In a world where emails, phone calls, texts, and Tweets constantly bombard us, it is getting harder and harder to manage the firehose of data and information being thrust our way. For young companies to succeed this environment, it is imparitive they become organized and efficient lest they fall behind and quickly become overwhelmed. While there is no shortage of online solutions, it can be hard to know which one is the right tool for the job, so here’s a list of five web applications to help kick-start your company and keep it organized without breaking the bank. Sponsor Google Apps – Google’s collection of web apps includes solutions for corporate email accounts, calendars or contacts, but its best use for a new startup is with document sharing. Using Google Docs to collaborate on text documents, spreadsheets or even presentations is far more efficient than sending a file in an email attachment. In recent years, Zoho has become an increasingly competitive enterprise alternative to Google, even adding integration with Google Apps . Zoho has also introduced more features that help it stand out against Google Apps, including their own CRM solution that aims to compete with Salesforce.com . Basecamp – We here at ReadWriteWeb use Basecamp on a daily basis for managing ongoing projects and reviewing edits of our stories. Developed by 37signals , Basecamp offers a great interface with an easily read dashboard of the latest activity, as well as to-do lists, milestones and email alerts. For the on-the-go entrepreneur, there are a handful of mobile Basecamp apps ranging in features and price. Personally, I recommend using Insight for iPhone , which was rebranded from Encamp and recently recommended by 37signals . Dropbox – Whether it’s large financial spreadsheets, or Photoshop mockups of your website-to-be, you are going to need somewhere to store all your files. Dropbox makes all of these easy and relatively inexpensive, offering up to 100 GB for $20 a month. But it’s not just storage. Dropbox can automatically sync with folders on your desktop, creating an offsite backup of your vital startup files in the cloud, which any member of your staff can access. An alternative solution would be to use Box.net , however their pricing plans are higher than Dropbox’s and are aimed at larger corporations. Dimdim – The next time you find yourself struggling to explain an intricate concept to your coworkers through a text document or presentation, check out Dimdim and use the power of screen-sharing to make your point crystal clear. One of Dimdim’s best features is that their product works entirely from within your web browser without the need to download or install any extra software. Screen-sharing services like Dimdim can save a young company hundreds if not thousands of dollars in travel expenses by providing a much more efficient way to meet and share information. Also a notable service in this space is Citrix’s GoToMeeting . However, like Box.net to Dropbox, its pricing is much higher than Dimdim’s. MindMeister – Between the last two semesters of graduate school, I worked on a collaborative ten-week reporting project, and used online mind-mapping app MindMeister extensively to stay organized. The application is a great way to keep those more abstract ideas organized in an easy-to-understand way. Countless startups have mapped out their product ideas and business plans on giant whiteboards, and now the whiteboard has gone digital. MindMeister makes it easy to create and share mind maps and flow charts, and best of all, its free to get started. Photo by Flickr user simax . Discuss

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5 Web Apps To Keep Your Startup Organized

