Thursday, January 6, 2011

personal finance budgeting

Intuit-owned Mint.com is heading to schools today with the launch of a free, online program designed to educate middle-school students about personal finance and financial management.

Mint has partnered with educational publisher Scholastic to develop materials that parents and teachers can use to teach children the ins and outs of personal finance management. The materials includes lesson plans as well as an interactive game, to teach children money management, budgeting and goals.

For example, the program teaches children the concept of compound interest with real-life math problems, and encourages children to set goals and budgets with their own current work opportunities (i.e. babysitting).

Mint says the curriculum will be expanded to 30,000 classrooms nationwide early next year. Considering the state of the economy and credit, teaching children financial literacy and sounds personal finance practices at an early edge is an incredibly important initiative. In terms of branding, this is a big win for Mint, which can start building awareness of its tools among students at an early age.

Five Best Mobile Personal Finance Tools

It's easy to convince yourself to spend and save responsibly when the numbers are right in front of you, but it's a different story when you're on-the-go. These five great mobile personal finance tools keep your money goals nearby at all times.

Photo a composite of images by neernijus and mellowr.

Smartphones have brought nearly every aspect of desktop computers to your pocket; it only makes sense they'd bring money management, too. Earlier this week we asked you to share your favorite mobile personal finance tool. Now we're back to highlight the five most popular options.

Mint (Android/iOS, Free)

Popular web-based personal finance tool Mint has an equally as popular mobile application for Android and iOS devices. It sports the same simple design as Mint's main site and makes it easy to track your spending, receive alerts about bills and budget issues, and monitor your savings goals. It's polished, the graphs are easy to read, and the total-overview that Mint provides helps keep you on top of your personal finances in ways other tools don't.

Pageonce (Cross-Platform, Free)

Pageonce isn't only about personal finance, but it does personal finance well, and it's available for nearly every mobile platform around. On top of a web-based interface, they have highly polished apps for Android, iOS, BlackBerry, and Windows Mobile (including the newly released Windows Phone 7). It's easy to get real-time updates via email or push notifications on your phone, set alerts to warn you about impending bills or overspending, and view all of your financial stats in eye-catching charts and graphs.

EasyMoney (Android, $9.95)

EasyMoney is an Android-only personal finance manager that includes a home screen widget for speedy transaction inputs, bill notifications, graphs to help you analyze and chart your past and future spending, and a host of small but very useful features like the ability to split transactions between multiple categories. Easy Money also includes a tool for photographing receipts and importing data as well as a checkbook register and easy import/export to .CVS files. EasyMoney offers a 30 day-trial if you're on the fence about spending $10 on the app (consider also, many of the features in EasyMoney are paid upgrades on similar applications).

Pocket Money (iOS, $4.99)

Pocket Money puts a sweeping view of all your accounts and transactions right on your iPhone or iPad. You can manually enter transactions, create repeating transactions based on cycles or dates, create custom filters to view your money the way that is most useful to you, and more. On top of the plethora of features in the stock app you can expand the feature set with in-app purchases like the $0.99 Photo Receipts plugin that allows you to photograph your receipts and import the transaction data off them. Pocket Money has a companion desktop application available for Windows, Mac and Linux—a nice break from the common pattern of iOS apps having Mac-only desktop companions.

ProOnGo (Cross-Platform, Starting at $0.99/Month)

ProOnGo is the most distinctly business-oriented tool in this week's Hive Five. You could use it as a personal finance manager if you desired but the feature set is weighted heavily towards business users who need to track things like automotive mileage, business-related expenses, and generate reports for tax purposes and submission to their company. The basic package runs $0.99/month and is limited to manual entires and expense report generation, the premium package runs $4.99/month and includes web-based access, backups, custom spreadsheets, and synchronization to your American Express business card.

Now that you've had a chance to look over the five most popular mobile finance tools, it's time to vote for your favorite:

Have an idea for the next Hive Five? Shoot us an email at tips@lifehacker.com with "Hive Five" in the subject line and we'll do our best to give you idea the attention it deserves.

