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Top Ten Free Business Apps for the iPhone

Monday, November 24th, 2008

The app store is one of the greatest selling points of the iPhone. There are literally hundreds of apps already available (including hundreds of free ones!), with more being added every day. Apple’s device is already a great productivity tool, but there are also some additional applications that can really help you and your business succeed.

So without further ado, here are the top ten (free!) apps not to miss for your business needs.

1.) PageOnce

Access all your accounts from one app.

Access all your accounts from one app.

In order to make this app work, you’ll need to get an account at PageOnce.com- but no worries, this is free too. PageOnce is a useful site that allows you to view many different accounts on one page. This can range from social sites like Facebook to email accounts. However, the real use for PageOnce from a business perspective is the ability to add financial services accounts to the page. It supports more than 6,000 financial services- including credit card accounts, bank accounts, and investment accounts.

The most useful aspect of the app for the business owner is the ability to check bank account and credit card information easily right on your phone. Whether or not you use the PageOnce website, having one-click access to your bank balance and recent transactions is really handy.

2.) iProcrastinate Mobile

Easy task management.

Easy task management.

There are plenty of to-do lists and project management applications for the iPhone, but most of the best ones cost money. Not so with iProcrastinate Mobile. This terrific application gives you a slew of features without being overbearing or difficult to use.

First, you create your own groups to categorize your tasks. Adding tasks is quick and easy, but you have plenty of options to work with. You can set the due date, write a brief note about the task, and set the priority. You even have the option of adding steps to your tasks. Plus, you can add team members from your contact list to tasks.

As if this weren’t enough, iProcrastinate Mobile has a couple other features that make it practically irresistible. First, the ability to create “smart groups.” You select which categories you want to aggregate, and you can create a group that will show you all tasks that are due within the time period you specify. I’ve made a “Due Today” group so I know what needs to get done immediately and a “Due This Week” group so that I can do some more long-term planning. The second really great added feature is the ability to email your task list, either to yourself or to anyone else.

iProcrastinate is also really easy to use. When you want to delete an item, simply ’swipe’ it and delete it. If you are looking for a certain task, type in a key word in the search bar at the top of each category page. You can also color code different types of task for easier viewing.

Finally, one of my favorite features of this app is that it displays the number of due and overdue tasks from the home screen. This allows me to easily see how far I’m falling behind with all my tasks. Depressing, but useful.

3.) Wordpress

Easily access your wordpress blog.

Easily access your wordpress blog.

If you built your company blog using Wordpress, as we have, then you may want to get this nifty little application. Adding blogs is really easy, and you can manage all of them (if you have more than one) from the same interface. You can write a new article or edit existing ones, including the tags, categories, and status. Although it will not usually be practical to write your blog entries using your iPhone, it can’t hurt to have the ability. It’s most useful for looking over articles and making quick fixes while you’re on the go.

4.) Box.net

Take documents with you on the move.

Take documents with you on the move.

Accessing your spreadsheets, presentations, and other documents while you are on the move can be very useful. Box.net provides an convenient way to access, share, and collaborate on your business documents. You just set up an account at the Box.net website (don’t worry, you can get a 1 gig account for free). It’s a breeze to upload your documents and share them with others as well. The app is clean and easy to use as well.

5.) IM + Lite

Although instant messaging is often the bane of productivity, it can also be an extremely useful tool for business. There are several possibilities to go with here on the iPhone, but I would recommend IM+ Light. I’ve had several problems with the AIM application, and the IM+ app offers some extra great features. Most important, it allows you to use several different services, including

  • AIM
  • Google Talk
  • ICQ
  • MySpace IM
  • Yahoo!
  • Jabber
  • MSN Live Messenger

Not a whole lot of bells and whistles for this app, but support for multiple services, ease of use, and less bugs than other offerings (in my experience) gives the nod to IM+ Light.

6.) BeamME

Send your contact info to anyone, at any time.

Send your contact info to anyone, at any time.

Business cards are really a big pain. They are easy to lose, inconvenient to access, and hard to transfer. The idea behind the BeamME app is to get rid of business cards altogether. Using this service, you can quickly beam your contact information via text or email to whoever could use it.

Signing up is a breeze. You just pick your address book entry (or create one if you don’t have one of yourself in the address book), and you’re ready to go. You can edit your account info at any time. Once you have a card made, you’re ready to go. You can now send your card information via phone or email to whomever you please.

If you choose to send your card via phone number, then the recipient will receive it in a text and will have to go to the rmbrME website to get your contact info. This is a decent solution but ultimately sees a tad inconvenient. The best way is to send the card via email. The recipient can see your contact info easily right in the email, or they can download your vCard and add it directly to their address book.

There still might be something to be said for the traditional business card, but the BeamME app can certainly come in handy if you need to get someone your contact info. The app is simple, clean, and easy to use.

Send via text or email.

Send via text or email.

7.) Fring

Mobile VOIP.

Mobile VOIP.

