App Chat with Eric Cook - Some of My Favorite Mobile Android Apps

Greetings everybody. Welcome to the Wednesday, February 25th, 2015 episode of Free Webinar Wednesdays. This is Eric Cook, and I'm with WSI Internet Consulting where we work with businesses and organizations on helping them better understand and leverage the power of the Internet as a strategic business tool. You can learn more about me online. at www.poweredbywsi.com. I do have some news to inform everybody of today. Jeff Simpkins, who was supposed to be joining me, apparently my old age is getting the best of me, and he's on-site with a client and notified me last week that he was not able to attend today. So I'm going to fly solo, but that's okay. I'm comfortable with that. As long as you don't mind just listening to me. But what I do want to ask you all is since today's show is about apps, I am very much an Android guy, so I'm going to share a lot of my Android apps. The thought around those is most of the apps that are on Android are probably on iPhone, and there may even be some really cool iPhone apps that I don't even have access to on an Android. So in the chat feature of the webinar, if you do have some apps that you are interested in sharing, that either I've missed on the Android device or ones that you find helpful, maybe you're an iPhone or an iPad user, by all means feel free to post those and I'll go ahead and pull those up. We'll do a little research and we can round it out a little bit so that it's not as much of a Google love fest as probably what it's going to turn out to be with all of my Android-focused application recommendations. So when we get started here, I just want to remind everybody today's show and all shows on Free Webinar Wednesdays are recorded and archived and made available at So you can go back and listen to this show and others. And we do encourage participation. So if you do have a suggested app or something that you would like to clarify or a question, by all means go ahead and post it in the questions area, and I will keep an eye on that and make sure that I do double duty of not only running the webinar and talking but paying attention to when you have a question. So I think that kind of does all of my housekeeping items. And with this being somewhat of a one-sided Android-based show, we may not take the full hour, and you may be able to go ahead and get back to work a little early today. So we'll keep our fingers crossed that I'm able to provide you with some helpful information and give you some recommendations and some cool apps that you can use for your phone. So it's no surprise that these little mobile devices certainly are taking over our lives. And while I think a lot of us forget that you can make phone calls on them, the app has created a level of convenience that I don't know before the app was even developed many of us even anticipated or expected. So I know I've enjoyed my little mobile device and all the little apps that come along with it. So we do have— we got one Android fan in the crowd, so thank you, Mark, for those words of encouragement. Android doesn't get enough love. It's all iPhone, iPhone, iPhone. But let's go ahead and move along. So if you've been on Free Webinar Wednesdays before and listened to Jeff or myself, even though Jeff is very much an iPhone Apple guy and I kind of go I guess across the board. I've got a Mac computer. I've got an Android phone. I've got a Windows 8.1 computer. Looking forward to checking out Windows 10 when that comes around. But Jeff and I have one thing in common, and that's our use of Google for Work, I guess is what it's called now. It used to be Google Apps for Business, but it's Google for Work. And a lot of Jeff's data and most of my data, although I separate it. We'll talk about that. A lot of Jeff's data, he's actually started consolidating. A couple shows ago, we actually talked a little bit about kind of our game plan for 2015, and one of his was consolidation and making sure that it was consistency, systematizing things, making things under one. He's using Google Drive a lot for all of his storage and backup. I use it. I also talk about Dropbox, and we'll share that a little bit. But Google Drive is certainly one of my go-to apps because it gives me quick access to all the stuff that I have stored out in the cloud. And then from that, it makes it really easy, probably easier than Dropbox, if you have to search for a document or a file or a folder or a client project or whatnot. And then what they've done recently within the Drive app is when you go to open an actual document, You used to be able to open it just directly within Drive. Now you are actually using the Sheets version for Excel or their document version for Word-based documents. And it opens them up in those separate programs. So you can see like Slides for example opens up your PowerPoint documentation. And so Google Drive makes it really easy. The other thing that I like about Google Drive with it installed is if somebody sends me an email and it has an attachment right from my actual inbox on my phone, I can go ahead and save that to my Drive account. And then when it's on Drive, then I can go into Drive and I can figure out where I want it to go from a folder perspective. And the reverse is also true. If I have an email that I need to send to somebody, I can go into Drive first and I can create a link to it so that I can send somebody a link. I can attach the file directly to the actual email and send it. Like Jeff, I operate more of a virtual office environment. We're traveling on the road visiting clients at conferences, so I don't always have access to my computer, but I always have access to my files. And it makes it really easy to be able to send information back and forth with clients and other people that we're working with, to be able to have that connectivity. So Google Drive, of course, starting off with Android, so I've got to go ahead and start off with Google. But Google Drive certainly is one that I use quite a bit. We've talked also a lot about Evernote. And