5 Awesome Free Online Tools We Love
IdeaPaint loves tools (and toys) that foster creativity and collaboration at work, home and school. Here are a few websites and apps that we use here at the office. What do you use? Post below!
Evernote makes it easy to remember things big and small from your notable life using your computer, phone, and the web. Chances are, if you can see it or think of it, Evernote can help you remember it. Type a text note. Clip a web page. Snap a photo. Grab a screenshot. Evernote will keep it all safe. Everything you capture is automatically processed, indexed, and made searchable. If you like, you can add tags or organize notes into different notebooks. Search for notes by keywords, titles, and tags.
How we use it: Our offices (as you would guess) are wall-to-wall whiteboards. Every work space, every conference room is 100% dry-erasable. We use Evernote to capture the notes, charts and doodles on the walls, and then share and archive this information for all employees. Evernote lets us continue our collaboration process off-the-wall, and magically makes our handwritten text searchable inside our images too!
(Hint: we have some fun stuff lined up with Evernote, stay tuned)
Issuu is a digital publishing platform that delivers exceptional reading experiences of magazines, books, catalogs, reports, and more. In just a few seconds users can create beautiful digital editions simply by uploading their publications. Issuu's mission is to empower individuals, companies, and institutions to publish their documents across all digital platforms.
Issuu is also a popular destination site visited by millions every month. It's a dynamic library where people are drawn to and engaged by great publications and where publishers find and build targeted audiences.
How we use it: IdeaPaint uses issue to organize and share sales tools and collateral pieces with partners, stakeholders and customers. Not only are we presenting information is a more convenient and attractive way, but we are saving money and trees by reducing printed materials.
Prezi is an online presentation tools that completely shatters how presentations are planned, delivered and experienced. It's Powerpoint meets Star Wars. Their zoom function and boundless canvas, plus the ability to seamlessly integrate media and real time note-taking, makes presentation rich, engaging and experiential.
How we use it: We use Prezi for many of the internal presentations you would normally use Powerpoint or Keynote for, but they are just much more awesome.
HootSuite is a social media dashboard that lets you monitor and manage multiple social networks through one client. The platform includes a team workflow tool that easily allows multiple users to contribute. HootSuite integrates with Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, LinkedIn, Wordpress and more.
How we us it: We use HootSuite to manage our social conversations. Their multi-stream view, and tab navigation, make this process simple and fast. HootSuite helps us better engage our customers and partners, and saves us time and headaches by not having to switch between clients. It also helps connect marketing and sales efforts through the team workflow tool.
Bubbl.us is a simple and free web application that lets you brainstorm online. Bubbl.us helps you create colorful mind maps online, and share and work with friends.
How we use it: Bubbl.us is incredibly simple to use, and we like using it for site mapping, video story-boarding and brand planning. It's great for brainstorming, and our mind maps are easily sharable internally, with agencies etc. The tool itself is so basic (in a good way) that we don't get caught up in layout --- you just click to add a box, connect it, and move on.
We'd love to hear what online tools you are using to foster creativity and collaboration. Post comments below and let us know!
Learn more about IdeaPaint!
