I recently came across the Jing Project and was a breath of fresh (I mean free) air for screen capture. If you other bloggers and guerrilla marketing gurus have been on the hunt for an affordable and realiable screen capture look no further. I am still on road otherwise I would have taken the time to show you a an example of the screen capture. Until recently Camtasia was my go-to choice, but 30-day trials only last so long and I refuse to pay for these type of services (amazing what we expect for free these days).
The biggest difference (besides being free) between Jing, Camtasia Studio and Snagit is straight from Jings website.
While there’s truth in describing Jing as a SnagIt or Camtasia Studio “lite,” the key difference is about workflow. Jing is designed to be fast-visual communication shared with others in a variety of locations. Capture. Annotate. Share.
Jing Project was #100 on PCworlds top products of 2008 list. It appears TechSmith is behind Jing (also developers of Camtasia & SnagIt) and will allow 2GB of storage for free or you can use other storage mechanisms. What I cannot figure out for the life of me is why TechSmith is offering almost a competing free product with the other two offerings. Ultimately it may lead to more sales, but for the rest of us it means a quality free screen capture project that allows us to share beyond belief.
I am traveling for Turkey-day and loaded up my ipod touch with an array of podcasts from one of my favorite resource sites– Smashing Magazine. I wanted to bone up on a few adobe products per the CS4 release and added some great podcasts for graphic designers and web developers. The podcast list reveals some great resources like lullabot (which I continue to use for drupal), layerstv and webdesignTV (.net magazine) and adobe creative suite podcast.
The list is comprehensive and worth your time regardless of your experience. So if you cannot seem to finish those online tutorials…lock and load your ipod with podcasts.
Ideas for small business startups in 2009 may have you stumped, but don’t despair the current economic climate may be the best time to get your startup rolling. To get your creative juices following for business ideas lets start by sector.
Alternative Energy / Green Products
Virtual worlds & Economies
Home care and Non Medical Services
Healthy lifestyle and Gyms
Baby Boomer Services
…you get the picture.
Once you have identified what sector your idea fits in start to brainstorm on possibilities. For example, you have a passion for Yoga and think you can deliver a better workout than any competitors around. Great, add to your competitiveness by going specific like kid yoga or mommy yoga. You will have much less competition and are likely to be the best around. Also pay attention to your specific geographic location, maybe Yoga is just not readily accessible where you live…all the more reason to open a studio.
Now be sure to test your idea further and make sure it will be a feasible business. If you think your idea has real potential than go through a startup idea checklist.
1. Who, Why, How?
Who will your customers be?
Why will your customers benefit?
How will your customers benefit?
2. What are your ingredients for success?
What is the proverbial secret sauce. Stray away from being qualitative and just fluffing up your business proposition. Get technical.
3. Do a market and feasibility analysis.
You don’t have to go crazy with a professional, you can do a lot just by looking around your location, the yellow pages and the Internet.
4. Do basic financials.
Finding out what your breakeven analysis is crucial to answer initially. This will determine how much capital is needed to start and how long your business will take to recover expenses (or breakeven). Be as conservative as possible to factor in unknowns.
5. You should be arriving at a yes or no possibility.
Yes….congratulations….now your ready to do a full blown business plan and get funding. You’re also ready to start a profile on statupaddict.com.
The Amazon Startup Challenge is down to seven finalists clawing for the $100,000 grand prize. As most of you know, I’m a huge fan of Amazon Web Services and startups that leverage the low cost - high scalability services. The seven finalists chosen by Amazon have truly interesting business models.
Encoding.com has transformed video encoding from a traditional software model to a software as a service (SaaS) platform. Encoding.com combines elastic computing resources with cutting edge video encoding software.
Startup Addict Musings:
I use to do a ton of encoding in my film and television days and used out of the box software like Sorenson and Cleaner for encoding. Having a SaaS is a boon for producers and editors who can load content from anywhere in the world with an Internet connection, completely software and platform agnostic. There will be a clear need for this business model…and you gotta love the tier 1 domain name, probably worth 250K just for the domain name.
Knewton supercharges any education content by teaching the exact concepts students need, in the medium and pacing best for each. Knewton’s self-optimizing “Darwinian” engine grows increasingly effective as each new student joins the network – so the learning plan of the 50 millionth student is powered by the combined data of all the others.
Startup Addict Musings:
A niche focused startup that offers 9 hours of free instruction and free GMAT test just to try it out. It’s the Moores law of education
MedCommons provides cloud-based Health 2.0 application services for patients and doctors, and enables third parties to customize and extend the MedCommons Platform for their own needs.
Startup Addict Musings:
The customization and application extension of this platfrom will really shine. Medcommons will be able to deliver at a far superior price point then competitors as well.
Sonian is a cloud compute email productivity service. Each day, 86 billion emails and IMs are created and most of this information needs to be saved and indexed for compliance and personal productivity. Sonian solves this problem with next generation software running on the Amazon Web Services cloud. Sonian archives electronic communications, files and unstructured content to unlock the actionable intelligence stored in this “dark data.”
Startup Addict Musings:
Seems like a pure data play to me and will have fierce competition. Focusing on enterprise or legacy systems may be the model.
Pixily is an interactive document management service that organizes paper and electronic materials online so people can instantly find and share information whenever and wherever they need it. For consumers, Pixily serves as a digital organization assistant that reduces paper clutter and helps manage personal information more efficiently. Businesses rely on Pixily as an affordable on-demand document management service to streamline daily operations and be more productive.
Startup Addict Musings:
A great concept to bring on-demand document management to the web, but getting businesses to send along sensitive documents and data will be a stumbling block for this model.
Yieldex delivers accurate forecasting of overlapping online advertising inventory and optimal campaign allocation for online publishers. Our tools help publishers get more revenue from their premium inventory through in-depth proposal analysis, scenario planning, and Yieldex’s proprietary yield index.
Startup Addict Musings:
Advertising metrics is always a profitable arena, but the proof is in the pudding. If Yieldex can really accomplish accurate forecasting, squeezing more revenue for the publisher and managing ad inventory it should be a winner. The company may face some turbulence with the consolidation of advertising networks and the general economic haze.
Zephyr enables enterprises to manage their test departments more efficiently, boost productivity, reduce costs and provide IT leaders with real-time visibility into all aspects of their software quality cycle.
Startup Addict Musings:
Web 2.0 outsourcing at it’s best…difficult to comment until I try the software, but a solid approach to a real world problem.
Financials on a few of the companies mentioned in this article
I just finished reading Content Rich “Writing your Way to Wealth on the Web”. The author and fellow entrepreneur Jon Wuebben tackles an enormous amount of material pertaining to SEO copywriting. He demonstrates the topics and techniques in an easy to understand language. The book is adequate for the novice or experienced copywriter but shines in the optmization (chapter 5) and the small business (chapter 12) categories.
Content Rich digs into the anatomy of copy writing by identifying solid SEO techniques for spiders like Google, MSN, Yahoo while paying attention to aesthetics for the human readers. I have personally been obessed with SEO techniques at the expense of good call-to-action and conversion techniques. Content Rich has a nice balanced diet of both. It’s one thing for a search engine spider to find you but entirely another to convert a web surfer into a customer.
I would consider myself middle of the road in terms of SEO copy writing techniques and thought the book to be worth its’ salt and a good addition to my bookshelf for reference in the future.