FormSpring.com is a data collection and management system with a particular emphasis in online forms, registrations and surveys. And enterprise-level system, FormSpring.com might seem rather dry to anyone but an online retailer or event coordinator. FormSpring.me , on the other hand, has tapped the very essence of what makes the social web so addictive. This new application, a free and social side project, nearly has all the requisite puzzle pieces to go completely viral. It’s fun, engaging, and slightly game-like, and it encourages the behaviors users love to indulge. It’s only missing one critical element. Sponsor A stable back end. But more about that in a moment. First, let me tell you what makes FormSpring.me so infinitely entertaining. First, the site is user-to-user Q&A . This is the kind of formula that has populated the Web with masses of UGC on sites such as Yahoo! Answers and Wiki Answers . It’s also the basic formula behind such highly praised startups as Aardvark , which allows users to ping one another across networks to get answers about specific topics. Q&A between end users is a growing trend on the web, without a doubt. Second, the site allows one user to anonymously ask questions of another user. Anonymity has bred some of the most interesting and varied experiments of the social web. Very often, a lack of links to users’ true identities leads to bathroom-wall-of-the-Internet content such as 4chan or YouTube comments. But while anonymity breeds trollism and is actually a dying phenomenon online, having a thin veil between the asker and the answerer of a question can act as a confessional booth in a way, allowing for more frank communication or the posing of some very interesting, controversial questions that might otherwise be considered impolite or risky. Finally, one of the most enduring trends of the social web, from its inception to the present day, is our deep and insatiable love of self-reference . The provocative beginning question for the site is, “Ask me anything,” which users then tweet or post to Facebook. Answering questions all about you, your preferences, your past, your thoughts, your wishes and hopes, your regrets, what you eat and where you live – nothing is more intoxicating to the average social media user. From our first LiveJournal entries to mid-2000s MySpace chain surveys to our latest tweets, we clearly love talking about ourselves. The way that FormSpring.me caters to this inherently human attribute is by giving us the impression or illusion that someone, somewhere actually cares about what we think and do enough to ask us and expect an answer. So, when you combine the power of a Q&A site with the magic of an anonymous commenting system and the addictive qualities of navel-gazing with the expectation of being noticed, you basically have on your hands the social web app of the year just waiting to happen. And if it weren’t for back end – which is likely built on Ruby on Rails, according to a few sources we’ve consulted today – FormSpring would have not only a money-making enterprise app but also a blockbuster social app. Although the concept is fascinating, the implementation is transparently shoddy. It seems like a hastily put-together weekend project along the lines of a Startup Weekend or Rails Rumble one-off. In fact, several developers we consulted said the site bears all the marks of a Ruby on Rails product, including rampant database scalability errors . ActiveRecord is a Rails class for accessing databases, and it’s been shown in past applications to be unscalable. Concurrency issues mean that a small group of geeks or judges can have a grand time with your app, but the second it catches on with the social media crowd and then – god help you – general Internet users, the app’s database is unable to handle that volume of traffic over a period of seconds, and end users start seeing error messages and abandoning ship like so many faithless rats. And since FormSpring.me is in all likelihood a side project from a single staffer or a couple employees (the company blog doesn’t even mention the offshoot), it might not get the executive attention for further development or resource allocation. After all, without a revenue model, why would an enterprise-focused company waste time and energy on a social application? Speculation aside, FormSpring.com support tech Ryan Dillman writes, “Eventually, we plan to rewrite the FormSpring.me code from the ground up using the same type of database as sites like Facebook, Twitter, etc., so that we can handle the load. In the meantime, the millions of calls to the database cause frequent issues during peak times.” Many parts of Twitter are built on Scala , and Facebook’s database abstraction layer was developed in-house. If that kind of userbase – millions upon millions of users accessing the site around the clock – is what FormSpring is preparing for, they’re going to need a much more robust solution that’s much closer to bare metal than whatever they’re currently running. And we do suggest they find one. FormSpring should consider monetizing and quickly scaling such an addictive little application before someone else does it next and better. So, to take the site’s “Ask me anything” query and pose it to the site’s creators, do you plan to seriously devote resources to create a stunning and addictive social app, or is this experiment destined for the digital dustbin? Ask us anything – or give us your frank opinions – in the comments. Discuss

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Anonymity, Self-Reference & Q&A: Formspring.me’s Winning Combination for the Social Web

Looking to spruce up that bland PowerPoint presentation for your next meeting with possible investors? Or do you need high-quality photographs for your product’s homepage or blog? Sprixi , a free use image search engine, is an excellent source for finding just the right image to add those finishing touches. Developed by Sydney, Australia-based company Thirsty Minds , Sprixi crawls Flickr and OpenClipArt.org for images licensed under Creative Commons and implements a user-based recommendation system to produce relevant results. While viewing photos, you can tell Sprixi whether or not an image is a useful result. Based on this data, Sprixi displays the most relevant images as rated by users at the top of the results. Sponsor The crowdsourced curation of images is what elevates Sprixi above other image searches. A Google Image search for “baseball” returns photos of varying qualities of balls, players, fields, video games and team logos. The same search on Sprixi uncovers a stunning photograph of a baseball laying in grass that has a “usefullness” rating 25.7. With no login required to browse and download photos, Sprixi displays the copyright information of each photo and can even embed the information into the photo for you, making the process of giving credit quick and painless. Discuss

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Sprixi Makes Searching for Free Photos Smart, Fast and Painless

