The Third Stage

Cool Stuff #53 Fiverr

Cool Stuff is The Third Stage's blog series is to help you out by telling you about useful websites and applications that can help you and your business.

So you have reached the point where your social media strategy is ready and you are looking for content for your website or Facebook page or to send to your followers on Twitter. Take a look at fiverr.com. For $5 (yes really that is all), you could get a video testimonial in Spanish, a new avatar, your name written in the sand, a plan to help you cope with a zombie invasion (personalised to you), or our favourite, your url written into the blank box in the middle of a tattoo on a model's back.

We seriously think that Fiverr is cool and useful, and full of practical things that can help your business. It is also addictive and an awful lot of fun. Be prepared to lose at least an hour of your life browsing and giggling the first time you visit. Here's one Phil, our leader got done - it cost him $5 (£3.28 at the time).

The Third Stage derives no financial benefit from featuring Roundpic in this series. If Fiverr is useful to you please comment and/or share this entry.

Cool Stuff #52 Roundpic

Cool Stuff is The Third Stage's blog series is to help you out by telling you about useful websites and applications that can help you and your business.

 

You know the problem, you have a number of pictures, or graphics that you want to have rounded corners and be web ready and all 2.0y. You give them to someone to do the rounding and get them back as a mixture - the top left looks different to the bottom right, the curve on one picture is different from another.

Roundpic solves that problem quickly and easily. Upload your picture, hit the Round It button, select how much rounding you need and whether you want a jpg or transparent png file & there it is ready for download.

A very good, very free, online tool to solve a problem we all face from time to time.

The Third Stage derives no financial benefit from featuring Roundpic in this series. If Roundpic is useful to you please comment and/or share this entry.

Cool Stuff #51 FoxTab

Cool Stuff is The Third Stage's blog series is to help you out by telling you about useful websites and applications that can help you and your business.

FoxTab is a cool add-on for Mozilla Firefox and any browsers that use Firefox as a template. This add-on is a 3D tab management tool for Firefox. The facility allows you to scroll with ease through tabs that you currently have open, re-open tabs that you recently closed or flip between tabs using the mouse or keyboard shortcuts.

This add-on is similar to the Cool Iris add-on (Cool Stuff #37) in the fact that the 3D user interface makes browsing far easier and more user-friendly. If you have several tabs open at once, you are able to quickly take an overview of them all and select the one you want to see with ease.

You are able to customise the 3D layout in any way by choosing background themes and the way in which the tabs are displayed. The add-on also lets you hide the tab bar at the top of the browser to give you ‘extra browser real-estate’. 

If you have a lot of tabs open at the same time, you may not be able to remember which tabs originated from which website. This tool enables you to track each tab to its original website at the touch of a button. The built in filtering tool also allows you to filter all open tabs for a keyword, title, domain name or URL.

In short this is a great tool that can make your browsing more user-friendly and fun. Its customizable features mean that you can browse your tabs in any way you like. This tool is worth downloading if you use your Firefox browser regularly.

To download this add-on click here or visit www.foxtab.com. If you have downloaded it and used it, please let us know what you thought about it by leaving a comment below.

Teimlo derives no financial benefit from featuring FoxTab in this series.

Cool Stuff #50: SUPER

Cool Stuff is The Third Stage's blog series is to help you out by telling you about useful websites and applications that can help you and your business.

SUPER is a free piece of software that allows you to convert a video file from one format to another with ease. It also enables you to alter aspect ratios, video scale size, bitrate and more.

This piece of software has become extremely useful when setting up our YouTube channel. It allows the conversion of almost any media file into another, but at Teimlo, we used it for the conversion of .avi files into .mov files.

On the outset it looks like a very technical piece of software to master, with several options available in both output and input mode. But the reality is all you need to do is select the output format you wish the file to have, then drag and drop the file into the conversion box, click encode and it does the rest for you. 

The software even has output presets for iPods, PS3, PSP, Nokia, Sony Ericsson and many more, which is great for anyone looking to convert videos to load onto these devices.

This tool has been used to great effect by Teimlo and we would strongly recommend it to anyone looking to convert videos or audio from one format to another.

The best part of this software is that it’s free to download and use. For more information on how to use the software, the video below walks you through the entire process, from downloading the software to using it.

