: Yes, so you know we’re going to focus this a little bit more on business mobility and how you’re going to be working with your team and the growth points which you know you might be growing as a business, you know, you as a solopreneur or if you had a team of five or if you’re outsourcing and so on and so forth. But we’re going to try to focus mainly on business mobility and Cloud computing. 1

MATT: Yeah I mean what are some of the symptoms you might see to know if you have this problem is if you’re emailing files back and forth to try to get them edited. I think we’ve all you know send a word doc back and forth across email a couple of times to try to get it updated by multiple people that you have to sync those back together and it’s just a really bad solution, right, or if you need to access some data and you’re on the go and you have your phone but you can’t get to it, you have this problem.

BRANDON: Yeah.

MATT: Can you think of any other examples?

BRANDON: Well, if you can get all streamline and working smoothly, god, what a time saver it can be because otherwise you’re just feeling like you’re always swimming upstream against the current and it’s just difficult to get it working smoothly but I think with the right tools implemented the right way and a little bit of thought, it can get there and I think there’s even more on the horizon for being even better and we’ll talk about some of the gaps in technology right now that probably still don’t have the right solution and what we’d like to be seen. Yeah, I mean that’s kind of the idea.

MATT: That’s a good lead and kind of a history of how you use to solve this problem and how the whole software industry is starting to rethink how to do this and giving us new productivity apps and things like that. Traditionally we use to build a corporate network where you had server software and file shares and printer shared that everyone could now use and share everything so you have a domain in, have an account in, logging in and you have to be physically present at your company’s location to be on this network. You know some of the down sides of this is that it has a very high upfront cost. You have to buy all those servers. You have to buy all that software and you have to hire someone to manage all those servers. That can be really expensive as you start to talk about exchange and you know all the different things that are part of that. So to overcome some of these, the industry is moving towards something called Cloud computing. And all Cloud computing really is it means that your data and your applications are hosted on somebody else’s server and somebody else’s network and you can access those across the internet. So you no longer have to be physically present on a network, or you know do something like a VPN onto a network. If you’ve worked in a corporation, you probably know what that is. But you can access all your data across the internet so as long as you’re on the internet somewhere and you can pretty much be on the internet anywhere in the world now, you can get to your data and get to your apps.

BRANDON: Yeah, so we’ve all probably worked in that corporate environment. You know you have your own computer and there’s a network that you belong to and I remember, gosh, it was probably 8 or 10 years ago that you know when we had the ability to check email from home that was like a big deal and being able to VPN or Virtual Private Network into the corporate network, that was a big deal. And then Outlook came out with their web version of the mail client, Outlook Web Access and that was a big leap forward and kind of going towards the Cloud because that was now as we’ve seen the future of kind of corporate applications.

MATT: Yeah, I think that brings up a really good example. So the ideal model of application to us is something is data hosted up in the Cloud and application that you can access over the web. So you know if you had a hosted exchange where you had your email stored somewhere, even like Gmail, so your email is all stored up on server and the provide you a web app that can access that, right, so you know Gmail you go to the Gmail client and if you had exchange hosted email, you’d go to the Outlook web access. But then also having a rich client in each of your devices that rides a little bit more full functionality, having Outlook on your desktop is you know, a lot better than going to the Outlook Web Access Client even though it’s a really nice client. And then on your iPhone, your Blackberry, you have a dedicated app that does email. That’s really the ideal solution.

BRANDON: Yeah, that’s what we’re looking for in all areas of communicating and keeping our data connected with all the people in our team and on our team. And so, yeah, that’s a good example to kind of work from so we’re going to show you a few other tools that we use. We can start of right way with the devices that we use, right. You have your phone, your laptop, maybe you have a desktop. If you’re traveling, you don’t have one of those, you probably will maybe use a public computer. For example, I use I think both of us we use iPhones. I was a huge Blackberry fan and you know there’s probably a lot of Blackberry users out there so we’re not knocking Blackberry at all, because I think it’s a fantastic platform.

MATT: So what are some of the differences? Since you’ve had both, talk about what you like better about iPhone and what you like better about Blackberry?

BRANDON: Well, the reason I switched to iPhone was you can’t deny the applications. They’re just so many good applications on the iPhone nowadays. That’s the number one reason why I switched.

MATT: And when we talk about like having data hosted in the Cloud and access in the Cloud and reach application on your device, those apps are exactly what we’re talking about, right?

BRANDON: Right and so you know I can check my WordPress administrative account from my iPhone. I can check my Google analytics and see where I am on any of my website and see how many visitors I’ve got that day or that hour or that month, you know. You can upload notes or record your voice into Jott and translate it into text for your to-do list. These are the kind of applications that I use on a daily basis. I think it’s worth the expense of the iPhone for being able to utilize those applications. But the Blackberry is a great phone. I love the keyboard on the Blackberry. I honestly can type faster on the Blackberry than I can on the iPhone.

MATT: Yes, I think if you’re doing a lot of typing like just send a lot of emails, you know, then maybe Blackberry might be better for you. I don’t know.

BRANDON: Yeah, and you know the one thing that Blackberry does real well that the iPhone doesn’t is getting a contact up immediately. Without having to go into contacts and going like you would on the iPhone, the Blackberry is easy. You just start typing you know. If I wanted to find Matt, I hit m-a-t and before I even get that far, it knows I’m trying to get to Matt. And the iPhone you know, you got to do a couple or more clicks which you know doesn’t seem like a lot but when you’re doing it multiple times a day, it’s nice, or you can type in a company name or even on the Blackberry, you could type in something that you kept in your notes and it knew, it pulled up a list, every letter. And you know the iPhone does that well except it takes a few more taps to get there.

MATT: Okay. So some other one that are out there, you know you still have a lot of the windows mobile phone, which was market leader awhile ago but it’s kind of an aging platform now. I’m looking forward to Windows mobile 7. Sounds like it might be a revival. There might be some more competition for the iPhone and the Blackberry in that but we’ll see. Google introduced another one that’s coming up. They’re really starting to advertise it a lot and I think Android will have a pretty good open source community around it so you might look for a lot of free apps around Android.