Dell is increasing its crowdsourcing efforts on IdeaStorm , by giving hardware manufacturers more feedback on products and services. “Storm Sessions” are designed to attract a larger business community to the IdeaStorm site, by providing a more focused, structured approach. Storm Sessions provide a way for Dell to listen to its community, but we are a bit skeptical that the effort will receive significant interest from the business community. Sponsor This may be in part due to the transparency of the process. Will business people feel comfortable giving their feedback in such a public way? Dell launched Ideastorm two and a half years ago, with the intention of giving customers the opportunity to post their own ideas about Dell’s products and services. Ideastorm now has 60,000 registered users. The community posts about 300 ideas per month. The free form aspects of the crowdsourcing effort attracts a consumer crowd. Product groups at Dell find Ideastorm useful. The Linux community is especially vocal on IdeaStorm and Dell now offers Ubuntu on Dell machines based on feedback from the Linux community. Storm Sessions seek to better match business users with the community aspects of the IdeaStorm site, through a more structured process. Storm Sessions will live on the Dell site for two to four weeks. Dell is starting with two topics, covering mobile technology and the redesign of the Dell support site. Sessions are presented with a statement, providing context about the issue Dell is exploring. Each session includes a count down. Ideas are submitted through a UI that looks much like a blogging platform. The ideas then get loaded to the IdeaStorm site. Dell product groups receive the information collected from the sessions. It is analyzed and integrated into the product development process. IdeaStorm is impressive, especially considering that just two-people manage it. The amount of feedback Dell receives in return is significant, which shows the power that crowdsourcing can bring to an organization. Storm Sessions will initially focus on the education market, where Dell shows a strong presence. This could serve as the major draw for Storm Sessions. We look forward to watching the progress of Storm Sessions and how other companies bring crowdsourcing into the enterprise. Discuss

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Dell Increases its Crowdsourcing Efforts – Will it Work?

Favrd , the now-retired (creator-destroyed) aggregation site for Twitter “favorites,” began as the irreverent offshoot of a community of influential designers and developers — people like Merlin Mann ( @hotdogsladies ), John Gruber ( @gruber ), Jeffrey Zeldman ( @zeldman ), and Dean Cameron Allen ( @textism ), the site’s creator. You don’t need to know the lofty origins of Favrd, though; if anything, they’re antithetical to the point. Favrd ran on a “no-webcock algorithm.” (“Webcock” was Dean’s term for shamelessly self-promoting “new media gurus.”) Sponsor This guest post was written by Kim Gaskins, a writer for Latitude Research . In an interview earlier this year, web developer Rafael Torres ( @rafitorres ) remarked: “A common concern for all of [the creators] was the idea that the social web had been invaded by a certain class of individuals who were apparently only concerned with marketing themselves and their brands through fake social interactions.” How Many Stars in the Sky? Infinite: and That’s Too Many. Simply put, I think what happened to Favrd was that a new crop of users appeared who didn’t know how to value the currency , and thus they inadvertently devalued it. They were arbitrarily plastering their stars around town to promote themselves, like “take-out menus hung on the doors of other restaurants.” Dan Wineman ( @dwineman ), “The Favrd Situation” In this way, currency (devalued) only serves to commodify valuable content. Remiel ( @remiel ) makes some generative suggestions here to “inject scarcity back into the equation.” What if Favstar instituted a new metric… ? “The result, ideally, is… a truly useful list of vetted Twitter content, reliably worth reading. In short: a great, alternative Twitter filter.” “I hate when clever, elegant things leave the web.” Jeffrey Zeldman to Dean Cameron Allen, commenting on “The Stars Look Down” Favrd: The Black Sheep of Bottom-Up PosterCommunities Cohesive communities like Favrd, grown organically without a pointed goal — especially the communities grown around liberality of mind and well-placed puns — have some people asking, ” yes, but what’s the point? ” Therein lies the point. “I’ve met lots of people, collaborated creatively with a few and even had one stay on my couch during his trip across the country. All wonderful experiences.” Jon Dascola , commenting on Zeldman’s “The Stars Look Down” So What’s Beside the Point? Professionally speaking, Avery Edison ( @aedison ) is an upcoming UK-based comedy writer who has her roots in the feedback and support of the Favrd community. You Look Nice Today ( @hotdogsladies , @lonelysandwich , and @scottsimpson ) is a free podcast “prepared by and for ‘adults’” that now performs in 3space as well, for money . Interview with Nick Douglas ( @nick ), author of Twitter Wit: Brilliance in 140 Characters or Less : For Goodness’ Sake… SmallCanBeBig is a charitable non-profit that harnesses the power of small, direct donations for families in need. Mark Nikolewski ( @mnik ) is lead designer and art director for the organization; from his personal experience in the community, he can trace back thousands of dollars in direct donations to SmallCanBeBig from Favrd members. He estimates that the community supplies about 20% of the organization’s ( @smallcanbebig ‘s) retweets, without accounting for any secondary networking effects. Mike Monteiro ( @mike_FTW ) has been one of SmallCanBeBig’s most outspoken supporters, incenting donations via Twitter in Favrd fashion: “SmallCanBeBig: Tell you what: you donate $50 and I will tweet a PERSONAL INSULT which you can RT to show your friends how cool you are.” (Visit SmallCanBeBig.org directly to donate sans personal insult.) Josh Hopkins ( @thedayhascome ) began tweeting about the medical condition of his daughter (born January 2009) as a part of the Favrd community, which rose up with overwhelming support while Lucy underwent serious operations and prolonged hospital stays. ( Josh and his family will be participating in the March for Babies in 2010 to raise money on behalf of Lucy’s name. If individuals would like to donate money to The March of Dimes, on behalf of Team Lucy Kate who is walking in the Indianapolis event, more information is available here .) “Keep starring the heavens, kids. #thankyoutextism” (via @pagecrusher ) A more comprehensive directory of projects from the Favrd community is available here . Discuss

