Inaugural Post! Posted by Mike Li | at 8:01 PM

This is our new company blog. Just a little about us, we're a pretty recent company. Your author, Mike Li, is one of the employees of this newly-founded company (started just last year). However, many of our technicians have been working on PC and Mac repair for years. Anyway, enough about us. I'm more excited about some software I found that have really helped us thus far...

Basecamp is one of those services that make you wonder how you managed all this time without it. It's really cool, because it's a project management tool but with a twist. You can collaborate and chat in real time. You can have to-do lists, message boards (shown on the right)... you can even set milestones, so you know what goals to lay out! For the company side, you can track your time, upload files for others to use, and of course, you can view the project in an overview page. It makes our lives so much easier for extremely large projects, although Google Wave has definitely been a tempting and free alternative. But even, so Basecamp offers many many features and an integration that Google Wave has yet to catch up to. So for us and many other companies, this is a great piece of software that is extremely portable, as it runs on the Web.

MailChimp is another great service that is amazingly... free. While its email marketing and email list services are given a bad rap because of the reputation of spam, we feel it's a great service because it allows real businesses to update their most valued customers on what the company is offering. (BTW, we don't want you to get spam either... so use disposable email addresses when you can and when you feel you don't want to be contacted by unwanted people). On a side note, that monkey looks really really happy delivering usually boring newsletters (not ours, though!). But it's an excellent service that you can integrate with other software so that you can manage those email lists and create newsletters that don't suck. In fact, that should be their motto...