BRANDON: Yeah.

MATT: And then you have Palm which I kind of see as the dying platform.

BRANDON: Yeah, we all loved Palm, didn’t we? I love, I had my Trio back in the day and I love the Palm but it’s a sad death for sure. I’m sad to see them struggling but they’re not going anywhere soon.

MATT: Yes, I think those are the major ones. iPhone obviously is the market leader. The only thing that’s really kind of holding them back in the US right now is that they’re tied to AT&T I think. I think it’s a definitely growth limiter for them right now and I’ve heard rumors of Verizon iPhones in the future but we’ll see.

BRANDON: Yeah, so have you had any troubles with your iPhone other than the AT&T service?

MATT: My problem is AT&T. That’s my big problem.

BRANDON: But what about apps? Do you like your email the way it is? You get your email the right way and …

MATT: I think email is okay but it’s not excellent. Like I have a bunch of different email accounts. I’d like to go switch between those accounts easier than diving in three levels to see the inbox folder and then backing out three levels to go to the another account. I wish they’d have something like a two finger swipe to switch between accounts or something. Windows mobile did that really well. You can switch between multiple accounts really easily.

BRANDON: So multiple accounts on iPhone in email is not as easy.

MATT: Yeah, it’s hard to switch between them.

BRANDON: Yeah, and you know iPhone used to use a lot of web apps but now with the app store, everything has become innate of apps.

MATT: Yeah, I think the app store is definitely the best feature of the whole thing.

BRANDON: Yeah, I’m even noticing that even something as simple as their website is not becoming an iPhone app, you know. There’s a lot of companies that are just jumping on the bandwagon, just to have an iPhone app even though what they are offering is pretty much a home page.

MATT: Yeah. Another great feature of the iPhone is that there’s millions and millions of people have one so you get a lot of people developing for it.

BRANDON: That’s true.

MATT: You know I have some hope for Windows mobile like after seeing what they did with the Zune HD like they’re building an app store, works pretty well. There are just no apps in it. So hopefully that will grow and Windows Mobile 7 will be a competitor again.

BRANDON: Yeah, we’ll see. What about laptops? Do you go with laptop or do you use a netbook and a desktop? What’s your situation?

MATT: I have a netbook but I never really use it because of the keyboard is so awful to use. I pretty much just carry my laptop when I need full computer and then have my iPhone when I don’t.

BRANDON: Yeah, see I like the netbook because it’s small and light. And now that I’ve gone almost completely to Cloud, it’s perfect because I don’t really need to worry about the CPU getting dragged down and you know have this auto synchronization, file synchronization stuff that works great which will get into more in a second.

MATT: Yeah you’re breaking the Cloud model with that.

BRANDON: That’s true but you know you do have your files and we’ll talk about the options there. You have Mac versus PC. You have a Mac. I got a PC. I think if you’re …

MATT: And I have a PC so I mean ultimately if you’re following the model, it really shouldn’t matter, you know, as long as you can access those Cloud apps and you have some sort of client that runs on your desktop, then you should be able to do everything from Mac that you can do from PC or everything you from PC from Mac, you know. PC’s probably going to have more applications than the Mac so you’ll find that sometimes you have to use the web-based version of things on the Mac but you should be able to do almost everything.

BRANDON: Yeah.

MATT: Another thing that we should mention with the netbook stuff is the Chrome OS that’s coming up next year which is Google’s O.S that is entirely cloud web O.S. That might be interesting for the type apps that we’re looking for. We really haven’t seen too much to say it’s going to be a real hit or it’s going to be a failure yet. But sometimes you look up for the future.

BRANDON: Yeah, I’m excited to see how that all works. It’s no secret that Google has been wanting to take on the operating system challenge and they’ve been trying to make it as if they’re not competing with Microsoft but clearly everybody knows that they’re eventually going to go head to head on the OS platform so that’s the goal there and we’ll see.

MATT: It’s either going to be a big hit or a spectacular failure. I just don’t know what it’s going to be.

BRANDON: Yeah. I think it’s going to do well. I mean they did a good job with Gmail and that was a major application that get right and now with Google docs and Google Apps, I think they’re on the right track and with the browser that they have a 100 percent control of, it seems like the closing of the loop that they needed to get it right so we’ll see.

MATT: Yeah and then the last thing we have is be able to access to you apps in your data from a public computer so that means going into an internet café and just sitting down and rent a computer and being able to run your business and run your apps and access all your data. You communicate with your team, right.

BRANDON: Right. You know there’s a lot of issues to be thought of I mean it’s kind of depends on how big you’re going to go like if you have a larger company, say, even five people or more, are you going to host everybody’s email for them or are you going to have everybody have their own email client. I’ve gone to the experience of maintaining my own server. Even when I have a smaller company of about five employees and I mean I handles it pretty well. I kind of felt I knew what I was doing but even though I knew what I was doing, the maintenance of keeping up a server and IT behind it if something goes down, you know, you need a back up and I’m so happy that eventually I went to a hosted exchange server. I did that a number of years ago. Now I’m on Gmail so that’s also hosted of course but I just wanted to put that out there knowing that there are a lot of people who when starting businesses, they feel like they have to have some sort of network in place within a little office and I’m here to say that’s not true. You can do it without…

MATT: Yeah, we’re definitely pushing everything towards you know having someone else host them for you or out in the internet somewhere, right?

BRANDON: Yeah.

MATT: So emails is kind of the first thing that you realize that you need to get started. You want an email address with mycompany.com over at the end, right? You definitely don’t want to be using you know companyname@gmail.com or companyname@hotmail.com. That’s just not professional and I know when I get emails from people like that, I don’t take them as seriously because I know how easy it is to just to go set up an account like Google apps or you know getting host exchange account.

BRANDON: Yeah, it’s funny how many fairly professional businesses you come across you know nice big office, very professional demeanor about them and then they give you their card and it says aol.com, you’re going, “What?” you know.

MATT: Aol is a really bad one, you know.