Send an email to Jason Fitzpatrick, the author of this post, at jason@lifehacker.com.

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Wednesday, January 5, 2011

Making Money Cash

(Editor’s note: Charley Polachi is a partner at Polachi, an executive recruiting firm. He submitted this story to VentureBeat.)

2010 is winding down rapidly with all indications that the worst is behind us – hopefully. At the very least, that’s the sentiment of many of the executives we deal with.

As we gave forward into 2011, we queried several of our executive search partners around the world to get their input on what they see happening in their back yards and what they anticipate for the year to come. Here’s what they had to say:

Sean Carroll, Polachi (NYC)

“If there is any meaningful uptick in the economy, good talent that may be on the sidelines will be gone and entrepreneurs will have a tough time hiring on their own. Also, I suspect there will be a strong M&A market as we’ve seen with Netezza, Unica, Coremetrics, etc. Corporations have lots of cash and will buy at the right price.”

“Lastly, as entrepreneurs pioneer innovative solutions, there will always be a shortage of skills as the experience or domain does not exist yet. A good example is SEO products. Automating SEO is an interesting problem to solve but there are only a few young product companies, so the only place to get SEO experience is the agencies…no SaaS or product experience there. Entrepreneurs need to make bets that talent can step up in a new sector.”

Andy Price, Schweichler, Price, Mullarkey and Barry (Silicon Valley)

“My view is that the talent pool is getting snapped up pretty fast and once again we’re seeing a very competitive landscape for people. We’re competing against two forces: Other companies recruiting, and inertia driven by either risk aversion or someone’s low priced options are suddenly in the money and they’re inclined to take risk off the table. That said, people believe startups have a chance again so they’re willing to talk to you. Closing people is the hard part right now.”

Steve Lavelle, Gillamor Stephens (London)

“In Europe, access to the talent pool is there, provided the company’s proposition is compelling enough. Closing candidates can be challenging though and having been through the low point of hiring activity, it’s only going to heat up as we move into next year.”

Sal Rocco, Stonewood Group (Toronto)

“We are seeing more product development, engineering-oriented searches than in the past 2-3 years. The only thing we can attribute this to is that when the market tanked and companies were cash strapped, the focus was on revenue generation and selling what we had. They gutted costly product development and engineering teams. The thought was: Don’t worry about new product development because we may not be alive in 2-3 years if we don’t get cash today.

“To the extent they were doing searches in the past 2-3 years, the searches were on either outward looking sales & marketing types focused on making money or CFOs/Finance types focused on raising cash or slowing the bleed. Today, as the future looks brighter and companies realize that their products are dated, they need to hire engineering leads and product development types, which they were laying off over the past 2-3 years.”

So, for 2011 the future looks fairly bright. VCs are investing and companies are hiring. A few things entrepreneurs can expect to see and look out for are the following:

Senior talent is getting scarce again

Social media works for staffing at many levels, but not at the executive level

Cleantech continues to march on – and more opportunities will be there for investors

Venture capital is emerging from a difficult stretch, but there is money for good ideas and strong teams in mobile applications, gaming and health care IT

Candidates want cash and equity.

Acquisitions will provide the bulk of exits in 2011; the IPO market isn’t here yet.

Next Story: Verizon iPad 2 to join the Verizon iPhone in 2011? Previous Story: Computer platforms with the biggest buzz will be the biggest malware targets in 2011

Seriously? This is the question of the day? When people are still voicing serious and legitimate concerns about the rest of the economy? We're talking about a company with enough money in the bank to make a Goldman Sachs-sized investment in Facebook if it wanted to, more than triple the amount Dell had in the bank at the end of the last quarter, plus more than five times the amount HP had too, while we're at it.

