Whether you dream of freeing yourself from the corporate nine-to-five and becoming your own boss, or already run your own business, there’s one thing you need to nail to make it a success: invoicing.
While finance admin can be a strain for any entrepreneur, using modern invoicing software makes it simple. And right now, you can get a lifetime subscription to one of the best invoicing apps for Mac: UctoX Invoicing Software, on sale for 60% off.
By Mike Goodman
I’m confident in my ability to sell delicious snacks. Before the pandemic, I was an unhappy line cook working at a chain restaurant in a big city. When things closed down, I was honestly relieved to take a break from the sweaty kitchen and monotony. And, after taking some time to reflect on the world and what was going down, I started to get my energy back and decided to revisit my passion.
As it turns out, exploring your passion comes with some chaos. But as they say, there’s an app for that — and the one that made a world of difference for me, believe it or not, is a $40 scanning app for iPhone and iPad.
Email can be a total productivity bottleneck. Following conversations between multiple participants gets confusing. The unfortunate result of all this email chaos? Important tasks get lost in long email chains.
Luckily for collaborators everywhere, messaging app Slack replaces the need for internal email, allowing for real-time productivity and communication for teams. Instead of redundant threads and signatures, Slack strips away the cruft of the email inbox. It turns your communication into what it was meant to be — a conversation.
LendingRobot today launched a pretty important mobile app for peer lenders. It’s LendingRobot Dashboard, and it lets these lenders monitor all their portfolios across three separate services: LendingClub, Prosper and Funding Circle. It’s the only mobile app available that allows investors to connect from across multiple marketplaces and see their portfolios at a glance.
There are greats apps for groups to complete tasks and great apps for group communication. In Pingpad, the group has a single app that allows for both.
Pingpad is a stew of many different first generation apps for notes, lists, calendars and instant messaging. In one space, a group can work across platforms on documents, chat back and forth and post pertinent links all in real time. Think Google Docs meets Whatsapp.
2014 will go down as one of the biggest years in Apple history. The stock hit record highs. The company’s first wearable was revealed. And Apple dropped $3 billion on its biggest acquisition ever. But of all the huge news Apple dropped in the last 12 months, nothing is likely to have as big an impact as the previously unthinkable announcement that Apple and IBM buried the hatchet and partnered up.
The move was significant not only for the historic aspect of the two rival tech titans uniting, but also for how it will impact all of us in the workplace. In his final note of the year, top Apple analyst Horace Dediu dubbed the IBM partnership “the most significant technology news of 2014.”
That may sound ridiculous considering how much hype Apple Watch is getting ahead of its release, but Dediu points to the first wave of apps created by the partnership. These offer an early indication of just how transformative the relationship could be. For the first time, enterprise apps are being designed for their users (the employees) rather than their employers.
Just take a look at the difference between IBM’s new Expert Tech app compared to the closest equivalent from Oracle, and see which one you’d rather work with:
Almost every major company has plans to develop a range of iOS apps (if they haven’t created some already). In fact, one of the reasons that enterprise app stores are becoming as popular as they are in business is that they fulfill two critical needs. One of those is to easily distribute internal apps to staff members. (The other is to point users to suggested or required apps from Apple’s App Store.)
One thing that every company developing an internal app needs to keep in mind is that users are becoming more tech savvy and comfortable selecting and using iOS apps. That can be a good thing for the whole enterprise app store concept. It let’s users choose and manage their selection of apps on their own without help from IT.
It also means that most iOS users are sophisticated enough to know when an app is poorly designed. That places an extra burden on anyone developing iOS apps, particularly if there are equivalent public apps that users can install as partial or complete replacements for a poorly built internal app.
