I’m constantly in AWE at how AVAILABLE everything is for someone to start their own technology-driven business. The tools that exist to the average user today FOR FREE far outweigh what small to medium sized businesses used to have to pay BOATLOADS to own in the past. Let’s take a look at some of what you can get out there for free, and how you might use it:
37 Signals– You want free things you can use today? These guys have LOADS, and it’s all web-based, and has free-levels:
Blogs There are SO many free blog sites out there. I’m using Blogger right now because it’s free, it’s hosted, and I can edit the template enough to add a few custom things like my Flickr photo badge. I’ve used and can appreciate WordPress.com, and also a Serendipity site called Supersized.org. Heck, Ben’s got a free blog site where he SWEARS you can build a new blog in under a minute.
How YOU Can Use it: Blogs are the easiest way to publish information onto the web. You type what you want to say, click Submit, and you’ve got information that’s easily reachable. If you’re a small business, or if you have an interest that you want to share with others, and you’re NOT using a blog as the most basic building block of a business strategy that includes online customers, you’re cuckoo.
Jot- Jot is a wiki site. Wikis are editable online websites that promote collaboration, easy publishing, and all kinds of other useful features. Jot’s neat in that folks have built applications around the wiki, so now you can just click a few things and you can set up a Client Relations Management application, a company contact directory, a project management framework. Whatever you want. I use a free wiki called PBWiki, but I’ve yet to really USE it for much.
My last two examples are a little techie. Feel free to geek out along with me.
VMWare– VMWare is a software product that sits between a computer’s hardware and the operating system, and it permits you to run more than one operating system on the same device. Bigger companies use it to cut down on server hardware, improve disaster recovery planning, build inexpensive development and testing architectures, and a few other nifty things.
How YOU could use it: VMWare gives away VMPlayer (and now, VMServer) for FREE on their site. They also have some pre-packaged virtual machines that you can download and set up superduper easy. (Mind you, the target box where you’ll run this has to have some decent memory and about a gigabyte of free storage space available.) But… you can download and set up a FREE system to try out new operating systems like Red Hat and Ubuntu. You can download full own application development environments like LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/PERL). For free.
Eclipse– Eclipse is a free, open source, integrated development environment. In the old days (or today, if you deal with Microsoft), developers had to pay tons of money to use the tools necessary to write code in a useful framework. Now? You get it for free.
How YOU could use it: Okay, if you’re not a developer, this is a stretch. But at least I’ll say that you can hook up developers to use it for free, and then you could write amazing product use cases that would result im amazing apps. : )
There’s Nothing Stopping You
Oh yeah, except that you need a realistic plan for how you’ll implement these types of things, make money, grow a customer base, etc. But that’s the easy part, right?
What are some of your favorites that I’ve missed?
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Tags: free, software, web2.0, rubyonrails, wiki, eclipse, vmware, virtualmachines