Let's look at a number for a minute: Apple has 51 billion dollars in cash. That's 51,000,000,000 bucks. Or, approximately the amount of money it takes to fill a vault-slash-swimming-pool. Who has that kind of money these days and didn't get it via government bailout? Apple, that's who. What is its secret? It made that money the old-fashioned way, by selling new-fashioned things.

In a time when few companies are profitable and everyone's excited about a flat line since it isn't a downward curve, Apple is making money iHand over iFist. One could presume from this that analysts and others who watch CNBC professionally would be excited about a company with growth and profitability in the current climate. However, that's not the case.

Remember when Apple wasn't doing well? Those bygone days when people may have actually believed the name of the company was "Beleaguered Apple Computer?" Well, once Uncle Steve made his return in 1996, that started to turn around. Apple Computer started making things that start with "i," and in 2001 with the launch of the iPod, Apple was officially cool again. You know, unless you were an analyst on Wall Street, in which case Apple wasn't cool, it was just less lame than before. But seriously, have you seen what sort of stock prices Dell and HP have these days? Now those are tech companies.

I call shenanigans! Now, instead of being impressed with profitability, the question is "Oh sure, you're all profitable, but can you stay that way?" Apple hasn't proven that yet? Explain to me how making ANY money in a time of unprecedented financial volatility is something that gets played down. What will it take before Apple gets a fair shake? A brand new device that sells a million units in three months? Try two and a half. A new version of the same thing released a year later, how long did that take to sell a million? Three days.

Find and replace "Apple" with a non-tech company in some of these articles and see if it still makes as much sense. Just the iPhone product line by itself is bigger than Coca-Cola, but Apple still gets dismissed like this?

Someone needs to have a little heart-to-heart talk with some of these guys. Apparently they've all had their heads down in their BlackBerrys for so long that they don't realize it's cool these days to carry around something Designed In Cupertino. Clearly a lot of other people have figured it out -- what's stopping Wall Street from seeing the light?

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Tuesday, January 4, 2011

web internet marketing

This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business.

In an informal class='blippr-nobr'>Twitterclass="blippr-nobr">Twitter poll, we asked our friends working at or running small and medium-sized businesses not what they could do for the class='blippr-nobr'>Internetclass="blippr-nobr">Internet, but what the Internet could do for them.

We heard responses that ranged widely, running the gamut from social media marketing tools to internal team communications. Here’s a list of great resources for SMBs that meet some of the most pressing needs you experience as a business owner or entrepreneur.

Best of all, every single one of these tools can be used free of charge (some have paid options for larger businesses or for those that need more features). And all of them are web-based; that means you won’t have to install software, worry about cross-platform compatibility, take up any of your own system’s resources or have to leave work when you leave your own PC.

If you have other tools you love using that you think other SMBs could benefit from, please let us know about them in the comments.

2 Internal Chat Tools

When you want to get your employees or clients together to brainstorm, make decisions or simply run your business, instant messaging can be a huge time-saver — especially if you’re working with a distributed team or out-of-town clients and vendors. While we love programs like class='blippr-nobr'>Skypeclass="blippr-nobr">Skype for business chat and conference calls, it may not be installed on every machine you have to use. These web-based group chat programs solve that problem.

Zoho’s web-based chat client allows you to create and chat with groups. You can easily share your desktop with co-workers, and you can integrate your calendar for quick appointment or meeting scheduling. Best of all, Zoho’s IM service also supports all kinds of IM clients, including Yahoo and class='blippr-nobr'>AIMclass="blippr-nobr">aim.

Another good online group chat service is Gixaw. With this service, you can create a unique URL for chatting with your group. You can share files, create multiple “rooms” for different projects or departments, and even search through chat history.

2 Task Management Tools

As your business and number of employees grow, you may need a central place for delegating tasks, monitoring progress and ensuring everything gets done correctly and on time.

HiTask is a free, web-based task management tool perfect for SMBs. It has a user-friendly, easy interface for your to-do lists and for team or project management. With HiTask, you can work on recurring events, make assignments, sort tasks based on priority and more, all within a simple drag-and-drop UI.

