Review the Market

Here’s something that you don’t see everyday. if you are a PDA user able to run applications on your phone, then this is the perfect mobile app for you. Fring is a FREE application that allows you to hook into all your VoIP networks: Gtalk, Skype, ICQ, SIP, etc. It lets you call your contacts on any of these networks from your phone using either your EDGE/3G connection, or through a Wifi connection (if one is available).

The nice thing about Fring is that it allows you to make a call directly from your phone. It doesn’t involve any callbacks like many popular Skype mobile versions do. You can use your SkypeOut credits directly from the phone just as you would from your PC.

It is available for a large range of phones and operating systems. To get a look at the complete range of features, visit this link.

THE ONLY DRAWBACK: There is no fring for BlackBerry. I use one and so its a big drawback, and I will be looking back again and again to see if they come out with a BlackBerry version.

Today we review a corporate performance management software. Of course, we have not used this software personally, but we will try and list all the features that this software has and how it can help you manage your corporate better.

Prophix is a software solution for budgeting, financial analysis, forecasting, financial reporting, personnel planning, consolidation, and other financial functions. It lets you rapidly gain control over your enterprise through quick implementation road maps.

The software has the following capabilities:

• Reporting - the tool provides complete reporting, including financial reporting, management reporting, transactional reporting, and ad hoc reporting. It has support for industry standards and built-in security features.
• Budgeting - supports top-down and bottom-up budgeting, audit tracking, scenario management, and zero-based budgeting. This combines with tools such as multiple budgeting, templates, charting, multiple currency, etc. makes it a compelling tool.
• Personnel Planning - you can manage benefits, overtime calculations, commission-based calculations, personnel data, and scenario planning.
• Forecasting - you can do break-even analysis, inventory forecasting, production forecasting, rolling forecasts, and sales forecasting. Once again, you can leverage advanced features such as automatic allocations and multi-user data entry.
• Advanced Functions - A number of features such as job costing, allocations, currency management, and consolidation add to the offering.
• Analysis - there are capabilities for scorecards and dashboards, variance reporting, analytics, ad hoc analysis, and converting analytics to action.
• Business Modeling - centralized control, business rules, alternate scenarios and mass data manipulation are some of the features that the Business Model manager offers.
• Business Process Management - has a GUI based designer to manage workflow and processes.
• Financial Consolidation - it allows multiple roll-up requirements, real-time consolidation analysis, secure approval process, and consolidated management and financial reporting.
• Data Integration - allows you to integrate with your sales data, CRM system, and historical data. It can connect to your ERP system as well. It allows you to connect to any ODBC compliant database, which pretty much means, you can connect to anything.

The above features are not even scratching the surface of this ull blown corporate application.

We reviewed the excellent product called DeskSpace some time ago. However, what we are about to preview today makes DeskSpace look a little less nice.

It’s called 360Desktop. This is a yet to release software which is why we are previewing it. It allows you to add infinite space to your desktop and it was previewed recently by us.  A couple of things came to our mind. Cool is the first one, and Useful the second. However, the best thing about it is that it is FREE. Or will be when it is released in the fall.

360 Desktop allows you to create panoramic 360s, as they are called. So think of your wallpaper as a continuous panorama of pictures one after the other. What they do with these 360s is that they add the ability to insert active content on them. They have Widgets which can pretty much run any of your web widgets on your desktop; they have APIs through which you can insert videos in the desktop, or show ads, etc.

Actually, we can not do justice to it by just previewing it. We need to let you do the same. Head over to the website at http://www.360desktop.com to see the preview; or just view it here:

I maintain a calendar on my desktop using MS Outlook; I also maintain a calendar on my PDA using Pocket Outlook, and to top all of it off, I also manage a web calendar using Google Calendar.

Keeping the 3 in sync is a HUGE problem, or at least it was. There are several products in the market which help solve the problem, but none works as well as the product I am going to review in this post.

Continue Reading »

There are so many tools out there which allow you to expand your windows XP desktop; they add multiple desktops which allows you to put various windows on different desktops and then simply switch desktops to find your windows. However, I haven’t seen any that even come close to this software when it comes to doing this in style.

DeskSpace is a 3D Virtual Desktop by Otaku Software. It gives you 4 desktops, and the ability to switch them with style. As shown in the picture to the left, the desktops are switched in 3D. You can add different items (icons, windows, etc.) on your various desktops and just switch to the one you need to by a keyboard shortcut (or through a mouse, if that’s your inclination).

Continue Reading »

I have been a project manager for many years during my professional career and as far as I remember I have been most of the time using applications installed on my personal computer that had to be always with me should I wished to work while not being at the office. Well, today I bring you all a good alternative for all of you, project managers, that love internet-based applications and freedom to work anywhere you are. I am talking about ProWorkflow, a new web-based project management software that promises to make our life easier for small and medium companies, offerting a full range of features for this new PM tool.

I have signed up for one of the free trial accounts they offer to check it out a bit and I have been nicely impressed. Not only you can manage projects, but it comes with a full range of options such a tasks and time manager, contacts, notes, reports, useful links, etc. On the initial screen you get a personal summary of the different sections you may be working in and the status of your tasks/projects. From here you can start fully working on them and easily control your ongoing processes.

The product has been designed by Proactive software, a well known company on the sector, so you know, if you are interested or iIf you want more detailed information just try it out or check out their company website.

I have been playing today with a new FTP software to replace the very old and basic one I have been using so far ( won’t say which one :-)). I came through the website of IPswitch and got the basic version of their WS-FTP. It is quite ok and simple to manage, in less than 5 minutes my sites were added to the site manager and I could already upload some new themes for Wordpress that I may try in this blog later :-).

Apart from that, the software comes in several languages, and it is very intuitive. Get your files from your computer on the left side of the screen, your server folders on the right, choose the ones to upload and hit the arrow :-). One thing that you also may like to do is to enable the deleting of folders that are not empty. This is in case you have upload plenty of stuff that you do not need anymore, if your ftp is not configure to delete full folders you will have to erase file by file. Quite annoying. Just go to the tools and options menu and activate the box to do so.

For any of you not very used to work with any FTP software there is also an interactive tutorial about how to use it.