I use Evernote a variety of different ways. I use it on my phone as well as on my tablet. I also have a cool little Evernote clipper here that I've got in my Chrome browser. So if I find something that I like that I want to save for future dates, I can go ahead and clip it. When I clip it in Evernote, I can assign it. Evernote gives you the ability to create a variety of different notebooks which you can use to keep different things. You can have client-related notebooks, subject-related notebooks. You can nest notebooks. So you can have a client notebook and then you can have a separate notebook within that that might be specific projects that you are working on or other elements. Evernote gives you the ability to not just store text but you can store audio recordings. You can take pictures and have those archived and stored into Evernote. And so the Evernote mantra as you can tell by their little elephant is remember everything. And it's a great little clipping tool that I use. Recently we just entered into an RFP process for a bank and their marketing director did just a bang-up job of taking a lot of the design elements and desired functionality that they want to see in their project and put them into a public Evernote, which I thought was a great idea because now as somebody that's interested in earning their business, there's no more second-guessing or wondering, well, what does he really mean by this? I can go right to that and within the Evernote program you can create these public links to notebooks that give you the ability to either just view it. So maybe you send that link to somebody and if they don't happen to have an Evernote account, they can still view it. But if they do have an Evernote account, you can send that information and then they can elect to join that notebook and that notebook then shows up actually in the Evernote program. So as you want to maybe add notes or comments and communicate back and forth, I've got a colleague down in Atlanta that we are doing some stuff with, and her and I are sharing an Evernote notebook, and it makes it really easy. Similar functionality to like a Google Doc where you go in and type stuff and you can collaborate that way. But she really doesn't have Google Docs, and Evernote is more of a preferred program for her. And since I'm an Evernote user as well, It makes it really nice. I do pay, I think it's like $45 a year for the paid version of Evernote because that gives me the ability to synchronize a lot of the information offline just because of my travels. I can go ahead and save a bunch of notes and clipped articles and other sorts of resources, and then when I hop on a plane or someplace where maybe I don't have data connectivity or Wi-Fi, it gives me the ability to go in and kind of read those. So it's a nice little clipping service. So use that a lot. I alluded to Evernote. You can see— or I'm sorry, Dropbox. Just got off Evernote. I alluded to Dropbox, and you can see Google recommends— there's a suggested to Dropbox. I think Dropbox shows up as a suggested to Google Drive. Dropbox is nice, and we do have certain files that we keep in our Dropbox account internally within our office. My wife does the books and takes care of all the accounting elements. And so a lot of what we do from a business perspective is stored in a Dropbox account. The nice part about Dropbox that I don't think is available with Google Drive is on the mobile app, Dropbox gives you an extra layer of security in that when you open Dropbox, you can require a PIN number. Now I have a passcode required to get on my phone. So that's one level of protection, because the last thing you want is if you lose your phone and you haven't had the ability to remote wipe it, or you don't have that set up yet, somebody can get on your phone. And if you've got all these cloud services connected, once they've gotten on your phone, then they can go ahead and access all of your information, which kind of defeats the purpose of having things in a secure cloud environment with a password. So Dropbox gives you the ability to create a 4-digit PIN number. So anytime I open Dropbox it prompts me for that PIN number, so I have to authenticate a second time to get in. Much like Google Drive, Dropbox gives you the ability to attach files, create shared links, do those sorts of things, which is pretty cool. But what I'm also doing in addition to my Google+ account, which I have configured to set up as a backup folder for my photos, is I'm using Dropbox as well as a backup for my photos. So anytime I take a picture— and I've been in situations where I've lost data and I've lost photos and other information. I'm a little bit of a packrat as it relates to making sure— hold on just a second. Let me mute that. I'm a little bit of a packrat when it comes to making sure that I have backups of everything that I create. And so with Dropbox, it's a simple setting where you can go ahead and turn that on. And then anytime your camera takes a photo or screenshot, it synchronizes. And then I actually use the Dropbox desktop synchronization tool that then syncs that back down to my computer. So then I've got a local copy, I've got a copy on my phone, I've got a copy in the Dropbox cloud. And then I also utilize CrashPlan, which is not an app that I'm going to talk about today, but it's an online backup service that then captures everything on my computer and stores it up to a dedicated backup server. So plenty of redundancy there to make sure. And again, if you've ever had a computer crash or lost data, you know that it's very bothersome and not something you want to go through very often. So as a combination to Dropbox, what I've also implemented is Dropbox's photography app called Carousel. So instead of actually going into Dropbox, which is the way that I used to, and looking at my photos there, with Carousel it creates a dedicated application for all of your photos, and it makes it really easy to navigate through all of your pictures and to scroll back and forth. It tags things based on location and just