BRANDON: I know but yeah so it’s…

MATT: At least you know they’ve been in business for awhile if they have an Aol account.

BRANDON: Right. Well you know just to give you a sense of how simple it really is, if you haven’t done this before, once you have your domain, we forward the name servers, Matt and I both used DreamHost but you could use 1and1 or GoDaddy has their own whatever you want and the great thing is that Gmail is free and you can forward your mail all the way to Google apps and have it set up so it controls all your email in and out and you know you’re set with the Gmail account but it uses your domain name and it’s real simple to set up. It probably would take about 5 to 10 minutes depending on if you’ve done it before. But don’t think it’s a hard thing to do.

MATT: So what do you think some of the differences where when you’re on hosted Microsoft Exchange versus Gmail?

BRANDON: Well the main difference is the UI. If you haven’t used Gmail, the main difference is your emails come in as conversations and so everything gets threaded as a conversation which takes a little bit of getting used to. You have an email that you decided it was worth replying to, you reply to it and next thing you know, they’ve replied back and its pop back up in your inbox but as a thread not as a new email. So it keeps on recurring every time there’s a new piece of information on that thread. That was a little confusing at the beginning. I’m not sure if I liked it. What do you think about that, Matt?

MATT: I still don’t like the conversation view. I liked the concept and what they’re trying to do but I think they can visualize it a little bit better.

BRANDON: Yeah, then so if you get two emails on the same conversation, it gets even more confusing because you’re reading the bottom one. It’s just by habit the top would be the newest right? But if you had two emails come in on that same conversation, you may not read the next one down because you think that the newest one is the top one. And so I’ve done that before where I haven’t even gotten to the second one assuming that that was just an old email. You know what I mean? Have you ever done that?

MATT: Yeah, yeah. I think another feature that is really nice with Exchange is that if you’re going to decide to use a rich client like Microsoft Outlook, which I think depend on the best desktop plan there is for you know. It’s probably going to integrate a little better with exchange. You had some issues trying to integrate it with email, right?

BRANDON: Yeah. Well you know Gmail will either come in as an Imap. I guess you can do Pop too but when you do Imap, the stars don’t work. It does work with the flags but the folders and tags are, tag is a folder basically in Outlook. That’s all the differences I can think of now.

MATT: And I think if you paid $25 a month or something like that you can get better synchronization between Gmail and Outlook, is that right?

BRANDON: Yes, that’s true. If you go to the premium version of Google apps, they do have an add-in on Outlook that basically makes it as if it works with exchange but its Gmail so yeah it’s much more tightly integrated into Outlook which is a good alternative. I think it’s probably the best alternative to go with. The problem is it costs $50 per year per user so you know it’s cheap but it’s not free.

MATT: Yeah. And as we go through these things, you kind of get to see that there’s a couple different suites of applications that, you know, if you buy in to the Gmail way of doing things, you’re probably going to buy in to the Google docs and the other Google services and if you think Microsoft is the way to go, you’re going to buy into Exchange and posted Sharepoint and things like that. Another option out there that both of us had looked up but I don’t think either one has tried is the Zoho Suite software, right?

BRANDON: Yeah, the Zoho Suite has got to be one of the most full featured app suites out there. It’s so enormous, it does everything. I’m almost a little intimidated to just dive into it just knowing how much it does. But I’ve heard a lot of good reviews from it.

MATT: Yeah. One thing that we kind of skipped over in this is probably kind of the first thing you want to look at is identity and really that is having a log in that you can use across different services. So you know when we talk about these different suites of applications, you know, if you use Google, you have a Google log in which is your email address. So you know matt@automatemysmallbusiness.com, I can use that to log in to all my different Google docs and Gmail and you know whatever else we use and in addition to just the Google services, you want to look for an identity provider which Google is one of those, that supports open ID. And what open ID is is a way to use your log in on other sites. So increasingly more and more applications and web-based apps out there starting to allow you to log in to their site with the open ID so I don’t have to create a new log in just for whatever app I’m trying to access.

BRANDON: Well, since you’re talking about ID and log ins and passwords, this is a good chance for me to say how I do it and I know it’s different than how you do it, Matt. But I love RoboForm. I know it’s not the most secure idea of using an application to store passwords but I do like having a one click log in from any of the accounts that I have out there. So there’s that option to have to.

MATT: So I think RoboForm is really a work around to the problem I’m not having a single log on, right. If you just have one username and password to remember and you could log on to everything on the internet, would you still RoboForm?

BRANDON: No. You’re right. If you had open ID and open ID was across the internet, you wouldn’t have that.

MATT: Yeah. So it’s not there yet but that’s the vision, right? So …

BRANDON: Right. And when it does, it went out to there, I’ll stop using RoboForm but until then I have 300 usernames and passwords I have to remember and it’s just much easier to have a management system know all that for me.

MATT: I’ll give you a pass. You’re much more idealistic.

BRANDON: Yeah. Matt and I always have this conversation about yeah, we’re indifferent about it.

MATT: Yes. Some of the other open ID providers are like your Facebook account so you can use your Facebook account to log in using open ID or live.com which is Microsoft’s identity provider. They had a beta but I don’t know if they have released it or not. But there’s a couple of other ones but basically you know whatever you decide on as your suite, you want to see if they offer up an idea and try use that as your identity. Google and Gmail is a pretty good one.

BRANDON: Yeah, thinking about identity and Facebook and Google, I think it’s little off topic but I think everybody should have a Facebook page, LinkedIn page, and their own web page and if you don’t have those three things, you’re out of the loop because the Facebook page you use for basically all your personal connections and your LinkedIn page is a professional. If you haven’t heard about LinkedIn, it’s a good site to go check out just to get your professional resume out there and you know connected to old coworkers and bosses and things like of that sort. And then I think if you don’t have your own domain, go get it. I even got my one year old his own domain, hisname.com and if you don’t think that’s important now, it’s going to be important in the future because when people search for you as everybody knows that everybody does now even at job interviews, they’ll search your name on Google and find you and the best way to protect your reputation is to make your own reputation. So I think it’s important to have your own website out there too.

