Move Your Paper Files To The Cloud

Ever hear of the paperless office? It’s a bit like the flying car. It always seems to be coming, but never actually arrives. Face it. We live in paper-based world and most of us are drowning under a mountain of it. Oh, not you? What’s all that stuff on your desk and in those filing cabinets?

Of course our business activities are more electronic than ever before. Improvements in manipulating, storing and transferring data have done two things for us. One, they’ve made it easier to create more paper documents. Two, they’ve kept us from drowning under an avalanche of documentation that would have grown with the increase of office productivity over the last few decades. Even so, how much time do still spend bridging the interface between paper documents and everything computerized?

The truth is that we burn a lot of time every day copying data from receipts to expense reports, entering business cards into a database or email client, documenting expenses for taxes and general accounting activities. Then those valuable pieces of paper have to be carefully filed so they don’t get lost.

The reason is simple. The only common denominator for everybody is a slip of paper. Someday there will be an accepted electronic exchange format and all that paper will go poof! Then we can leave work early and take the flying car for a cruise around town.

Until that happy day, you’re left with a decision. Do you handle the entry and filing of all those receipts & business cards yourself, hire an assistant to do it for you, or send it to the cloud?

How can paper move to the cloud? Won’t it just fall out and rain down on your head? Not if you do it right. What you need is a cloud based service called Shoeboxed. The metaphor is the classic shoebox that you carry your receipts in to the tax preparer. In this case, the shoebox is stored in the cloud and easily accessed from anywhere you happen to be.

Here’s how it works. You gather up that pile of papers on your desk, including receipts, business cards and other documents, and put them into a secure mailer. Drop it in the mail to Shoeboxed and YOUR desk is now clean. At the other end, your paper based documents will be carefully scanned and entered into a secure online database.

This is more than a mere scanning service. Shoeboxed’s specialty is creating human-verified data extraction so the important data from the page is put into an electronic format that you can easily work with. You can create and email expense reports or export data to programs such as Excel, QuickBooks, Salesforce, Constant Contact, Outlook and more.

What about receipts you get electronically? No problem. There’s a mobile app that lets you email them in or even snap a picture of a receipt or business card with your smartphone and then email it to your personal database.

You’re grinning, now, from ear to ear aren’t you? This sounds a lot better than all that paper shuffling you keep putting off, doesn’t it? Well, wait no longer. You can get a free trial of Shoeboxed right now and see if makes your life easier and frees up time you can put to better use.

Christmas Gifts For Boomerangs

Are you shopping for boomerangs this year? No, not the curved aboriginal hunting tool. These boomerangs are kids that went off to school, tried to make it on their own, and were smacked down by a couple of stock market crashes and a hideous job market in the short first decade of this century. Now they’re back living with mom and dad and trying to figure out what to do next. Hence, the boomerang moniker. So, what do you give a boomerang as a holiday gift?

One good approach might be to give them something that will help them get back on their feet again. Cash is always nice, but it may go as fast as it came. Besides, who has a really significant amount of cash to dole out in these hard times? How about something that can do a lot of good for a little money?

One characteristic of the Millennial generation is that they are tech savvy and like to connect socially. One excellent tool for making connections, including those connections that might lead to a job offer, is a cell phone. But aren’t cell phones and plans a real luxury for someone out of work? Not if you don’t have to pay extra for the phone or buy a separate second service plan.

Here’s what I’m thinking. Your cell phone plan is about to expire. You want a new model phone, anyway. So get yourself a new phone for free and a substantial package of minutes. But don’t buy an individual service plan. Instead, buy what’s called a family plan. You still have a certain number of minutes each month and you get a single bill. But a family plan can have multiple phones on it. Get that free phone for yourself when you order cellular phones and service online and then get a second free phone that you can give to your progeny. Remember, you didn’t pay anything extra to get that second phone. If you can trust them not to hog all the minutes (under threat of being disconnected), you’ll only pay marginally more for the service plan. You can even add a third line for a spouse, all on the same plan.

How about a nice set of business cards to had out to potential employers and anyone who might be helpful? Don’t pay for those either. For just the cost of shipping, you can create a set of 250 custom business cards online for that special someone and have them sent to you ready for wrapping. They can thank you by handing them all out to good prospects in the next year.

Even better than traditional business cards is an inexpensive new gadget called Poken. It’s a wireless USB device packaged as a small character or flash drive. The owner creates one or more business and personal electronic cards which can be shared with other Poken owners. The process involves touching the devices together in an electronic handshake that transfers the contact information. A free personalized online hub organizes the contacts you make and helps you know more about them and how to get in touch. This “Y” generation will easily embrace Poken, as they’ve adopted MySpace, FaceBook and Twitter for social networking.

Do these sound like good presents for young adults living at home? Now that you think about it, they sound pretty good for any age and even those who have already left the nest.

Business Cards Go Green With Poken

Wonderful, wonderful Copenhagen
Going to slip under the sea
As the ocean warms and the nasty storms
Are convinced we can’t do three-fifty.