makes it really, really nice. You can see kind of the scrolling area here, so you can certainly scroll through up above, but you can also drag this timeline. And if you knew, well, we were at the lake in June of last year and I want to go back to that picture, you can go ahead and drag this scroll bar. And I use this timeline quite often because, you know, I'll remember I was at a conference or at an event, or we were up at the lake, or we were skiing. And rather than going through and looking at the pictures one at a time, figuring out what time of the year it was, Makes it really, really easy. So I like that feature quite a bit. The other thing that the Carousel app does that I just discovered because it offered it to me once was it will periodically give you a, hey, a year ago these are the pictures that you took, or 2 years ago, or 5 years ago. And it's kind of a cool Wayback Machine almost, if you will, where it gives you a reminder of, oh, that's right. Last year we were with our friends Doug and Linda. I wonder what they are doing. Or yeah, last year I was at this event. Or pictures of dogs playing outside in the snow which I've got plenty of those this time of year. So Carousel is kind of cool. I believe that is also an app that works across platforms. But this is a nice little add-in especially if you've got a lot of photography. So the next one that I'm going to share with you is a productivity tool. And there's a paid version for this that I'm not using. The free version works just fine for me. The paid version gives you some backend file management capabilities, but I figured out a way to be comfortable with the free version. But what Genius Scan does is let's say I get back from a conference and I have some expenses or receipts that I want to send for reimbursement or maybe keep copies for my accountant, whatever the case may be. I used to go and put those on a flatbed scanner and scan them and put them onto a file. Now what I do is I just take the receipt and put it on a contrasting background. So find something dark with a light receipt, and you can see when you take a picture of it, it'll give you, depending on the level of contrast, it'll give you an outline so it just captures the actual receipt. And then you can say, yeah, that's right. So you can scan it and bring it in. It'll either take the actual picture or it can do like a black and white text rendering for you and clean things up a little bit. So you get to go ahead and actually convert it right to a PDF on your phone. And then you have some options. You can see in the, in the last portion where you click on the little share icon here. I'm just emailing these to myself and then I save those directly to my computer in the appropriate folder or I forward it on to somebody or I scan it save it, and I just email it directly to whoever I need to email it to. With the paid version, you can save those directly to a folder in Dropbox or Drive or any other place that you're using for cloud storage, but the free version works just fine for me. This has been a real kind of productivity time saver for me because standing at a flatbed scanner and doing that while I'm on the road, I can just take a picture of these while I'm maybe still traveling, so I don't have to wait and do everything when I get back. I've even taken receipts and put them on the carpeting at the airport and just taken pictures and gotten all that done. So by the time I get home, I've got all my receipts and everything all taken care of. I see we do have a comment. Let me just hold on. Bob says, you can do scanning within Evernote. I do a lot of that with business cards and it links the contacts. to LinkedIn and then pulls in their information. Bob, are you using the Android version or the Apple version? Because I also purchased the Evernote Moleskine notepad, the notebook, and with the thought that I'd be able to scan and it would pull things in and recognize. And apparently the Evernote app only offers that kind of enhanced functionality on the iPhone. It doesn't have that capability On the Android. So Apple iOS and you have the notebook. Yep. So there's an advantage. Okay, I'll admit iOS, checkmark that. You certainly can go ahead and scan the item into Evernote. I don't know if Evernote will convert it to a PDF like what this does. But there's a variety of different ways. I'm sure you could probably scan it into Evernote, pull up Evernote, go to print, print it as a PDF. and send it that way. But this gives you the ability where you get an email that just shows up with the actual item as a PDF, and you're done. Save those to the folder, attach those to an email, send them off to wherever you need to send them off, and now you've got all your receipts all in one spot, PDF, done, and you don't have to use a conventional scanner for that. So Bob says, sorry, I didn't know Android didn't have that. Yep. Well, you know, iPhone does have some pretty cool stuff so I'll give them that. Hopefully, maybe Evernote is listening and that would be a functionality I'd really like to see added because now it's just a Moleskine that I paid a little extra money for with Evernote logos on it and it doesn't have the indexing functionality that I was hoping for but oh well. One of the other cool services that I'm starting to use right now and I think this may be Android only, sorry Bob and other iPhone but There may be a similar service out there on the iPhone, or maybe this is just native within iOS, but an app called Pushbullet. And this gives you as an Android user the ability to send information back and forth. So things like notifications, text messages, chats, hyperlinks, other sorts of things. It gives you a really nice interactive capability. You can see that there is a Chrome plug-in here. So if this were a page that I wanted to send to my mobile device, I could go ahead I just click on Pushbullet and I can send it to my Droid Turbo. I can put a description with it. I just ended up— you may have heard my phone in the background now, although I said Droid Turbo and that acknowledged the