55 great productivity tools and, resources for startups and entrepreneurs

Between commuting to office, catching up with your inbox, to rushing for review meetings, it’s a hard life, as any entrepreneur will know. They are always on the lookout for ways to get the most out of their day. Running a startup is a daily challenge, but there exist tools out there to simplify almost all aspects of a business, enabling entrepreneurs to minimize distractions and focus on their ‘core’.

Right from naming and registering a business, to managing teams, to handling marketing and customer relations, these tools can help you ease up the process of running your business.

Here are 55 great tools that can assist your business in being effective and efficient:

Asana: Asana is a Project Management and Collaboration Tool which helps keep teams organised, connected and focused. It is one of the most popular project management tools and offers convenient integrations.

99designs: 99Designs is the world’s most popular marketplace for graphic design. It is a great platform to find able freelancer designers, especially for logo and web designing.

AngelList: AngelList is a website for startups, angel investors, and job-seekers. Its goal is to introduce entrepreneurs to sophisticated investors, and simplify the process of early stage business. An AngelList profile is also an important visibility platform, practically synonymous with a birth certificate in the startup world!

Animoto: Animoto makes it easy to create professional-quality videos. Animoto automatically produces beautifully orchestrated, completely unique video pieces from photos, video clips and music.

BetaList: BetaList provides pre-launch startups with their first hundred users. It lets them understand the market and enable them to reach the product-market fit.

Brand24: Brand24 is a tool which allows one to monitor one’s brand, product and services online. It is also a great method of measuring the buzz around a brand, product or keyword.

Bunchball: Bunchball is the market leader and visionary in gamification. Bunchball provides cloud-based software as a service gamification product intended to help companies improve customer loyalty and online engagement using game mechanics.

Codecademy: Codecademy is an online interactive platform that offers free coding classes in eight different programming languages. Codecademy also provides a forum where enthusiasts, beginners, and advanced coders can come together and help each other.

CoFoundersLab: CoFoundersLab offers an online matchmaking service that connects entrepreneurs with compatible co-founders looking to join a startup. It helps aspiring entrepreneurs connect through their online platform and in-person events.

Doorbell: Customer Feedback is probably the most crucial aspect of an early-stage business. Doorbell helps gather in-app user feedback for free. It is available for websites, iOS and Android.

Dropbox: Dropbox is the premier file backup, sync and sharing solution beloved by more than 4 million businesses. It lets you store and share huge chunks of data through the cloud.

Evernote: Evernote is a closed based freemium suite of software and services, designed for note taking and archiving. It is a modern workspace that syncs between all of your devices.

Expensify: Expensify provides an online expense management service for customers worldwide. It eases the process of tracking expenses and is one of the most popular expense reporting apps for phone & web.

Fontello: Fontello is a tool to build custom fonts with icons and helps you easily create a unique text branding for your business. It packs vector images into webfonts.

Free Invoice Generator: Free Invoice Generator provides for an easy to use free invoice template to create invoices in PDF. It ensures a standard and convenient form for invoicing every order.

Germ.io: Germ.io is a project management tool centred around ideas. It lets you get from ideas to execution by helping you capture every eureka moment.

Get Satisfaction: Get Satisfaction is an online customer engagement community platform connecting businesses with their customers to foster better relationships. Companies of all sizes use Get Satisfaction’s platform to modernize customer support, accelerate sales and differentiate their brand.

GitHub: GitHub is a web-based Git repository hosting service offering distributed revision control and source code management functionality of Git as well as adding its own features. Over 4 million people use it to share code.

Google tools and resources

Google AdWords: Google AdWords is Google’s advertising system in which advertisers bid on certain keywords in order for their clickable ads to appear in Google’s search results. It is definitely one of the most important tools to advertise online.

Google Analytics: Google Analytics is a freemium web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports website traffic. It shows you the full customer picture across ads, videos, websites, social tools, tablets and smartphones.

Google Trends: Google Trends is a public web facility of Google that shows how often a particular search-term is entered relative to the total search-volume across various regions of the world, and in various languages. It can be quite useful for targeting the right customers online.