To download this software visit http://www.erightsoft.com/SUPER.html

Teimlo derives no financial benefit from featuring SUPER in this series. If SUPER is useful to you please comment and/or share this entry.

Cool Stuff #49: Social Oomph

Cool Stuff is The Third Stage's blog series is to help you out by telling you about useful websites and applications that can help you and your business.

If you are currently growing your Twitter following, you may find that you have surges of followers, on a Friday for instance, and there are far too many to keep in touch with all at once.

Teimlo use Social Oomph is to set up an automatic welcome message to all new followers. If you are familiar with Twitter then you will be familiar with receiving Direct Messages as soon as you follow someone. This is simple to set up using Social Oomph, and allows you to broadcast a simple welcome message to anyone who decides to follow you.

This can be useful if you are trying to promote a particular web page, Facebook fan page or blog at the current time. All you have to do is write your message on Social Oomph, include a link if you wish, then click save and the message will be sent to all new followers.

This is not the only facility available with Social Oomph, with the free version you are able to track keywords, automate your Twitter account to follow those who follow you, vet new followers, purge your Direct Message inbox and add as many accounts as you wish for free.

There is also a professional version available for a cost which has many more added features for other forms of social media.

We say this is a useful free tool, especially if you are looking to grow your social media following.

To start using this tool, visit www.socialoomph.com

Teimlo derives no financial benefit from featuring Social Oomph in this series. If Social Oomph is useful to you please comment and/or share this entry.

Cool Stuff #48 Formspring.me

Cool Stuff is The Third Stage's blog series is to help you out by telling you about useful websites and applications that can help you and your business.

This is one of our favourite tools for using with social media, as it allows anyone to ask you a question directly, then display the question and the answer in an easy to read format for others to see.

Formspring .me allows you to set up a simple profile including a picture and bio section. You can also edit background colours and images to suit the current colours your organisation uses. You are then able to direct people from nearly all of your social networks to your profile to ask a question. You can then set up an automated service which will update your social networks with a link to the question and your answer.

A user can ask a question either anonymously or leave their details, so therefore they can feel free to ask anything, no matter how trivial they feel it is.

A great feature of Formspring.me is that you can also add the ‘ask a question’ box into your website or blog. All you need to do is copy and paste the supplied HTML code into your website and the box will appear. For an example of this integration, take a look at the top right hand side of our blog.

At Teimlo we use this tool to offer the opportunity to our audience to ask us anything about mobile. This makes our blog, Facebook fan page and Twitter account more interactive. It also provides a means of assisting any potential customers with any questions they have, whilst reinforcing their view of the knowledge you have in your field.

To start using Formspring.me visit http://formspring.me

Teimlo derives no financial benefit from featuring Formspring.me in this series. If Formspring.me is useful to you please comment and/or share this entry.

Cool Stuff #47 FriendFeed

Cool Stuff is The Third Stage's blog series is to help you out by telling you about useful websites and applications that can help you and your business.

With social media reaching the height of popularity and with so many different ways to reach people it is hard to keep track of all things at once. This is why FriendFeed is such a great tool, especially for businesses.

FriendFeed is a social media platform which benefits both followers and users. The real time streaming of updates allows a follower to keep track of any updates across several social media platforms made by a user. This is a great way of ensuring you don’t miss any updates! This is not only great for individuals but for businesses too.

For example a business may have a blog, a Twitter account, a Facebook account and a YouTube channel. If you have followers interested in your business then the task of constantly monitoring all the content you update on each of these sites is very time consuming, this is where FriendFeed helps. For a business, this is a great way of bringing all your content together and ensuring that your followers are kept up to date with all the latest content.

With the ability to also feed in Delicious, Stumble Upon, Digg and Mashable too, there is an enormous benefit to having FriendFeed. You are able to comment or like any update that comes through as you would on Facebook, so a great interactive tool as well.

The feed automatically updates and the information cascades down in a central column making viewing the content easy. You can also pause the feed at any time in order to view any content more closely.

So why not try FriendFeed and keep track of the content that is important to you or make sure that your followers can view all you’re content in one easy to read format.

Teimlo are currently on FriendFeed, and through following us you will be able to keep up with all aspects of our social media. Add us at http://friendfeed.com/teimlo1 or leave us a comment with your username and we will follow you.