Another great task management tool is RememberTheMilk. Don’t be fooled by its homemaker-ish name. This web app has been widely acclaimed over the past several years, and it works for individuals as well as small teams. RTM integrates with class='blippr-nobr'>Gmailclass="blippr-nobr">Gmail and Outlook, and the service has mobile apps for class='blippr-nobr'>Windowsclass="blippr-nobr">Windows, class='blippr-nobr'>Androidclass="blippr-nobr">Android, iPhone and BlackBerry.

8 Social Media Marketing and Monitoring Tools

One of the categories SMBs ask for the most help with is social media. You need to quickly and easily keep an eye on what people are saying about you; more importantly, you need to participate in the social media conversation yourself, without drowning hours upon endless hours bouncing around various websites.

There are three great tools we’d recommend for pushing out updates to a variety of sites at once. All three have free, web-based services, and they’re great for working with teams, too. Depending on your specific needs and tastes, you could try out Hootsuiteclass="blippr-nobr">HootSuite, Seesmicclass="blippr-nobr">Seesmic and TweetDeckclass="blippr-nobr">TweetDeck.

If you want to see what people are saying about your company, your product, your location or your vertical in real time, try searching for relevant terms on Collecta or SocialMention.

You also have options for network-specific monitoring tools. To see how your tweets are performing, try CrowdBooster. And remember, Twitter’s official analytics product is coming soon, too. For Facebook, use that social network’s Insights dashboard for your business’s Facebook Page.

3 Bookkeeping Tools

When it comes to keeping your finances straight, there are also several free, online tools just right for SMBs.

You can try Numia.biz, accounting software made just for recording and processing small business transactions, including accounts payable, accounts receivable, bank balances and more. It also gives you forms for invoicing, purchases and bank reconciliation and allows you to set up customers and vendors.

The desktop version of QuickBooks is a standard feature of many SMBs. This web-based version of QuickBooks is free and perfect for the new or smaller business. You can use QuickBooks Online to create invoices, pay bills, track expenses and more.

Finally, MoneyTrackin’ is a free web app for simply and quickly tracking your revenue and expenses. You can also share budgets and collaborate with many people together on the same account. MoneyTrackin’ lets you control as many accounts as you need to and tag your transactions; the service is also available as a handy mobile web app.

5 Cloud-Based File Hosting Tools

For sharing and storing large files, class='blippr-nobr'>Google Docsclass="blippr-nobr">Google Docs will allow you to share a wide range of files — including PDFs, spreadsheets, images and much more — free of charge for the first 1024 MB. And believe us, it can take quite a while to get to 1024 MB of content. Google Docs files are easy to keep private and easy to share with others, including clients and team members. Plus, you’ll have a relatively stable company on your side, which isn’t necessarily the case when the startup hosting your files gets bought by Facebook and shuts its doors, for example.

However, if you’d rather go the small-web-company route, there are lots of options for moving large files around the Internet.

If you just need to e-mail a large file to another person, try YouSendIt, which lets you e-mail a link for downloading files up to 2 GB. If you’d like to permanently or semi-permanently store rather than just e-mail your files, you could try Esploded, which lets you create a free account, upload your files and create groups for sharing files. There’s also Dropboxclass="blippr-nobr">Dropbox, FilesAnywhere and Box.netclass="blippr-nobr">Box.net, all of which offer free and paid memberships, just depending on your business’s size and needs.

3 Hiring and Applicant-Tracking Tools

Last of all, as you grow, finding and hiring great new staff members becomes increasingly important and requires more of your attention — and likely greater organization.

Zoho Recruit is free for one person to use. It lets you schedule interviews, add and manage candidates, store resumes and publish job openings from within a simple but robust dashboard.

