Website For You

Increase your productivity by using Drop.io, FreeConference, myHours.com and Windows Live Sync, among other free Web services.

These slick services can help you sync PCs, share large files on the Web, enhance your blog, kill snail mail and more.

BEST: Windows Live Sync: Having a tough time keeping files and folders on multiple PCs synchronized? It's a snap for this Microsoft service (registration required). Install the software on each PC, tell the service which folders to look at and how you want them synchronized, and the software does the rest, without your having to do a thing.

Drop.io: If you need to share files, including pictures and videos, this Web site makes it a breeze. Just create a name for a "drop," upload your files to it, and then give access to anyone you want to be able to download them. Each drop includes thumbnails of the files you upload, so people can preview them before downloading.

5min: Want to get advice on using your iPhone effectively, or on asking your boss for a raise? Or maybe you'd prefer to leave work behind a bit and learn how to play the bass, or how to master the Pilates abs core workout routine. You'll find all that and plenty more from this service, which hosts hundreds of videos of five minutes or less. It's a do-it-yourselfer's dream.

GreenPrint World: This clever download scans everything you print and removes any wasted pages, such as a Web page with a single line of text. In addition, it removes ads from Web pages and lets you preview the results so that you can remove unwanted pages or images. It will even track how much paper and money you save.

Microsoft Live Mesh: Here's a way to synchronize your PCs and Internet-connected devices, and share files among them. After you create folders on your own Live Mesh Web site (registration required), point all your devices to them. You can also synchronize your devices to what you have in the mesh, and take remote control over devices. The site is sometimes confusing to use, but it's very powerful once you get accustomed to it.

PrintWhatYouLike: Another tool for saving paper is this free online editor, which helps you print any Web page minus the junk, ads, extra space and images. You can save the page as a PDF or HTML file as well.

SkyDrive: This free Microsoft service (registration required) lets you store up to 25GB of files and access them from any Internet-connected computer. You can also share the files. What's the catch? There isn't one.

Zemanta: If you're a blogger, here's a way to juice up your posts. This Firefox add-on will enhance your blog with automatically created links, pictures and more.

Zoho Mail: This often-overlooked Web-based mail service (registration required) provides pretty much all the features you'd expect. Everybody can use more than one e-mail address and mail service, and this is a great addition.

Zumbox: Had your fill of the U.S. Postal Service? Would you prefer to have bills, statements and offers sent to you electronically? That's the promise of this service (registration required). Tell participating businesses to send items to you via Zumbox, and you'll get them there rather than in your physical mailbox.



Savvy scheduling assistants

You need to be where? And you need to be there when? These four free services can keep you -- and your business -- on track.

Calendar sync programs, free conference calling, billable-hours tracking and all-around planning programs to help you glide through the workday with ease.

BEST: Google Calendar Sync: If you use both Google Calendar and Outlook's calendar, and you can't figure out where you need to be when, use this download to synchronize the two calendars and straighten out your schedule.

FreeConference: Set up and make conference calls for free with this service (registration required).

myHours.com: Do you do consulting, project work or other kinds of jobs where you need to monitor your time and costs? This simple-to-use site (registration required) tracks billable hours and creates reports and time sheets.

Zoho Planner: Keep track of appointments and to-do lists, and generally get your life in order, with this service (registration required).

Money. Whatever you think of it, you can’t simply disregard it. Luckily, managing your finances today is easier than ever. We’ve collected over 40 tools and resources that will help you spend less, earn more and organize better.


Budget organizers & Financial Planning

Buxfer - Personal money tracking: keep track of how you spend your money and who owes you.

BudgetTracker - track your transactions, bills, income and budget in one place. Organize yourself with BudgetTracker’s calendar and receive notifications of upcoming events.

BudgetPulse - free service that enables you to track your money flow, plan your budget and create fancy looking charts and diagrams. Currently in public beta.

Cyclr - Create “cycles” of money: find others who owe the same amount as you and cancel out each others’ obligations. Currently in private beta testing.

DimeWise - Dimewise is a secure web-based personal finance manager. It’s not free - the services costs $5 per month.

NetWorthIQ - create your financial profile and compare it with other users. Overly aggressive ads might put off some users.

