Back to School Biz Apps: Our Favorite SMB Tools

We had a year’s worth of apps to look at for our semi-regular posting on useful small-medium biz tools. And after lots of espressos and into-the-night discussions, we’ve come up with six tools that will streamline internal tasks and promote your products and services while doing it on the cheap.

Visual.ly–Like us, you’ve probably grown tired of connecting with customers through all the usual social media mechanisms. While not strictly for SMB’s, infographics does prove the point that non-simple data tells a story more effectively with pictures than just words alone. Visual.ly is in the process of creating an infogrpahics marketplace that will let SMBs choose from an existing library of graphical stories or commission their own from a pool of info-artisians.

uberconference–Winner of this year’s TechCrunch Disrupt NYC, uberconference is a free voice conferencing service with one powerful differentiator– it tells you who is currently calling. That’s a feature you don’t see on any of the expensive paid services used by many large companies. This is great service for small businesses, especially those with a distributed workforce that don’t have the telecom budget. Still in private beta, so enter your email on their site to gain early access.

BetterCloud–BetterCloud is focused on the Google Apps environment. This startup realized that lots of businesses have freed themselves from Microsoft’s tractor beams, and therefore need administrative tools to monitor and managed documents, calendars, and mailboxes. They have two services, DomainWatch and FlashPanel for which they charge a modest per user fee. TO a generation that has grown up with Google, and now have their own startups and compananies, BetterCloud will make great sense.

Yapp–We saw Yapp at NY Tech Day in April. It’s an easy-to-use mobile app generator that can manage invites for events, parties, conferences, etc. You select from a set of templates, craft your message and event details, and then Yapp handles everything else. Great for any kind of small biz.

InboundWriter–We’re not SEO experts, and no doubt as a small biz, you’re not either. InboundWriter is a WordPress plugin that guides non-web marketing types to tune their text with a dashboard-style interface. After picking keywords, you use this tool to optimize your post for either expensive search terms or for the less crowded and cheaper long tail.

BuzzCard–BuzzCard is a free branding tool that lets small businesses brand their videos. You provide the video, of course, and BuzzCard lets you insert a logo and messaging into the beginning. You do have some choices over how the titling will animate. The point here is that it is simple to use, and you won’t need to master a complicated video editing package.