GREAT APPS FOR YOUR BUSINESS

Business apps are great little inventions made specifically to help make your life around the office much easier to manage and enhance.

For the New Year, here are our suggested apps which might be just what your business needs to perk systems up.

Rapportive (category: business communication)

This is a Gmail plug-in that brings all your social networking data into your Web-based mailbox.

How this works in practice is that when you select an email you’ll see a picture of the sender along with their job, company and LinkedIn profile information. Additional features include location data (if they enable this) so you can see if they’re nearby.  Plus, with it, you can follow contacts on your social networks, make private notes about the contact and you gain access to a few other details about your contacts pulled in from apps like Skype or MailChimp.

Although this sounds a little intrusive, but given this is all information you have already it’s really just a neat way to make effective use of the contacts you already have, and, of course, to create a few fresh connections.

Rescue Time (category: business productivity)

Because time is precious, it’s no great surprise most of us waste so much of it. Rescue Time aims to help you claim some of that time back.

First it watches the time you spend on applications and websites to offer you an accurate picture of how you spend your time. Armed with this information you can choose to set alerts to let you know how much time you spend doing something; you can block the websites that distract you for defined lengths of time so you can focus; and lets you analyse how much time you spend engaged in particular tasks.

Available for Mac, PC, Android, Linux the application runs discreetly in the background. The basic service is free, a more advanced version is available and costs USD9.99 per month.

Google Drive (category: business data storage)

Google’s new Drive app is a fully-featured office suite, allowing users to seamlessly import and edit files from PC to tablet to smartphone.This software also acts as a full cloud drive, letting you store any file type via a virtual drive app or the Web interface. Google apps are the top choice for small businesses in regard to webmail, and this new feature will get you a nice 5GB of storage for free.