Coordinating on a budget can be a real challenge, especially when you consider all the other projects on which you could be spending your time. These free online tools can help optimize the meeting and scheduling process.
Doodle – Fast Free Scheduling
doodle.com

Tired of calling back-and-forth, struggling to find a time when everyone is available? With Doodle you can make an online poll of possible times - then send a link to the interested parties. No calls necessary.

As each person checks off their availability, Doodle will automatically highlight the time slot(s) with greatest …

Have you ever wished that giving someone your contact information with an iPhone or Android were as simple as handing them a business card?

With Bump, it is.

Bump uses the built in GPS in modern smart phones to tell when two such devices are in the same place at the same time. If they both vibrate at once (say, by bumping one against the other) it will let you connect your phones to transfer contacts cards, event invitations, photos, and social media account information.

In other words, just about anything you might want to put on your business card …

Looking for original artwork, but don’t have an in-house designer?  DeviantArt (dA) is definitely a good place to start.

Since 2000, dA has been providing an interactive community for artists of all sorts.  The includes the following key features:

• a categorized and searchable gallery of artwork
• feedback space for every work of art in the gallery
• e-commerce interface for artists ready for digital sales

Admittedly, not every artist is prepared to sell their work over the internet, but this does not have to be a dead end.  The deviantArt gallery also includes contact information for the contributing artists, giving you the …

There is more to life than time clocks, profit margins, and marketing campaigns.

Thankfully the Internet also has resources to help with your after-hours planning. One of my favorites is TIX Bay Area (@tixbayarea on Twitter), a clearinghouse of half-price theater tickets on all sides of the San Francisco bay (and even inland a little ways).

In addition to providing great same-day discount tickets all year round, TIX Bay Area is also an outlet for Free Night of Theater California, a series of no-cost performance throughout the month of October.

If you’re looking for …

“Next,” “next,” “next,” if you’re like most people, your eyes probably glazed over after the second slide, perhaps even sooner. Imagine, then, how difficult it would be to capture your audience’s attention if you are the second presenter, or third, or tenth….

Prezi (www.prezi.com), provides a different way to organize and present your visual support. Instead of making several distinct slides, a Prezi presentation consists of a single large image that contains the whole of your visual presentation. Instead of advancing slides, you can zoom in on one part of your image to focus on one aspect of the …

The Pin Poet of Berkeley first introduced me to MOO during a discussion of different media suitable for small form physical branding.

Because of the Printfinity technology that MOO uses, it is possible for a designer to give them any number of custom images and they’ll print a series of cards using every single one (even if this means a different image on every card).

But what really hooked me was their Inspiration page, which highlights different innovative ways to make use of their products, from their hallmark MiniCards …

This week’s Online Ore comes to us from programmer Zac Matthews.

Zac likes using delicious.com (or del.icio.us) to track the pages he wants to bookmark.  Delicious is a social bookmarking tool.  When you bookmark a web page, you can see what tags other users have applied, how many users have bookmarked it, and how they have rated it.  You then get a chance to apply your own tags or ratings to the site.

Even if you don’t use the social elements of Delicious, it can still be used to store …

Twitter, Facebook, Buzz, LinkedIn, Flikr, Photobucket, Ning, Xanga, WordPress, …. The list of social media platforms goes on and on.  Some overlap with each other, others have no channels of compatibility, and most of the services that would allow you to synchronize the content of multiple services are annoyingly piecemeal.

Enter Ping.fm.

Ping.fm has compiled a list of 40 blogging sites, social networks, online status recorders, social bookmarking services, and photo sharing sites - each and every one of which can be updated individually or in groups from within the Ping.fm interface.

See a service you don’t yet use?  Ping.fm will …

Have you ever been looking for that perfect fact that helps you translate a statistic from your presentation into a language your audience understands?  Well this week’s vein of online ore will help you do just that.

For example, 1 in every 8.5 American children under the age of 18 is without health insurance.  The same portion of the California population filed for personal bankruptcy in 2008.

Book of Odds has been online for close to a year offering articles and odds statements on topics from sports and relationships to health and death.  And once …

This week’s vein of Online Ore can be found at www.surveymonkey.com

If you want a custom survey on short notice and do not have the expertise to add one to your own website, Survey Monkey is an excellent solution.  The questionnaire generator has easily adjustable prebuilt templates for marketing, customer service, client satisfaction, and much more.  Depending on your needs you can change how questions are worded, set available answers, insert a logo, or change the color scheme.  Then when you’re done, you’ll get a link that you can share over e-mail, through Facebook, in your blog, …