SmartRecruiters is hiring software that helps users create job ads and post them all over the web, including major job boards and social networks. You can consolidate all your applicants in one place, prescreen them online, share the best candidates with your co-workers or executives, schedule interviews and even rate the candidates all from within the app.

iKrut is an interesting free recruitment system. You can build your own recruitment microsite quickly; from there, you can list all your current job openings on this new career portal. Candidates visit the microsite to upload their résumés and cover letters for you to review. This all also allows for interview scheduling and organizing references. Microsites can be branded to match your own website, and the system has built-in messaging.

More Business Resources from Mashable:

- 10 Ways Business Leaders Can Turn Ideas Into Execution/> - 7 Tips for Building a Better Branded App/> - 9 Web Tools to Keep Your Business Running Smoothly During the Holidays/> - 5 iPhone Apps For Avoiding International Business Faux Pas/> - 7 Tips for Succeeding as a Social Media Strategist

Images courtesy of class='blippr-nobr'>Flickrclass="blippr-nobr">Flickr, in order of appearance, by danox, inlinguamanchester, esther17, tsevis, nhankamer, takashi, socialisbetter.

For more Business coverage:

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Canadian Tech Conferences to Attend in 2011

We’ve rounded-up some Canadian tech-related conferences happening in 2011 that we thought you might like to attend.

“My first observation was the opportunity in Canada is far bigger than I expected — and I expected it to be huge. I think there’s just an enormous amount of upside in terms of businesses catching up with consumers, and unleashing a little more creativity on the web” – Google Canada, Country Director Chris O’Neill

Mesh Conference

When: May 25th – 26th 2011

Where: Toronto, Ontario

Mesh was founded by 5 esteemed individuals including ME Consulting’s Mark Evens and Mathew Ingram from GigaOm. This web conference is a venue for people to “connect, share and inspire” and its focus is on anything related to the web. Mesh looks at the way the web is “affecting the media, marketing, business and society as a whole”. As of today, Mesh has not announced its keynote speakers for this year but you can be sure it will be filled with workshops, panels and thought provoking conversations and presentations. We’ve heard nothing but good things about Mesh and it’ll likely be a worthwhile experience.

FITC Toronto 2011 – The Design & Technology Festival

When: May 2 – 4th 2011

Where: Toronto, Ontario

The FITC conference began as a Flash Festival, but over the last few years, it has evolved and branched out gradually adding more creative and technical presentations. FITC aims to “educate, challenge and inspire”and they’ve previously held 20 events over the last nine years in five countries. At the event, Flash, motion design, Flex and Air are the types of subjects you’ll learn about in the presentations. FITC prides itself on the quality of its handpicked speakers and additionally claims its “parties are legendary”. Sounds very intriguing.

CeC (Canada -e- connect)

When: February 2-4

Where: Toronto Ontario

The CeC conference was created by the Canadian tourism industry and mainly focuses on e-marketing within that industry. Any tourism business or organization can use this conference as a tool to learn more about using technology to market and gain sales. It also takes a look at opportunities, web trends and online successful campaigns. I’d go just for the speakers. They’ve grabbed three internet celebs to present this year; Amber Mac, Tara Hunt and Scott Stratten. If you’re in the tourism industry, I’d say this one is a must-go.

Confoo

When: March 9th-11th

Where: Montreal, Quebec

The Confoo conference held in Montreal, Quebec will be kicking off another coding conference in 2011. This conference won’t interest you unless you’re a coder interested on learning more about Java, .Net, PHP, Python and Ruby. But, if

you are a code-monkey you’ll likely have a lot to take away. Presenters will be walking the developers through programming solutions, security, content management systems, frameworks and databases. Confoo also promises a management portion that includes project management, referencing (SEO), web marketing analysis and social networking. Overall, this sounds like a great conference to attend if you rawk the code.

StartupCamp Montreal 7

When: January 20th, 2011

Where: Montreal, Quebec

Later this month, StartupCamp Montreal will be holding the seventh edition of its event for startup companies. If you’re involved in a startup, this conference will put you in contact with investors, fellow companies and can assist you in working out things like your business pitch. It will also feature speakers such as successful native-Canadian entrepeneur Perry Evans.

