Category Archives: Tools

What new and exciting things have YOU discovered this week, either online or off?

I believe one of the main characteristics of a good blogger – or a good writer of any kind – is a high level of curiousity and enthusiasm for the world.  A person who moves through her life saying “WOW! Amazing!” is going to find a whole LOT of things to write about, whereas someone who’s always complaining about how terrible things are – not so much.

Here are the highlights for me, for the week of May 24th, 2010:

1. Dave Navarro, TheLaunchCoach.com. Dave is my hero in so many ways. I think he’s brilliant, and every freebie/giveaway, purchased product or email I get from him is brimming with useful information. No fluff. No patronizing, skeevy Internet Marketing language. Just good stuff that makes you feel like maybe – just maybe – you actually could make a go of this web business of yours. And that’s pretty outstanding. So do yourself a favor now – sign up to get on his mailing list, and you’ll get access to the best free gifts I’ve ever seen anyone give away on their website.  If you’re feeling really spunky today and want to buy one of his products, go for his “Creating Products That Sell” and “Building a Responsive List” workshops. You can buy them separately or save a little dough and buy them together. Be prepared to have your mind blown with all the ideas Dave will spark in your entrepreneurial brain!

2. Will Young, British Pop Star.  No, this has nothing to do with the Internet, other than the fact that I’m really enjoying watching Will’s videos on YouTube. Will Young was apparently the very first winner of “Pop Idol” (the UK version of our “America Idol”) and he’s a HUGE star over in Europe. I had never heard of him, and I’ll bet most of the other people watching him perform on the American Idol finale this week had never heard of him, either. If you can ignore the sappy Idol montage footage happening in this video, and just focus on Will’s performance, I think you’ll really like him, too.

Note: I had embedded a video in this spot, but unfortunately YouTube yanked it down for some reason, so you should go and find Will Young videos on your own – you won’t be sorry!

Yes, I realize I just outed myself as someone who watches American Idol. I may pay for that in the comments on this post, but it’s worth it to be able to post this Will Young video here.

3. My new ScanSnap scanner, used in conjunction with DropBox online storage and file sharing. I’ve been using DropBox for a few months now – to share files between multiple computers and with my subcontractors – and I LOVE LOVE LOVE it. Basically, DropBox is set up so that when you save a document on your computer, it will also appear in a little “box” on your colleague or subcontractor’s computer…whoever you’d like to save that document with.  It saves SO much time now that I don’t have to email files to myself and to other people. I can just say “It’s in Dropbox” and we’re done.

And as of tonight -  I can use Dropbox with my newest all-time-favorite-EVER gadget, the ScanSnap mobile scanner, and I’m well on my way to eliminating my paper problem. And for those who know me well, you know I’ve ALWAYS had a paper problem – I’m drowning in it all the time. This nifty scanner lets me load up my document (even multi-page docs), hit ONE big  button on the top of the scanner console, and it zips the page through and turns it into a clean, readable PDF file in about 30 seconds. You can even create searchable PDFs, so that everything you scan is searchable and findable whenever you need to look for it. It even does BUSINESS CARDS in about 15 seconds each.

The whole scanner is also about half of the size of a shoebox, so I can chuck it in my backpack and use it at a coffee shop if I want to.

Yes, this little baby is pricey, but I’ve only been using it for 3 hours and I already consider it a piece of equipment I cannot live without.

That’s it for Beth’s Amazing Things for this week – next week, you can look forward to a review of ODesk, the best outsourcing resource no one’s every heard of.

In the meantime, please share your Amazing Things in the comments here!