Expensr - a free financial manager that helps you understand where all your money is going. It supports graphs, projections, and some community features like tags and public personal profiles.

I owe you - log, track and share your expenses in various currencies; generate instant reports, and access all this data from anywhere.

MintMint reviews - do not confuse this Mint with analytics software Mint from Shaun Inman - these two have nothing in common. Mint is a personal finance organizer which is currently in early beta stage, with invitation-beta coming soon.

Pearbudget - compare what you thought you’d spend to what you’ve really spent; analyze your expenses and save money. Pearbudget is a free desktop application, but a web-based version is currently in beta stage.

BillHighway - Tools for group finances: chapter finances for fraternities and sororities, paying the rent and buying group gifts.

Foonance - A simple, “Web 2.0″ money tracking solution: add your “money stores” (places where you keep your money) and log transactions.

Billster - Track personal and group expenses (including standing orders), and set reminders.

SpicyDigits - Track shared and recurring expenses within a group - notifications are sent to group members via email. Free to use.

BillQ - Slick, nicely designed service to keep track of your bills. Like Basecamp for bills.

Mvelopes - Unlike many other services, Mvelopes connects to your bank account (supported banks only) and pulls all your data together on one place. However, pop-up ads for “financial success” courses made us dubious about this one.

Iohu Money - New bill tracking service, currently in private beta testing.

Less Accounting - Expense tracking for small businesses.



Invoice Management

Freshbooks - a tool for tracking time and invoices; allows you to send invoices and receive money via PayPal and Authorize.Net.

BlinkSale - a free online service that lets you create, send and track invoices. It supports data import from Basecamp, CSS customization, and automated invoice sending. Integrates with PayPal for automatic payments.

Cashboard - free financial planner aimed primarily at small businesses. Enables you to create and track invoices and log your financial performance.

SecondSite - another invoice management site with a lot of features, including SSL encryption, data backups and document sharing. Starts with a free plan for 1 user, several for-pay plans are also available.

SimplyBill - create invoices, export them to PDF, send them to clients, track your time, keep track of payments and more with SimplyBill.



Financial Trading & Investment

Gstock - get elementary analysis of buy&sell signals for most stocks on the market.

Motley Fool’s Caps - a rich resource of stock-market related information and tools from one of the better known financial sites on the web, the Motley Fool.

StockCloud - a very simple yet interesting tool, StockCloud shows company tickers in a big tag cloud. A larger ticker symbol means that a company distributes press releases more frequently.

Wikinancial - Test your stock picking strategy and compare it to the rest of the community. There’s no real money, but you can use the knowledge you gain to trade on the real-life stock markets.

DigStock - DiggDigg reviews for stock news: boost good stories to the top.

SaneBull - A “Netvibes for finance” that helps you make trading decisions by putting all the essential data on one page.

ValueWiki - A wiki for stocks. Also includes live chat and a ticker widget for your blog.

Yahoo! Finance - One of the most popular sites for stocks. Includes up to date market info and the ability to create a portfolio.

Google Finance - GoogleGoogle reviews ’s rival to Yahoo Finance. A simple layout with Flash graphs and portfolios.



Social Networks

SocialPicks - A social stock-picking community: share ideas with others and track your investments. Includes groups and Digg-like voting on financial news stories.

StockPickr - Get stock ideas and recommendations from a community of investors. Owned by financial news site TheStreet.com.

Wesabe - Community-based money management. You enter your financial data, and Wesabe serves up tips based on the experience of similar users. Your financial data is not shared directly with other users.

Zecco - An online stock broker complete with community features. Trade real stocks - up to 40 trades a month for free, after which fees apply.

BullPoo - Share stock information with a community of investors. Includes blogs, portfolios and forecasts.

RipplePay - An experimental payments system that passes debt between users in an IOU system.



Salary Reports

PayScale - Compare your salary to those with the same job.

WageExchange - a social network where you can anonymously share your salary with other users and see how you stack up.



Online Payment Systems

PayPal - Love it or hate it, Paypal is the leading way to exchange money between individuals online. Owned by eBay.

Google Checkout - Google’s service for buying items in online stores without giving your credit card details to the merchant. No person-to-person exchanges.