MATT: Yeah, I’ll follow your tangent and say that you know domain name is the classic one you want to protect as your brand and your identity. But you know make sure you’re able to put your name for Twitter and your name at all the different social sites that you want. Those are just as important as the domain names now. Okay, back on topic.

BRANDON: Yeah. Back on topic. What have we got?

MATT: Productivity and office suite.

BRANDON: Yeah, so we’re talking you know file structure, folder structure. How do you keep all your documents and where do you keep them. Google docs is a pretty good one for finding out that there are some good add-ins to Microsoft Office that will allow you to completely synchronize your documents with Google docs. I just started using that and I was pretty impressed with it. It is an add-in called Offisync and basically you’re able to use Word or Excel or Powerpoint, hit save and it saves it to your Google docs account instead of saving it to your local drive.

MATT: Yes, this is following your model of having your data stored up in the Cloud in Google docs, having the Google docs web app to kind of do some basic editing or just viewing of the files and then having a full feature rich client like Microsoft Office with Word and Excel and Powerpoint to do editing on your local desktop, right?

BRANDON: And you know the Google docs does support pdf so you can put pdfs there. You can of course use Word documents and Excel documents and of course that Google versions of those and Powerpoint as well. It does some limitations though. I’m not aware of being able to store pictures or zip files so there’s that to consider. So it’s not a perfect solution by no means.

MATT: It works pretty well if you have a few people but once you get above like 3, 4, 5 people, you know it starts getting difficult to manage you old domain whereas something like you know traditional file share or you know even a modern Sharepoint server, where you can see all the files and search all the files of your company. The only thing you can see in Google docs are things that people had explicitly shared with you which I think is the real limitation as you get into a bigger and bigger company.

BRANDON: Yeah, you mentioned that and I didn’t realize that’s the case. As an owner of the domain and an owner of the company, you’re not able to see all the documents in that domain unless they were shared with you from all the team members you might have.

MATT: Yes, that’s one concern and the other concern of mine is discoverability so if one of my team members writes a document and maybe they share it with me but another contractor that I’m working with is searching and trying to find information about something, that another contractor is not going to see that information so it’s just not discoverable, you know. I want a set of documents in the sharing area that is open to the whole team and you know they can find all the information they need without having to explicitly share it with them.

BRANDON: Yeah. What if one team members working on the manual and another team member, months later decided, “Hey, we should have a manual,” and they start working on a manual and they could have just easily search for what manuals are already started and they couldn’t figure that out unless they ask around but there would be no evidence of a document out there even if it was in your own domain or in your own team. Yeah, discoverability I think is going to be important in whatever you choose. So that’s why I think if we had to choose a recommendation we’re going to go with Sharepoint on this one.

MATT: Yeah, Sharepoint is a solution that a lot of big corporations use but you can also get a hosted solution where you pay you know a couple of bucks a month for a Sharepoint site which you’re going to upload different files to and give everyone in your team access to.

BRANDON: Yeah, I’m sure there’s some competing platform out there, some web apps that would give Sharepoint a run for their money. But until we see something better I think it’s a good one to recommend.

MATT: Yeah, and it integrates really well with office client obviously for Microsoft and I think there’s some hosting directly from Microsoft or you can get it hosted by someone else. Some other things that are out there, I know you’ve used Dropbox for just synchronizing files across mobile people’s machines.

BRANDON: Yeah, real simple. You basically you have a folder on your computer that is your Dropbox folder and if you want to have that document shared across all your team, you drop it in that folder, that’s why they call it the Dropbox. You drop it in that folder or you know you can have subfolders of course but what it does is it immediately makes it available across not only on your computers and on the web but also your team mate’s computers so you basically have 100 percent real time synched folder which by the way each file has its own URL so it works as a good way of sharing the file with others that may or may not be part of the team. You can just sent them a URL for that file. It also has versioning that basically keeps backups of all the versions you changed on the particular file so that’s handy to have too.

MATT: I think it’s pretty good solution because it follows our model of having a, you know, hosted in the cloud source of that data then having a synchronized each of the machines.

BRANDON: Yeah, it’s handy. I think it’s a great solution.

MATT: Yeah, I think Sharepoint is headed that way. You know in the initial version of Sharepoint they’re going to have something called Sharepoint Work Space which will synchronize those files off of that server down to your local machine and keep them in sync so you get kind of the same thing but Sharepoint is not quite there yet with that.

BRANDON: Yeah. Did you talk about Groove?

MATT: Yeah, Microsoft bought Groove which was kind of a peer to peer file sharing thing. It’s kind of a cool solution where you don’t have a centralized server and it’s kind of like a Limewire for sharing your files but a private Limewire where you only share it with the people you want to share with.

BRANDON: Yeah, you know just because it never did get into the cloud, it didn’t seemed to be the perfect solution for me. So it is there and I think it was free with Vista. Isn’t it built in the Vista?

MATT: There are some free services but I think you have to pay for them. I’m not really sure.

BRANDON: Oh no, you know what, I remember. It was an Office Ultimate 2007.

MATT: Yeah, I think you used to be able to download it separately but now I think its part of the Office.

BRANDON: Yeah, I would go with Dropbox over Groove on that one.

MATT: I don’t think we want to talk about what this is, how you organize your files within these systems. I don’t know if there is any system that really implements the way that we want to do it perfectly yet but they’re moving that way. So we talked about this in our personal productivity and our emails as somewhere, we don’t put things in folders and we want to use tags in searching to organize and find things. I think we want to do the same thing with files. We just haven’t kind of got the system that lets us do that as well as we would want to.

BRANDON: Yeah and this is kind of a major paradigm shift for all of us really because we’re used to putting all of our file in folders and we’ve got into that habit of kind of thinking that way but the real utopia of organizing your files is will really by using tags and keywords and even OCR or optical character recognition, to know more what content is in, even scanned files if you want to. But then being able to search those files for both content and keyword tag across multiple folders not just having to dig into certain folders to go and find it.