Mobile Camp Montreal

When: May 14th, 2011

Where: Montreal, Quebec

This year will be the first ever Mobile Camp Montreal and will focus on all things mobile. It’s still in its infancy although we spoke with the organizers this evening and they tell us they’re confident the event will be a success. “The idea is essentially to act as a central point for mobile enthusiasts, whether they’re into devices, apps, OS or marketing. We’ll have people come talk to us about which devices are the best, what to expect from 2011, where is mobile going, how to properly target the mobile market, how to advertise, how to track, etc etc” the event founder said via email. They’re looking for sponsorship and presenters if you’re inclined to help them pull it off.

This is not a complete list of Canadian conferences, just a few you should think about attending in this coming year. And if you know of a great tech conference in Canada, please give us a shout in the comments.

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This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business.

If you have other tools you love using that you think other SMBs could benefit from, please let us know about them in the comments.

2 Internal Chat Tools

2 Task Management Tools

As your business and number of employees grow, you may need a central place for delegating tasks, monitoring progress and ensuring everything gets done correctly and on time.

8 Social Media Marketing and Monitoring Tools

If you want to see what people are saying about your company, your product, your location or your vertical in real time, try searching for relevant terms on Collecta or SocialMention.

3 Bookkeeping Tools

When it comes to keeping your finances straight, there are also several free, online tools just right for SMBs.

5 Cloud-Based File Hosting Tools

However, if you’d rather go the small-web-company route, there are lots of options for moving large files around the Internet.

3 Hiring and Applicant-Tracking Tools

Last of all, as you grow, finding and hiring great new staff members becomes increasingly important and requires more of your attention — and likely greater organization.

Zoho Recruit is free for one person to use. It lets you schedule interviews, add and manage candidates, store resumes and publish job openings from within a simple but robust dashboard.

More Business Resources from Mashable:

- 10 Ways Business Leaders Can Turn Ideas Into Execution/> - 7 Tips for Building a Better Branded App/> - 9 Web Tools to Keep Your Business Running Smoothly During the Holidays/> - 5 iPhone Apps For Avoiding International Business Faux Pas/> - 7 Tips for Succeeding as a Social Media Strategist

Images courtesy of class='blippr-nobr'>Flickrclass="blippr-nobr">Flickr, in order of appearance, by danox, inlinguamanchester, esther17, tsevis, nhankamer, takashi, socialisbetter.

For more Business coverage:

Canadian Tech Conferences to Attend in 2011

We’ve rounded-up some Canadian tech-related conferences happening in 2011 that we thought you might like to attend.

Mesh Conference

When: May 25th – 26th 2011

Where: Toronto, Ontario

FITC Toronto 2011 – The Design & Technology Festival

When: May 2 – 4th 2011

Where: Toronto, Ontario

CeC (Canada -e- connect)

When: February 2-4

Where: Toronto Ontario

Confoo

When: March 9th-11th

Where: Montreal, Quebec

StartupCamp Montreal 7

When: January 20th, 2011

Where: Montreal, Quebec

Mobile Camp Montreal

When: May 14th, 2011

Where: Montreal, Quebec

robert shumake

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robert shumake

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robert shumake

There are thousands of marketing tool kits available online for a whole range of prices, but what if you are not interested in buying someone else's tool kit and are more interested in creating your own internet marketing product and toolkit to sell. Well, there are plenty of ways to going about doing this.

First, you should have considerable information that you can easily compile into a toolkit or e-book to sell. Whatever information you are including in your marketing product, make sure it is viable and relative information your customers can use and will find practical. Providing this information will carry you a long way when it comes to customer reviews and recommendations of your product.