MoneyBookers - a popular alternative to PayPal, especially in countries where PayPal still doesn’t let users receive funds.

These eight free downloads and services will help you beat back the bad guys with antivirus and anti-spyware programs, personal firewalls and even a program that can detect whether your Web site is under attack.


BEST: Avast Home Edition: The big names in security software charge you big bucks for big suites full of big, bloated software. Avast Home Edition scans your system for malware and kills what it finds, and gives you seven different types of "shields" to keep you safe from harm, such as one for protecting you from dangers that might be lurking on Web sites (such as drive-by downloads), one for guarding against peer-to-peer attacks, another that stops instant messaging threats, and so on. And it does all that, amazingly enough, without taking up much RAM or system resources.

a-Squared HiJackFree: Spyware is notorious for evading even the most rigorous cleaners, which is why you need more than one anti-spyware utility on your PC. HiJackFree is a great download to use in concert with your main anti-spyware program for extra protection. Rather than offering a live shield, it checks your system for spyware and then eradicates it. For the geeky, it offers a lot more as well, such as tools for viewing what programs are using your TCP ports, and for examining programs that run on startup.

Attack Trace: Worried that the bad guys are targeting your Web site? This free service checks to see if your site is under attack.

Comodo EasyVPN Home: This download allows you to create secure peer-to-peer networks over the Internet for sharing information, chatting and so on. Everything is encrypted, so no one else will be able to snoop on what you're doing.

EULAlyzer: Hidden in some end-user license agreements (EULAs) are indicators that the software may be spyware, or that it might invade your privacy in other ways. This downloadable analyzer examines EULAs and warns you about dangers.

Online Armor Personal Firewall: This is the best personal firewall you've never heard of. It provides solid protection, but unobtrusively. Lots of firewalls bug you constantly when you first install them, asking about any program that wants to access the Internet. This software starts out by allowing known safe applications to access the Web and bothers you only about the programs it's unsure about. It also has a clever "Safer mode" that will allow certain apps to run with stripped-down privileges.

SpywareBlaster: With this downloadable anti-spyware utility, you can make sure you don't get infected in the first place rather than scanning for and killing spyware after it hits your machine. It works differently from most competitors by restricting the actions that potentially dangerous Web sites can perform when you visit them. It also protects against dangerous ActiveX controls, and keeps tracking cookies off your PC.

SuperAntiSpyware: Here's an excellent anti-spyware tool that does a thorough job of scanning your system for dangers, and then whacking any it finds. This download scans not just your files and memory, but also your registry. It doesn't offer real-time protection, though.

Social networking is great for keeping in touch, but how much time does it take? Our personal experience is that you can eat up an entire day managing your online social sites faster than you can accumulate pals on Facebook. (Don't tell the boss, though.)

Here are seven ways to make the experience less complex. These services, which include Google Latitude, Pipl and TweetDeck, can do things like display all your Twitter tweets from your tweeps at once or bundle your entire online social whirl into one package.
Happy hobnobbing!

BEST: Digsby is excellent for aggregating your entire online social life, wrapping e-mail, instant messaging and social networking into one tight little package. This multitasking download integrates Facebook, Gmail, Twitter, AIM and tons more, all from the comfort of one unified system-tray application.

If you want to know where your friends (or kids) are at any given minute of the day, Google Latitude acts like a LoJack for your loved ones. Accessible from your cell phone or browser, Latitude displays where all your friends are located on a Google Map.

It's always exciting to see that someone has written on your Facebook Wall, but if you're tasked with doing actual work at some point during the day, the flood of e-mail notifications from social networks can be a huge time sink. NutshellMail consolidates messages from the likes of Facebook, Twitter and even secondary e-mail accounts into one scheduled digest, so you can get a quick snapshot of your popularity.

Rather than managing profile information, Ping.fm (registration required) is all about managing your status. Set this service up with your Facebook and Twitter accounts, for example, and a single update automatically posts a new status update on Facebook and a new tweet to Twitter. Multiply that by more than 30 supported social networking sites, and you could save some serious time.

Want to hunt down your college roommate or a long-lost love? People search engine Pipl scours the Web to find every last fingerprint that the person you're seeking has ever left online, down to every photo, address and blog post it can find. Pipl even supports reverse people lookups by e-mail address, user name and phone number.