The start of the climate change summit in Copenhagen, Denmark this week has me waxing lyrical. Despite the deniers and the cynics who are convinced we can no more get to 350 ppm of CO2 than we can stop sucking high fructose sugar water in the handy 2 liter travel bottle, I remain hopeful. People nay-sayed acid rain until it started dissolving war memorials and everything else made of stone. Then we up and stopped it in a matter of a few years. This, too, will be dealt with.

With green the theme, I’m onto something that may well change the way we network. No, not a threat to Ethernet. This is about person to person networking. You know, the kind where you all get in a room and start passing around business cards. In just a matter of minutes you have absolutely no idea which face goes with each card or what these people really have to offer. Isn’t there a better solution in these 2.0 everything days?

There sure is, and it’s gaining momentum as we speak. It’s a technical solution consisting of a small hardware tag and a complementary online portal in the cloud. Is there any doubt that technology would once again step up to save the day?

The solution I’m talking about is called Poken and it rhymes with token. The token is a small plastic device that looks either like a standard USB flash drive or a cartoon character. It your choice of whether to go hip or go square. They work the same.

Each device has a big white hand with four fingers. It’s looks so friendly. That’s by design, of course. When you meet someone else that has a Poken, you touch their hands together. They start glowing green to indicate something electronic is going on. That something is a data transfer over a low frequency near field comm link. You send them a small data dump that has your name, phone number and social networking links. They reciprocate by sending you the same. It’s all stored in the Poken.

When you are done for the day or just get into an upload mood, you pull out the hand and plug it into a USB jack on your computer. You are automatically connected to the pokenHub, a personalized portal that uploads the contact info stored on your Poken and displays it in a timeline format. If you can remember about when you met somebody or who you were with at the time, you can likely find them right away and see just what they’re all about. Data transfers and your portal are secured. That’s handy if you don’t really want to admit knowing some of these people.

This probably isn’t the end of business cards as we know them. After all, we still need to use something for a bookmark. Or do we? That Amazon Kindle and the new Barnes & Noble e-readers are about to pull the plug on book printing. In a few years... who knows?

If you’d like to learn more about Poken and perhaps get your sales, marketing or project team connected, then you should Meet Poken. If you are more of a lone wolf, you can simply order one of these for yourself and use it at clubs, class reunions or other get-togethers where you may want to rekindle and old friendship or get to know someone new. Will they Poken you? Of course. Who can resist a three eyed space alien, a panda or a vampire that hangs around your neck?

$2 Toll Free Numbers Help Professionals Go Independent

At this point in the economic malaise, many talented individuals are giving serious consideration to disconnecting from the corporate environment and going independent. It's a big decision to cut that umbilical cord to one's employer, but there are tools available that can help you leap the abyss to self-employment. One of those is an almost unbelievably inexpensive toll free service that lets you operate free as a bird.

Here's the situation. Those who decide to strike out on their own are often operating out of a limited home office space and are typically on the go much of their day. This is especially true for those selling a service, such as real estate or insurance, or technical professionals acting as consultants on-site. The question is how do you make sure that customers and potential clients can reach you no matter where you are? How can you conduct business on the go with only your cell phone and laptop computer?

Most importantly for anyone just starting out or trying to get their feet wet by moonlighting before they commit to the independent lifestyle is the matter of cost. You want to keep as much money in the bank as you can as a safety fund. It's often hard to know how fast your business will spin up and when the cash flow will begin in earnest. So rather than go out and spend a bundle committing to new equipment and support services, why not spend a bare minimum on a pay as you go basis? Pay next to nothing while you are getting started and only modestly more as your business and income grows.

This is the design of the Kall8 Toll Free Service system. You pick a toll free number, which in most cases is going to cost you a measly $2 to capture. That number is assigned to you for as long as you maintain it. You print it on your business card and flyers as the only number clients need. You make sure that business prospects know they can call you toll free anytime and even send fax documents to that number.

Maintaining your toll free number is also a low cost experience. You pay $2 per month to keep that number assigned to you. You don't pay anything else until you start getting calls. Then it's just 6.9 cents per minute for calls from the contiguous U.S. states. Of course, anyone who calls that number is going to be well worth your while to talk to. After all, they are your business clients and prospects, right?

What you get for a couple of dollars a month plus calls is a complete mobile office communications system. From your online control panel, you can decide where your toll free number will ring. Planning to be in the home office for awhile? Set it to ring to your landline. Going to be in the car or at customer's sites? Set it to ring to your cell phone. Change it from any Internet connected computer as you wish.

Of course, if you can't take the call at all it will go to voice mail. But this is very special voice mail. Your incoming call will be recorded, translated to a audio file and sent to your email if you wish. The same is true for FAX messages. Just tell anyone who wants to get a fax to you to send it to your toll free number. The FAX will be accepted and converted to an email attachment that you can pick up from your computer when it's convenient. Voicemail to email and FAX to email are often expensive add-on services, but Kall8 includes them with your toll free service.

Consulting engineers, contract technicians, recruiters, crafters, artists, Realtors and sales people in all fields have found low cost toll free service to be just the tool they need to maximize their ability to communicate with important business clients.