Make sure any information that is not yours is documented properly and that you have permission to use it. When you start compiling the information, make sure it looks professional. Also, be sure the information is easy to read and understand. Bullet points, lists and step by step guides are very helpful for individuals interested in learning how to market a product.

Edit your e-book or toolkit several times as well as have another set of eyes read over it to make sure it is clear, concise, and understandable. The last thing you want is to provide confusing information and receive hundreds of emails that you don't have time to response to. Do it right the first time and you will receive more customers, positive reviews and constant cash flow.

There are a variety of software programs that can help you compile this information into a professional and easily read e-book or toolkit. Certainly, if you plan on selling and creating your own internet marketing product, you will want to make sure it is professional, organized, detailed and provides real and pertinent information to your customers.

Once you have created your own internet marketing product, you will want to have a way to get it out to the public. As a result, you will need a web page or a minipage that is dedicated to selling this product to customers. Generally, you can find a web hosting company that charges a small fee monthly that will register a URL for you and host your page.

Also, most have a web page builder program if you are not knowledgeable of building web pages and design. The most important aspects of this web page are reviews of the product and a purchase now button. You will want to make the checkout process as easy as possible because once customers have decided to buy; they want the process to be quick and easy. If not, you will likely lose a customer.

Additionally, you will want to have Paypal or another program such as this that accepts a variety of payment options in a wide range of currencies. This will allow you to market and sell your marketing guide to people worldwide.

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News Corp. Online Gaming Head Sean Ryan to Head Facebook's Social ...

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John Roberts, the veteran newsman who co-hosted CNN's American Morning for three years, is joining the competition. “We are excited to welcome Jo...

robert shumake

robert shumake detroit

This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business.

If you have other tools you love using that you think other SMBs could benefit from, please let us know about them in the comments.

2 Internal Chat Tools

2 Task Management Tools

As your business and number of employees grow, you may need a central place for delegating tasks, monitoring progress and ensuring everything gets done correctly and on time.

8 Social Media Marketing and Monitoring Tools

If you want to see what people are saying about your company, your product, your location or your vertical in real time, try searching for relevant terms on Collecta or SocialMention.

3 Bookkeeping Tools

When it comes to keeping your finances straight, there are also several free, online tools just right for SMBs.

5 Cloud-Based File Hosting Tools

However, if you’d rather go the small-web-company route, there are lots of options for moving large files around the Internet.

3 Hiring and Applicant-Tracking Tools

Last of all, as you grow, finding and hiring great new staff members becomes increasingly important and requires more of your attention — and likely greater organization.

Zoho Recruit is free for one person to use. It lets you schedule interviews, add and manage candidates, store resumes and publish job openings from within a simple but robust dashboard.

More Business Resources from Mashable:

- 10 Ways Business Leaders Can Turn Ideas Into Execution/> - 7 Tips for Building a Better Branded App/> - 9 Web Tools to Keep Your Business Running Smoothly During the Holidays/> - 5 iPhone Apps For Avoiding International Business Faux Pas/> - 7 Tips for Succeeding as a Social Media Strategist

Images courtesy of class='blippr-nobr'>Flickrclass="blippr-nobr">Flickr, in order of appearance, by danox, inlinguamanchester, esther17, tsevis, nhankamer, takashi, socialisbetter.

For more Business coverage:

Canadian Tech Conferences to Attend in 2011

We’ve rounded-up some Canadian tech-related conferences happening in 2011 that we thought you might like to attend.

Mesh Conference

When: May 25th – 26th 2011

Where: Toronto, Ontario

FITC Toronto 2011 – The Design & Technology Festival

When: May 2 – 4th 2011

Where: Toronto, Ontario

CeC (Canada -e- connect)

When: February 2-4

Where: Toronto Ontario

Confoo

When: March 9th-11th

Where: Montreal, Quebec

StartupCamp Montreal 7

When: January 20th, 2011

Where: Montreal, Quebec

Mobile Camp Montreal

When: May 14th, 2011

Where: Montreal, Quebec

robert shumake detroit