Google Voice, so it's waiting for me to give it a command like Siri. But now I can go ahead and turn my phone off. It's talking to me. So you can see I can put a note, a link. I can attach a file. If I wanted to, I could send this directly to my tablet. Here's the ability to create SMS text messages. You can also get notifications. Pushbullet also has a community that's kind of cool that gives you the ability where you can sign up for notifications of things. And I know some of the examples where you can have Pushbullet send you a notification when let's say Google buys another company, or Twitter buys another company, or Apple buys a company. So there's different feeds that you can sign up for, and then you can have notifications show up on your desktop. You can have it show up on your phone. You can have it show up in both places. So it's kind of a cool little feature and adds functionality because sometimes maybe you want to text somebody back but don't want to necessarily have to do it on your phone. So you can go ahead and do it this way. So in iOS, I believe that— yep. Looks like Bob's my resident Apple guy here. So yeah, Handoff does a similar thing, but it looks like it only works in Yosemite. So if you do have the latest operating system, which I'm probably going to be upgrading to because I did see in my App Store that it was offering me a free upgrade for that, but if you're using Yosemite, you can go ahead and you can push information back and forth. But for Android folks out there, this is a cool little app that's getting a lot of Prior to using Pushbullet, and I still rely on this a little bit, is another little app called Chrome to Phone. And you can see my little icon here, but another similar to Handoff and some of the others. If I'm doing something on a website or I'm visiting a site and maybe I want to check to see whether it's mobile responsive or mobile capable, we've talked about that. In past shows, and I don't think I need to beat that drum too much harder. But certainly the importance of how your website looks on a mobile device is something that cannot be emphasized enough, especially when you talk to the folks at Google. But if you're visiting a site and you want to push it over to your mobile device, you can go ahead and set up this Chrome to Phone. You put the app on your phone, you install the plugin in your browser, and you can go ahead without having to visit your computer or visit your— I'm sorry, visit your phone to actually type the actual URL in. So this is a nice little time saver that pushes information back and forth, and it creates a little history for you as well. So if there are sites that you check on a regular basis— I also have this Chrome Remote Desktop. I'll admit I haven't used it a ton, so this is one of the apps that I'm thinking about playing with just to see how that interacts and works back and forth. But for right now, Chrome to Phone is usually the way that I send that URL to my mobile device just to check for mobile compatibility. Another program that I use— I've actually got an intern that I work with that I'm kind of mentoring. He also happens to be my godson, and he may even be listening. So if you're there, Mark, you can go ahead and Smile because I'm talking about you. But when Mark and I collaborate internally on things, and also I'm starting to use this more as a personal productivity tool, one of the elements that Jeff and I talked about a couple weeks ago is having some sort of a system in place to keep things organized, which is very important for everybody, especially if you're running your own business. And Asana is one of those platforms that it's like a Basecamp or a Wrike. But we are using a free version. And quite honestly, I don't know exactly when they are going to get to the point where they are going to start charging for it. But Asana has got some really great capabilities to create projects, assign tasks. You can put tags associated to things. So if we are working on something that may be website and image related versus SEO or maybe Google Analytics, You can create as many tags as you want and put those in there so you can classify different tasks and activities, assign due dates for when things need to be completed, notes, bullet points. And they've got a great app that they've updated probably a couple times over the last few months that has got some really great functionality. So as Mark and I are collaborating on things and there's other stuff that needs to come up, I can go ahead and put that right into the Asana app. And assigned to him. He gets a notification. He can provide me with updates. And one of the things that I'm trying to do for anything internal within my business, whether that's working with our intern or working with our production centers or maybe even working with clients, is trying to get further away from just traditional email. So we're leveraging, you know, apps like Asana and Wrike and Basecamp. And WSI has a platform called K2, which is an internal social collaboration portal. And using more of a social system-like platform to communicate and share information and not so much email. Even though email notifications do go out, it's a whole lot easier to find information when you go into one of these platforms and do a search as opposed to having to dig through reams and reams and reams of email. I've talked about this one in the past and it's kind of been a tried and true and I could not do an app show without mentioning it, but this is still my go-to application that I use for news and information. They were acquired by Flipboard last year, maybe even a little bit before that, but I've not seen any changes to the negative as a result of that acquisition. The thing that I really like about Zeit is just its simplicity and the ease of use and your ability to create different categories. And it goes out and basically, you know, it's a news and magazine archival service that scours the internet and brings in data for you that is related to topics that you want to follow. And a lot of the information that