Google Web StarterKit: Web Starter Kit is boilerplate and tooling for multi-device development. It is a front-end template that helps one build fast, modern mobile web apps.

FullContact for Gmail: FullContact for Gmail supercharges your Google Contacts and lets you know everything about your Gmail contacts, right from your inbox. You can see the name, photos, social profiles, company info just by hovering over an email address.

Homerun: Homerun is a lightweight tool that makes recruitment personal and effective. Homerun enables businesses to create authentic job openings, receive richer applications and review applicants faster and more effectively.

HootSuite: Hootsuite is the world’s most widely used social relationship platform. It is a social relationship platform that empowers users to execute social media strategies across their organizations.

How Much To Make An App: How Much to Make an App lets one calculate the cost of a building a mobile application. You just need to choose the desired features, and it estimates the cost of those features within seconds.

HubSpot: HubSpot is an inbound marketing and sales platform that helps businesses attract visitors, convert leads, and close customers. It includes tools for social media marketing, email marketing, content management, analytics, landing pages and search engine optimization, among others.

intercom.io: Intercom shows you who is using your product and makes it easy to personally communicate with them . It provides for live conversations and allows sending targeted email and in-app messages, triggered by time or behavior.

Kickstarter: Kickstarter is the world’s largest funding platform for creative projects. It is especially useful for film, music, art, theatre, games, comics, design, photography, and more.

LaunchRock: LaunchRock is a platform that enables its users to create viral “Launching Soon” pages with built in sharing tools and analytics. It help its clients incentivize and reward users for telling others about their projects through email and social networks.

MailChimp: MailChimp is a popular online email marketing solution which lets one manage contacts and send emails. It helps you design email newsletters, share them on social networks, integrate with services you already use, and track your results.

Meetup: Meetup is an online social networking portal that facilitates offline group meetings in various localities around the world. It can help you meet your fellow entrepreneurs in your region/industry and get a better understanding of the market.

Meldium: Meldium is the simplest way for teams to access the cloud tools they need. By aggregating and monitoring accounts across any web service, it frees one from tedious account management.

MobileDevHQ: MobileDevHQ is an enterprise organic app marketing platform that offers mobile marketers with app store optimization (ASO) solutions. The platform enables app marketers to analyze and optimize the app store presence of an app, track an app’s relevant search ranking queries in an app store, discover top chart rankings, analyze keywords etc.

Moqups: Moqups is a stunning HTML5 App for creating high fidelity SVG mockups, wireframes and clickable prototypes. It lets you create website and app prototypes without any technical knowledge.

Moz: Moz is an industry leader in building tools to facilitate inbound marketing easy. It provides automated research and analytics tools which lets you focus on strategy and insights and allows you to gain a quick understanding of the competitive landscape in any given search result.

Go Daddy: GoDaddy is the world’s largest web host and domain name registrar. It offers dependable and stable services to ensure smooth online presence.

Naminum: Naminum is the leading free startup name, company name, business name and website name generator on the web. It helps you find a suitable name for your business.

Near Me: Near Me is a peer-to-peer commerce solution enabling anyone to setup their own branded marketplace. Users can create peer-to-peer marketplaces to share, trade, swap or rent anything all over the world.

Upwork: Previosuly called Elance-oDesk, Upwork is the world’s largest online workplace where savvy businesses and professional freelancers meet. It is an effective platform to get quality output at affordable costs.

Pixlr: Pixlr is a cloud-based set of image tools and utilities, including a number of photo editors, a screen grabber browser extension, and a photo sharing service. The apps range from simple to advanced photo editing and can be used on PCs, and smartphones or tablets.

PostMark: PostMark is a web app which removes the headaches of delivering and parsing transactional email for web apps, all with minimal setup time and zero maintenance. It lets you see who opened your emails, where they opened it, what clients and platforms they used, and even how long they read the email.

Prezi: Prezi is a popular cloud-based presentation software and storytelling tool for presenting ideas on a virtual canvas. The product employs a zooming user interface (ZUI) and lets you create striking presentations.

