James Kim is a writer for Choosewhat.com, which provides product reviews and test data for business services and products. Choosewhat.com’s goal is to help small companies make informed buying decisions on business solutions that help their business.

Going viral is no longer an option — for many businesses it’s a requirement. More and more companies are shifting from physical to virtual entities. While people have debated whether this is a good or bad thing, this shift has brought a vast array of useful, cloud-based tools for entrepreneurs. From online fax to finances, there are now plenty of online services that can help you make your business more efficient. So what are you waiting for? Try out these online business tools.

1. Collaboration

As a CEO of a small-business, you may have to forego office space in the beginning phases of company development. However, these online communication services can help you stay in touch, regardless of geographic distance.

In-Company Communication

• Campfire: Offers private chat rooms, through which you can invite clients or employees
• GoogleDocs and ConceptShare: Share or comment on documents
• Skype: Free video chats and low-cost calls to landline and cell phones, easy open communication

Call Services

• RingCentral Fax: Provides online fax services, through which you can send faxes for free from home without interrupting your phone line
• GoogleVoice: Allows you to get low rates for international calls, and gives you one number for all of your phones with a single voicemail box
• NewVoiceMedia: Contact center solutions including call routing and CRM

2.  Organization

Juggling all the elements of a business can be enough to make a person go insane. Lucky for you, there are plenty of online services that help you tackle this difficult task.

Calendars and Planners

• GoogleCalendar: Calendar tool
• Skedgeme: Scheduling, allows you to accept/make appointments, and customers can see services and book online

File Backup

• Carbonite and IDrive: Offer unlimited backup plans at affordable prices, and allows you to access your information from mobile devices
• Box.net: Backup and collaboration at affordable prices for monthly plans
• DropBox: Allows the sharing/storage of large files

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

• Highrise: Helps keep track of customers, contact and communication history
• Commence: Quote based cost, has one system for sales, marketing and customer service

3.  Finances

It’s always good to utilize a program that will organize all your transactions, assets, and finances. These programs can help you do just that.

• Dimewise or Wesabe: Record transactions
• Prosper: Allows you to get loans from either a single person or many individuals

Thanks to online services, maintaining a business has never been easier. Access everything you need from your computer or, if your on-the-move, from your mobile device with cloud computing services.

Every year, people around the world make the terrible decision to set New Years resolutions for themselves. They often times revolve around giving something up. Stop smoking, lose weight, get out of debt. Here it is the end of February and my guess is that the majority of people out there already broke their resolutions because they set an unobtainable goal for themselves. Besides that, if you wanted to become the best person you could possibly be and you knew you needed to do a specific thing to achieve it, why would you wait until the beginning of the year to start? Why not June 30th?

Instead of setting yourself up for failure in 2011, steal a concept from blogger Chris Brogan and come up with 3 focus areas for the year. These don’t have to be specific actions or smart goals, just words to guide you throughout the year.

I chose Lead, Brand, Execute. Read More

As the new year is well underway, so is the activity at StartupRoundup. I started this blog with the intention of discovering and showcasing early stage tech startups. I didn’t want to be redundant and cover the same sites that the TechCrunches of the world talk about. That left me looking for the pre-funded startup teams consisting of about one to three people.

Since my goal is to help these startups, the StartupRoundup blog is going to begin sharing the details of business plan and other startup compititions where seed money is available. On top of that, I would like to follow up with the winners and/or the most interesting startups as these events and share their story.

In my continuing quest to help other entrepreneurs, look for a startup competition calendar coming soon that will list as many events as possible. Also, check back on the home page often for details on the most interesting competitions. If you have any suggestions for events to cover, please send them my way on twitter @StartupRoundup or shoot me an email at startup@startuproundup.com

Make 2011 the year of your startup!

Do you have an idea for a mobile app? Want to turn it into some sweet cash? Why not develop it for Nokia’s new N8 phone and have a chance to win some  serious money. They are giving away a total of $10 million! If you are one of the two grand prize winners, you will get $250k in cash and almost $2 million in marketing for your app. Even if you are not one of the grand prize winners, you can still walk away with one of the 17 category prizes ranging from $150k – $50k for first through third place.

Visit the Calling All Innovators site to get more details, such as the different run-time options you can develop it in as well as the official entry form. The deadline is Friday, January 28, 2011 at 5pm Eastern Time.

To get you started, here is some great app development advise from my interview with the founder of Appiction, Spencer Forrest. He gives a peek into the different ways to separate your app from the rest, Appiction’s unique development process, and the lessons they learned along way.

Looking for some more inspiration? Find out how one college student took his idea for an app called KartMe and made it happen without spending his days programming.

So you think you have an idea for the next fad iPhone or Android app that will make you millions? CEO Spencer Forrest of Appiction would encourage you to think long-term about your app. That is exactly why he built such diverse teams at Appiction. With a focus on creating apps with a longer shelf-life, this end-to-end developer is helping the app development business get its second wind.