I share through social media on sites like Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn and others comes as a result of what Zyte is finding for me and bringing to my attention. So you can go into Zyte and you can customize it with specific keywords and other sorts of information that you want to stay on top of, and it does a really, really good job of bringing that information to you. You can see some of the others that are listed here that I also have installed. I know Flipboard is one that I also like, and that's kind of the starter of all these news magazine aggregators. Google has their own version called Current, and you can see based on the checkmarks next to these that each one of these is actually installed on my device as well. But if I had to pick one to keep and use on a regular basis, at this point it would still be Zyte. Another service that I am also starting to use more is Circa News. And the difference between this and Zyte is I've not found it to be as customizable as Zyte. So sometimes I'd like to see more things related to internet and social media, maybe bicycling, where I can customize those a little bit more in detail on the Zeit program. But the thing that I like about Circa is it grabs what I like to refer to as the important stuff, the things that I probably should know but maybe I'm not paying attention because it's not something that I really deeply care about, but I should know it anyway. So things that are going on in the world that might slip by me because I'm not a big newspaper guy, I don't sit down and watch the evening news. Circa gives me that, and it aggregates it and summarizes things and almost gives me a digest version of what's going on. So when stuff starts going on over in North Korea or over in the Ukraine or with the ISIS crazies that are out there doing stuff, it can come back and provide you with an update. And then if you want, you can dig in. But it aggregates information from a variety of different news sources and just gives you more of a digest summary which is kind of nice. Yahoo Digest does that as well. So you can see that's got a checkmark so that's also installed on my device. And I will go in there as well. And then you see Google's got a news reader and some other things. But anyway, Circa, I think that's one worth checking out. And it's a good way. I don't spend a tremendous amount of time in there but it's a good heads up just so If somebody says something that's going on in the world, I'm not completely ignorant to it, which is kind of important. As I'm traveling or maybe working out or just maybe want to veg out and kind of listen or engage and maybe learn passively, I've always been a big fan of podcasts. And that was one of the things that I liked when I had my iPod and iTunes when I was an active iTunes subscriber is I would get podcasts. Flip those over. I've kind of migrated away from that. I'm sure there's a variety of different ways, and there's probably even an easier way to pull these directly into Google Play Music. But I've started using the Dogcatcher podcast player, and I've got several channels that I've actually subscribed to. I'm still on the free version, so I think I'm limited to like a dozen channels, and it doesn't do auto-update. But that's fine for me because I don't have a boatload of podcasts that I'm listening to, but there are a few that I like. Leo Laporte and This Week in Technology, the TWiT Network. So This Week in Tech, This Week in Android, or All About Android, This Week in Google. The TWiT platform is just a really, really good area, especially if you're into technology like I am. And all of those have streams that are available through Dogcatcher. And so this is one of the ones that I listen to quite frequently, especially if I'm going out for a run or any sort of exercise. It's nice to have that just kind of playing in the background. My biggest challenge is, of course, with any podcast, invariably you're going to get ideas and other things. And I've actually at times stopped and fired up Evernote and created a note because maybe something on This Week in Google is like, wow, that's really cool. I've got to remember that. Or that's an app I've got to check out. So I'll stop and make a note in Evernote so that it reminds me. Or sometimes what I'll do is I'll use the voice recognition within my phone and I'll have Google actually create me a reminder so that when I get back I can then research it, put it into an Evernote clip so I can save it offline or dig in or download the app. But Dogcatcher is a good podcast player. Again, if you're an iPhone user and iTunes, you probably don't need a third party. But that was one of the things that I found out that I needed once I departed my iPod. Some podcasts that are out there have their own apps. And I know Twit and Twig and some of the others also have their own. And Nerdist, you may have noticed, is actually included as one of the available But just for giggles, I went out and I downloaded the Nerdist podcast, which, if you're not familiar, Chris Hardwick is— I guess they call him a comedian/entertainer/TV host. He's the guy that does The Talking Dead, the after show, The Walking Dead and then Talking Dead. He also hosts a show that I like a lot called @midnight on Comedy Central, which is a Twitter-based improv where he brings in— it's almost like Twitter meets Jeopardy meets Whose Line Is It Anyway. If you can't stay up to midnight, DVR it, and it's pretty funny. And actually on the Comedy Central app, they have some unedited versions where these comedians— it's just pretty funny how they are able to come up with stuff. But it's all social media based, which is pretty cool given the industry that I'm in. But The Nerdist is one of the ones that I also listen to quite frequently. Some of them are technology related. Some of them are just really interesting interviews that he has. I listened to one recently. He went for I think almost 90 minutes talking with Sir Paul McCartney of the Beatles. And it was a great interview. And just to be able to be in a room