QuickMVP: QuickMVP is a tool that helps entrepreneurs test a new business with a Landing Page Builder and Google Ad Creator. It is one of the easiest ways to test your ideas, without wasting time or money.

Recruiterbox: Recruiterbox is the easiest way to receive and manage job applications to one’s business. It is more efficient than email and simpler than any other recruitment software.

Rewardstream: Rewardstream lets one create engagement and lead generation through well-designed, best-practice-driven, and highly tailored referral marketing plans tuned to meet one’s business’ changing needs. It makes it quick and easy for marketers to incorporate digital, mobile, and word-of-mouth referrals into their customer acquisition and brand awareness mix.

Scoop.it: With a focus on content marketing, Scoop.it helps professionals and businesses publish content online in a meaningful, easy and rewarding way. It is a convenient form of finding and creating content for social media marketing.

Shopify: Shopify is a powerful ecommerce website solution that allows one to sell online by providing everything needed to create an online store. Shopify offers a professional online storefront, a payment solution to accept credit cards, and the Shopify POS application to power retail sales.

Sidekick: Sidekick lets you see Who Opens and Clicks Your Email. With Sidekick email tracking, one can get live notifications when someone opens or clicks on one’s emails.

Slack: Slack is a team communication tool that allows for real-time messaging, archiving and search for modern teams. It is an advanced messenger and can help ensure smooth team co-ordination.

SurveyMonkey: SurveyMonkey is the world’s most popular online survey software. It lets you create and publish online surveys in minutes, and view results graphically in real time.

Termsfeed: Termsfeed lets one create elaborate legal documents in minutes. It lets one create custom agreements that can be legally binding for users: Privacy Policies, Terms and Conditions, Terms of Use, Terms of Service or Return and Refund Policies.

TinyJPG: TinyJPG helps make websites faster by compressing JPEG images by 40-60%. It analyses images and chooses an optimal strategy to apply the best possible JPEG encoding, keeping the quality impact but reducing the size at the same time.

UICloud: UI plays an important part in defining customer experience for any app. UICloud collects the best user interface designs and provides a search engine to find the best UI elements for one’s need.

WordPress: WordPress is the most popular web platform to create beautiful websites and blogs. It provides for hundreds of free, customizable, mobile-ready designs and themes.

Source from yourstory.com

Googles Code Jam 2015 Programming Competition Is Now Open

Registration for the 12th annual Google Code Jam programming competition is now open. This time around, there’s a new track called Distributed Code Jam to test participants’ skills in solving problems using a network of computers in tandem.

The competition attracts professional and student programmers from around the world to square off against each other as they attempt to solve algorithmic puzzles.

Previous Code Jams have seen more than 35,000 coders compete for the top prize. This year’s Code Jam Champion will take home a grand prize of $15,000, and the winner of the Distributed Code Jam will win $3,000...

Registration for the 2015 edition is open from today until April 11, with the qualification round kicking off on April 10 and the finals scheduled for August 14 and 15. Contestants must be 13 or older at the time of registration to enter.

Infosys hiring to hit 3-year low next fiscal

Infosys will hire 30,000 people in the next financial year, the lowest in the last three years, reflecting partly the company's growing emphasis on automation and productivity improvements. The number was first mentioned by CEO Vishal Sikka in an investor call earlier this week to discuss the acquisition of US automation company Panaya. Infosys subsequently confirmed the number to TOI.

In the first three quarters of this fiscal, Infosys made a gross addition of 38,915 people. By the end of the year, that number should be well over 40,000. Last year, it had hired 39,985 people, and in 2012-13 the gross addition was 37,036. That makes next year's hiring target the lowest in recent times, and it's a year in which Infosys expects its revenue growth to be higher than in the current year.

The actual additions to the workforce will be significantly lower, considering that many leave the company. The net addition in 2013-14 was just 3,717. This year, it had touched 9,233 by December. In the next fiscal, a 30,000 gross hire — combined with a conservative 16% annualized attrition rate estimate (the rate is currently at 20%) — would mean a net hiring of less than 3,000.