Appiction blends the trinity of smart phone app creation: creative, development and marketing. The Austin-based startup builds native and web apps for entrepreneurs, businesses and interactive advertising and marketing firms. The company’s end to end service don’t just launch apps, they launch app businesses.

I had a chance to interview Spencer Forrest to find out how he was able to create a successful company in what seems like a crowded market. Spencer is an entrepreneur that is able to combine his 20 years of experience in mobile, software deployment, and e-learning to take on one of his toughest challenges yet: creating apps that people will use more than once.

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It’s much easier to work hard and give 100% effort when someone else is holding you accountable for your actions. In a traditional job, most people don’t want to let their boss or their team down, so they go the extra mile. Ambitious entrepreneurs often strive to impress and rise to the top. This means productivity is great in a 9-5 job, but what about when you are employee #1 at a one person startup? What about that side project you are working on that you aspire to turn into your next business?

To borrow from the book Rework by the founders of 37signals, “Inspiration is Perishable.” After the initial excitement of a new project wears off, will you have what it takes to keep going and take an idea to the next stage while no one is paying attention to you? Can you complete that prototype so you have something to show to others, begin to get feedback, and recharge your excitement for the project?

Here are 5 ways to battle the single person startup fatigue and get you over that hill to your future adoring fans:

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Cloud computing has provided the means for us to instantly share pictures with friends on Flickr or Facebook, have conversations on Twitter, and post blogs for the whole world to read on Wordpress. Thanks to Google’s Gmail, being able to access your email anywhere you have a connection to the internet and having more inbox space than most people will use in a lifetime has become the norm. We can even draft and share documents online  thanks to Google Apps.

But what happens when the unthinkable happens? When there is a glitch in the cloud or you accidentally delete something and are the victim of lost data that cannot be recovered and has floated away. We have seen examples of this such as T-Mobile Sidekick owners losing their contacts, calendars, and photos on the Windows Mobile platform. Just last week, social media giant Facebook, had its worst outage since only having 7 million users. The remedy was to actually temporarily turn off the database for many of the 500 million users.

It’s easy to forget a time not too long ago where we were responsible for backing-up our own data on our computers. This may have meant periodically burning your files onto a DVD or backing them up to an external USB drive you kept in a safe place for your piece of mind. With cloud computing, we give up some control. That philosophy wasn’t accepted by the founders at Backupify. They still wanted the same piece of mind for their social media and online documents that they got from backing up their computer to an external USB drive.

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Twitter has released a preview of the next evolution of the online service. In attempt to make the site easier to use and much more useful, they have commandeered more screen real-estate to present additional tweets and multimedia on the same page. Now that you have “Everything in one place“, as Twitter says, the width of the site went from roughly 764 pixels to 1040 pixels. This takes away much of the coveted background area where many people and companies like to do additional branding. Taking what little space is left and effectively using it will be a challenge for many.

To get you started on this challenge of redesigning your Twitter background, I thought I would write a quick tutorial as well as include a Photoshop template.
(Template also works with GIMP – a free Photoshop alternative)

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Learning software such as Adobe Dreamweaver can be expensive, complicated, and intimidating. That’s why Myra Rhodes started Everyone’s E-Learning, an online course that teaches how to develop websites by using Dreamweaver. Once signed-up for a $30 monthly access fee or $200 year long pass, the interactive course can be accessed from Everyones.com. A key differentiator between Everyone’s E-Learning courses and other instructional programs is that the course simulates the software. This means you can go through the exercises without actually owning the Dreamweaver software. This is a great advantage since someone may not have access to the expensive software, but wants to being working with it and understanding it for future job opportunities. Each exercise also comes with a step-by-step PDF so if you do have the software, you can use the PDF’s to walk through the exercises.

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Groupon has been under fire the last week for both fraudulent offers as well as the Groupon Nation nearly bankrupting mom and  pop shops that take on the massive number of sales coming from the discounted deals. The Fraudulent Groupon Photography Deal was covered by Tech Crunch when it was brought to light that no professional photographer could ever schedule 1000’s of on-site sessions in a timely fashion. This is especially true with an 87% discount, bringing the photographer’s cut of the Groupon to roughly $30. I’m confident that, moving forward, Groupon will put a more rigorous review process in place to keep from making Tech Crunch news in this fashion.

The second issue this week is the real problem. Posies Cafe let the whole world know how taking on the responsibility of a Groupon deal nearly bankrupted this mom and pop store. The deal was pay $6 for a coupon valued at $13. After Groupon took 50%, the cafe owner was left with just $3 to cover the fixed cost of the $13 value. There were nearly 1,000 coupons sold. After 3 months, the business had lost $8,000 from their marketing efforts and could not make payroll. The owner had to take $8,000 from her and her husband’s savings to cover the costs.

If the business offering the deal does not cap the number of Groupons that could be purchased, there is no ceiling to the risk that business is taking on by signing-up to offer a Groupon deal. Also, there is no easy way for the business to measure the ROI of a Groupon deal. There is a simple solution and a large piece missing from Groupon’s business model.

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