for 90 minutes with Paul McCartney is amazing. The things that they talked about and whatnot. It just was really pretty cool. So this is one that's kind of fun. It's got a little bit of a technology bent. They are a little geeky, but it's pretty cool. When I get into sharing information, so let's say I found some really cool articles in Zeit or maybe Flipboard or some of my news readers, even though I also use HootSuite and some others, Buffer seems to be the app that I end up going back to when it comes time to share something. And you can see I've also got the browser plugin, so if I click on this, it pulls up an option for me to go ahead and actually create a buffer and send this out. Now of course, while I'm on the webinar— there we go. So you can see I've got several of my social media profiles that are pulled in here. I can go ahead and I can share this. So if I wanted to create a buffer to promote Buffer, which is almost kind of like starting a black hole if you will. But I could go in and do this. It creates a shortened link for you. I can post it immediately. I can share it as part of my next item. I can schedule it to go later in the day or just add it to the queue. And what Buffer does is it keeps an eye on your social activity and helps to determine when might be the best chance for it to be able to be seen by your audience based on engagement statistics and other information that it is collecting behind the scenes. So it is a great little app. It is free. If you want to have a lot of items in your buffer, there is a paid version, but I have not surpassed that yet. But this is a great little tool that I like, and it is just a really convenient way to share information and to kind of spread some ideas. As a side note, one of the things that I particularly like about any of these is it makes it really quick and easy to share. But the thing that I also recommend is if you can, try to give it some personalization. So if you create a buffer or share on this and somebody else is doing it, chances are it's going to come up with the exact same subject matter and title. You can manipulate this. So I work a lot in the banking sector, so a lot of times I'll try to figure out a way where I'll maybe do a hashtag, you know, bank marketing or something that would be a little bit more catered to my audience and create a little bit of interest from people that are seeing it, make it a little bit more findable instead of just accepting the default text that shows up. That's another recommendation. You know, Jeff and I have talked about LinkedIn strategies and making connections. When you're sending an invitation to somebody on LinkedIn, it's always a good idea, and you can't do it on the mobile device, so when you're sending an invitation, I always try to do it from a computer computer. But sending an invitation to somebody to connect on LinkedIn, it's a good idea to change the, hi, I would like to invite you to my professional network on LinkedIn. Sincerely, Eric Cook. Well, that's pretty boring and again everybody sends that. So swap it out. Hey Bob, I'd love to connect with you on LinkedIn. Really appreciate all the great Apple iPhone information that you shared with me today on Free Webinar Wednesdays. Looking forward to staying connected. Something like that. So now Bob might get 10 or 15 invitations to connect this week through LinkedIn, but chances are mine is going to be the only one that is going to be customized. And if Bob is somebody that I want to develop a relationship with, he is going to have a better chance of remembering me because he knows that I took the time to put something personal in the message that went out to him. So anyway, that is a suggestion there. So the next app that I have, I've alluded to this, is Google Play Music. I got in at the early stage. This is a Play Music service. I use the paid version. I'm paying $7.99. If you sign up today, you will pay $9.99 because I got in on a special deal. But what Play Music does is it gives me the ability to basically have access to any stitch of music that is in the Google Play world. And so you can see that— I think I've got it actually queued up here— where within Google Play Music you can see all these different new releases. So some of these I can just go ahead and download and add. Now it stores it for you on their system, so if you buy it, you own it. But if you're using the subscription service, it gives you the ability to have access to it. You can stream it. You can store songs locally. So if you want to be able to have them on your device and you don't have an Internet connection or Wi-Fi or data, you don't want to use your data plan, you can store those. But it is a really nice way to have some good background music. Go into My Music. I think you will be able to get a little bit of an idea of some of the things. You will see a little bit of heavy metal, a little bit of Johnny Cash. A little bit of the Beatles. So it's a rather eclectic combination. But they also acquired— and for the life of me, I cannot remember the name of it. And if anybody in the chat room has a recollection of what it was— but Google, within the last probably 4 to 6 months, acquired a music service that, that had this function to it where you could pick kind of the what I'm in the mood for, and it would go out and it would create a compilation, almost like maybe a Pandora channel or whatnot. But if I really needed to have my energy boosted, granted, I could go in here and I could, you know, I could pick my Marilyn Manson compilation, and that certainly is going to get me energetic, although it might make me a little angry as well. But I can go in here to the actual boosting my energy, and now I could go in if I want to do an '80s throwback and put on my parachute pants I could go in and I could hit my energetic '80s, and now I've got the ability to go in and pick some of these. So maybe the pool party might be kinda cool, so I could go ahead and hit that, and then it's just gonna go ahead and stream all that music. And if I start finding artists or, you