Automation is beginning to replace employees performing repetitive tasks, and Sikka has been the most vocal of Indian IT sector CEOs in advocating automation. Many IT processes are now repetitive and lend themselves to automation. In some cases, the systems have become so complicated that manual interfaces are highly inefficient. With machine learning and AI, the systems learn from their past mistakes and ensure they don't make those mistakes again. That further reduces the need for human intervention.

Noshir Kaka, MD of McKinsey India, recently said the decoupling of revenue from headcount had already begun in IT. "For the first $100 billion in revenue, 3 million people were added. Indian IT services revenues are on track to touch $225 billion by 2020, but will add less than 1 million people for the next $100 billion. About 50% of talent will have to be reskilled to be relevant," he said at a Nasscom event in Mumbai. Kaka's provocative presentation pointed out how machines will join the workforce impacting knowledge workers. "An algorithm gets a seat at the board," he said.

In 2013, Infosys tied up with IPsoft, the New York-based automation and machine learning company founded by Indian American Chetan Dube. The Panaya acquisition seeks to accelerate the automation move.

AngularJS 1.4 Announcement

AngularJS 1.4 Announced, More to Come in 2015

Work on AngularJS 1.4 has begun. After announcing their plans for version 2.0, the team has decided to advance version 1.x with new features and continue active development on it throughout 2015.

It's still early in the cycle, so there isn't an exact list of features or changes. In a blog post, Brian Ford described the main "themes" for version 1.4 as:

• New Router
• Internationalization
• Forms
• $http
• $parse
• Documentation

During planning, the team decided to limit the scope of version 1.4 in order to release it by ng-conf, the AngularJS focused conference on March 5, 2015. "I'd rather have a smaller release and get it done by ng-conf," Igor Minar said. When asked about the aggressive timeline, the tech lead for AngularJS 1.x, Pete Bacon Darwin, said getting version 1.4 out quickly was important to allow developers to benefit sooner:

We are aware that more regular big releases are easier for developers to consume. In the past we went for months without a big release, which meant that the migration effort was greater and that developers had to wait longer before they were able to make use of new features.

1.4 will have some breaking changes for some developers. Darwin explains that in the AngularJS numbering system, "Increments in the 'patch' number will not have breaking changes while increments in the 'minor' number can have breaking changes." Since 1.4 bumps the minor version number, breaking changes are expected.

When details of AngularJS 2.0 came out, some developers were unhappy with the new direction and worried how long Google would continue to support version 1.x. The initial wave of criticism has receded and Pluralsight Author Travis Gosselin is encouraged by the news of 1.4:

I think it is fantastic that Angular 1.x is receiving parallel development to Angular 2.0, and really indicates the commitment of the team to the community.

Jeremy Likeness believes there is much to come to the 1.x branch in 2015:

The fact that there is a 1.4 release imminent signals that the 1.x product still has life left and we can imagine if 1.3.x is comparable that there will be plenty of iterations of 1.4. This gives customers a lot of runway in 2015 to continue with their current investment.

Darwin says that, although there are plans for version 1.5, they're not sure how many more versions of 1.x there will be:

It is not possible to say how many more big releases AngularJS 1.x will have before it goes into maintenance mode. There are many factors including how well the increased release frequency works out in practice, how long until Angular 2 is released, how quickly people adopt Angular 2 and whether we can get to a stage where we feel that we can do no more to improve AngularJS 1.x.

The planning and work on version 2.0 is being done in the open and the team wants to bring more of that openness to the 1.x line. In addition to the design documents and meeting notes, with 1.4, the team also broadcast their major planning meeting for all to see. Darwin says this is an attempt to "make our processes more inclusive and transparent." Likeness thinks this openness gives developers plenty of time to plan:

I believe the Angular team is doing the right thing by being as transparent as possible with their approach and plans. Developers have been given plenty of time to form strategy around release schedules and plan how they wish to evolve their apps accordingly.

Developers can review a spreadsheet of the proposed changes for version 1.4 and are encouraged to participate in the project on GitHub. "We really care about the development experience and this means that we welcome feedback from people on the front line using Angular day in day out," says Darwin.