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On Favrd, Twitter & Community: Why You Should Be Able to Count the Stars

This morning in her address to LeWeb conference attendees, her majesty Queen Rania Al Abdullah of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan asked the question, “Did Michael Jackson change the fate of the green revolution?” While CNN was slow to report on this year’s Iranian election protests, Twitter became a powerful news vehicle . Nevertheless, after a week of “Tehran” as Twitter’s top trending topics, Michael Jackson’s sudden death quickly replaced it. Sponsor Interested in the power of activism and social change, Queen Rania tweeted the question, “Can the real-time web change the world?” Inundated with answers, the Queen was surprised to find that 60% of those who replied answered no. As one way to rally netizens to participate in life changing social action, Rania called upon today’s attendees to join in her mission of universal education for children. In participation with the 1Goal project, the Queen appealed to bloggers for their help. In a campaign to collect more than 300 million signatures in support of universal childhood education, she is asking bloggers to devote one day of tweeting and blogging to the 1Goal project. Said Rania, “The classroom can be a chrysalis for change…We can be lifestreaming and life changing.” For more information on how you can participate visit join1goal.org . Photo Credit: Chris Heuer Discuss

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Queen of Jordan Calls on Blogger Friends

Microsoft researcher Danah Boyd took a decidedly different approach when considering social networking at today’s LeWeb conference. In speaking to a room packed with more than a thousand entrepreneurs, investors and journalists, Boyd explained how we tend to focus on the positive aspects of social networking services. Technologists tend to praise web publishing for its ability to encourage artistic expression and public dialogue. In contrast, Boyd makes the point that negative and disturbing web content can also serve as a vehicle for change. Sponsor Boyd explains how those who monitor online profile information, tend to have something to gain from it in a negative way. For example, oppressive governments often monitor the web for signs of criminal activity in order to enforce laws or suppress certain activities. Nevertheless, Boyd believes the visibility of violence, drug use and criminal activity can also be used by regular netizens for constructive purposes. She references “eyes on the street” – a concept coined by urban sociologist Jane Jacobs in her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities . Writes Jacobs: “There must be eyes on the street, eyes belonging to those we might call the natural proprietors of the street. The buildings on a street equipped to handle strangers and to insure the safety of both residents and strangers, must be oriented to the street.  They cannot turn their backs or blank sides on it and leave it blind.  The sidewalk must have users on it fairly continuously, both to add to the number of effective eyes on the street and to induce a sufficient number of people in buildings along the street to watch the sidewalks.” Boyd believes this same concept can be applied to online safety and health. Says explains, “The web makes available all parts of society and it’s up to us to find a way to make it constructive.” With Facebook’s user base often cited as being bigger than the population of all but 4 countries in the world, netizens have the visibility to do more than simply consume content. Boyd’s presentation reveals that while the internet has the power to uncover the abuses and oppressions that are happening around us, ultimately it’s up to us to decide whether or not to acknowledge and help remedy them. Photo Credit: Ewan McIntosh * For more updates on LeWeb, follow along on the Social Media Club House Discuss

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Says Danah Boyd, Leverage the Web’s Most Disturbing Content