Teimlo derives no financial benefit from featuring FriendFeed in this series. If FriendFeed is useful to you please comment and/or share this entry.

Cool Stuff #46 - Hootsuite

Cool Stuff is The Third Stage's blog series is to help you out by telling you about useful websites and applications that can help you and your business.

Hootsuite is a great free tool aimed at helping you manage multiple social networking activities all from one location. This software lets you manage your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pingfm and Wordpress activities at the same time. It also allows you to update several statuses with just one click.

The one aspect of Hootsuite that we at Teimlo found incredibly useful is the ability to schedule in tweets or status updates for any time in the future. This is a great time saving device as it reduces the need for constant monitoring of your social networks, it gives a user the ability to program all their tweets in for the day or for the week ahead without having to manually update them at each interval.

Hootsuite also allows a user to have several search columns so that any keywords can be monitored with ease. The site will refresh at intervals that will suit you and can be manually refreshed too. Hootsuite also comes with a Hootlet, a function that sits on your explorer bar, and when a quick update is required, just click the Hootlet, enter your update (it will also shorten the URL of the current page that you are on for ease when using Twitter), then click update and it will be updates instantly. An app for the iPhone is also available.

The best bit about this software is that it is free of charge, and there is no donwload needed (apart from the iPhone app) as it is all managed from a browser window.

To start using this great tool, visit www.hootsuite.com and start managing all your social networks with ease!

Teimlo derives no financial benefit from featuring Hootsuite in this series. If Hootsuite is useful to you please comment and/or share this entry.

Cool Stuff #45 PhotoScape

Cool Stuff is The Third Stage's blog series is to help you out by telling you about useful websites and applications that can help you and your business.

Yet another great image manipulation piece of software that has been of great use to Teimlo. PhotoScape is a free piece of software with a suite of image manipulation tools from batch conversion to screen capture. But two of the tools we found really interesting were the ‘AniGif’ tool and the ‘Combine’ tool.

The ‘AniGif’ tool allows you to easily create an animated .gif without the need to use Photoshop. This is the ideal tool for anyone who needs to create a simple animation using several images, without requiring the more advanced tools in Photoshop. All you have to do is drag and drop the images into the animator, then use the set of simple tools to adjust rotation and transition effects. This is simple to use and easy to understand, ideal for knocking something up quickly using existing images.

The ‘Combine’ tool is also useful as it allows you to drag and drop images in any order to make one large image. You are then able to tweak dimensions as you see fit. Again this is ideal if you need to make something quickly without the need for extensive tweaking.

Therefore our recommendation here at Teimlo is that if you work with images on a large scale, or with web content management, this tool would be ideal to keep handy for ease of use with animations and combining images.

To get this product to free, and to view all its capabilities, go to www.photoscape.org

Teimlo derives no financial benefit from featuring PhotoScape in this series. If PhotoScape is useful to you please comment and/or share this entry.

Cool Stuff #44 FastStone Image Viewer

Cool Stuff is The Third Stage's blog series is to help you out by telling you about useful websites and applications that can help you and your business.

If you’re looking for a tool to make image conversion or image resizing on a large scale easy, then FastStone’s Image Viewer can help. As digital cameras are improving the resolution of images are also improving, resulting in larger file sizes. A problem we found here at Teimlo was that if you have say 200 images you need to upload to a website, the current file size/resolution would be too large and result in a lengthy process to correct each individual image. Through using FastStone Image Viewer we found that you can alter these factors quickly and easily, for as many images as you wish, which is much easier than manually re-sizing each one!

With this tool you can also reduce the file size to a percentage that would be suitable for a web upload, and also to the format needed.

Please be aware that the batch convert tool is only one of FastStone’s many features. Other features include image viewing, management, comparison, red-eye removal, emailing, resizing, cropping, colour adjustments, musical slideshows and much more.

In summary, this is a great time-saving tool which is easy to use and can be a great addition to the arsenal of tools for any web content manager. And of course, saving the best till last, this software is totally free to download, so enjoy!

Download it from www.faststone.org

Teimlo derives no financial benefit from featuring FastStone Image Viewer in this series. If FastStone Image Viewer is useful to you please comment and/or share this entry.