know, oh God, I totally forgot about Prince and how awesome Purple Rain was, I can go in and I can actually grab that album and save it and put it on my device and have it available. So if I'm not interested in listening to a podcast, I can go and I can listen to music and kind of jam out that way. So Google Play Music, again, I'm paying the monthly fee, but it's well, well worth it. The last couple items, kind of rounding them out here, because I attend a lot of meetings and I'm not always available at the computer, GoToMeeting, which is great. It's not real easy to see a PowerPoint presentation on a phone screen, But I do use this also a lot on my tablet, and gives me a nice way of actually still being part of a presentation. I've also participated in WebEx, TeamViewer, Join.me, some of the others that are out there. But obviously you're all joining through a GoToWebinar session, so you know that Citrix GoToWebinar is kind of the preferred platform here at Free Webinar Wednesdays. But GoToMeeting makes it really nice to be able to attend a session and kind of create some convenience. I also know that there's a lot of folks on our team where if they're out of the office but they have to attend, they'll sometimes start the meeting on a mobile device using the GoToMeeting app, but then when they get into the office, they'll just switch over and be able to dial in normally so they don't really miss a beat. So GoToMeeting has been really handy for me. And then lastly, before I go ahead and kind of announce my last one, I just remind you, if anybody that is attending live has an app. I mean, look at your phone. What's the app that has the most fingerprints over it? I'd be curious to know what those are, just to get maybe some ideas. Maybe there's some stuff that I'm overlooking as well. And then the last one, this is just kind of a fun one. And, you know, I debated about going into all the games and some of the other things that I've got, but, you know, I'm kind of a gadget guy and I'm always kind of curious. And, you know, deals Everybody likes a good deal. So this is kind of one. It's called Wish. And it's got a lot of different kind of unique gift items, products that get bought in bulk and then they are made available. So I can't really see myself wearing some of this stuff, so we will kind of maybe skip past the clothing. Certainly wouldn't see myself wearing any of that stuff. But when you get into some of the technology things, There is some cool stuff that they offer, backup batteries, portable keyboards. You can see lens set for your iPhone. So if you wanted to be able to do a fisheye or zoom or enhance anything, cables, memory storage, USB thumb drives, charging connectors. It is just kind of a cool little app that you can go in. This is where I get all my makeup. Haha, tongue-in-cheek. But just kind of checking out and seeing what all the different categories are. You don't know. There may be some cool things in there. I mean, the stuff is crazy inexpensive because they must be buying it in bulk and whatnot. But extra cable adapters, so whether you've got the old iPhone, the new iPhone, or you want to be able to have a micro USB, maybe you've got an Android or some other device, Now you can pick up a cable for $6. Regularly $28. Snag it there. So it's kind of a cool area to go in and spend some time in. So that is kind of the last app that I have. Let me go ahead and see. So one suggestion was Pod Beyond for getting And accessing podcasts. Let me take a look and see if Pod Beyond is anything that's available. Again, Mark, is that an Android or BeyondPod? Android. I flipped it. Let me just type it in here. Computer's going slow. BeyondPod. While I'm waiting for my computer to catch up, the other question was switching over from GoToMeeting smartphone to a desktop. Essentially what happens is they just stay on the smartphone until they get into the office, and then when they get into the office, they just launch a new GoToMeeting instance with the invitation, log in there. So for a brief period of time, they're actually logged into the system twice. It doesn't restrict you on a per-email address, so you can be logged in as many times as you want. But then you're on your phone and you're on the desktop, and then you can go ahead and disconnect the phone, or you can go ahead and stay on the phone if that's what your voice connection is on, and then you can just start paying attention to the actual screen on your desktop, which is going to be a whole lot bigger. So let me do BeyondPod. BeyondPod. There we go. If I typed it correctly. See, I'm reading and I'm talking and I'm typing, and it's just So it looks like BeyondPod, BeyondPod Podcasts. I don't know which one of these is the one that you're referring to, but we take a look just at the free version. Maybe this is the one that you're referring to. But yeah, so there's— maybe I'll try that one too, because again, Dogcatcher, I do have a little bit of limitation on there with regards to frequency of updating and making sure that some of those So yeah, one of the other ones that another person, again Bob, my Apple guru in the chat room, OnePassword for password management. So yep, I agree, that's a good one. Feedly for RSS news reading. So if we go here and we take a look at OnePassword, OnePassword, I still haven't gotten to the point where I'm using a password management tool, although I think I really need to do that. So OnePassword, I've heard a lot of good things about that one. You can see it's got 4 out of 5 stars, so that's cool. And then Feedly for RSS reading. So if we take a look at Feedly, you can see I do have that one installed, and we'll use that every once in a while. Ever since Google Reader went away, I've kind of been a little anti-RSS feed, so probably something I need to get over. And then when you get into— and Bob makes a good point— the Microsoft versions of the apps are out there. So even though I've been comfortable with the Android versions, the Google versions pulling things in, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, those