I had a history teacher that used to call these “watershed events.” You know… things like the Polio vaccine, Women’s suffrage, seedless watermelon. We were never the same after these things.

And now we have this: single sign-on from Zoho.

Avid readers of this blog have long since figured out that I am quite a fan of the web application developers Zoho. One minor irritation for users has been that each service or application required a separate login account.

Lately I’ve been using Zoho CRM and Zoho Sheet quite a bit. It did cross my mind more than once that it would be nice to log in just one time and have access to all Zoho applications that I use.

And now we have it. Oh joy!

Here is their full write-up.

These Firefox extensions will greatly improve your ability to conduct business efficiently and effectively.

1. Adsense Notifier - Display your Adsense earnings within the Firefox toolbar.
2. Copy Plain Text - Have you ever copied something to Thunderbird or Office and been annoyed that the text formatting (bold, font size, etc) came with it?
3. Feedview - Display an entire RSS feed as a web page. It also adds the ability to add a livemark and the ability to switch article lengths.
4. FireFTP - secure, cross-platform FTP client.
5. Free eBook Search - search for free eBooks to help you solve any business problem under the sun.
6. Sage - stylish RSS and ATOM feed reader.
7. RankQuest SEO Toolbar - several nifty tools to help you drive more traffic to your website.
8. TimeTracker - Track how much time you spend on the internet. (especially useful for bloggers)
9. StumbleUpon - Find great new websites to support your professional education.
10. SpellBound - nifty Firefox spell checker.

I’m generally a huge fan of new Web 2.0 offerings for several reasons, the largest of which is probably that I enjoy all the innovation and entrepreneurial spirit surrounding this mini gold-rush we call “Web 2.0.”

Ironically, it’s for this very reason that I am advising against new startup “Competitio.us.” The site’s sole mission is to help you keep an eye on your competition, and offers the following tools to get the job done:

1. Clippings - Organize news clippings of your competition.
2. Blog - Subscribe to your competition’s blog.
3. Traffic Graph - Compare your website traffic to that of your competitors’.
4. Feature Matrix - Keep track of and compare competitors’ features to your own.

As a general rule, I don’t like to keep track of what my competitors are doing. The way I see it, how can my organization possibly gain from becoming much more LIKE our competition?

I frankly don’t want to spend a moment of time working towards similarity. I have always seen pure creativity and innovation as much better long-term investments.

To the creators of competitio.us: Was the iPod born out of obsessively tracking the Rio player features? Was Dean Kamen forever looking over his shoulder to see if Schwinn was catching up while he developed the Segway HTS?

I hate to say it, but in my opinion your application not only stifles innovation, but through its “Feature Matrix,” actually increases the chances that I will become just like my competition.

Having put in my two cents worth, I’ll be the first to admit that this is just one person’s opinion. I really do wish the creators the best of luck and I officially invite you to publicly lambaste me if and when you prove me wrong.

Tony Valle
Promethius Consulting, LLC

At Promethius, we’ve done a whole lot of searching for ideas to improve our service and our customers’ experience. After much experimentation and testing, I feel very confident recommending these tools to any business manager:

1. Basecamp - This very intuitive project-management software by 37signals is a very affordable way to immediately gain control over multiple projects and staff members. It even has restricted login functionality for clients as well.
2. Zoho CRM - One of the great stable of products coming out of Zoho. It’s free for up to three users and is quite affordable as you add more users.
3. Netvibes - If you do one thing this quarter, get netvibes and learn how to use it! A savvy manager will make it his browser Home page and will fill it with relevant RSS feeds, bookmarks, gmail and so much more.
4. Omnidrive - This universal web storage platform lets you easily store, access and share files of any size over the web.
5. Google Analytics - Google is at it again with its great web stats tool. Just drop a little code behind each page of your website and you’re off to the races. This tool is especially good if you are running an Adwords campaign.

Why should you worry about bettering your managerial skills? Ron over at Buzzoodle had a great post yesterday about why this should be your number one concern!

Tony

Tony Valle
Promethius Consulting, LLC