MATT: Yeah I think the real distinction between folders and tags is that a file can have multiple tags to it so I can access that file coming through multiple tags or multiple hierarchies of tag. But a file can only be in one folder. So you’re getting this paradigm where you have to choose, should the file be in this folder or this folder? Should it be in 2009 folder or should it be in the locations specific you know United States Texas folder or it really should be in both, with the tags you can do that.

BRANDON: And there’s the age old problem of having a folder structure that shared across that just never seems to be the right folder structure for employee one versus employee two that the first employee might have it one way and then the second employee comes along and says, “Well, I would reorganize it to make it this way and that would work better for me.” With tags it doesn’t matter whereas the folder structure causes problems among the collaborators when you’re dealing with folders being in certain files that work the best for one person but it doesn’t work the best for another person.

MATT: Right, so you can get them both. You can have one added key for one person and one added key for the other person. As you grow, people will see these two ways of accessing.

BRANDON: Right.

MATT: Okay, another kind of core application that we think everyone needs is accounting and we both use Quickbooks online which is into its web based solution and this is an area where it doesn’t quite fit the idea model but it’s getting that. Intuit produces great books online and they produce Quickbooks desktop editions and what we really would want to have happen is have the Quickbooks desktop to be able to access the data in Quickbooks online but it’s just not quite there yet.

BRANDON: Yeah, Quickbooks has been around, what, for decades almost it seems but the online version has been around for I’m going to say about 4 years now and they still are kind of limited in their feature set, the online version I’m talking about and even recently I was looking for a way to send out invoices and be able to have the customer pay directly off of that email. When I say send out invoices, I meant email those invoices to the customer and then have the customer pay with the pay button right there on the email. And believe it or not, Quickbooks online doesn’t support that feature but Quickbooks the actual installed version does but it turns out my bank does it for me anyway online so I end up doing it that way. But it just gives you an idea that Quickbooks online even though it seems like real straightforward idea is to put your books online and use it on a web application. They’re actually one of the pioneering companies to do it. Freshbooks and we’ve talked about a few others out there that do some invoicing for you. They are out there doing good job but there’s really not an alternative that I know of that does all of it.

MATT: But there’s things like Netsuite which is really like it runs your whole company on the web. It’s pretty cool. And clarity accounting. But Quickbooks is kind of the standard and even though Quickbooks online isn’t as full featured as we‘d like it to be, it’s probably still one of the better solutions right now.

BRANDON: Yeah, it works pretty well.

MATT: So the next thing we have is communication. But this is both you know voice talking with your contractors in India and the Philippines places like that and I am.

BRANDON: Yeah, in order to really call yourself mobile, you’re going to be able to communicate with your team no matter where you’re at. You could be at your desk, that’s obvious. You could be in the car. You could be on vacation. You could be with your laptop. What we’re looking for is a way of communicating no matter where you’re at so having that ability built into your phone and your laptop and everywhere is what you’re going for. So Skype is good. I used Skype especially across international borders because it seems like everybody around the world is on Skype. You can do a lot with it. It works great as an instant messenger. It works great for voice. It works great for even screen shots sharing. So that’s a key core application.

MATT: And it has an iPhone client, right, and I think some other like Windows Mobile client. I don’t know, did they have a Blackberry client?

BRANDON: You know what, I don’t know.

MATT: So that’s kind of cool because I could have my iPhone and be in someone else’s house and you can make a call on my Skype account.

BRANDON: Skype, does it have a push capability with iPhone?

MATT: Not sure about that but I’m not thinking about it as push and it’s restricted right now only for WiFi.

BRANDON: I think they recently lifted that. I could be wrong but …

MATT: They haven’t updated it yet but I know a couple of other apps got cleared for being able to make WiFi calls.

BRANDON: Right.

MATT: Maybe Skype will get cleared pretty soon.

BRANDON: Yeah, so you know for instant messenger, we both use Trillion. I know Mebo is a good one too to get all your instant messenger platforms all in one client.

MATT: Yeah, the cool thing about Trillion is it has both the web based interface and a rich client for Mac and for PCs. It really fits our model of being able to use either just the web or a rich client on your PC or on your Mac.

BRANDON: And they’re going to have an iPhone client here shortly. I know they have it but they haven’t released it to the public.

MATT: Yeah, we weren’t privileged enough to be on that beta. Maybe someone has some influence and they can get us in.

BRANDON: Yeah, really. I think Trillion is a good one all around.

MATT: So since you don’t have an iPhone client for Trillion yet, what are you using right now?

BRANDON: I use an application called Fring, that’s ring with an F at the beginning of it and it does have native push. So you can actually get it to ring or chime if anybody IM’s you even without the application running. I can’t believe it took them this long to get that working but it’s either Apple or AT&T was the slow one at that but ( cell phone rings) just like that.

MATT: See. And I use Ebuddy. My favorite feature about Ebuddy is that it automatically log me out after I do something. I don’t really want to get those push alerts on my phone for IM. I only want to get on when I’m ready to IM people so I kind of like the feature of Ebuddy logging me out and not getting push after that.

BRANDON: Well, you can always log out but you like it logging out automatically for you.

MATT: Yeah, I forget to log out then I get instant messages when I don’t want them.

BRANDON: That’s funny. Good. Well, what else? If you’re going to be with any sort of multiple computer situations, you’re going to want to sync your files.

MATT: Or really you want to store your files up in the cloud but you know that might not always be possible so there are some tools that work around that.

BRANDON: Well, I think we talked about you know some of those tools like Dropbox, you know, where you got the cloud in the middle. It’s kind of a hybrid or you if you don’t want to do that, let’s say you have booked and you have a desktop and you just want to have the two folders synced just because you know that you only use your netbook maybe once a month or something, right. You can use SyncToy which is a good one.

MATT: Who makes SyncToy?

BRANDON: SyncToy is a Microsoft.

MATT: Okay. So it’s kind of one of the power tools sort of you know.