things come in. And then of course LinkedIn as an app. So LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, those are kind of staples. So hopefully I didn't mention those at the beginning, but those are ones that I use on a pretty frequent basis as well. But definitely the LinkedIn app. Just again, to go back to LinkedIn, you send an invitation to somebody to connect on LinkedIn, you do not get the ability to customize it. So just know that when you invite people on LinkedIn, it's just going to come across as a generic, hello, I would like to invite you to my professional network on LinkedIn. If you're at a conference or an event and you're standing right next to each other and you're like, hey, I'm going to connect with you, I'm going to go ahead and send it, that's fine. But if it's an after-the-fact and it's not something that's being done right away, Maybe I'll create a reminder in Google or Evernote to do that, but I do try to send all my connection requests to LinkedIn contacts directly through a desktop so I can customize those. Good list from everybody. Unless there are other recommendations that people have— I went a little bit beyond the half an hour, but I don't know if we're going to necessarily take the full hour. We've got about 10 minutes left. I'll give another 30 seconds if there's anybody out there that would like to share an app that they like to use, or if they have a question or a comment. I promise I will not hum the Jeopardy music, but we'll kind of do it tick, tick, tick. Okay. Well, it looks like the chat area is clear, so I think with that, It gives you a little bit of insight into what I'm using on my device, some fun entertainment, some productivity, some organization, kind of a mix. Although I'm probably getting to the point now where I need to do a clean restart of my phone and reinstall the apps that I know that I'm going to be using on a regular basis just because things seem to be getting a little bit laggy for me, and I need to take care of that as well. Oh yes, thank you very much. I believe it's Lethal. If I'm pronouncing your name incorrectly, I apologize. But yeah, Shazam is another cool one. Let me go ahead and I'm going to type that in here as well. Shazam is kind of neat because if you've not used it before, if you are listening to music and you are like, what's the name of that song, or who is that artist? And you may have noticed There are even some businesses now that as part of their commercial, they'll say, you know, Shazam this, and then it will take you almost like an audible QR code where it'll take you to a different site or it'll play a different message. Shazam gives you the ability— it listens to what's playing and then identifies it. Google Search on the Android device actually is doing that now, where if you pull up the Google Search tool and you want to search for something, there's a little microphone that you can click on and it will listen to the background and it will find it for you as well. And of course, if you're a Play Music user like I am, the cool part about that is it gives you then the ability to say, hey, would you like to add this to your library in Google Play Music? Which is kind of cool. I know Shazam gives you the ability to hop over to maybe— I think they use the Amazon market if you want to buy the Amazon version of the music. But Shazam is pretty cool, and the technology behind that is just pretty amazing how it can listen to information. And yes, I did get your name right, so thank you for confirming that. So doing a little happy dance here. So cool. Well, I think that's it. I certainly miss Jeff, and with him absent, I got to hog the whole show with all of my Android apps. Maybe the next show when we get him back, we'll go ahead And he can share some of his Apple apps. And who knows, maybe Bob will co-host that one, and I'll just kind of sit on the sidelines and take notes. I do want to mention one thing for next week. I'm going to be doing a show, and this is kind of near and dear to my heart. Let me just make sure that I pull it up here. Last year right around this time, I actually traveled to Charlotte, North Carolina to visit a good friend of mine who actually I hadn't seen in about 20 years. And he started an effort called All In to Fight Cancer, which is a Texas Hold'em poker tournament in the benefit of one of his good friends who passed away from cancer and raising money to help battle the disease and build awareness. And it's called All In to Fight Cancer. And I'm again traveling to Charlotte, North Carolina to be part of the event, and we're going to do the Free Webinar Wednesdays directly from his boardroom in Charlotte, and I think Jeff is even going to be there. So we've only had one show in our history where Jeff and I have actually been together during a show. We're gonna have for the first time in Free Webinar Wednesday history Jeff and our guest and myself in the same room for a show, which will be kinda cool. And Jeff's not met Steve before, and so you can see, unfortunately, that the site's taking a little time to load. I think it's my computer. But learn about All In to Fight Cancer if cancer Battling and fighting is something that's important to you, certainly I know that there's lots of opportunities to donate, but this is certainly a great cause. And so Steve's going to be sharing some information about how his event has grown and where it is going to be expanded to, and just kind of a really, really cool thing. So they've got a Facebook page and you can learn more about All In and Rob's story and the benefiting organizations and just all the great stuff that's going on. So I'm really excited that we're going to be able to feature All In at next week's session. So with that, I appreciate everybody's time and attention and for joining me. Hopefully I did a decent job flying solo today and didn't bore you too much. But enjoy the rest of your week, and we will be back next week with a special show All In to Fight Cancer. And until then, we'll see you online. Take care, everybody. Bye-bye. Bye.