Social networks have turned cyberstalking into a national pastime, but who has time to check all the possible places your crush may be socializing online? Web service Spokeo (registration required) searches the farthest corners of 41 social networking sites to uncover the deepest, darkest secrets of your friends and loved ones. We hope you're proud of yourself.

If you're nuts for the popular social networking and microblogging service Twitter, you've probably outgrown writing and tracking tweets using Twitter's Web interface. TweetDeck is a free download that puts Twitter on steroids, letting you easily track any search terms, group your friends, shrink unwieldy URLs and more, all from one centralized window.

World of Photo and Video

Freshen up digital photos with freebies like PhotoPerfect Express and Skitch. Also, find and manage video with free downloads and services like DVDFlick and Wowbrary.

You can use these five free offerings to decorate, detail and enhance your photos and screenshots.

For instance, with some of these no-cost services and downloads, you can upload a photo of your face and have it appear in an image of the Mona Lisa or in a museum frame, among other options; capture screens easily and share them; work with a Web service that approaches the abilities of Adobe Photoshop; and edit your photos to make them leap off the screen.

BEST BET: PhotoPerfect Express: You may not have the trained eye of a professional photo editor, but with this download, you won't need it. Create stunning images through simple point-and-click optimizations that make your photos pop.

Jing: This download captures screenshots and video screencasts of your desktop with elegance and ease, and then lets you share the results quickly and easily online. Rather than trying to describe to friends and co-workers what you're seeing on your computer, you can show them.

PhotoFunia: Plaster your skillfully superimposed face all over iconic (and not-so-iconic) images with Google's PhotoFunia service.

Skitch: This service (registration required) annotates images -- either screenshots you've taken with it or any photo you drag into it -- with attractive and readable text, arrows and shapes, just the thing for getting your point across with style. Once you're done drawing, you can share your Skitch creation on the Web with the click of a mouse.

Sumo Paint: This impressive Web-based service packs all the layered image-editing goodness of Photoshop into one incredible Web application -- perfect for a little advanced photo editing from your cubicle.

Vital video helpers

In this group, you'll find nine innovative ways to discover, transfer and organize video.
You can learn to cut down YouTube videos so your friends don't have to watch the full six minutes to see the monkey throw the cream pie; create embeddable playlists of favorite videos; make DVDs friendly to PCs and set-top devices; and interact with a great media hub and player.

BEST BET: DVD Flick: Normally, burning video files to a DVD that you can run in your DVD player is notoriously difficult, unless you're ready to bust open your piggy bank. This no-cost download, however, burns virtually any video file to a playable DVD with ease.

Embedr: This simple but smart service creates embeddable video playlists, allowing you to fashion the perfect combination of online video clips into one long-playing video.
HandBrake: This must-have download converts DVDs to computer- and mobile-friendly formats so you can get your "Lost" fix during your commute, on your iPod or other video-capable portable device.
KickYouTube: Ever wish you could download a YouTube video to carry with you on your cell phone, iPod or PSP -- or just to save on your PC? This service converts YouTube videos to virtually any device-friendly format, on the fly. All you have to do is add the word kick to the front of any YouTube URL.
RerunCheck: TV lovers often ask, "Is my favorite show a new episode or a rerun this week?" Jump onto this site for the answer, or sign up for weekly e-mail reminders so you never suffer the heartbreak of a warm bowl of popcorn and nothing to watch.
Splicd: Feel bad about making friends suffer through a five-minute-long YouTube video just so they can appreciate the pratfall at 4:43? With this service, you can link straight to the good part when you share YouTube videos.
TV.com: Hulu's video service was big in 2008, but it now has some stiff competition from the CBS-owned TV.com. This service is part Hulu, part IMDb, and all television-streaming goodness.
Wowbrary: Looking to save some serious cash on entertainment in the midst of this financial apocalypse? This service (registration required) monitors your local library for new DVDs (along with books and CDs) so that you can be first in line to get your hands on a fresh release.
XBMC: Originally developed to run on the original Microsoft Xbox (hence the name, XBox Media Center), this download is a robust media player and entertainment hub. It runs on Linux, Mac OS X, Windows and Xbox.