BRANDON: Yeah it’s a power tool and it’s simple, simple and it works really, really well. I use it on my Microsoft small business server and it work really well. Basically, every time you’re in your know network, it synchronizes your files for you in the background and then when you leave your network it will have an offline copy of all your files and so if you make any changes to those files, you know, they stay local files until you get back into your network and then the sync. So those two tools really work if you have a network that you come back too often, you know. At least once a week, you’re checking into your main network.

MATT: So the Microsoft product I really like is the Live Mesh, which is kind of a multipurpose tool for keeping you synchronized. It’s kind of on the personal side than on the business having multiple users thing. But really you can have you know multiple of your own computers synced up to this Mesh and it’ll keep files synchronized between all the computers and an online storage space. You know it worked really great for me being synchronized between my different computers. I think I have like six computers in my Mesh now.

BRANDON: Yeah, that’s kind of the ultimate is bringing the online copy into the mix so that you have not only the synchronization between computers but you can always access those files online as well and it works as a good back up as well.

MATT: Yeah, the other thing it does that I really like is the remote access. So like it lists all those six computers and I can just click log in directly into one of those six computers without doing the you know.

BRANDON: So you have remote access to the Windows, to the desktop level.

MATT: Yeah, so like I can log in and use any apps that are on there, do whatever, right?

BRANDON: Right. So you use Live Mesh mainly for specific files or group of files, you don’t do your whole hard drive to it, right?

MATT: No, I just kind of pick some of my important folders and use that for that.

BRANDON: So if you did want to back up your entire hard drive using the cloud, I think a lot of people are moving to Jungle Disk which I think started off as Amazon S3 but Rackspace bought them, didn’t they?

MATT: Yeah, Rackspace own them. But you can use that for Rackspace over for Amazon S3.

BRANDON: It has both platform to back up to but you pretty much have Terabytes if you wanted to back up to if you’d like.

MATT: Yeah it gets really expensive in Jungle Disk and Amazon S3 if you start buying terabytes.

BRANDON: Well, it’s 15 cents a gig, isn’t it?

MATT: Yeah, so what is that, like $15 a month for a terabyte.

BRANDON: Yeah, which, I guess you’re deserving for having to pay that much if you have that much upload and be careful when you know I think Mozy or was it Carbonite that offers unlimited storage, the actual fine print is that yes, you do get unlimited storage but you have a cap of how much bandwidth you can use to upload. So you’re only allowed to do so may gigabytes per month, I believe it is. That may have changed recently but that was the last time I checked that’s the way it worked. I personally like LogMeIn. I’ve used GoToMyPC and a few others out there but LogMeIn is free and it’s pretty much all I need. I have all my families set up on LogMeIn. I have my mom, my uncle, my grandparents, my wife’s parents. What I do is every time they ask me for some help in their computer I jump on and I say, “You know what, just give me am minute. I’m just going to install this little application in your taskbar,” and they don’t even know I’m doing it. If they weren’t my family, it could be a big security problem but what I do is then I log in to my LogMeIn account and I have a list of every family member and all their computers and it tells me which ones are actually on and which ones are off. Of course any computer I have I do the same thing with and it works it real well.

MATT: So those services are basically make it easier to access those computers but really most people don’t know that Windows has a functionality built in, right? It’s called the remote desktop. The problem is it uses a port that’s not normally open through your router so you got to open up your router. It need some way to address your local machine so you probably need to set up something like dynamic DNS because you don’t have an IP address that’s constant.

BRANDON: Right. You know I did that for many years and it was just a pain in the butt. I’d have to worry about what router port was open and all that. It can be done but there’s so many easier ways to do it now using port 80 html and using a local client to connect. It’s basically similar to how an instant messenger client worked where the two computers are talking to each other and it’s over the http protocol.

MATT: Cool so maybe a related topic maybe conferencing, right. So LogMeIn and all those stuff is great for when you need to go and take control of a machine but you know sometimes you just want to share your desktop and some slides that you have with a bunch of different people. So for that we use some web conferencing or webinars software, right.

BRANDON: Yeah, Free Conference Call is a good one. I’ve used that in the past, freeconferencecall.com. I’ve used GoToMedium before which is pretty good. It just, you know, you got to pay for it. It is expensive. I know they’ve come down in price recently but why pay for it if you don’t need to. What have you used, Matt?

MATT: I’ve used a lot of Live Meeting and Microsoft Shared View. Shared View is kind of a free less full featured client and then Live Meeting is kind of like the enterprise thing that I’ve used in working. Live Meeting is traditionally have been kind of expensive but I think it’s part of the new Microsoft online services that we’re talking about. So if you get that whole suite, I think you get that like $2 a month per user or something like that. It’s a pretty good full featured webinar client.

BRANDON: Yeah and you can also do webinar seminars like you’re doing a presentation basically. It could be doing it to two people or 2,000 people. I mean if you’re doing it to 2,000 people there are certain packages you buy to get that kind of bandwidth but it works great for sales. If you’re in any sort of business where you’re calling up clients or customers that need kind of a walkthrough of your product or your service and you want to kind of sell them on the idea with the visual presentation but not having to really drive or fly to their location. It is a fantastic way to save money and to save time. Talk about automating your business. If you have a large number of sales people, stop the 15 cents a mile expense reports and all of the airfare expenses.

MATT: 15 cents, you haven’t bought gas lately, man.

BRANDON: No, what is it? Isn’t that the deduction of our taxes?

MATT: Just like 53 cents a mile or something like that.

BRANDON: Is it 53 cents, is that right? Wow.

MATT: It’s really expensive.

BRANDON: Well, I think the IRS needs to readjust their tax deduction the price per mile then. But yeah so there’s lot of cost involved in pushing your sales people all around to go visit clients and this is a fantastic strategy. Probably not only to save cost in the meantime but I think it’s probably a better solution to the get your customers to say yes to a presentation instead of having to knock on their door, interrupt them and go and meet them and spend more time than what they would need to if they were just online sitting in front of their own computer. So I think people are more open to sitting and watching a presentation for 10 minutes than have you come to their office and spend an hour doing small talk or things of that sort.