We do many of our business conferences using Skype, a free VOIP (voice over IP) application I highly recommend. I discovered Fring when I was looking for a way to join the Skype conversation directly from my phone. As long as you are connected with wi-fi, this nifty application allows you to access your account while you’re on the move. Another advantage: calls are completely free if you make them with Skype.

8.) Bloomberg

Worldwide market indexes.

Worldwide market indexes.Detailed information on individual stocks.Create and track your own portfolio.

Whether you invest in the stock market or not, it’s good to know the state of the market and the economy. While the iPhone comes with a native stocks app, it really doesn’t get the job done. A much better solution is the free offering from Bloomberg. You get up to date reports on all the major markets- Dow Jones Industrial Average, NASDAQ, Nikkei, and many more- from all around the world. You can also look at detailed reports of individual stocks, and you can select your own portfolio to quickly monitor the state of your favored stocks. Even better, the Bloomberg app comes with a terrific news section so you can stay informed on the state of the economy.

The app also looks slick, is easy to use, and loads quickly, making it the easy choice for tracking the financial world.

9.) iXpenseIt Lite

Mobile expense tracking.

Mobile expense tracking.

If you’re looking for a mobile expense recording solution, iXpenseIt is the way to go. Remembering why you spent $23.19 at Wal-mart two months ago can be very difficult- so why not record it on the spot?

This app allows you to do pretty much anything you could want. Set your budget, and track how well you are doing. Entering an expense item is quite easy, but you also have a lot of options. Enter the dollar amount, the type of expense (business or personal), place it in a category and a subcategory, specify the date, the method of payment, the vendor, append a note, and take a picture of the receipt. Categories, subcategories, vendors, and expense types can be edited so that you have the options you want.

Once you’ve entered your expenses, you can easily view your data with a number of displays (summaries, bar charts, and pie graphs). Plus, quickly email your data to whomever you choose, either in HTML or CSV format.

One big limitation of the free version is it only allows you to input 10 expenses. If you use it frequently, you’ll have to email yourself the results often to keep track of them. However, having such a limitation does greatly reduce the utility of the application. There is a paid version that allows you to input unlimited expenses, which may well be worth your money if you are attracted to the idea of mobile expense recording.

10.) iTalk Recorder

Simple voice recording.

Simple voice recording.

It’s always good to have an audio recorder with you. You never know when you will want to log a meeting or a good idea that pops in your head. But nobody wants to carry around a clunky recording device. That’s where iTalk Recorder, a free app created by Griffin, comes into play.

The interface is wonderfully simple. You just name your recording (if you want, you can always rename it later), pick your preferred audio quality (good, better, best), and press the big button. You can pause and then resume recording as well. You can easily listen to the different recordings on your iPhone and you can append notes for easy reference later.

Finally, you can head to the support site to get iTalk Sync, a simple program that allows you to easily drag and drop audio recordings from your phone to your computer desktop.

Did I miss something? Leave a comment and let me know if I left a deserving app off the list.


Storing Passwords

Friday, November 14th, 2008

I recently had a discussion about web app security and we were talking about the not-so-distant past when SQL-injection was the scariest thing since polio.  90% of these attacks didn’t try to return everyone’s credit card information from a database (people knew pretty early to be careful when storing this stuff), they were attempts to simply return a username and password.  

As a result, many people would go to a site that doesn’t need very much security (like a forum), and run some sort of sql-injection to return all username/password combinations from the database.  Then they would spend the whole day going from bank-website to bank-website, trying each and every one of these combinations (not only do most people use ridiculously simple passwords, they also re-use them for multiple sites) and they may get one login from one bank.  This could turn into several thousand dollars by draining that single account.  

Now, I know things have changed quite a bit, and bank websites have stepped up security standards a good deal.  I also realize that convincing people to be smarter about their login passwords would be a major challenge. However, I’m always shocked to find out that some web developers still store passwords in plain text in dB column called “password”.  

That brings us to one of the simplest methods for securing against password retrieval, that many people just don’t do. Now, there are many ways to secure against sql-injection, but let’s pretend for one minute that, somehow, someone gets the information in your database.  It doesn’t matter if it’s through injection, or getting your shared-host login from something, or someone having direct access to your server.  But let’s just say someone has your dB data, and they have all of the stored username/password combinations.  

The easiest thing to do is use a digest or hash for password storage.  You never actually need to retrieve this password, you simply need to compare a password against it.  By comparing the same hash of the input password against the stored hashed password, you are achieving the same thing. Your logins work exactly the same, except you have 4 extra lines of code.  

For another small method to improve security, add some secret letter/number/symbol combination to the word before storing/comparing.  Because most people have terrible passwords, if someone does get the information, they could get the passwords from sites that build dictionaries of MD5, SHA1, etc. combinations.  So by adding a small snippet to the end of the password, not only are you improving security against a dictionary attack, but you are differentiating this password from the user’s password that may be used some where else.

Most developers, I hope, will have learned nothing new from this article and will consider it quite obvious.  That’s a good thing.  But after hearing from a few individuals who still used plaintext storage of passwords, I felt as though this might help someone.