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Welcome the second episode of Cool Tool Review. I am excited because I got T.A. McCann; CEO of Gist to come on the show and demonstrate to us how his online tool will enable entrepreneurs to move beyond simply piling up business cards of contacts to actually establishing more meaningful relationships with their clients and prospects. We are now in an age where people are continuously engaging online via blogs, social media websites such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and so on; this has created an environment for you to get a lot more insight into the minds of your clients and prospects so that you can meet them at their point of need. Hence, you can become a resource to them, even before becoming their vendor.

With a cloud-based tool like Gist you are able to see what your contacts are saying online on various websites and this gives you the upper hand to really wow them and build a community. I personally use the tool myself (it’s installed on my iPhone4) and I felt the need to share this tool with you, hence, I reached out to T.A. and he kindly came on the show to give us a demo of how to use Gist (as well as a much better explanation of its uses than I have previously mentioned – LOL)  and also share his insights on why being able to deeply listen, engage and communicate with your network of contacts online on the same websites they regularly use will eventually leaded to increased profits as a direct result of increased brand loyalty; check out the interview to find out how!

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Every so often I come across a cloud-based (online) tool that does something remarkable and from now on my plan is to test it out to see if it’s something that I will use and also recommend to my blog audience, hence the reason for my new blog series called “Cool Tool Review”.

The first tool in the series is Tungle.Me; a free tool that enables users to easily schedule meetings via a widget. You can simply install the widget on your website by placing a few lines of codes on the particular page you want the widget to be on; for instance your “Contact Us” and once the user clicks on the link the widget shows them all your available meeting times slots and they get to choose a time that is convenient for the both of you.

I reached out to Marc Gingras the CEO of Tungle.Me and he kindly came on the show to give us a demo of how to use Tungle.Me and also share his insight on how the Calendar as we all know it is evolving; check out the interview to find out how!

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There are many things that large businesses have that a small business can do without for a while. However, a telephone and voicemail system is not one of them. Even in the age of e-mail and social networking, the number one way, short of walking to your door, that most customers or clients will contact you is through a telephone call. In addition, the business owners who makes use of virtual assistants will occasionally find it necessary to actually talk to their VA’s.

This doesn’t mean that your telephone system has to be the same old ones that businesses used 10 years ago, though. The dawning of the Internet and of cloud-based computing has brought with it telephony options that are cheaper for you than standard landlines, and which make it easy and convenient to receive calls, even if you can’t hire an on-site receptionist. Let’s take a look at some of the options available to you.

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The conventional wisdom regarding Apple’s new tablet computer, the iPad, is that it is a gorgeous toy, suited for mostly consumption of media such as movies, games and e-books; that it’s not ready for serious use as a business tool. That got me thinking and I needed to find out why every day I see people involved in real work carrying the device with them, and they brag about just how productive they can be on it. Although I’m not yet ready to declare the iPad as the ultimate replacement for notebooks and netbooks, I can see value in using the iPad, especially for small businesses that make use of a lot of Cloud based (online) tools in their daily operations. Here are some characteristics that I think merit a second look by entrepreneurs:

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I’ve always considered entrepreneurs who work in the ‘Cloud’ (i.e., using Internet-based resources) to be visionaries and life style designers. By most accounts, this is how much business will be done in the future. Still, many business owners have been befuddled as to how to do some business tasks via the Internet. One such task is signing contracts. For instance, I strongly believe that when you hire virtual assistants for your business, you should sign contracts that outline each party’s responsibility. Plus, businesses that serve a national or even global clientèle find it a challenge to sign a contract with those clients. Do they fax the documents back and forth? Sign it and scan it and then email it?

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