MATT: Yeah. I’ve seen a lot of live demos over the internet. I definitely prefer them than coming to get in the car and travel somewhere.

BRANDON: Right and then you know there’s bookmarks, if we’re going to talk about mobility you know you got to bring your bookmarks or have access to your bookmarks all around wherever you go so I like to have my bookmarks saved in you know my browser but I synchronize them. That’s probably going to be going away here shortly with Del.icio.us and Ego.

MATT: I mean this is one thing I never understood why the browsers never implement some centralized kind of bookmark storage. Now this just seems like so obvious that I need to be able to get to these multiple machines that I don’t know. I used to use Del.icio.us and I moved to Diigo because I kind of like some of the extra features they had about marking up the web and seeing what other people wrote. I think Del.icio.us has more things that integrate with it which is one of the things I like about Del.icio.us and I miss about Del.icio.us but I mean I kind of like Diigo.

BRANDON: So the usability of it though, how would you rate them?

MATT: I think they’re pretty equal. They both have plug ins that load in most of the major browsers and then they also like kind of a light plug in bar where you click a bookmark button and it pops up like a little java script bar at the top of your browser which I kind of like because it’s a little bit lighter weight and doesn’t slow down my browser.

BRANDON: Yeah, I would say if you could go that direction, that’s the best way to go with your bookmark but if you absolutely want to keep them in your browser which is going to be located on your local hard drive, at the very least synchronize them. There’s a couple of programs out there that can do that. I used Xmarks to synchronize them across my computers and that seems to work pretty well.

MATT: Well, the other thing that I like about Del.icio.us and Diigo is that their social and I can share those bookmarks with people. I think that’s one of the limitations you have with just you know using your built in browser bookmarks is that you can’t really share a set of bookmarks that they want or I can’t browse what bookmarks you have.

BRANDON: Right. You’re absolutely right. There’s no sharing capability there. Although there is syncing platform out there that does offer to do some sharing but Del.icio.us by far is the most well known.

MATT: So I mean those are kind of the core productivity and the main things you’re going to probably be using. There’s other apps out there that you’re going to want to have hosted in the cloud like a CRM or customer relationship management. I think we have plans of kind of dive into this a little bit deeper in the future episode but things like sales force and Microsoft CRM and Sugar CRM. We’ll get more in depth in that another time. Is there anything we missed?

BRANDON: You want to talk about Wikis which I think is a good way to talk about documents and notes and stuffs and all put together. I use this all the time with my VAs especially my VA in the Philippines. Every task or project that I assign her, she puts a Wiki page which I built a little template. Basically take documents, place them here, any notes or task list, place them here. It’s pretty much a drag and drop right onto this Wiki which is built on the Google sites platform. Real simple for her to maintain and so if there’s anything that I need to know about project or how it’s coming I like to go to that one page and see what the next task list off of that check box and then maybe what documents I could see right there and look at the latest excel spreadsheet on what research she’s found or whatever. That’s a good way to use a Wiki and I use Google sites for that. It can also be great for just documenting procedures or keeping the information available at fingertips of all your teammates to get information right away.

MATT: I have always kind of battle between Wikis and Documents. I feel like Wikis do a lot of the same things that documents should traditionally done with like the how-to stuff and things like that. And I think my additional solution would be to have a Wiki that people can collaboratively edit online and then be able to take all that information offline in the form of a document to share with people. I feel like they’re trying to tackle some of the same problem and I know Wikis do a little bit more than just putting a documents in but I love to be able to just say, “take this whole section of the Wiki and dump it into a pdf or a Word doc,” and you know not have it offline so I can read it as I want and I have to browse it. So I think that would be my ideal form of host in the cloud with some sort of client that allows you access to it.

BRANDON: Right. So will that be something similar to you know the Google word doc that they would keep up to date for that work?

MATT: Yeah, some of them, maybe.

BRANDON: So if you’re going to be using offline so you’re saying a good alternative might be a synchronization of the Wiki?

MATT: Yeah, into some file format that some app I have can read, right, like natively I think you know that’s a word document with different chapters in it or something. But maybe it’s a new app that does something different from like a local Wiki copy and synchronizes the back up. I just don’t know anything that does that yet.

BRANDON: Well, one thing that Google is trying to do is synchronize the online world with the offline world and they have a tool called Google Gears. Matt, you used it a lot. Tell us how that work.

MATT: It’s basically kind of just a framework that apps build on top of so Gmail builds on top of this, WordPress built on top of it that lets you take certain actions while you’re offline and not connected to the internet and it stores then later on forwards on and does its actions once you connect to internet.

BRANDON: So they have this already built into Gmail and I think they use Google Gears to do this where you’re getting your email online but if you ever drop offline or your laptop offline you still can get your email and see what emails you have. It may not be the most up to date or it may be a few minutes late or you might not get the latest email at the top of the list but you have access to your emails and then if you ever need to send an email you pretty much use Gmail as if you were online and it synchronizes once you get back, right.

MATT: Exactly, unless of course you have Snow Leopard then which case it doesn’t work.

BRANDON: It’s Windows only, right?

MATT: No, it used to work for Mac but they just haven’t updated it. Hopefully they’ll fix it one of these days so I can use it again.

BRANDON: Yeah. Well, I think that pretty much wraps up all the tools that I can think of that would be good for mobility and having any sort of cloud computing ability.

MATT: Yeah, really for every app you encounter I mean you covered some of the main core ones that everyone accesses and everyone is going to use but whenever you come across an app you really want to look for hosted data storage you know up in the cloud on the internet somewhere. A hosted version of the app that you can access your data with and then reach clients on your PC and Mac and on your phone, I think that is the ideal we’re all striving for and you may not always get it but you know try to look for that. Make that kind of the benchmark by which you judge everything.

BRANDON: Yeah, you know this cloud computing although there’s some fantastic apps out there, it’s still kind of in its infancy and …

MATT: Very much so, yeah, very much in its infancy.

