9 up-and-coming cloud apps for one-person shops
I am a reasonably organized person, but there are days where I could use not one but two personal assistants to keep my head straight. So, I perused a "list" infographic that I received this week -- called the 25 most popular freelance tools -- with some degree of self-interest.
There is one really important high-level thing to say about this list, which was compiled from a survey of freelancers, consultants and sole proprietors conducted by small-business resource BestVendor: every single one of them is a cloud service or application, not some piece of desktop software.
I was intrigued most by the applications that were on the fringe in the survey, the ones that more people are starting to talk about but that didn't garner the same votes as something like Dropbox or Google Calendar or Evernote. That's what I'll concentrate on first. (The entire infographic is at the bottom of this post.)
16bugs - Specifically for developers and other technical projects, this is a service for bug tracking. It is priced starting at $8 per month for tracking one project and goes on up from there.
Adroll - A platform for personalizing online display advertising. The CPM (cost of impressions) is between $1.00 and $2.50.
Capsule CRM - A simple system for tracking bids, deals and opportunities that starts at $12 per month for up to 50,000 contacts.
Expensify - This company has to have one of the best taglines ever: "Expense reports that don't suck." And yes, you guessed it, it helps scan receipts and create expense reports that can be imported into Intuit Quickbooks. There is a free mobile application. It is free for individual users and $5 per month per user if you want to add other people.
FreeAgent - An online accounting service that includes estimating functions, invoicing, project management and contact databases. It is priced at $24 per month.
Harvest - Online time tracking and invoicing software, priced starting at $40 per month for up to five years (only $12 per month if it is just you). Like many of the other services, it integrates with Google Apps and includes Android and Apple iOS mobile apps.
Jing - A free application for capturing and sharing images or videos on services including Flickr, Twitter and Facebook.
Outright - This is the small-business financial management system that was acquired by GoDaddy last month (and that I wrote about mere days ago).
Remember the Milk - This is exactly what you expect it to be, an online task-management and to-do list application. This software was suggested to me randomly and anecdotally last week as something that I should use. The free service expects with all manner of mobile platforms (including Android and Apple iOS) and has integrations with Google Apps and Twitter, among others.
Here's the entire list of applications: