TechCrunch Disrupt Startups Show Off Small-Business Tools

At TechCrunch Break up in San Francisco this workweek, startups presented a slew of new cloud-founded services built to help small businesses. These include business management, analytics, and conferencing tools. The freemium payment model, whereby a disengage service has premium features available for a price, is the model of choice. Present are or s highlights from the group discussion.

ZeroPC

ZeroPC is edifice a cloud-founded, desktop-panach workspace. Customers will get 1GB of information computer storage gratis, in addition to integrated memory access to equal to 14GB of free storage from otherwise touristed obscure storage services, with much storage available for a fee. Inside any Browser, ZeroPC creates a workspace to Lashkar-e-Taiba you integrate documents, emails, photos, medicine, videos, and social media content from services such as Box.net, DropBox, Evernote, Facebook, Flickr, Google Docs, Instagram, Picassa, SugarSync, Chitter, and with your possess localised computer storage. (Notwithstandin, ZeroPC recommends the latest versions of Firefox Oregon Chome, as some features require HTML5.) A suite of Web apps and native apps are also included for working with the files in the browser, and the workspace and content can be shared with a single Universal resource locator or published to Facebook or Twitter, so you can collaborate with your friends or share with the world.

vCita

vCita is targeting small businesses, including consultants and others who book informational appointments with clients, with a widget they rear end add to their website. This lavatory replace an existing Web contact configuration with a vCita "contact and docket" integrated form that lets visitors to your website schedule a picture meeting or speech sound anticipate directly. You can extend free meetings, or charge either hourly or by the serving. Payments are secured past PayPal Beaver State charge card to book the time, and then finalized at the end of the meeting. vCita enables Web video meetings and conference calls, accessible from a single management splasher. If you charge a fee for your meetings, vCita costs $21.95 per month, or $13.95 monthly if you sign high for an one-year plan.

Apptivo

Apptivo provides a rich business management platform victimization the SaaS (software as a service) model. They offer tools for plan direction, human resources, marketing, sales, financials, product management, customer service, supplying chain direction, sourcing, web site management, fundraising, and collaboration. Right now, altogether of these tools are free, but Apptivo says they consume a monetization project in place.

Lemon tree

Lemon launched in beta, testing form, is a cloud-based receipt direction tool, converting data from scanned receipts into reports to track outlay, tax data, and expense reports. It throne work from integer files or photos of receipts. For instance, you sack snap a smartphone photo of a receipt, or read in the physical copy, then save it to Lemon for optical characer acknowledgement. This service looks similar to Manilla, and provides a obscure supported alternative to victimisation something like a Neat Receipts scanner.

WikiOrgCharts

WikiOrgCharts is delivery organizational charts to the cloud. Users pool their business contacts and collaboratively mapping the relationships within a company. The HTML5-based charts let you construct, modify, search, and share, and integrate real-time social information from Twitter. The goal is to help people speedily recover the right point of contact in a company. A system of credits attained for communion and spent for looking up profiles is meant to encourage people to add their information to the charts. A premium subscription programme is forthcoming for users WHO wish to buy credits without sharing their possess information.

B2Brev

B2Brev is like Yelp for business services. It's meant for business owners to review services like Groupon and Bread and butter Social, and comment connected how those services have helped their business or not. Their day-after-day deals initiatory brought in 160,000 meriting of reviews for various unit of time muckle services. Business owners can in real time read reviews from other business who have tried the varied daily deal services to decide if joining such a program is right for their business organization. B2Brev, in beta, plans along monetizing via an affiliate fee for copulative businesses to services and products provided by other businesses. For now, they are merchandising research reports.

OpenSesame

OpenSesame is an online mart for corporate training. Their goal is to prepar purchasing and merchandising corporate e-encyclopedism courses as easy as downloading a song from iTunes. The market will be crowdsourced with an aim to provide a fresh and extensive pick of courses. Sellers can add courses just aside mise en scene up a visibility, uploading a line (.zip, SCORM, AICC, or telecasting file in), entering a description and pricing, and collateral it to make a point information technology wish display in any learning management system. After the course is validated, OpenSesame promises to review and publish your course to their marketplace within one business enterprise day.

SizeUp

SizeUp is a business analysis tool for smaller businesses. Larger business can hire consultants and in-mansion analysts to hold track of operations, competitors, and advertising strategies. Little businesses are leftist out. SizeUp is built to serve smaller businesses with the one demographic, industry, geographic, occupation, and cost data using Mint.com-like data analysis of information from sources such as IRS records, the Yellow Pages, commercial enterprise publications, and the U.S. Communication Service. Using a variety of charts and graphs created aside SizeUp, you john compare your business to your competition by region. SizeUp also shows information to help business owners find the Sunday-go-to-meeting places to advertise and helps them choose the most stiff campaigns.

Michelle Mastin has been a freelance musician and teacher since going away conservatories five years ago, and a spare-time activity nerd for altogether of her 30 eld. Lear classical music and red-brick gadgets collide at her blog, or follow her on Twitter @violajack.