As we've progressed with Shoes of Prey we've come to realise that we're not using a lot of software on our computers and that instead most of what we do is done in 'the cloud'. Not only is this cheap, but it means we can easily share what we're doing with each other and jump on any device connected to the internet to work, whether that be our computer, someone else's computer or our iPhones. Here's what we do that's done in the cloud:
- We host our website with Google AppEngine.
- We use Google Apps for our email, calendar, documents and spreadsheets.
- From starting our business until just 2 weeks ago Mike, Jodie and I had never all been in the same city at the same time, and Mike and Jodie still haven't met Vanessa in person, so we use Google Talk within Gmail for chat and video conferencing.
- We use Blogger to host this blog and Tumblr to host the Shoes of Prey blog
- We recently discovered and now use Pixlr for a lot of our image editing.
- Twitter and Facebook are two of our key marketing tools. We also use Google AdWords and Facebook Advertising.
- As we've talked about previously, we use Saasu to do our accounting.
- We use Picasa to share our shoe related photos between Jodie, Mike and I.
- As we've mentioned previously, we use Campaign Monitor to manage our Shoes of Prey email subscription list.
- Mike stores our website code with Github so it's not lost if anything happens to his computer.
- We use Google Analytics to analyse usage of our website and will soon start using Website Optimizer to improve our website.
The only software we use that's not in the cloud is the operating system and web browsers on our computers, Skype for cheap international calls, particularly when we're overseas, and the web design software Mike uses - Adobe Flash, Dreamweaver and for some graphics editing, Fireworks.
Is there any other cloud based software that you use which would be useful for us?
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