BRANDON: I wouldn’t say that we’re really even close to getting to where we want to be but there’s a lot of great apps out there that are pretty much showing some light at the end of the tunnel and I would say for anybody listening to this who’s just going, “Holy cow, there’s so much out there. I didn’t know and god, do I really need to change all of my email over to this and my file structure over to that.” Take it one step at a time. Don’t go crazy with this and, you know, don’t go where all your functioning folder structure and your email is all going to get changed overnight. I wouldn’t do that. Just go one step at time. Maybe get a Gmail account if you don’t have one. See how that works and go figure out how to get a Dropbox account working on Sharepoint service working and then you know try putting your accounting on Quickbooks online. You know one step at a time you’re going to find out that down the road you’re going to be happy you did because this all will save you time in the end.

MATT: And the integration between these is going to build better and better as you go along. I think that’s one of the things that buying into one of the big suites like the Google suite or the Microsoft suite or the Zoho suite or the Netsuite products that integration is really tight and if you kind of go best hybrid you pick one from each other place you know the integration kind of suffers and that’s a place there’s some opportunity for.

BRANDON: Yeah, which brings up a good point, if you do go with one platform of some sort, be aware that this could change because they all leap frog each other, you know. One minute it’s Microsoft with the best application and then the next you think Google’s got the best thing and you know you don’t want to be tied to something so closely that you don’t have flexibility to get the best performing application out there.

MATT: That brings up a really good application is that whenever you’re looking at a cloud application out there, make sure there’s a way for you to get your data out of the application if you want to leave. A lot of the really early web application didn’t have a good way for you to extract all your data if you wanted to leave that provider and go somewhere else. So look for an easy way to export your data to a common file format or some sort of data base format that you can then import something else.

BRANDON: Yeah, I mean previously you would buy a software application and now these web applications are all offering monthly, $10 a month or $20 a month. So your gut instinct is to say, “Oh, this is great. I’m not tied to it. It’s a month to month. I can stop anytime. But little do you know the more you use it the more married you are to it and you know sometimes they don’t give you a way out and that’s unfortunate because what you thought was kind of a temporary “let’s just try this out for a few months,” all of a sudden “we’re going to be stuck with this for many, many years if we don’t find something else to get it out.”

MATT: Yeah and we mentioned that cloud computing really changes the way that you find that software and probably in the long run it’s going to make it a little bit more expensive than it would be to buy everything but I mean it’s the same principle that you know financing your car and getting mortgage for your house and all those things did is you know they flip something for being a really high capital and then to an upfront cost to being a more of an intunuity over time and like you know you pay a monthly fee to live in your house, right. You pay your monthly mortgage. You pay your monthly car payment. You pay you know all those things monthly and that made it more affordable for people to get in and use these services. The same thing is happening for all these big software platforms like exchange in Share point is bout really expensive server products from Microsoft but being able to pay for those at $10 a month per user makes it accessible to small business like us.

BRANDON: That’s what’s so great about this time. I feel that entrepreneurs have this window of opportunity right now to take advantage of what normally would have been sometimes tens of thousands of dollars to buy 10 years ago and now you just use a sliver of it on a web application and you’re only paying $10 a month for it and it’s a game changer. It changes how easy it is to enter into a business as an entrepreneur gives you the ability to compete with the big guys having the same tools that they’re using for a fraction of the cost because it’s a per user or per month situation and you’re getting into the business for almost nothing and still being able to compete at the same level that the big guys are and I think that’s just so exciting.

MATT: That’s a big point in there. That is the game changer. Being able to compete with the big guys using the same tools that they’re using for no risk upfront, right. So what if you lose $50?

BRANDON: Right. It’s such a great time to own your business and jump on to these opportunities and yeah, so it’s exciting. If there’s anything we missed you know I’m sure there’s a lot of people out there going, “Oh, they didn’t even talk about such and such or x and y.” You know I’m sure there’s something that we didn’t cover but if you have a tool that you want to tell us about, something that you think is just ideal for you know being mobile and being able to travel you know. As an entrepreneur, one of the reasons why you go into business is to be able to have the freedom of your own time and not be tied to you know corporate job that you have to go into the office 8 to 5 every day and you know so this is kind of hitting the core of our philosophy about being a business owner and having the ability to be mobile and if you have to work, go work from Africa while you’re taking pictures of you know the lions and elephants and you know still be able to access any information that’s necessary to hit the business running if you had some issue go wrong. So this is kind of core to our philosophy and so these things are important to be able to master. So if there’s anything that we missed, let us know and if you like what we’ve talked about today, go on to iTunes. Give us a review, whatever it is, tell us what you think about us and we want to get more reviews on iTunes because it lets others know how we’re doing.

MATT: And if all the feedback you can give to us either you know as a comment on our website automatemysmallbusiness.com or as an email to podcast@automatemysmallbusiness.com.

BRANDON: Even if you have a question or something you want to send us a comment, you can drop us a voicemail at 785-288-6672 which is 785-automsb.

MATT: And you can always follow us on Twitter. My handle is mattdot, m-a-t-t-d-o-t.

BRANDON: And I’m nnov84fun, that’s n-n-o-v-8-4-f-u-n.

MATT: Don’t get to sign up for the newsletter at the website. We’ll send you a free list of tools that we use. We went on through a lot of them today but you know I think there’s some that we didn’t include on here today.

BRANDON: Yeah, we’ll get that sent out to you immediately after you sign up and we have lots more coming and we’ll see you next time. Thanks for listening.

You’ve been listening to Automate My Small Business. We hope you enjoyed this episode. To get a list of the links we’ve just talked about or download more episodes and How-To videos, go to automatemysmallbusiness.com. Thanks for being with us and catch us next time on Automate My Small Business Podcast.

Podcast music features, “Nothing’s Got Me” by Big Bad Sun, distributed by Magnatune and licensed under Creative Commons. The Automate My Small Business podcast is engineered by Vincent Furlong and transcribed by Flo Umali. And licensed under Creative Commons Attribution No Derivative Works license and may be freely distributed to share with friends, co-workers and strangers.