Quick Mini-Reviews: TweetDeck, Wink, CamStudio, VCOrganizer, DriveImage XML

You certainly get your money’s worth at TechVentureGeek! Here are 5 product mini-reviews in the space of a single post – and most of them are freeware!

First, we’ve switched over to TweetDeck for our tweeting.

As speculated previously, HootSuite came up with a monetization scheme, and that scheme didn’t work for this casual tweeter.

So, we jumped over to TweetDeck, and couldn’t be happier.

The prior reason for staying with HootSuite was that it has a lighter footprint. It is 100% JavaScript & AJAX.

TweetDeck, on the other hand, is an Adobe AIR RIA app. OK, so the overhead isn’t so heavy that we really care. It works great.

We’ve put all of our Twitter accounts into it as well as some Facebook pages.

Next, we’ll experiment with specialized, filtered Twitter feeds to isolate – without unfollowing – a few of the automated/media feeds.

TweetDeck is free, so long as you don’t mind using Adobe AIR, which is an installed application framework (like Silverlight, etc.)

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Review: Intervals for Project Management and Time Accounting

At R7 Solutions, in addition to GeoRoom, GeoIntelis (and soon to be announced GeoDomis), a good percentage of what we do is to provide professional services.

We provide software engineering, business process design and strategic IT consulting.  Just like any professional services firm, that means keeping close track of projects, tasks and hours.

And we’re a highly technical company selling business automation to our clients, so we hate doing things on paper when a better option is available. And for project management and hours accounting, we’ve tried them all.

Oh, boy, have we tried them all:

• Paper
• Microsoft Project Server 2003
• QuickBooks Timer
• Paper again
• ScoutSoft StandardTime
• Axosoft OnTime

(We also looked at WorkEtc.com, DeskAway.com and BaseCamp.com.)

Finally, in 2009, we tried Intervals.

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Review: Hootsuite for Managing Social Media

Hootsuite is an online web application that provides a streamlined, highly customizable interface for managing multiple social media outlets, especially including multiple Twitter accounts, Facebook accounts and pages, as well as Plaxo and LinkedIn accounts.

It is currently free to sign up for an account. Getting started is painless. After you set up connections to a few accounts, Hootsuite’s default interface layout is immediately useful and required little fiddling to meet our needs.

Updates stream automatically through multiple vertical windows laid out across the screen, allowing you to track posts, mentions and direct messages on a single screen. Ongoing conversations are also tracked and can be displayed with a single click.

We use it for all of the above, and especially to monitor for direct messages, mentions and relevant posts.

It also provides scheduling of posts, which we find invaluable when we want to tell absolutely everybody about our company’s latest technical triumph… but it happens to be 1:38 AM in the morning…

The ability to post to multiple streams at once, to quickly respond to messages, and to set up intervals for automatic updating of various streams, all make this a very user-friendly product.

We also really like the detailed statistics available about the number of clicks received on our individual posts, so we can know quickly whether anyone actually cared about our aforementioned early morning triumph, or whether we’d better take our misplaced geeky enthusiasm elsewhere.

There will certainly be changes as Hootsuite figures out how it is going to monetize this very successful product.

Product Review: Xobni Add-in for Outlook

It isn’t difficult to define the most useful aspect of the Xobni add-in for Outlook for me: It automatically puts faces with e-mails, instantly, for people I’ve met, people I’ve never met – and, crucially – for people I’ve met just a few times or a long time ago.

For me, that is amazing. Even if I don’t remember who the author is, I’m instantly reminded with a quick glance at the Xobni pane, which sits on the right side of the typical Outlook layout.

How does it do that trick with the photos?

Simple: It checks social networks – FaceBook, LinkedIn, Twitter and many more – for their accounts based on their e-mail address and name, and can log into my accounts and allow me to instantly connect, friend and follow them, right from Outlook. You can also look up their company’s profile in Hoover’s.

This is social networking for the way we really work.

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Decent VOIP phones for your startup

I haven’t posted anything about Tools We Use in awhile, so I thought I’d drop you a post about a recent upgrade.

Like many companies, basically all of the Black Mesa Ventures companies use VOIP phone systems. I think the last company using a local, on-site hardware PBX system sold it in December 2008 and moved everything to hosted VOIP. (See this previous post on this transition.)

And we love it. We have complete web-based management of our telephone lines and extensions, extension pools, forwarding anywhere we need it, as many local and national toll-free numbers as we want, and forwarding of voicemail and fax messages via e-mail to any device. There is also a lot of new competition emerging since we selected a vendor, including Google Voice and Grasshopper.

However, our initial choice of handset didn’t work out. We used BudgeTone phones at first, which were OK most of the time, but the sound quality was mediocre and once we moved them behind an additional firewall, they had difficulty logging into the service. (From what we could determine, the port forwarding confused them when there were multiple phones on the network.) They had to go.

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