Are you using an iPhone as part of your mobile office? If you’re still finding it’s lacking some features, check out these five great apps that can help you add the business functionality you want and need.
1. Documents To Go
Need to create, access, or edit documents from your phone? Documents To Go, which supports Microsoft Office formats, lets you do just that. It helps you open e-mail attachments, make last-minute changes to presentations, and even write new documents, all from your phone. This award-winning app retains the original document formatting, lets you view embedded graphics and other custom elements, offers many formatting options, and lets you undo/redo changes. It also gives you an advanced PDF viewer and supports syncing with Google Docs, Dropbox, Box.net, iDisk, and SugarSync.
[Read more at AllBusiness]
Have you considered mobile payments options for your business? These range from accepting credit cards on the go and using your mobile like a wallet to making your e-commerce available on the mobile web. Mobile payments are becoming big business — and the segment is only expected to grow.
A forecast from UK-based Coda Research Consultancy predicts mobile e-commerce will grow 65 percent annually to reach $24 billion in 2015. Though that’s still a small segment compared to total e-commerce, it’s nothing to scoff at. And a number of new and longstanding companies want to help you take advantage of the mobile marketplace by increasing compatibility with mobile sites, allowing quicker checkouts, and offering new concepts for how transactions are completed.
[Read more at AllBusiness]
When designing your Web site, one of the best tools with which to plan the pages and functions you need is a wireframe. Though typically used by designers, these stripped-down, preliminary mockups show the items to be included on each page of your site, as well as notes on how things will work. With a bevy of free online tools that’ll give you the prefab elements you need — navigation bars, text boxes, buttons, image placeholders, and more — you don’t need any special skills to quickly put together a simple site mockup. With it, you can better visualize where you’re going and communicate clearly with your Web designer.
Mockingbird
This completely free online tool lets you create Web site wireframes for multiple projects and will really give you a feel for your finished site, from highlighting tabs and menu items to letting you link between pages so you can create an interactive experience. The drag-and-drop interface is simple and it includes a large range of common page elements. When you’re done, you can share your mockups via link or embed code, and you can save them as a multipage PDF, too.
[Read more at AllBusiness]
Flash used to be the driving engine behind bringing videos to the web, powering YouTube and most other big video sites, but now it’s falling out of favor due to new web standards and lack of support on iPads, iPhones, and other mobile devices. With the change in how many browsers and devices display video, two new video codecs, H.264 and VP8, are coming to the fore and gaining popularity — promising higher quality and more portability. Here’s a quick view of what they are, what you need to know about them and what sorts of changes you may want to make to your technology.
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For the business owner trying to do it all, online social networking can be a frustrating experience. Keeping up with fans on multiple networks can suck up your time, you’re often dealing with sites that lack the functionality or level of customization you want, and it can be hard to fully gauge your impact since stats tend to be cursory at best. Once you start looking away from the built-in solutions, though, a bevy of helpful apps emerge. Following are some of our favorites for augmenting your experience using the social Web, from blog comments to Facebook Pages to media sharing and beyond.
Disqus
Disqus makes your blog comments more social. Bringing in links from Twitter and other sites, as well as allowing video comments and e-mail subscriptions to comments, helps to up your response count and make your discussion area more robust. And with a Disqus account, whenever you comment on a Disqus-enabled blog, you can go back and edit or even delete your comments.
[Read more at AllBusiness]
Top 5 iPhone Business Apps
Mobile Payment Tools for Your Business
Free Wireframe Tools to Help Plan Your Website
New Video Coding May Replace Adobe Flash Player
